Amazon Seller Beginner Mistakes Part 3: Running Ads before Retail Ready

In this series, we will cover some very common, but easy to avoid mistakes that many brands make when selling on Amazon. We call these “beginner mistakes”, but even some longer-term sellers make many of these beginner mistakes as well.

By learning to avoid these mistakes in advance, you can put your brand in the best possible position to success on Amazon.

Amazon Seller Beginner Mistakes Part 3: Running Ads before Retail Ready

A very common mistake made by sellers new and experienced is not making sure their product listings pages are retail ready before starting to spend on Ads.

What does it mean for a product to be “retail ready?” Retail ready means that your listing page can convert the traffic you send to it into purchases at a high enough rate.

Below, I’ll briefly touch on the different factors that go into retail readiness and the downside of sending traffic to your listing with ads before you are ready.

Listing Optimization, Including Main Image & Title

Before sending traffic to your product listing pages with paid ads, you have to make sure that the traffic will convert into sales. If you spend money on clicks and none of those clicks convert, then you are just throwing money away. It is better to thoughtfully design your listing page so that it clearly communicates the benefits your product provides.

A well-designed listing with high quality listing images, A+ content, and copy will not only clearly communicate your products features to shoppers but can signal the quality of the product as well. If your listing page looks amazing, then your product is probably amazing as well. A crappy listing page signals that the products itself is crappy, resulting in customers hitting the back button and finding another product to buy.

You can test the conversion rate of your listing page by sending a small amount of traffic daily so you can learn what your current conversion rate is. Once you prove your listing page converts, go ahead and increase your ad budgets.

Reviews, Using Amazon Vine

Getting verified reviews on your listing page can be the difference between failure and success on Amazon. If your listing page has few or no reviews, it will be very hard for you to have success on Amazon. The best way to get verified reviews fast is to enroll your product in Amazon Vine. While Vine isn’t perfect, it’s currently the best way to get verified reviews for your product.

Amazon Vine is a program where you give your product away for free to people Amazon has chosen to review products. These reviewers have a long history of writing useful reviews and are likely to write useful reviews in the future. Because of this, shoppers trust reviews from Amazon Vine as much or more than reviews that came from actual purchases.

You may be thinking to yourself, “I don’t want to give away my product for free.” Think of this as an investment similar to ad spend. In fact, the money you spend on Amazon Vine will have a much higher ROI than paying for traffic that sends shoppers to a listing page with no reviews.

One additional benefit of using Amazon Vine is that you get real feedback before a lot of people pay money for your product. I have seen situations where Amazon Vine reviewers exposed issues with the product or the listing page we would not have known about. By enrolling in Amazon Vine, we were able to address the issues and avoid making paying customers angry.

Brand Store

In addition to the listing page, you also want to design a brand store that tells your brand story and sells all your products in one place. Your brand store is the only place on Amazon that nobody can run an ad. That means that if a shopper makes it to your brand store, they will only see your products presented in the way that you want shoppers to see them. You can even send traffic directly to your brand store with Sponsored Brands ads.

Start Slow, and Build

How do you know when to start spending big dollars on Amazon advertising? The best advice I can give is to start small, see what your conversion rate is, get feedback from customers, and make improvements. Once you see a conversion rate from ads where you can sell profitably or at least break even, start to increase your ad budget. Repeat this process over and over again. You will see sales grow, and, once you start to rank organically for valuable keywords your business will turn profitable.

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