Launching products on Amazon is always a thrilling experience. The excitement of putting up a listing and anticipating the first sale is one of the best feelings sellers get when introducing new products.
But the act of putting products up for sale can also be anti-climactic, especially if you’ve been waiting months for the first sale. In such moments, you examine the launching process and realize more steps are needed to ensure success.
Whether it’s your first time launching a product or your hundredth, here’s a six-step laundry list of processes you can follow to ensure your product launches leave you with nothing more than satisfaction.
#1 Choose the Right Product
Product selection plays a huge role in launching your product. When you pick a winner, it can bring revenue starting from the launch phase down the long road.
It pays to be deliberate in your search for the right product. When doing so, consider the following factors to help you find what works for your Amazon business.
Low Competition
A product with few sellers indicates an existing demand and plenty of room for new players to enter the niche.
Take low-competition products as a good sign, but keep digging deeper. Other factors, such as demand volume, barriers to entry, and branding fit, could affect a product’s viability.
Assess the inner workings of your business relative to the product. Ensure that taking it on will benefit your business rather than cost resources.
Reliable Supplier
A supplier has the power to make or break your Amazon business. Their selling price becomes your base cost, and their out-of-stock items can hold you up, so be critical when selecting them.
Shop around for different suppliers. Know their sales track record and pricing points. This way, you’ll be more informed about your potential product’s availability and its most profitable selling price.
A good practice is to have a shortlist of suppliers for a product you want to sell. Keep one supplier as your primary and the rest as a reserve to ensure you always deliver whenever there’s a purchase.
Quality and Safety Testing
Before striking a deal with your chosen supplier, get a product sample delivered. Ordering at least one item accomplishes several things: you’ll know how reliable their logistics are, and you can test their product’s quality and safety.
Confidence in your merchandise’s quality is critical because it affects many aspects of your business. For example, giving a customer a replacement or a refund for a defective item affects your time and resources. They can also leave a bad review, which hits your potential sales and may undermine your ongoing marketing efforts.
No Restrictions
Sometimes, you must undergo additional steps before selling products due to Amazon restrictions. So you must check them before choosing a product. Some of the typical product categories with restrictions are:
- Supplements
- Electronics
- Gems and Jewelry
- Medical accessories and devices
- Surveillance item
#2 Work on Your Amazon SEO
After selecting your new product, SEO comes as a natural second in the order of steps. Amazon is an online marketplace with users relying heavily on the website’s search engine. With millions of products for sale, the only way a potential buyer can find what they need is to type in a query.
Your primary SEO effort must be researching highly relevant keywords and building a keyword list. To do this, scout Google Keyword Planner or Helium 10 for words and phrases that you think leads to your product.
Understand that your potential buyers use short-tail and long-tail keywords with different intents—short ones mean an inquiry, and longer ones mean more buying intent. So include different words in your list for insertion during your product launch’s listing optimization phase.
#3 Plan Your Product’s Amazon PPC Strategy
A paid advertisement strategy can grow your sales in a relatively short period. With PPC advertising, you can cut through the long ranking process and invest in a good web page real estate. That’s why you should include it in your product launch.
Planning your PPC strategy includes selecting advertising mediums (i.e., search, display, etc.), your budget for each, and your target results. Getting clear on these things will help set your product’s direction. It will also help PPC professionals decide what to implement and improve in their PPC tasks if and when you hire them.
#4 Determine Your Product Pricing
Your pricing decisions affect your sales more than you think. Besides buyer’s price sensitivity, Amazon also uses it as a criterion when selecting Buy-Box-worthy products.
The good news is— pricing, once decided, is not set in stone. You can change your product’s pricing anytime. You just need to know how low or high your price point can go, given various market conditions. So, consider your cost, competitors’ pricing, and potential customers before deciding your product’s initial selling price.
#5 Create A Digital Marketing Plan
Selling and advertising your product can be done even outside Amazon. So it’s best to use digital marketing to drive traffic and sales to your products.
Most potential customers only realize they want your product if they know it exists and can meet their needs. So put your products where they can see, and start creating your digital marketing strategy.
#6 Launch!
After going through the five-step process, you’re ready to launch your product on Amazon! You need to tie up a few loose ends immediately before your product goes live and after. Here’s a list of things to do.
Optimize Your Listing
Before you upload your product as an Amazon listing, you must optimize it. Apart from inserting the SEO keywords you collected from step #2, you also have to upload crisp images, compose compelling copies, and even get yourself an A+ content.
Optimizing your listing makes your product more appealing to potential buyers. They get to know your product better, which builds trust that can potentially convert to a sale.
Promote on Social Media
Social media sites continue to be virtual gathering places for potential buyers and sellers. So it’s an excellent idea to promote your Amazon products in these mediums.
Social media product promotion must follow a non-traditional route. You approach it by engaging your audience with content rather than directly selling. This strategy works by using these social media promotion ideas.
Encourage Product Reviews
After the first successful product sale, reach out to your customer and encourage them to leave a review. This simple task brings a huge benefit to your product listing.
A favorable product review can boost your search engine rank and give potential buyers the social proof they need to buy your product.
Product Launch Iteration
To maximize opportunities, you have to launch more products in your Amazon store. The challenge is if you go through the six steps, it can take several weeks or even months before you launch your next product.
You can take a shortcut by hiring professionals to launch your product. It will help you put out more profitable listings in a single business year than if you do it alone. Go ahead and check out an efficient Amazon product launch.
Conclusion
Successfully launching a product involves more than just creating a listing. You must have a high-quality product sourced from a reliable supplier, and that’s only a portion of the whole process.
Planning and strategizing marketing efforts before launch play a huge part in putting out a listing that sells, and scaling profitable products requires that you execute the six steps as efficiently as possible.
Punit