Selling products on Amazon is not just about posting professionally shot product images and well-written product descriptions; being an Amazon seller involves some work if you want to be successful.
Amazon has become an eCommerce giant through the years, with annual sales amounting to $280.5 billion. That’s a big pie from retail eCommerce sales, an industry that’s expected to be worth $4.8 trillion worldwide by 2021. If you want to put your product in front of a large global audience, Amazon is the best way to go.
One of the biggest factors to your success as an Amazon seller is choosing the right product to sell. Without proper marketing strategy for your products, you might be setting yourself up for failure at the onset. You should take the time and effort to choose the right product because the competition is fierce, and many sellers on Amazon make use of large budgets and sophisticated software and tools. This makes it very challenging to carve your own niche in the Amazon marketplace and the general eCommerce industry, which is evolving significantly.
Still, nothing beats a data-driven approach, and the tips below will show you how to tackle “Amazon marketing” and ensure that your efforts aren’t wasted on the wrong product and approach.
Define Your Product
The first step to Amazon’s marketing success is knowing and defining your product. The main consideration here is your budget; you can’t choose a product you can’t afford, and looking at the price isn’t enough. You need to know the quantity you can source, how much capital you need, and how to price your product competitively. These factors will help determine how long you have to wait before you see any cash flow.
One thing to remember about selling products on Amazon is that it isn’t a “get rich quick” scheme, although you could get lucky once in a while. The key to any long-term success, though, is setting realistic and specific revenue goals, which depend on three main factors mentioned above. Align your expectations with your budget so you can get an accurate estimate of potential revenue.
It’s also advisable to not put all your eggs in one basket. The Amazon marketplace is a very competitive market, and you don’t need to win it with just one product. As competition becomes fiercer, product prices become lower—and it might well be to your benefit to find and leverage smaller, promising opportunities in several products to meet your revenue goals.
Find Your Micro-niche
In simple terms, a micro-niche is a market within a market that, although a lot smaller, can provide opportunities for you to outplay a smaller number of competitors. A micro-niche might not provide much in way of volume, but this small volume is its inherent strength. The small number of users that search for micro-niche products are high-intent and present a golden opportunity for an immediate sale. The key is to find trending or relatively popular micro-niches and become one of the major players.
Once you find your micro-niche, you’ll need to compensate for the small volume of users by putting out several products. Find a specific product and product market that looks profitable for you according to your revenue goals. You need to look for something that you can source at a low cost. One of the best ways to attract your target market is by optimizing your Amazon product listings by finding and using the appropriate keywords. This will ensure that your products appear in the search results when users search for specific keywords.
Validate Your Product Idea
As mentioned above, keyword research is essential in succeeding in the Amazon marketplace, but you have to ensure that you’re searching within your micro-niche. You also need to know and understand how users search for products to figure out what keywords or phrases they use. Also, think about the brands that come to mind when you think about your product and keywords; what do these brands do? Why are they successful? Brand association is a strong conversion indicator, and it would be beneficial to see what they’re doing to find something you can emulate or find gaps in their strategy you can use as leverage.
Another consideration is how sales are divided among the products in your micro-nice. Sales should be relatively spread out because it would be very hard to capture a reasonable share of the market if only a few products generate a great majority of the sales. In such cases, it might not even be worth the time and effort and you may be better off looking for another micro-niche altogether. You should aim to have the best product in the market, but hitting the market average is good enough to keep your Amazon marketing efforts sustainable.
After validating your product idea, it becomes easier to forecast your margins by looking at the average market prices and comparing them with your sourcing estimates. Remember to consider Amazon’s FBA pricing tiers and referral fees so you can calculate accurate numbers and come up with realistic forecasts.
Conclusion
It’s no easy undertaking to market your products on Amazon; the competition is huge and most of the sellers have big budgets and sophisticated tools and research software. The more established sellers also have the advantage of experience, sales history, and a large collection of product reviews. The gateway to success for newcomers in the Amazon marketplace is deeper research, specific goals and strategies, and diversification.
