Many sellers see Amazon as a huge opportunity for their business. What they don’t realize though is how tough the potential competition is that they face. As Amazon’s seller base grows to over 2 million sellers worldwide, competition for selling also grows.
Customers rely on your Amazon product listings to find your products and then compare you to other sellers, both on Amazon and off. The information you provide helps a customer determine whether or not they want to buy from you.
However, optimizing and managing your Amazon product listings is often a pain point for sellers. In this article, we’ll help you understand what information and tools you need to create high quality Amazon product listings.
Amazon Product Listing Optimization
You first have to create your Amazon product listing if you want to sell anything. When building your Amazon listing, you’ll want to keep these best practices in mind:
(If you already know how to build a great listing, you can skip on down to our best practices for managing all of your Amazon listings.)
Find Your Amazon ASIN
ASIN stands for Amazon’s Standard Identification Number. Amazon uses ASIN numbers to identify and track items in their retail catalog.
So, if you want to sell on Amazon, you need to first identify your product’s ASIN number. You can do this by finding the items on Amazon you want to sell, or creating your own.
Amazon also uses ASIN numbers for customers’ search and browse. If you don’t use the right number, your customers won’t find your products.
If you’re not sure what an ASIN number is or where to find yours, read our post that details what an ASIN number is.
Product Description
Having a full, rich product description is key for a high quality product listings. Customer use you product descriptions to find, evaluate, and purchase your products.
The better your description, the easier you make it for the customer to do those things.
A high quality product description has both basic and detailed product information. Basic information includes the product title, image, brand, condition and description. Details information includes key features, size, material type, warranty, etc.
Don’t skimp on this type of information. Rich product information helps customers compare and identify the exact product they want to buy. When they’re confident that this is the item they want, they’ll make the final purchase.
As a seller, be aware of category-specific product information requirements. You’ll need to meet these requirements, too.
Read our post that compares a good product listing from a bad one (while this post doesn’t cover Amazon listings specifically, you’ll still understand what goes into a rich product listing).
Adding Product Images
For online buyers, images are vital. They’re the only way a buyer can see the product they want to buy. Use high quality images to attract customers and ensure their confidence in you as a safe seller to buy from.
Check out Amazon’s help page about adding images.
Price
Consumers flock to Amazon to find lower prices on items that they want. You need to always be aware of how your competitors are pricing. Keeping a competitive price helps your product to be at the top of product results and can result in more sales.
Make sure you have a system in place to keep your price relevant and up to date. A lower price can also help you win the Amazon buy box.
Inventory Availability
If your product listing is active on Amazon, then you must have the inventory available to fulfill an order. Amazon will kick sellers off their marketplace who sell items that they can’t physically fulfil.
When customers make a purchase, they expect you to have it. When you go back and say you don’t, you can bet that customers won’t shop with you again.
You need to accurately describe to customers what inventory you have. This means keep your inventory status at in stock, the number of limited items left, or a date when stock will be fulfilled
These best practices combined can help you create high quality product listings that attract your customers.
(Following these best practices can also help you win the Amazon buy box, read our article to find out how).
Best Practices for Managing Your Amazon Listings
Following all these best practices for one or two Amazon listings is manageable without any major problems. You can spend the necessary time manually filling out information and making updates.
However, what happens when you sell hundreds of products? Or, you need to make updates almost daily, or seasonally?
You can easily get sucked into spending hours managing your product listings. Or, you can opt to not spend the time and suffice for subpar product listings. Either way, your time isn’t well spent and your performance on Amazon will suffer.
If managing all of your Amazon listing is a huge pain point for your business, then you need to adopt product information management best practices for your Amazon listings.
Manage Listings in a Central Location
For those with hundred or more products, you need one central location for product management. Doing so ensures that you retain the same data quality standard across all of your products.
For example, you can make sure that you always identify the color green as Green and not GRN.
No matter where your product information came from, whether from suppliers or not, you only present your customer consistent and accurate product information.
Read more about why you should use PIM to centrally manage your products and not Excel or your eCommerce platform.
Define Products by Attributes
Amazon creates a better customer shopping experience by organizing their catalog by product attributes and categories. Think about how a customer can drill down by Clothing > Women’s > Shoes > Athletic > Running. Then, they can refine their search by color, brand, size, support type, feature, color, price, etc.
Customers can narrow down to the exact type of item that they want. If you want them to eventually purchase your product, you need to provide these exact types of attributes.
You don’t want to just offer a running shoes by Asic for $100. You want to sell a women’s, Asic running shoe, size 8, neutral support, lightweight, and $100. Attributes help online Amazon buyers know they’re buying exactly what they want.
Attributes also help drive how you organize your products. You can begin to use attribute to define product types and build collections. This type of management makes listing easier.
Build and Define Collections
Building product collections can help you manage your products in a more intelligent way. You can create collections based on product assortments, season, or whatever makes the most sense for your business.
If you sell in multiple Amazon categories, you can build collections based on specific categories. Within that collection, you can then improve your listings with category-specific information.
No matter how you group products, collections allow you to better merchandise your Amazon product listings.
Make Bulk Product Updates
As a larger Amazon seller, you need to have a way to make bulk edits, or updates to your products. It would take way too much time to manually make changes to attributes, colors, size, etc. to hundreds or more products. This is especially true if you make changes almost daily.
Manually making changes also leave room for human error. These errors are hard to catch and can lead to inaccurate listings on Amazon for your products.
Save yourself time and ensure data consistency by having a way to edit your items in bulk.
List to Amazon With a Product Information Management (PIM) Application
Many sellers might look to Excel to provide a central location where they can manage their product data for their Amazon listings. But due to Excel’s limitations, you’re probably managing multiple spreadsheets of your different product types. It’s inefficient to make bulk edits, build product attributes, and define collections.
Managing your Amazon product listings in Excel quickly becomes messy and complicated. And, you can’t directly push your listings to Amazon from it.
Instead, sellers should use a designated Product Information Management (PIM) application that is built just for managing your product data. The main benefit of using a PIM is that it provides one location where you can upload, edit, and then push your product listings directly to marketplaces like Amazon.
A PIM allows you to exercise product information management best practices of your Amazon listings that we mentioned above. You’ll be able to:
- Add category-specific attributes to Amazon product listings
- Create collections of Amazon product listings by product type, season, etc.
- Make bulk edits to product for price changes and data normalization
- Push products directly to Amazon and verify within PIM that Amazon listings are correct
With a PIM application, you can ensure that you list consistent, accurate, and high quality listings to Amazon. Customers will thank you by purchasing your product. Read more about why you need a product information system.
There are different types of PIM applications out there to evaluate, everything from enterprise to basic and free. Picking one just depends on your unique needs as a seller.
If you’re interested in learning more about PIM solutions, check out nChannel’s PIM application.
What to Do Next
Creating rich, high quality product listings is vital to your selling success on Amazon. Following these best practices can help you create and better manage your Amazon listings.
Check out our free guide that tells you everything you need to know about using Fulfillment by Amazon. Click the image to get your free guide right now!
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