MAXIMIZE SALES
Catalog & Content Quick Wins to Get the Most Out of your Amazon Listings
Our GEARING UP content series is aimed at helping Brandrunners gain control and maximize business potential in today’s complex retail environment. As many brands face decelerating sales growth, uncertainty on future consumer demand, and rising costs, the most proactive Brandrunners are ensuring they’re fully maximizing the elements of the business that they can control, even with limited investment dollars.
In previous editions, we discussed how to forecast in volatile environments with more control and confidence, as well as how to identify cost savings to maximize the bottom line under today’s cost pressures. In our final installment, we’re sharing how to maximize your top line sales on Amazon through low-investment opportunities across content and catalog.
DEFINING CATALOG & CONTENT, AND ITS IMPORTANCE
Catalog and content are foundational to your Amazon listings, ultimately ensuring consumers discover and then convert on your products. A brand’s Amazon foundation is built in the catalog, yet,, we often see brands underutilizing these levers. This presents a big opportunity for the Brandrunners to be diligent in creating and maintaining their customer-facing presence on Amazon.
Catalog refers to the back-end architecture of your brand and products on Amazon, such as the brand name and product identifiers. While a lot of these fields are not necessarily visible to the consumer, they are vital to help ensure your products show up when a consumer is searching for a specific product or browsing relevant categories.
Content includes customer-facing brand and product attributes, such as the product title, images, A+ content and descriptions. The primary role of product content is to bring to life 1) what the product is, 2) what/who the product is for, and 3) what makes it different from all the other listings on the digital shelf.
While catalog and content are not interchangeable, the two feed into one another and work together to fully maximize your Amazon listings.
“If you think of catalog and content like a cake, the catalog is the assembly of the cake, and the content is the frosting that makes it look pretty. If your cake is frosted beautifully but doesn’t taste good, you’re missing the mark. The same is true if you have a solid cake but forwent the frosting. So you need both elements for the perfect cake (or Amazon listing).”
- James Lopez, Netrush Senior Catalog Manager
CATALOG QUICK WINS
A STRONG CATALOG STARTS WITH ITEM SET-UP
Accurate item set-up is the first step in creating strong listings. This includes entering in the correct brand name, products, and categories. While these tasks may seem rudimentary, their tedious nature makes them prone to mistakes which can be difficult to fix. As an example, it is nearly impossible to adjust a brand name or product identifier after the brand or ASIN have been created. Changing the categorization of an existing listing is more feasible, but time intensive, as it requires going through Amazon’s ticketing system. Therefore, we always recommend taking the extra time upfront to set up items with care and attention to detail in order to avoid negative effects and additional time spent fixing mistakes later on.
1-10 new products can be added manually via the “Add a Product” tool. For time savings on anything over 10 new products, we recommend bulk uploading with an Amazon Flat File.
PRODUCT VARIATIONS CAN MAKE OR BREAK CONVERSION
The most common and significant opportunity we see with Sports & Outdoors catalogs on Amazon is with product variations. Brands in this industry often have large product portfolios with products offering different sizes and design options, which can make digital merchandising more complicated. We recommend looking at your product assortment with a B&M shopping view in order to find the right variation strategy for ecommerce.
Imagine a physical shopping experience where size and color options of the same product were scattered across the store. You find a pair of shoes you were looking for, but in the wrong size, and you have to hunt the whole store to find a good fit. You notice a shirt you like, but wish it was offered in a different color. There are four other color options hidden throughout the store that you were unaware of, and you leave the store frustrated and empty handed.
What a nonsensical way to set up a store; what a poor shopper experience; and what a risk for missed sales! In reality, B&M merchandisers typically put the different size and design options in one place—all of the shirt colors and sizes on the same rack; all of the shoe sizes in the black option clustered together, with the blue option and all its sizes right next to the black.
Ineffective variations online give consumers the poor shopping experience described above. Rather, we want our digital merchandising to mimic the merchandising of great B&M stores. This can be achieved through variations on your Amazon listings using “parent ASINs” as the overarching, umbrella listings identifying an entire product line, and “child ASINs” or “variations” nestled under the umbrella as options for the consumer to choose from (such as color or size).
THE BENEFITS: A BETTER SHOPPING EXPERIENCE CAN INCREASE CONVERSIONS
Proper variations puts every relevant product in one place for consumers so they can easily find the variation they want without having to navigate multiple Amazon listings
A variated product combines ratings and reviews of all the child ASINs, providing more information for the shopper journey and helping to build trust with consumers.
THE BENEFITS: A BETTER SHOPPING EXPERIENCE FEEDS INTO THE ALGORITHM
The above benefits to the shopper also impact the following inputs into Amazon’s algorithm for organic ranking, creating an exponential effect to a great (or poor) variation strategy:
Time on page increases as consumers are browsing variations on one page versus jumping to multiple listings
Ratings and reviews increase given the combining of child ASINs
Conversion rates and sales volume increase as there’s a greater chance consumers find and buy what they’re looking for
CASE STUDY: NEW VARIATION STRATEGY CONTRIBUTED TO 80%+ SALES GROWTH
The Challenge: With a large product portfolio of over 150 product ASINs, Nutcase was challenged by a fragmented catalog resulting in a frustrating consumer experience and poor search visibility. Originally a 1P vendor, only the top-selling ASINs were given the proper attention needed to thrive on Amazon, and product launches especially produced poor sales performance.
The Solution: When Nutcase transitioned to a 3P model with Netrush, we worked together to carefully consolidate product listings with clear size and style options. This improved the consumer experience and aggregated product reviews to boost sales ranking and consumer confidence. We variated newly launched product designs with legacy parent listings to accelerate new product growth.
The Results: 150+ product ASINs was effectively consolidated down to just five parent listings, contributing to an 82% sales increase in the first month of the cleaner catalog.
PRO TIP! ENABLE “REVIEW SHARING” ON YOUR VARIATED LISTINGS
Brands can open a support case with Amazon and ask to enable “Review Sharing” for parent ASINs with variations. This will show the sum of reviews for all children on the product detail page, rather than showing each child’s review count when it is clicked on.
WHEN IT’S TIME TO BREAK UP A VARIATION
While product variations have benefits, too many variations can make the listing look overstuffed and begin to have negative effects. If a listing has more than 48 variations, the customer selection layout changes to a dropdown menu instead of showing swatch thumbnails. This can create a subpar shopping experience given the customer cannot easily see all the options in front of them. This is particularly true when design options are important, such as apparel and footwear products with multiple color or print variations.
Brands can solve for this by breaking up the listing in a way that makes sense for the product type. For example, we’ve had success breaking up a textile product into three separate listings that variated 1) solid prints, 2) patterned prints, and 3) limited edition prints.
If you break up an existing variation, please note that all reviews will carry over with the applicable children. To maximize the number of reviews after the listing separation, use the “Review Sharing” tip shared above.
CONTENT QUICK WINS
Most often, the lowest-hanging fruit related to content is in the foundational written content—or “copy”—of the listings. By focusing on copy first, you’ll be utilizing more opportunities to index on relevant keywords. Compared to other content types, copy is the strongest lever to improve organic ranking—and thus increasing visibility and sales—even without large marketing budgets. In this piece, we’ll be focusing on this low-investment, high-return fundamental content. Once the foundation has been established and you’re ready to grow your Amazon budget, you can begin optimizing and investing in additional content types such as A+ content, videos, brand story and brand stores.
“Listing copy is fundamental to get right! On Amazon, you’re working to beat your competition out of space on the search engine results page (SERP). Brands need to do everything under the sun to maximize their on-listing keywords to attain full potential in organic ranking and thus visibility.”
- Kathleen Burckhardt, Netrush Content Director
PRODUCT TITLE
Ensure your titles check these boxes:
Brand name (Amazon requirement)
Product name (Amazon requirement; note, product needs to listed as the name shown on the product packaging)
Keyword(s) that communicates what the product is and what/who it is for
The product’s key differentiator compared to the other listings on the search results page (e.g. women’s mountain biking helmet “with visor”
But keep in mind some nuances:
Be careful not to crowd the title with too many keywords. For example, if items 1-3 above result in a lengthy title as is, or if your key product differentiator requires a longer explanation, feel free to save that for the images, feature bullet points, and/or product description.
Our general rule of thumb for title length is 100-150 characters (200 is the maximum Amazon allows). However, we recommend the shorter end of that range, closer to 100 characters, for many Sports & Outdoors categories like apparel and footwear, as Amazon automatically adds in variation details such as sizing and gender information which results in longer titles.
The mobile shopping experience typically cuts the title off after 50-60 characters, so ensure your key product messaging is communicated right away in the title.
LEARN FROM THE BEST
Petzl’s headlamp titles give shoppers the key details they need:
Brand name: Petzl
Product name: ACTIK CORE Headlamp
What the product is and what/who it is for: 450 Lumen Light; for Hiking, Climbing, and Camping; Black
Key differentiators: Rechargeable; Compact; with Red Lighting
Key details visible on mobile search engine results page (SERP)
FEATURE BULLET POINTS
Netrush recommendations:
Always use the maximum number of bullet points (typically around five; can vary by product type) to fully maximize the impact on SEO.
Use these bullet points to focus on the product’s key features and how they benefit the shopper.
200 characters per bullet point is the maximum Amazon allows.
LEARN FROM THE BEST
Astral’s Men’s Loyak shoes listing maximizes the allotted space for feature bullet points, giving shoppers key product details in a way that evokes to the shopper the positive experience and tangible solutions the product provides:
Number of bullet points: 5*
Key features: Flex-Grip outsole, made for the water, level footbed and wider toe box, lightweight, vegan and sustainable materials
All-cap, simple headers immediately draw the shopper in and communicate the most important features
* First bullet point is auto-generated by Amazon
product description
Netrush recommendations:
Use this space to elaborate on the information in your title, images, and feature bullet points and provide detailed specifications for the customers wanting to know more about your brand and the product they are considering.
In addition to repeating key details from the other content types, try to incorporate mid-ranked keywords using synonyms for some of the most important keywords.
We recommend keeping product descriptions to a maximum of 600 characters in length.
LEARN FROM THE BEST
The product description on POC’s Omne Air Spin builds upon the other content types. With more emotional language—compared to technical and functional tones in the title and bullets—POC shares the “why” behind the product and brand.
images
We often see brands underutilizing their enhanced listing images, which provide a powerful opportunity to connect with shoppers right away when visiting a product detail page.
Netrush recommendations:
All listings need a minimum of one main image showing the product on a white background. However, we recommend filling the allowable number of seven to nine images (varies by category).
These additional images should be used to showcase why your product is unique, provide feature and benefit education, demonstrate how to use the product, or proactively clear up any potential confusion the shopper may have. We provide some examples below that can serve as ideas for your own listings.
back-end keywords
Lastly, don’t make the mistake of neglecting your back-end keywords. This content type can also boost your organic ranking but tends to be underutilized by brands. When filling out back-end keywords, avoid repeating terms that are already included in the front-end content; instead, use this space to include lower-ranked keywords that are still relevant to your product. This provides opportunities to rank for rising search terms and get ahead of category trends.
THE ALGORITHM MATTERS, BUT DON’T FORGET ABOUT THE HUMANS
Content optimization can involve keywords, SEO, and character limits catered to the Amazon algorithm, but your content should be human-centered, first and foremost. As you work the algorithm, make sure that the content still makes sense and is easy and enjoyable for your consumers to read.
CUSTOMER REVIEWS ARE CONTENT CLUES
Customer reviews are content clues. Spending even just 30 minutes reading through your Amazon reviews (and customer questions & answers) will lead to valuable learnings you can directly apply to content. Common questions or frustrations can be addressed and clarified in bullets and images. Customers’ favorite features and new use cases can be marketed throughout the listing.
DON’T FORGET TO SPELL CHECK!
While this may sound silly, we’ve seen tons of product detail pages with typos and grammatical errors. This is an easy way to lose trust from the consumer shopping your page. Double and triple check your written content to make sure it looks and reads perfectly.
FINAL TIPS FOR CATALOG & CONTENT
CONSISTENCY IS KEY
Amazon listings are an extension of your brand and your content and branding should be consistent and cohesive with the rest of the ecosystem. This can be achieved effectively and efficiently by maintaining one single source of truth for creative and ensuring collaboration between content specialists for Amazon and other marketplaces, as well as team members across branding and marketing.
Similarly, there should be content consistency across similar parent ASINs on Amazon. In Sports & Outdoors, we see this mistake happen most commonly when brands release new designs or product features on new parent ASINs (e.g. 2022 versions have different colors or feature upgrades compared to the 2021 versions). If high quality content was created in 2021, duplicate that content on the new listings and then add in any 2022 differentiators. This ensures you’re getting the most out of your content and creative investment, while also ensuring a consistent experience for consumers that are likely to shop both listings.
EFFECTIVE RESOURCING FOR CATALOG AND CONTENT
Listings need to be monitored constantly—ideally with the help of 24/7 automation—as things can go awry due to technology kinks or other marketplace sellers. Leading Brandrunners are also proactively refining content based on changing keywords, drops in conversion rates, new competitors on the marketplace, a rebrand, and more.
While taking care of this foundation doesn’t have to take a large investment, it does require human resources. We recommend brands have a dedicated, in-house ecommerce catalog or merchandising specialist to manage the catalog—especially brands with a large Amazon assortment. Responsibilities of this role would include:
Monitoring catalog for accuracy, fixing as needed
Keeping catalog up-to-date for broader business shifts; translating those shifts into actionable, marketplace-specific updates
Coordinating marketplace-specific new product launch details, like item set-up
Working closely with a partner like Netrush to understand and address trends and changes in policy
For content, we recommend having a content strategist that sits on the marketing or brand team—rather than a siloed Amazon team—given Amazon content is an extension of the brand and cohesion and consistency is important. The strategist would lead initiatives like:
Establishing what avenues are best for targeting certain personas
Establishing what the brand voice and messaging looks like in action, in support of key business goals
Deciding how that message is disseminated in each channel and at all levels of the customer journey
Facilitating adaptability and usability of creative assets across all platforms, including Amazon
Working closely with a partner like Netrush to understand and address trends and changes in policy
A MESSY MARKETPLACE LEADS TO MESSY LISTINGS
Effective brand control is critical in nearly every aspect of modern commerce, with catalog and content being no exception. The more sellers on your listings, the greater the risk for you to lose control of your catalog and content. Brands have experienced other sellers break up existing variations, tag the sellers’ products onto well-established variations, use low quality and off-brand copy and imagery, and more. Protect your brand and make sure it’s presented the right way by being intentional with who sells your brand on the marketplace, and by reserving Brand Registry for yourself or a single authorized reseller you trust. (Note, see Part 1 to learn the impact of brand control on forecasting.)
LEARN HOW NETRUSH CAN HELP YOU GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR LISTINGS
Netrush Studio helps Brandrunners uplevel their product listings by combining our in-house team of creatives, niche Amazon expertise on catalog and content, and deep experience in the Sports & Outdoors industry. And once your listings are in tip-top shape, our technology performs 24/7 scraping on all listings and notifies us when anything is inconsistent or awry, so we can fix it right away.
Email michele.flamer-powell@netrush.com for a FREE AUDIT of your catalog and content and more information on our Studio capabilities.
ABOUT THE SERIESWe’re keeping up the momentum of The Big Gear Show with a limited series for Sports & Outdoors leaders. At the show, we heard Brandrunners sharing uncertainties and challenges related to recessionary impacts, cost pressures, and more. This series provides tangible tools, data, and perspective to help Brandrunners solve those challenges and subsequently gain control and maximize profits in today’s complex retail landscape.
Visit the content series landing page.
ABOUT THE AUTHORClaire McBride leads research, insights, and education for Netrush. She has spent the last five years helping brands grow and optimize their ecommerce businesses through written research, events, share group discussions, and one-on-one consulting, formerly with Cleveland Research Company before joining the Netrush team.
