The Secret to Selling More on Amazon

I often see the same question in online forums “Why aren’t my Amazon products selling? I’m running PPC, I just did 5 days of giveaways, and now no sales.”

 

What if I told you I knew the secret to getting your products to fly off the virtual Amazon.com shelves? Well ok, here goes.

There’s really only two things you need to do to get your products selling. First you must get them in front of the customer (also known as discoverability), then get them to click the buy button (desirability). That’s it. Get the customer to see your product and make a decision to buy your product.

 

Step 1: Bringing the customer to your virtual storefront

There are thousands of products in your category and maybe even direct competitors of yours. So how do you get the customer in front of your product? There are several ways:

 

1. External traffic – Drive them from an external website to your listing
2. Be on Top – Be on page 1 of the search results for a specific keyword
3. Run advertisements – Run a pay per click advertisement to bring your product to page one without having to rank there organically

 

External Traffic – There are so many ways to drive customers to your listing from external sources. You could run an advertisement on social media, create a landing page on your website or use a landing page creation service. You could get an influencer to blog about your product, or you could advertise a sale on a deal site. Try not to get lost in the sea of external traffic options. Focus on mastering one source and then get creative and move on to the next source.  

 

Be on Top – If you’re on page 12, how will the customer even see your product?  This is why so many sellers do massive giveaways, because they know Amazon ranks products based on sales numbers, and even if they give the product away, it still counts as a sale. I don’t recommend this, there are plenty of other ways to increase sales without giveaways. For example, you could use one of the tips listed above to drive external traffic and increase sales at the same time.

 

Run Advertisements – Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a great way to get your product to the top of page one for a keyword, or to show your product in the middle of a competitors listing page. The problem with PPC is that it can be confusing, and if you don’t understand how to optimize your advertising campaigns you can spend far more than your profit margin and even lose your entire investment in a very short period of time. But if you do learn to master PPC, you can pay a very low amount for a click that leads to a very profitable sale. If I pay 35 cents for a click that leads to a profit of $10, it was well worth the effort to learn PPC.

 

Step 2: Making the Sale

This is perhaps the most important step and it should really come before step one. You’ve done all this work to get the customer to your listing and they are going to look at your listing for less than 60 seconds before either clicking on a competitors listing of a sponsored product advertisement right inside your listing, or moving on completely.

 

What can you do to get the customer to choose your product within that 60 seconds? An exercise I run with my clients is asking them to imagine they are selling this product at a table inside a popular big box store. I’m the customer and I’m walking by the product, I glance over and you have 30 seconds to interrupt my intentions for coming inside the store today and get me to add your product to my cart.  What would you say? First of all how does your product look? Is the packaging clean and beautiful? Are you proud to show off the features and benefits? Why should I buy this one and not one of my favorites brands that sells something similar?

 

Write all of these things down and then check your listing to see if it matches your sales pitch.  

1. Do your photos say buy me? 90% of customers shop on mobile devices, which means they probably aren’t reading your listing but instead looking to your photos to see if the product meets their needs. Do your photos show the features and benefits of the product? Do they show the product in use? Do they show the size or included accessories of the product? If not, you will lose the sale to a competitor who does. Many times, when I offer product photography services to clients they don’t want to spend $200-$300 on photos. But in my opinion, they are looking at this the wrong way. I’d rather spend $300 once and make 3000 sales as a result, then try to take photos myself and give all those sales away to my competitors. How many sales do you need to make up for that $300 invested in professional photos? Consider that when making the investment.
2. Does your listing evoke emotion and speak to your customer? Read your listing through a customers eyes. Do you know who your ideal customer is? What do they like? Google a few blog posts about similar products in the industry and see what people are saying about them. Look at competitors reviews, what are customers complaining or raving about? This morning I was writing a listing for a client and I found a blog post about the importance of cleaning paint brushes. I used these reasons to evoke emotion and inform the customer of these benefits for a brush cleaning product.
3. Optimize your listing – Just like optimizing ppc to get the best bang for your buck, you should optimize your listing to appeal to the mobile shopper, help the customer imagine the product in their lives, and understand why they should buy your product over others. Listing optimization helps ensure that your listing ranks higher in searches and that your product is discoverable when customers use search terms to find it. It’s worth hiring someone who understands both search engine and keyword optimization as well as creative copywriting to appeal to the customer and make the sale. Invest in this once and get the sale every time.  

 

Well there you have it, the two secrets to getting your Amazon products to sell is to make them discoverable and desirable. Start by making sure the product is presented well on the virtual shelf, that it speaks to your ideal customer. Then get that product in front of the customers eyes so they can click the buy button! See it, buy it! That’s it.

 

Need more help making this happen?  Contact us today to inquire about our product photography and copywriting services. Join our Amazing at Home Facebook group for free training on PPC, Listing Optimization, and so much more.