How to Succeed with Selling on Amazon
What I'm about to cover is probably the most important aspect when it comes to Amazon. It's something every seller on Amazon's platform should know but unfortunately, many don't. So, make sure to read this carefully and if you are part of a team, ensure everyone is aware of this.
Let me start by focusing on you and your company. As a seller on Amazon, you can reach two customer groups:
- Existing customers who are familiar with your brand and products.
- Potential new customers who are not yet actively searching for your company or products.
Both of these groups are immensely important, and you shouldn't overlook either of them. But what differentiates the approach of successful sellers from less successful ones?
Existing Customers
The first group already knows you and may have purchased your products before. These are customers who think of you when they need the kind of products you sell. They actively search for your specific brand and convert well. These customers are very important to you. However, they would most likely have bought from you even if they couldn't find your products on Amazon. The advantage of Amazon is that it provides these customers with another platform to find you, better shipping conditions (usually), and better geographical availability.
Existing customers are often the ones who buy the first products, leave the first reviews, and simply give you a good start in sales.
New Customers
The second and larger group is new customers. Customers who could potentially buy your product but are not familiar with you and are not actively searching for you. Instead of "Fjällräven backpack," they only search for "backpack." They search for "t-shirt" instead of "Hilfiger t-shirt." This is the large customer group you need to sell to in order to reach the truly vast potential that Amazon offers. Amazon's great strength is that it attracts a very large and broad customer base. So how do you reach them?
- Use advertising and optimize it to show the right product to the right customers at the right time and at a low cost.
- Be the product that appears when customers make broader searches (e.g., "backpack"). To succeed in doing this, you need what is called Amazon SEO.
Both Amazon SEO and advertising are crucial parts of achieving success on Amazon. All companies, big or small, can benefit from optimizing for this. This is primarily how you reach the broad masses on Amazon. But what does ad optimization and Amazon SEO concretely mean?
Ad Optimization
Ads on Amazon are extremely important and can often be very cost-effective. Customers search on Amazon to buy products (unlike, for example, Google), and therefore conversion rates are often high. There are simply great profits to be made by using advertising to increase sales. Unfortunately, many other companies have also realized this, and therefore the competition is tough. So, if you are working with advertising, make sure to really read up on how to structure and optimize your ads. Or get help from someone who truly understands Amazon advertising, like us at SellWave.
The advantage of ads is that you have all the control. You can set a large budget and reach out to many, many people. With the help of various keywords and segmentations, you can reach specific groups and customers, and you can figure out what customers who buy your products are searching for. Everything is up to you.
The big disadvantage is, of course, that it costs money and can eat into margins, which is not the case with Amazon SEO. However, advertising helps with SEO, making the ads even more valuable.
Amazon SEO
Being the product that appears at the top of the search results is a goldmine. If your product is among the top 3 products that appear in a search, it can mean 10x more sales than the products that appear in positions 10-12. But on Amazon, there aren't just 10-12 search results. There are thousands of results for every search a customer makes. And trust me, you don't want your products to appear in position 1,000. You don't even want them to appear in position 100, 50, or 20. The solution to this is Amazon SEO. This is the work that will take your products to the top of the search results.
SEO is the Key to Success on Amazon
Working with advertising and other parts of sales is, of course, important. But having your products be the ones that appear at the top on Amazon organically (without paid marketing) is what will really bring success. Amazon has such a large amount of traffic and over 4000 products are sold every minute. But none of your products will be sold if customers can't find them. Ads are one way to go, and you should use them, but they eat into margins. Organic traffic means free traffic. Traffic that doesn't eat into margins but generates profit.
SEO is therefore the foundation of the entire Amazon strategy. Of course, the product and brand are always the most important, but when it comes to strategy and work on Amazon, SEO is at the center.
How Does Amazon SEO Work?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and simply means adapting data according to the parameters that Amazon's search engine algorithms look for. There are many parameters, but the three main ones you should focus on are:
- Relevance
- Conversion
- The total sales of the product
I won't go into depth about SEO on Amazon here; that will be a future post. But I want to quickly explain the basics of the above parameters.
Relevance
Relevance is important because it shows Amazon that the product is relevant to the search. If a customer searches for "bike," an iPhone should not appear. No matter how well an iPhone converts. The product displayed must match the customer's search. Relevance is primarily about using the keywords that the customer is searching for in the title and product description. This way, Amazon sees the keywords and associates the product with those keywords.
Conversion
Conversion is about how many of the customers who see the product then buy it. Conversion is extremely important on Amazon and there are many ways to improve it. For example, by working on product texts, product images, reviews, shipping terms, and price. This is about putting the customer's needs and experience first. Ads also affect this. If you show the product to customers who are not interested through ads, conversion will drop. While it increases if you show it to customers who are looking for the type of product you offer. Conversion obviously affects not only SEO, but also the actual sales.
Total Sales
Total sales also affect SEO. Amazon wants to show products they know customers buy. If Amazon's algorithms see that customers buy a product, there is a good chance that future customers will also want to buy the product. Because total sales are so important, it's not uncommon for companies to advertise so aggressively that they lose money on the ads. They lose on the ads, but the total sales lead to better SEO, which in turn leads to greater profits.
Other Parameters for Amazon SEO
The algorithms measure many more parameters, but the three above are the ones you should focus on. If you focus on the other parameters, it's easy to lose the big picture. In the end, this is what matters for whether you and your company succeed on Amazon or not.
If your company wants help with SEO, you are welcome to contact us at SellWave. We help you write SEO-optimized product texts in all the languages where Amazon is established today.
Summary of How to Succeed on Amazon
To summarize, you achieve success with sales on Amazon by:
- Realizing that the big profit lies among the group of potential new customers.
- Working on increasing the exposure of your products.
- Focusing on Amazon SEO as the core of your company's Amazon strategy.
I also want to add that Amazon SEO is not as mechanical and boring as it sounds. Most of the work is about focusing on the customer. Good and descriptive product texts, images that clearly show the product and its benefits, as well as terms and price. These are all parts that affect relevance, conversion, and total sales. But they are also what affect SEO the most. Make sure to keep this in mind when working on Amazon. Think about conversion, relevance, and sales in every choice you make. Whether it's about product images, shipping, texts, category, etc.
I really hope this text helped you understand the basics of how to succeed on Amazon. If you work in a team, I strongly recommend getting the team on the same page. Best of luck!
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