As Amazon’s customers, we’ve all seen these weird listings: a bunch of misleading images, confusing descriptions, or the item is out of stock – everything to make the shopping experience terrible.
Many of Amazon’s new sellers believe that they will start selling as soon as they upload their products to the Store. Of course, they’ve put so much effort to get their products to Amazon finally, so now they can’t wait to see their stuff selling like hotcakes. To boost the listing, they even try to run advertising immediately after the product is active. But If Amazon doesn’t consider your product as “retail-ready,” any advertising strategy you are currently using to drive traffic to your page will be in vain.
What is retail-readiness, and why is it so important?
The concept of retail-readiness is self-explanatory. It’s all about ensuring that your product page displays all content (text or media) in the most efficient way to attract potential buyers and help bring in more traffic and conversions through advertising campaigns. Using ‘retail-ready’ best practices helps to increase conversion rates. Increased conversion rates lead to higher sales rank, which results in a feedback loop on the Amazon platform that leads to more sales and growth. Therefore, retail readiness helps increase Amazon’s advertising efficiency and improve overall sales for brands on the Amazon platform.
So what does it take to be retail-ready? Below you can find our quick and detailed checklist.
Product Titles
Product titles are the first thing that a customer sees; thus, it should be well-optimized to be attractive to potential buyers and efficient in the description.
Amazon allows 200 characters; however, keeping titles at a minimum of 80 characters provides for mobile optimization. Include the brand, explain details of this particular product variant, state the unit quantity, and describe the product using relevant keywords. Each Amazon category has specific guidelines, so it’s essential to check your particular category’s guidelines.
Description and Bullet Points
The bullets should list the most eye-catching product features and benefits in order of importance. Just as with the product title, keywords should be included in each bullet to help the product gain visibility in Amazon search. Similarly, the product description should highlight the significant benefits of the product and include search keywords. bullets should take advantage of the available real estate of 5 bullet points and 500 characters for each bullet
Product Images
Descriptive product images are one of the key factors influencing a buyer’s purchase decision. The main image must meet the requirements of specific guidelines, including having an all-white background and no text on the image. However, the rest of the images don’t have such strict guidelines, and it’s wise for sellers to use text, graphics, and lifestyle photos to communicate all product’s features.
Customer reviews
Your listing has to have a substantial number of reviews and ratings if you’re going to promote a product. To be retail ready, an ASIN should have at least 15+ customer reviews.
Star rating
This is one of the first things a shopper will see. Your rating will communicate to shoppers what kind of customer experience they can expect when purchasing your goods. It’s essential to have a minimum of at least a 3.5-star rating.
If you are launching a new listing and require quality customer reviews, consider taking advantage of Amazon’s Early Reviewer Program – this program allows randomly selected buyers to review your product in exchange for a small voucher from Amazon.
Inventory
To achieve success and secure the Buy Box, you need to ensure Amazon that the product is in stock enough to handle as many orders as may come in. Amazon Marketing Services campaigns also require you have stock for at least the last 30 days before launching a campaign.
Buy Box
Amazon evaluates each seller based on reviews, price, fulfillment, customer experience, and other factors to determine whether they win the buy box for each product they have listed. Winning the Buy Box means you have the highest chance of sales for that specific product.
Losing out on the Buy Box will restrict you from running sponsored ads, and you will likely lose what money you’ve put towards promotions for the product. Learn more about winning the Buy Box
Enhanced Content (A+ content)
Brand-owning sellers can use enhanced content to add rich content, enhanced photos, and unique text placements within their product description page. This tool helps bring in higher sales conversion and lower product returns.
It takes a lot of work to create a retail-ready product on Amazon, but the result is worth the reward if your brand is successfully growing. Creating descriptive and informative detail pages improves the customer experience and drives sales, and reduces returns or negative reviews on the ASIN’s detail page.
If you need help to get your listings retail-ready, we welcome you to contact us for more information.
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