10 Tips to Increase Sales on Amazon

The Amazon marketplace can be a great ecommerce business for online sellers when you get it right. However, there is a lot of competition out there. The enormous number of shoppers who use Amazon makes it easy to see why so many sellers set out to start their enterprises on the Amazon platform. To increase amazon sales means you must keep up with the competition and learn quickly what works and what doesn’t.

To help you with the learning curve, here are ten tips that will add to your success as an Amazon seller and increase Amazon sales.

#1 – Be Competitive

The competition on Amazon is steep, with the biggest differentiator setting apart one seller from another being price. This doesn’t have to be an obstacle to profitability though. You have to use the price competition to help you determine which products are worth promoting in the marketplace. Only sell items that have a sufficient margin to offer you a reasonable rate of return while still being competitively priced. Don’t forget to factor in inventory, order fulfillment, and overhead expenses.

#2 – Automate Your Listings

Spending your time continuously listing products is not only time-consuming, but may be a waste of time that you could be better spending on marketing, customer engagement, and other key business strategies. Automating your Amazon listings can help you simplify the whole process, saving you time and money. Using an Amazon listing tool can help you with listing products in bulk, while an ecommerce inventory management solution can help you with automatic reordering.

#3 – Invest in Pro Merchant Subscription

Amazon’s Pro Merchant subscription can save you money and give you additional tools to make your selling easier if you plan on listing a lot of items. It costs individual sellers $0.99 per transaction, but with Pro Merchant, you don’t have a per-item fee. Rather, you have a $39.99 per month charge to list as many items as you want on the Amazon marketplace. That means that if you have 100 transactions per month, you would pay an average of $0.40 each. But if you have 1,000 transactions per month, that charge goes down to only $0.04 per transaction.

Plus, with Amazon Pro Merchant you get some additional benefits like being able to upload in bulk, enhanced reporting, more selling options, and the ability to list new, unique items to the marketplace.

#4 – Consider Using Fulfillment By Amazon

Increasing your sales volume is easy with Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA). Most top sellers on Amazon use the FBA option. With this service, you send your inventory to Amazon and they take it from there. When one of your items sells, Amazon fulfills the order, packages, and ships it to your customer. You pay for storage of your items and shipping costs, which are often discounted. Additionally, you can use FBA to take care of order fulfillment for the products you sell through other sales channels. To ensure profitability, make sure you’re selling the best products for FBA.

#5 – Win the Buy Box

The coveted Amazon Buy Box is the box on the right side of the product detail page where customers can click to add the item to their shopping cart.  The Buy Box is so coveted because it significantly improves your chances of selling items. The best way to increase sales is to win the buy box.

Appearing in the Buy Box requires that you meet certain criteria and that Amazon chooses you from the pool of sellers who offer the same item. The criteria include availability, price, your overall performance on as a seller (you have to be at least a Featured Merchant), and shipping options.

#6 – Improve Your SEO

With so many sellers on Amazon, it’s important that buyers are able to find your products. Amazon looks at the keywords in your product titles to rank listings, so you need to include as many keywords as you can in the 500-character title. To help you with this, Amazon offers a Keyword Tool, which will optimize your listing titles.

#7 – Get Feedback and Reviews

Customer reviews and positive feedback are extremely important on Amazon. Nearly 90% of buyers say that they trust online reviews as much as they trust personal recommendations. That said, only about 10% of Amazon buyers leave feedback after making a purchase. To remedy this, you can use a solution like Feedback Five, to increase feedback volume.

#8 – Advertise on Amazon

Advertising on Amazon is a good way to be seen and increase amazon sales. When you are just starting out, or looking to increase the visibility of your products, you should give the Sponsored Products option a try. This will display your product below search results or on the product detail pages. There is a cost for this service, but it is a pay-per-click charge, so you only pay for what is used. Plus, Amazon offers you a deal for using sponsored products the first time. If you already do this, here are a few tips to optimize your Amazon ads.

#9 – Market Outside of Amazon

You aren’t allowed to market people away from Amazon, but you can absolutely market outside to bring customers to your Amazon store. You can use blogging and article writing on your other websites to get potential customers to look at your items on Amazon. Using social media for your ecommerce business is a great option as well.

#10 – Know the Rules and Regulations

Make sure that you understand and follow the rules and regulations that Amazon has put in place – there are many. It’s important to the success of your business that you comply with them, because if they are broken, you run the risk of being suspended or having your account completely shut down. By following the rules and regulations you are on the right track to being able to increase amazon sales.