Happy Birthday Amazon! It’s been 20 years this month since its humble beginnings as an online bookstore. Now the world’s biggest internet retailer, it has presented an excellent opportunity for third party sellers to make a living.
It’s no surprise that it’s popularity continues to rise with sellers, Web Retailer recently reported that 4 times as many people make a million in sales on Amazon compared to eBay. With $88,000 being spent every minute globally on the site, we thought it would be a good idea to share some tips and tricks to help you increase sales, starting today.
1. Get Reviews
The power of customer reviews is enormous, 88% of consumers now say that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Try and think beyond the obvious, find reviews that include media. Video reviews or a review with a product picture could work wonders. If you know people locally that have enjoyed your product, go to them. Enquire at a local university to find students to help you with the project, this would only incur a small cost or could be free altogether.
Around 90% of Amazon buyers fail to leave feedback. Using a program like Feedback Five can help increase the volume of feedback submitted and help you to eradicate those neutral and negative comments. Amazon stresses an importance on seller performance, when ranking your items in the top positions.
Why not contact sellers outside of Amazon to provide reviews? The benefit of this is that if some customers present you with negative or constructive feedback on your product this can help you improve your product without your rankings suffering. This is an especially good tactic when releasing a new product.
2. 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 99% 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 good will. 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.
3. Improve your SEO
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 500 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 best fit and import them into Google’s Keyword Planner Tool, where you can gauge the search volume of these keywords.
Separate to the product title, Amazon also offer 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!
4. Stay competitive and win the Buy Box
Many sceptics 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, fulfilment and customer experience, pricing is important to winning the buy box.
Repricing software such as FeedVisor or teikametrics, monitors your competitors prices 24/7 to ensure you are competitive. Simply entering that you want to be $0.01 cheaper than anyone else could be the deciding factor. As these are working in real time around the clock, this becomes a massive benefit. For example if one of your competitors is out of stock with a certain product, your repricer will automatically raise your price to ensure maximum profit.
5. Get advertising
If you are just starting out or looking to your product infront 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 have 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 its a complete no brainer!
6. Discounts, Discounts, 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.
7. Marketing outside of Amazon
Even though email communications and direct calls to action that lead people away from Amazon is prohibited, this doesn't mean you can’t marketing people to your Amazon store. Article writing and blogs are a great way to achieve this, as you can target your niche with relevant content for free via WordPress.
A site such as Hubpages is also a great place to write articles around your subject, where you can link back to your store.
Attaching a coupon to the bottom of your packing slip is also an effective way of establishing customer retention. Flash deals, BOGOF, one time promotions and free shipping are a few ways of enticing people to order again.
Feature image curtsey of FireArt Studio
can you please tell me what illegal document required to open the amazon store on .com USA
Hello Sachin, check out our guide to selling on Amazon for more info.
Very nice post, many of the sellers or online eCommerce sellers are not understand the amazon listing or selling, this post may help them a lot and follow these Tips. Get advertising and right SEO may help your amazon sales.
My understanding is that Amazon i showing all reviews for product that are given for free or heavily discounted as unverified, how do you go about this? What is the purpose of sending out codes if you can’t get a verified purchase review?
nice post
Thanks for the tips I will give it a try!
Great info! I have sold on Amazon for years yet my sales took a hit from competitors who were exchanging products for reviews. It us my understanding that Amazon cracked down on this in Nov 2016. What advice do you have for working on an Amazon approved method to offer discounts in an effort to increase reviews? Also I find the discount setup very confusing on Amazon, do you know where I could find step by step set up for each type written in laymens terms?
I really enjoy your blogs!
Stella
Hi Andrew,
I am also interested to know who you used for marketing. I been looking for a trustworthy one which doesnt take my hard earn money and runs or do nothing at all. Thanks!
Hello Richard,
Its really a great post that you shared over here. Few months back I hired a company to promote my business and I don’t know what they did even they sent me a report too but I never new how to check that. But my sales increased greatly and they are saying it’s 100% white hat method. So I also don’t know If it is white or black but my account is still safe and now I am getting more than 100 sales per day.
They shared my products through the SMM and Blogs. Even I thought my sales increased with my efforts not with their. But again I shared one more product with them and they did the same in 20 days. So my question is that. Should we hire a company or not ? Is it safe for the future ?
Thank You
Hi Andrew! May I know the name of the company you hired? I need some help with my online sales ..thanks!
I would be interested in finding out the name as well. Is it worth it for a small start-up with little working capital?
Hi Andrew,
Can you please share the name of the company you were talking about? I would highly be interested in some prefessional help. Thank you.
Hi Andrew,
Please help us with the name of the company you ired for you marketing I am also looking for one.
Hi Andrew, I would very much like to learn what company or person you used to increase your sales, mine have been stagnent for years. Thanks
Yeah right but amazon affiliates need a tool which give them results about amazon best selling products, keywords ideas and amazon market trends.
Hi…thanks for the article!
I’ve been an online seller for large and small companies, some needing promotional and things mentioned in your article, some not so much. Recently I’ve been having a big slump in sales. I was wondering if you have step by step advice on what to do first and then what’s next, because I’ve been doing the majority of your recommendations to no increase in conversions. And honestly I’ve never seen any increase using Amazon keywords or Amazon sponsored products. Are there really benefits to those promotional vehicles?
Great tips. One suggestion: If you use FBA, also consider applying for FBA export so that your products can be sent to customers anywhere in the world. Enrollment is free.
Just to add on product reviews strategy , it is undeniable that it is one of the method that can help to increase sales. Studies show that product reviews on your web store increases the likelihood of purchase. People depend on product reviews before they begin to purchase.
However what is the effective way to actually get product reviews? It is something that all start-up businesses having a difficulty with. Even new websites that promote various products are fighting this battle.
I came across a video on youtube on the service that can actually help us on this. It has a unique feature that collects product reviews from various online stores and displays them on your website.
How cool is that !
You can find out how to do that on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k9tJmm3u08
Hope that helps.
Great article. I was confused about the extra keyword boxes. I thought we could add many keywords seperated by commas, but this is not the case. I never considered marketing outside of amazon back to my product pages. Would this help your rankings if amazon see you are pushing people to their store?
You can put in multiple keywords, but don’t put commas, just put spaces. Also, don’t use keyword phrases and don’t repeat keywords… Amazon will compile phrases from your keywords.