Everything you need to know about the Amazon Product Launch

Amazon is a giant platform that is currently dominating the eCommerce industry. Each month more than 197 million users begin their search on Amazon. It has become a must-have service for users who want efficient online shopping solutions with a vast selection of over 350 million products and fast delivery options. It offers various products, both from marketplace sellers and its own private catalog of above 12 million products.

Take advantage of its large customer base and economy of scale for your launch.

“Our vision is to be earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.” -Amazon’s mission statement.

As Amazon’s mission statement cites being customer-centric and having every available product in its marketplace, it is not surprising that it could be the perfect and popular platform to launch a product. Launching a product and keeping the statistics in mind can be a daunting task. All it requires is a good branding strategy. Sometimes you have to take a plunge and see where it lands you.

Let’s understand first what does Branding strategy means? Branding is more than just the name of a business. It is the set of associations that consumers make with your company, product, or service. In essence, it’s what people think about you when they hear your name. A branding strategy is a plan for promoting and creating a brand identity. It defines, differentiates, and positions the brand from its competitors.

Some of the essential steps to follow for a good branding strategy:

• Define your ideal target audience, you need to know who your customer is and what can they expect from you
• Finalize the Product Niche. Choose a product with high demand, a high profit margin, and low competition
• Create content using relevant keywords A well-made content strategy is a way to execute brand strategy
• Keep on improving your product, make sure your product is well-received by the market and keep a close watch on competitors.
• Build your brand strength and promote your product to keep up with the competition and grow your business. Amazon product launch is the beginning of the journey, not the end.

Launching a product might require a lot of work. It would be best if you got the word out (i.e., the importance of branding we discussed), elicit interest, and make sure your brand gets the best exposure it can.

Now let’s dive in and take a look at the various elements of a successful Amazon  Product Launch. 

1. Product category Analysis

Launching a product without picking a targeted category is like heading to a music festival without knowing which band will be performing. Let’s understand why product analysis is a must.

Product category analysis is essential to understand the pulse of the market and its growth rate. It helps you to determine which product category you want to enter. The most important thing that one should consider while conducting market research is analyzing the industry by evaluating the competitor’s products, their features, prices, and services offered.

In addition, you should also analyze your potential customers’ buying behavior, choose the target audience wisely and make a plan for marketing campaigns before entering into this business.

2.Set the prices for your product launch

Pricing is often one of the most confusing facets of getting your product launched on the Amazon Marketplace. While there are no set-in-stone rules for pricing but amount to be charged should be done cautiously. You know how the saying goes, ‘tread the waters carefully.‘

Even if you are a hot selling product, pricing too high will not help you maximize your sales. On the other, pricing too low will hurt you in the long run.

Key points that will help you in price decision;

Know your business revenue: Calculate profit margin considering all the costs such as inbound, Amazon fees, storage fees, advertising cost. This will help you form a comfortability margin.

Set your minimum and Maximum rate: Initially, set a charge of your product, such as how much you sell. Your goal touches the break-even point.

Monitor your competitor’s price: Your goal as a brand should be to showcase your attribute and create a perceived value. So, price within your minimum and maximum, but don’t always be on the low-end road. Price competitively according to your product niche, but also not overlook competitor’s price chart.

Use consumer-driven pricing: AKA’ psychological pricing’, based on the characteristic traits of a customer. This technique can be based on distinguishing factors such as time, place, goods, or service.

Experiment with A/B testing: List your product on the platform at varied prices at a set amount of time and compare the performance. This can help in making data-driven decisions.

Keep adding Coupons and deals: This discount-driven pricing always intrigues customers and may help build customer loyalty and improve visibility.

Update the price timely: After testing all the pricing strategies, don’t be shy in optimizing your cost for better results. Amazon is a highly competitive marketplace. To be on the top ladder, updating and Optimizing are the key.

3. Set up Amazon Seller Central account

Amazon seller central account is a marketplace where sellers can list their products for sale; it is a unified interface for FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon) and merchant fulfilled orders.

To register for Amazon Central, some of the details are required to make the navigation process easier.

• Supplier address
• Box dimensions and weights
• Number of Units per box
• Transport of delivery (Carrier)
• SKU of the product

With all the details entered correctly, Amazon will provide you with labeling stickers, and they are significant in tracking the product and warehouse.

4. Create your Amazon inventory

So, after setting up an Amazon Seller Central account, establish an inventory in the warehouse, and that can be done in two ways.

(a) Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)

Amazon FBA is a fulfillment service that enables sellers to store their products in Amazon’s warehouses and deliver to customers through its logistic network. This means sellers don’t have to worry about the storage and shipping of the product.

Note: Make sure to list the product with correct details on the site correctly.

(b) Merchant-fulfilled or Seller-ship Program

Amazon Seller Ship is a program that helps sellers to manage their inventory and fulfillment process. This program lets you ship items to Amazon’s fulfillment centers, where they can be stored, packed, and shipped on demand directly to customers.

Paxcom’s Kinator software assists brands with inventory alerts and geographical inventory tracking, which provides brands with daily/weekly alerts to refill the out-of-stock products on multiple channels, simultaneously avoiding lost sales along with the data of their competing brands. Our dashboard and reports summarize the in-stock percentage availability of each channel to get an overview of stock availability at each channel.

Learn more here on how out-of-stock instances can hamper your sales.

5. Create the Perfect Amazon listing

Consider the importance of eye-catching content; it makes and breaks your game. When you sell on Amazon, your entire marketing strategy revolves around getting more traffic through your product listings, Titles, Descriptions, Images, and A+ content, and in order to create an optimized listing, some of the things need to be established as follows;

We all know how the Amazon algorithm works when it comes to conversions. To come in top search results, sales velocity matters, and to achieve that, let’s understand its inner-engineering.

RESEARCH, RESEARCH, and RESEARCH!

Conduct competitor analysis to analyze your competitor listings to get an insight into your product launch and look for keywords they have included in their titles, description, bullet points, and A+ content. You can learn more on how to optimize content for better ranking here.

For making your keyword research better, Discover Long tail and short tail keywords. It helps you to stay relevant for a longer time. Let’s take an example for a clear understanding of how Long-tail keywords works? They have at least three words in them. “Budget laptops under 15,000”-  it has three words in it: “budget” “laptops” and “under 15,000”.

Short tail keywords are just one or two words only: “laptops.” These are less competitive and easy to rank for. But it is hard to get traffic from them because of little search volume.

50% of search queries consist of at least four words according to 99firms

So, instead of putting all eggs on the basket, spread your efforts over several keywords.

Format of 10/10 product listing based on Paxcom’s expertise

• Titles: Creating short titles with relevant keywords to boost click-through rate
• Descriptions and bullet points:  It lets you stand out from the competition.
• Images: Amazon has strict guidelines regarding images. They should be in HD and rich in content.
• A+ content: It is a new type of enhanced content that provides more than just information. But lets brands tell their story with a combination of visuals and text.

6. Use Amazon marketing services/ Advertising solution

After all the planning and brainstorming, the product is launched. Wouldn’t you like an extra hand in your product launch? A partner can help you create awareness about your product- AMS could be the helping hand to grow your sales with Amazon’s audience and access its platform.

Interesting facts to find an audience and be a part of their consideration:

Why not leverage Amazon marketing services/ advertising Solutions to amplify the success of the product launch? With these, you can reach browsing shoppers and help customers to redirect your page who viewed your product pages.

Let’s take a look at Marketing solutions to ease your product launch process;

I. Amazon Marketing Services

Amazon Marketing Services is a global advertising platform that helps businesses advertise their products on the Amazon marketplace. It offers multiple advertising properties and targeting methods to help sellers reach potential customers.

Let’s glide through various Ad properties:

(a) Sponsored Products

Amazon sponsored product is a single cost-per-click advertising service, appears on the product detail page and search results. It enables advertisers to engage customers across the amazon network and help drive traffic to their product listing page.

For example, if your new product is a home audio system, you would want to create a sponsored product campaign that includes keywords like home audio systems, home audio systems, home audio entertainment systems, etc. It will help drive traffic to your product detail page. Once your campaigns are live, you can monitor them and adjust your budgets and keywords to reflect key moments in your product lifecycle.

(b) Sponsored Brands

Sponsored brand ads are the ones that feature custom image, text, brand logo and appear when you type specific keywords into the search. They are a great way to drive traffic to your product detail pages or brand store since they are contextually relevant and help with product discoverability & boost awareness.

You can run sponsored ads on the search pages and even on product listing pages, allowing sellers to engage users at the beginning of their shopping journey.

What is a brand store, and what are its benefits when linked as a landing page of a Sponsored brand ad?

Brand Stores are virtual storefronts that allow you to showcase your new product features to millions of audiences and help create mainly top-of-mind awareness among customers.

Shoppers browsing a store get a brick-mortar feel with rich content and visual aesthetics and know about the brand’s history & offerings.

Note: Amazon Brand store requires no investment or fee, and it can be customized basis the brand’s needs.

(c) Sponsored Display

Amazon sponsored display ads are product ads displayed to customers when they browse the product listing page. These help to increase brand awareness and drive sales of your products.

For instance, when a customer searches for a camera and he/she lands on the product with a buying or reviewing decision, your ad appears over the page, and this helps in remarketing, allowing you to engage with them while looking for a similar product.

II. Amazon DSP

The Amazon display side platform (DSP) is a targeted advertising platform that works on a pay-per-view basis. It helps deliver dynamic display ad campaigns to improve customer engagement and increase ROI. It allows businesses to find potential customers based on their past browsing history, interests, demographics, and location through rich, personalized, and interactive ads on the network of choice.

Whenever you run a paid ad campaign, you compete with your competitors and other products in the same category.  I am sure every brand has a unique story to tell but imagine telling it to millions of customers on Amazon looking for similar products like yours.

 The advantage of this platform is to help you with product promotion and ensure that your product gets the correct impressions and improved discoverability.

Amazon marketing services and Amazon Display side platform are often used in isolation. Studies have shown that all the services helped brands reach shoppers faster both on and off Amazon when collectively used.

Amazon internal data observed that those who used Sponsored Ads, and Amazon DSP Ads combined, reached the goal 64% faster than the baseline.

7. Use an external source to drive traffic

When your product is newly launched, it might not always be seen as the most relevant product even though it is highly available in search results. You can increase your traffic externally through online marketing such as blogs, forums, endorsing products on social media with a link that redirects to the Amazon product page to make people aware of your product or range.

It can be a stepping stone to generate more sales and help move your product into top search results.

8. Reviews

The statistics say that over 49% of customers read reviews before making a purchase.  But when you have just launched a product, it is hard to get any reviews. Amazon’s Early review program can act as a boon for this.

Amazon’s early review program is a new feature launched by Amazon to help customers spread the word about their latest products. Customers can now get free items in exchange for giving feedback on them. In short, it’s a win-win situation for you and your customer. Using this tool, you can reach out to customers who bought the same or similar items and ask them to leave a short review on your product page. It helps in building trust among your potential buyers.

With Amazon’s early review program, you can quickly build up hype around your product launch and increase its chances of success. You will also gain valuable insights from real-time insights that are generated from customer reactions. This information is crucial to improving your following product or service offering.

Conclusion

For a product launch to be successful, all it requires is marketing tactics and all the efforts you put before the launch promotion. 

Key takeaways to get your product rank at the top pages of Amazon

• Define a Brand strategy to attain a position in the market
• Monitor competitors closely for deeper industry insights
• Create an optimized product listing with relevant keywords, product title, images, description, bullet points, and A+ content for organic ranking
• Create Amazon inventory: Fulfillment by Amazon or Seller-ship program
• Adopt Amazon Marketing Services/ advertising solution: Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brand, Sponsored Display and DSP services
• Generate external traffic through social media marketing
• Partake in Early Review program for customer engagement

These are our eCommerce experts’ full-fledged tried and tested methods for a streamlined sale and launch process.

Paxcom’s Solution for Amazon product launch

Paxcom team can help you get beyond those challenging issues so you can focus on what’s essential – leading to more sales.

We have eCommerce experts who have experience with brands of all sizes across a multitude of product categories and A-Z expertise in Product listing, Content optimization, Amazon Marketing Services, Data Analytics, Inventory management, Order fulfillment, and handling global customer support.

As a part of Amazon Launch Solution, Paxcom has an in-house proprietary software Kinator, which will help as a post-launch strategy. It crawls all publicly available data and provides customized reports on on-shelf availability, search visibility reports, category visibility reports, product pricing, and promotion to enable decision making.