5 Mistakes That Will Kill Your Amazon Holiday Sales

With 237 million active shoppers around the world, Amazon is the #1 most shopped marketplace during the holidays.

But where there’s money, there’s competition.

And even though there’s a flood of holiday buyers coming through Amazon’s front door,  these five common mistakes can bring your Amazon holiday sales to a standstill…

1. Not Optimizing Your Amazon Product Page for Search and for Buyers

There’s no point in going to all the work of sourcing great products, only to list them against a poorly optimized product page.

Amazon uses these four “keyword zones” when determining whether or not to display a product page in a buyer search results.

• Title
• Features
• Description
• Back-end keywords

Unless a product page is well optimized, the chances of your product getting found by holiday buyers in Amazon search diminishes significantly.

Add to that, your conversion rate (the number of visitors to the page who actually buy) will decrease when you don’t give buyers the RIGHT (or enough) features and benefits to help them make the buying decision.

Unfortunately most Amazon sellers pay little attention to optimizing their product pages.

Make sure that you review every product page you list against to ensure that it’s doing the best job of selling your product 7×24.

• Do you have the most important keywords/keyword phrases in the title?
• Do the Features bullet points highlight benefits of the products as well as features
• Are those features described using the top searched phrases that a buyer would use?

Taking the time to improve and/or create a well optimized product page will translate to increased sales.

 If you’re not sure how to optimize your Amazon product page, Karon Thacktson’s new digital book will get you started!

2.  Going ‘Out of Stock’ and Decreasing Your Chances of Getting the Amazon Buy Box

The worst thing you can do during the holiday season is let your product run out of stock.

While the obvious reason, ‘no product = no sales’, is a critically important, what you may not know is that every time your product goes out of stock it also hurts your chances of winning or sharing the Amazon Buy Box.

Amazon hates an “out of stock” product page. They feel it’s a bad customer experience for a buyer to land on a product page with zero inventory. In fact, Amazon will even suppress “out of stock” pages from being found in search.

When the Buy Box algorithm looks at all the all the seller variables to determine which seller to assign the Buy Box to, inventory levels are one of those variables.

 Make sure to replenish your inventory in plenty of time, so that you can get it shipped from the supplier and checked in to FBA BEFORE your current stock is gone.

3. Replenishing Inventory Too Late in the Season (and not having a Plan B)

Hopefully you already have the bulk of your holiday inventory ordered and the first round listed on Amazon.

However, replenishing that inventory when levels run low can be another story.

Wholesale suppliers are often out of stock on their best sellers as early as September.

Place your replenishment orders now. You can request to stagger delivery (and payment) from most wholesalers at the time you place your order.

And if you can’t replace your best sellers? Have a Plan B for what you’ll source to replace that inventory. Otherwise, any income projections you made for Q4 will be out the window.

The only way you can make money on Amazon during the holiday season is to have the in-demand products that buyers want.

 Always have a back-up plan in place for alternative inventory to source so you can keep your numbers up.

4. Not Creating Amazon ‘Product Bundles’

Speaking of in-demand inventory…

Competition is hot on Amazon and to pull ahead of the pack, you need to differentiate your product offerings. You can’t be a “me too marketer” selling all the same products that everyone else sells.

The biggest untapped sourcing opportunity that sellers don’t take advantage of is ‘creating’ their own unique in-demand product through product bundling.

A bundle is a combination of two or more complimentary existing products, combined to form a new unique product.

Bundling is not a new concept in ecommerce, (in fact, I first spoke about this successful way to create a “new” product at Ebay Live 2005) but it is highly underutilized on Amazon!

With a product bundle you can breathe new life into saturated products, come up with a unique holiday gift that no one else is selling and provide the ideal solution for holiday buyers looking for that perfect gift.

 I’ll be sharing more here about how to bundle, later this week!

5. Not Marketing Your Products On Pinterest

If you think think you can count solely on Amazon to bring you holiday buyers this year, you’re making a big mistake.

Remember that as an Amazon seller you have to compete with all the other sellers at the Amazon product page level.

And how do many Amazon sellers “compete”?  On price.

Instead of playing the downward spiral price game, take your holiday sales into your own hands and drive traffic directly to YOUR offer on Amazon by using Pinterest.

But you can’t simply “be” on Pinterest and expect it to generate holiday sales. You have to apply the right Pinterest strategy and use it correctly to get new customers and make more sales.

In fact, Pinterest is so important, I’ve just released my brand new Pinterest for Holiday Sales program….

The only step-by-step, leading-edge program available for online merchants that teaches specific, business strategies for using Pinterest to increase your holiday sales!

 Grab your copy of Pinterest for Holiday Sales today at this special introductory price!

You only get one chance at a profitable holiday selling season!

If you want to give your business and your sales the competitive edge, you need to do what your competition isn’t doing!

Avoiding these five common mistakes will help you both increase your sales and help you make this your best holiday selling season on Amazon ever!