Every Amazon seller faces the challenge of getting new products to sell on the platform. Getting the initial sales for your product and starting to index for keywords on the platform is one of the largest obstacles that new products face. The process of getting those initial sales has changed over time. However, the concept of creating a product launch is something that every Amazon seller still follows.
One way that many sellers previously launched their products was using a service called Viral Launch. Viral Launch has evolved over time to be more than just a product launch platform, and now offers their own suite of tools to help Amazon sellers on the platform.
We’re going to take a look at what Viral Launch does, how it works, its features, pricing, and our review and recommendation of the product. We are also going to look at both their product launch service, which has changed over time, and the new software suite that they are offering.
What Is Viral Launch and What Does It Do?
Viral Launch is one of the names in the Amazon space that is probably one of the most well-known. The company and their product has been around for years, and you can even go back to blog posts and forums from 5 or more years ago and see mentions of Viral Launch in using the service.
They have made a significant shift to their business model over time, however. Prior to incentivized reviews, being banned, and Amazon’s closer monitoring of trying to manipulate the algorithm, Viral Launch was a product launch service that helped promote your offer to interested customers for a steep discount on their deal site – which used to be called Elite Deals.
Now, Viral Launch mainly seems to be pushing their software suite of tools over their product launching services. The tools range from product and keyword research to advertising management and automation. They also provide keyword tracking to help see how your product is improving over time.
How Does Viral Launch Work?
Viral launch markets themselves as a tool that allows sellers to scale by providing everything they need. The tool seems to pull a lot of information that is available on the front end of Amazon through scraping a platform into a database that you can use for keyword and product research.
The more well-known feature of Viral Launch it’s product launch. It works by providing interested customers with a high discount in exchange for them purchasing the product. Previously, these customers would have been able to leave product reviews as well; however, Amazon incentivized reviews, making it impossible for these reviews to show up on the product listing. The idea behind the product launch is that you can start generating sales which will show Amazon you are relevant for a specific search term and Amazon will start organically indexing you for that search term.
The suite of tools that they provide seems to be competitive with a few other platforms such as Jungle Scout and Helium 10. Both platforms feature product research and keyword research tools as well as tracking tools. Viral Launch differentiates itself by providing its kinetic advertising tool.
Viral Launch Features
Let’s take a look at the different features that Viral launch’s software and product launch service have. The software provides a lot of analytics into keyword research and product research as well as advertising automation. Product launch could still be a way to get your products selling on the Amazon platform quickly.
Product Launch
The product launch feature is what Viral Launch was previously best known for. To launch a product, you would make a certain number of coupons for a large product discount, like 90% or higher. Viral Launch would distribute those coupon codes among shoppers who were interested in receiving the product for a discount on their deal site.
The effects of their product launch does not seem to be as great as it previously was. Part of that could be due to changes in Amazon’s algorithm which seems to value full price sales or sales with a minimum discount more than high-discounted purchases.
You can still use the service to get initial sales for your product, but it does not seem to have as great an impact for your ranking in the future. They specifically warn that your account should have existing sales not to alert Amazon to any potential issues, used to indicate that this product could cause potential account issues for newer sellers. You may get better results from an aggressive advertising campaign.
Product Research
There are two tools within their software suite designed to help you and the product research phase of selling on Amazon. They refer to the tools by the names Product Discovery and Market Intelligence.
The Product Discovery tool seems to reverse-engineer product ideas for you based on certain inputs. The inputs seem to range from the types of products you wish to sell and the target monthly revenue numbers that you want to hit. It then runs a search through Amazon to find products that meet your criteria.
Market intelligence estimates the monthly sold units and monthly revenue for a search term. It also provides insight into how competitive the marketplace is for that keyword and what historical numbers and current trends are. Finally, they help you calculate what your costs would be to source this product and start getting sales on Amazon through ranking.
Keyword Research
Viral Launch also has, what appeared to be, separate keyword research tools. The first tool is what is known as a “reverse ASIN search”, which will allow you to pull QR data for listings that are already on Amazon. It scrapes Amazon to see what keywords a product is indexed for, and how it ranks on search engine results pages.
Keyword research tools seem to provide information on historical search term data and trends over time. You identify relevant keywords for your product and see which keywords are becoming most popular or changing over time allowing you to identify advertising opportunities on specific search terms.
Listing Audit/Content
Understanding opportunities for improving your product listings is also important and Viral Launch seems to address this with a few separate tools and their suite. The first tool is the listing analyzer to compare your listing to competitor listings, but also to identify what content your listing has or is missing and ways it can be improved.
The Listing Builder tool helps you create written content for your listing by tracking a set number of keywords that are relevant for your product and how they’re appearing within your listing content. It provides a score on your listing content, which keyword you use from the list, and the frequency that you used particular keywords.
Keyword Tracking
The keyword manager tool provides in-depth insights as well as keyword tracking to see how your performance is changing over time. It allows you to track up to 2,000 keywords and see how the search volume makes it easier to see which keywords have the most potential for making money on Amazon.
Advertising
The newest and most high-end tool that Viral Launch seems to offer is their kinetic PPC management tool. The advertising tool allows you to set custom rules to automate your advertising campaigns. You can also manage all of your advertising campaigns directly in the interface instead of going into Seller Central.
The Kinetic tool integrates with the other keyword research tools in the Viral Launch tool suite and that helps to automate your keyword research and campaign creation. Kinetic also combines keyword performance across all campaigns and provides an easy view to see exactly which keywords are leading to the most cells for your products.
Finally, Kinetic provides tracking logs so you can see exactly what changes are made to bids and keywords overtime in the interface.
Viral Launch Pricing
The pricing for a viral launch’s product launch services and their software are separated. They previously charged thousands of dollars to launch products on the Amazon platform. That pricing has significantly changed where they only charge $200 now per product launch. it seems that based on that pricing the aspect of their business has changed a lot, and the value of the service was previously providing may not be as great as it is now.
The separate software pricing is offered on monthly or annual subscriptions. An annual subscription saves you about 2 months of total payments and they’re also separate tiers that have a range of product features available based on the amount you pay.
The beginner plan starts at $59 per month, but only provides access to the product ideas features. It then ranges up to $199 per month for their top-tier with access to all of the product features. You can see the full pricing chart below and exactly which features are included in each subscription plan for viral launch.
| Plan | Monthly Subscription | Annual Subscription |
|---|---|---|
| Beginner | $59 | $50 |
| Pro | $99 | $83 |
| Brand Builder | $149 | $125 |
| Kinetic | $199 | $166 |
Our Review of Viral Launch
What We Like
What we like most about the Viral Launch product is how well all the tools integrate into each other. Keyword research tools can be used to easily pull in data to the list builder, keyword manager, or Kinetic advertising tool. They make things a lot simpler and require last downloading files to get the results you’re looking for.
The application itself also has well-built interfaces that are easy to use. Getting started using the tool requires little to no effort on the customer’s end and can be used immediately once you sign up.
- Usability. The application interface makes it easy to use.
- Ready-to-go. Tools can be used immediately from set-up with minimal requirements from the seller.
- Pricing. Prescription plans are priced competitively with other products in the space.
What We Don’t Like
What concerns me the most about the tools is the broad range of Amazon tasks that the suite tries to accomplish. As I mentioned multiple times, Viral Launch was traditionally a product launch service and has since started transitioning into the software as a solution space.
Their goal seems to be to provide as much value as possible to the consumer by offering this wide variety of tools. However, the concern with that is spreading themselves too thin and instead of possibly building one incredible tool they may have created multiple tools that replicate features of other software programs that were already on the market.
Also, when any tool claims to offer advertising automation we immediately get concerned. Certain aspects of Amazon advertising can be automated such as keyword research. But, when it comes to managing your campaigns to get the most results out of your advertising software can only go so far.
- Broad offering. Focusing on too many tools may prevent them from doing any one thing well.
- Customer reviews. Opinions are mixed when it comes to the value that the tools are actually bringing to the customers.
Who is Viral Launch for?
Viral Launch could be a great tool for sellers that are just getting started on the Amazon platform. The variety of tools that they offer helps address a lot of the concerns and issues that you sellers will have. Advertising tools may also provide a lot of value to sellers that are not comfortable with paid advertising management on their own and provide enough value to help them get a good return on their advertising dollars.
More experienced sellers may have more success implementing other tool suites like Jungle Scout or Helium 10 that have been established in the marketplace for longer – or they may need to utilize multiple software offerings to create a tech stack that helps them get the most out of Amazon.
Overall, we would give Viral Launch a good product review, and recommend it to sellers who are looking for a single software solution that can provide a lot of value to them by addressing different areas of Amazon selling.
