Take the plumber’s approach to increasing your Amazon sales. If you’re looking to improve a product’s Amazon sales each answer is going to be different. Knowing which strategies to apply and when is always the secret sauce. I’d like to share a story below to help get the point across. The tools are simple and we will share them below, but for now here is the story. 

“A man calls a plumber to his home to solve a problem with one of his pipes. The plumber looks around and listens for about 10 minutes, and then he grabs a pipe wrench and hits a pipe three or four times in the same place. The problem is quickly solved. The plumber then hands the man his bill, and the man is shocked to see that the invoice is for $200. The man objects, “How on earth can you charge $200 for simply banging on a pipe three or four times with a pipe wrench? I demand that you clarify this bill.” The plumber takes the invoice from the man, recalculates it, and hands it back. The invoice now reads:

Item one: Hitting the pipe with a pipe wrench–$2.00

Item two: Knowing to hit the pipe with the pipe wrench–$99

Item three: Knowing where and how to hit it–$99.”

Now, let’s go over where you might be able to use that trusty pipe wrench on Amazon. 

4 Guidelines for Increasing Amazon Sales

1) You can’t sell if your shop is closed

Pretty straight forward, if you would like to increase sales make sure your shop stays open. A big issue that sellers big and small have is maintaining the buy box. Without the buy box your shop is essentially closed. On Amazon you may need to compete with a few other sellers for the buy box which is completely normal. However, if you aren’t buy box eligible it may also be because of your Order Defect Rate. It is a metric that is calculated by adding together the total amount of your Negative Feedback, A-Z Claims, and Chargeback claims and dividing it by your total orders. If this percentage goes above 1% you will lose the buy box, even if you’re the lowest price. Keep those doors open.

2) Don’t Force People to Read

I hate reading, you hate reading (except for this beautiful blog), let’s not make customers shop with their bifocals on, okay. On your product’s listing page you have a few different ways to persuade a customer; images, product description, product title, and reviews. Product descriptions tend to be either really dense and wordy, or contain only a few words that don’t paint a picture. We want to paint a picture and let’s actually just paint the picture for the customer instead of leaving it up to them. 

The description and images should complement each other and overlap. A customer can read to get details, but don’t make that their only option. Here is an example of a well done image and text complementing each other: