Amazon accounts 35% on online sales in the UK market and has complete dominance of the online eCommerce market. With around 70% of online consumers starting the product searches on Amazon, brands stand a great chance of generating sales and revenue on their platform, however brands which are not present equally may lose out.
However, in order to be the most successful on Amazon, brands must make it to the first page Amazon’s search, with over 65% of shoppers never going past the first page.
It is very difficult to make it to Amazon’s first page, and it is up to their algorithm on where your product’s listings end up. This is based on a number of variables from number of sales to keyword relevance to fulfilment strategies and product availability, and a number of other more niche factors, and it is not enough just to have a great product with competitive pricing.
If your business or brand are looking to convert potential customers away from competitors, you would need to optimise your product listings.
What is an Amazon listing?
An Amazon listing, basically a the Product Detail Page, is a landing page for each of the millions of products sold on Amazon.
This should include all of the most relevant information, including a product’s title, ratings from past purchasers, description, images or videos, and pricing.
Amazon’s product listings seem relatively straightforward initially, however, if you compare a few product listings side by side, you can start detecting best practices, typically on the highest-ranking products on Amazon’s search engine results page.
Optimised Amazon listings are key for your product’s success
Amazon listings are crucial to the success of any brand on Amazon, whether you are a household name or just new to the market.
If you optimise your products’ listings it will help your business or brand:
1. Give your products more visibility to customers on Amazon
2. Increase the chance of products appearing on the search engine results page.
3. Ultimately lead to more sales
In order to do this businesses and brands must create a great and memorable shopping experience, in order to acquire, convert and retain new customers.
Your brand and business will need to be retail ready and requires constant management in order to deliver optimal results, especially in more competitive verticals.
A secure business strategy must be in place to deliver everything stated on the product details page, as well as keeping your products in stock. If you manage to generate a high sales volume, it can affect your product search placement if you ever have inventory shortages or even shipping delays, which could then leave to negative reviews and reduced product search placement. If your brand or business wants to streamline their picking, packing and despatching process so there are no delays which may affect your sales, then it may be worth working with a premium fulfilment partner like UK Fulfilment, who can assist in streamlining your order fulfilment process.
Amazon Listings: Basic Key Elements
· Product Titles
· Bullet Points
· Images and Videos
· Product Description and Keywords
· Great Content
· Pricing
· Positive Customer Reviews
· Buy Box Ownership
· Inventory
All the above basic points need to be optimised when preparing an Amazon listing.
Product Titles
When an Amazon shopper is searching for products, the initial thing they will see is the product title and the image. These titles are key to introduce the product in order to get the potential customer to click on it rather than scroll past.
Amazon allows a product name length of up to 200 characters, with a minimum of 80 characters for mobile optimisation.
Your brand or business must establish relevancy to their product to boost their ranking, as well as to make their product more enticing to potential customers than rival products.
The product title must convey as much value about your product as possible in 200 characters or fewer, so they must be chosen very carefully. Selecting words which depict the product information such as brand, model, size, quantity and colour, to aid potential customers in their decision on potentially purchasing your product.
Brands and businesses should aim to include relevant keywords or phrases in order to rank well, these should be based on Amazon keyword research of the product category, which should be included in the first 80 characters.
Additional Points
· Create consistent formulas across your product categories: Brand name, collection name, product type, additional high indexing keywords or search terms, and the variation (colour/flavour/ size etc)
· Avoid All Capitals
· Avoid symbols
· Write number as numerals
· Exclude price and quantity
· Void promotional messages
Bullet Points
These should be a short concise summary of the product’s benefits and features, which a potential customer should be able to quickly scan through to get an overview of the products features. Along with the features they should also include benefits of the products.
As there are so many products which can be purchased on Amazon, the concise bullet points should remain within 170-200 characters, to avoid a lot of unnecessary words that shoppers will probably never use.
It can help in the products discoverability if a few popular product keywords are added to the bullet points.
Additional Tips
· The first word of each bullet point should start with a capital letter.
· Avoid any links or code
· Keep bullet points in uniform length
· Utilise 5 bullet points for benefits of features your products
· Avoid any promotional or price based content
Images and videos
One of the most important features in capturing the attention of potential customers is the product’s images and videos, which is essential for ecommerce because it allows the customer to view and visually review the product from various angels before making a purchase.
Your product images should be carefully planned out to depict the products features whilst removing any customer objections they may have when viewing the product.
Whilst Amazon allows 9 images, the optimal number is around 5-7 and should follow the below guidelines:
· Have clear images and feature close up shots and avoid any pixelated shots
· Ideally use a white background or use a background removal tool
· Keep products well lit
· Keep the main product being sold in the fore front and easily recognisable
· Alternate shots of infographics, ingredients or any lifestyle uses
· Use only JPEG format when uploading
· Resolution should be kept 72 pixels per inch
Product description and back-end keywords
The product description of a listing is actually one of the less viewed sections on the product page, as it is neither visually appealing nor easy to quickly read.
There are limited options when it comes to the product description, you should have around 500-700 characters (max: 1900), which should help to communicate everything about the product, and which will help boost the product listings SEO.
In the product description, unnecessary information should be avoided, along with repetition and buzzwords.
Pricing
Pricing is obviously a major factor when attracting potential customers, but Amazon’s pricing formula is constantly changing and fairly complex.
In order to have success in sales it is key to be competitively priced. Amazon’s algorithm takes velocity and conversions into account, which are obviously dependant on pricing.
One thing to take into account, is whilst discounts and sales may boost conversions, it won’t necessarily guarantee revenue growth or a product listing having a good SEO. This is due to the algorithm checking if a product is priced suitably.
Another pricing factor is whilst the platform may boost your sales, Amazon’s fees do take up a large chunk out of your margins. Some brands and businesses have to increase their prices just to cover the additional costs, but, it is recommended that your Amazon pricing does not differ from your other sales channels as it can again impact your presence on Amazon.
Positive Customer Reviews
Like all other sales channels having great customer reviews helps immensely in boosting eCommerce sales. This is down to customers often relying on onions of past purchasers before purchasing the item themselves, and there is no exception to Amazon’s platform. However, it is difficult obtain Amazon reviews, as has been made illegal to incentivise shoppers to leave a review, but nevertheless they still drive a positive impact.
Here are a few ways to boost your reviews through your Amazon account; through your Seller Central you can request reviews between a week and a month after your order has been delivered to the customer, without any direct communication between the seller and buyer.
Amazon’s Vine Program is an invitation-only product review feature managed by Amazon, that rewards a select group of reviewers for their unbiased and un-incentivised reviews.
Instead of reviews customers can leave star ratings, which is much easier and quicker for customers to leave than a wordy review. However Amazon’s algorithm has made this more complex that it initially may seem, the ratings aren’t calculated by a simple average, but take into account factors like how recent the review is as well as verified purchased status from the customer.
Most Amazon sellers do not know how to use their customer review section to improve their product’s listing, but a good start is 15+ reviews with an average rating of at least 3.5+ stars.
Amazon’s Buy Box Ownership
Amazon’s Buy Box is found on the right-hand side of the product detail page, and is used by customers to add products into their shopping basket. It may look like every Amazon listing features a Buy Box, however only sellers who ‘win’ a Buy Box possess one.
With an abundance of competition on Amazon, it is very difficult as the platform takes a number of factors into account like the performance and pricing, in order to determine which seller represents the product best. Through this the strongest seller usually will win the Buy Box, which means their share of the sales will be a lot higher.
For instance, a top seller of a specific product, could hold the buy box for 75% of the day, whilst a lower ranked seller could have it for 25% of the remaining day. If your product is strong enough to obtain the Buy Box, you will receive each sale of the product from your account, which would increase your ASIN’s sales and boost its rankings further. It is one of the hardest things to claim on Amazon, but if you manage to obtain it, it is one of the best sales boosters out there.
To hold the Buy Box Amazon uses the below factors:
Lowest Price: Better price for your product than your competitors
Prime Eligibility: Must be able to qualify for Amazon Prime
Inventory Status: Don’t run out of stock
Fast Shipping
Inventory
Like above to win the Buy Box, you must consistently maintain your inventory levels, ideally keeping a 95% in-stock rate. There are various fulfilment options available to brands and businesses:
FBA – Fulfilment by Amazon: where a business can outsource their order fulfilment and picking and packing to Amazon.
FBM – Fulfilment by Merchant: where the brand or business stores and fulfils their orders independently.
Your business or brand can fulfil FBM orders, through utilising a third-party fulfilment centre like UK Fulfilment. Fulfilling your orders with UK Fulfilment, will pick, pack, and ship each one of your orders and allow your business to maintain a high customer satisfaction rates through keeping your transit times, error rates and shipping costs low. This can able your business to be in a better place to win the ‘Buy Box’.
A+ Content
Amazon’s A+ content is a premium feature that allows brands and sellers to give enrichment of their brand’s story through a range of multimedia content, such as charts, high-quality images and videos. Amazon has stated that A+ content on average helps increases a seller’s sales from 3%-10%.
The A+ content can replace the product description and creative an improved more informative shopping experience, which will hopefully lead to higher conversions, which is down to the customers wanting to know more detail of the product prior to purchase. Whilst it is recommended that the product description should be roughly 500 words for optimum results, A+ allows 1900 characters, and allows brands to portray their products in use through image and video content.
Using superior multimedia content in your listings, will not only improve the customer's user experience, and allow them to obtain a greater understanding of the product before making a purchase, it will reduce your business's negative reviews and returns, and ultimately boost your sales.
Additional Amazon Listing Tips
If you and your business have followed the above points and have optimised your listings that Amazon’s algorithm rates highly, then it is important to continue to manage the listings to guarantee that it continues to have a good ranking and convert customers into making a purchase.
· Fine Tune Listing based on Amazon’s Algorithm
You should regularly review Amazon Search Trend Reports to monitor what shoppers are searching and looking for. Utilise highly searched keywords, and update your listing where necessary words to help boost your listing’s ranking.
To rank your listing organically you need to tick Amazon’s algorithm boxes, so ensure all the components of your listing from the correct keywords to educating your customer on the product.
The most important point is that sales and positive reviews will drive the best results for your listing’s growth and the algorithm will show your product at a higher ranking and frequency, if you have a high volume of sales and a high rating of reviews.
Another additional point would be to consider in paid Ads on Amazon, as this can drive growth further especially with a already successful product, and is a good way to give your product some initial eyes.
· Utilise the Colour/Size/Flavour Variation Feature
It is recommended that if your product has varying features such as colour size etc, then it is encouraged that you fit the variations within a single product listing. This catalogue of variations aids in boosting conversions, rankings and number reviews for items which perform less well, as they will all lie under one parent ASIN.
· Manage Active Listings
After your Amazon product listings have been uploaded and are running, businesses should regularly manage their inventory using their ASIN tags.
Also brands and businesses should regularly track performance and optimise advertisings efforts accordingly. Along with tracking and reviewing their competitors’ listings and performance in order to remain competitive, and in line with optimisation practices for Amazon.
Utilising a 3rd party logistics company, like UK Fulfilment, can allow businesses and brands to offer an streamlined and optimal shopping experience which will aid in satisfying customers’’ needs along with Amazon’s A9 algorithm.
· Inventory Management
Whilst your Amazon listing management remains important for your business’s success, managing inventory, order management and fulfilment are also key components which have to be handled correctly in order for your business to succeed. If you utilise Amazon’s FBA top fulfil your products, the platform can further penalise your business if inventory isn’t managed correctly, and you have periods without stock for certain listings.
Amazon have an Inventory Performance Index, which monitors and assesses a sellers demand and inventory management. The index is based are four factors; sell-through rate, excess inventory, stranded inventory and in-stock inventory. If your business’s score is deemed too low by Amazon, your products will show up lower in their search results, which will result in lower sales, along with your allotted FBA storage space may be reduced, and it can even lead to losing Amazon Prime status.
Many eCommerce businesses utilise Amazon’s FBA to handle both their inventory and order management for their Prime orders. However for non-Prime orders it is better to use a 3PL and fulfilment provider like UK Fulfilment, who can pick, pack and despatch Amazon orders on behalf of your brand or business.
Manage Duplicate and Third-Party Listings
If your business is a third-party seller
Streamline your Amazon listing sales fulfilment process with UK Fulfilment
UK Fulfilment is a fulfilment company that can fulfil orders from an array of sales channels, including Amazon’s Fulfilled by Merchant, eBay, Etsy, Shopify and many more. UK Fulfilment's warehouse management system (WMS) for brands that handle fulfilment in-house.
