Selling, maintaining and advertising on the Amazon platform demands a distinctive approach to success. Ranging from the application of varied resources to sophisticated strategies; it necessitates a holistic approach towards upholding a prosperous position on this marketplace. Adding on to the stress and strain, the marketplace is absolutely competitive, resulting in the optimization to be a complete challenge. Central concepts of contesting these challenges happen to be Product dicoverability and Product Buyability.
Let’s start off by defining these concepts:
Discoverability – A product’s discoverability is its ability to be found on the Amazon platform from the consumer’s point of view. It is important to remember that Amazon SERPs are product oriented and sellers have limited entitlement of increasing product sessions. Therefore, overall it is the product which needs to be focussed on. Increasing the discoverability can be related to driving traffic in terms of traditional marketing.
The following is an example of an Amazon SERP for the keywords ‘chandeliers for living room’:
As seen from the results, the product ‘Prop It Up Antique Design Brass Chandelier – 5 Lamps’ is listed among the best sellers and is also the first product on the result page. Amazon shows the product price range and the number of other offers (other sellers) on the SERP itself, which further promotes the purchase decision in any consumer. In a product like chandeliers, the product design plays an extremely vital role and probably that is the reason why the display of the SERP is in the tiled format clearly showing all designs. Motivating discoverability is dependent on many factors that are portrayed on the SERP including:
- Image quality
- Discount rates and offers
- Reviews rating
- Any tags that have been achieved (e.g. best seller)
- Payment information
All these factors together can be well dealt with in the optimization process and as we will see later on, all marketing activities eventually form a cycle whereby each process is inter-dependent and linked with the others.
Buyability – Product buyability is based on two metrics:
- A seller’s percentage of total buy box ownership
- Traffic conversion on a product page
To better understand this, let’s take an example of a corner table. Suppose this corner table received a total of 100 orders in a month. The first metric of buyability focusses on having the highest share of the total 100 orders. The second metric of buyability is highly driven by discoverability and and overall optimization practices.
Taking a closer look at the SERP for chandeliers:
The SERP itself shows options for other sellers as well, but at this point, the buy box is with Prop it up. Looking from the perspective of this seller, buyability will be to continue having the buy box.
Discoverability is directly related to Amazon SERPs and buyability is most relevant on the product detail pages. Both these concepts are inter-related and form a cycle – sustaining a high position of sales for a particular product.
The major goal of all marketing optimizations on the Amazon platform is to increase the conversions from all the sessions on a product i.e. receiving a higher conversion fraction from total number of sessions. Two prime ways to do so are based on the metrics of product buyability.
- Buy box ownership: Getting a higher number of orders is directly related to your buy box share. The higher your buy box ownership percentage, the more orders you get and as a result more revenue is generated.
- Product Page Optimization: Conversion rate optimization (CRO) needs to be brushed up with minute practices and best strategies such that once a customer has landed on the product page, nothing convinces him/her to leave without ordering. Robust tactics should be implemented in describing the product page content – title, description, image quality and placement, etc. Take a look at the product page of the best seller for the chandeliers:
Each aspect of the product detail page has been well explained on this product. Images have been provided in good resolution from various angles. The title of the page is complete including the brand name, product name, product type and product size. Good number of reviews and ratings are highlighted. The price and delivery details are also appropriately listed. Bullet points have been all utilised giving all the information that would answer the questions arising in any consumer’s mind regarding purchase. Detailed information on designing a product page can be found here.
Before investing ample time and resources on product page design and optimisation, it makes absolute sense to first grab a good share of the buy box ownership. Otherwise all these efforts will be directed towards a competitor’s offer. The question is when to start strategizing buyability according to metric 2 – conversion rate optimisation?
To start off the process, you must first dig into your sales performance reports and pick up your top performing products based on the following criteria:
- Number of orders: Identify the products that have got the highest number of orders and then analyse on the reasons – which may include high number of sessions/page views or a higher buy box share.
- Sessions: Look at the ASINs that have been receiving the highest number of sessions and analyse the buy box share for them. Marginal changes in the buy box share for ASINs with high sessions can result in a good number of orders.
- Revenue: Again, working on minute changes for the buy box with products generating revenue in the higher range make pay off with significant results.
On performing this analysis, you might find quite a number of your products overlapping in all the above categories. These are the products that you should focus on performing the maximum CRO techniques, followed by the products falling individually on the top of each category. Select these products for optimisation processes.
The overall process can be summarised as a two stage process:
- Win the buy box
- Improve conversion rate
Elaborated work on these two basics are sure to drive your sales at good speeds and heights!