Amazon is a sales channel that needs no introduction. Whether you’re a product brand or a retailer, you’ve consciously made the decision to either shun or embrace Amazon as a player in your overall ecommerce strategy. The reality is that if you’re a product retailer in 2014-15, there is no scenario where Amazon, as both the sales channel and the retailer, doesn’t affect your ecommerce success.
As a third-party Amazon seller, you can think about Marketplace Strategy (as the sales channel) in two ways:
- Product Discoverability
- Product Buyability
These two pillars (and their inevitable overlap) should define your Marketplace strategy and are the keys to approaching the Marketplace in a more sophisticated and controllable way.
DISCOVERABILITY
The ability for a product listing to be found on Amazon. From a consumer’s point of view, Amazon is essentially seller agnostic, focusing SERPs on products rather than the sellers of those products. As a third-party seller of a given product, you have an incentive to increase the overall number of sessions to a product detail page provided that you’re in a good position to win the sale for that product. To relate it more to traditional product ad channels, think driving traffic.
BUYABILITY
Buyability can refer to two highly overlapping concepts: A reseller’s ability to influence their Buy Box ownership percentage.
- The factors that influence the overall conversion rate of a product page.
- To relate it to more traditional product ad channels, think converting traffic.
To put Buyability in better context, let’s say you sell a SwissGear 10-person tent and that its product detail page received 100 overall orders last month. Your goal will be to have the highest share of those 100 orders as possible and once a high share is reached, you can shift strategy towards increasing the overall number of orders.
Increasing the overall number of orders will come through:
- Improving the overall conversion of the product detail page with optimized product content
- Increasing the number of sessions to that detail page
By understanding the factors that influence these two sides of the coin – driving shoppers to product pages (Discoverability) and converting those shoppers once they reach the product detail pages (Buyability) – a third-party seller can start to sculpt their overall Amazon strategy and decide when and where it makes sense to focus their resources on Discoverability over Buyability (and vice versa).
If you are looking for FREE consultation on how to maximize sales on Amazon, do not hesitate to contact us at Binary Means.
