WRP TV Episode 5: 7-point checklist to ensure your Amazon Products are Retail Ready
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Summary
In this episode, Gary, Lucy & Jen discuss the importance of getting products retail ready on Amazon and provide a checklist of key elements to optimize. The main topics covered include product titles, product descriptions and bullet points, images, customer reviews and star ratings, inventory management, winning the buy box, and enhanced brand content. The hosts emphasize the impact of retail readiness on sales and the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
Takeaways
Optimizing product titles, descriptions, and bullet points is crucial for retail readiness on Amazon.
High-quality images and videos are important for sales success.
Customer reviews and star ratings build trust and influence purchasing decisions.
Maintaining sufficient inventory is essential to avoid penalties and ensure availability.
Winning the buy box increases the likelihood of making a sale.
Enhanced brand content provides additional information and answers FAQs.
Sound Bites
"How to get your products retail ready in Amazon and why that's important."
"Product descriptions and bullet points, customer reviews and star ratings, inventory, winning the buy box, enhanced brand content."
"The importance of the buy box, enhanced brand content."
Chapters
00:00 Introduction: The Importance of Retail Readiness
07:02 Building Trust with Customer Reviews and Star Ratings
11:20 Enhanced Brand Content for Additional Information
Transcript
Hi, and welcome to episode five of WRP TV. I'm Gary, your host. I'm joined by Lucy McNeill, who's a PPC director here at We are Polymer and by Jen Grant, who's head of performance. And today we're going to be talking about how to get your products retail ready in Amazon and why that's important. And it is important because if they're not retail ready, it becomes really difficult to optimize your ads effectively and to get the most out of them. And it can really hinder your performance on Amazon. And one of the things that the guys have is sort of a checklist that they go through about how to make sure that your products are retail ready and what you need to do. So I'm going to hand over to Lucy and she will start to take you through some of those points that we have.
The 7-point checklist to ensure your Amazon Products are Retail Ready
Have an optimised product title
Make use of product descriptions & bullet points
Have good product images
Have the minimum customer reviews & star ratings
Have sufficient inventory
Control the buy box
Ensure you have enhanced brand content - A+ Content
Perfect. Thanks, Gary. So yeah, we've got kind of seven key elements essentially that we track and kind of look to optimize across Amazon products to ensure that they're kind of retail ready and that they're kind of, yeah, as optimized as possible. So we'll chat through kind of each of those points and give a bit of a summary so that you know what to look for.
So the first one being product titles. So as you can see on the example here, the product title is that bit that you initially see essentially across all of the products. So it's really key to make sure that that's optimized in the correct way. And the way to do that, I guess, is all kind of what you should look to be including within that product title is one...
the highest kind of volume relevant keywords. So that when people are kind of looking at the results that they see on Amazon, they're kind of noticing what they've searched for straight away within your product title. And that's really kind of engaging to them. It's important to kind of restrain from stuffing like loads of keywords into the title, because that won't be, that won't be good in terms of kind of optimization.
purpose. It's also key within the title to kind of highlight your product benefits, any USPs, as well as product information like the color, as you can see that that's included within this example, as well as anything like the size. So they've got the weight there included as well. So just things that kind of give an overall impact of what your product is and the kind of key info there.
The recommendation is to keep it around 80 characters long. So don't try and kind of include loads of information that will just kind of flood the title. Especially if your products are showing on desktop and mobile, you obviously want it to be very readable on mobile devices as well as the kind of lengthier desktop titles as well. So just one to kind of watch out for there. And then the second area.
that's kind of included within the retail readiness is the product description and the bullet points. So the first section you come to will be the bullet points, which is that, yeah, just about this item shown on the screen. And that's kind of, again, another area where you can include additional information about each of the products and you're able to add up to five.
bullet points per product. So really key to kind of fill this information in as much as possible, include things like dimensions, color, shape, as well as thinking about any other high volume keywords that you can fit into a sentence within that area. So these ones shown are quite concise and you can kind of make them a bit longer. So you're allowed up to kind of 500 characters per.
bullet points so they could be filled out in more like sentence style structure if that's kind of relevant for your product. And then the product description is shown kind of further down so you have to keep scrolling for that one to actually find it. But again, it just is another area where you can add more information about each of the products, things like...
key kind of features, any ingredients, you can see that that's kind of listed for this product example, as well as if it's like a product which is like multiple products within one, you might want to include what's like within that pack and again, make it kind of easy to digest for the consumer. So you might consider breaking it down.
into different sections as it is in this example, or even again, including more kind of bullet -coated structure just so people can really easily kind of read through and get what they want from the section. Another one that's quite interesting to try and kind of cover off in this section is any kind of pain points that you see from customers that you might want to kind of answer within the description so that again, they're getting everything they want from.
your product listing and they're able to just click right through and purchase with all that information. And then scrolling back up, sorry, the kind of third area to look at for retail readiness is the images. So this obviously plays a massive part for online shopping in particular, because the customers aren't able to kind of pick up your products as they are if they're shopping within stores. So.
Yeah, it's definitely important to include kind of high quality images. Videos are the higher end if it's possible content. But yeah, at least kind of six images is what we would recommend and including the product from different angles as well as showing kind of any key features of your product. You can use things like infographics if you want to.
include like text within the image as well. And yeah, the, I think they also have within this example, a 360 image, which is kind of highly recommended if it's possible to do. That's kind of like the holy grail of Amazon imagery, if it is possible. So yeah, just wanted to bear in mind that. But I'll hand over to Jen for the kind of remaining key elements for retail readiness. Cool, thanks, Lucy.
So final few points. So the first one is customer reviews and star ratings. So according to Amazon, around 90 % of customers who shop online will only make purchase after an overentry review. So it's really important to make sure that you are kind of collecting those reviews from customers once they have purchased. It used to be the case that you could kind of spam customers on Amazon and
lot of people have fake reviews, but they have really sort of clamped down on this. So they do need to be legitimate reviews from legitimate customers who purchased a product. And so that isn't kind of a kind of quick win around that one anymore. But what is really important is that each individual skew has at least 15 reviews and a star rating of 3 .5 or more in order to be considered retail ready. So we can see in this example here, the rating is 4 .4 and there's
you know, nearly 32 ,000 reviews. So you could definitely say that this is a retail ready product. But it just helps to, you know, tell your customers that you're a legitimate seller, they can trust you. And, you know, they're going to receive the product that they think they are going to get. So reviews and star ratings are really important. Another one which you may not automatically think of because it's so obvious, but it's the inventory. So,
As straightforward as it sounds, you just need to make sure that you do have products that are in stock regularly. So if your products are kind of constantly going out of stock or spend lots of time out of stock, Amazon can sort of penalize you for that. And it might start to sort of impact your organic rankings if you do have products that are regularly out of stock. It also obviously means you might be pushing products that aren't available to buy. And you definitely don't want to be doing that, especially if you're running ads.
So within our sort of team with our internal tech polymetrics, we do run scripts to kind of check, looking at the backend of Seller Central and the ads campaigns, you know, are any products out of stock? And we just make sure that if anything is out of stock, the team can go in and make sure all the ads are caused. So there's no sort of wasted spend there, but yeah, as simple as it sounds, just make sure if you're pushing products on Amazon that you do have that inventory readily available.
The next thing is around the buy box. So the last episode we did was all about how to win the buy box and if you have issues with it, what you can do. So check out that video if you do want more information. So being has it on the buy box, winning the buy box is really important to be retail ready. Just because it allows your customers to really easily go through and purchase your product. If that buy box isn't there.
is much more difficult for them to actually make a purchase. And it's much more likely that they'll kind of default to a competitor. And so definitely something that you want to be on top of and make sure that that white box is visible on the landing page. And then the final thing, if we can scroll down to the bottom of the product listing, is enhanced brand content or A plus content. And so this is where vendors can add a lot more detail specifically around kind of
each product, it might be some more information about the brand. So here we can see some information around like how to get a smoky eye look. So it's not necessarily something that you want to stuff into a product description or a title, because you're just going to be flooding that word count with irrelevant information, but it is actually still related to the product. And it might be something that the consumer wants more information on before they go and purchase your product. So it's a really good way to just...
to just get more information on the product page. It's also a really good way to answer any sort of FAQs that might not appear above, but I know Lucy mentioned earlier around pain points in the product description. This is another area where you can really kind of focus on those things and get those customer questions answered before they're sort of messaging you directly for those answers. So, you know, save yourself some time, try and answer those things ahead of time.
But yeah, those are, those are the main sort of areas that we look at. And yeah, we, we definitely think that it's worth, well, it is worth optimizing your products and making sure that retail ready. And if you do that, you'll, you'll definitely see more sales, both organically, but also through your ads as well. And just by making sure those product listings are optimized and retail ready. That's great. Thanks guys. That was really useful actually. Yeah. And yeah, absolutely. Right.
Gary Reid (11:49.07)
Overstate how important it is. Um, you know, making sure you've got a visor was being retail ready in the air plus content really makes a difference. Makes you stand out when Amazon makes the ads work and mix, you know, makes it much easier to run those campaigns. Um, if you need any help running your Amazon campaigns, that's what we do. We're an agency that helps people run PPC, Amazon and paid social. Please get in touch. Our email address is hello@wrp.team
And we'd be more than happy to do a review of your account and give you some feedback on what we think the plan and strategy should be. But that's all for episode five. And we look forward to seeing you next week. Thanks, sir. Bye.
We are Polymer a PPC, Paid Social and Amazon Ads Agency that also provides service to in-house teams, if you would like to find out more please get in touch here
