How to increase the sales of a store is always a commonplace topic, but it seems to be always new. Whether it is an old seller or a new seller, everyone feels that the sales are not enough and hopes to have better sales. Old sellers always lament: there are too many new sellers entering, sales have dropped, profits have decreased, and various methods must be used to stabilize sales. New sellers also lament: it is too late to settle in, and the sweetest part of the sugar cane has been eaten by old sellers. You must work hard to get a share.
Efforts are necessary, but if the direction of effort is wrong, the results will be very different. For sellers, if you want to increase store sales, you must follow the following 9 rules in operation.
1. Don’t make the goods too single, choose enough rigid goods
If you want to increase the sales of your Amazon store, you must first have a certain number of goods on sale. The sales volume of each product has a “ceiling”, which may be 50 orders per day or 100 orders per day, but no matter how many, as the sales volume increases and the ranking rises, once a product becomes a hot-selling product, the sales volume will reach the “ceiling”. While ensuring that there are a certain number of products in the store, the products in the store cannot be too single, and should try to cover the different needs of different consumer groups. If the entire store only sells one series of products, and the only difference between the products is the style and color, in this case, the sales growth will be very limited. Take mobile phone cases as an example. Even if there are 1,000 mobile phone cases of different styles and colors in the store, the keywords that can be covered are only a few related to mobile phone cases. The overlap of products is high, and the sales growth is weak.
In order to make it easier to create, it is recommended that sellers choose products that can meet the rigid needs of consumers. What is a rigid demand product? Simply put, it is a product for which consumers’ demand for the functionality of the product is greater than their demand for external attributes such as color, appearance, style, and size. The target audience of rigid demand products is clear, and it is easier to create a hot product, which should be the main consideration when selecting products.
2. Carry out the most detailed product optimization
For a store to operate, it is not enough to have only good products. No matter how good the products are, they cannot be converted into orders if they are not properly displayed in front of consumers. Therefore, perfect product optimization is a necessary condition to promote sales growth.
The Amazon A9 algorithm will identify the relevance of products and then display them in front of potential consumers. In order to increase exposure, it is very important to select highly relevant category nodes and use keywords that match consumer needs when publishing products. Shopping by looking at pictures is a typical feature of online sales. In the eyes of many consumers, the product picture represents the product itself, so picture optimization is a top priority. In addition to the above two aspects, more product details, including titles, keywords, five elements characteristics and product descriptions, all need to be carefully crafted by sellers.
Only optimized products can attract more consumers and achieve higher conversion rates, thereby promoting store sales growth. For details on product optimization, you can check the relevant chapters of this book.
3. Do a thorough analysis of competitive products, find out the gaps, make up for the shortcomings, and ensure better performance than competitive products.
In the process of coaching students, I often emphasize a sentence, “Everything you haven’t thought of and haven’t done, your competitors have already done it.” For Amazon sellers, it is important to learn to think from others’ perspectives and make horizontal comparisons. If you want to gain an advantage in the competition and make your store’s sales grow steadily, you must do a thorough analysis of competitive products. Competitors are the best teachers. You must be familiar with your competitors and understand their product details, product price promotions, advertising, product reviews, and operating strategies. In the process of learning from competitors, take their excellence and improve their shortcomings. Being able to do these well is enough for you to get more orders.
4. Set competitive prices
There are many sellers on the current Amazon platform, and competition is fierce. Consumers will choose products with competitive prices. In order to get more sales, sellers must make their product prices have an advantage over the prices of competing products. Only in this way can they win in the competition.
To make the price competitive, sellers must be cost-conscious, choose the right source of goods, not over-pack, and use the right logistics method to ship. Only by carefully optimizing the cost structure can we avoid being passively “beaten” in the competition.
5. Place CPC ads on the platform for key products
The competition on the platform is fierce and the traffic is limited. How can we get more traffic? We must take the initiative to attack Amazon’s CPC ads on the site is the most practical and effective tool to actively obtain traffic.
CPC ads on the site can introduce accurate traffic to products and are an indispensable tool in operations. Through in-site advertising, products with lower rankings have the opportunity to be displayed on the front pages, and products with higher rankings can also get more display positions. These displays bring more traffic to the products, which in turn are converted into orders, which will be of great help in increasing sales.
Although in-site advertising can effectively attract traffic, sellers must also understand that ads with low conversion rates are a waste of their own money. Therefore, advertising placement should be strategic, refined and quantitatively measured. For example, we can capture the “three highs” keywords through our own advertising and add them to manual advertising activities, and adjust the keywords and advertising bids of the advertisements through the analysis of advertising data reports. In the process of advertising operation, only by continuous optimization can the advertisements play the greatest role.
For the placement and optimization techniques of CPC advertising on the site, readers can refer to the contents of the relevant chapters of this book.
6. Make good use of various promotional tools on the site
In addition to on-site advertising, Amazon also provides sellers with a number of promotional tools, such as flash sales, coupons, Prime exclusive discounts and promotions, to help sellers increase sales. Participating in flash sales can greatly increase the sales of a product in a short period of time. Setting up coupons can increase the click-through rate and conversion rate of products. Prime exclusive discounts can better attract the attention of Amazon Prime members. Promotional activities as tools in the store can also add points to operations if they are properly set up. In operations, we must make full use of these tools.
7. Guide and encourage buyers to leave reviews
The impact of product reviews on sales is obvious to all. I believe that every seller knows the important role of product reviews in increasing sales. A product without reviews has a very low conversion rate, and a product with a low star rating has a similarly bleak sales volume. More reviews with higher star ratings are sales boosters, and sellers must find ways to guide and encourage buyers to leave reviews.
Sellers can guide and encourage buyers to leave reviews by sending after-sales service cards and thank-you letters within the platform specifications, thereby increasing the review rate and the probability of receiving favorable comments.
8. Use off-site traffic to add points to operations
After all, on-site traffic is limited. For some powerful sellers, when the sales volume brought by on-site traffic reaches a bottleneck, they can consider obtaining more traffic through off-site traffic diversion and off-site marketing to increase brand awareness and sales. A simpler approach is to promote sales of a product through Deals websites. Furthermore, you can create brand homepages on social media websites such as Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, and Instagram to gather your own user base and fan base for a long time. A more in-depth approach is to share your knowledge of the industry on vertical websites and communities to accumulate loyal users. If you are strong enough, doing some offline promotion is also a good marketing method. As the operation progresses step by step, you can integrate traffic at multiple levels and dimensions to add points to your own operation. It must be emphasized that for a seller who relies on the Amazon platform for sales, on-site traffic is always dominant, and off-site traffic is only supplementary. If you put the cart before the horse and blindly and excessively pursue off-site traffic, you will only get half the result with twice the effort. 9. Precise promotion through EDM emails If sellers sell goods on multiple e-commerce platforms and have collected a lot of buyer data, then you might as well make full use of these buyer resources. When a new product is launched or you want to focus on building a certain product, you can send EDM emails to old customers in a targeted manner to increase the repurchase rate of old customers and increase sales performance. If you can do the above 9 points, then the growth of store sales will be just around the corner.