Contributed by Tom Buckland
Whether through affiliate marketing or by selling goods yourself, there are many lucrative ways to make money through Amazon. Arguably, one of the easiest and best ways is to become an Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) seller. FBA gives you the opportunity to grow and scale to a substantial ecommerce business, without worrying about the majority of the logistics and customer service elements.
Let’s dive deeper into building a successful Amazon FBA business, and in particular how to set goals that will set you on the road to business success. More importantly, how to meet those goals!
What You Can Achieve as an Amazon FBA Seller
FBA, or “Fulfilment by Amazon” is a highly popular program run through the Amazon platform. Under this platform, the FBA seller needs to label and ship their products to an Amazon warehouse. From there, all storage, packaging, shipping and customer service is the responsibility of Amazon.
Although the fees and charges associated with the FBA program can seem high at first, it is worthwhile balancing this against the time and energy you will save on logistics and customer service, and what you can achieve in this time in terms of marketing and growing your business. Many businesses find that the savings in time and energy more than warrant paying the fees in the long run, and they get substantial returns on this investment as revenues and profits soar.
There are some pretty impressive case studies which demonstrate the success you can have as an Amazon FBA seller. The brand Cards Against Humanity, for example, built a product through Amazon FBA, which at $1.5 million has become the most successful private label product on Amazon.
Setting Goals for Your Amazon FBA Business
Setting realistic, ambitious goals for your business will put you on the path to success and encourage to you to drive your business forward, even at times when motivation may be lacking. Having formal goals in place will also let you track how your business is going and see when improvements and adjustments need to be made.
Here’s how to go about setting goals for your Amazon FBA business:
- Start with your long term goal: where do you ultimately want to go with your business? Why did you want to become an Amazon FBA seller in the first place?
- Use this long-term goal to set shorter-term ones, such as six months or one year from now.
- Break down each of these goals into objectives: actionable chunks which will bring you to your goal.
- Make sure all your objectives (and as many goals as possible) are measurable: have specific targets which will allow you to assess your progress along the way.
The Amazon Algorithm and the Traffic-to-Conversions Link
Once you have set your goals, you need a plan that will let you achieve them. In order to do this, it is essential to understand how selling on Amazon works. As with any kind of business, more sales means more success. And as with any kind of ecommerce business, driving more sales comes down to two things:
- Driving more traffic to your site or listing
- Converting as much of that traffic to sales as possible
On Amazon, the number one thing you can do to drive more traffic to your listing is to rank your product highly in Amazon’s organic search results. Users rarely browse past the first page of search results, so ranking on the first page is crucial. Amazon determines rankings based on its own A9 algorithm, which looks at a few factors such as relevance (that is keywords), organic traffic, reviews and above all else, sales. Amazon wants to point users in the direction of those products that are most likely to sell, because they are a business that wants to make sales.
Thus, sales and ranking are strongly interlinked: the more you struggle to make sales, the more you struggle to rank your listing, which means you struggle to make sales, and so on.
Of course, you also have to make sure that you have a high rate of conversions. This not only increases your sales volumes, but also improves your rankings.
How to Rank, Convert and Meet Your Amazon FBA Goals
The first thing you need to do in order to achieve both high rankings and better conversion rates is to optimize your product listing.
Optimizing your product listing should include:
- Competitor analysis: check what’s working for them, what’s not and what you can apply to your own business.
- Keyword research: using the right Amazon seller tools to research and track keywords lets you drive more traffic, and most importantly the right kind of traffic to your listing.
- On-page optimization: optimize your listing title and description for keywords and persuasive copy (which will encourage clicks and conversions) and include images that will close the sale.
Outside of your product listing, there are other things you can do to drive traffic to your site, improve conversation rate optimization, and rank your listing in Amazon. The first seven days of your product’s listing are critical for establishing a good ranking.
Before you launch your listing, make sure it is fully optimized for both ranking and conversions. Then, during the initial seven day window, pay attention to the other elements that Amazon’s algorithm looks for. Seek out as many positive reviews as possible by following up with customers, as well as leveraging your network. Also drive organic traffic from outside of Amazon through external marketing, such as social media and content marketing strategies. The A9 algorithm likes external traffic, so this will also boost sales rates, again increasing rankings!
All of these processes combined together have something of a snowball effect, resulting in the perfect storm of higher rankings, more sales, more revenue and exponential business growth!
Author Bio
Tom Buckland is a digital marketing consultant specializing in technical SEO & Amazon Marketing. He’s the founder of HQ SEO and Amazon SEO Consultant in the UK and has helped hundreds of businesses achieve exponential growth through ranking their products on Amazon.
✔ You may also be interested in reading:
Online Marketplaces for Canadian Sellers
Finding Wholesale Suppliers for your Canadian Business
How to Choose the Best Products to Sell Online in Canada
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Melody McKinnon is an internet entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in a wide range of online business models, backed by a formal business education and enhanced by training and mentorship. She has owned or managed both educational and ecommerce websites. Her book, 7 Recession Proof Online Businesses to Start From Home, is available from all major ebook retailers.
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I’m interested in FBA but intimidated at the same time. So many rules & fees to master and they’re always changing. I always got the feeling that Amazon only works with small businesses grudgingly and would rather not continue. I bet they’ll squeeze us out eventually unless we have something totally unique. I’m looking at a strategy from different angles and then I’ll give it a try.