WARNING! Think Carefully Before Making Decisions on Amazon

Amazon is amazing in many ways. As a seller, Amazon gives you the opportunity to reach a vast new market that you might not have been able to access before. Amazon also offers a lot of support in the form of seamless logistics solutions, an advanced advertising platform, and much more.

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But no matter how great Amazon is, there’s a problem. The platform does not forgive mistakes. For example, when you as a seller upload products and structure product pages, there are certain choices that are almost impossible to change later—at least not without significant difficulty. Amazon offers little flexibility. Take product variations as an example. They can be crucial in many cases, and changing them afterward is no simple task. Attempting to restructure them (if even possible) can result in losing all previous reviews, needing to overhaul your ads, and resetting the data Amazon feeds into its SEO algorithm. Devastating.

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That’s why it’s extremely important to be mindful of what you and your company are doing when setting up products on Amazon. How do your choices impact your SEO, future options, and conversion rates? Make sure you understand this before making decisions.

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Many Sellers Make Mistakes, But Why?

When I and the SellWave team help companies that have previously sold on Amazon, it’s not uncommon to find that their current ads, structures, and implementations are quite poor. In some cases, this is due to time constraints, but more often than not, it’s due to a lack of knowledge. This inadequate implementation often leads to:

• Poor SEO: The product isn’t found by customers. Amazon SEO (along with great products) is the foundation of success on the platform.
• Lower Conversion Rates: Product pages that are not set up optimally can often confuse customers and fail to convert them. Potential upselling opportunities are often missed as well.
• Expensive Ads: Ads set up without a clear strategy often result in high costs with low conversion rates. The poor structure also means that valuable data cannot be gathered. The data you do collect is essentially useless.

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This isn’t a critique, but rather a warning to all the companies already selling on Amazon or those about to start. I completely understand the situation many companies find themselves in. Amazon is new, and their system can be frustrating. But because these decisions and issues can have a huge impact on your sales, I want to raise this warning. If you and your company want to avoid these problems, make sure you educate yourselves or hire someone who knows Amazon to do the work. Best of luck!

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