If you’re selling on Amazon, you know that your product listings are key to your success. They are your product packaging and your in-store display. They are what transforms a shopper into your customer. A well-crafted listing is the difference between a lost conversion and a sale. Just as a poorly packaged product will gather dust on store shelves, a product with a poorly crafted listing will be passed over. If the listing doesn’t first catch a shopper’s eye and provide the information needed to make a decision, then this will translate into a poor Amazon conversion rate.
Different shoppers look for different things. For instance, the same shopper will probably not care much about the type of paper used for a detective novel but care very much about the composition of the paper in an artist’s sketch pad.
That said, whether you’re selling knitting wool or fishing tackle, or back-to-school accessories, the following tips will help you get optimal conversion rates from your product listings.
Anatomy of a Listing
An Amazon listing is like an information funnel, directing the shoppers’ attention to increasingly specific information until they make a buying decision. An Amazon product listing consists of the following aspects:
- Title: Ensures the product appears in searches, and provides its key features.
- Pictures and Video: Provide a visual confirmation of the product and its key features.
- Product Feature List: Provides additional, relevant detail about the product, especially the details that make this product different from the others.
- Price: Self-explanatory—almost. Use as a differentiator.
- Shipping: Can be a deal maker or breaker for roughly equivalent products.
Your Amazon strategy should leverage other techniques to support and improve your information funnel, and transform clicks to buys. These techniques include:
- A+ content: Register with the Amazon Brand Registry and gain greater control over product listings and brand promotion.
- Reviews: Leverage product and seller ratings to increase conversion rates and build your brand.
- Amazon Advertising: A few judiciously spent advertising dollars can reap huge rewards. The trick is to know where and when to spend the money.
1. Title
Your title is your listing’s most important component. It determines how often your product is returned by shopper searches, and where it appears amongst the other products. And it is often the first—and sometimes only—thing a shopper will read.
Remember the following basics when you compose listing titles:
- The optimal title length is from 80 to 140 characters.
- Highlight key product features.
- Don’t use promotional phrases, or characters.
- Capitalize the first letter of each word, except for articles, conjunctions and prepositions: words like “the”, “and”, and “from”.
- For numbers, use numerals not words (“2”, not “two”).
Now let’s put these basic points into practice. Here is an example of a poor Amazon listing title:
Flying Bicycle, twenty-two foot wingspan, Red, Blue & Silver, very light. *Insurance Discount*
On the other hand, this is a better Amazon listing title which complies with the guidelines mentioned above.
Flying Bicycle: 20-inch Molybdenum Alloy Frame, 22-Foot Cantilever Carbon Fiber Wings, 2-Blade 7-Speed Picard Push Propeller, 17.8lbs
2. Pictures and Videos
Your listing should include at least one picture. Who wants to buy anything sight unseen? Your pictures and your video should be of the highest quality possible, and they should tell more about the product. Fuzzy, out-of-focus pictures don’t add anything useful to your listing. In fact, they do the opposite: they suggest a lack of professionalism, harming the shopper’s view of your product and your brand.
In contrast, good pictures and a good video provide shoppers relevant information that help them decide to buy your product and enhance their view of your brand.
Content quality is an important driver of your Amazon conversion rate. In most cases, aim to use all 7 picture spots available, as well as the video. Do remember, though, that for some products fewer pictures and no video are a better approach. For instance, if you’re selling a knitting set, a picture of the entire set followed by pictures of individual items: needles, point protectors, wool, instruction booklet, etc. along with a video of someone using the set is likely optimal. However, for a detective novel, more than a picture of the book cover and perhaps of the author is likely superfluous. A video of your cousin reading and looking frightened is probably overkill and might even harm your brand.
3. Product Feature List
The product feature list (or bullets) is where you lay out the relevant details shoppers will want to know before making a decision. In particular, pay attention to the details that show how your product is better than others at a similar price point.
Use all the bullets available to you, and use each one to tell something important. Use them to:
- Provide more detail about key features noted in the listing title. For example:
2-Blade 7-Speed Picard Push Propeller is manufactured in Svalbard according to Vickers 2018.3 design specifications. Easily removed for storage or replacement. One spare is included with each bicycle.
- Present important features and selling points not mentioned in the title. For example:
Frame and wings available in 7 colors: black, white, red, blue, navy, copper, silver.
Finally, don’t use emojis. While you will probably come across listings that include emojis, Amazon policies prohibit them, so they could cause your listing to be suppressed and lead to a significant drop in your Amazon conversion rate.
4. Price
Price is and will always be crucial to your product’s success: too low, you lose money; too high, you lose customers. It is of course up to you to decide on the optimal price for your products, but when composing your Amazon listing, the following will help:
- Drop Down a Digit: That is, if your price is $100.00, then make it $99.99 or $99. Especially in North America, this is common practice in retail and effective. It drops your product into a lower price category, even if the actual difference is just a dollar or even a cent.
- Showcase the Savings: If the pre-discount price is below $100, offer a percentage. For example, if the pre-discount price is $39.99, and your discount is 10%, present it as a percentage. The value of the discount is $4.00. Because 10 is a larger number than 4, the 10% discount is more attractive than the $4 discount. On the other hand, If the pre-discount price is above $100, offer a dollar amount. For example, if the pre-discount price is $239, and your discount is 10%, present it as a dollar value. The value of the discount is $24. Because 24 is a larger number than 10, the $24 discount is more attractive than the 10% discount.
5. A+ Content
If you are selling your own products, register your brand with the Amazon Brand Registry so you can take advantage of A+ content. As a registered brand you’ll have more control over the contents of your listings. In particular, you’ll be able to customize your listings and do more to promote your brand which will translate to a better Amazon conversion rate.
Trellis’ Top Tip: Are you looking to gauge the quality of your Amazon product listings? Explore Arch, our free Amazon listing analyzer which assesses the quality of your product listings in seconds and present actionable insights to help improve them.
6. Shipping and Handling
The shipping and handling times you select in your Shipping settings can affect your product’s ranking and can make the difference between a sale and a pass. Even if the price is slightly higher, shoppers often choose the product with the shorter shipping delay.
Set your shipping and handling times to the shortest reasonable delay. Keep in mind, though, that unattainable delays (e.g., selecting 2 days when you know your minimum is 5 days) will earn you disgruntled customers and negative reviews.
7. Product Reviews
Every shopper is unique. Some shoppers check the reviews before they do anything else; others barely give them a thought until they have decided to buy. Product and seller reviews can make or break a sale, though, so don’t ignore them.
Positive Reviews
Unless they are unanimously negative, product reviews always help sell your product. Reviews praising your product’s quality and features reinforce the content in your listing.
For example, something like “So glad there was a spare. I landed on some hidden rocks and broke the propellor. It took me only 5 minutes to remove the broken prop and replace it with the spare that comes clipped under the port wing” will assure your customers that your listing is accurate.
In the example we used above to illustrate a bullet description, we described our flying bicycle’s propellor. Notice, though, that we forgot to mention a key feature: the spare clips under the port wing so you can bring it along on all your flights. We should revise our listing to include this key point. For instance, we could add: “No risk of being stranded because of a broken propellor. Spare prop easily clips under the port wing.”
Negative Reviews
Negative reviews are less welcome than positive reviews, but they can be turned into good news stories for your brand. For instance, imagine that instead of the review above we receive the following:
So glad there was a spare. Too bad it was clipped so tight under the wing that it broke when I tried to use it to replace the one I’d broken. I had to hitchhike home and borrow a friend’s pickup to get the bike back. Not happy at all with this product.
If you respond to the review politely, and especially if you can state what you as a seller are doing to right the situation, you can turn the negative review into an affirmation of your brand. For instance, something like the following shows future customers that you stand by your product:
We are very sorry that you had trouble removing the spare propellor from its clips and had to hitchhike home. We have reviewed our clip design and made some adjustments we hope will avoid problems like this in the future. We have shipped you a replacement propellor and clips, along with installation instructions. If you aren’t comfortable doing the clip installation yourself, one of our authorized dealers will be happy to do it for you.
8. Seller Reviews
Many sellers tend to focus on the product reviews and forget the seller reviews. However, seller reviews are as important as product reviews. In the long-term they may be more important. Seller reviews help you build your brand, so they affect not just the product in a particular listing, but all the products you’re selling on Amazon.
As with product reviews, positive reviews are always welcome, and negative reviews can be transformed into opportunities to showcase your professionalism. Answer positive reviews with a note of appreciation. For example:
We’re so pleased you are enjoying your bike. Thank you for recommending Pterodactyl FBs to your friend.
Be equally professional when responding to negative reviews; for instance, to a comment like “I’ll never buy another Pterodactyl. It’s slow and sluggish, won’t Immelmann!” you might respond with
Thank you for your comments. We’re sorry you find your Pterodactyl FB sluggish. It is not designed for maneuvers such as Immelmann turns, and we don’t recommend them. We are working on an aerobatics FB, but it is still in the design stage.
9. Amazon Advertising
Your product listing is a work of art. The title presents its key features succinctly, the pictures and video show off its best features, the bullets provide all the description and detail shoppers need to buy, the price is right, shipping is quick, and you’ve even got some good reviews. What next?
Ads of course! Ads are essential to your success. They help sell individual products and help prime future sales under your brand.
On Amazon, you can run automatic ad campaigns and manual ad campaigns. With automatic ad campaigns, Amazon runs the ads for you, automatically matching your ad to all the search terms Amazon deems relevant to your product. With a manual ad campaign, you choose the shoppers you want to see your ad: shopper targeting is more precise and ACoS is lower.
Ads, however are tricky. It is just too easy to spend money on ads and get little or no improvement to your conversion rates. If anything can be said about selling on Amazon it is that it is always in flux. Sellers know this, and many spend countless hours reviewing and adjusting their targeting, trying to get the most from their ad spend by getting their PPC ads to just the shoppers most likely to become customers.
Closing Thoughts
Trellis offers an easy-to-use, AI- and data-driven automated platform for targeting and managing your manual ad campaigns. It takes the guesswork out of managing your campaigns, to ensure the best possible return for your ad dollars.
To launch a PPC ad campaign with Trellis, you only need to select the products you want to advertise, set a budget, and specify your ACoS goals. Trellis does the rest, adjusting spend according to evolving trends and keeping you informed of PPC performance, freeing you and your staff to focus on growing your business.
By combining an Amazon ad campaign with the tips we’ve presented above, some of our customers saw their conversion rates increase 20% to 30% within just a few weeks. Witness the power of limitless Amazon growth, try Trellis now, for free.