6 Ways to Boost Your Amazon Sales in 2019

July 17, 2019 by Maria Fagerland

Guest Author: Chris Dunne of FeedbackExpress

Selling on Amazon comes with huge advantages. You gain access to its global customer base of millions and benefit from being associated with one of the world’s leading brands. However, Amazon is a fiercely competitive marketplace, with over two million third-party sellers clamoring for buyers’ attention and dollars.

In today’s post, I’m going to share six top tips for Amazon sellers looking to increase their sales in the second half of 2019.

1. Get reviews

Positive reviews on Amazon improve your product ranking and provide social proof to potential buyers. With around 90% of Amazon buyers failing to leave reviews, building up your review count can take a bit of effort. Using an automated tool like FeedbackExpress can help you get more product reviews and seller feedback and alert you to negative comments.

Try to encourage reviews from customers especially reviews including media, product pictures or descriptions of usage. Positive reviews can build trust with prospective customers and are a stamp of credibility when you are still building your profile. Amazon also uses product review quantity and rating to determine if a product is worth ranking highly in search results.

Likewise, don’t be disheartened by negative feedback and instead, use it as a way to improve your business. It’s a little known fact that the odd negative review can help your metrics as Amazon views the existence of such reviews as normal for any seller on its marketplace — and addressing negative feedback proactively will show you are committed to the customer experience.

2. Stay competitive and win the Buy Box

Many sceptics who avoid selling on Amazon do so because of the misconception that it is too competitive— despite 55% of its sellers reporting a profit margin of above 20%.

The other misconception is that one seller wins the Buy Box, where over 83% of all sales on Amazon occur. The truth is that qualifying sellers on any listing get their share of the Buy Box periodically, based on their price, shipping method and seller metrics.

Amazon repricing software such as RepricerExpress monitors your competitors’ prices 24/7 to ensure you are competitive and win as much Buy Box placement as possible. Repricers work in real-time and around the clock. If one of your competitors is out of stock with a certain product, your repricer will automatically raise your prices to ensure maximum profit.

Pricing competitively will help you win more Buy Box and you can also boost your chances by using Amazon Prime as your shipping option, developing an excellent Amazon seller rating and improving shipping performance.

3. Improve your Amazon SEO

44% of online shoppers use Amazon as a starting point when looking for a product so you should be paying close attention to your Amazon SEO within your product listings.

As well as seller rating and price, Amazon also looks at keywords in the product’s title to rank listings. With the product title, you have a character limit of 500 characters, in which you should include as many keywords as possible to ensure your product is visible. Amazon suggests including brand, description, product line, material, color, size and quantity in this field.

Separate to the product title, Amazon also offers you the opportunity to enter information into a keyword field. It’s worth noting that it is ineffective to include any keywords that you had already used in the product title, as Amazon will simply overlook this. You are allowed five keywords or keyword phrases to be entered here, so choose wisely!

4. Advertise

If you are just starting out or looking to get your product in front of as many eyeballs as possible, consider trying Amazon Sponsored Products. This allows your product ads to be displayed at the top and bottom of the search results pages, within organic results, and on the carousel on product detail pages.

You choose which products you want to advertise, assign keywords to those products, and enter a cost-per-click bid. When an Amazon shopper searches for one of your keywords, your ad is eligible for display alongside the search results. You pay a fee for this program only when an Amazon shopper clicks on your ad, at which point the shopper is taken to the detail page where your offer is listed.

Amazon monitors the search history of consumers on all their devices, which means your sponsored product advertisements will be put in front of people who are most likely to buy them.

5. Master your pricing

Amazon shoppers are always on the hunt for the best deal. You can’t price your products much higher than a competitor because customers are often there to find the best price.

Whilst most sales will come down to price and with so much competition, it is bad business to base your whole business on being the cheapest. On marketplaces like Amazon, it quickly descends into a race to the bottom and the increase in sales may not make up for the decrease in profit margins.

Instead, it’s important to be flexible whilst remaining competitively priced. Understand the seasonality of your pricing with special offers during periods of less demand and including add on items when possible.

Tips from top seller Kev Blackburn.

Have a plan – You will only do as good as your plan allows you to be, so leave room for error and be prepared for the unexpected.

Be early – You never know if there will be delays due to weather, inbound traffic to fulfillment centers, or others.

Talk to others – You would be surprised at how willing to help your fellow merchants and sellers are (more so when you don’t compete).

Look at the data often – We review forecasts and consumption weekly if not more often throughout the holiday period.

6. Sell Internationally

By only selling in your native country you are limiting your sales. Cross border ecommerce is growing rapidly. Online retailers have access to international markets thanks to technology.

If you’re an Amazon seller it’s relatively straightforward to sell directly on their international marketplaces. And if you use Amazon’s FBA program it’s even easier — as Amazon will store your inventory, process your orders and ship them anywhere in the EU.

Conclusion

In this blog post, I’ve presented you with six top tips you can use to sell more and grow your Amazon business in 2019.

These are by no means the only six options out there, nor are they arranged in any particular order. Every single business is unique, so take and implement from this whatever suits yours. I hope you can take away something useful to gear up your business and take it to the next level.

Special FeedbackExpress offer for Shipworks readers

With FeedbackExpress, you can get more Amazon product reviews and seller feedback easily. Plans start at $20/£14.95 and include a free 30-day trial for you to try out and see if it works for your business.

If you have any Amazon feedback queries, get in touch via [email protected] and one of our great customer support team members will get back to you asap.