Start Selling on Amazon: A Beginner's Guide to Jumpstarting Your Amazon Strategy

Learning how to sell your brand on Amazon can be a daunting task, let alone how to beat competitors on the eCommerce superpower. Whether you’re looking to expand your presence on Amazon or just starting out, certain areas need to be addressed in order to form a strong foundation to a robust go-to-market strategy for Amazon. 

“SO HOW DO I START SELLING PRODUCTS AND HOW DO I WIN ON AMAZON?”

1.  Getting Started.  The first step to selling on Amazon will be deciding which selling method and services you choose to leverage. This decision will depend on a number of factors that best suit your business, such as different options of order fulfillment and shipping fulfillment. These methods include, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM), and Vendor Central, which can all be understood on Amazon Service’s home page. If you’re curious about a fourth called, Vendor Express, Amazon will begin retiring this method May 22, 2018.

2. Inventory. Regardless of which method you choose, once you begin attracting market share, it’s essential that you have enough inventory to fulfill eager shoppers. Failing to do so will not only result in a loss in sales, but also potential removal of your product detail page and a subsequent impact on your search ranking - an Amazon algorithm (called A9) whose exact formula is kept very quiet about.

3. Discoverability. Ensuring that your brand populates on the first page of search results is essential to winning any online shopping journey. The driving factor in your brand’s search ranking is Amazon’s A9 search algorithm, which is comprised of several factors including keyword matches, pricing, reviews, content quality, listing completeness, and more. To learn more about mastering discoverability on Amazon, check out these two resources by Salsify’s Co-Founder Rob Gonzalez:

• Webinar: Boosting Product Discoverability on Amazon
• Video (7 min): Improving your Product Page Rank on Amazon

4. The “Buy Box.” With multiple seller’s of the same product, it’s essential to gain control of a product’s “Buy Box”. This “Buy Box” is where a product detail page lists it’s featured seller, often determining who gets the sale. Keeping your inventory, ratings, and pricing in a healthy state area just few factors which will help you with this. Also playing a large role, is ensuring that you’re offering the product at the most affordable price - which should be the case for any brand-manufacturer

5. Shopper Experience. Overall, to win on Amazon, it is essential to provide a digital shopper experience that your consumer demands, rich with optimized titles, images, videos, A+ Content, Bullet Points, Descriptions, Specs, etc. Most importantly, keeping up with consumer’s purchasing decisions requires an iterative approach when creating and maintaining product detail pages (PDPs) on Amazon. This includes updating product content, like SEO keywords, to reflect changes in consumer buying habits like seasonal changes, holidays, social trends, product updates, etc. 

In order to support this iterative model and deliver a best-in-class shopper experience, leading brands (large and small) across every industry (Coca-Cola, 3M, Home Meridian, Harman, etc.) are leveraging the market’s only closed-loop digital merchandising solution, a.k.a. Product Experience Management (PXM).