Amazon Seller Support

Webstore Tips for the Holiday Season

The holidays are a busy time for everyone, including your customers. Use our list of tips to make it easy for customers to find your products and site, view your best deals, and find all the information they need to make confident purchasing decisions.

Holiday Selling Tips:

1. Get the word out! Reach out to your social networks and e-mail list; generate buzz about your holiday offerings.
2. Make your products easy to find: The holidays are a great time to sell on Amazon and comparison shopping engines, Amazon Webstore makes both easy!
3. Promote! Holiday shoppers expect deals. Free shipping options or promotions (like “free shipping on all orders over $100”) are always popular. Dollars off, percentage off, and “buy x, get y” can also work well. Highlight your best deals on your home page and other popular landing pages if not site-wide. A regularly updated “deal of the day” or “sale” category are great ways to keep customers coming back to your site.
4. Make a good first impression: Focus your merchandising efforts on making your home page, key category pages, and other popular landing pages look great. Slow pages drive customers away, so avoid heavy merchandising that slows key pages down.
5. Clear messaging: During the holidays customers are overwhelmed with messaging. Effective merchandising and promotional text is descriptive and accurate while being brief, to the point, and with a clear call to action. Keep things simple and easy to understand, avoid repetition, and don’t mix messages.
6. Offer fast and free shipping: Fast shipping and free shipping are always important, but especially during the holiday season. Eliminate shipping cost from the buying decision by making it free. Customers need to know their gifts will arrive on time. Provide clear, site-wide messaging around delivery timeframes, shipping cut-off dates, and contact information.
7. Returns: Returns are part of the holiday experience. Make sure your return policy is available on your website and very clear, especially about any limitations.
8. Get your servers tuned and ready for more traffic?!? Don’t worry, we have that covered for you!

Happy Selling!

The Amazon Webstore Team

Listing tips to help buyers find your products

Categorize Products Accurately

• If a product type or subcategory is incorrect, the item may be unsearchable or can be placed into the Everything Else category.
• For Pro Merchants: make sure item-type-keyword values are correct and only use lower-case letters and dashes.
• When in doubt, search for existing products on Amazon.com to help guide how your item is popularly categorized.

Professional Product Titles

• Keep your titles tidy and maintain the continuity of Amazon.com sold items with crisp, professional product titles.
• Avoid providing gimmicky terms like "super”, “cheap" or "quality" unless it is part of the trade name.
• Remember that in a catalog of over 90 million items, including the unique and specific language of your product into your keywords can help your product stand out.
• Good images are important. Let your product image entice customers.
• Keep less essential information within the product description and bullet points.

Brand uniformity

• When entering the brand, keep it accurate to the brand of the product, keep spelling consistent and exactly as the manufacturer has it, and keep capitalization uniform. This assists in better brand browsing within the site.
• Avoid using trademark symbols, and use the word “and” instead of “&” (ampersand character) when possible.

Amazon Product Ads: Placement



Product Ads can display your products to millions of customers: those who look specifically for your kind of product on relevant pages, and those who do not have a particular product in mind.

 

We place an ad based on features the advertised product shares with other products in its category, and we use two ad placement approaches.

 

We use targeted placement when we determine that an advertised product is identical, similar, or complimentary to a product in the Amazon.com catalog. We display the product's ad on the detail page of the related product, in the "Product Ads on External Websites" section.

 

Though you cannot specify related products, the more descriptive your product titles and category information are, the more accurately we can identify product relationships.

  

Here is an example of a targeted ad:

 

 

We create a new detail page if we determine that your product is unique in our catalog.

Customers will be able to find the ads using search or browse, or in the "Product Ads on External Websites" and "Buy Box" sections of detail pages, or on "Read all Product Reviews" pages. Customers can view a product's details on Amazon.com or they can click the link to go directly to your Website to purchase the product.

We encourage you to provide UPCs for your products so we can quickly determine whether your product is unique in the Amazon.com catalog.

 

Here is an example of an ad for a product that is unique in our catalog:

 

 

 
 

If you have a Product Ads account, for more information search on "placement" in seller Help.

If you do not have a Product Ads account, for more information about this program, search on "product ads" in seller Help.

Help turn browsers into buyers with good product descriptions

If you're a professional seller on Amazon, you can create detail pages for products that don't already exist in the Amazon.com catalog. A well-written product description on the detail page helps potential buyers imagine the experience of owning or handling your product.

When writing a product description, put yourself in the customers' shoes: what would they want to feel, touch, think, and want?  Incorporating information about the feel, usage and benefits of your product can fire the customer's imagination.  This is as close as you can get to creating an in-store experience.

Do's and Don'ts for Good Product Descriptions

• Do describe the major product features and list product information including size, used-for and style
• Do provide enough detail to make your product come to life, and include critical product information.
• Do include accurate dimensions, care instructions and warranty information
• Do use correct grammar and complete sentences    
• Do not include your seller name, e-mail address, website, or any company-specific information
• Do not write about anything but the product for sale; this is your opportunity to tell the customer what they are buying
• Do not include pricing or promotional language such as "sale" or "free shipping”
• Do not repeat the “product feature” or “product title” as the “product description”

Learn more about selling professionally on Amazon.com.

Using Amazon to Grow Your Ecommerce Business; 6 Tools

In Practicalecommerce's article "Using Amazon to Grow Your Ecommerce Business; 6 Tools" read about different ways you can use Amazon services (Selling on Amazon, Product Ads, Display Ads, Webstore, Fulfillment, Payments and Amazon Web Services) to grow your business.

-Michelle

 

Make it Easy for Buyers to Find and Buy Your Listings

Did you know that one way to increase your sales is to make sure customers are provided with all of the information they want to see when making a buying decision?

You can help more customers find and purchase your listings by including brands, specific titles, product specifications, rich product descriptions, and images on product detail pages. For example, we've found that customers really want to see a product image when they are considering a purchase, and listings with images sell much faster than listings without them.

There’s a great new feature in Amazon Selling Coach that can help you improve your listings. It's a report that includes your listings that may benefit from the addition of an image, a fuller description, or even a more specific title for the product detail page. The report also includes "Fix this" links that allow you to add the missing information quickly and easily.

This new report will only be available in your account when you have listings matched to product detail pages that are missing important information. To see if you have any listings missing information, click here and look for the report.

We encourage you to look for the report regularly and add more product information for your listings. Although you are not required to fix the product pages in the report, adding some or all of the missing information can increase your sales.

Improve items' performance in product Search on Amazon.com

Categorize Products Accurately

• If a product type or subcategory is incorrect, the item may be unsearchable or moved into the Everything Else category.
• Mis-categorized items are often at a disadvantage in ranking; however, items can correctly appear in multiple categories as they belong in different subcategories.
• For Pro Merchants: make sure item-type-keyword values are correct, only use lower-case letters and dashes, and use the “other-products” item-type-keyword as a last resort.
• When in doubt, search for existing products on Amazon.com to help determine if your item is categorized properly.

Professional Titles

• Keep titles tidy and maintain the continuity of Amazon.com sold items with crisp, professional product titles.
• Avoid providing gimmicky terms like "super,” “cheap" or "quality" unless it is part of the trade name. Amazon buyers are savvy shoppers, and these terms can make your product seem the opposite by sounding unprofessional or overhyped.
• Remember that in a catalog of over 90 million items, including the unique and specific language of your product into your keywords can help your product stand out. Some buyers will search for “haircutting scissors,” while others may search for “styling shears.”
• Let your product image entice customers.
• Keep less essential information within the product description and bullet points.

Brand uniformity

• When entering the brand: keep it accurate to the brand of the product, keep spelling consistent and exactly as the manufacturer has it, and keep capitalization uniform. This assists in better brand browsing within the site.
• Trademark and reserved symbols should be avoided.
• Use the word “and” instead of “&” (ampersand character) when possible.