Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / 7 key steps to successfully launching your product on Amazon

Transcript

7 key steps to successfully launching your product on Amazon · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:09
  Hey, welcome back. It's Dune here, your host and hype girl. Thank you so much for tuning in to my solo episode for this week. Today I'm bringing you another workshop inspired special brought to you through the hype club coffee chats.
• 0:25
  Now, if you listen regularly, you'll have heard me chatting about our Wednesday virtual coffee chats in Hype Club before, and this is such a great hour of the week, let me tell you. It's a chance for all the founders in there to catch up with one another on their busy weeks and an intimate place to hype and support one another.
• 0:45
  We have this amazing community of like-minded female founders early on in their journey right now. And these Wednesdays have really become a highlight of my week. It's even more so the case when we have a special guest popping in to teach us a workshop in their area of expertise.
• 1:06
  with a couple of founders in the group looking to launch into Amazon in the near future, we invited Karina McLeod to come in and teach us the initial steps to getting the hang of this notoriously tricky channel. Karina is a real expert in the space and she has 20 years of retail and 18 years of Amazon experience behind her.
• 1:28
  She now runs an Amazon-focused agency called Ecommerce Nurse, run by a team of ex-Amazonians, helping sellers and vendors grow and reach their potential on Amazon in North America and Europe. In other words, the perfect woman for the job.
• 1:46
  During our session, she broke down the seven key steps you absolutely must take into consideration if you're going to succeed on Amazon. And because I know how useful that was to all the women in the club, I am so excited to share the general roadmap with you here today. So let's get into it. Here are seven key steps to your success on Amazon.
• 2:09
  Number one, the first step may seem super obvious, but there are a lot of businesses out there that do not keep this in mind. And that's that you should firstly and absolutely make sure you're selecting the right product to sell on Amazon. This is back to the basics of supply and demand.
• 2:30
  make sure that there's actually a real demand for what you're wanting to sell before placing your listing. I didn't actually know this existed, but there's a tool for this and it is great. Through ZonGuru, which I will list in the show notes, you can set up filters for buyer demand and search volume to get an idea of how many people are actively looking for your specific product.
• 2:56
  Because if you've got a product that nobody is actually searching for, it is going to be a serious problem for you. Besides this, there are also a few more practical elements to keep in mind when it comes to selecting the right product for your Amazon listing. Amazon has some pretty clear rules when it comes to this kind of stuff, and your product must absolutely adhere to their packaging and labeling requirements, which are stated really clearly online.
• 3:22
  And lastly, and maybe even more obviously, you want to make sure that your product isn't explicitly restricted on the platform. There were some pretty surprising things on the list that I didn't know about, like non-alcoholic beer, vehicle tires, and lanterns, if you can believe it, just to name a few. So don't be caught out with that. You need to do your research before you get started. The second step is all about getting the most out of your product listing.
• 3:53
  You want to start off by creating a list of 10 to 30 keywords that describe your product, which you might already have handy for SEO purposes. But if you don't, this is your sign to put it together. It doesn't take long and you'll be forever referring back to it throughout the lifetime of your business. Make sure these keywords are consistently mentioned when it comes to your titles, your bullet points, and your product descriptions.
• 4:18
  I'm just going to repeat it. This is key. Secondly, embrace images and infographics. They catch attention. And as you know, a picture is worth a thousand words. It's very useful on a site where you have character limitations. Karina referred to this as the area where they're seeing the greatest uplift at the moment. So that is definitely one to be sure to implement.
• 4:46
  Step number three, and one to take serious note of, one that also took me to buy a surprise, to be honest, is that you should make sure to absolutely always stay in stock when you're listing your product on Amazon.
• 5:00
  Running out of stock is always bittersweet, but on Amazon, it can be pretty detrimental to your performance on the platform. It's basically the worst thing you can do. It's because once you start getting sales, Amazon sees that you're getting sales and your product will start appearing more and more and more.
• 5:18
  see it as being like in the good books, in the good books with Amazon. But this all stops as soon as you go out of stock. Essentially, all of your hard work to get into those good books on Amazon in the first place goes totally out the window. So if you know that you're going to fall out of stock, you need to do whatever you can in your power to slow sales on the platform down.
• 5:40
  It's a tough pill to swallow, but trust me, it's better than falling completely out of stock. The way to do that would be to stop investing in PPC, slowing down your ad spend to ensure fewer people are coming across your page, and try to always have a clear idea of your inventory by forecasting your stock as much as you can before you get to this stage. Next, you want to make sure to put yourself in a competitive position on the platform.
• 6:07
  There are people out there who believe Amazon is just too competitive as a marketplace right now. But the cold hard truth is this. It's only too competitive if you go half the mile. With a disciplined and well thought out approach, it stays an excellent place to make money. Okay.
• 6:25
  One way to stay on top is to make sure you have your competitor monitoring all figured out. Check what customers are focusing on, what types of questions they're asking. Helium 10, as an example, is a great little tool for checking your competitor statistics for forecasting, benchmarking, and if you're just feeling a little bit nosy. You've got to know who you're up against to stand any chance at having a competitive advantage.
• 6:51
  On top of that, promotions do really well in attracting customers on Amazon. Having deals on your products works wonders for conversion and visibility. Especially when you're first launching, make sure to launch with a voucher or deal to stand out and get that initial momentum going. Step number five to making it on Amazon is all around driving positive, authentic customer reviews to your product page.
• 7:19
  with extra emphasis on the word authentic there. Reviews impact sales hugely and work as one of the main reasons to attract customers to your product. I'd actually say it's probably one of the most important assets that you can have, but there's a catch and something you have to be careful with.
• 7:38
  Amazon is really hot on tracking down fake reviews. So if you're considering asking your friends and family to pitch in with a helpful review, it might actually not be so helpful after all. There are quite a few cases of people having their account suspended as a result of this, and it's just not worth it.
• 7:56
  One pretty good alternative to this is that you can consider using a review program that Amazon itself offers. It's a way for Amazon reviewers to test out your product and then publish reviews on your listing right from the get-go. You've basically just got to send some samples over to them and voila, done.
• 8:16
  Step number six is to ensure a continuous flow of traffic to your product listing. You can have the best product page in the world, but if a customer can't find your product, you're not going to get any sales, obviously. It's very possible that you might get lost down a black hole and you obviously don't want that because once you're there, it's really hard to get out of it.
• 8:38
  So how do you go about that? How do you drive traffic? You can drive traffic through Amazon itself by investing in PPC, which is pay-per-click advertising. And to be honest, you will have to bite the bullet and do this to ensure any success on Amazon, especially in the beginning. So really make sure you put a budget aside for this as it can get quite expensive.
• 9:02
  But without driving traffic on Amazon, your product won't be visible and that is a guaranteed loss. If money's tight, it can help a lot to focus on your product niche in this department over bidding on more popular terms that will cost a lot of money to guarantee. And another way to drive traffic, which is complementary to PPC, is of course any other marketing channels that you can engage outside of Amazon.
• 9:27
  Fueling external traffic directly to your product page will give a positive nod to the algorithm gods and might even land you in the Amazon bestseller list, which will help enormously with that initial momentum. It's the strategy that I used when I launched my book, Your Hype Girl, Out into the World, Managing to Get Just That. Now, the last step to Amazon success is to realize that your listing isn't something that you will just set up and leave to fend for itself.
• 9:56
  a setup and leave it strategy just does not work on this platform. You need to nurture it on the daily every single day. It's all about momentum and relevance with Amazon. What was a strategy yesterday might not actually be a strategy today and you should be consistently working to optimize your listing and A-B test your strategies. So get yourself nice and familiar with the platform because Amazon is there for the long run.
• 10:26
  Alrighty, that's all for today. Thank you so much for listening in. Success for Amazon is absolutely possible for everyone. And I hope this episode allows you to focus your attention on all the right areas for that initial launch. If you want the extended version of what I'm talking about, you can sign up to Hype Club and watch the replays of all of our past workshops, including this one with Karina from eCommerce Nurse.
• 10:50
  And as always, if you're on your phone listening to this episode, take a quick screenshot of the podcast and share it to your Instagram stories or leave us a review in your podcast app to help other ears find us.
• 11:02
  And of course, you are always welcome to slide into my DMs or my inbox because you know how much I love to chat. Feel free to ask me any questions or share just what you're thinking and what you're up to. You can get me on Doon Rasheen in all the usual places, which is D-O-N-E-R-O-I-S-I-N. See you next week. Bye.
• 11:42
  Hey, it's Dune here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 12:06
  And if you're a founder building an e-commerce brand, you can join our private network of entrepreneurs called Hype Club at femalestartupclub.com forward slash Hype Club. We have guests from the show joining us for intimate Ask Me Anythings, expert workshops, and a group of totally amazing, like-minded women building the future of D2C brands.
• 12:29
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