Preparing your listings for the holiday season is a key component to your Q4 planning, but it’s really just the beginning of your listings strategy. After all, it’s one thing to have accurate and descriptive product listings, it’s another to have listings that convert.
Not sure where to start? Here are five ways to optimize your listings so they bring in sales this holiday season:
1. Make Sure They’re Showing Up in the First Place:
Your listings can’t convert if they’re not showing up in search results. Are any of your listings suppressed? You should know before the holiday seasons starts if Amazon is blocking your listings due to misinformation (or incomplete information), incorrect product categorization, or another listing violation. Our friends at Teikametrics walk you through how to look for suppressed listings — and what to do if a listing is suppressed.
2. Consider the Products Themselves:
Let’s take a step back from your listings and look at the products themselves. Are they performing well for you now? If not, you may want to stop selling them during the holidays — especially if these products garner more negative reviews than others. Eliminating the under-performing items from your stock means your high-performing (and positively-reviewed!) products will improve your overall seller rating and Buy Box potential.
Pro Tip: Without the Buy Box, the chances that your listings will convert are slim. We’ve put together a guide to win the Buy Box, with strategies ranging from price matching to optimizing customer service/feedback.
3. Optimize your Listing Titles and Descriptions:
Have you reviewed our holiday listings guide or our tips to optimize your listings? In short, you’ll want to review all of your listings to make sure they have accurate and clear titles and product descriptions, high-resolution images, and holiday keywords (think “stocking stuffer,” “gift for her,” or “free holiday shipping”). If you only have one or two images, consider adding more, including one showing the product in a real-life setting — the more a customer can visualize using the product, the better.
Don’t forget to keep different platforms in mind as you put your listings together — specifically the titles. As you can see in this article from Web Retailer, customers will see a different number of title characters if they are on a desktop vs. the Amazon mobile app vs. a smartphone web browser.
Pro Tip: If you offer a guarantee of any kind (for example, a shipping guarantee in time for Christmas), mention it as the first bullet in your description.
4. Answer Customer Questions:
Do you have a backlog of questions for your products? Take some time to respond to each one. And if you see the same question asked multiple times by different shoppers, consider updating your listing to more clearly address whatever the question is asking.
Be sure to also look at the existing Q&As to make sure the information is still accurate.
5. Implement a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Strategy:
Implementing a CRO strategy will help you understand where you need to make changes to your listings to increase conversions. Here are two ways to do this:
- Use a Product Listing Grader: You can plug your ASIN into a Product Listing Grader like Splitly or Overgrowth, to see how it’s performing across a variety of areas, including title, images, product features, etc. Based on the results, you’ll know where you need to improve.
- Look at Your Competitors: Compare your listings to your competitors to see how your descriptions and images differ.
Need more Q4 Amazon seller tips? We’ve got a variety of holiday tips to help you maximize your sales this November and December.
