You’ve got your product photos and description, you’ve created a product page listing on Amazon. Now to sit back and watch the sales roll in, right?
Wrong.
While Amazon is a great way to sell your products, the competition on the e-commerce giant is more fiercr than ever. Worldwide, there are more than three billion products listed on the site. Which is to say, to sell you need to stand out.
How can you do that? With an Amazon Audit.
This isn’t some new-fangled high-tech concept, though there’s certainly technology involved. Audits have been around much longer than Amazon.
Think about it. You audit your business, your marketing, and your departments. Why wouldn’t you audit your Amazon presence?
An Amazon audit, or at least one worth doing, is a fairly comprehensive process. From copy to branding to pricing, your Amazon audit needs to address several things for you to get the best insights and actions from it. We’ll dive into a more in-depth look at the elements of a good Amazon audit below.
First up on your audit checklist, brand appearance.
When you search your brand name and brand terms on Amazon, where do you appear? Hopefully top of the search results, but this isn’t always the case. Especially if it’s a competitive market.
This is because many competitors may be duplicating your product listings or copying your brand terms in theirs. As well as this, competitors can use sponsored product ads and headline search to appear above you in the search results, even on brand terms. You need to make sure your listings appear first for all your brand terms.
Another way to audit your branding on Amazon is by checking the areas you can brand yourself on within the platform. Obviously, these are fairly limited but images, enhanced brand content, A+ content, and your Amazon Storefront all need auditing.
Your Storefront in particular is important. It’s the only real space on the platform you can tell your brand’s story and organize your product listings. As available analytics on the Storefront have increased, it’s well worth looking at these to see how your store is performing.
We don’t mean overall copy. Your keywords are a huge factor in Amazon’s search engine ranking system. In essence, all the things you do for your keyword research for your SEO strategies on Google, Bing, etc you should be doing for Amazon too.
Look at your competitors and see what keywords they’re using. Conduct keyword research and optimize your listing copy with it. Best is hiring a content provider with a proven proprietary process to create your listing. Most sellers use the same suite of services and standing out from the pack can have a big impact!
Ensure you’re using the Amazon hidden keywords functionality on the backend. Make sure to prioritize your top keywords and don’t repeat the same keywords multiple times.
Best copy practices on Amazon include keywords, but it isn’t solely keywords that make best practice.
Starting with your title, it needs to be under 50 characters and include your primary keyword. If you have variants of your product, your title should express this. Along with these, it’s worth adding things like brand name, product name, and size or quantity if appropriate.
Next up is your bullet list. These should be rich in your keywords, but also informative for potential customers.
Five bullet points in order of importance are best practice, all highlighting the unique selling points or benefits of your product. Stay within a 350 character limit for each bullet point.
Finally, your longer copy at the bottom of the product listing. This allows for more creative freedom and narrative. You get up to 2,000 characters so explain your product and company in-depth here with keyword-rich content.
It seems obvious, but seemingly not to every seller. If you don’t price your products right, they won’t sell.
This isn’t to say make your product the cheapest thing available. But it needs to be competitive within whatever scale of the market it’s in. By this we mean, if it’s a higher quality product, it needs to compete with other high-end competitor products on price point.
Pricing closely ties in with availability, so we’ll lump the two in together for ease. Amazon’s algorithm is live. This means when it comes to availability, even if you’re competitive on pricing, if you’re out of stock, the Buy Box will go to a competitor.
The reason we say the two are closely linked together is because even if you have stock available if another seller is cheaper than you, they’ll get the Buy Box. So evaluating these two together is great in an audit.
Last, but by no means least, Amazon FBA audits. This is a rather more technical aspect of auditing your Amazon business but there are so many reasons to have an FBA audit for many sellers. If done correctly, you could be looking at considerable FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon) reimbursements.
FBA reimbursements are available to all sellers. Amazon allows for up to an 18-month period where sellers can audit all their FBA transactions. Sellers can look for discrepancies, open cases, and get reimbursements if their case is successful.
Discrepancy is a vague term so let’s break it down a little. The most common discrepancies are logistical. This includes lost, damaged, and destroyed inventory.
You might think it’s unlikely, and statistically, it is. Discrepancy rates are small. But this small percentage for super sellers clearing a decent amount of sales every month adds up to some large savings, which you could be due.
Conducting an Amazon Audit is absolutely worthwhile, but can be very time-consuming. If you don’t have the time or staff to conduct an audit, we’re here to help. Just get in touch today.
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