Top 5 Ways Sellers Struggle on Amazon (and what will fix them)

I’m happy to welcome Ivelin Demirov of River Cleaner to the Marketing Words Blog to share his insights about constant struggles sellers face and how to overcome them. 

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Have you tried to make it as a seller on Amazon?

Did you follow all the conventional advice, but still haven’t seen the results you were promised?

Have you even lost money? Are you ready to give up?

Before you do, take a moment to see if any of the following five areas sound familiar to you. They are where most sellers struggle. Overcoming any of these common problem areas will instantly improve your success on Amazon. Mastering all of them can take you to heights you never thought you’d reach.

1. Keyword Research and Optimization

Even if you have the world’s best product, no one is going to find it if you’re not using the right keywords. You probably already knew that.

The problem is, most sellers automatically go after the terms with the highest search volume. Sure, that’s part of the process, but Amazon is so competitive that you also need to know which keywords offer the best chance of improving your rankings.

Even if you know your market extremely well, some potential customers may use keyword alternatives you’re not aware of. This ignorance could be costing you in a big way.

Far too many people fail on Amazon before they ever really get started simply because they drop the ball with this essential step.

       —–>   Action Step: You can never spend too much time researching your keywords. This is something you should be doing once a month, at the very least. Remember that if one of your competitors does a better job of coming up with keywords, they could overtake you instantly.

Continuously research your market to ensure you’re never missing out on keywords that your competitors have begun using. If you aren’t seeing traffic from the ones you’ve chosen, try something different.

2. Leveraging Your Competition

Most people have no idea that their competition can actually be a lot of help.

It’s not hard to spy on them, of course. You can easily conduct your own searches and then check what your competitors are doing right on the Amazon.com site or using other tools.

For instance, we just mentioned keyword research. If you were about to list a product on Amazon, you could go to the trouble of doing all your own research starting from scratch.

On the other hand, you could simply leverage what your competitors have already done. The ones who are ranking in the top spots have probably done a good job of finding the most relevant, popular keywords.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, you should be making the most of all the hard work your competition has done.

       —–>   Action Step: Just like keyword research, checking on your competition should be a priority — something you do constantly.

How are they formatting their listings? What type of copy are they using? Please note that I do NOT recommend that you duplicate or plagiarize your competition’s copy. That is illegal and unethical. I also don’t recommend that you take everything from a competitor’s listing at face value. It is easy to manipulate Best Sellers Rank, reviews and other elements you find on a page. Still, these are all potential opportunities to improve how you’re doing things if taken with a grain of salt.

3. Making the Most of Amazon PPC

If there’s one area where sellers truly struggle, it’s Amazon’s pay-per-click (PPC) program (also referred to as Sponsored Ads). This is a real shame, too, considering how much promise it holds, especially for new sellers starting at the bottom.

The way it works is that you can pay for ad space on Amazon and have your listing shown anytime someone makes a relevant search.

Now, this doesn’t automatically mean buyers will click on your ad and make a purchase. However, the advantages should be clear.

First, you will definitely see a lot more sales using Amazon PPC than you would being a brand-new seller. While you should work to improve your rankings so you get more exposure, in the meantime, you can “skip the line” by paying for PPC space.

Second, you can use this increased exposure to improve your organic rankings on Amazon. That’s because you’ll begin getting a sense for what works with customers and what changes you need to make in your listings.

The earlier you can make these distinctions, the better. When you are starting on the bottom rung of the Amazon ladder, you’ll be lucky to see a few potential customers a day, much less enough to truly provide you with actionable insights.

       —–>   Action Step: While PPC can immediately help with this, too many sellers don’t know how to properly use it. The fact that it costs money keeps many at bay. Others don’t take this feature seriously enough and end up wasting lots of money without seeing any results.

Make time to educate yourself on Amazon’s PPC platform. You can begin with a simple automated campaign. Amazon will create the list of keywords for you. Use the data you get back from this campaign as a starting point to see which keywords brought in visitors to your product page and which converted those visitors into sales.

4. Using HTML for Better Product Descriptions and Formatting

Amazon couldn’t make it easier for people to list their products and begin accepting purchases right away.

That’s one of its many strong points, but it also leads to a certain amount of uniformity across sellers. Most people’s pages look exactly the same. You don’t have to be a marketing expert to understand that you don’t want to blend in too much.

A lot of sellers get around this problem by using HTML to create custom sales pages. You can use HTML to make a sales page look much more professional, and that, in turn, brings in more sales.

While this is actually against Amazon’s terms of service, we don’t know of anyone who’s ever been punished for this tactic. Instead, they seem to simply enjoy greater sales for doing so.

Meanwhile, their competitors suffer from all looking the same.

5. Setting Maximum Order Limits to Protect Your Inventory

One of the oldest tactics in the book for increasing sales — at least in the short term — is to put on some kind of promotion. Drop your prices or otherwise give customers a deal, and you’ll receive an immediate infusion of cash.

Many Amazon sellers do this thinking that they’ll quickly see a gain in sales and even an improvement to their rankings. They might, too.

Unfortunately, they often find out that their inventory has been completely depleted. Their promotion worked too well and now they need to restock. A lot of times, they even lose money from their strategy.

       —–>   Action Step Put some safeguards in place if you’re going to create a promotion of any kind. Otherwise, you run this very real risk of ruining yourself despite your best intentions.

5 Secrets I Stole from Vendor Central to Boost My FBA Sales

Want to put these struggles in your rearview mirror? Interested in what I (as a successful Amazon Vendor) found out about optimizing listings for stellar results? Watch the free webinar training and demo replay that Karon and I did.

We discuss the challenges mentioned here and show you how to overcome them with automation once and for all.  Plus, I share my experiences as an Amazon Vendor and the insider secrets I discovered for pumping up your backend to improve rankings and conversions.