How To Increase Sales On Amazon

By Author: Hardik Somaiya
Total Articles: 1
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Some advice on how to scale your business on Amazon by leveraging its smart features, using suitable advertising, and other relevant strategies.

Hello, fellow Amazon sellers !! Now that you are selling on Amazon and finding it interesting to get decent numbers on Amazon, you must also be thinking about how to increase sales on Amazon and leverage more of what Amazon has to offer.

I have scaled a business on Amazon from $135 (10,000 INR) per day to $4,000 (3,00,000 INR) per day within a year and a half. In my experience, it all comes down to a few important points that need to be taken care of to ensure multifold growth on the e-commerce platform. Let’s get right to it:

1. Visibility – Part 1 – Prime Badge

This point is not helpful for sellers using FBA since Prime badge is already granted to products in FBA.

In my earlier days of trying to increase sales on Amazon, we were fulfilling orders through Easy Ship. While exploring I learned that to get the Prime badge, we had to opt-in for the Easy Ship Guaranteed Delivery Program. Once my order fulfilment was as per the requirement of around ...
... 30 days, I would be given a Prime badge for all my products.

I already knew about the Prime badge but I had underestimated its importance. After getting a Prime badge, our sales doubled the very next day. We were shocked to see the effect the badge has on visibility on Amazon.

Please note, when you opt-in for the Easy Ship Guaranteed Delivery Program, you cannot charge shipping on your products. But if you want to charge for shipping on a particular product, you can ask Amazon for a product level opt-out form and that particular product can be opted out of the program and shipping fee can be levied.

2. Visibility – Part 2 – Amazon SEO

The Amazon algorithm is somewhat similar to Google but there are some factors that are considered much more important than others. The most important factor is keyword research. You should know what your customers could be searching for from your product portfolio. Based on those search queries, you should optimise your product listing around those keywords.

If I had six hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first four hours sharpening my axe - ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Remember, shortlisting the right keywords is like sharpening your axe. You can make keywords from customer search terms by the following means:

i. Advertising – If you are running campaigns, you can get to know which search terms are high converting, especially when you run automatic campaigns. Shortlist them for your listings.

ii. Brand Analytics – Amazon has introduced this report where you can enter the ASIN of a product and get the search term it is ranking for. This is a great way to get keywords that are working for your competitors.

iii. Third-Party Tools – I personally combine the above two methods with Keyword Tool to get more insights about customer search behavior. This is a paid tool and if you are just starting, you can rely on the above methods.
Once you have the right keywords, now it’s time to put them to use. Here is where you should be including them:

- Title – Your product title should have the top one or two keywords in it. The product title has a significant impact on organic search results.

- Listing Keywords – I personally consider this as one of the most important places where you can use the right keywords. Listing keywords have a great impact on the organic search results, even more than that of the title.

- Manual Campaigns – If you are advertising, it would be a good strategy to use these shortlisted keywords as phrase and exact matches in your manual campaigns. Bidding the correct amount for these keywords would ensure that your product gets good visibility.

- Bullet Points and Product Description – Try to use the same keywords in bullet points and definitely use them in product descriptions. Make sure that the product description consists of at least 1,000 words and it explains the product in detail.

3. Visibility – Part 3 – Gain Positive Feedback and Product Reviews

People influence people. Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the holy grail of advertising. - MARK ZUCKERBERG

Reviews and feedback is the report card from previous customers who have tried and tested your product. Just like you would try something your friend recommends, customers on Amazon trust products with good reviews given by previous customers. Product reviews have one of the greatest impacts on customer decisions.

When you want to promote or launch a product on Amazon, make sure you are doing everything to get positive reviews. It can also include incentivising customers to give a positive review.

There’s a method you can use to grow your review. Amazon allows you to send an email to the customer to leave a review on the product. But doing this manually will not be possible as your orders grow and hence you can use a tool to automate this.

It is equally important to tackle the negative reviews that you are getting, else they can prove to be very harmful to your sales. You can tackle such reviews and feedback by solving a problem that the customer has faced. They might reconsider the review once you have addressed their issue.

For this, you would also require a mechanism to know if someone has left a positive/ negative review/feedback on your product or account. This facility is available in FeedbackFive itself but if you have too many products on Amazon, FeedbackFive would prove to be costly. Hence, I use SageMailer for this. SageMailer sends you an email whenever someone leaves a review or feedback.

Both of the above are paid tools and in the long run, this activity has proven to be so useful in increasing sales on Amazon that I don’t mind spending on them.

4. FBA and Cluster Replication – Deliver Faster to Delight

If you are selling on Amazon, by now you must have known that customers love getting products in a day or two. If you are selling in one corner of your country, then probably customers ordering from a distant location, would be getting delivery in at least 4-5 days. To increase sales on Amazon, you will have to make sure they get deliveries in a day or two. This will improve your conversion rates in that region. Now your question would be, how is it possible? Well, Amazon terms this as cluster replication. Basically, you would have to send your products to the FBA warehouse in that region or even Amazon can pick it up for you.

To do this in India, you would need to check if there’s an Amazon warehouse in that region or state and you will need GST registration for that state and add the warehouse address as an additional place of business in your GST.

When you are done with this, your next question should be, which products should I send? To answer this question, you need to know what are the sales of your products in the surrounding areas for an average of 30 days and send the quantities accordingly. If you send less, then you will not see the effect on your sales. If you send more, your storage fees could take a bit of toll on your profits.

5. Advertise

Launching a new product? Or have a product that you want to rank higher on Amazon? Advertising is one of the best answers to your question of how to increase sales on Amazon. Assuming, you have got the right keywords for the product, now making them rank first or second in search results is very important. To do this, you can try different types of campaigns such as:

i) Sponsored Products – Automatic Targeting:

If you do not know what keywords you should be targeting, you should start with automatic targeting search campaigns. It is very easy to set up and it automatically targets based on Amazon algorithms. From this, you can get high converting keywords and ideas from customer search queries.

ii) Sponsored Products – Manual Targeting:

It works the same as the above campaign, but you have to specify the keywords on which you want to show your products. Keyword research is of prime importance to run such campaigns. Below is a screenshot of how the ads appear on Amazon. Check the sponsored label on the first two results.

iii) Sponsored Brands – Headline Ads:

Check the top bar before the search results. This is how the sponsored brand or headline ads appear. It’s a good way to catch attention especially when you are serious about promoting your brand. These ads are also helpful in getting customers to your brand store and showcase them the varieties you sell.

iv) Sponsored Display/Product Display Ads:

Sponsored display ads, formerly known as Product display ads are useful when you want to target your competitor’s products or display an ad on their product detail page and various other pages.

6. Product Photos

Listings first, campaigning second -EVERY SUCCESSFUL AMAZON SELLER

No matter how much you spend on advertising or trying other methods to increase sales on Amazon, you just can’t ignore your listing, especially the product photos you have used as listing images. If you ain’t got this right, you ain’t getting good sales. Before investing anywhere, invest in your product photography and listing quality. Only then the rest of the methods would work.

7. Automate

Efficiency is intelligent laziness - DAVID DUNHAM

It is not about laziness here, but you need to have some time on your hand to try new things to expand your business. That can only be done if you automate as many processes and tasks as much you can. Automation can save man-hours or increase efficiency of some tasks. Use technology to your greatest advantage so that you can focus on other important things in your business.

Conclusion:
I have shared with you the points that should not be ignored when you ask how to increase sales on Amazon. Some other important points that you should be focusing on are:

1. Sell unique products that are not already on Amazon
2. Price your products right
3. Follow Amazon Policies and Performance Metrics
4. Create a Brandstore
5. Market outside Amazon (Brand Marketing, Influencer Marketing, Blogs/Thought Leadership)