Amazon’s charge into the Australian market continues at pace with revenues doubling and a massive investment in infrastructure. Forecasts suggest that over the coming years Amazon is set to grab significant e-commerce market share in the Australian market.  

Sellers that can master the art of working with the marketplace giant stand to reap the benefits. Simply listing products on Amazon Australia is unlikely to cut it in this competitive space, where tens of thousands of sellers are vying for consumers’ attention. Sellers need to carefully consider their Amazon strategy to ensure success. What are your brand’s strengths and weaknesses? How are you grabbing shoppers’ attention and ensuring loyalty? Is your fulfilment process improving the customer experience or not?

ChannelAdvisor, a leading multichannel commerce platform that helps brands and retailers connect and optimise online commerce, recently published a Comprehensive Guide to Amazon, that takes sellers through must-know strategies to succeed on Amazon.  

The company suggests a holistic view (the growth flywheel) is an effective way to structure your thinking. 

This helps assess and develop strategies in five areas:

• Connect products to consumers with error-free listings.
• Market products effectively to drive awareness and sales.
• Sell products by converting browsers into buyers. 
• Fulfil customer expectations with fast, efficient delivery.
• Optimise Amazon strategies to constantly improve results.

Connect your products to consumers

How do you want to sell on Amazon? 

• A first-party (1P) relationship: you sell your products to Amazon via Vendor Central. Your brand is responsible for advertising, promotions and shipping products to Amazon, while they control the pricing and inventory.
• A third-party (3P) relationship: you sell directly to consumers via Seller Central. You control the advertising, pricing, inventory and any fulfilment or logistics. 

Start your Amazon presence strong with error-free listings by ensuring your product data is clean, organised and in line with Amazon’s standards.  Don’t forget every marketplace has different requirements.

Market effectively to drive sales

Amazon Advertising helps sellers boost awareness among consumers and increase sales. Successful Amazon sellers vary their marketing across ad types:

• Sponsored products – keyword-driven ads that appear alongside organic search results to promote individual listings.
• Sponsored brands – top-of-page ads that build awareness for your brand among browsing shoppers.
• Sponsored display ads – display ads that appear on product detail pages, the Amazon homepage or third-party apps and websites.

Investing in a mix of Amazon ad types ensures different consumers see your products at various stages. ChannelAdvisor offers a complimentary advertising analysis if you’re not sure where to start.

Sell at the right moment

A growing number (25 per cent) of Australian consumers now begin their search on marketplaces, like Amazon. The more accurate your product listings, the more trust you build during the consideration phase for eventual purchase. What do consumers want to know? How will they search and arrive at your product? Research similar competitor products and optimise your descriptions with accurate and detailed keywords. 

Keeping prices competitive is obvious – but no one has time to manually monitor price variations so consider automated repricing tools that automatically adjust your prices to remain competitive.

Fulfil Amazon buyers’ growing expectations

Sellers need to keep up with rising expectations from consumers in terms of delivery times. Amazon offers two options to make fulfilment fast and seamless:

• Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA). Send inventory to Amazon. They handle the rest, including customer support and returns.
• Seller Fulfilled Prime. You entice customers with the Amazon Prime name and shipping guarantee, but you’re responsible for packing, shipping and returns, which are automatically authorised by Amazon.

Optimise for improved results

Sixty-eight per cent of Australian consumers now look at reviews before making a purchase, so ignore satisfaction ratings and reviews at your peril. Stay on top of your customer satisfaction levels by monitoring key metrics, such as order defect rate, return dissatisfaction rate and late shipment rate. Luckily Amazon provides a wealth of data to help.

If you’re thinking big, once you start your journey with Amazon, the world is your oyster with the marketplace’s 19 countries of operation. Selling internationally can increase brand awareness and expand your customer base. Amazon Global Selling program allows you to “test the waters” of cross-border trade.  

Don’t just list on Amazon, prepare to win with Amazon.  

ChannelAdvisor solutions can help you execute flywheel strategies to succeed on Amazon and across more than 340 other channels. Chat to an e-commerce expert today.