Selling on Amazon is competitive, sure, Amazon is the world’s largest online marketplace by a considerable distance, and it’s still growing, but that doesn’t mean you need to drop your prices in order to increase your sales.
Here we will discuss ways that you can sell more on Amazon without resorting to depleting your margins by offering the lowest price.
Here are the top four ways to increase Amazon sales without decreasing prices:
1. Optimise your product titles and descriptions
Brands looking to increase their sales on Amazon will have to know how to optimise their product listings in order to get Amazon’s A9 algorithm to work in their favour and improve their rankings on product search results, and the higher a product appears the better the chance of a sale.
Start by conducting keyword research to allow you to ensure your product will rank for all relevant search terms related to your product. It is vital, however, to keep language natural.
Keep the product title short, the titles are limited to 150 characters including spaces, but Amazon actually recommends that it should be 80 characters instead. Ensure all of the important information that a shopper would need to know about the product is front-loaded to ensure truncation does not affect the shopper’s ability to know what the product is. You should also use important keywords in your title.
Use concise bullet points to highlight the product’s benefits within the product description. Online shopping’s main appeal is convenience, by hiding product benefits in huge blocks of text, shoppers are likely to lose interest in the listing and move to a competitor’s listing instead. Using bullet points improves readability and makes the text easier to digest.
2. Improve your Amazon product images to increase sales
Good imagery plays a crucial role in converting a shopper when shopping online, and Amazon is no exception. Online purchases require shoppers to trust that the product they are purchasing is going to meet their expectations on arrival, and the best way to do this is provide plenty of high-quality images of each product.
Shoppers want to see every angle of the product clearly, if the product has a certain function or use be sure to include images that demonstrate this. Amazon has some best practices that should be followed when it comes to using images. These are as follows:
- The first image must be on a plain white background.
- The first image must also show the actual product (not a graphic or illustration) and must not be on a mannequin or pictured in packaging.
- Images should be square and at least 1,000 x 1,000 pixels, so that buyers can zoom in.
3D rotating images and/or videos are also great additions to a listing, the more the shopper can trust a product the higher the probability of them making the purchase.
3. Improve delivery times
Slow delivery is a common reason for cart abandonment online and with some sellers offering Prime delivery, shoppers on Amazon expect fast delivery when ordering on the marketplace. One way that sellers can increase their sales is by offering a fast delivery with a Prime badge.
One option sellers can look into is FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon). This service is open to any business selling on Amazon. FBA is a system whereby your business can send their stock in bulk to Amazon, then Amazon takes care of packing and distributing each individual sale, meaning shoppers can get your products at Amazon lightning speed. With this service, Amazon also deals with customer service too.
4. Increase your positive reviews
Authentic, 5-star reviews on Amazon are not the easiest to build up, but when you have a good amount of these reviews your products become less price sensitive, as shoppers will choose a peer-approved good product and seller experience over taking a risk on a cheaper but potentially poorer quality product.
There are a few ways you can start getting more reviews. First is to use any of Amazon’s own review-building programme – Vine. If you pack your own products and they are only sold on Amazon, you can add a card into the box to ask for reviews from your customers.
Be sure, however, not to offer any incentives or try to tempt the customer away from shopping on Amazon. These actions are greatly frowned upon by Amazon who will not hesitate to suppress your account if you are caught.
The second way of increasing the number of positive reviews, and the most important, is to consistently provide a great shopper experience. Fast delivery, high-quality product and attentive customer support. Once you are confident in your operation, you can encourage your customers to leave reviews by sending follow-up emails after an Amazon purchase asking for feedback within the first 24 hours of receipt of their parcel.
If you want to be proactive too, you can analyse the negative reviews competitors have in order to pre-empt issues that could arise and make sure your operation has these kinks ironed out.
Finally, consulting with Arthia, an agency that can help make Amazon work that much harder for you will steer you on the right course with a holistic strategy to increase profitability at every stage of you operations.