How Momentum on Amazon Drives Sales

Part 1 of 5 – This is the first part of a multi-step guide on creating a successful strategy on Amazon. In this first installment, I’ll discuss the importance of momentum on Amazon.

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Momentum

Imagine Amazon’s ranking system as a hill, and your product page (or pages) as a cart you need to push uphill. The better your SEO, advertising, copy, images, pricing, etc., the easier it is to push that cart up. Each improvement you make to your product page reduces friction. But, and this is an important but, you still have to push the cart. Every sale your product page makes can be seen as a push uphill. Each sale is an effort that moves your cart up the hill. So, every optimization makes your cart better, but without all the pushes, it won’t get anywhere. Great! It’s not that hard, right? Just optimize everything and start pushing (selling), or is it?

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The problem on Amazon is that you’re not just challenging the hill; you’re also challenging a bunch of other carts. Carts, just like yours, are being optimized and pushed up the hill. There’s another issue. The hill has no peak; it never ends. Instead, it just gets steeper and steeper. There’s no summit, but there’s always a cart that’s ahead, one in second place, and so on. This is the ranking.

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Now imagine you start pushing your cart. You put in all your effort. You advertise to drive sales, and the cart begins to move uphill. Customers start finding your products through organic search results because you’ve SEO-optimized your content. Then, they choose to buy the product because the images and text are convincing. You’ve also received some really good reviews from your first customers, which further boosts conversion. Everything is going well. Slowly, you move up the hill, passing competitors and climbing Amazon’s rankings. This, in turn, generates even more sales, pushing your cart even higher. You’ve created positive momentum.

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When You Lose Ranking

But suddenly, your cart comes to a stop. Not only that, it starts rolling back downhill. Carts on hills have that familiar trait. What happened? You’ve lost sales. Your product isn’t selling as well as before, and the current sales volume isn’t enough to keep your cart in its current position on the hill.

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So what caused the drop in sales? It could be anything. Maybe your competitors lowered their prices, and you’ve been competing on price. Or perhaps you’ve run out of stock, and no orders can be fulfilled. Or maybe you’ve received a lot of negative reviews, causing potential new customers to lose trust in your product. Whatever the reason, this decline in sales leads to a drop in ranking. You’ll continue to lose ranking until your current sales can compete with the nearby carts.

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This means that if you’re out of stock, your ranking will keep dropping until it hits the bottom, unless you can restock before reaching the bottom. If you’ve “only” received some negative reviews and started losing ranking, the situation isn’t as critical. But as you make small drops in rank, the traffic from organic results will decrease. This, in turn, leads to fewer sales, and so on. You need to stop the decline and fix the problem as quickly as possible to regain positive momentum. Your ranking, and therefore your sales, depend on it.

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Conclusion - Momentum on Amazon Drives Sales

This is, of course, not an exact explanation of how ranking and momentum on Amazon work but rather a (hopefully) helpful analogy. The important takeaway is that momentum drives sales, and it’s crucial. I’ll revisit this concept later in the SEO-specific sections. But it’s important that everyone involved as decision-makers and project managers in your company or project understands this and can adjust the company’s strategy accordingly.

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I hope you found this section insightful and that you now have a better understanding of how momentum on Amazon leads to sales. Don’t miss the next part in the multi-step guide on creating a successful strategy on Amazon.