With competition on Amazon at an all-time high, it’s crucial to make
sure your business is retail ready. There are a number of ways to
prepare, but the bottom line is to ensure your account and listings are set
up for effective marketing placements. There’s no point in spending
money on advertising or driving external traffic to Amazon pages that
won’t convert.
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to implement key actions and get your
listings up to par. These basic steps can get you started on the path to
retail readiness on Amazon.
What Does it Mean for a Product to be Considered Retail Ready?
Sellers cannot hope to create a listing and climb the bestseller rankings a
few minutes later. A proper Amazon listing must be set up correctly and
contain crucial information to inform customers enough that they will
add the item to their cart and actually complete checkout. Retail
readiness on Amazon isn’t about advertising or traffic, but about
marketing your item correctly in the first place.
Sellers also cannot violate Amazon policies and guidelines. Because of
this, it pays to know what you’re doing and ensure you’re above board.
It does your business no good if your recently listed products get your
entire account suspended.
Keep reading for a complete Amazon retail readiness checklist that will
help you prep for success.
Retail Ready Listing Optimization
Basic listing optimization includes titles, bullet points, product
descriptions, backend keywords, and product images. On top of that,
make sure you’re in the right category and that your parent-child
variations are set up properly. It’s important to avoid these common
mistakes and check Seller Central help pages for the specific guidelines
for your respective category.
To ensure you’re well-placed for paid and organic search, it’s crucial
that all of these components include well-researched keywords. After
you complete basic content, you can invest resources into A/B testing
content to boost your listings further.
Titles: This is the most important piece of basic content. Include
your brand, item name, and descriptors. Keep character counts
lower for a better mobile experience.
Product feature bullets: SEO-friendly keywords and readability
are important. Sellers get five bullets up to 500 characters, but
shorter is punchier and easier for customers to digest.
Poor product features like those in the image above won’t give
customers much information. Since they contain so few keywords, they
aren’t going to help in search and browse.
Product description: This is your chance to expand on the info
you might have left out of the product bullets. For sellers using A+
Content, this field won’t be customer-facing, but don’t skip it! This
gives you 2000 characters to include more SEO-friendly keywords.
While we don’t recommend keyword stuffing, you can really use
this area to your indexing advantage.
Backend keywords: This field is never customer-facing. While
the backend search terms are not weighted as heavily as the title in
Amazon's search algorithm, they are still crucial to include for
indexing purposes. Use this field for common misspellings and
cast your keyword net both wide and deep. Many keyword tools
will recommend competitor brand names, but using them is very
risky. Amazon will suspend listings with copyrighted terms in the
content.
Product images: Depending on your product category, you will
get up to 9 images. Use all of this space wisely. The main image
must fill 80% of the space and be on a pure white background, but
the other images can be designed. We recommend showing off
your product's unique selling propositions and incorporating
visually appealing lifestyle images and videos. As of June 2023,
non-brand-registered sellers who have been selling on Amazon for
at least three months may now add product videos to their listings.
Translation and localization: If you’re planning to expand to
other locales, be sure your content is localized and translated in
each marketplace correctly. Your existing content may not convert
in other countries.
How to Take Advantage of Enhanced Content
Once the basics have been taken care of, it’s time to up your game. If
you have access to the Brand Registry (which has many great benefits
for sellers), you can create free brand-specific content to boost your
conversion.
A+ Content: Build out your detail pages with large images and
immersive text. Learn how to build a high-quality A+ detail page.
Brand Store: Your site within Amazon to create a branded
store and showcase products, deals, videos, and a number of
interactive modules. A multi-page Brand Store is also required to
unlock certain types of Amazon Advertising within Sponsored
Brands. Don’t skip it, and ensure it’s on-brand and informative,
like this one that was created by eCommerceNurse.
Brand Story: Every brand is unique, and the brand story piece
within A+ Content is a great way to showcase your original ideas.
Tell a little bit about your brand and how it began. Customers love
this, and it can set you apart from generic sellers and those doing
blackhat reselling. It's also a perfect place to discuss any charities
your brand supports or anything else that makes you stand out.
This example from an [Link] detail page is simple but
effective.
Customer Engagement and Brand Reputation
All of the above are a great start. But if customers arrive on your detail
page and there are no reviews, they’re unlikely to make a purchase.
Before you drive traffic to your listings, boost your customer
engagement and reputation.
Customer reviews: Many sellers ask what is the minimum
number of customer reviews a product should have to be
considered retail-ready. To be retail-ready, it’s best to have at least
15 good reviews on a product before you pay for ads. Kickstart
your reviews with Amazon Vine and be sure you
use FeedbackFive to ramp up your reviews from any sales.
Poor reviews can be voted “helpful” by customers and stay on your
detail page forever. Avoid them by ensuring you adhere to quality
standards, provide instructions, and request a lot of reviews to balance
out any bad ones.
Star rating: Be conscious of your star rating. If a product drops
below 3.5 stars, it will lose traction in the Amazon algorithm and
be ineligible for certain marketing and ads placements. A big part
of building a good star rating is ensuring customer questions are
answered in a timely manner and that customers have all the
details they need through A+ Content and basic content (pack
sizes, color options, how to use the item, batteries required, etc).
This type of information can reduce returns and increase the
likelihood of positive product ratings.
Check out the number of ratings and answered questions on this Amazon
product. There's a reason it's a bestseller!
Amazon Posts: Another Brand Registry find, Posts launched in
2020. It's available for US sellers and acts as a social media-like
feed on Amazon. This is also linked from your Brand Store and
customers can follow your posts.
Manage Your Customer Engagement tool: If a customer is
following your Posts feed, you can reach out to them within the
seller platform to share new launches and deals. We’re sure this
feature will continue to grow, so don’t miss it.
Correct Pricing and Adequate Inventory
The last piece of the Amazon retail readiness checklist is all about
ensuring customers can purchase your product.
Sufficient inventory: Is it in stock and buyable? It doesn’t make
sense to run advertisements or drive social media traffic to a listing
that has one day of cover in FBA inventory. RestockPro can help
you manage your FBA inventory more effectively to ensure you
stay in stock.
Pricing and promotions: Unless your products are priced
competitively, they are not going to do well. Pricing can be
complex, but you should do enough research to know the category
well. Too low and you’ll undercut margins, but too high can kill
your sell-through and result in other problems. It can pay to
understand how promotions work, too. Running a coupon or a
discount code can make all the difference to slow-moving stock.
Plus, it makes your listings more attractive and will show up in
search results and ads.
Create Your Advertising Strategy
Once you’ve prepared your listings and brand correctly on Amazon,
you’re ready to invest in Amazon Advertising. Ads are absolutely
crucial to success on Amazon, especially when you’re trying to
constantly ramp up sales. We recommend testing and running all types
of campaigns to see what works best. But if you’ve taken the steps
above and invested resources correctly, you can expect a better ROI and
ads that actually convert.