During the second quarter of 2017, an unprecedented shift occurred. For the first time ever, the number of units sold by third-party sellers on Amazon surpassed units sold by Amazon itself.
The Amazon marketplace continues to grow by leaps and bounds, and it represents billions of dollars of global sales. But the competition can prove fierce. When it comes to how to increase sales on Amazon, here’s what you need to know.
Get Found
With all of the competition, one of the most effective strategies you can employ as an entrepreneur remains SEO. Like Google, Amazon looks at keywords in your product titles in order to rank listings.
Make sure you fit as many relevant keywords into your 500-character word product titles as possible. Not sure which keywords to use? Check out an Amazon keyword tool to find the most relevant long tail keywords gleaned directly from Amazon.
By having the right search terms incorporated into your product titles, you up your search rankings in Amazon. The higher your search rankings, the more traffic and sales you’ll get.
Choose Wisely
When it comes to increasing Amazon sales, you definitely need a competitive edge. That means choosing products wisely.
One of the biggest differentiators on Amazon? Price.
Of course, there are ways to increase product sales even if you don’t have the lowest price listings. But you still need to remain as competitive as possible.
How? Let price competition guide you toward selling the best products. Make sure you choose items that have enough room in their overall cost to provide you with a solid return on investment (ROI).
This means factoring in other important expenses such as overhead, order fulfillment, and inventory.
Use Fulfillment by Amazon
What sets most top sellers on Amazon apart from the competition? They rely on Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) to make increased sales volume easy to manage. How does it work?
Simply send your inventory to Amazon. Then, sit back and relax. You see, FBA takes it from there so you don’t have to.
FBA manages order fulfillment including packaging and shipping. Yes, you pay for item storage and shipping costs. But shipping costs often prove discounted.
Although there are fees associated with FBA, it comes with numerous advantages. One of our favorites? When you opt for FBA, your products will appear higher in Amazon’s search results.
Check out more Amazon product management tips that lead to big ROI.
Increased Sales Volumes and a Pro Merchant Subscription
When it comes to making money on Amazon, the last thing you want to do is start throwing around lots of money for subscriptions and services that offer little value. But if you sell big, then give Amazon’s Pro Merchant subscription a try.
The Pro Merchant subscription makes selling easier by providing you with streamlined tools and enhanced reporting. You get more selling options and can upload in bulk. And it lets you add items to the marketplace that are new or unique.
Instead of the $0.99 per transaction fee that individual sellers pay, the per-item fee vanishes.
Of course, this gets offset by the $39.99 you pay per month for the subscription. But if you list lots of items, Pro Merchant definitely proves worth its salt. With the subscription, there is no limit to how many items you can sell per month.
So, if you have 200 monthly transactions, you’ll pay $0.20 per transaction. If you have 2,000 monthly transactions, that’s $0.02. Mere pennies on the dollar.
Go Automatic
As you ramp up your Amazon listing volumes, you’ll want to consider automating as much of the process as possible.
Use an Amazon listing tool to list products in bulk. And don’t forget an e-commerce inventory management solution for automatic reorders.
This will help you streamline your listings process so that you can spend your precious time on other activities like customer service and marketing.
Close the Feedback and Review Loop
Amazon’s customers rely on feedback and reviews to make purchasing decisions. In fact, 88 percent of consumers place as much weight on feedback and reviews as they do personal recommendations.
So, you need to pursue feedback and reviews for the gold that they are. But here’s the rub, only about 10 percent of Amazon users actually leave feedback and reviews. How do you encourage customers to leave more feedback and reviews?
Invest in an Amazon product management solution or feedback software to close the loop. Then, start getting the feedback and reviews you need to succeed online.
Market, Market, Market
The more traffic you direct back to your Amazon pages, the more sales you’ll make. So, you need to consistently market your products in a variety of locations.
Advertising through Amazon remains an excellent way to increase visibility and sales. Start with Sponsored Products, which displays your products on the product detail pages or below search results.
Like other pay-per-click ads, you get charged based on customer clicks. If it’s your first time using the service, Amazon will give you a deal.
But don’t stop your marketing efforts with Amazon alone. You can also market in other places although you must take care not to draw people away from Amazon.
Set up your own company blog and contribute to it regularly to enjoy massive lead growth. Of course, this requires hiring professionals or learning the ins and outs of great content marketing and SEO to bring more traffic to your blog.
Consider guest blogging on other sites, too, to get the word out about your products. Finally, don’t neglect social media. It’s a great and easy way to drive more customers to your Amazon product pages.
How to Increase Sales on Amazon
When it comes to how to increase sales on Amazon, you must know and use the right tricks of the trade. Competition proves fierce on Amazon Marketplace.
That means you need to learn how to use Amazon’s tools to your advantage. You need to understand how to successfully differentiate yourself from the competition and get the word out about your products in a variety of places.
With the right digital content marketing, SEO strategies, and management support, you can ramp up sales and enjoy massive sales increases on Amazon Marketplace.
Interested in more great tips to make your small business wildly successful? Check out our marketing blog.
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