Amazon Retail Readiness Checklist for Sellers

With competition on Amazon at an all-time high, it’s crucial to make sure your business is retail ready. There are a number of ways to prepare, but the bottom line is to ensure your account and listings are set up for effective marketing placements. There’s no point in spending money on advertising or driving external traffic to Amazon pages that won’t convert.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to implement key actions and get your listings up to par. These basic steps can get you started on the path to retail readiness on Amazon.

What Does it Mean for a Product to be Considered Retail Ready?

Sellers cannot hope to create a listing and climb the bestseller rankings a few minutes later. A proper Amazon listing must be set up correctly and contain crucial information to inform customers enough that they will add the item to their cart and actually complete checkout. Retail readiness on Amazon isn’t about advertising or traffic, but about marketing your item correctly in the first place.

Sellers also cannot violate Amazon policies and guidelines. Because of this, it pays to know what you’re doing and ensure you’re above board. It does your business no good if your recently listed products get your entire account suspended.

Keep reading for a complete Amazon retail readiness checklist that will help you prep for success.

Retail Ready Listing Optimization

Basic listing optimization includes titles, bullet points, product descriptions, backend keywords, and product images. On top of that, make sure you’re in the right category and that your parent-child variations are set up properly. It’s important to avoid these common mistakes and check Seller Central help pages for the specific guidelines for your respective category.

To ensure you’re well-placed for paid and organic search, it’s crucial that all of these components include well-researched keywords. After you complete basic content, you can invest resources into A/B testing content to boost your listings further.

Titles: This is the most important piece of basic content. Include your brand, item name, and descriptors. Keep character counts lower for a better mobile experience.
Product feature bullets: SEO-friendly keywords and readability are important. Sellers get five bullets up to 500 characters, but shorter is punchier and easier for customers to digest.

Poor product features like those in the image above won’t give customers much information. Since they contain so few keywords, they aren’t going to help in search and browse.

Product description: This is your chance to expand on the info you might have left out of the product bullets. For sellers using A+ Content, this field won’t be customer-facing, but don’t skip it! This gives you 2000 characters to include more SEO-friendly keywords. While we don’t recommend keyword stuffing, you can really use this area to your indexing advantage.
Backend keywords: This field is never customer-facing. While the backend search terms are not weighted as heavily as the title in Amazon's search algorithm, they are still crucial to include for indexing purposes. Use this field for common misspellings and cast your keyword net both wide and deep. Many keyword tools will recommend competitor brand names, but using them is very risky. Amazon will suspend listings with copyrighted terms in the content.
Product images: Depending on your product category, you will get up to 9 images. Use all of this space wisely. The main image must fill 80% of the space and be on a pure white background, but the other images can be designed. We recommend showing off your product's unique selling propositions and incorporating visually appealing lifestyle images and videos. As of June 2023, non-brand-registered sellers who have been selling on Amazon for at least three months may now add product videos to their listings.
Translation and localization: If you’re planning to expand to other locales, be sure your content is localized and translated in each marketplace correctly. Your existing content may not convert in other countries.

How to Take Advantage of Enhanced Content

Once the basics have been taken care of, it’s time to up your game. If you have access to the Brand Registry (which has many great benefits for sellers), you can create free brand-specific content to boost your conversion.

A+ Content: Build out your detail pages with large images and immersive text. Learn how to build a high-quality A+ detail page.
Brand Store: Your site within Amazon to create a branded store and showcase products, deals, videos, and a number of interactive modules. A multi-page Brand Store is also required to unlock certain types of Amazon Advertising within Sponsored Brands. Don’t skip it, and ensure it’s on-brand and informative, like this one that was created by eCommerceNurse.
Brand Story: Every brand is unique, and the brand story piece within A+ Content is a great way to showcase your original ideas. Tell a little bit about your brand and how it began. Customers love this, and it can set you apart from generic sellers and those doing blackhat reselling. It's also a perfect place to discuss any charities your brand supports or anything else that makes you stand out. This example from an Amazon.com detail page is simple but effective.

Customer Engagement and Brand Reputation

All of the above are a great start. But if customers arrive on your detail page and there are no reviews, they’re unlikely to make a purchase. Before you drive traffic to your listings, boost your customer engagement and reputation.

Customer reviews: Many sellers ask what is the minimum number of customer reviews a product should have to be considered retail-ready. To be retail-ready, it’s best to have at least 15 good reviews on a product before you pay for ads. Kickstart your reviews with Amazon Vine and be sure you use FeedbackFive to ramp up your reviews from any sales.

Poor reviews can be voted “helpful” by customers and stay on your detail page forever. Avoid them by ensuring you adhere to quality standards, provide instructions, and request a lot of reviews to balance out any bad ones.

Star rating: Be conscious of your star rating. If a product drops below 3.5 stars, it will lose traction in the Amazon algorithm and be ineligible for certain marketing and ads placements. A big part of building a good star rating is ensuring customer questions are answered in a timely manner and that customers have all the details they need through A+ Content and basic content (pack sizes, color options, how to use the item, batteries required, etc). This type of information can reduce returns and increase the likelihood of positive product ratings.

Check out the number of ratings and answered questions on this Amazon product. There's a reason it's a bestseller!

Amazon Posts: Another Brand Registry find, Posts launched in 2020. It's available for US sellers and acts as a social media-like feed on Amazon. This is also linked from your Brand Store and customers can follow your posts.
Manage Your Customer Engagement tool: If a customer is following your Posts feed, you can reach out to them within the seller platform to share new launches and deals. We’re sure this feature will continue to grow, so don’t miss it.

Correct Pricing and Adequate Inventory

The last piece of the Amazon retail readiness checklist is all about ensuring customers can purchase your product.

Sufficient inventory: Is it in stock and buyable? It doesn’t make sense to run advertisements or drive social media traffic to a listing that has one day of cover in FBA inventory. RestockPro can help you manage your FBA inventory more effectively to ensure you stay in stock.
Pricing and promotions: Unless your products are priced competitively, they are not going to do well. Pricing can be complex, but you should do enough research to know the category well. Too low and you’ll undercut margins, but too high can kill your sell-through and result in other problems. It can pay to understand how promotions work, too. Running a coupon or a discount code can make all the difference to slow-moving stock. Plus, it makes your listings more attractive and will show up in search results and ads.

Create Your Advertising Strategy

Once you’ve prepared your listings and brand correctly on Amazon, you’re ready to invest in Amazon Advertising. Ads are absolutely crucial to success on Amazon, especially when you’re trying to constantly ramp up sales. We recommend testing and running all types of campaigns to see what works best. But if you’ve taken the steps above and invested resources correctly, you can expect a better ROI and ads that actually convert.