A guide to improve your Amazon sales over Christmas

The growth of online retail over the past ten years has been phenomenal, and the Black Friday and Christmas periods have become key pillars of the online retail calendar. In 2020 this growth is set to continue with more people than ever looking to do their festive shopping from the comfort and safety of their own homes.

We simply can’t talk about online retail without talking about Amazon. Recent research shows that 86% of adults in the UK have an Amazon account and 24% of all online shopping journeys start on amazon.co.uk. What’s more, £1 in every £5 spent in online retail in the UK is spent with the e-commerce juggernaut.

So, with over 400 million visits to amazon.co.uk per month and all this spending it must be easy for businesses selling on Amazon to increase sales, right?
Wrong! With nearly 300,000 sellers on Amazon in the UK and over 350 million products being offered worldwide, it can be incredibly hard to cut through the noise and get your products seen. Here are 5 ways you can boost your performance on Amazon this year.

Optimise your listings

Amazon’s chief focus is on giving customers the best service possible, so they are always encouraging sellers to increase the amount of information on their listings to deliver a better experience for buyers.

Scroll through Amazon and you’ll find listing after listing with just one or two pictures, a confusing title and a lack of product details. To get ahead of the game we recommend having at least five images per listing (including pack shots, product photos and lifestyle images), detailed bullet points including key features and A+ content including detailed information about product features.

Build a Store

Amazon Stores are completely free for sellers to build and allow you to have your own area within Amazon. Here you can control which of your products feature more prominently, add more information about your company and offer customers exclusive deals.

Not only will your Store appear in search results on Amazon, it can also appear in Google search results and at the bottom of other listings on Amazon – giving you free visibility of your brand and products.

Engage with customers

Reviews can make or break sellers on Amazon and have a major influence on customers’ buying decisions. Firstly, when it comes to simply getting more genuine reviews, you can try Amazon Vine, their dedicated reviewer programme. This is the best way of getting genuine, high quality reviews quickly.

Equally important however is engaging with users who have left reviews and questions on your listings. Take the time to respond to positive and negative reviews, as customer engagement is a significant plus point for Amazon.

Product selection

The run up to Christmas is the right time to ensure you have your full product range listed on Amazon, giving users as much variety and choice as possible. One way to increase your number of listings and visibility easily is with variants. For example, listing different sizes, colours or versions of a product.

You can add the variations to existing listings which will give more options on the listing for users and generate more visibility opportunities when users are refining their searches.

Don’t run out of budget!

Amazon ads are a great way of generating sales, with ads appearing in the most prominent positions when customers are searching. However, on peak shopping days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday the amount of traffic and searches massively increases and so your usual daily budgets may only be enough to get you to mid-morning before running out!

Each year hundreds of advertisers fail to increase their budgets sufficiently for the peak days and spend much of the period with no ads running, missing out on potential sales. On these peak days, make sure to increase your budgets, check in regularly to monitor pacing and increase budgets where necessary.

The opportunity for e-commerce has never been greater, with an impressive 69% of Brits saying that they are more likely to shop online now than they were before the pandemic (Attest, 2020), so it’s an avenue brands simply can’t afford to neglect.

If you’re looking for help with your Amazon sales this Christmas, contact us for a free consultation.