Estimates put the number of third-party, active sellers utilizing the Amazon marketplace at two million and Amazon’s catalog at 350 million products. As an Amazon seller, differentiating your brand against those figures can seem daunting! In this article, I’ll introduce our product optimization and listing management approach and give you some strategies to build your product’s detail page foundation. Getting your page details correct from the start will go a long way in achieving success on the Amazon platform.
Let’s start with an acknowledgment that you’re building a foundation. How you craft your detail page will drive everything. Poorly laid out copy that’s unresearched, copywriting that fails to take advantage of all the marketplace research tools and information available, or pages that contain content that’s just “eh” will lead to poor conversion results. Read on for a few “pro strategies” based on selling close to a billion dollars worth of products over hundreds of thousands of SKUs on the marketplace.
Strategy 1: There are many great tools for doing search term research. Take a little time and research well-performing competitor ASINs. At Kaidako, we like to reverse engineer competing listings, looking specifically at the search terms driving organic traffic. That information helps in two ways. First, it provides an unbiased view of search terms, keywords, phrases, etc., leading to a competitor’s success. Secondly, you can cross-reference those SEO terms to see if your competitor is also paying for those search terms. If they’re not – i.e., only ranking well organically for high-value terms but not for paid search, you may be able to “buy” some of that traffic. This allows a new-to-platform product to achieve some lift out of the gate, as these search terms are proven drivers.
Strategy 2: Always remember that you’re building a foundation, laying the substructure, then the other elements on top of that foundation. Never put anything in the Amazon ecosystem that you don’t want to remain there – maybe forever. Creating placeholder bullet points, listing temporary attributes and the like, is a recipe for headaches down the road. It’s just so much easier to get it right from the start and avoid having to change things later. For example, adding the term “generic” as a brand name attribute placeholder can be challenging to change once that attribute is locked.
Strategy 3: Use your character count and page elements well. Avoid repeating search terms and follow the basics of detail page element hierarchy. In our experience – and most agencies would agree – the hierarchy should be: Title, Bullet points, Back End Search Terms, Product Descriptions, Alt Tags. Your title is critical, be sure to follow the categories syntax and style guide.
Strategy 4: Don’t forget mobile; by some estimates, half of all e-commerce is happening on mobile. This is especially important when designing A+ content. Use Amazon’s preview tools and create informative product detail pages that look good and flow nicely in that limited format.
Each of these strategies could be a series of articles in its own right; however, grasping these basics will put you on solid footing. Creating high-converting products on the Amazon platform is a unique blend of designing search-friendly, well-optimized pages that represent your brand well, are rich with product information, and are appealing from the consumer-facing side.
Do you feel you should be achieving a higher level of success on the platform or want to get some honest insight? It’s always free to contact us for a listing or account discussion. Kaidako’s team has over a century of e-commerce experience. We are experts at bringing clarity and calm to what may seem like a calamitous marketplace. Discover why our client retention rate is 100%.
About the author: Stu Eisenman is CEO and a Co-founder of Kaidako, an Amazon-centric agency helping brands and manufacturers realize the full potential of direct-to-consumer sales on Amazon. A self-described OG retailer, he has decades of retail and e-commerce success. Kaidako’s team has sold nearly a billion dollars worth of products on the Amazon marketplace, either as a third-party seller or on behalf of clients.
