What are the factors impacting your Amazon sales?

We all want to maximize our sales and minimize our costs. Advertising is a key piece of the puzzle, but it’s not the whole puzzle.

Advertising performs most efficiently when it’s paired with other elements of a strong business. That enables advertising to activate the flywheel effect and drive strong organic sales.

You don’t want to pay for every sale you make, so let’s ensure you are set up for success. 

I regularly review these key areas with my clients because I consistently see that they are impacting their products’ performance: pricing, buy box, competitive analysis, traffic breakdown analysis, and product detail page. 

Pricing 

It is no surprise that performance is dependent on pricing. When evaluating swings in performance, this is the first place I look.

Are we comparing performance to a week when products were selling at a promotional price? Did we raise our price from last year? Are our competitors currently running promotions? 

Shoppers are always looking to get a good deal, and they are willing to hunt for it or even wait for a promotion, especially for high ticket items. Changes in price will affect conversion rate, bounce rate, and overall ad and organic metrics. 

Buy Box

In order to win a sale on Amazon, you need to win the Buy Box. This is an integral piece to success on Amazon – if you aren’t winning the Buy Box, you won’t make the sale, and it is likely that someone else will. Your Sponsored Products ads won’t even serve if you’re not winning the Buy Box.

Buy Box percentage is a key metric I look at when digging into performance. If your Buy Box percentage dropped from 95% to 70% week-over-week, you are sure to see a resulting drop in performance. 

Not everyone is eligible to win the Buy Box. Amazon evaluates a sellers’ eligibility based on a number of KPIs including on-time delivery rate, cancellation rate, fulfillment method (FBA is usually #1), price, and shipping time. 

Basically, they want to ensure that they are promoting the seller that will give the customer the best experience. 

Competitive Analysis

Every seller should be competitive shopping and evaluating changes in their competition on a weekly basis. 

In order to keep your products competitive, you need to have a pulse on the market. Be able to answer these questions:

• Who are the new players in the space?
• What is their value proposition?
• How do we stack up?
• What is their pricing model and how does it compare to ours? 

You should always know if your competitor starts stealing additional market share, garnering more 5-star reviews, or moving up in organic ranking. 

If you have a pulse on this, then you know how your competition fits into your sales trend, and how they could be impacting it, and how you can defend market share or conquest your competition. 

Traffic Breakdown Analysis

Customers find their way to Amazon in a variety of ways. Many shop the site regularly thus simply type it into their search bar, but there are also other key ways to find products on Amazon that impact sales, including SEO rank, SEM, and affiliates articles. 

You should be tracking SEO (organic search engine optimization) and SEM (paid search engine marketing) placement and progress on a weekly basis as these can greatly impact volume. SEO, in particular, should be a priority,  as this is a free placement. 

Affiliates’ articles, placements, and links can drive huge spikes in traffic and volume to a product detail page (PDP), and to an overall brand. If you aren’t already working with an affiliates partner like Yahoo!, Brad’s Deals, or Wirecutter, you should evaluate this as a white space opportunity, because these placements can be huge for a business.

Product Listings

Finally, a key area that can impact sales and hamper the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, is the quality of the product listing. 

Headlines, product descriptions, bullet points, and images all need to work together to help Amazon’s algorithm match searches with your products, and to support the purchase decision process.

My colleague CJ Haugen wrote about this in Three Amazon Product Listing Mistakes That Kill Ad Performance. Read his article to understand how your product listings are helping or hurting your sales.

Takeaways

In summary, advertising is a critical component of success on Amazon, but it does not operate in a vacuum. We cannot look to advertising alone to understand what is driving sales up or down for a product and a business. 

Be sure you are tracking these critical areas that impact sales:

• Pricing
• Buy Box
• Competitive Analysis
• Traffic Breakdown Analysis
• Product Listings

There are many factors that impact performance. A strong seller should be digging in on a regular basis and finding areas of opportunity to pay less for more sales over time.

Want more ideas to increase sales? Check out 7 Ways To Increase Your Amazon Sales in 2021