Amazon Marketing 101 – Why all eCom Businesses Should be on Amazon

amazon business marketing

marketing planMarketing and selling products for your e-commerce business on Amazon.com

It’s coming up on the busy Christmas retail selling season that can literally make or break a year for business-to-consumer businesses that sell online. Identifying new selling channels like Amazon can ensure that your e-commerce business can thrive during your busiest online selling season.

This article is going to talk about why all Ecommerce businesses need to get on Amazon fast with the basics for Amazon marketing and selling!

Amazon Seller Introduction

So why should you be selling on Amazon? Well as you probably already know Amazon is a huge international marketplace for all types of products making billions of sales every year. But Amazon is also a very easy way to generate some extra sales for your business’s products through the sheer amount of visitors they have going straight to their website.

Two thirds of online consumers searching for a pre-determined item will now go directly to Amazon instead of any other location. This means that instead of using Google to search for the product, 2 thirds of consumers are going straight to Amazon! That’s why you need to get your products listed and that’s why ranking at the top of Google alone is not good enough anymore!

How to Do Amazon Marketing – The Basics

In the past I’ve written extremely long guides on how to build an Amazon business, but today I’m just going to talk about the 3 key points you need if you already have your product in place and want to sell through Amazon and utilise their huge market. Remember this is assuming that you already have a product that can be distributed from day 1.

Point 1 – Distribution and Fees

When you sign up to the amazon seller central you will need to go through the usual sign up options, this includes a £25 + VAT fee per month to simply have an Amazon seller account. After this you can add as many products and variations as you like. When creating a product listing you will have the option to either ship these orders manually or to utilise the Amazon FBA network.

FBA stands for fulfilled by Amazon and is essentially where you send your inventory directly to an Amazon warehouse and they take care of the storage, picking, packaging and sending.

There are obviously increased fees associated with FBA, but in proportion to the fees you still have to pay for simply listing on the Amazon site, I would recommend seriously looking into the FBA platform even if you already have a warehouse and distribution network set up.

Point 2 – Creating the Listings

The product listings themselves are incredibly important for 2 primary reasons. The first is conversions – Your listing will contain your reviews, photos, description and all the details about the item you are selling. If this is incomplete or poorly written then less people will go on to buy your product and hence you will earn less. But more than this if the images and reviews are also not perfect, then you will have people visiting your listing and then clicking back to the Amazon search, this is a huge negative point to Amazon and you will begin to rank lower in the search engine.

The second element is having a well optimised listing so it ranks higher in the amazon search engine itself. Generally if you have ever read into the on-page optimisation tips for websites, you will know that you should include your keyword in the title, H tags and URL, as well as having a number of related keywords throughout the content. Writing your listing is very similar to this. You want to have your primary keywords in the title of your product, and any secondary keywords in the bullet points and description of your listing.

Point 3 – Ranking in Amazon

As you can probably guess, an extremely important aspect to having a successful product in Amazon is down to how well you rank in their search engine. Unlike Google, Amazon’s search engine is primarily based on how many sales your product makes. This means the products that make the most sales will rank higher in the search engine for their specific keywords. But as you can probably guess, the products ranking top already for their keywords will generate their own sales, which is why starting a product in Amazon is so difficult, but once it’s ranked it is very easy to maintain.

Below are some key points to getting the initial rankings.

1.) Optimise your listing – As we mentioned above you need to optimise your listing. This includes keyword research, putting these keywords throughout your product listing, having large images that are clear and can be zoomed in on, having a long keyword rich description as well as having good reviews for your product. Generating reviews is another topic completely that I will talk about later on in the Amazon marketing series.

2.) Generate sales through external sources – At first your product won’t rank anywhere near page 1, even if you are targeting a relatively uncompetitive keyword. As a result you will need to generate your initial sales from somewhere else other than the Amazon search engine. You can do this in almost anyway. Most people start by asking friends and family to purchase the product to get the ball rolling. I think this is a good place to start but you need to continue, try to make 20-50+ sales when you first launch a product, and get to 10+ reviews as quickly as possible.

3.) Start-up an Amazon PPC campaign – Once you have 10 reviews in place (assuming they are mainly positive) you can start an Amazon PPC campaign (also called Amazon sponsored products.) If you have ever set-up a Google AdWords campaign before then Amazon’s platform will seem straight forward, if you haven’t then you can hire a PPC consultant to help you implement this. The main reason I recommend setting up a PPC campaign is that it continues to help you get sales through Amazon (which in turn helps you rank in the Amazon search engine) and the price per sale (Cost per click x conversion rate) is very low on Amazon, meaning you will still make a profit from the sales you make through paid clicks.

I hope you enjoyed the post. I will be writing another Amazon marketing post in the coming weeks, going through each individual element in more detail but if you have any questions before then feel free to contact me over at: http://amazonseoconsultant.com/ Thanks again, Tom.

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Editorial Staff

This article was written by SBMarketingTools.com editorial staff.