Amazon never stands still. The company’s brand values (their ‘leadership principles’) include “bias for action” and “invent and simplify”, so it’s no surprise the marketplace undergoes rapid innovation with new programs, products, and algorithms launched regularly through the year. What worked for sellers in 2021, or even 2022, may not necessarily be the optimal strategy today based on Amazon’s ever-changing landscape, so here are 10 ways to drive sales on Amazon in 2023.

1 – DEVELOP A PRODUCT & PRICING STRATEGY

Don’t assume you need to put your entire catalog on Amazon. Long-term storage fees can add-up and slow-selling products with low BSR (Best Seller Rank) are de-prioritized by Amazon. Instead, focus on your best-selling products, products with higher margins, or products with higher price points (as Amazon fees can erode margins). Also, don’t feel the need to include every variation of your key products.
Then, once you’ve established success and have a better handle on the competitive landscape, you can expand your catalog one or two products at a time.
If possible, consider pricing the parent ASIN lower to increase organic and paid rankings, and let customers upsell themselves onto the higher-priced child ASIN variants.

2 – CREATE AMAZON-SPECIFIC PACKAGING

If you are an FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) seller, you should seriously consider designing and manufacturing your packaging to fit within lower Amazon shipping and storage tiers. Even it if means a separate print run from your in-store packaging, the cost savings on Amazon fees can be considerable and allow you to provide deals and promotions, or even a lower standard price point, than might otherwise be achievable.

3 – STAY IN STOCK

This might seem obvious, but if you don’t have inventory in stock, you can’t make any sales. Worse still, going out of stock resets your rankings which can take time to build again, and will prompt availability warnings to customers, which damages your sales even when you have stock available again.
Monitoring stock and having bulk shipments for Amazon ready and registered will help you avoid stock issues. Forecasting remaining days of inventory is not simply total stock divided by average sales per day. You need to factor in seasonality, holiday periods, promotions, and, most importantly, the impact of sales trajectory, i.e. when a product starts to sell well, Amazon increases its ranking, which causes an incremental sales increase.

Q4 2022 saw many sellers suffering from the FBA inventory limits Amazon implemented, but as of March 1st 2023, you can use Amazon’s new Capacity Manager feature to bid on additional inventory if you can see a sales peak looming.

4 – TREAT REVIEWS AS GOLD DUST

There is no silver bullet with marketing, but reviews on Amazon are the closest thing to one. This is because Amazon uses the number of reviews and average rating as major factors in determining organic and paid rankings. Popular products which create satisfied consumers and brand advocates are going to sell more, so it’s obvious why Amazon weights the impact of reviews. The fake review brokers are a thing of the past, so to standout you now must think strategically.

Leverage the Vine review program across multiple ASINS and then re-group them, consolidating the reviews and accelerating your early review count. Contact customers who leave bad reviews to remedy their experience and encourage them to amend their review and ratings more favorably. Capitalize on post-purchase rationalization and use inserts in your product packaging to suggest that customers leave honest feedback.

5 – DRIVE OFF-AMAZON TRAFFIC TO AMAZON

Driving traffic to Amazon rather than your DTC website from ads on Google, social media, or affiliate website might seem counter-intuitive, but it can drive favorable returns even when you factor in Amazon fees given the relatively high cost of Amazon ads these days.
However, achieving an acceptable ROAS is only half of the story. When you drive external traffic, Amazon rewards you for bringing consumers who may otherwise have used other marketplaces or websites. The rewards that Amazon provides include the artificial manipulation of algorithms which artificially increase your organic ranking (we suspect paid ranking too). It also artificially increases your BSR, which itself if based on a number of factors, so it’s clearly impacting one or more of those. It removes the competitive banner at the top of your product listing page, or includes only your products in this location. Lastly, Amazon will pay you a Brand Referral Bonus of 10% of any sales made by external traffic you drive to Amazon, which significantly helps offset media costs.

All of this means that not only can you see an acceptable ROAS from this activity in isolation, but you will see an incremental uplift on your wider Amazon performance. We work with brands to determine which products should be promoted on which channels, and provide an integrated strategy to ensure keywords and media $’s do not compete with each other.

6 – CUT THROUGH THE CLUTTER

On Amazon there can be well over 30 competitor products featured on your product detail pages, because Amazon wants to make a sale even if the product isn’t yours. When you’ve spent precious media budget driving customers there from Amazon searches or off-Amazon, the last thing you want is your competitors pilfering your customers. Brands therefore need to ensure that their main listing area and the A+ content (the custom content that lives further down the page), stands out from everything else on Amazon.

Content should keep consumers focused on your products and ensure they ignore the competitive noise. Clearly design elements play an important role here, but at Emplicit we view the copy as equally important. For example, if there is a product feature that nobody in the marketplace is talking about, we set-out to own it, effectively setting the agenda and influencing what consumers end up viewing as important, while simultaneously turning it into a differentiator.

7 – START USING AMAZON POSTS

Amazon Posts are still in Beta having launched way back in 2019, but in Q4 2022 some major updates were made to the Beta, and we are starting to see Posts have a significant impact on performance.

Amazon Posts are the equivalent to social media posts on Amazon. They exist in a separate page on your brand store, and on your listing pages, but also potentially on your competitors’ listing pages (and conversely their posts can appear on your listing pages). Amazon Posts represent both a proactive and defensive tactic to use on Amazon, and provide an opportunity to communicate your differentiators potentially without the high-level of scrutiny that Amazon applies to listings.

8 – CREATE & ENCOURAGE VIDEO CONTENT

Video content still remains the easiest way to engage consumers on social media or your brand’s DTC website, so it’s no surprise that products on Amazon with high quality video content outperform the competition.

Brands can occupy up to two slots with video on their product listing. Importantly if they don’t fill these slots then user generated content which the brand doesn’t control can occupy these slots, or worse still, videos from your competition can appear as ‘Related Content’. Also, there is an opportunity to curate the content in the Videos section by using affiliates and influencers to create content and displace any competitor videos.

9 – USE AMAZON MEDIA TO YOUR ADVANTAGE

Most Amazon sellers are using Amazon ads, in particular the Sponsored Product Ads and Sponsored Brand Ads, which are both PPC-based ad types. However, many sellers pursue keywords based on popularity rather than propensity to convert. They need to look at the Search Query Performance (SQP) report and blend that with sales / conversion data to determine where their brand conversion rate is greater or lower than the market conversion rate and adjust spend (and content) accordingly.

Sellers need to be aware of new ad formats like Sponsored Video Ads which are great if you want to use Sponsored Brands Ads, but don’t have the required 2-3 products to feature.

With the increase in consumers using Amazon as a browsing destination and brand discovery tool, brands need to be aware of the targeting options available with Amazon’s Sponsored Display Ads, which include retargeting, search, and category options.

10 – USE EXPERTS

The agency model is designed to support success on Amazon. Afterall, why hire and pay for 100% of a generalist, who will struggle with all the diverse aspects of Amazon, when you can utilize 10% of 10 different subject matter experts who are dedicated to specific areas of Amazon?

CONCLUSION

To drive Amazon sales in 2023 means implementing a nimble and strategic approach. Utilizing the usual tools and tactics won’t set you apart because almost all sellers are doing the same thing. Leveraging Amazon’s platform means staying on top of new programs, products, and algorithm changes, and being ready to implement new activities and methods.

By Seb Lyner, VP Commercial Director, Emplicit

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