Beat Amazon in Sales by Reading this First!

Amazon is the runaway leader in e-Commerce. Most people discover the products they are looking for quickly because the product pages in Amazon are full of great information.  Additionally, Amazon guides and recommends visitors to make a buying decision. This is a teaching moment for some SMB retailers, brands, wholesalers and distributors who want to mimic key content success strategies and KPI of large retailers and brands.
 
Fortunately, there is an abundance of affordable tools and technology to help with your teaching moment. However, it is not just about tools, it’s the commitment of the owner to dedicate the focus these tools deserve. For most companies, an affordable turnkey cloud solution, or very easy to use SaaS platform that takes a few days to implement, lends the way to removing the barrier to get started.
 
While there is a plethora of reasons why people buy on Amazon, some of the top ones are discoverability, user experience & trust. To compete in your category or segment, we must start somewhere and establish your unique value proposition for your web store.
 
The purpose of this article is to talk about both Content and Analytics as it relates to the visitor adding your product to the sales cart.
 
You want that sale.
 
Best in Class Tools Reign Supreme

Larger companies have the best in class tools for continuous content diagnostics. This includes a highly-regimented on-boarding process, QA and huge budget to create unique content to go the extra mile to improve each of the millions of product pages. Amazon might very well be on its way to being the largest product database as well as the gold standard. Ask yourself this simple question. If you had a UPC or SKU, where would you look up the product specs and product page information?
 
Most buyers these days, will skip Google and go directly to Amazon even if they are only researching.
 
Companies like Amazon, Google, Walmart, Home Depot understand Content is King and good content is good for commerce. Conversely, bad content is bad for commerce across all channels.
 
The above companies continuously improve their on boarding requirements with requests for more exacting standards based on data feeds they receive. They make this investment. They have over the years scientifically and statistically recognized key factors in product pages that cause cart abandonment. As you know, every visitor is not a buyer. But the visitor that is a buyer has made his decision based on detailed descriptions, great imagery, reasonable pricing, product reviews, quality of data, stock and shipment and most importantly the specific attributes he is looking for.
 
Differentiate Your Site With Unique Content That Speaks to Your Value
 
While there are many commodity items where price decides it all, that is not the case for many branded items and unique categories and products. Would you buy the cheapest toothpaste or tablet? Trust me, in my earlier days I bought a knockout tablet which is now used as a coaster. The higher the price of the item, the more the information specs are required to fulfill the buyers quest. For instance, when buying a camera, if the zoom factor is missing or takes too long to figure out, a buyer may not take action to purchase it.  Similarly, if a food item doesn’t include information such as gluten free, which can be a key decision making factor for many buyers, the company may definitely lose that sale. The more the number of attributes, the better.
 
Options for SME to compete

So, what does the aspiring SME eCommerce store owner do to list on the first page and to compete with the 800-pound gorillas? Simple answer.
 
First, complete product pages based on industry as well as your own standards.
 
For SME’s, investing on product page content diagnostics and optimization is the best strategy and ensures a much higher conversion rate for sales. Think of it like this, you drive 20 people to your product page and 2 buy your product, versus driving 10 to your site and 2 buy. In the first case, you have 10% conversion but in the second you have 20% conversion with a much smaller budget for traffic generation. Anyone can figure out the ROI quickly and verifiably. Regardless of the percentages, these numbers can be improved.
 
There are over 1 million stores on various eCommerce platforms that sell great products. They are told by SEO marketing people to generate traffic by subscribing to both onsite and offsite SEO optimization packages. These packages tend to go way over budget and the results are not as expected.
 
Get Discovered First….Then Compete

Discoverability and find-ability are key factors to holding the interest of the visitor. With the right keyword someone could discover your company but it is entirely possible that your products classified incorrectly or differently and the ultimate SKU page was not found. Content Analytics can improve both discoverability internally (online) via your site or externally (offline) in Google and other search engines. Make it easy for the visitor with faceted attribute search and easy navigation.
 
Measure and Monitor in Real-Time 24/7

Content gaps cause sales to evaporate. Since most companies do not measure and monitor content gaps in catalogs, there is no way to know what gaps are critically hurting their online business. Often keywords with very poor traffic volume are used and hence products rank low on Google and Amazon searches. Data errors or wrong classifications can easily prevent the product being found on your own site. For example, a ring that is classified as a bracelet might not show at all. Promoting out of stock items is a huge money drain.
 
In short, SME’s lack the right tools to manage the product information like the big guys. They don’t have time to QA or run real-time diagnostics as many don’t have a set of rules or validation libraries that work for their industry. 
 
Time for a Check Up!
 
You don’t want to wait until you realize your product isn’t selling to find and fix what is broken. It is 10x more expensive if the problem is fixed at the finish line compared to what it would cost if done at the starting gate. Likewise, you don’t want the creative/content/3rd party to deliver data when it is no longer required.

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If you’re not sure if your eCommerce data is at peak performance perhaps it’s time for a health analysis of your eCommerce site? It can instantly alert you to what is working on your web store and what is driving customers straight into the arms of Amazon. Give SKU Magic a call so we can do a full check up of your eCommerce site and alert you to any potential red flags.
 
Anand Ayyar