How Can Amazon Sellers Improve Sales On a New Competitive Product

One of the hardest things to do as a seller on Amazon is selling a new product in a competitive market.

Often times, your product is being ignored because established sellers are making so many sales a day that you can’t get your foot in the door.

Let’s be clear here; it’s going to be really tough to rank your product on Amazon.

However, once you are there, prepare yourself because your sales performance and overall business will skyrocket.

Here are a few sales techniques to help you out.

Optimise the product listing

First of all you need to make sure that the product listing page is fully optimised. We have talked about this in another post but in order to maximise the potential, here are a few things to do:

Include plenty of keywords in the product title and product features. This will help Amazon’s search algorithm rank your product for the keywords. Also, include your brand name at the beginning of the product description. Once you start getting ranked, Amazon will begin to associate your brand with the product. Again, this boosts rankings as customers could use your brand as a keyword, which is a very powerful asset!

When it comes the back end of the product listing, there are 5,000 characters available to use. Make sure that you include relevant keywords and not just loads of filler text. Just because there are 5,000 characters to use does not mean you have to use it all. The more words that you include increases the risk that you will end up ranking for the wrong keyword, which will do a lot more harm than good to your product.

When writing about the product itself, tailor the content to a specific person. Tell them exactly what it is, what is does and why they need it. Again, use relevant keywords but everything should be simple and easy to read; the keywords should seem natural.

The best products in a competitive market can be scanned over without much effort and give all the information a customer needs to know without reading into a load of detail.

Next, make sure the image has high resolution and clearly represents the product. The best images enable it to be zoomed in on when a user hovers the mouse over it.

Because you’re in a competitive market, it’s likely that images will be very similar between your product and a competitor. If this is the case, try and get your picture to be as unique as possible. How can you convince customers to buy your product over theirs if it looks exactly the same?

PPCs

This should be, above all else, the number one thing to take away from this entire article.

To increase sales on Amazon with a new competitive product, you need to invest heavily in pay per clicks (PPCs).

$100 dollars is just not going to be enough.

Think about it like this. If a competitor is making 100 sales a day and you spend $100 just to advertise, you are effectively buying $1 for every 1 product that they are selling. This is not good.

PPCs are your best bet to help push organic rankings but it’s going to take some serious planning and spending power in order to match what your competition is pulling in.

If your business is getting a lot of impressions but not converting them into sales, it’s likely because you are not bidding high enough on Amazon’s keywords. Start by increasing your bid on the auto campaigns. This may mean that you will only be breaking even or even making a small loss. The point is that you will be able to clearly see what keywords are helping you rank and convert the best, so even when you stop with PPCs the listing keywords are already optimized. It’s worth the investment.

Maybe try and attempt to reverse engineer what your competitors are doing as it is obviously working for them! Learn from their methods and implement them into your own business’ approach.

There isn’t much more to say about this topic but that doesn’t take anything away from its importance to increasing sales volume for an Amazon ecommerce store.

Use social media for reviews

Nowadays, everyone with access to a mobile phone and computer will have some sort of social media platform.

As we know, reviews are a huge factor when it comes to ranking and boosting sales in Amazon. The better the reviews, the better the rankings.

This is a perfect opportunity to get in contact with individuals that run blogs or have other social platforms such as a YouTube channel. People that have already gained an audience will automatically have gained authority in their field and therefore will have achieved influence. You can use this to your product’s advantage such as by asking them to review your product for you, talking about its pros and cons.

Your competitive product will have been exposed to a wider audience and so works just as effectively as paying for other ads on sites such as Google.

The two points we have just discussed, investing in PPCs and using social media for reviews, both have one thing in common:

INCREASING EXTERNAL EXPOSURE

You really need to do more than just saying ‘I have an ecommerce store on Amazon - come check it out’. The best sellers on Amazon have a variety of exposure techniques so you need to have some of your own to gain a competitive edge.

Subscribe and save

This method is either often forgotten about or not actually known altogether.

In order to determine whether this technique is a good fit for you, try to answer the following question:

Does my product is something that a customer would purchase over and over?

If you answered 'yes', then there is potential for your store to set up a ‘subscribe and save’ feature.

Let’s say you are make 100 sales in a month and only 1 of them subscribes and returns to your store. Now, I know what some of you are thinking:

Is it even worth it if i’m only getting 1 person to come back?

My answer is simple: Yes.

You may only be getting 100 sales this month but the next you will have gotten 101 sales. Then the next, you will have gotten 102 and so and so forth.

For something that is so easy to implement, it’s such a simple method to getting customers to return and repeat business. This is like striking gold for ecommerce stores; customers that come back again and again creates loyalty and builds rapport.

Cross promotions

Does your new competitive product also overlap or provide similar value or use when combined with another product that your store already sells?

If so, this is something that you need to be taking advantage of.

For ease, let’s call this new competitive product ‘item 1’ and the original store product ‘item 2.’

Item 2 may be worth using as your store’s main product and go heavy on the marketing for this instead. If item 2 is less competitive than item 1, it may be an easier way to get into the new market.

Even though item 2 will not be making you as much money as item 1, you will be able to rank far more easily for only a fraction of the cost. The benefit to this is that you will be able get your brand exposed at a faster rate.

You can then cross-promote item 1 and then advertise along the lines of:

‘If you liked this item then might also like this one we also offer’ or ‘customers also purchased X when they bought Y.’

Once item 2 is in the customer’s cart and they see that item 1 is something they like and will get good use of, they can simply add that to their basket and checkout in one easy process.

This may not occur every time someone buys item 2 but every now then, item 1 will be bought as well. Selling only 2 or 3 one month can turn into 5 or 6 the next and so on. Once the ball starts rolling it’s hard to stop.

Final take

If I didn’t stress enough earlier in the post, get stuck into increasing your PPCs. Seriously, this will be the best way to improve sales for your new competitive product. Do some keyword research and invest in the ones that will best serve that product.

Get the most out of external sources as well. Social media is a powerful tool in the modern marketing world so make the most of it.

But have patience; these techniques will not provide overnight success. Once you start seeing the results, you will be well on your way to becoming an established (and may even become the number one) seller in a competitive environment.