How to Sell on Amazon Successfully This Year

In some areas of life, you want to find what works and stick with it. But when it comes to selling on Amazon, learning and evolving is crucial to finding long-term success. The start of a new year is a great opportunity to take stock of how you’ve performed on the platform over the past year and strengthen your strategy to find even greater success moving forward.

In this article, we'll share five tips that will teach you how to sell on Amazon successfully this year.

1) Review Your Analytics

To craft a better selling strategy for the future, start by looking at the past. Review all the sales data and analytics you have from Amazon, as well as any provided by third-party tools that you use.

Pay attention to which of your products sell well and which items underperform. Weigh the profit margins of each product against the cost of storage and shipping. Take note of any seasonal trends in how products sell. If you ran any ads or promotions, calculate their return on investment (ROI).

Analytics can provide a lot of valuable insights into the current state of your business that you can use to improve your strategy for the coming year.

2) Analyze Your Returns Data

Sales data is important, but don’t forget to also look at your return rate. Earning a sale is worth a lot less if it turns into a return afterward. And sometimes returns reveal an issue with the product that you need to address to avoid hurting your reviews and overall seller reputation.

Pay attention to which products are getting returned and the reasons customers give for why it happened. Determine if you need to drop certain products, improve their listing content, or make changes to the product design.

3) Research New Products

One of the biggest challenges to selling successfully on Amazon is finding the right products to sell. They need to be popular enough that you know customers will want them, but not so competitive that you regularly lose sales to competitors. They also need to be products you can sell at a high enough margin to make money back after factoring in shipping costs, storage costs, Amazon fees, and all the other costs of doing business.

To make the process even more complicated, the products that check all these boxes will change over time based on consumer trends. An item customers were clamoring for six months ago could lose its luster or be replaced by something better.

Countless people want to know how to be successful selling on Amazon. To remain profitable, you need to stay on top of which products sell well on the platform. That means making a strong effort to perform product research at least once a year.

Related reading: Six Elements of eCommerce Business Success

4) Revisit (or Develop) Your Review Strategy

Amazon reviews are powerful. For customers, they serve as social proof and allow people to check on whether other buyers liked before making their own purchasing decision.

For sellers, they provide value in a few ways. First, earning positive reviews is a great way to boost your sales. Getting lots of strong reviews and ratings can boost your rankings on the platform, which in turn helps to boost your conversions once customers click through to your product listing.

On top of that, written reviews also provide you with valuable product feedback. Monitoring your reviews ensures you understand, specifically, what customers do and don’t like about your products. You can use that insight to improve your product offerings and tailor your listing content to better represent what customers like about a product.

But all of that depends on getting reviews to begin with and making an intentional effort to review them and use what you learn. That requires a strong review strategy.

Think through how best to encourage customers to leave reviews, while staying within Amazon’s strict review guidelines. Create an ongoing process to check the reviews you get and incorporate what you learn.

Doing all that manually could translate into a lot of work, but you can invest in review management software like FeedbackFive that automates much of the manual labor for you. If you want to know how to sell on Amazon successfully, improving your reviews is a great place to start.

5) Make Sure Your Marketing Efforts are Effective

Selling good products that people want is a prerequisite for selling on Amazon successfully. But no matter how good your products are, no one will buy them unless they can:

Find them on Amazon's search result pages.
Learn enough information to confirm that the product is what they need or want.

Achieving both of these things requires smart marketing. Start by taking the time to get your Amazon product listing right. Provide thorough information about your product, highlighting the most important value propositions high up on the page.

Invest in strong copywriting and photography to make the case for why your product is so valuable and provide customers with accurate images so they can see what they’re getting. Consider adding a video or two to your product listing to give customers an even better idea of what to expect.

In June 2023, Amazon made product videos available to both brand-registered and non-brand-registered sellers. The latter must have been selling on Amazon for at least three months in order to participate.

But that's not all - you'll also need to put some effort into ensuring people will find and see those perfect product listings. Optimize each product page for Amazon SEO (search engine optimization) to increase your odds of showing up on the search results page. Consider investing in advertising to further extend your reach.

Related reading: Amazon Advertising News: Recapping the Major Updates

Selling on Amazon is competitive. Marketing is one of the best ways to gain an edge.

Monitoring your product pages for any changes to your listing content is also incredibly important. Resellers, hijackers, and even Amazon itself can alter your product details at any time, so it's imperative to keep a close watch. SellerPulse's listing content alerts notify you if your product's title, main image, or brand name has been modified or if the item has been flagged as "adult" by Amazon. In any of these cases, taking prompt action to correct inaccurate information is key. The alerts include recommended next steps to help you get started.

How to Sell on Amazon Successfully: It Starts with You

Selling on Amazon has its challenges. But the sellers that do it well can reap significant rewards. Take time this month to learn from all the work you’ve done up to this point and apply those lessons to your strategy moving forward.

By being smart and strategic in your approach to selling on Amazon this year, you can learn how to sell on Amazon successfully, increase your profits, and improve your business.