The Fundamentals of Being a Successful Seller
Congratulations, you’ve gotten your product assortment on Amazon. You either 1.) Sold your products directly to Amazon 2.) Sold your products to wholesale accounts or distributors who have placed your products on Amazon or 3.) Opened a Seller Central account and placed your products on Amazon yourself. You’ve been waiting for the storied sales on Amazon to appear but you haven’t sold much and your products are hard to find. You’ve built it but they haven’t come. What is a brand to do? Amazon is a competitive channel to sell on and you are struggling.
You ask yourself:
How can my product stand out when there are 12 million products on Amazon?
Should you throw in the towel? No. Take a deep breath. It is possible to compete. To do so you will need to have the right marketing strategy, perform detailed execution and be committed to the channel. If you don’t have the internal expertise or resources you should find an agency that does. The success you will enjoy will be worth the investment.
To get on the road to improvement, you will need to review and address the fundamentals of being a successful seller.
The first thing you will need to understand is the behavior that Amazon rewards with its search algorithm:
The basic action that Amazon rewards is Search + Click + Buy.
Search: Amazon wants to deliver results that match the buyer’s intent. If you have optimized your listing correctly it should show up for the right keywords and satisfy the Amazon shopper’s want.
Click: When the search results are displayed, is your listing compelling enough to elicit a click? If so, you have told Amazon the customer likes your result. A great title and a compelling image help here.
Buy: When a customer chooses to buy your product, it gives Amazon the ultimate signal that it delivered a good result. For this conversion you will need a convincing listing and an enticing price.
This action is the most basic form of what satisfies Amazon’s A9 Algorithm. The full algorithm is Amazon’s secret sauce and is far more complex and factors in many more nuanced behavioral signals to deliver its results. For now, there is no need to dive into that complexity, you should focus on driving the search + click + buy action on your listings and your sales will improve.
10 Tips To Increase Amazon Sales
Before you delve into complicated marketing tactics and tricks, you should make sure you’ve covered the basics.
#1 - Have a Good Product
Is there demand your product? It may seem like a simple question but you won’t sell a product that nobody wants. Additionally, because Amazon is keyword search driven, it is a difficult channel for a product that a customer doesn’t know to search for. There has to be a market for your type of product and your product has to be a satisfactory version.
How do you determine this? Subscribe to a market research tool such as Helium 10, JungleScout, or Scope. Use them to determine what the potential sales volume is for a given product and search terms.
#2 - Sell Your Own Private Label Product
Don’t allow your distributors, wholesale accounts or Amazon to sell your product for you. Nobody knows or cares more about your product, brand and margins than you. Permitting other sellers to do this for you, dilutes your control and resulting success. Enter the Third Party Marketplace (3P) on Seller Central, go through the Brand Registry Process and sell the item yourself.
Sell the product through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) or Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM) programs.
Some larger, more recognizable brands (typically over $10M) may be restricted from operating a Seller Central account.
#3 - Control the Buy Box
Control your distribution. Study who is selling your product against you on Amazon and contact them. Let them know that you are the only permitted seller of that item on Amazon. If they don’t willingly comply with removing your products from Amazon, cut off distribution to them. Having multiple sellers creates a race to the bottom on price and chaos on your listings. It can also pollute your inventory with discontinued, damaged, or counterfeit products.
#4 - Prime Badge
Amazon Customers are spoiled by 1 or 2-Day Shipping. They expect a product to be delivered in two days or less. They not only expect it, they count on it. They complain loudly if this shipping window is missed because it ruins their plans. We saw that less than 4% of our clients’ customers elected to have their package delivered slower than Prime (i.e. over 2 days). A product that doesn’t meet this fast shipping window will not sell well (i.e. the other 96% of our clients’ sales). If you elect to ship products yourself in Amazon’s FBM program you will need to consider the costs and feasibility of Seller Fulfilled Prime.
#5 - Optimize Your Listing
Create a great title, excellent bullet points, a strong product description, include 7-8 original professional photos, an enticing video and strong A+ content. Make them keyword-rich and compelling to the customer. Why? You need the algorithm to find your listing and to convince the customer to click on it and convert. This is part art and part science. Consider A/B testing your listings.
#6 - Provide Great Customer Service
Amazon considers itself a customer-obsessed company. They want you to be too. If a customer has an issue, resolve it. If a product has issues, improve it. The better you are at doing this (and staying on top of your Seller Feedback), the better your end sales will be. Amazon and its customers will judge you as a Seller, your brand, and your products by how responsive you are to customer concerns.
#7 - Get Feedback and Reviews
Set up a post-purchase feedback email. Ask your customers to share their product feedback with other Amazon shoppers and provide a link where they can contact you with questions, concerns or ideas. Feedback Genius and Feedback Five both do this well.
#8 - Drive Traffic
A sales rank is assigned to each ASIN (Amazon Standard Identification Number) hourly. The lower the sales rank the higher the product appears in relevant keyword search results. A large part of this sales rank is determined by the sales velocity of that item in the last hour, day, week, et cetera. You will want to drive traffic to your listings. Put on your digital marketing hat and figure out how to best do this for your product. Typical methods include Amazon Paid Search, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, links from websites, email lists and social media. You can also encourage your influencer network to send traffic to your listings.
#9 - Watch and Respond to Competition
Study your competitors, especially the ones that are outranking you. What are they doing better than you? How can you improve on what they are doing? Be self-critical and actively try to improve your own marketing, customer service and product. Be willing to acknowledge that you can always do better.
#10 - Measure Results and Evolve Strategy
We constantly hear one of our founding partners say “to improve something you need to measure it.” Developing and monitoring key business metrics focuses your goals on what you need to improve. Without the proper measurements, you won’t know if the changes you make worked or how to move forward. You need to watch your metrics religiously and evolve your marketing strategy in response to them. For example, if you spend time on listing optimization, be sure to measure your sales volume and conversion rate before and after you make changes. If the changes you make work, those numbers should improve.
In Conclusion:
For your product to sell better, you first need to address the fundamentals of your Amazon business. Carefully addressing the items above will help you improve your Amazon sales. Be sure to always follow Amazon’s Selling Policies and Seller Code of Conduct. Resorting to black hat tactics and tricks may help boost your product in the short-term but will ultimately result in a loss of selling privileges. They should be avoided at all costs.
If you are unsure of how to execute the items above, contact our team for a FREE consultation.
