From our work, we’ve seen a lot of products and a lot of listings from vendors and Amazon FBA sellers.

And we see the best sellers doing something everybody else isn’t doing.

What is that?

We decided to share it right here.

If you want to be an Amazon professional seller, you need to master this.

Here’s the playbook you need to implement if you want to be successful selling on Amazon in the long run.

1. Sell something people want
2. Optimize your listing
3. Get reviews
4. Optimize & Max Out Amazon Sponsored Product Ads Spend
5. Calculate your Page 1 Demand Deficit
6. Utilize other sales channels make up for your Page 1 Demand Deficit
7. Get your product ranking on page 1 for its primary keywords

You likely have no idea what numbers 5 and 6 mean. Don’t worry, we’ll explain them below.

We’re going to go over the most important information you need to know, with an emphasis on points 5 & 6 from the above list because understanding these two points will take you from mediocre success to massive success on Amazon.

Now let’s get started.

1) Sell Something People Want

This is the foundation of everything.

You must be selling a product that has sufficient demand. If people don’t want your product then you won’t sell it. No matter what!

Additionally, assuming you’re selling on Amazon, your product must be appropriate for Amazon.

What that means is this –

On your Amazon sales page you don’t have lots of space to explain your product. Buyers must be able to understand the value of your product given the limited space you have to sell it on your Amazon listing.

Going further, this means that you don’t have a lot of space to educate people about your product. Your product’s value must be apparent immediately!

You don’t have the opportunity to explain in a video, webinar, or long form article why your product is so great. You only have your title, bullets, product description, images, and the other components that make up an optimized listing.

Also, buyers search for products on Amazon according to keywords and keyword phrases. Therefore, your product must be one that is easy to find with descriptive keywords that customers use to buy things. This means that if your product is a brand new invention, and there are no keywords that shoppers use to find your product, then you’re going to have a difficult time selling on Amazon.

2) Optimize Your Listing

We wrote an entire article on this. Listing optimization is so important that it shouldn’t be summarized here.

Instead, go read the article here after finishing this article.

3) Get Reviews

Reviews are for social proof.

Nobody wants to buy anything that’s untested.

Reviews help you with sales conversions, which are critical for selling more on Amazon both organically and with paid advertising.

There are many, many ways to get reviews.

How many do you need? It depends on your product, category, and competition. But, aim to get a minimum of 25 reviews as soon as possible for any new product. In truth, you don’t need that many reviews to compete. We see products sell with 15 reviews when stacked against competitors with hundreds of reviews.

Reviews are getting harder and harder to get as Amazon cracks down on review abuse. Do what you can and try to emphasize quality reviews over quantity of reviews.

Your average review star rating is more important than the number of reviews on your listing. You want to do what you can to maintain an average review rating of at least 4.3 stars so you have at least 4.5 stars on your listing. Maintaining a 4.3 average star rating will increase clicks, conversions, and total sales.

4) Optimize and Max Out Amazon Sponsored Product Ads, or Amazon PPC Spend

Here’s the general PPC setup process.

Each product gets the following campaigns, for at least 4 total campaigns per product.

1. Automatic
2. Manual Broad Match
3. Manual Phrase Match
4. Manual Exact Match

Amazon PPC is an art and a science.

It’s not a set it and forget it activity because Amazon is always updating and changing their platform, and savvy advertisers need to adjust and adapt to the continuous competition on the marketplace.

Monitor your PPC 1-2 times per week or hire someone to do it for you. Remember, it takes time to research keywords, analyze results, and adjust bids.

At a minimum, you should be using software to help you manage your Amazon ads. Even consultants use software. Nobody analyzes Amazon ads in Excel anymore. That’s so 2016!

Get aggressive

You should be maxing out your PPC spend. That means your PPC should be running at a break even, minimum. And we personally believe you should be operating at a small loss with your PPC.

When we tell people this they get scared. They want to make money, not break even or lose money. The point is to stay in business, right?

Absolutely!

But, here’s how good products on Amazon behave – They get about 20% of sales from PPC and about 80% of sales organically.

How do you get organic sales? You rank. How do you rank? You run PPC. It’s a virtuous cycle.

The more PPC, the more organic. And, the more organic, the better results you’ll see with PPC because Amazon will reward your sales by giving your product more ad inventory due to increased ad relevance because your product is converting to sales.

If you are maxing out your PPC, either breaking even or running it at a small loss, you should more than make up for your PPC spend on the backend with organic sales.

If you’re not making way more from organic sales than from advertising sales, then you’ve got issues with either 1, 2, or 3 from the above list – Is your product something people want? Is your listing optimized? Do you have enough good reviews?

Be aggressive with your PPC. It’s the best way to sell more on Amazon with the highest return on investment compared to all other options.

Don’t be afraid to let it run!

You’ll notice we didn’t touch on Headline Search Ads or other Amazon marketing products here. That’s because Sponsored Product Ads are by far the most important ad type. Once you’ve maxed out your Sponsored Product Ads then move onto the other ad types and max those out too!

5) Calculate Your Page 1 Demand Deficit

Here’s where things get interesting.

Here’s where you should be now –

Your listing is great. You have awesome copy, good reviews, great pictures, and your PPC is optimized and maxed out.

Yet, despite all of this, you’re still not on page 1 of the search results for certain important keywords.

Why is this an issue?

Because you aren’t maximizing your organic sales.

To sell as much as you can, you need to rank high on page 1 for your highest converting and most searched for keywords.

So, how do you get to page 1?

Enter the Page 1 Demand Deficit calculation.

Here’s a research task you need to do

You need to know how many sales per day the products on page 1 of your keyword’s search results are getting.

Amazon doesn’t publish this information, but you can use tools to find it yourself.

Jungle Scout will give you an estimate of sales volume. This is a paid tool but it’s worth the money.

Or, you can get the free tool Unicorn Smasher, which is very similar to Jungle Scout and it gets the job done.

Simply search for the keywords you want to rank on page 1 for, and use one of these tools to get a good estimate of how many sales per day you need to rank on page 1.

Now, take this number and subtract the amount of average daily sales you’re currently getting, and this is your Page 1 Demand Deficit calculation.

P1DD = (# of sales per day for a page 1 product) – (your current average daily sales)

Let’s take a quick example.

You’re selling a garlic press. Your pictures are great and so is your listing. Your pushing PPC hard and spending as much on ads as you feel comfortable with.

But you’re still not on page 1 for your best keywords.

So you search on Amazon for “Garlic Press” and you get the search results for page 1.

Using Jungle Scout or Unicorn Smasher, find the average sales per month per product. (The tools will give you sales per month, so divide by 30 to find sales per day).

Target where you want to rank on page 1 and figure out how many sales per day you need to get there.

Let’s say it’s 50 sales per day. And, let’s say you’re getting about 15 sales per day (on average over the course of a month) currently.

That means you need 35 extra sales per day to rank on page 1.

This is your P1DD!

This information is critical if you want to boost your sales and long term success on Amazon.

6) Utilize Other Sales Channels to Make Up for Your Page 1 Demand Deficit

Now you have your P1DD number.

This is how many extra sales per day you need (on average) in order to rank on page 1 for your best keywords.

You now need to find a way to make up for this extra sales traffic.

You need to find a way to sell more products. How many more? As many as your P1DD number is.

You could try and spend more on Amazon PPC. But, you may have already maxed out your ability to drive sales with PPC (which is what we advise you to do in step 4).

So, you need to go outside of Amazon in order to get more sales.

You’ve got 3 options to do this:

1. Drive external traffic to your Amazon listing
2. Utilize launch services
3. Lower your price to spike sales

You may need to offer your product at a major discount for the first 2 options as well in order to get the extra sales you need.

But these are your only options.

Our favorite way of doing this is option 2, using our own internal launch service that we created.

This is a list of Amazon shoppers we’ve found by getting them on an email list using Facebook ads, a landing page, and an offer for them to give us their email address.

We like this option because it’s our own private list, where we have control.

Also, once we pay for the Facebook ads to get these buyers on our list we can email them as much as we’d like with deals and promotions.

Long term you’ll be best served to build your own email list of potential buyers too.

When you have other (off Amazon) ways to generate sales beyond what you’re currently doing on Amazon, you can now make up your Page 1 Demand Deficit whenever you want.

A heads up –

When you’re working to get more sales to make up for your Page 1 Demand Deficit, know that it takes a few days for Amazon’s ranking algorithm to update. Therefore, in order to reach page 1 and stay there, you’ll need your total daily sales to be at least the amount you need daily to hit page 1 for about five days.

You might even find that you need more than five days of extra sales, or you might need to get a boost in sales periodically to hold onto your position. This is because Amazon’s ranking algorithm takes sales history into account. Over time you can build up your sales history so that your product remains on page 1.

Last, don’t over do it.

If you need 50 sales a day to hit page 1, don’t aim for 100 sales in one day.

Remember, sales history matters in Amazon’s ranking algorithm, so multiple days of fewer sales are more powerful for rank rather than a day or two of tons of sales.

A one day massive spike in sales is an aberration, but a consistent steady stream of sales over time is a pattern, and Amazon rewards you for consistent sales!

7) Get Your Product Ranking on Page 1 for its Primary Keywords

If, for several days you’ve now matched the number of sales you need to get to rank on page 1, you should now be on page 1!

You’re now in position to get a lot more organic sales!

The primary issue now is conversions –

If you aren’t converting sales at a rate similar to other page 1 products, you will fall in rank.

But, this shouldn’t be a problem, because you already optimized your listing!

If however, your product falls in rank, you either need to do another round of boosting your sales to solidify your rank in the Amazon algorithm, or you need to work on your conversions by optimizing your listing.

But, once you’re in position and converting sales on page 1, you can then settle in and optimize your price for total revenue maximization.

From there you’ll then see your sales take off.

Wrapping Up

This strategy is how you go from selling a few units a day to selling more units than you thought possible on Amazon.

Again, here it is –

1. Sell something people want
2. Optimize your listing
3. Get reviews
4. Optimize & Max Out Amazon Sponsored Product Ads Spend
5. Calculate your Page 1 Demand Deficit
6. Utilize other sales channels make up for your Page 1 Demand Deficit
7. Get your product ranking on page 1 for its primary keywords

Use this strategy to grow your sales on Amazon.

This article outlines the critical concepts you must know in order to be successful selling on Amazon.

If you want to talk tactics and the implementation of this strategy for your business, reach out and let’s talk!