After much research and comparison, the consumer has narrowed down their selection to your product and two others. How can you ensure your product is the one ultimately purchased? What’s needed to improve Buy Box performance on Amazon and tip the scale in your favor?
Using our newly launched Salsify Command Center for Amazon, we’ve culled together some important core and sub-strategies for identifying both risks and opportunities regarding pricing, inventory, content, and reviews. Each contributes to increasing consumer eyeball share and eventually winning the Buy Box every time.
1. Anticipate inventory fluctuations and resupply in real time
Consumers have zero tolerance for brands who showcase a product, but don’t have the inventory to support the demand. Selling out of a product is, in many ways, a bad thing. Shoppers will simply move on and purchase one of the other products on their short lists.
Using predictive insights, brands can maintain dominance by keeping tabs on sales velocity, knowing potential inventory sell-throughs in advance, and being alerted to low numbers.
As soon as a low-inventory trigger is sounded, pre-determined internal processes will launch to pad low levels before the consumer is even aware. A key to this strategy is ensuring the manufacturer or distributor is in the loop so they can also plan for shortages.
2. Keep a pulse on price changes and competitive pricing
Visibility into Amazon’s pricing timetables and logic can be one of the most frustrating concerns for brands. Amazon often drops prices without indicating beforehand, leaving some brands to scramble and match pricing among their other channels.
Salsify Insights includes Buy Box Monitoring, which provides an in-depth look at which brands and products are winning the sale, those sales prices, who is driving the price fluctuations – Amazon, the brand, or competitive retailers – and potential violations by third-party sellers.
3. Optimize reviews on your product detail pages
Shoppers often use the number of stars to determine if a product listing on Amazon is even worth opening. Reviews must be a priority. Positive reviews should be acknowledged and negative comments should be addressed and remedied. Doing so will help float your products to the top of search results, leading to more sales, and eventually even more reviews.
4. Upgrade your product content and imagery regularly
Having guidance on how to improve product content has always been Salsify’s mission. Now, with the Salsify Command Center for Amazon, brands also receive insight into content health through a grading system that considers the number of feature bullets, title and description length, number of images, and more. Recently, ShurTech was able to maneuver a 15% increase in Amazon’s sales rank by completing this very task.
Brands need to understand what works with their products and what does not. This requires pulling back the veil on Amazon’s many mysteries—a feat that often proves difficult for brands to accomplish on their own.
