7 Essential Selling on Amazon Tips to Grow Sales and Win Market Share
The Amazon marketplace can be a great e-commerce business for online sellers when you get it right. However, there is a lot of competition out there. The enormous number of shoppers who use Amazon makes it easy to see why so many sellers set out to start their enterprises on the Amazon platform. To increase Amazon sales means you must keep up with the competition and learn quickly what works and what doesn’t.
To help you with the learning curve, here are ten tips that will add to your success as an Amazon seller and increase Amazon sales.
1. Focusing on Good quality image
A product image is important for an e-commerce store as it creates the impression on the buyer. An image enhances the product description which makes it appealing for the visitors of the Online Store. It is not possible for the shopper to feel the product in an Online Store, it is the product image they visualize before making the purchase. In this age of visual culture, an image is an essential component that drives your customer’s notion.
Few points to keep in mind before upload a product image:
- The product pictures should be appealing.
- Plain white backgrounds are always better to view the image.
- The product should have different angular images for better interpretation and not just one.
- The image should also have zoom in features for clear and neat spectacle.
- Edit if required.
- Size of the picture, bigger is better.
- Image should not be blurred.
Product image is the main tool for convincing your customers, as you do not have the option of a salesperson. Many times it is noticed that few products listed in the Online Store do not bear any photographs instead a nice professional write up describes the product, in this scenario what will your customer buy if they have no idea about what you are offering? You can never turn your website visitors into your customers. In this fashion, the product will be displayed on your e-commerce store and not in the shopping cart of the consumer.
2. Get Reviews
People buy the product on Amazon that has the most positive reviews.
When we’re scared about making a decision, our brain falls back to certain factors and uses that limited information to make a decision. That first factor we fall back on is social proof.
We look around at everyone else and see what they think is a good idea. If a product has 10x more reviews than other products – we literally have to resist our biology to buy a different one that has fewer reviews and therefore more risk.
So get reviews. Give away as many of your product as you have to in exchange for fair and honest reviews.
3. Give it away for free
Stay with me here, although in the short term this is a bad move, this can have a significant impact in the long term. As mentioned in the previous point, obtaining reviews is crucial in order to get your products shown. So in order to gather them, offer customers a one-off 80% discount code(Amazon won't currently allow you to offer 100%), in exchange for a review. This will instantly improve your Amazon search ranking and will hopefully ensure that those customers will think of you next time they need an item you sell.
One way to get rid of stale inventory is to implement giveaways to customers in order to generate goodwill. This way, when they are looking to purchase an item in the future, they will be more likely to come to you. Linking your Amazon Seller Central account with your other sales channels allows you to identify those items and better manage your inventory.
4. Improve your SEO
A proper title, bullet points, description, and great images can drastically improve your sales.
As well as seller rating and price, Amazon also looks at keywords in the product’s title to rank listings. Amazon’s keyword stuffing option for a product's title is very reminiscent of tactics SEO agencies use to deploy to improve Google rankings in the early 2000’s.
With the product title, you have a character limit of 200 characters, in which you should include as many keywords as possible to ensure your product is visible. Amazon suggests including brand, description, product line, material, color, size and quantity in this field.
Additionally, I’d suggest using the Amazon Keyword Tool, which uses Amazon's Autocomplete service to find popular long tail keywords, where they are awarded a score from 1-10. You should export the ones you seem the best fit and import them into Google’s Keyword Planner Tool, where you can gauge the search volume of these keywords.
Separate from the product title, Amazon also offers you to enter information into a keyword field. It’s worth noting that it is ineffectual to include any keywords that you had already used in the product title, as Amazon will simply overlook this. You are allowed five keywords or keyword phrases to be entered here, so use them wisely!
5. Win the Buy Box
Many skeptics who avoid selling on Amazon do so because of the misconception that it is too competitive. Despite 55% of its sellers reporting a profit margin of above 20%.
Amazon states that along with availability, fulfillment and customer experience, pricing is important to winning the buy box.
6. Get advertising
However, all hope isn’t lost. Amazon’s latest release, headline search ads, may help new and experienced sellers by putting their products front and center in Amazon search results.
Headline search ads are pay-per-click ads that help sellers target customers based on specific search terms.
Once campaign parameters are set (keywords, bid amount and daily budget), headline search ads appear at the top of search results – a powerful opportunity to outrank similar products (aka healthy competition), drive shoppers to your listings and increase sales.
If you are just starting out or looking to your product in front of as many eyeballs as possible try Amazon sponsored products. This enables your product to be displayed below search results, in the right-hand column or on detail pages.
Amazon has announced that they plan to expand this feature soon as well, to make ads more visible. Invariably they offer a free credit to get you started as well, so it's a complete no-brainer!
7. Offering Discounts
Similar to point number 2, discounts are an important way of converting highly motivated buyers and building lasting relationships.
Daily deals and significant discounts could land you at #1 for your product category. This also opens up the possibility of appearing on the Amazon home page under the “Hot Deals” and “New & Noteworthy” categories, which will generate enormous amounts of traffic.
This also grants exposure to your related products which can also be seen on the page. Thus allowing customers to see your other offerings at a glance and perhaps entice them to purchase one of your full priced items.
The most important thing on Amazon is ratings.
Madhe, CEO & Co-Founder Sellertask
The most important thing on Amazon is ratings.
Madhe, CEO & Co-Founder Sellertask
