Are you struggling to get sales and product reviews on Amazon? This episode offers practical strategies to kickstart your journey on the platform, especially if you're new to selling. Tune in for valuable insights that can help elevate your Amazon selling experience.

Key takeaways:

• Setting up Amazon sponsored product ads is one of the quickest ways to generate initial sales.
• Using promotions, deals, and discounts can significantly increase visibility and attract customers.
• Engaging with your existing customers can help in obtaining reviews and driving sales.
• Consider leveraging social media and email marketing to inform potential customers about your products.
• Participating in Amazon Vine can provide a legitimate way to gain product reviews.

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Best of all, it’s totally free! Head to the link in the shownotes to grab your copy now and start your Amazon journey with confidence. Let’s make Amazon easy!

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Welcome to the bring your product idea to life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.

Hello, welcome to another of my Amazon made easy episodes. So today I wanted to talk about how to get sales and product reviews, particularly if you're fairly new to Amazon.

I thought this would be a useful thing to talk about because I know from experience, from my clients experience, just how hard it is to get started on Amazon. You need those first sales, they're really hard to come by. You also need reviews because reviews obviously help with sales.

And all of this, let's face it, is really quite difficult. But remember that these two things will really help you with your overall ranking on Amazon.

So hopefully you listened to my episode last week about what ranking means and you know, what factors are involved in you ranking highly for relevant search terms. And the things we can talk about today will really, really help you. Plus obviously sales are always really good.

So I have a few ideas for getting both sales and product reviews. So here goes. I think we're going to talk about my ideas for generating sales first and then we'll talk about reviews afterwards.

So probably my number one sort of suggestion for getting your initial sales on Amazon is to set up Amazon sponsored products ads. If you can afford to spend a little bit of budget here, this is probably the quickest way to get sales started on Amazon.

Obviously it's going to cost you money, so you have to have the money to invest and know that is an investment because ads, as I say to anyone I work with on them, they may not be, they may not work from day one, they may not be profitable from day one, but they absolutely can work for you.

I work with lots of clients managing their ads on Amazon who have a great roas, which is return on ad spend and investing just a little bit of money can really help to get things going. You don't need to spend a lot of money on Amazon ads, especially initially.

And if you've ever worked with me, you know, I actually advise against spending a lot of money initially because as I've said, you know, ads may not work from day one and you want to do a little bit of testing and see what works before you start throwing a lot of money on ads. There are lots of different advertising options on Amazon, unless you really know what you're doing.

I'd suggest starting off with a really simple keyword targeting campaign.

This is because you've done the work.

So you know what are the words and phrases that you need to rank for. So why not put these into a campaign? You can start off a really low daily budget.

I would advise using either phrase or exact match when it comes to the targeting. I promise I will do something in more detail about Amazon ads at a later date. So this is just a little tip here.

Hopefully that's helpful if you do need any help setting up ads or anything else. Of course you can always book in some time with me and we can do this together.

These episodes are really intended to give you a bit of an overview and hopefully it will give you enough to go away and do this yourself. But if not, you know where I am.

You can also do ads that target competitors so that if you're looking at a competitor's listing, your product will show as one of the suggested products further down their listing. You can do banner ads that go right across top of the screen. You can do video ads. There's a lot you can do if you're not sure where to start.

I would suggest that a simple keyword targeting campaign, as I've already said, is a good place. But absolutely you can do all or some of the other things I've suggested as well. It just depends on how much you're willing to spend really.

Because as you can imagine, Amazon do like to spend your money. Testing is key. Your ads might not work from day one.

And probably the biggest piece of advice I could give you is please don't set up your ads and then forget about them. You really do need to keep an eye. You need to see how much you're spending.

Are there terms that you're spending a lot of money on but not generating any sales? Equally, can you see from the reports that there are terms you haven't even thought about that are generating you lots of sales?

And actually, are there words missing from your product listing?

Because you can see from your ads that there are phrases that are converting really well, but you actually haven't used that text in your listing anywhere. There's a lot you can do with this. So yeah, and I'm a real fan of Amazon ads.

And actually the other reason I think they're good, which I haven't mentioned, is that obviously if people are on Amazon, they're there to shop. So if they're searching for something, it's with intent. Whereas I am not saying that other Advertising isn't good.

So Facebook ads, meta ads, whatever you call them, but when people are on social media, they're not necessarily there for shopping. When they're on Amazon, they are looking to buy something. So if you sell wooden spoons, that's the example I used last week.

If you sell wooden spoons and someone types wooden spoon into the Amazon search bar, presumably they're looking to buy a wooden spoon. So you see what I mean? So this is why I think these ads can really, really be good.

So other things you can do to help get your initial sales is use deals, promotions and vouchers. So if your products are eligible, and by the way, they're not always, you can take part in Amazon deals. So sometimes these are for set events.

So we've just had Black Friday, we had Prime Day earlier this year, and it's totally up to you whether you participate in these or not. I actually prefer to set up deals and promotions myself or to run them at other times of the year when it's more likely to stand out.

Because I do worry that if you're offering a discount and so is everyone else, yours might get lost. But this isn't saying don't do it. The purpose of this is just to let you know what's possible.

And also as a customer, though, I do think it's nice to feel like you're getting a good deal any time of the year. I always quite like that. So you can set up promotions where you offer a percentage discount or maybe a buy one, get one free deal.

Or if people buy multiple products, let's say you have a range of products, you could say, okay, if you buy two products for me, you get 5% off. If you buy three, you get 10% or however you want to do it.

You can also set up a voucher which gives a customer a discount at the checkout if they click through to it.

And you could, and this is probably the simplest option, and one of my favorites actually is you could set up a sale price by the offer page for your listing in Seller Central.

And I can't tell you which of these is best or which one will work for you, but it's worth experimenting and trying a few things and seeing which has the greatest impact on your sales.

And then my final tip for getting your sales going on Amazon is to use social media, your email list, people you know, because it always surprises me when people get set up on Amazon and then don't tell people about it because there's a lot you can do for free. So you can email your mailing list, you can share on social media, so your business and personal.

You can text or email your friends, your family, your acquaintances. You can ask other people to share for you. There might be groups and networks who'd be interested in your product and knowing it's on Amazon.

And if you're running any promotions or sales or deals on Amazon, as I've just outlined, and you're doing that to kickstart sales, well, why not tell people you're doing that? It might help to encourage sales, it might help encourage people to share it.

And the best people to buy your product and leave reviews, which we'll talk about in a moment, are existing customers who already know and like your products. So you might not want them to buy your products on Amazon forever.

And I can, I do sometimes get a bit of resistance to this because obviously there are fees involved in Amazon that you don't have to pay on your own website. So it might be much more profitable for you if someone buys from you directly.

However, even if you pitch it to people that why not buy on Amazon just this?

You know, why not add on, why not buy enough for me on Amazon just this once while I've got this special deal going or whatever it is might just help you to get going.

So just a suggestion, and obviously not everything I suggest will be for everyone, but do you know, do think about who you know that could help you out here because it is hard to get your first sales and reviews on Amazon and I think do whatever you need to to get them going. And so finally, let's talk about getting product reviews because this is always really, really hard.

Years ago, when I first started selling on Amazon, I used to use an autoresponder to use to be able to set something up that once a customer bought from you, it would send them an email, you know, thanks for purchasing. And you could tell them a bit about your business or a bit about the product.

And then when it was delivered, you could ask them if everything was okay. And then a few days later you could ask for a review. But these just don't work anymore because most customers block these emails.

Most customers even block the emails that Amazon sends asking for product reviews.

So you might remember that years ago if you bought something on Amazon, you would always get an email from Amazon, like Amazon directly asking you to review your purchase. And you don't probably even get those anymore because you've probably opted out of them and don't even remember doing it.

So it makes it really, really hard to ask for product reviews. Which reminds me, if you do ask people for product reviews, you can't ask for a positive review and you can't incentivise them.

So if you do find a way of asking, people, just know those two things because they will get you in trouble. So one option is to put a polite requesting with your product packaging, so maybe even a QR code that takes them through to the product page.

You could put it on your packaging, you could put a postcard in with your product. That's one idea. You can ask your existing customers.

As I said, you can't ask for a positive review, but hopefully your existing customers would give you a positive review anyway. So you could say, you know, I've just launched on Amazon and I'm offering 20% off for 48 hours only.

Why not come and buy here, by the way, while you're there, could you leave me a review, that kind of thing. You could also enrol in Amazon Vine. Now, I'm going to do a whole episode about this next week to tell you more about it, but essentially.

Well, actually we won't go into too much now. It's basically a review program where Amazon will ask people to review your products and you will pay a small fee for it.

But it's totally legitimate, it's ran by Amazon, so it's okay. You're not going to get into any trouble for getting reviews this way.

And as I say, I will talk about it more in next week's episode because I can see this one is actually getting a bit longer than my usual. And also do know that there is a small percentage of customers that will always leave reviews.

And you could just say, okay, I'm going to focus on getting sales and know that the reviews will come organically. You probably won't get as many reviews as if you were really focusing on getting them.

But I think it all depends where you want to spend your time and energy. Because if you've only got so much. Yes, both are good. And also we've spoken about advertising.

I'd suggest at least having some reviews before you run ads, if you can. And I'll talk about this more next week, but you can actually enrol one or two SKUs. So one or two items in vine for free at the moment.

So you could have one or two free Amazon vine reviews. You could probably find a few people to leave you reviews.

You've got a handful before you start running ads because obviously it's so much harder to convert a product with no reviews at all. Unfortunately, there is not an ideal solution to getting reviews. Lots and lots of sellers struggle with it.

In fact, I think everyone struggles with it unless they've been on Amazon a really long time and they've built up a lot and then maybe they don't remember. But I promise the beginning would have been a struggle. As I said, using your existing customers might be the most effective way.

Just remember that you can't ask for a positive review. And I know I said that before, but I need to say it again because that's obviously really, really important because it could get you into trouble.

So I hope that helps give you some ideas on how you might want to get started.

As I said, next week we're going to talk just about Amazon vine because you may or may not have heard of it, you may know what it is and I think hopefully you'll find that interesting and useful. So thank you so much for listening. I will see you next week to talk about vine and on Friday with another interview.

Thank you so much for listening. Right to the end of this episode.

Do remember that you can get the full back catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickiewinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this this episode if you've enjoyed it and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.