The top 2 reasons why Amazon sellers fail

There is a lot of fine advice on how you can list your product on Amazon. Unfortunately, if you come across the incorrect advice, it would have significant gaps depending on what products or services they are attempting to sell you.

If you are a smaller company and don’t have unlimited budgets, or you are a sole proprietor entering the e-commerce market for the first time, gaps and blind spots could bankrupt you.

as Amazon consultant for over 10 years and CEO of a software company for Amazon, I can inform you firsthand the three most typical reasons entrepreneurs fail and what to do as an alternative.

1. Building an Amazon brand as an alternative of a brand

A cursory search on Google and YouTube will inform you what your ticket to Amazon success is, in response to the following formula:

1. Find products with high or medium demand and low competition.

2. Source products from manufacturers.

3. Get a trademark for your brand.

4. Put your brand on products.

5. Send products to Amazon FBA success centers.

6. Optimize your offers.

7. Run PPC ads.

This sounds good in theory, but the nuance lies in the old adage about not only predicting the automobile, but also anticipating traffic jams.

This results in a bad Amazon customer experience because the Amazon marketplace is flooded with dozens or tons of of the same products, each with different names because all of them run the same software that tells them to source the same products.

That’s just a part of the problem with this model.

Courses, articles, and YouTube videos teaching this model focus on listing optimization “hacks” and shortcuts that also contribute to a poor Amazon customer experience.

They skip the basics of selling and building the brand that you simply are should focuswhich accommodates:

This results in a flood of ugly offers where customers are forced to read 50 other ways to say “avocado cutting tool” as an alternative of top-notch customer support.

So if you are an Amazon seller and you should provide your customers with the highest quality and only the best products, how will you solve this problem? You’re making it harder for “private label” sellers to get to the top and reach customers.

Amazon does this through its algorithm, prioritizing non-Amazon KPIs reminiscent of external traffic, brand website, and more, in addition to KPIs inside Amazon that inform Amazon about brand awareness, reminiscent of branded searches.

This eliminates our next category.

2. Not focusing on Amazon

On the surface, you have been taught to think that Amazon is a closed ecosystem and you simply focus on what you’ll be able to see on Amazon. This includes:

• Keywords

• Opinions

• Price

• A+ images and content

• Movies

• Bullets

• PPC

From there, you may focus on pricing strategies, giveaways, back-list optimization, and other top ways to quickly increase your sales on Amazon. But that is only half of it.

Success on Amazon is based on two pillars:

1. On Amazon

2. Outside of Amazon

Because you are taught to be an “Amazon brand” and not a “brand”, the non-Amazon component is ignored.

To be clear, if you sell an avocado slicing tool and want to seem at the top of Amazon search results when someone types in “avocado slicing tool,” you should focus on building your brand outside of Amazon to enhance your rankings and relevance on Amazon .

To build your brand on Amazon, concentrate on them best practices:

• search engine marketing of your brand’s website

• PR

• Brand mentions on social media

• Amazon Influencers

• Getting featured on “Best” and “Top” lists on blogs and YouTube videos about what you sell

Amazon crawls the web for information about the products sold on its marketplace and uses that information to prioritize what appears in search results and ads.

Plus, I discussed earlier about “branded searches” – when customers visit Amazon and type your brand name into the search bar – and how that helps you rank higher for non-branded searches like “avocado tool.” The above list shows how you can build brand awareness, resulting in branded searches.

OFF Amazon is also a excellent spot to learn more about your customers, which may show you how to with your photography and copywriting. By spending more time online, where your customers are, you may learn more about how your products ease their pains, solve their problems, and fulfill their desires.

Amazon prioritizes and recognizes strong, customer-recognized brands that deliver excellent customer support in their marketplace. This may be you if you focus on being a “brand” and not an “Amazon brand.”