3 Quick Tips for Improving Sales of Retail / Online Arbitrage Listings on Amazon

Most of the time, when you hear Amazon selling pros talk about boosting traffic and conversions, they are referring to listings that sellers actually created. However, it is possible to tweak existing Amazon pages that you’ve simply tacked onto in an effort to help them improve.

Tip #1 – Benchmark First, Edit Second

Before you begin to tweak a listing, make sure you have a peek at some statistics. If you don’t know where you stand now, you won’t know if your changes have any impact. Truth be known, you still may not fully understand because, if you did not create the listing, you don’t have access to as much detailed data as the original seller does. Benchmarking first will still give you a better idea about whether your changes will help.

Go to:

• Reports
• Business Reports
• Detail Page Sales & Traffic by Child Item

Then look for the ASIN you want to improve. You are primarily concerned with the Session Percentage (traffic) and Unit Session Percentage (conversions).

For the Pyrex 4 Quart Glass Roaster (above), you can see this listing isn’t performing well at all. About 1/3 of 1 percent for sessions (traffic) for the last 30 days and ZERO conversion rate for the past 30 days (the default setting).

Tip #2 – Pick ONE Element to Change

Here’s what we’ll use as our case study for now:

These coffee thins (coffee / chocolate bars) started out with 1/2 of 1 percent for traffic / sessions and a 4.88% conversion rate. The one element I chose to change was the search terms. Because Marketing Words didn’t create the original listing, I didn’t have access to the current list of search terms. I did my keyword research and compiled a list to submit as recommendations.

***NOTE: Please keep in mind that Amazon considers all entries into the Search Term fields as suggestions. Amazon states that they are not obliged to use anything you put in these fields if they do not feel the terms are relevant.

My personal philosophy (because I can’t see the original list of search terms) is to include every keyword I think might be relevant to the product. Then Amazon can worry about whether there are duplicates of the original keywords the first seller used when setting up the page.

I researched and used obvious terms such as synonyms (mocha, snack, chocolate) as well as some not-so-obvious terms pertaining to gifting, including business, gifts, ideas, coffee lovers, gourmet, housewarming, etc.

After checking the next month’s stats, I found a nice little surprise:

The traffic increased by 300% and the conversion rate jumped up by 44%! Not bad for a few minutes of work.

Tip #3 – Keep Moving

After you see a positive change, keep moving forward. After the search term tweaks, it would be easy enough to edit or totally rewrite the title, the feature bullets and/or the description (testing one at a time, please!).

After each change, allow the same number of sessions to accumulate as you had before (to ensure accurate results), and check for changes.

Things to Remember

• Any seller on the listing can log in and suggest edits to Amazon so — if someone else comes in behind you — they could undo what you’ve done.
• Yes, you will potentially be giving other sellers a rise in sales, too, but so what? You’ll still be making money.
• Amazon does not always accept the changes you submit. Don’t fret if (after a week or so) you don’t see your edits listed. Just keep moving to other areas of the page or skip to another ASIN.
• Make sure any and all search terms are relevant and have decent search volume. Sending traffic to a page using extremely broad terms can easily backfire on you!

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