5 Tips to Promote Listings and Drive Sales on the Amazon Marketplace

As a global leader in eCommerce with millions of products listed, it’s almost as easy to get lost on the Amazon marketplace as it is in the Amazonian rainforest.

With Amazon's range of own brand products constantly increasing, it’s becoming increasingly hard for outside names to bring their best cards to the table and win. That’s where we come in. With the help of Amazon expert and founder of Online Seller UK, Prabhat Shah, we’ve put together our top five seller optimisation tips aimed at increasing traffic and conversion rates for your products.

Fortunately for you, Amazon doesn’t change its algorithm half as much as other platforms, so these tips are worth remembering.

As a general rule, the more effort you put into your Amazon listings; the more you will get out of them. People rarely go to the Amazon marketplace to do product research, instead they are usually close to the point of purchase. Therefore our top 5 tips are centred around increasing visibility and encouraging customers to purchase from you rather than a competitor.

 

1) Creating products that sell

After clicking on your product, customers usually make a decision within seconds whether they want to continue with their purchase or return to search results. Ensuring your product images are up-to-scratch is therefore key to selling on an online marketplace, as these entice customers to stay on your page. You can do this by:

• Including multiple product images – Amazon allows up to 9 images including your main image. We generally recommend that between 5-6 is the optimum amount of images, but this is dependent on what you’re selling.
• Getting professional photos.
• Making sure the first photo is against a white background.
• Using lifestyle shots of the product being used.
• Taking photos of the products packaging – this means customers are less likely to be disappointed by your product as they will know exactly what to expect.
• Complying with Amazon image requirements.

Likewise, product titles and descriptions are equally as important. To optimise these you should:

• Research the A9 algorithm, which is what the Amazon marketplace uses for product search. It operates on a keyword search method and how closely a product matches the query.
• Make use of the generous 500 character limit (as opposed to the 60 you get on Google) – products with long, heavily descriptive titles outrank those that are short and simple. We recommend following the ‘Brand + Model Number + Model Name + Product Type + Colour’ structure.
• Technical details and product description should give additional information to make a better purchase decision i.e. ingredients, manufacturing parts number
• Pay close attention to spelling and grammar.

2) Getting initial sales

After listing your product, the next thing you should focus on is how to get initial sales. We suggest following the ‘loss leader’ approach whereby you start selling your product at a lower price than planned. This encourages people to make those initial sales, and once a more loyal customer base has been built the price can be raised. It’s important that you also:

• Monitor and reprice items often according to market demand – capitalise on fluctuations by raising your price to maximise profit
• Run a competitor analysis to educate you on best practice or promotional opportunities for a certain product – How often to do competitors update their product content? Is there an opportunity to cross sell? Do they have good customer reviews?
• Ensure that your product isn’t priced lower on any other platform – The price on the Amazon marketplace has to be as low as other channels, this would be against your Pricing Parity Clause with Amazon
• Consider offering free shipping if your costs allow for it – a large percentage of people consider this as a deciding factor when determining whether to purchase
• Consider Fulfilment by Amazon – these products tend to rank higher than items fulfilled by merchants which means more people will see, and ultimately purchase, your products

3) Getting product reviews

As well as helping your product ranking, getting reviews gives your product a greater sense of credibility, which is essential for driving sales. The ideal situation is to have lots of reviews at a 4 or 5 star rating. One method of encouraging this to happen is by sending follow up emails to customers that have bought from you. This could either be automatically or after they have bought the same product from you a certain amount of times.

But according to Amazon guidelines, the email must not contain any marketing or promotional messages, have links to other websites, ask or incentivise positive reviews. Sending this kind of email will develop a customer relationship, which means customers will be more likely to leave a positive review and buy from you in the future. However, be aware that Amazon also automatically send out emails for product reviews and if you send out too many it may feel too spammy and consequently have a negative impact.

4) Utilising external marketing

Our fourth tip concerns external marketing – that is, driving traffic to your products using websites other than Amazon. To do this you should begin by deciding which of your social media channels it makes sense to direct to the Amazon marketplace and take it from there. Many businesses tend to forget about this part, but directing customers to your products is never a bad thing, it is likely to result in more sales and therefore a higher product ranking on Amazon. Some examples of external marketing campaigns to drive customers to your products are:

• Social media competitions – they capture email data and increase brand awareness.
• Sending out discount offers to your email listings.
• Engaging with Facebook groups
• Trialling Facebook ads with details of the offers on your products
• Sending your products to micro-influencers
• Giveaways

5) Making the most of sponsored ads

Our final optimisation trick is to use sponsored adverts within the Amazon marketplace. As we’ve already mentioned, Amazon uses a pay per click model that allows sellers to promote their products within their search results. The result of this is that your product will get more impressions, and therefore conversions, than it would organically. There are two types of sponsored ad:

• Automated – Automated ads assume that your full product details are keywords.
  • The higher your bid; the higher your sales. But only do what is right for your business.
  • However you risk wasting money as you haven’t focused on a specific keyword so may be targeting the wrong thing.
  • Generally automated ads are very powerful so it’s good practice to leave them running.
• Manual – After running automated ads for a while you’ll have a good idea of which keywords are working for you.
  • Add negative keywords if you found that they are wasting money in your automated ads.
  • After evaluating which keywords work best you can tell Amazon that you’re happy to pay 50% more for well-performing keywords.

Want to chat more about selling on the Amazon marketplace?

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