Identifying Your Most Valuable Products on the Amazon Marketplace
Whether you have 100 or 10,000 SKUs, there are hidden opportunities in your Amazon catalog. The key to surfacing these areas for significant growth will be:
A) Understanding when and where to focus on increasing product Buyability over Discoverability (and vice versa), and
B) Segmenting your product catalog into buckets based on your strategy focus
A grasp of these two processes is a characteristic shared by professional Amazon Marketplace sellers – those with a calculated product-driven strategy. Once mastered, sellers can be much more efficient with their Marketplace management and focus on manipulating the controllable levers that influence “Amazon SEO,””Amazon CRO,” and the Buy Box.
Let’s dive into what an audit of your Amazon inventory will look like depending on the strategy you should be focusing on.
Catalog Analysis for Product Discoverability
Why You’re Focusing on Discoverability: We go pretty in-depth on how the concept of product Discoverability fits into your overall Amazon sales strategy in our Amazon Discoverability white paper, but in short, the goal here is to increase sessions. Driving customers to product detail pages where you have an active offer is key to getting exposure for your products that you know are very likely to convert. You could fall into either of 2 general scenarios here:
1) You’re the brand manufacturer and sole seller of a given ASIN and are looking to raise awareness for your product due to currently low session volume.
2) You’re the seller of a very competitive ASIN. Your Buy Box ownership share is very high and in an effort to maximize the number of orders for that product, you’re shifting towards increasing sessions for that ASIN.
In either case, you’re benefiting from any increase in exposure for an ASIN because you’re the current (and presumably the most dominant) Buy Box owner. Thus, you’re sending shoppers to product detail pages where your offer is the most prominently displayed and most likely to convert.
Segmenting Your Catalog: With the goal of increasing exposure for your “most valuable” products in mind, you should prioritize the products that are already driving the most orders and revenue for you. There will be plenty – if not the majority – of products that are low session and low order, and so initially, you wouldn’t want to spend your time driving customers to a product which hasn’t proven to convert well in the past.
For this reason, sort your inventory by those products with:
A) The highest Buy Box ownership share (%)
B) The highest number of orders
C) The most amount of revenue generated
There will definitely be some overlap here (and acknowledging this overlap will be critical), but the first bucket – products where you’re “winning” the Buy Box the most – is most crucial. This is because it simply doesn’t make sense to intentionally invest time and resources into sending customers to a detail page where your offer isn’t most likely to convert.
In the above screenshot, “Bowhunters Supply Store” is the sole seller of the left-hand version of what I know to be a very popular recurve bow. It’s a high AOV item that probably receives a solid amount of qualified traffic (since “Left Hand” is clearly in the title), and so Bowhunters Supply Store should be focusing on driving more shoppers to this detail page (…though they should probably restock first).
To simplify things, consider starting small. Identify the 10-15 products in your catalog that have close to 100% Buy Box share and generate the most orders and revenue for you. With this subset, you can start to manipulate and optimize the levers that influence product Discoverability, including product content submission, search term keywords, product feedback, etc.
Catalog Analysis for Product Buyability
Why You’re Focusing on Buyability: Product Buyability? We have a guide for that, too. When focusing on driving product Buyability, the goal here is to both increase Buy Box ownership share and optimize the overall conversion rate of a product detail page. Intuitively, this is crucial to increasing the number of orders for products that already receive high exposure.
For example, say you sell the PS4 gaming console. You already know that this is going to be a very popular and highly visited ASIN on the Marketplace, especially in Q4. But with such a high level of competition around the product, it’s hard to have your offer stand out.
This is where manipulating Buyability comes in.
Sellers may find themselves in either of 2 general scenarios here:
1) You are the seller of a highly competitive ASIN (like the PS4 example above). You’re not occupying the Buy Box very often and need to increase your share of the X amount of orders that detail page is seeing every month.
2) Your own manufactured/branded product is receiving a lot of exposure on on the Marketplace, but it’s converting at a very low rate.
In either case, the traffic is there but you’re suffering from a low conversion rate for your offers, most of the time due to low Buy Box ownership and partly due to the content on the detail page not being optimized for conversions.
Segmenting Your Catalog: With the goal of increasing both the total number of orders received for a given ASIN (via improving the conversion rate of the page) as well as your share of the overall number of orders (via increasing Buy Box ownership %), sellers should segment their catalog based the products that are already receiving both a high amount of sessions and generating significant revenue and orders for you.
For this reason, sort your inventory by those products with:
A) The highest number of sessions
B) The highest number of orders
C) The most amount of revenue generated
Knowing the overlap for all three of these buckets will allow you to prioritize your time on the products which stand to have the biggest impact to your bottom line. Once you have at least a small subset of ~10-15 of these high-session, high-value products, you can shift your strategy towards increasing Buy Box share by manipulating Buyability levers like fulfillment method, seller rating factors, pricing strategy, and seller feedback volume. Even very slight, marginal increases in Buy Box share can be very significant in driving sales volume for a high session product.
Ultimately this exercise of auditing your catalog based on your strategic focus will help you identify your top-performing products – an essential step towards success on any product advertising channel. With this knowledge, you can identify areas for opportunity for those products (ex. a top-performing product in terms of sessions but could see a big improvement in Buy Box share) as well as know the products that you’ll want to keep a close eye on and defend. Like a mother defending her young, knowing the products that are already delivering for you and protecting their continued Marketplace success is just as important as exploiting new opportunities for growth.
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