Launching Products on Amazon

Part 5 of 5 – This is the final part of a multi-step guide on how to create a successful strategy on Amazon. In this concluding section, I’ll go over how you should approach your product launch on Amazon.

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When you decide to sell on Amazon, you’re either operating an existing business with established products, or you’re new to the industry and want to start something fresh on the platform. The big difference is that if you already have existing products, you now face a decision: should you launch them all at once, or a few at a time? If you’re starting something new, you don’t have much of a choice—it’ll be a more cautious start with one or a few products.

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Why is this worth mentioning? It’s tied to a recurring theme in this guide: Amazon is complex. Your products need to stand on many different legs—SEO, images, advertising, copywriting, etc. The problem for a large company is that this investment can be quite expensive. Maybe not more per product compared to a small company, but the total sum increases when there are more products. Many companies then choose to do exactly what I’ve previously warned against when it comes to launching products on Amazon—“just throwing up the products and seeing what happens.” That doesn’t work!

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I see two options if you’re in a situation where you have many products (100+) and feel that it would be too costly to launch them all with proper SEO, copywriting, images, ads, etc.

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Option 1 - Start Small

No one is forcing you or your team to launch everything at once. Choose the products you believe in the most and start there. Then, you can launch the rest of the products when the budget allows. You can even wait to launch the rest until the sales from the first products have financed it. There’s nothing wrong with starting small. Admittedly, it won’t lead to as rapid growth, and you need to be aware of that. But it’s much better than launching all products in a half-hearted way and not seeing any growth at all.

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Option 2 - Launch Everything (with a Twist)

There’s an alternative I’ve seen yield good results, and that is to launch everything but with a twist. Instead of launching everything and doing it halfway, I recommend with this method that you minimize the initial focus on Copy, SEO, and other optimizations on the product page. Focus instead on advertising. This isn’t a long-term strategy but rather a launch strategy to identify which products sell well and which sell less well. Once these products are identified, you must quickly get optimized product texts up for the bestsellers. The sole purpose of advertising here is to quickly drive traffic to test customers' purchase intent. Don’t expect to make a profit until all optimized product texts and images are in place. The significant initial costs go towards writing SEO-optimized and selling copy, as well as images if good ones aren’t already available.

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With this method, you thus delay the major initial costs until customer interest has been identified. For products that don’t sell as well, you can either choose to optimize them over time or, of course, decide that they won’t be optimized at all.

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Keep an Eye on Competitors

What’s tricky about this strategy is knowing what constitutes “good” sales. As mentioned, you’re most likely not going to be profitable with this method initially. I would combine this method with a thorough market analysis to determine which products sell well enough to invest in. During a product launch on Amazon, it’s crucial to keep an eye on your competitors. If your products are more expensive than your competitors' and if the product’s competitive advantage isn’t clear to the customer, then you probably won’t sell much, no matter how many ads you run. As you can see, this isn’t a straightforward strategy—it requires a good understanding of the competition and other conditions. But if you have that and are aiming for rapid expansion, this could be a good method for you.

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Start Small, but Not Too Small

Okay, okay. I just said you should start small, but sometimes it becomes unnecessarily small. If you’ve identified a market opportunity through a market analysis and have the budget to invest, do it! You don’t want to be so cautious that it becomes foolish. Who hasn’t heard a friend say, “If only I had invested back then, I’d be rich now”? Do you want to be one of them? Make your decisions based on data and conditions, but don’t be cautious out of fear. Sure, you risk less time and money with a smaller investment, but you also risk missing an opportunity. The risks of starting too small are twofold:

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1. Competitors Take Your Market

If you’ve seen the market potential but don’t take the chance and instead wait, your competitors are likely to seize the opportunity instead. If they take the chance before you, they have a time advantage over you, and they will have collected data, received reviews, and fed Amazon’s algorithms before you even start. This will make it harder and more expensive for you to get started afterward.

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2. You Lose Potential Sales

In marketing, there’s a concept called Cross Promotion. It means that two different products promote each other. On Amazon, there’s a great potential for customers of one of your products to also buy your other products. The more products you have, the better the chance the customer will find more interesting products. This effect becomes stronger the better your products fit together and the more established your brand is. This Cross Promotion leads to more sales at a lower cost, which in turn leads to better SEO (your wagon gets more pushes up the hill). But if you avoid launching more products out of fear and caution, you lose this opportunity unnecessarily.

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And that brings us to the end of this multi-step guide. I hope you now feel you’ve gained the knowledge you need to think about your product launch on Amazon and that, after these five parts, you’re equipped to create a successful Amazon strategy. Good luck!

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In case you missed the previous steps, you can find the first part here.