With a seamless out-of-the-box business model, a built-in consumer base and low barriers to entry, brands across every industry and vertical are clamoring to sell their wares on the Amazon platform. While this wonderful world of Amazon sales is tempting for brands of all sizes, if your team is looking to start moving products on Amazon, there are a few things to consider.
For instance, there is a significant amount of manual work, time and resources that are required up front to kick-start an Amazon brand presence, as well as continuously manage and fulfill orders throughout the online sales cycle. Not sure if your brand is equipped to handle selling on Amazon? This article will explore the three most important parts of the Amazon sales process, with some tips and tricks on how your team can optimize your Amazon success.
Product Marketing
How your product looks in photos, the keywords used to describe it and where your product listings show up are the deciding factors between whether or not someone will click "Add to Cart" or not. While it may not seem like much, a ton of work goes into the back-end of product listings to ensure maximum conversions.
Even before consumers read your headline, their eyes will be drawn to your images. The most successful Amazon sellers have a team of photographers dedicated specifically to handling product listings, but brands of all sizes can create a professional presence by following a few key guidelines. Amazon itself has a comprehensive list of guidelines available to sellers, but there are a few key best practices to remember: photograph your products in front of a clean white background, show products from a variety of angles (including the top), and make sure you’re conveying the scale and size of products in your images. Your product listings are also a showcase for your product description and other content, which help give consumers more details about what your products do, what they look like and why they’re important. From headlines to bullet points to content, the words used to describe your products can help sway customers who may be weighing whether or not to purchase your product.
Finally, there is advertising on Amazon. There are many different types of marketing campaigns your team can take advantage of — from Sponsored Products to the Amazon Brand Registry to Lighting Deals — and all it really takes is some dedicated time to test out what works best for your products and your team.
Inventory Management
Although getting your product listings successfully up and running on the Amazon platform may seem like a lot of heavy lifting, it’s all just setting up the real operational task force of Amazon selling: the logistics and fulfillment of orders. When a brand decides to start selling on Amazon, it joins one of two groups to dictate how its outbound orders will be managed, shipped and tracked: fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) or merchant fulfillment. Whichever fulfillment option your brand chooses will also determine the level of visibility you will have into your inventory tracking and stock management capabilities. FBA inventory reports deep-dive into some pretty complex inventory metrics, such as recommended removals and overall inventory health.
If your team is managing your own inventory in-house, it might take some time to build your perfect inventory management strategy, but with the right tools and tracking system in place, you’ll be able to efficiently manage inventory, quickly fulfill orders and master Amazon logistics guidelines.
Customer Service
After your products are packaged and out the door, it’s time to start thinking about your customer service experience. At first, it may seem as though customer service on Amazon is all the same — it is all sold from the same platform, after all — but there are plenty of ways customer service can make or break your Amazon success. In some ways, the Amazon platform is also a social network, with consumers sharing ratings, reviews and details of every seller interaction. Too many negative engagements and your sales on Amazon will plummet. Your Amazon seller rating directly impacts whether or not your products will win the Buy Box (the most coveted real estate Amazon has to offer), which makes customer service even more important. There are a few types of engagements that influence your seller rating on Amazon.
First, there is how your team fields, responds to and handles customer questions. If your brand is represented through FBA or another seller on Amazon, you might have little to no control over how your customers' questions are answered, which can negatively impact your product ratings. If you’re selling on Amazon yourself or leveraging a single third-party seller relationship, you’ll be able to ensure every customer question is met with respect, efficiency and professionalism.
How your team handles returns will also impact your overall seller rating. Amazon recently streamlined its returns policy for all sellers, which has made it harder for sellers to know exactly why customers are returning items, the exact issues with a product (and whether or not its damaged) and how efficient the return process was a whole. Whether your team is managing returns out of your own warehouse or out of an FBA warehouse, it’s critical to track all of these metrics as well as what happens to your merchandise after it is returned.
It’s easy for brands who are thinking about starting to sell on Amazon to view the online platform as a completely different retail and logistics experience, but in reality, it operates quite like other retail outlets. With the right marketing strategy, a strong logistics plan and excellent customer service, your team can excel at Amazon sales.
