There are five parts of your listing that influence consumers to buy:
- Listing images
- Bullet Points
- Reviews
- Description
- Questions & Answers
Notice we control everything but reviews! Or...can we control that too? Not control in a manipulative, against the terms-of-service kind of way, but create the right foundation, and your reviews will be stellar! 🌟
Make your product DESIRABLE.
1) Build a Better Product
You need the right foundation. Don't just find a product that sells on Amazon and copy it.
If you find a great price on Alibaba.com and think, "I can sell that too!" then you've fallen for the me-too fallacy. If it's already on Amazon, why would anyone buy yours against the identical one that has reviews? Price? No. Someone else will come along thinking "me too" and do the exact same thing, taking your Buy Box away.
It's the reason why most Amazon sellers fail.
Obliterate these roadblocks by building something differentiated!
Apple used to say, “Think different.” YouTube says, “Broadcast yourself.” Nike—“Just do it!”
We say Build it Better!
Ensure that your product is visually differentiated. When someone is scrolling through their search results, nothing pushes them onto the next step more than the main image.
Pro-tip! If an existing product sells like crazy and yet has low star reviews, fix the problem customers complain about to build a better product.
On the left, we have a foldable pet carrier. Definitely better than the box with holes dogs and cats usually get. A bubble cat carrier, on the other hand, immediately stands out. Cats can look out from the backpack and better experience the world with their owner! How cute is that?
Online, we can't touch, feel, or smell a product to see if it's better. All we can do is look. If you differentiate a product in a way that buyers can see it's better, you've laid the groundwork to make a ton of money! 👀
This not only helps a customer pick out your product in the search results and motivates them to buy, but sending them a truly better product is what leads to 5 star reviews!
2) Show a Better Product
You might be thinking—If I built it better, won't it just sell better on its own? Won't they buy something that tells you it's better? No!
In storytelling, we have a saying: show, don't tell. It's true for Amazon listings too. While the foldable pet carrier tells us how it's different, the bubble pet backpack shows us!
While your actual value is high when you've built a better product, now you have to focus on perceived value.
You customer won't be able to tell that your product is better if they can't see how in an obvious way.
Some sellers do the opposite and make the product look amazing 🤩but then when buyers open the box, it doesn't live up to the promise on the page 💩.
It doesn't live up to the pictures. That leads to a negative review. Then people won't want to click on your listing, it won't rank, and it'll fall into the abyss of forgotten Amazon pages.
But if you focus only on reviews, you're obsessing over something you cannot completely control. But your product, your pics, bullet points, description, and responses to questions are 100% up to you. It's the same in life. Focus on what you can change rather than what you can't or you'll be miserable for no logical reason.
By focusing on what you can control, reviews will tend to take care of themselves.
Use an interest-grabbing, high value, featured image—one that shows what's better about it in action! It's worth it to take a high quality photo even if that means hiring a professional photographer.
Take two kinds of photos:
- White background—where it's just the product filling up a white square. Fill up as much of the white space as possible!
- Model—have an attractive person using your product. Your customer cannot pick up and touch the product, so help them visualize it!
Even if you love a photo, it may not be what consumers love. You can split test the images to find out which one is best!
One way to test this is to switch the image and compare. Test each photo one week which one is more desirable (while having not changed anything else about your listing). If you see a 10% or greater rise or drop in your sales, and you've controlled for all other factors, then you'll know which pic is better.
Another way to test is to go to pickfu.com. For a small fee, everyday people will vote for their favorite photo, and you'll have your answer within minutes.
The next thing listing visitors see isn't your description. Many sellers gruel over the description, but anyone who's going to scroll that far down will go to the bullet points first.
Focus on benefits over features.
After investing so much time in building a better product, it would be natural to be excited about your titanium, low density eyeglass frames. It's high quality. But no one cares about the material until they see the benefit of the material. Instead, start with "durable" and "lightweight". No rust. Screws don't strip.
Give them the experience of using their other senses as much as you can.
Use the second half of a bullet point to tell them how. Rust-free because it's a special titanium. Most buyers are emotional. The other, more detail-influenced customers will be swayed by the science you write about afterwards.
Shorten the customer decision-making process.
One more tip before we move on:
Brand Registered sellers can now upload product videos and enhanced brand "A+" content!
The video doesn't need to be Hollywood produced as long as it shows the benefit of the product and feels authentic/emotionally engaging. 🎥
This wasn't true just a short while ago. Amazon constantly changes, so you can't learn from some old, recycled course. That's why with Just One Dime membership, you get an unending, evolving course, one-on-ones from coaches who currently do gangbusters on Amazon, and have a full community of like-minded sellers to bounce off of.
3) Create a coupon clipping
In Seller Central, click on Advertising and choose Coupons.
You can set your coupon to Percentage Off or Money Off.
Choose whichever one looks better for your listing. One percent may not look as nice as $5. One dollar may not look as good as 10% off.
This is a badge that sits on the front of your listing before they even click on it, increasing Click-Through-Rate. (For more on Click-Through-Rate [CTR] & Conversion Rate [CR], check out our previous blog.)
While it may be a simple thing, it looks like a professional badge and creates trust with the consumer.
Many sellers are nervous about doing this because they're so concerned about their margins. Remember, your new listing is like a newborn or a sapling. It needs more care and sacrifice in the beginning so later it can grow up strong and take care of you!
And lots of customers forget to apply the coupon anyway.
4) Use introductory pricing
Here's my strategy: If products in my category range from $40-$60 for my top ten competitors, mine will about around $57.
Consumers usually think that higher priced products are a better value but also beyond their income bracket. Somewhere in the middle near the high end is the sweet spot.
When potential buyers go to my listing, they can tell the value is greater than my competitors, so they choose mine.
However, when you launch, go lower. Target price may be $57. Launch at $37—significantly lower in order to increase conversion.
I do that because I want to get as many buys as I can in the beginning. This will increase the number of reviews I could get, rank me higher, and make my listing more secure.
5) Enroll in the Amazon Vine Program
If you are brand-registered, you can enroll under Advertising.
You must:
- Have fewer than 30 reviews on the listing
- Have a product offer that's fulfilled by Amazon in ‘new’ condition
- Not enroll an 'adult' product
- Have available inventory, an image, and a description.
You provide free units to a select group of Vine Voices.
Vine Voices are review nerds. They treat reviews like its their life's worth and passion—going into extreme detail and posting photos or videos with their reviews. They're also an overwhelmingly positive bunch.
Reviews are not guaranteed but extremely likely. If you did the work of building a better product, they have no reason to not give you a 5 star review. ⭐️
This could result in up to 30 glowing reviews within 30-45 days of launching.
When you see "Amazon Vine" as a badge on a review, it shows that it's both verified and credible.
If you have to get reviews the schezy way and pay people on the back end, you probably didn't build your product right.
There's a lot of illegitimate and terms-of-service violating advice "gurus" out there who don't really sell on Amazon and do nothing but give you an old, recycled course.
Do it right. We've been through the struggles and frustration. So, we can tell you what to do to streamline the process and arm you with the knowledge you need.
However, it will not be easy. But you wouldn't be reading this blog if you thought it was easy.
If you're not doing what you love and picked the "normal" path of least resistance, know that we live in an unprecedented time of opportunity. In the history of the world, never have we been able to sell to people who we've never even met all over the globe!
BONUS: Build a brand
After you've garnered reviews, customers will buy your product because it's the best. If you build your business right, they will buy it some day because it's your brand.
Use every chance to put your brand name and logo in the forefront to get customers to associate their positive experience with your brand. That will help when you launch more products!
Customers will return to you because they expect the same quality in your new product as your previous product.
New buyers will swarm your online store because they've heard of you. They know you. They trust you because of the positive buzz around you.
A brand label immediately gets the consumer to perceive it as higher value. Most buyers are emotional spenders and will choose you over anyone who comes around and tries to supplant your success.
Check out our previous blog that shows you how making your product Desirable works in tandem with making it Impactful and Visible.
Root yourself in the soil and watch your money tree grow. 🌳
