Amazon is sizzling hot right now, and sellers can make a lot of money. According to Statista, Amazon has 150 million Prime customers—that’s 150 million accounts populated with credit cards “primed,” as it were, to purchase. The pandemic has sent more people shopping online than ever, and 70% of all new product searches happen on Amazon. The playing field requires a price for admittance, and you need to be smart with your money.
1. Have Enough Product and Get It to the Warehouse on Time
The first stage is getting your inventory into Amazon. You need to ensure that you can keep up with sales because customers will be looking for your product. One of the biggest benefits is having access to FBA—Fulfilled by Amazon—which eliminates a world of worries and hassles for the seller. Amazon will ship your orders and even process returns. No longer will the homemade soap seller wait in line for an hour at the Post Office during the holidays hoping her meticulous packing holds as she fends off dirty looks from others in line because her boxes smell like patchouli and lavender.
2. Create a Seller Account
As a net-new brand, you will need to create a seller account with Amazon. You are Amazonifying your business—getting ready for listings and sales. You need to be proactive as a business owner on Amazon. Go to sell.amazon.com and read everything. You will not have a customer service rep, and it’s up to you to make wise decisions on how to spend your ad dollars.
3. Make Your Mobile Listing Memorable
It may be hard to believe, but 90% of all Amazon searches take place on mobile devices. The first thing a customer is going to see is your title and your product image, so you need to make sure that not only that your image is optimized for mobile.
Pro Tip: Superimposing a key term over your product image adds a lot of weight and affects how often a key term is converted into a sale.
4. Prepare for Sales
There are two ways to generate clicks for your product—organic and paid advertising. Your product will show up organically in a search if Amazon’s algorithm perceives that your product name and keywords are relevant to a customer’s search. Paid listings appear above an organic search when you have paid to play, or pay-per-click advertising (PPC). Because selling has become so competitive, If you don’t advertise, you don’t show up on Amazon on mobile for the keywords where your customers are searching for your type of product. You have no visibility and your sales will be next to nothing on Amazon. When you’re a new brand, you don’t have as much relevancy, so your ads will cost more, it’s harder to get ad placements, and to win an auction where you show up. In the beginning, you may not even be able to spend more than $1,000 for a net-new product in month one, but you are going to spend money on all sorts of keywords, a phrase, or an exact phrase. As your relevancy score increases, you will get more data and information and sales.
5. Do Your Research
Most people believe in Field-of-Dreams marketing. You may have built a beautiful thing, but they are not going to come unless you advertise. One of the biggest mistakes that net-new brands make in the first 60 days is not leveraging the research. More than half of all new brands go wrong by not taking that testing and measuring and using that information to create a strategy that drives toward exact match (as opposed to broad match). You find the specific keywords that work for your product and pursue them aggressively through PPC.
6. Use the Analytics to Create Your Strategy
Amazon’s analytics are difficult to use, but they help set your strategy. You will be able to see your analytics for 60 days before they disappear. You can find sponsored products and sponsored brand reports, which will give an idea of how your business is performing. Getting to the point where you can evaluate your data is critical. If you have a search term that converts to a profitable sale, you will want to spend more money and move it to an exact match. If a keyword or phrase is generating clicks but no sales, negate it. Be familiar with the Amazon acronyms, RoAS (Return on Advertising Spend) and ACoS (Advertising Cost of sales). RoAS is sales divided by ad spent, and ACoS is sales divided by ad spent. It’s important to note that your first sale on Amazon will result in more sales on your website and doesn’t reflect the true customer lifetime value of this customer’s first purchase!
Pro Tip: Strategy in a thumbnail: use the keywords that are converting to sales and dump those that aren’t.
7. Respond to Your Customers
Getting 4- and 5-star reviews is important. It’s also important to monitor what people say and quickly address any problems. If you’re doing FBA, your item arrives quickly, and that’s what you want, but the easiest way to build a brand is to have a good product.
