This post is by Daniel Sugarman, the CEO and co-founder of Zentail.
Amazon is a place of high risk and high reward. As lucrative as it can be, only 8% of its sellers ever reach $100,000 in sales and hundreds of thousands of new sellers join each year.
Hitting it “big” on Amazon – even for an established brand – requires both a strong offense and a strong defense. It requires a deep understanding of how Amazon works and what makes it unique from any other ecommerce channel.
In this blog, we’ll share some of the hurdles that often trip brands up. We’ve seen these challenges impact even the largest of companies that seek our team’s help, and know full well that unless you’re prepared to tackle these head-on, you’re in for a turbulent ride.
So, without further ado, here are eight pitfalls to avoid when selling on Amazon.
View Top Amazon Seller Tools1. Pricing too high, thinking your branding will win out
Amazon isn’t a cakewalk for any brand. It’s one of the rare places where the playing field is level between brands big and small – where a strong reputation doesn’t equate to immediate success, due to the wide range of alternatives available on the site.
There is also evidence to suggest that most buyers on Amazon aren’t brand loyalists. 78% of searches on Amazon are unbranded, and 65% of surveyed consumers said they feel comfortable buying from sellers they’ve never heard of before on marketplaces.
As a result, companies that place too much store in their branding when they set their prices on Amazon can wind up hurting their chances of success. We see this in the pet category, where Furbo prices its dog camera nearly three times higher than its closest competitor at times.
Amazon sales for Furbo are volatile year round, as reflected in data from AMZScout, and only seem to jump momentarily during the holidays. Furbo’s rankings decline during other times of the year, when lesser known, more affordably priced competitors are able to swoop in.
The takeaway: Check your ego at the door and do your due diligence before solidifying your Amazon price strategy. It’s possible that some of your products aren’t appropriate for Amazon if the playing field consists of mostly “dirt cheap” alternatives. Or, Amazon may be better suited for liquidating your out-of-season or excess inventory. Either way, don’t bank on your brand being the exception to the rule on Amazon.
Instead, start by determining your lowest selling price. Then go to Amazon or use tools like AMZScout to research the pricing and performance of competitors that rank on the first page of your target keywords. Your prices should be within a reasonable range (no higher than 20% above the highest price on page one). Test several price points to try and maximize your profits, but make first-page ranking a priority in order to boost sales.
2. Getting lazy with listings
This becomes all too easy to do when you’ve got a large catalog or a jam-packed schedule. However, you do yourself a disservice by taking a set-it-and-forget-it approach to listing, or copying and pasting your listings from one channel to another.
Not only do you risk duplicate content issues on Google, where Amazon will almost always rank above your site pages, but you also risk getting overlooked or penalized by Amazon’s algorithm.
For instance, traditional SEO (for Google) favors shorter titles, but on Amazon, longer, more detailed titles often rank higher. Third-party sellers are known to max out their character counts; using this type of approach, one brand drove seven times more monthly orders to their listings within two months of updating their titles.
Data quality can also be a make-it-or-break-it factor on Amazon. Brands too often miscategorize their listings or skimp on product details, destroying their changes of ranking on the first page (or even the first ten pages) of their target category.
To complicate things further, Amazon is known to automatically re-classify ASINs if words within the listing suggest it belongs to a different category, and it’s entirely on you to report these errors to Seller Support. Case in point: this HEXBUG toy was miscategorized as a pesticide by Amazon, according to its seller.
The takeaway: Tailor your listings to Amazon and keep in mind that by going beyond the required attributes, you can set better customer expectations and minimize returns, plus ensure that you’re not excluded when a buyer filters the search results.
Take the time to optimize your listings for better Amazon SEO. If you’ve got a large catalog, you can always start with your best-selling listings and gradually work your way through the rest. Or, you can use ecommerce listing software to automate the process or make bulk edits. The best software can help identify gaps in your data or categorize your SKUs for Amazon.
Bonus tip: Using other tools at your disposal, like A+ Content (formerly EBC), can help to reduce bounce-offs from your product detail pages, build trust around your brand and increase sales. Don’t hesitate to experiment with those if you can!
3. Failing to keep up with marketplace changes
In addition to requiring unique SEO practices, Amazon has strict listing requirements that regularly change. Brands that aren’t regularly monitoring them could wake up one day to find their items hidden from the search results.
