As a seller, you are probably focused on profits – which is all well and good – but you should also be focusing on how to increase Amazon conversion rates for your products.
What Is Conversion Rate in eCommerce?
Put simply, conversion rate in eCommerce represents the percentage of visitors that turn into shoppers or regular customers in a set period of time; it is, therefore, an important aspect of your paid search strategy.
These are the most common conversions that, as an eCommerce seller, you’ll come across:
- Social media likes/shares
- Email/Newsletter signups
- Online sales
- Shoppers adding products to their cart/wish list
- Any other Key Performance Indicator (KPI) that your company may have
In a recent study, Wordstream.com found that a good conversion rate for eCommerce ranges between 1.84% and 6.25%, taking into account that, in general terms (all industries), a ‘good conversion’ is somewhere around 2% to 5%.
How Is Amazon Conversion Rate Measured?
Since this is the most vital metric in eCommerce, your conversions are also the result of all your efforts to improve sales. In other words, you have to increase your Amazon conversion rates to see success for your products.
According to Amazon, conversion is measured as follows:
“Total ordered units net cancellations divided by page views in the past 30 days.”
Amazon also suggests that, in order to increase conversion, you must think like a customer.
But what does this entail?
Self-evaluation is one of the hardest things to do, especially when it comes to being objective about your selling strategy, and what is behind all this.
It is paramount that you’re always in the search for areas of improvement. Thinking that you have everything figured out or that your customers will understand your brand strategy right away will cause you more harm than good.
How to Improve Your Listings Conversion
Here are some ways you can improve your listings conversion:
Product Content
Provide descriptive and comprehensive product content by making sure that:
- Your product image matches the description in size, color, and features
- The product is recognizable and accurate (not a drawing)
- The photo captures all the angles of the product
- Close-up shots are not blurry
- The product occupies at least 80% of the image area
- Take shipping costs into account when developing your pricing plan and don’t forget to clearly explain your shipping policy (charges and delivery times)
- The five key features of your product are highlighted in the description (dimensions, age appropriateness, ideal conditions, skill level, contents, country of origin, etc.) and maintain a consistent order for all your listings
- Each bullet point begins with a capital letter and doesn’t include ending punctuation
- Your listing doesn’t include promotional/pricing information
A+ Content
Include A+ Content to your product detail pages. This content includes a unique brand story, enhanced images, and text placements.
This type of quality content once referred to as “Amazon Enhanced Brand Content (EBC)” by sellers and “A+ Enhanced Marketing Content (A+ EMC)” by vendors – now receives the name of A+ Content for vendors and sellers alike, and it’s available at no cost.
Early Reviewer Program
This program encourages buyers to share their experiences through reviews. These reviews can drive conversions since it helps customers make informed buying decisions. It is suggested that you have at least five customer reviews on each of your products.
All these aspects will give your customers sufficient insight to make an informed purchasing decision.
How to Increase Amazon Conversion Rates
Increasing Amazon conversion rates involves many different processes working together to create the perfect combination of elements. There’s no perfect formula – or at least we can’t know what it is because it’s Amazon’s best kept secret. You have to figure it out, but these areas are what you need to work on to increase Amazon conversion rates. And remember – whatever changes you make, always be sure to do them separately and run split tests so you can see the full effects of each change, however small.
Broaden your Product Variations
Note that this works to increase Amazon conversion rates, but won’t work on your own eCommerce website. Amazon customers buy more when they can see more options while other customers get confused and can’t decide what to buy. This is because Amazon customers are used to having a very wide selection of products. When they see more, they are pleased and more likely to buy. On the other hand, small eCommerce store customers become indecisive and leave without purchasing.
Getting a customer on a huge marketplace like Amazon to visit your listing is already a great achievement. Now you don’t want them navigating away to find a better variation. Give all you’ve got to them upfront so they can find what they want and just buy it already.
Find a Pricing Balance
The price of a product carries the biggest influence over whether you can increase Amazon conversion rates or not. It isn’t as simple as pricing lower than everyone else, however. You need to find the right price – the equilibrium price. This way, you can increase Amazon conversion rates and still make a good profit.
Check out the competition, but don’t simply try to outdo them. Cheap often means poorer quality, so be careful there. Consider also your profit margins and if they are wide enough to take a hit. You don’t want to sacrifice profits for the sake of conversions. You can, however, do discount promotions to increase Amazon conversion rates for a time, which will boost sales.
Optimize your Product Listings
Optimization is more than just what keywords you use and how you integrate them into the different areas of your listing. You of course need to know how to work the Amazon algorithm, but Amazon optimization is also finding the perfect balance among all the elements of your listing. This balance is what creates the ultimate hook that you need to increase Amazon conversion rates.
Add Good Keywords
Clicks are an important part to conversions. You can’t increase Amazon conversion rates if you aren’t getting a good amount of traffic to your listings. You need relevant keywords to bring the right customers to the right listings. Then you need to properly integrate these keywords into the title, bullet points, description, and search terms of your listings. Finally, look at how you word the text and how it all comes together.
Use Good Images
Your product images are all that customers can see when looking for a product. If your images are poor quality or don’t really tell a good story, then all you’ve done to bring customers to your listing is in vain. No matter how amazing your product is, if you can’t show that to customers, you’ve lost.
Loot at the quality of your images – Do they clearly show the product and all its tiny features? Do they show your product in the most attractive light? Do they demonstrate the unique or high functionality of the product?
Frequently Bought With
Cross-promotion is a great way to increase Amazon conversion rates. Take a good look at all your products and try to get Amazon to feature the ones that go together. If customers see these related products and recognize their usefulness together with the original item they went to Amazon for, then you can get another hit right there. Amazon Customer Insights is a great tool to use to help you make more informed decisions based on purchase behavior.
You can encourage customers to purchase more by running promotions like a 10% discount on an additional item, or a buy 1 get 1 free deal. More on that below.
Email Follow-Ups
Once a shopper makes a purchase from you, you want to nurture that relationship. They are the best assets you have for promoting the products they bought – because they actually got to see them and hold them and use them – and they are also the best people to promote you other products to.
You don’t want to bombard your customers with emails, but you want to make sure that they know you care. Send them a simple email after they make their first purchase to see if they are happy with the product. Let them know you’re available for any questions or concerns. You can add a link to your email so they can easily enter a product review or feedback on their experience. More on this below.
This is also a good time to send that discount code to encourage a second purchase.
Because Amazon is so huge with so many options, if a customer comes back for a second product, it’s enough to call them a fan. It means that they purposely came back and did not just randomly end up on your listing.
Customer Reviews
Organic reviews are so important, especially since incentivized reviews were shut down. A high rating is essential to increase Amazon conversion rates. In fact, if you fall below 4 stars, your overall conversion rate will plunge. Do all you can do to ensure that you get more 4 and especially 5-star ratings with excellent customer service and excellent products. Then you can protect your reputation and easily increase Amazon conversion rates.
Asking for honest reviews is totally safe. Just make sure that you make it clear that the discount you are offering is not connected with the review – simply saying that it’s a thank-you for their purchase, and on a different line above the review link in your email is enough.
External Marketing
Just because Amazon is a completely different beast than Google and social media, it doesn’t mean you can use such platforms external to Amazon to promote your products. You can increase Amazon conversion rates by directing purchase-ready shoppers to your listings, and you can increase the number of purchase-ready shoppers going to your listing by leveraging external marketing tools like Facebook Ads and Google Shopping. Affiliate marketing and re-targeting are also good options, but you want to make sure that your sales funnels are optimized so you are sending to your listing only the people who are actually ready to buy.
Amazon PPC
Although it can be quite an investment in terms of time and money, Amazon PPC is one of the best ways to increase Amazon conversion rates. You get prime spots for greater visibility and increase sales to improve organic rankings. Amazon PPC is actually a low-risk strategy because you only pay when a customer clicks on your sponsored listing. If your listing is optimized, it will convert.
Run a Promotion
Promotions can help you increase Amazon conversion rates by encouraging customers to make a purchase decision sooner, especially because there’s a deadline, or even to purchase something they might not have really been interested in at first. This also increases your order value if the promotion is linked to another purchase, further helping to increase Amazon conversion rates.
Note that you can only offer percentages of rather than fixed dollar amounts, so be careful what you add to your promotion. You don’t want to lose all your inventory at a discount.
The best way to run promotions is to make sure they are available to shoppers on search, your listings, and also the checkout page. This gives them more changes to make a purchase, and to purchase more than one item. This works best when combining percentage discounts by offering them on related products or a buy 1 get % off promo.
For best results, we recommend choosing the group claim code option so you can enter a custom code that’s more enticing and easier to remember, and so you can also add a bit of customized promotional text to go along with it on your listing and on the checkout page. The code also puts customers at ease because they can see the validation notice that assures them that they got the discount.
Note that setting the code to “none” means that it’s not visible in the organic Amazon search results. This is a marketplace safeguard to prevent malicious activity.
External Benefits
With this offer, customers can again see a bit of customized text about your promotion when they review their items on the checkout page. This can be used for a buy X number of product and get % off or to cross promote a related product. The offer here is a post-order benefit that applies once the customer adds one of a certain product to their cart. It’s a great upsell method.
Increase Amazon Conversion Rates Over Time
You can definitely increase Amazon conversion rates, but it will take time. Examine your listings, evaluate your conversions, and work on the most obvious areas first. Then keep going as you reach optimal levels in each area until you’ve completed all the tweaks.
Monitor closely at each step so you can see exactly what’s going on. But give your tweaked listings enough time to show a noticeable difference before you decide that something isn’t working.
There are a lot of external factors that can also impede conversions, like holidays and seasonal dips, so always get a good time period to base conclusions off. Check your sales and traffic to identify sessions and page views and any increase Amazon conversion rates (called Unit Session Percentage in the Sales and Traffic report). Play with the dates to see changes, and download the reports so you have a record you can refer back to later. The best comparison is with the same period the year before, because of the external factors mentioned above.
Final Thoughts
Try the different options out in each to see which ones make the biggest difference for you. Once you get the right balance, you can increase Amazon conversion rates to a level that you probably never expected to see. Don’t worry about cutting into your margins a bit at first, especially when you run promotions. This is a temporary dip that you can easily recover after you’ve increased traffic and sales.
Don’t forget to A/B test each separate change so you know exactly what works. Trying to save time by making a bunch of changes at once will only confuse your results, making them useless.
