Although there are many factors essential to your brand’s success on Amazon — conversions, CTR, relevant keywords, product listing completeness, etc. — some of these should be tackled before others (for example, you need traffic to your listings to improve conversion rates).

This post will focus on KPIs we’ve found to be the most important to track to rank and sell better on Amazon.

5 KPIs to focus on to boost Amazon sales

Key performance indicators, or KPIs, provide valuable insights sellers can leverage to improve their online businesses. They’re a crucial part of your growth strategy on Amazon because they reveal what’s working well with customers and how people interact within the system.

Let’s break down five main KPIs that significantly impact your sales growth as an Amazon seller.

1) Content quality

High-quality product detail pages (PDPs), including images and videos, are the first thing you should consider when differentiating your products and improving your positioning on Amazon. First impressions matter, so your product needs to stand out to generate traffic and growing sales.

Invest more of your time creating unique, high-quality, interesting, and relevant content, and stay up to date with the latest opportunities to enrich your Amazon content.

Here are some concrete ways to maximize your optimized listings:

• • Employ the most relevant keywords to product titles and bullet points.
    • Your product title is the first thing customers see and makes a huge impact on how your product ranks in search results. As such, optimizing your listing (through SEO) should be the first thing you improve to draw more traffic to your product listing.
    • Amazon uses the A9 Search Algorithm to best match customer searches to the desired product, and content is an important factor that influences your search ranking results in it.

• Publish up-to-date pictures.

• • Quality images support sales and help build your brand’s perception.
  • Aside from general product images, spotlight its critical features, the product in use, and lifestyle images.
  • Include award badges to provide additional value for potential customers.

• Showcase videos

• • Videos help you build relationships with potential customers by putting a face and voice to your brand.
  • Effective videos highlight product features and benefits and show their various uses.
  • You can add up to six videos to each product page, so you can combine “how to use” and influencer videos with general product videos.

• Add A+ content to present your brand and products as premium and professional.

• • Amazon asserts sellers can increase sales 10% by educating your customers about your product with A+ content.
  • Each section of your landing page sells the next, and all the creatives need to entice the visitor to keep scrolling. A+ content does this best.

To calculate the quality of your content, you can take advantage of numerous tools that’ll review the status of your titles, key points, images, and other elements of the product page to determine which parts of your content should be improved.

2) Reviews

Once you know you have a rich listing and valuable content for your brand, consider your reviews strategy. Amazon reviews are a critical factor of your store’s success; they directly impact conversion rate, rankings, and your sales.

From Amazon Vine to the “Request a review” feature, there are many opportunities to enrich your product pages with customer opinions. We also recommend searching competitors’ reviews to look for common complaints or issues. Avoid the same mistakes and refine your on-page content to surpass customer expectations.

Follow Amazon’s Review Policy to avoid negative repercussions for your store. Some restrictions to be aware of include:

• Posting a review of your own product or a competitor’s product
• Offering a financial reward, discount, free products, or other compensation to a third party in exchange for a review of your or your competitor’s product
• Providing a refund or reimbursement after the buyer writes a negative review and asking them to change or remove the review before or after the reimbursement
• Creating a variation relationship between products to manipulate reviews and boost an item’s star rating via review aggregation

As mentioned earlier, there are two Amazon initiatives sellers can use to increase their reviews:

a) Amazon Vine

This program invites Amazon’s most trusted reviewers to post opinions about new products to help their fellow customers make informed purchase decisions. Amazon invites buyers to become Vine reviewers (also known as Vine Voices) based on the insightfulness of their Amazon purchase reviews.

To be eligible for this program, you need to meet the following criteria:

• Be a Professional Selling Partner
• Register your brand in the Amazon Brand Registry
• Be identified as a brand owner
• Have eligible FBA offers

b) Request a review

• This is an optional way to request reviews from your buyers, found on the Order Details page.
• Sellers can use this feature once per order between five and 30 days after the order delivery date. This ensures customers receive relevant, recent review requests.

When you receive a negative product review, you can contact the customer directly to remedy the issue. Navigate to the Customer Review section on your store’s dashboard. After clicking “Contact Customer,” you’ll be presented with two options:

• Courtesy Refund – Offer a full refund
• Customer Support – Ask the customer for additional details on the order to try and fix the problem

When communicating with customers, always maintain a positive, understanding, and friendly tone.

Once you start collecting customer reviews, you can leverage in various ways them to drive new sales, including:

• Display reviews on your website
• Share them on social media channels
• Familiarize yourself with customer needs and update listings accordingly
• Incorporate your best reviews in your PPC campaigns

To keep an eye on your ratings, you can check your Amazon account or have a review tracking tool manage them for you.

3) Inventory Performance Index

Although Amazon keeps secret the math behind their Inventory Performance Index (IPI), the company does suggest sellers pay special attention to three factors to boost their number:

• In-stock inventory – Avoid stockouts and lost sales
• Excess inventory – Minimize inventory carrying and storage costs
• Stranded inventory – Ensure your products are available for purchase and delivery

If your IPI falls below 350, Amazon will limit your ability to send more inventory and impose a penalty on any excess inventory sitting in Amazon warehouses. You can review your IPI in the Manage Inventory tab.

4) Buy Box percentage

A whopping 83% of Amazon sales go through the Buy Box, so knowing how to win the Buy Box for your products is critical to earn more conversions. Numerous factors affect your chances of winning the Buy Box, including your chosen fulfillment method, total product price, and delivery speed. Check these regularly and make improvements on the most critical variables to increase your Buy Box win rate and, in turn, your sales.

You can find Buy Box metrics on your Seller home page and in Amazon Business reports on the ASIN level or as the average rate of all your listings in a chosen period.

Source: BigCommerce

5) Unit session percentage rate

The unit session percentage rate is the number of units ordered divided by the total number of sessions. So, the greater the percentage, the more sales you’re making.

This metric indicates the quality of your product page and your advertising strategy. You can improve your conversion rate by taking the following steps:

• Include product videos

• Split test to find the perfect product photos and phrasing

• Improve SEO (pay special attention to keywords in your product title and page copy)

• Upgrade your A+ page branding

• Increase the number of reviews and their ratings

• Revise and optimize your PPC activities

Wrapping up — Choose your Amazon KPIs wisely

Simply put, there’s no shortcut to improve your Amazon performance. However, focusing on the KPIs mentioned above will boost your rankings in the Amazon product search algorithm and consequently lead to sales growth.

The post 5 Amazon Listing Quality KPIs to Focus on For Growth first appeared on InClouds Consulting.

For sellers, it’s the perfect time to make as many sales as possible, bring extra attention to the store, and create good relationships with customers for the long term.

Since its launch in 2015, Amazon Prime Day has grown into one of the busiest sales days of the year, generating substantial business benefits for Amazon and its eCommerce sellers. In 2021, consumers bought $11.2 billion worth of items from Amazon on Prime Day, up 7.7% from $10.4 billion in 2020.

There are several steps that you can use to be prepared on time and to ensure better results for your Prime Day activities, such as:

• Choose the products that you are going to promote/sell on Prime Day
• Create Lightning Deals on your best selling products
• Use coupons prior to and/or on Prime Day
• Utilize all Prime member offerings
  • Prime Exclusive Discounts
  • Prime Members Promos
  • Prime Early Access Deals
• Create a concrete on- and off-Amazon marketing strategy
• Create product bundles
• Create an additional review strategy
• Have an advertising strategy and budget

It’s still not confirmed, but Amazon Prime Day 2022 will most likely take place on July 11 or 18. Amazon has announced that the inventory cutoff falls on June 20 this year and has notified sellers who want to participate in Prime Day that they must submit their deals for consideration by April 29.

So, one of the most urgent steps you need to take is choosing your products and submitting them for Lightning Deals. Here are the steps on how to submit and accept Lightning Deals:

To submit a Lightning Deal* to be considered for Prime Day, follow these steps:

1. From the Merchandising drop-down menu, select ‘Promotions’.
2. Choose ‘Lightning Deal’, and then select the ‘I want Amazon to consider my deal for Prime Day’ checkbox.

*Prime Day deal submission for participation ends on April 29

To accept a Lightning Deal recommendation for Prime Day:

1. From the Merchandising drop-down menu, select ‘Promotions’ and go to the ‘Recommendations’ tab.
2. Review and accept your recommendations. It takes just two clicks. You can also edit your recommendations before submitting them. (Not all vendors receive recommendations.)

If your deal is approved by April 29, 2022, Amazon will consider your submission for Prime Day and assign a start date around Prime Day Week for your deal based on its quality. Amazon does not guarantee that your deal will run on Prime Day.

Also, while creating your Lightning Deals, calculate the fees that are associated with them. Amazon announced that the Lightning Deals which run during the Prime Day event and Lightning Deals that run during the week of Prime Day will have different fees.

The best advice that we can give is to be prepared, do your research, and create your promotional strategies, advertising strategies, and off-Amazon activities. If you are in search of more strategies on how to win this year’s Prime Day.

The post How to Prepare for Amazon Prime Day 2022 first appeared on InClouds Consulting.

As the competition between sellers increases each year, finding a new way to stay ahead of the game is an ongoing task for all serious brands wanting to appear on the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for their category.

One of the best ways to drive incremental sales growth and improve organic rank is to take advantage of Amazon’s Editorial Recommendations Program.

What is Amazon’s Editorial Recommendations Program?

Designed to bring product-related content from third-parties onto Amazon to help customers research and discover products they might be interested in, Editorial Recommendations are shown as a short article penned by a professional publisher about your product that shows on Amazon’s first page of search results when one of your product’s keywords is searched.

They are distinct from organic listings and PPC sponsored listings and usually appear below the sponsored ads and above or below Amazon’s Choice products.

How can you recognize these articles?

As mentioned before, Amazon Editorials appear on page 1 of search results which makes them hard to miss.

Example: On the image below you can see the article from publisher Byrdie about the best facial cleansing brushes. On the left-hand side, you can click for the full-length article and on the right, you have three sections displaying best in each category: Best Overall, Best Budget, and Best Manual.

The main goal of these recommendations is to enhance customer experience and simplify the decision-making process. Instead of scrolling through multiple pages of similarly-rated products before making a final decision, customers can now use Editorial Recommendations as support before deciding which product to choose.

How to get your product published in Editorial Recommendations

Editorial Recommendations is a product of the Amazon Onsite Associates Program to which only the best and most prominent publishers are invited.

Usually, publishers would write articles on their websites and now they have the opportunity to recommend products directly on Amazon. If the customer buys a product, they will receive a commission for each product being sold. It’s good to know that the selection is not influenced by Amazon at all – all the recommendations were chosen by the publisher.

Once it’s published, you cannot know how long the recommendation will stay live. Amazon wants the article to perform well so the number of days your article stays live will be closely related to the volume of conversions.

To qualify a product for an Editorial you need to be a well-established seller with good reviews, great sales, and inventory. If you are a beginner and launching your first product, you will not be able to take advantage of this program.

All requirements your products must meet:

• Minimum of 100 reviews with at least a 4-star rating
• Your product is in the top 20% of Best Seller Ranking for its category
• High levels of inventory
• No medical claims on listings
• No relation to religion, sex or drugs

What are the benefits?

Amazon’s Editorial Recommendations are a highly effective way to get ahead of your competition. Any reputable Amazon seller should aspire to have their product featured in an Editorial Recommendation as it is sure to make a huge impact on overall Amazon performance.

The post Getting Started With Amazon Editorial Recommendations first appeared on InClouds Consulting.