How to Sell Anything on Amazon And Increase Amazon Sales
We all are aware of Amazon. Not to mention but we have used it at least once in our lives (or many times a day!) to shop for some kind of product there.
We buy apparel. And we buy electronics.
Additionally, we buy books.
Surprisingly, we even buy food from the big retail giant.
When we are using Amazon as a seller, we don’t concern ourselves much about how things work there and why should we.
But the moment we think of using Amazon to expand our digital sales channel, we feel overwhelmed to learn what all goes into making a sale there.
Suddenly, Amazon presents an entirely different picture – a picture that remained hidden from us for so long.
Or we were so close to it that we saw only the tiniest area of it and as we started moving back, we realized that there is an entire universe hidden there.
How Customers Use Amazon to Buy Products?
Let me tell you how I shop on Amazon (or millions of others like me. I don’t exhibit any unique buying behavior here.) If I need a dress for a party, I will log into my Amazon account and these are the steps that will follow.
I will either go to the women’s fashion category and keep adding filters until I start seeing the kind of products I want to.
It will be something like this. Amazon>Women’s Fashion> Clothing> Dresses> Cocktail and so on.
Another thing that I can do is I will go to the Amazon search bar and will type ‘party dresses’, ‘cocktail dresses’, ‘women dresses’, ‘latest women dresses’, or anything else matching my needs.
As soon as I finish typing in the search bar and hit enter, Amazon will show me over 30,0000 products. As a time-starved person as we all are, I don’t have time to go through this long list of over 30,000 products matching my need.
When that happens, a buyer like me is opened to two possibilities. I will add more parameters in my search to make it more specific like ‘knee-length evening dress’, ‘red evening dress’, ‘under $50 party dress’
Or I can narrow my choices by being more specific with my needs and filtering down until I am left with not many products.
I can filter based on my size, color, length, purpose, price, sleeve length, and many other preferential factors.
After applying all the filters, now I will be left with over 1000 choices which seems much better than having to go through a list of 30,000 products.
6 Common Mistakes to Avoid While Selling on Amazon
Let’s try to understand that by adding a little mathematics to the example above. Amazon search results pages show 48 products on one page.
If you are casually scrolling through those products without any intention of opening and reading a description of any of them, you are going to spend approximately 30seconds per page. Generally, that is not the case.
In a more realistic case where you’re checking out at least one product on an Amazon search page, you are going to spend 1-2minutes.
If you plan to check out all the search pages containing those 1000 products, you need to visit 20 search pages which will imply you’re going to spend 40 minutes minimum.
In real life, we don’t check out just one product per Amazon SERP (search engine result page) as there is more than one good option available on every page.
I check out a minimum of five products on the first page. This implies if I decide to check out all the 20 search pages, I will be spending 200 minutes or 3hrs 20 minutes on Amazon.
Amazon Selling Mistake 1: Expecting a Customer to Find You on Any Page Other Than the First Three
As you can tell from the above example if your product is on the 18th page or 20th page, you are expecting a customer to spend at least 3hrs 20minutes of their precious time on Amazon to discover you.
Having such a kind of expectation is unrealistic and also, deadly for your business.
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A customer neither has so much time, nor patience to keep scrolling for many hours to reach your product.
70% of the sales go to the first Amazon search page. If you can’t come on the first page, you should aim for at least the top 3 pages.
If you let your customer just wander on Amazon for too long, there is a chance they might be lured by other competing products before they stumble on your brand. I wouldn’t recommend any business to take a risk like that.
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Amazon Selling Mistake 2: Competing With Just Brands and Not Products
As a seller, Amazon appears very different than a buyer. First, you are competing with 2.5 million other sellers.
They all are not from your industry but the data is to show you a picture that Amazon is highly competitive.
If you narrow down these 2.5million sellers to show only those ones that belong to the same industry as yours, Amazon’s competitive environment is still not going to get any better.
As you are not just competing with these sellers, you’re competing with each and every product that can replace you. Unfortunately, the number of products you will be competing against will be not that small.
Let’s say that you have just one competitor, in some kind of unimaginable unrealistic Amazon multiverse.
The problem is that one competitor can have many listed products.
As you can guess you’re not just going to compete with him, but you’re going to compete with all the similar products he has got, including even alternative and substitute options.
Amazon Selling Mistake 3: Forgetting About the Substitute Products
How do these substitute products work?
For convenience, let’s say that I am searching for that very same dress that we were discussing in the first few paragraphs of this article.
And luckily, you’re selling a dress that matches the exact description I have fed to Amazon.
Before I add that dress to the cart, my eyes fell on your competitor’s product, it can be an Amazon listing or can be an Amazon ad. The product is a trendy golden jumpsuit.
Buying a jumpsuit was never my plan but now I am not sure what I want anymore. I can’t deny that that jumpsuit is as good as any elegant party dress.
With all this confusion, I change my mind and decide to give that golden jumpsuit a try rather than the dress I was looking for. This is known as losing your sales to a substitute or alternative products. And it is worse than losing a sale to the same category of competitive products.
Amazon Selling Mistake 4: Inability to Gain and Retain Buyer’s Attention
Even if you are selling the right product, I can scroll right past it.
The answer to the question of whether or not you will be able to grab my attention is dependent on more than just the pictures and description of your product.
The answer lies in the seller’s ability to translate customers’ needs into the form of a product. This is undoubtedly not an easy job.
You need more than an Amazon specialist for this part, you need an expert marketer who knows how to read a customer like a book, translate his needs to the Amazon sellers so they can talk in a language that makes even distracted non-listeners listen.
Amazon Selling Mistake 5: Underestimating the Power of Faster Customers’ Decision-making
As we just agreed your customers don’t have 3-4 hours to spend on Amazon to find their favorite products. It will slow down your sales numbers.
Let’s say you have just one customer for the sake of simplicity. That one customer does nothing else but shop your products.
Let’s say after removing the sleeping, eating and other recreational hours, your customer has 8hours every day to buy things on Amazon.
As this customer takes 4 hours to pick one product, he won’t be able to buy more than 2 products a day.
Now, let’s imagine he takes only 1hour to decide what to buy, he can now buy 8 products.
What if your product is available on the first page, matching the exact needs of your customers!
Your customer might spend 10minutes to 30minutes and buy your product. Now, this translates to 48 sales a day. That’s a big jump.
You can now direct your imagination to a more realistic scenario. If your customers are making faster decisions, you have plenty of opportunities to sell more products in the same amount of time.
Amazon Selling Mistake 6: Not Striving to Improve Amazon SEO Ranking
Customers generally check out the first page of Amazon quite intently. Some of those customers even visit the 2nd and 3rd pages.
After the third page, customers lose interest and patience.
They will either make a decision to buy something out of those products available on the first 3 pages.
In some rare cases, they will decide to check out some other retailers’ websites. But in both those cases, you have lost a possible sale.
That’s why more than the right product, what matters more is being in front of the customer when they start searching for something that matches one of your products’ descriptions. Share on X
You have to move past the crowd of competing products and you have to make your customers notice you.
“Here’s the thing you’re looking for. It fits your exact needs. These products not just will fill the gap that your need has created in your life but will also save you time and bring you out of your misery.” That should be the thought that should be driving you on Amazon.
How can you bring your product to the first page of the Amazon product search?
The answer is Amazon ads and Amazon SEO. I always recommend the combination of two.
The difference between the two is that Amazon ads are paid but Amazon SEO isn’t.
Amazon ads bring fast results which makes them more attractive than Amazon SEO.
Amazon SEO, on the other hand, is a long-term strategy.
In the long term, it’s going to make your brand stronger and bring your costs down by a considerable amount.
The goal of Amazon SEO is to improve your products’ rankings and make many potential customers find you easily.
If you need help with Amazon SEO, Amazon ads, or Amazon selling strategy, get in touch with us.
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