How to Increase Sales on Amazon: The Complete Guide for 2021

Whether you want to start out or have been in business for several years, increasing your sales is the best way to grow your Amazon business in the long run.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it sounds.

For most sellers out there it’s hard to increase their sales. In most cases, they aren’t even able to close their first sale.

They don’t understand that there’s no magic tool to increase sales. They have no clear strategy. They don't care about product quality. And most importantly, they think they can grow their business with absolutely no budget.

All in all, they get a lot of things wrong.

But actually, all it really takes is a straightforward plan and you to execute this plan.

If you want to know how to increase your sales on Amazon, you’ve come to the right place.

In this post, I'll show you some incredible insights and the exact strategy to increase your sales on Amazon, make more money and grow your business in the long run.

Here’s what you will learn:

• How to set up the foundations to beat all your competitors
• How to create the best Amazon listing in your niche
• Great insights that will help you develop a product that sells itself
  
• Strategies the pros really use to increase sales on Amazon
• Lots more

Let’s dive right in.

What You Need to Know

Perhaps you've heard of the flywheel-effect? It's uber important that you understand what it is.

In fact, the flywheel-effect indicates that top-ranking products generate more and more sales automatically. In comparison, this doesn't work for low-ranking products.

Customers only take a look at the first search result page. Quite rarely they give the second page a chance.

Top-ranking products benefit from the flywheel-effect, while low-ranking products suffer from it.

How can you climb to the first page when customers don't see your product?

How Amazon's Algorithm Works

To better understand how you can increase your sales, you need to know how Amazon's Algorithm works.

Like Google, Amazon takes a lot of criteria into account to determine which product ranks on the first, and which one on the last page.

However, Amazon's search engine is different from Google. Google intends to provide the most relevant information while Amazon aims to make as many sales as possible.

Regarding this, here're the three main aspects Amazon uses to determine a product's ranking:

• Click-Through-Rate (CTR): Percentage of clicks on a listing compared to impressions
• Conversion-Rate (CR): Percentage of buyers to visitors
• Customer Feedback

Sure, they first check if a product is 100% relevant to a given search query. But if there are 10 equally relevant products, they mainly take these three criteria into account to determine rankings.

Here's the whole process:

To make sure that your product is indexed for a keyword, you’ve to include it into your listing.

If you don’t mention a keyword in your listing, you won’t get indexed for it.

Accordingly, you'll lose a lot of sales.

So first of all, make sure that your listing is 100% optimized for relevant keywords.

Here's how to do that:

You should also use Helium 10 Cerebro to discover all keywords that your competitors are ranking for.

You may wonder what you can do if your product ranks on the 4th or 5th page of Amazon search results.

If your product ranks that low, Amazon doesn't take criteria into account such as Click-Through-Rate (CTR) or Conversion-Rate (CR) because either way, no one sees your product.

The easy solution to this problem is: make sales.

Jup, you’ve to make sales to get your product noticed by Amazon and to increase your ranking.

If you’re interested in learning how to do so, read on. In this post, I’m going to share some powerful strategies with you to increase your ranking and make more sales.

Here's How to Set the Foundations

Whenever you want to make more sales through Amazon or another sales channel, make sure you set the foundations right.

Here are some advanced strategies and tips to help you double your income in half the time.

How to Develop a Product That Sells Itself

First of all, it’s important to create a super awesome product that sells itself.

If your product reaches the first page of search results, it will sell more often over time.

But do you know what will happen if your product sucks?

It will get a ton of negative reviews.

Accordingly, you'll lose your rank and at the end of the day, you’ll lose all your customers.

On the other hand, if you've a great product, it'll be ten times easier for you to outperform your competitors and make more sales in the long run.

Therefore, make sure that your product is super awesome.

To do so, you've to understand the kano-model. It’s a model which enables you to learn how to achieve 100% customer satisfaction.

It consists of 5 attributes:

Must-be-Attributes

Basic features that customers only become aware of when they're not fulfilled. If you can't provide these features, your customers won't be satisfied.

However, if you provide them, they either will not feel much satisfaction.

One-Dimensional-Quality-Attributes

These are known by customers. They eliminate dissatisfaction or build satisfaction.

Attractive-Quality-Attributes

These attributes provide satisfaction when achieved, but do not cause dissatisfaction when not.

Indifferent-Quality-Attributes

Indifferent-Quality-Attributes are irrelevant. Customers don't care if they're fulfilled or not.

Reverse-Quality-Attributes

Reverse-Quality-Attributes lead to dissatisfaction if present, but to customer satisfaction if absent.

Here's also a graph:

You need to focus on building Must-Be-Attributes, One-Dimensional-Quality-Attributes, and Attractive-Quality-Attributes.

While Must-be-Attributes and One-dimensional-Quality-Attributes are less problematic, it is challenging to create Attractive-Quality-Attributes. 

Fortunately, you usually don't have to create a completely new product. You can easily analyze what customers criticize about other products in your niche and fix these problems with your product.

Here's a great strategy to find bad product characteristics:

When you're 100% sure that you created an outstanding product that no one of your competitors can face with, head over to the next steps.

Get a Professional Seller Account

If you want to sell on Amazon, there are two plans you can choose from. 

Individual Seller Account or Professional Seller Account.

If you take the Individual Seller Account, you’ve to pay Amazon an additional fee of $0,99 for every sale you make. 

On the other side, you don’t have to pay a monthly flat fee of $39,99.

So if you make less than 40 sales per month, the individual seller account may be okay for you.

Yet, if you want to go serious and boost your sales, make sure to choose the Professional Seller Account.

Make Sure to Use FBA (& Sell Products via Prime)

FBA means Fulfillment by Amazon. Using this service, Amazon does all the hard work for you such as storage, shipping, or customer returns.

For a few sellers, this might be not a good option because they’ve to pay fees to Amazon which can decrease their profits.

This concerns especially sellers for whom it's cheaper to store and ship products on their own. Usually, these are huge sellers who sell not only on Amazon but also on other marketplaces.

If you're not that kind of seller, use FBA to increase your Amazon sales.

Here's why:

• You can focus your entire activities on marketing
• Amazon prefers FBA products

Before you start selling via Amazon FBA, it's uber important to check your fees and profit margin. You can do this with Helium 10's Profitability Calculator. Here's how:

Furthermore, using FBA, your products will be automatically eligible for Prime.

This will make a big difference.

The average Amazon Prime member spends $1,400 a year while a non-Prime member only spends $700.

Here's an infographic I recently created on some great Amazon Prime statistics:

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Powerful Strategies to Optimize Your Amazon Listing

If you want to increase your sales on Amazon, first make sure that your listing is 100% optimized.

If you optimize your listing, chances are good that your CTR and CR will improve. Accordingly, your sales will also grow and your product will climb to position 1.

There're a few advanced strategies that I'm going to share with you in this section.

First of all, if you want to optimize your listing, you'll first need to do extensive keyword research:

Find Keywords Based on a Seed-Keyword

Find Keywords That Your Competitors Are Ranking For

Optimize Your Title

First of all, make sure that you make your title descriptive. Tell potential buyers what they will get when they click on your listing and include relevant information. 

To know this information, you'll have to study your niche. 

A great way to do so is to study all reviews of your competitors (like mentioned above):

You can also use these insights for further optimization, e. g. for product development (like mentioned above), listing creation and so on.

Optimize Your Bullets

Here're a few more advanced strategies to optimize your bullet points:

• Focus on Value Proposition
• Use all bullet points
• Use keywords
• Improve your copywriting skills
• Include a multiple items discount bonus in your bullets

What's important is that you focus on the value proposition instead of technical details.

Customers want to hear benefits, they (don't) care about technical details.

Yet, still many sellers flood customers with technical details in their bullet points.

Establishing a great value proposition can give your business a huge advantage over your competitors. 

According to Marketingexperiments, only 2.2 % of businesses have a useful value proposition. 

I think this number won't be much higher on Amazon, so this is a great opportunity for you.

Optimize Your Product Description

An accurate and detailed product description helps you close more sales. 

In a normal retail store, people usually can ask an employee if they've a question. On Amazon, they can't ask someone. If they don't find the information they're looking for, they will click the "x" - button.

Thus, your description should include all relevant information and answer all questions. The product description is the place for technical details (and not for benefits).

Here's how to get the necessary information:

• Check all Q&A of your competitors
• Check all Reviews with Helium 10 Review Downloader (like mentioned above)

Optimize Product Photos

Here's where it gets important. 75% of Online Shoppers rely on product photos when deciding on a potential purchase.

Furthermore, 22% of returns occur because the product looks different in person.

Here's also an infographic showing the number of photos needed when shopping online by the age of the customer.

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So looks like if you've great photos, you not only make more sales, you also will get fewer returns.

Sounds great. But what should a great product photo look like?

When people want to buy a product, they're looking for value and quality.

So first of all, make sure that your images are of high-quality. Then, focus on these two things:

1. Focus on Value

When selecting product photos, you should also make sure to focus on benefits and not just highlighting the features.

Make sure that you're not only uploading photos that show your product. Be creative and include some photos that show how to use your product.

2. Make dominant pictures

Do you know why Apple is so successful?

Here's why:

• They focus on benefits (Instead of 1GB storage, they say: 1.000 songs in your pocket)
• They make dominant product photos
• Their products have a great design

Make sure to implement these strategies.

Here're two more things to consider:

• Make sure to show your product from different angles
• Make sure to follow the Amazon Guidelines

Why Pricing Matters

When it comes to pricing, it's important to make enough profit to survive. If your profit margin is too low, it makes no sense to set a lower price.

So first of all, make sure your business can survive.

If you are 100% sure, you can try to set a lower price than your competitors.

If you can deliver the same benefits, you can create much more perceived value with this strategy.

But what's perceived value?

Perceived value is defined as “consumer’s overall assessment of the utility of a product based on perceptions of what is received and what is given” - Zeithaml (1988)

In fact, benefits - cost = perceived value.

Therefore, a lower price with the same benefits means more perceived value.

However, you should not set a much lower price than your competitors.

Studies have shown that perceived value may go down if the product has a much lower price than competitor's products.

Regarding this, don't offer your products 2 or 3 times cheaper as your competitors. Stay within a range of 5%-10%.

The Only Strategies You Need to Increase Your Sales on Amazon

Advertise on Amazon

The most efficient way to increase your Amazon sales is to advertise on Amazon. The reason for this is actually pretty easy: You’re able to get your product in front of interested customers who want to buy it.

In comparison, when you run Facebook ads, you “push” people to buy your product. They scroll down the feed and see your push-ad, but they’re not intrinsically searching for it.

If you run ads on Amazon, you have to pay per click (CPC). The average CPC is $0.97 while the average conversion rate is 9.47%.

This means that if 100 people click on your ad, 9.47 will buy from you. With a net profit of $10 per unit and 100 klicks on your ad, that would be a total cost of $97 for ads and a total profit of $94,7.

Even if you should achieve better results with your campaign, you should understand that the main goal is to improve your ranking. In this case, the cost would be $2,3 to improve your ranking.

However, your costs could be higher or lower. Here's a great infographic created by Adbadger showing average Amazon PPC values:

If you use Helium 10 Magnet or Helium 10 Cerebro to find great keywords, you can see how many sponsored ASINs there are for each keyword:

This is super helpful.

What you've to do is to choose relevant keywords with low competition to get the most out of it.

Market Outside Amazon

You should not only market your product on Amazon. Here're three effective ways to promote your product outside Amazon:

Sell Your Product to Your Friends

Why don’t you talk to your friends and family and tell them that you’re selling products on Amazon?

Sure, you should not push them to buy from you, but if they need a product that you actually sell on Amazon, they should buy yours.

Keep in mind that this isn't a long-term strategy. 

However, if you want to make sales right after the launch, it'll be super helpful.

If you leverage all your contacts, you should be able to make about 50 additional sales.

Establish a Social Media Presence

I’m not the fan of creating a random Facebook or Instagram page, run ads and hope to make a ton of sales.

I can actually tell you that this strategy is going to fail.

But what you can do is to establish a social media presence with a nice following and consistently run ads to reach new customers.

In the long run, it will pay off and you’re going to make passive sales because you’ll also get more organic visitors from social media.

In my experience, Facebook and Instagram are great channels to establish a social media presence.

If you want to go for this strategy, make sure that these things are in place:

• Create an awesome social media page, not a random fan page
• Be sure to have a budget for ads
• Be sure to have a good amount of followers before you start running ads

To get your first real followers, there’s a simple strategy that you can use. What you’ve to do is to run a campaign to get more followers, but you should not target people in an area with a high CPC.

Instead, you should target people in areas with a very, very, very low CPC.

These are mostly areas of the Middle East like Nepal, India, Bangladesh or Pakistan. This sounds strange first, but many marketing pros use this strategy for a new page. Moreover, you'll get real followers.

Remember that this is only a strategy to get your first real followers to build social proof.

If you run ads for your product, you should target people who are likely to buy your stuff.

Start Blogging

This strategy will pay off in the long-run. The idea is that you create a blog and write articles on a specific topic.

People will find your posts through Google, read them, see a link to your product, click on it and will buy it.

That’s the theory.

And it works. The only thing is that it will cost you a bunch of time to create blog posts and make them rank in Google.

However, if you established a blog with 30k visitors a month, it will give your sales a powerful boost.

Furthermore, it will be so super easy for you to launch new products since you can directly promote it to a ton of people.

Get Feedback

This is probably the most important point if you want to increase your sales on Amazon in the long run.

Here's an infographic showing the customer satisfaction score of Amazon from 2000 to 2019.

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One thing's for sure.

If you create Attractive-Quality-Attributes, your customers will be ten times more likely to leave a positive feedback. 

And if you continuously try to get more positive reviews, you will grow even more in the long run.

The problem is that you first have to sell lots of products to get your first reviews.

So, first of all, make sure that you sell your product continuously. 

Then, I highly recommend using Helium 10 Follow Up to boost positive reviews, rank higher and make more sales.

Helium 10 Follow Up is an email automation tool and I highly recommend to check it out because you can get 50.000 emails for free here.

Here're a few more things to consider:

• Leave a message through packing slips
• Respond to buyers requests
• Solve issues

Repricing

I personally don’t think that’s a good idea to reprice manually. However, there are tools out there that automatically reprice your products. 

Considering that 80% of Amazon sales go through the buy box, this could be a great opportunity to increase Amazon sales immediately.

Influencer

Of course, you can also use Influencer Marketing to boost your Amazon sales. But there are several things to keep in mind. 

Here’re the most important ones:

• Don't reach out to influencers with a super huge following
• Find influencers who engage with the right people 
• Find influencers with an engagement rate of at least 5% on Instagram. This means that if an influencer has 100.000 followers, he should at least have 5.000 likes for one post on average
• Find influencers with an engagement rate of at least 15% on YouTube
• Avoid fake influencers 

To connect with them, you’ve to reach out. Here’re two guides that deal with influencer outreach in general:

• The Ultimate Guide to Speed Up Your Influencer Outreach Campaign
• A Step by Step Guide to Influencer Outreach

Advanced Strategies

Stay Ahead From Competition

Once you climbed to position #1, you’ve to maintain your ranking.

If your product is awesome and you can provide great customer service, that shouldn't be a big problem.

However, I highly recommend to go one step further and use Helium 10 Alerts to stay up to date.

Register Your Brand

By legally registering your brand, you reduce the risk that someone sells counterfeit products under your brand name. 

However, I recommend that you only register your brand if there is a lot of value behind your Amazon business.

If you make $2000 a month in sales, you should not consider this.

Go Global

The easiest way to expand your business on Amazon is to go global. If you have enough budget to enter other marketplaces and quickly establish your product on these markets, this could be your best bet for extreme growth.

Create a Storefront

If you want to create a storefront, you've to register your brand via Brand Registry 2.0.

You can then promote your store via Google Ads, Facebook Ads or other advertising channels.

What's great is that you can track your external traffic sources via Custom Source Tags.

Here's a great guide on how to create an Amazon storefront.

Sell Your Product to Your Existing Audience

If you have an existing audience, you can promote your products to them. You can do this via email, posting on social channels like Facebook or Instagram or promote your product on your blog.

If you don’t have an existing audience yet, you should start building your audience as soon as possible.

Follow the Rules

If your Amazon seller account is suspended, you can't sell anything on Amazon, right? 

So make sure that you follow all Amazon Guidelines to be on the safe side.

Here you can read them.

Manage Your Inventory

You must manage your inventory properly. If you go out of stock, you will not only lose valuable sales, but also valuable rankings.

Imagine that you've worked hard for months to improve your ranking, but then lose everything because you're out of stock.

To protect yourself from this worst-case scenario, use Helium 10 to control your Amazon inventory.

In Conclusion

To summarize what you've learned, here're the most important things:

• The Flywheel effect makes it hard for new products to rank on the first page
• Amazon takes Relevance, CTR, CR & Feedback into account to determine a product's ranking
• A good product is the foundation for long-term success
• To develop a good product, you need to understand the kano-model
• You should focus on benefits when marketing your product
• Most advertising strategies require budget and time
• A good way is to promote your product directly on Amazon
• In the long run, you should build up other advertising channels like a blog or a social media presence
• You need to focus on getting feedback
• If you want to grow further, you should expand your business to new marketplaces.
• Manage your inventory properly
• Stick to the Amazon rules

Hope this article helped you to know how to increase your sales on Amazon and make more money in the long run.

Yet, let me know what's your favorite strategy and whether I missed anything important.