Internet World Report
Borgholzhausen, February 24, 2021 – You don’t have to have clairvoyant skills to predict which online retail company would come first in a spontaneous, fictitious survey. At least for B2C customers: Amazon. The Internet World Report on Amazon has dealt with what is important if you as a retailer want to participate in this growth. We’ll give you a few tips from this.
The Federal Association of E-Commerce and Mail Order Germany (BEVH) has confirmed that gross sales in German online retail will grow by 14.6 percent for 2020. That means an increase from 72.6 to 83.3 billion euros compared to the previous year. The Seattle-based online company accounts for around 53 percent of this online sales. It generated this through proprietary trading, but also through sales by dealers on the marketplace. According to Ingrid Lommer of the Internet World Report, salespeople have good chances of profitable business here. In 2019, around 240,000 dealers were on the marketplace of the company’s German website. “Nowhere can you reach more customers, no marketplace enjoys such a high level of trust, no product search engine is more important than Amazon,” she describes in the editorial of the report. However, one must observe an important rule:
Selling on Amazon: yes – but if so, then with a plan
Simply joining Amazon is difficult. Trading on the marketplace is currently experiencing a high level of professionalism. This applies not only to the quality of the product sold, but also to all steps in the value chain: from presentation to shipping processes to customer communication. The Cologne market research institute IFH found in its own study “Gatekeeper Amazon” that it is not just about the pure sales that Amazon generates. The Americans’ online pages are rather a research pool for those who want to make their wishes come true by ordering online.
So how do you display products on Amazon in a profitable way?
The Amazon algorithm A9 answers this question. Because clicks ensure that the rankings are calculated for a search query. The more clicks, the better the ranking. You are the decisive criterion. Title, ratings, product descriptions are factors that increase the probability of a click, but “only” influence it indirectly. The direct influencing factor is the performance, the sales statistics of the article. What always sells well will probably continue to do so and end up higher in the ranking. However, the relevance is more decisive. How relevant is the product – at least as it is described – for the search query of the potential customer? Keyword analysis helps here. All keywords that the customer enters should also be found in the context of the product description, for example in the title or descriptions. If that fits, the sellers have already lured their customers into the digital shop with their product listing. Now she or he just has to “try on”. What is directly looking at it, maybe trying it out or putting it on in a store, has to be an optimal experience at Amazon. For example, by clearly describing the benefits of your product in the five bullet points that are available to you. High-quality images are classic eye-catchers, application videos increase the information content:
What other customers say is almost as important as the brand name
In the third step, the focus should be on evaluation management. According to the IFH, over 60 percent of those interested decide against a product if the customer ratings are bad or wrong. The social evaluation factor of a product has increasingly come alongside the standing of a brand in online trading. So the most important thing here is to react quickly when communicating with the customer and to keep a watchful eye on reviews. Because not only the number of sales of a product has an impact on the brand. It is also the pure information traffic on Amazon that can have a positive effect on the brand. For many users, product research on the platform is essential before making a purchase, even if they then shop elsewhere. It is therefore important to analyze your own product listings measured against various keywords at regular intervals according to key performance indicators (KPI). This includes, for example, the buy box rate, i.e. the option to equip your own item with the Amazon shopping cart. 90 percent of sales on Amazon take place this way.
Would you like to deal more closely with the subject of “Selling on Amazon”? You can download the corresponding Internet World Report here for a fee.