Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry
Clothing: sales grew 7×, but the returns mattered just as much
The ads could report a sale and the business could still lose it days later. Sales grew 7×, ACOS fell to 18%, and the return rate was nearly halved.
Period: March 2023 to January 2024, nine monthsAmazon PPC Management
Results
Sales
7×
↑ in 9 months
ACOS
47.98% → 18%
↓ 29.98 p.p.
Return rate
35% → 17%
↓ 18 p.p.
All changes measured against the account's own performance in march 2023, before the engagement.
Run by Serhii Khyshchenko.
Why no brand name. The client is under NDA. The category, the nine-month window, and the before and after figures are exact; the brand and its ASINs are not named.
Clothing, Shoes & Jewelry is one of the most crowded categories on Amazon, and this product was competing in it from the hardest position: premium price, premium materials, limited budget.
The materials and craftsmanship genuinely justified the premium position. The difficulty was getting enough people to see that difference before a cheaper alternative won the click.
The constraint
In March 2023 the account was running at an ACOS of 47.98%.
At that level, the budget runs out before the campaigns have learned anything. Every increase in spend is punished, so the account cannot grow into its own data.
The approach
Rather than raising bids to buy visibility, we went the other way: many campaigns at low bids, covering Sponsored Products, Sponsored Display, and Sponsored Brands, with detailed keyword segmentation underneath.
Low bids across a wide, well-segmented surface collect conversion data cheaply. The account learns which terms work before it commits real money to them, which is what a limited budget in a premium segment actually needs.
The result
Over nine months, to January 2024:
- Sales grew 7×
- ACOS fell from 47.98% to 18%, a 29.98 percentage point drop
- The return rate fell from 35% to 17%
The return rate is the part a PPC dashboard can make easy to miss. The sale registers, ACOS looks healthy, and then the money leaves again when the parcel comes back. Bringing returns down from 35% to 17% changed the economics of the account as much as the advertising result did.
The dashboard
The advertising portfolio from mid-2021 to February 2024, with ACOS and sales on separate scales. The marker sits on March 2023, where ACOS was 47.98%, the starting point this case is measured from. The portfolio name is masked in the source screenshot.Open full size 
Refunds for 28 June 2023 to 20 February 2024: 198 refunds, down 22.22%, and a 17% refund rate, down 18 percentage points. This is the return-rate figure above, with the reasons behind it. Nearly half were sizing.Open full size