Sales strategies for fast moving consumer goods and apparel categories on the Amazon platform

Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) refers to products with short service life and fast consumption, such as food, daily chemical products, etc. Such products are usually low-priced and have fixed usage scenarios, so they are often impulse purchases. Consumers can quickly make purchase decisions mainly based on factors such as product appearance/packaging, advertising and promotion prices.

In the traditional concept, clothing is not regarded as fast-moving consumer goods because it has a long life cycle and the supply chain response speed is relatively slow. Offline retailers are often limited by product selection when choosing products, while brand chain stores need to make sales plans in advance, use buyers to find styles in advance, stock up in advance and send them to stores, and finally complete the sales process. No matter which model you choose, you will inevitably need to bear a series of costs such as store rent and product inventory. Facing the growing number of SKUs, sellers need to improve the flexibility of the supply chain and shorten the design cycle. However, once this system becomes too complex, it will slow down the response to the market and miss the best opportunity for new product launches. However, in recent years, with the increase in popular styles, clothing has also begun to show a certain trend of fast-moving goods, and brands such as ZARA and Uniqlo are among them.

When purchasing clothing online, although consumers will also conduct price comparisons, compared to offline shopping, online purchasing behavior is more emotional, which means that they are more easily affected by graphic descriptions, which in turn promotes purchases. Decide. The diversity of consumer demands makes it difficult for one company to dominate the clothing market, which provides opportunities for small sellers. Clothing sales usually follow a cycle: “The introduction and adoption of fashion leaders → the increase in public acceptance → the consistency of mass consumption → the final decline and obsolescence of the fashion.” Thanks to my country’s rich supply chain resources, even those who are new to the industry Small and medium-sized sellers can also cooperate with smaller suppliers to quickly respond to market changes.

Fast moving consumer goods are different from 3C products in that the former cannot achieve differentiation through continuous technological innovation or increased functionality, so they are homogeneous to a large extent, especially in the clothing category. As long as sellers can ensure the stability of the basic attributes of the product, they can meet market demand. In other words, even if a new product has an initial evaluation of only 3.5 stars, its quality is enough to attract most consumers. It can be seen from the Amazon Top100 list that many sellers include multiple variations in their product links, and finally achieve sales rankings by gradually improving product quality after the peak sales season and adding new variant options based on popular trends. overall improvement.

However, fast moving consumer goods also bring the risk of inventory overstock. Although the product life cycle on the Amazon platform is long, due to seasonal effects, some hot-selling products in the current season may need to wait until the next year before they can be sold again. For this reason, sellers should choose to use the FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) delivery service and focus on creating popular products to complete inventory turnover as quickly as possible and maximize profits.

In addition, consumers have low brand loyalty for fast-moving consumer goods, products are highly substitutable, and quality is easy to judge intuitively. Therefore, if sellers hope to achieve long-term and stable development in the clothing field, they need to establish their own brand while improving product quality to enhance customer stickiness and repurchase intention.