Now that you have decided what you’re going to sell on Amazon and you have your supplier in hand, it’s time to go through the checklist for proven results. Here you will get some deep insight into the launch strategy of a product on Amazon.
Amazon New Product Launch Checklist
If you have got your product manufactured and now you are ready to launch the product on Amazon, make sure:
- Listing is optimized
- Know your main keywords
- Price lower than the competition
- Listing has reviews
- Generate one-time useable promo codes
- Max order quantity set at one unit
- Listing is FBA
- You own your buy box
- The listing is indexed for your keywords
- You are tracking keywords
Optimized Listing
When you present your product on Amazon for the first time make sure your listing is optimized that means your main image should be catching customers’ attention and at the same time should be compliant with Amazon’s policy. As per Amazon’s policy, you should use a white background and only display the product or things that you are going to ship to the customers and nothing else.
Listing Images
For some products, It is not very attractive to show only the product in the main image. Sometimes It’s hard to figure out what your product is really about, for example, it’s hard to identify what this product is really about.
In such a case, you can show the product in use for example with eggs in this case. But I’d suggest you print a nice converting picture on the product’s packaging and display the product packaging in the main image. As you are shipping the product with the packaging so technically you are shipping everything that you are displaying on the main image. I’ll talk in detail about converting images in my other article.
Apart from images, your listing should contain 20-30 highly searched phrases and all the relevant keywords in the title, Amazon search terms, bullet points, and description. The most widely used software tool for keyword research is Helium10’s Cerebro. You can use this tool to analyze your competition and know what keywords they are targeting and getting sales on.
Bullet Points Copy:
Also make sure you have a good listing copy, especially the bullet points. Generally, a customer on Amazon checks out 4 things before buying a product. These are the title, images, price, and bullet points. Write benefit-focused bullet points instead of product features. For example, if you are selling a baby toy, instead of writing “It weighs half a pound” try to phrase it as “The baby can carry around easily”.
Listing’s Main Keywords
Make sure you know your listing’s main keywords because your end goal is to rank for those keywords organically. It is also required for advertising purposes. Once you research your main keywords you can use Helium10’s Magnet tool to find out more related keywords along with their search volumes. That way you can start focusing on low-competition keywords that are easy to rank on and make your way up toward the highly searched keywords.
Price Lower Than the Competition
When your listing is new and does not have any reviews or a few reviews the customer hesitates to trust your product. Therefore, you have to compensate for it by offering a lower price than your competition. A good copy in your listing with the added advantage of a lower price does convince more buyers. And once you get your listing ranked and have more reviews to show, you can slowly increase your price.
Get Listing Reviews
After you launch the product try to get the early reviews as soon as possible. You can try the Amazon Vine program to get more reviews if you are brand registered. There is also another way that sellers use to get initial sales and reviews, called “Search, Find, Buy”. This means that they give away their product for free but the buyer has to search and find the product and then buy it. This is a risky method and If not handled with care can terminate your seller central as it mixes with Amazon’s terms of service and review policy. Getting reviews is a major factor in success that’s why I have a complete article on this website about getting more reviews. In that article, I have included all the safe methods that I use to get my client Amazon reviews.
Generate Promo Codes and Set Order Quantity
Promo codes are mostly used to generate traffic from outside of Amazon. I’ll discuss it later in this article. Make sure you generate one-time useable promo codes. You wanna set the maximum order quantity to one unit because you don’t want a single person to avail of all the discounts.
Listing Is FBA And Own Your Buy Box
Make sure you are sending inventory to the Amazon warehouse. Because more buyers have a monthly subscription to Amazon and they prefer the Prime listings i.e, FBA. If your competitors are doing FBA and you are doing FBM then it’s very difficult to compete and outrank them. Especially when you are new Its gonna take forever to rank unless your product is very unique and has very low competition.
The next thing you should make sure of is that you own your buy box. You may lose the buy box if Amazon thinks your price is too high or someone else starts selling on the same listing you created with a much lower price. I’ll discuss that in another article about how to deal with such a situation.
Listing Is Indexed and You Are Tracking Keywords
Once you put in all the keywords in your listing and optimize it for conversion make sure Amazon is indexing your listing for all those keywords. Also, make sure to track your rank for your focused keywords. Helium10 has a keyword tracker tool that lets you enter the list of keywords and it keeps track of your listing’s rank against those keywords. You can access this tool here Keyword Tracker [track product rank against keywords]
Honeymoon Period
Now there are a few other things to keep in mind while launching a product on Amazon. When a new listing is created on Amazon it does not have any past sales data. Meaning Amazon is completely unaware of how this new listing will convert for any keyword or impression. That’s why for the first couple of weeks Amazon gives you the benefit of the doubt and trusts your keywords in regards to the relevancy of the product.
Therefore, you have to prove to Amazon that you are actually relevant by converting more. So Amazon keeps showing your product for those keywords. In this initial period, which is called the Honeymoon period, Amazon prefers to show your product at more and more places easily that it would not otherwise show. For example, if you’re running a PPC campaign on Amazon, it will show your ad at a lower cost. And It will give your listing a high ranking in sponsored rank compared to other old listings.
Its Source?
The honeymoon period is not an official term from Amazon. It’s just a word someone used at the start and this concept hit the market. Also, Amazon has not released any such thing confirming this behavior of the algorithm. But, over the years from multiple sellers around the world, this behavior of Amazon’s algorithm has been observed and is now known for a fact.
How Long Is This Honeymoon Period?
There is no confirmed answer. Some people have observed it to be 30 days long some say it lasts for the first 3000 impressions. It also depends upon the product category and the competition. Generally, it is considered to be 30 to 45 days long from the product launch.
You don’t wanna waste this time because the momentum that you get during this time is all that you want for a successful launch. Don’t just throw your product off and then work on its listing, sourcing, and logistics. Make sure you have everything ready before you get your new product launched on Amazon. Get your listing optimized, and your A+ content and video content in place.
If you don’t have everything ready or your listing is not optimized you are going to have a lower conversion at the start. This will demotivate the algorithm to prioritize you. Even if you fix the listing later that low conversion history is going to stay there forever. You can’t erase that and any improvement in the later stages will not help that much. Also, make sure you get your product live with enough inventory.
How Many Units Should You Have in Stock?
This depends upon your lead time, i.e. How much time you need to replenish the inventory before running out of stock. It mainly depends on your product category and the competition. If it’s a highly competitive niche then you’re gonna probably go with the higher number of units in stock. Generally, I would suggest that you have at least one month of the inventory in FBA as per your monthly estimated sales.
When you ship your product to Amazon and it changes the status from “reserved” to “in stock” in your seller central that’s the point when you hit the party, activate your listing, and start benefitting the honeymoon period.
Advance Listing Setup
If you are setting up the listing in advance while your product is still being manufactured at the supplier, you can do it but make sure to set the future release date there. Although your product will not show up if you don’t do this. But, you should do it as a safety measure for your product’s honeymoon period.
Remember, you don’t wanna start off with slow sales. You wanna start with a bang and build the momentum from there.
The best practice would be to follow the multi-channel approach i.e. generate traffic also from advertising outside of Amazon.
Advertising Outside of Amazon
The number of online touchpoints before a purchase is increasing. These touch points include YouTube videos watched, Google queries searched and forums read. This means people are searching more about a product before buying it than ever before. Therefore, if you want to build a lasting brand you got to compete on all platforms that people mostly use.
For your Amazon launch, you can generate a one-time useable coupon at maybe a 90% discount and generate a search URL for your product.
A quick fact I wanna mention here is that Amazon does not give much weightage to sale that happens at a heavy discount price.
Search URL
The search URL is the URL that appears in your browser when you hit enter after searching with a keyword. If someone buys your product after searching it from a specific keyword, this uplifts your product and helps you rank higher for those keywords.
Now people on social media or any other place are not going to go through the hassle of searching for the product with your desired keywords and then buying it.
Therefore, you will have to generate a direct link to your product for the people. And at the same time, you want Amazon to think that someone actually searched for the product before buying it. You can use Helium10 to generate such links for your desired keywords. You can also contact me for an Amazon product launch service, and I’ll generate such links for you. Now if someone clicks on this URL, it will take them right to your Amazon product page. And if a sale happens Amazon’s algorithm will see it as if someone searched for it before buying. This helps improve the product ranking on Amazon.
FB Ads and Manychat for Amazon Sellers
Facebook has more active users than any other social platform. Wondering how you can use Facebook Ads to launch your product? You can run ads with promotions and ask the user to DM (direct message) you to get the PROMO code. When they do, you simply provide them with the search URL to your Amazon product that we discussed above.
Also, provide them with the promo code using the Manychat bot that you will have configured in your messenger inbox. This whole process will work on automation with ManyChat. You can use Helium10’s Cerebro and Magnet tools to find out how many units you have to sell daily to rank on the first page for those keywords. Then you can generate the same number of promo codes and disperse them to your Facebook audience. Facebook audience selection is also important. You should know how to research and target the right audience for your product. When people buy your product from the promo codes that you disperse in the messenger inbox you can follow up with them a few days later for a review. This helps to generate more sales with more reviews. The faster you get reviews the faster you outrank your completion on Amazon. But remember you should not exceed the review posting rate above 25% otherwise, it will get flagged in Amazon’s algorithm.
Influencer Marketing ROI
Nowadays a brand’s success is going more towards how well people know you. If you have your own audience that means your brand can survive in the long run. This can be done by building a team of influencers. Return on investment (ROI) with influencers is recorded as up to 500 to 600%. Meaning for each dollar spent you can get $5 to $6. Generally, a 300% ROI is considered good on any advertising medium or platform. If you manage to build a team of influencers on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube It will make the launch process of your further products much easier.
Google Shopping Ads
When you advertise PPC outside of Amazon you will notice that cost per click (CPC) will be lower than on Amazon PPC. But the conversion will also be lower than your own Amazon store. 20% of US buyers start their search on Google before ending up buying it on Amazon. Therefore Google ads are a great way to expand your brand’s exposure.
Google smart shopping ads are the simplest ads to set up, It’s like Amazon’s automatic campaign type. In this you let Google handle everything, the bid optimization and placement, etc. Let’s discuss the quick pros and cons of these ads.
Pros:
- Google has reserved some display places specifically for smart shopping ads.
- Smart Shopping campaigns include dynamic remarketing ads.
- Smart Shopping ads can show up across Google Surfaces (YouTube, GDN, Shopping Tab, Search, Search Partners).
- Aside from feed updates or issues or changes in ROAS targets, Google handles the rest. This could be good as Google knows a lot about the user e.g., what are the things that he is interested in, what types of websites he visited, and want he is looking for on the internet.
Cons:
- You can’t add negative keywords.
- You can’t run a search term report
- You can’t have more than one ad group in a smart shopping campaign.
- You can’t opt out of networks.
Use Canonical URL for Ranking on Google
A canonical URL is the URL of your Amazon product which is indexed on Google. If this URL contains the keywords your product will appear in Google search results. So, make sure you generate a proper canonical URL when you create a new listing. The canonical URL contains 5 words from your product title. If you want to make sure that your desired words are used in the canonical URL make sure you add a dash (-) after the first five words in your Amazon product title. This way Amazon will generate the canonical URL with those first five words. Otherwise, it will just take random 5 words from your title.
Amazon Posts
If you are brand registered, Amazon posts are also a way to generate free visibility and traffic. This alone may not help that much but all these methods together generate a snowball effect. Use everything you can, because it makes a huge difference that how fast you rise on Amazon.
Amazon PPC, Advertising Inside of Amazon
After your product is live start PPC right away. Don’t wait for the first couple of reviews also don’t ignore them either.
You will have less conversion rate and it will be more expensive. But remember you will get reviews from sales and reviews to drive sales. It’s a chicken and the egg story really. You can only enroll in the Amazon Vine Program if you have a brand registry with Amazon. So, consider doing that as well these will be free reviews.
Ninja Hack/ Pro Tip: you can list your variations products as stand-alone ASINs at the start. For example, if you have a product with 3 variations, instead of listing them as parent-child ASINs, list them all as independent ASINs and enroll in the review program. When you will get some reviews on each ASIN you can combine all these ASINs under one ASIN’s variations later. This will also add up all their individual reviews. This you can get more reviews faster.
Use the PPC search term report to analyze and tweak your listing a bit within the first 30 days. In the brand registry, Amazon also allows A/B testing. For example, you can test two different titles and some other listing parameters too.
Be Patient!
it usually takes 10 days for this process to get rolling. And it can take up to 3 months to really know the potential of your product and to know how this product gonna perform. I’d like to give my product 6 months before I make a decision if I’m gonna cut it or stick with it.
Launching a Product is An Expense!
Remember if your listing does not have reviews or you are launching the product you need to forget about the profit. You have to understand that launching is an EXPENSE. If you manage to sell at the breakeven that is more than enough.
Sometimes you have to sell at a loss as well to rank your product on the first page. Once your product is ranked then you can recover all the costs. If your product is in a very low competitive niche you can expect to generate some profit in the launch phase as well.
If you do the “Search, Find, Buy” method to get early sales and people buy it after clicking on your ad that is also a good thing. Because Amazon sees that your ads are converting and shows them in more and more places.
Helium10’s Cerebro and Magnet tool has a special column named: ‘CPR” that tells you how many sales you have to get to rank on page 1.
Remember!
Remember your goal is to sell as many units as possible and gain sales velocity. If you run out of stock that pretty much means you are gonna need to go through all those troubles again. And if you are relaunching an existing or older product that will be even more difficult to continue with. Sometimes it’s even worth ditching the existing listing and starting all over. If you still can’t avoid getting out of stock for some reason “close the listing” to avoid greater damage.
I also wanna mention here that like every other business this FBA business also contains risk. And there is no guarantee that your product will rank or go successful even after following all these pro steps. But if you follow them your chances of success will be much higher. Also, read my article about getting more and more reviews on Amazon.
