As the demand for online shopping grows in eCommerce, the level of competition grows with it. There are over 2 billion online shoppers around the world and over 7 million online retail stores serving this demand. On the most popular eCommerce marketplace Amazon, there are over 9.7 million sellers worldwide. This number is growing steadily, as more than one million new sellers join Amazon each year.
With so many businesses selling products online, you need to know how to differentiate your products if you want to be competitive. We spoke to an experienced Amazon seller, Milo, about how to best position your products for success. In this post, we share how to optimize your product pages and go through the important areas he believes you should focus on to get your eCommerce products to stand out from the crowd.
1. Use quality product photos
Product photos are the most important area to optimize if you want to make your products stand out. Images capture users’ attention and help them get a sense of what your items are like. Milo says that you need to do everything you can to optimize your images if you want to convert visitors into sales.
Here are some of the best practices to follow from Milos when adding photos to your eCommerce product listings.
Use high-quality photos: Product photos should be clear, high-resolution images. With high-quality photos, customers can zoom in to see every detail of a product to know if it is right for them.
Multiple angles for images: Your listings should include images from multiple angles. Customers want to see an item from all sides and need this ability to fully understand the product.
Show product in use: Lifestyle images are pictures that showcase your product being used in a real-life situation. For example, if you were selling running shoes this could be a pic of someone wearing your shoes while jogging on the sidewalk. Lifestyle photos help your customers imagine themselves using the product, making them highly effective in turning viewers into buyers.
Use aesthetically pleasing images: Some product categories are more visual than others, making visually compelling images even more important. For instance, clothing or furniture. With these items, the physical appearance of the products is a major component of their value. As such, images for these products must be aesthetically pleasing to convince customers they are worth purchasing.
Milo describes how he was unable to take the quality of images needed for his products himself. This led him to seek the help of a professional photographer to get the winning photos his Amazon store needed. He was able to get high-quality photos, helping his products generate more sales.
This is not the only service he says is worth outsourcing. He says that when you want to submit your trademark for Amazon Brand Registry you will need a copyright expert lawyer to navigate the process.
2. Opt for user-generated content
You can differentiate your products from the competition by leveraging user-generated content from your customers. User-generated content is a form of social proof where customers post content featuring your brand.
In eCommerce, this typically involves a customer taking a picture with a product and tagging the brand. It is a great way to boost the trust in your products as consumers highly value the insights of their peers.
Fabletics provides a great example of an eCommerce site using user-generated content to make its items stand out. The MyFabletics social feed features images of customers wearing the brand’s products. Customers upload their pics to Instagram with the tag #myfabletics and then the images are added to the MyFabletics page on the brand’s website.
3. Add relevant product descriptions
Product descriptions are where you tell visitors all the details about your items. You only have a few seconds to get your customers’ attention, so it is important that your product descriptions are concise and to the point, while still providing all relevant information.
Along with providing crucial information, Milo says it is important to describe your products in a unique way to help distinguish your brand. His business sells shower curtains with special design features that show motivational quotes on both sides. The special brand identity feature gives him an upper hand in the market but this value must be reflected in the product description to win over shoppers.
Here are some additional ways Milos recommends improving your product descriptions:
Benefits over features: when describing your products, it is important to emphasize benefits over features. Most customers are more interested in how a product will solve their pain points than the fine details of how the product is made.
Optimize titles: your product titles are just as important as your descriptions. Along with the featured image, titles are what shoppers see when searching for products, meaning they play a big part in getting people to click through to view your items. It is best practice to include important details about your products in the title along with the item’s name. You also want to ensure that you are adding all appropriate keywords to your titles.
Use keywords for SEO: product descriptions should be optimized for Amazon SEO just as much as the customer experience. When choosing how to rank products for search results, Amazon evaluates several factors.
One of these factors is sale page content. Amazon scans product descriptions and titles to understand what your item is about. By adding relevant keywords to your product listings, you boost the chance of your products showing up for these searches.
There are plenty of Amazon keyword research tools you can use to quickly find relevant keywords for your products. For example, Milos recommends using AMZScout, which has many useful tools. Some of these tools include a Keyword Search tool. With this tool you can search a seed phrase, and the software will provide a list of related terms and their monthly search volume.
Milo describes how he was able to use the tool to find new keywords to add to his product descriptions which ultimately resulted in more organic traffic. He also used the tool to gather keywords for PPC advertising campaigns. Milo says that using the software available was key in helping him learn more about Amazon SEO and PPC.
4. Share your customer reviews
Reviews play a critical part in consumers’ decisions to purchase a product. Many will look to reviews to understand an item’s quality and previous customers’ experience with the business.
When you have a healthy amount of positive reviews for your products, you can convert your visitors at a much higher rate. That said, many people will not leave a review if not prompted to do so.
If you want a lot of reviews for your products, you need to know the best ways to ask your buyers to provide feedback. Here are some of the most effective ways Milos encourages you to get more reviews on your products.
Send follow up emails asking for reviews: The first way to get more reviews for your products is to ask your customers by email. By default, Amazon sends a generic email message to customers asking for them to leave a review. Because the messages are generic, they do not always get the best engagement from customers.
However, sellers have the ability to personalize the follow-up emails that are sent to customers. By customizing the subject line and body of the email you can communicate with your customers in a way that leads to more reviews.
Add a product insert asking for reviews: the next way to get more reviews is to add packing inserts to your deliveries. These inserts can include messaging that asks customers to leave feedback for their purchase.You can also add QR codes to the inserts that customers can then scan to redeem a discount or other reward. QR codes tend to get better engagement than just a simple coupon code.
Follow marketplace guidelines: when trying to gather reviews, you want to be aware of which tactics are allowed. Many online marketplaces have restrictions on how sellers are able to gather reviews. For instance, on Amazon, you cannot buy reviews, review your own products, or give something away for a positive review.
You can avoid any potential problems by knowing these rules and ensuring that you adhere to them. While it can be tempting to grow your business faster, Milo says it is better to avoid schemes like giveaways and buying reviews and instead focus on SEO and PPC campaigns.
His business focused on these channels along with some Facebook campaigns and other social media promotions. He even got some minor partnerships and mentions. While these were helpful, Amazon PPC remains the greatest growth factor for his business.
Optimize all areas of your product pages
These are the important areas you need to focus on if you want your products to stand out in a competitive market; photos, user-generated content, descriptions, and reviews. Milo was able to master these areas, allowing him to sustain a profitable Amazon business within months of first selling. By optimizing these areas of your product listings, your products can receive more sales and grab a larger share of your market.
Passionate about digital for several years, I am the Inbound Content Manager SEO at Contentsquare. My goal? To teach you how to improve the digital CX of your website and activate the right acquisition levers to generate more traffic on your site and therefore…more sales!