Amazon offers one of the most powerful platforms for online sellers to expand their reach and connect with the ecommerce giant’s readymade pool of buyers. It also offers a powerful platform for offline sellers to venture into the world of digital sales, with a huge selection of integrated features and selling tools that make it easy to build and develop a strong Amazon brand. But what happens when you’re ready for even more?
Here are our top 4 hacks to get more from Amazon and develop your business further:
1. Focus on SEO
Any business that’s already worked to build an online presence through the creation of their own website knows the importance of being visible on Google. You might have spent time reading up on Google’s complex ranking algorithm, working to incorporate things that the Google Bot likes into your SEO strategy in a bid to get your website as close as possible to the coveted No.1 spot. Things like keywords, relevance, content frequency, backlinks, and so on… they all help to promote your website in the SERPs.
An important question to ask yourself now is this: Are you transferring what you already know about Google SEO to the Amazon side of your business? While Amazon’s ranking algorithm – known as A9 – isn’t quite as complex as Googles, it still works in much the same way, and it’s still essential for business growth. It picks up on identifiers that allow it to deliver the most relevant results to users. And at a time when every organisation – even industry giants like Amazon – are looking to improve the overall user experience, delivering the best results for every search query has never been more important.
By incorporating SEO into your Amazon strategy, you can make it easier to build your customer base by ensuring that your products are showing up for the right searches. You can also engage better with high quality prospects, and boost conversions, too.
But what does Amazon SEO look like? Of course, it’s quite different to Google SEO, and the good news is that it’s a little simpler. Ultimately, the most vital SEO factors you’ll want to consider can be placed into one of two categories: relevance, and performance.
- Relevance-related SEO factors help Amazon to connect the right products with the right users based on the search terms that they use, and the relevance of your products to these terms. Make sure to include relevant keywords in your product name, content (eg. product description), seller name, and backend keywords, which act as the Amazon equivalent of Google’s metadata.
- Performance-related keywords are somewhat unique to the Amazon ranking algorithm. Unlike Google which wants to promote products, Amazon’s ultimate aim is to sell them, which means that it strives to deliver results that are statistically most likely to sell. For this reason, Amazon includes a range of performance data into its algorithm, such as competitive pricing, conversion rates, and reviews.
Like Google, Amazon is constantly updating its algorithm, so SEO needs to be an ongoing effort, rather than a onetime thing, if you really want to see top results.
2. Look to Your Competitors
One of the best Amazon selling hacks of all is not to place all your attention and direct all efforts on your own listings, but to spend some time scoping out the competition.
Growing a business isn’t always easy, especially on Amazon where competition is becoming more fierce than ever before. It’s reported that third party sales on Amazon have been rising for some time and, in Q2 2020 – the start of the major digital shift sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic – 53% of all Amazon sales were attributed to third party sellers; an increase on the month before. More businesses are moving online, and Amazon is where they’re heading. For those who haven’t wanted to build their own independent presence – or haven’t been able to – ecommerce platforms like Amazon are perfect, especially as the COVID-19 essential items policy was only short lived.
The secret to growing your business in a highly competitive landscape is to use the competition to your advantage. Checking out competitor pricing strategies and keywords is important, sure, but full Amazon competitor analysis goes a little deeper.
Reviews are a good place to start. Customer reviews highlight any issues that buyers have with competitor products, allowing you to think more closely about how your own products address these issues, and helping you create content that effectively communicates how your product is different. Reviews can also show what customers love about your competitors, highlighting areas where you may be able to improve. The same goes for Amazon’s Q&A feature; it can identify common pain points for audiences, and allow you to use these to shape your Amazon content strategy.
Amazon itself offers some good competitor analysis tools, especially the Market Basket Report that’s available through the Amazon Brand Analytics tool. This report shows the top 3 products that are most often added to a basket alongside your own products. Of course, a good chunk of this data will be useless. Buyers use Amazon for almost everything, and it’s not uncommon for a user to purchase stationery and dog food in the same order. However, some of this data can be massively valuable, providing an opportunity for you to expand your inventory to include associated products.
Imagine, for example, you’re a plant business selling flowerpots and seeds on Amazon. You notice that many of your buyers are also purchasing children’s outdoor toys or dog toys at the same time. This is an opportunity to expand from being a plant business to being an outdoor business, providing a one-stop shopping experience for customers
3. Optimise for Buy Box
The biggest secrets to growing your Amazon business? Visibility is one, but perhaps even more important today is convenience. Amazon’s ecommerce platform is known for its strong focus on convenience. Amazon has been taking big leaps to create a more convenient buyer journey than ever before, with features such as one-click purchasing and automated monthly deliveries. And one of the most convenient features of all is the sought after buy box; the promoted, go-to buying option for any given product.
If you’re among one of many sellers offering a specific product, the product page will feature just one of you in the buy box, with options for buyers to add to basket, or buy now. All other sellers offering the same product will be grouped together, with customers needing to specifically click a link to see all other buying options. 82% of sales take place through the buy box, making it one of the best ways to increase your audience base, reach out to new prospects, and grow your business significantly.
One of the best things about the buy box is that it’s only available to established Amazon businesses, which means that you don’t have to worry about competition from the many new sellers that have popped up as a result of the COVID-19 digital shift. To be eligible for the buy box, you must have a professional seller account, good performance (defect rate, cancellation rate, and late shipment rate data is used), and sufficient order volume, which varies by category. However, it’s unlikely you’ll be featured in the buy box just for being eligible; you need to optimise for the buy box.
This takes us back to Amazon and its dedicated focus on performance as a ranking factor. Amazon wants to feature products in the buy box that are statistically most likely to sell, so to win the buy box you must optimise for sales. This includes implementing a competitive pricing strategy, offering free shipping or Prime shipping, offering excellent customer service, and ensuring products are always in stock. The best news is that the buy box is free, so it’s a very budget-friendly way to grow… if you can get there!
4. Double Check Your Product Categories
Amazon is clever… but it’s not THAT clever. Imagine you’re selling a pair of trousers. You write a description, you add an image, you do everything to tell Amazon that you’re selling trousers. Yet if you fail to categorise your listing as clothing, none of this matters. Amazon doesn’t know what you’re selling if you don’t categorise your product, and the platform can’t get your listing in front of the right eyes if it can’t understand the context.
Amazon relies heavily on information that it’s provided with by sellers, using this information to place each product in the correct place within the online catalogue. If this information is incorrect – or missing entirely – it becomes much more difficult for customers to find, compare, and purchase your products, and it creates a pretty sizable obstacle when it comes to creating a seamless navigation experience.
Amazon’s inventory file templates can help, but you’re probably already using these. There is a hack to get more value from product categorisation, however, and that hack is to double check your categories, and monitor them consistently. Why? Because sometimes you’ll have a product that spans two distinct categories, and ensuring that product is placed in the category where it’s most likely to sell is the secret to success.
Say you sell USB cables. Should you place these into the computing category, or the consumer electronics category? Using Amazon data can help you to make the best decision. There are two types of data that can be valuable here. The first is to look at the largest categories for third party sellers. For example, research shows that in April 2019, the majority of marketplace sellers sold products in the home & kitchen category. So imagine you sell baby bottle washers. Do you put them in the highly competitive category of home & kitchen, or do you put them in the less utilised baby category?
The second type of data that’s worth thinking about is profit data. In 2020, the handmade category demonstrated a 26% profit margin, compared to apps and games which stood at just 17%. If you’ve developed a handmade game, this data suggests it may sell better in the handmade category than the game category. By optimising your backend data for improved sales, you can grow your business.
Exploring More
Amazon’s selling platform is rich in functionality for both new and experienced sellers, yet the dedicated tools that it offers can only do so much. To really grow your business, it’s important to look beyond Amazon’s own selling features and think more about how you can derive more value from the available tools through strategic optimisation.
