Amazon is the leading e-retailer in the United States with close to 280.5 billion U.S. dollars in 2019 net sales. The majority of the company’s revenues are generated through e-retail sales of electronics and other products, followed by third-party seller revenues, subscription services, and AWS activities. The Amazon juggernaut is real!
If you are a retailer selling on this platform, it can definitely open up a whole new world of possibilities for exposure and profit.
These are some actionable tips to boost sales and generally help you navigate the Amazon terrain.
1. Optimize Searching with Detailed Product Description
Amazon sells more than 12 million products. And, if you expand this to Amazon Marketplace sellers, the number is closer to 350 million products.
One of the most important Amazon selling strategies is ensuring that your products show up at the top of customer searches.
How can you do this?
In order to show up at the top of customer searches, it is critical that you provide Amazon with as much detail as possible on every product, including title, description, any product identifiers, size, color, etc. Be as detailed as possible!
There are excellent tools at your disposal like product information management software that can do some of this heavy lifting. These can be especially useful when selling across multiple marketplaces.
Here are 3 choices that we recommend:
- Akaneo for dramatically improving product data accuracy and quality while simplifying and accelerating product catalog management.
- Salsify The world’s biggest brands including Fruit of the Loom, Coca-Cola, GSK, Rawlings, and Bosch use Salsify every day to stand out on the digital shelf.
- Riversand Platform Highly customizable with the ability to upload large amounts of data at once.
2. Price Competitively
Do the research before you list your items. The economy is heading toward a recession and price is a large consideration for many customers on Amazon.
What are similar items selling for? If yours is priced competitively, you boost your chances of showing up at the top of search results.
Amazon’s Match Low Price feature is an excellent tool to employ for this. It allows you to set your own preferences so that you always compete on price.
3. Centralize Your Inventory Tracking
Supply chain disruptions are shining a light on the need for many small businesses to prioritize centralized inventory management. If you’re using manual spreadsheets to track inventory, you may be making costly mistakes.
Good tracking software helps you control inventory costs, minimize dead stock, storage costs, and stockouts. Centralizing your inventory can give you a real-time picture of how sales are going and when you need to restock products.
Some great software options are:
4. Forecasting Accurately
To forecast Amazon business, it’s important to look at the data on a consistent basis. Amazon’s marketplace is not static–it shifts continually. Look at the day-to-day stats so you can stay on top of trends.
When reordering supplies, there are several factors to consider.
- Evaluate the daily sell-thru of items. Look at the past week, month, and two-month stats.
- Look at buy box win percentages. Percentages can be impacted by things like stranded inventory, rogue sellers, and buy box suppression.
- On-hand inventory for each item and what the deficit is.
- Break down lead times into segments to quickly identify trends within a supply chain.
5. Reinvent Your Brand for Amazon
Creating an “Amazon Only” brand opens you up to cater to specific markets. It can be very beneficial to test new products outside of your niche in this way.
This strategy allows you to gain access to Amazon’s considerable customer base and try out different things. You may want to experiment with prices, offering sets or bundles to see if it helps boost sales, all without affecting your brand reputation.
Tricia Carey, a director at Seller Engine, a software company with resources for Amazon sellers, summed things up nicely: “With Amazon starting to become a search engine in its own right, anyone selling a product needs to seriously analyze their reasons for not being on Amazon. It’s a platform where any commerce seller can expand their marketplace, and it’s the default place people go to search to buy a product. While the US has the most opportunity, the rest of the world is following suit. With their network of warehouses, logistics, and infrastructure already in place, a vendor or seller can get access to this without having to build out their own.”
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