How often do you hear of a new merchant listing on Amazon with the hope of making a tidy sum, only to be disappointed by how slowly their stock sells due to poor Amazon product visibility. Enticed by the sheer number of shoppers visiting Amazon’s sites worldwide, they could be forgiven for thinking a minuscule proportion of those buyers would surely find and buy their products.
The reality, however, is much different. Listing your inventory on Amazon is but one piece of the jigsaw—another pieces centres around committing to making your products visible to buyers and exceeding customer expectations whenever possible. Yes, there are millions upon millions of buyers on Amazon, but there is also a huge number of merchants selling to them—the competition!
Today, we’ll discuss the three key elements of making your products more visible to those millions of Amazon shoppers.
1. Optimise Your Products’ Visibility via Search
To successfully sell to customers, you need to ensure they see your products for sale and engage in anything that can make your merchandise easily found on Amazon. Put simply, you don’t want customers looking for a needle in a haystack!
Whilst many customers do use the left navigation tool to browse shops and categories (myself included), the main search bar remains by the far the most common method of locating items on Amazon. As such, customers are putting their faith in Amazon’s ability to find the products they’re looking for via search, so you should take an SEO approach to your products’ keywords and optimise them accordingly.
In this context, Amazon is essentially an ecommerce search engine, which ensures its search results are relevant to users by looking at products’ titles and descriptions (as well as price—but more on that later).
Step into your customers’ shoes—how would they naturally search for your camera, or your TV, or your kettle? Your title should be descriptive, helpful, easy to understand and reflect buyers’ search terms where possible. Avoid punctuation and caps—we don’t use them when searching for products. Don’t include title, merchant and brand information in your character search terms allowance as those details already constitute part of your search which Amazon attributes to the product.
As we’ve already mentioned, most people will find products via the search bar, but many categories of items are easily navigated to via the left-hand navigation column, so always include two browse nodes in your product listing to ensure users can get to your product when drilling down into product categories.
When you have your listings optimised in this way, you’re a step closer to customers finding them and certainly getting away from the ‘needle in a haystack’ approach that so many merchants hope will work.
2. Price Optimisation and Strategy
Earlier, we talked about how important it is to optimise your products’ listing for search visibility which will help buyers find your particular products much more easily—but there is much more involved in reaching the first page of any buyer’s search—the second major element to look at is related to adopting a competitive pricing strategy for your products.
I wrote a piece for Tamebay explaining why online merchants need to adopt a repricing strategy to be successful on Amazon. Buyers choose Amazon because they trust it to deliver on customer service, availability and pricing so merchants who continually excel in these areas will find themselves awarded the Buy Box or high rankings in the ‘more buying options’ listings where customers see their products.
Pricing is a key element that continually fluctuates on the marketplace so it’s imperative to monitor competitors’ prices and react accordingly. Your pricing strategy should balance the need to win sales with the need to maintain profits, which can be very difficult and time-consuming if you attempt it manually.
In fact, it’s near-on impossible to implement an effective pricing strategy without the help of repricing software like RepricerExpress. With an automated repricing solution, you can choose to beat FBA, the Buy Box and certain competitors against specific criteria that suit your own business. And because an online solution like RepricerExpress is fully automated you can simply set it up the way you want it and let it run in the background.
Related: Best Amazon Repricers: The Complete List (Updated for 2020)
3. Customer Service
So, you’ve learned how to optimise your products’ listing for search visibility and create a pricing strategy that will increase sales and protect profit margins—now it’s time to slot the final piece of the jigsaw into place that will surely help in your pursuit of success on Amazon—customer service.
Exceed Customer Expectations
If you really think about it, Amazon is in the business of making a massive selection of products available with amazing prices, but their real success has been in ensuring customers can trust the transactions, from start to finish. When I buy on Amazon I’m pretty certain the whole process will be painless and transparent with delivery being on time and the product as expected. I also trust that if that’s not the case, Amazon or its merchants will remedy the situation quickly, since negative feedback of any sort is not in their interests.
That’s why customer service is so important to your success as an Amazon merchant. When your performance as a seller continually exceeds Amazon’s standards you’ll gain the Featured Merchant Status which is a prerequisite to being eligible to win the Buy Box and rank highly in product searches.
You’ve got to ensure that you can ship fast, respond to customers’ queries or complaints quickly and do all you can to assist in making the transaction a great experience. Doing this will ensure you:
- Sell high volume
- Keep negative feedback low
- Keep returns (A to Z claims) low
All of the above will bring you closer to the Buy Box, in conjunction with optimising your products’ pricing and listing information.
Depending upon the products you’re selling, your competition and your own strengths, you may be able to find a competitive advantage through product listing, pricing and/or customer service. Most of your competitors will be trying to do their best in all these areas, so to compete successfully you must excel in the areas you feel you are strongest.
Whilst FBA will help with the whole fulfilment and customer service aspects, a repricing tool like RepricerExpress will be a must to competitively and continually reprice your inventory within a strategy you’ve set for your business.
We hope this series has helped you gain a greater knowledge of how to get your products in front of buyers searching on the Amazon marketplace. You may also like to read in more detail how to Win the Amazon Buy Box and implement an optimised price formula that can push your sales up.
Final Thoughts
Of course price and listing optimisation alone won’t automatically get you in front of those buyers. Amazon expects its merchants to exceed its own high levels of customer service, value for money and delivery so to round out your eligibility to win the Buy Box you’ll need to excel at ecommerce customer service among other things. We’ll cover this in the last part of the series on Amazon product visibility but for now, it’s important you get your pricing strategy in place.
