How To Launch A Product On Amazon

Launching a new product on Amazon is not only a costly affair but also one which can set you back by hundreds to even thousands of pounds, if not done properly and with the right insight. Many sellers go into it with a view to generate sales, for example, yet do not have a full-fledged product launch strategy. In some cases, they may even have the relevant keywords handy but, again, the lack of a proper product launch strategy for a newly launched product or one they’re about to launch, sets them back.

Advertising campaigns can only get you so far – they may help you get more sales but what are you going to do after the first few sales? Then what? You’re also probably not popping up anywhere as high as you should in search results, despite having done a fair amount of keyword research.

Look, it’s not just about keyword research and search results criteria or making your listing look “pretty”. There’s an entire ecosystem around it, including the images, video, and bullet points you choose, and these are just some of the things that can make a major impact on your product’s conversion post-launch.

Once you’ve identified your target audience, you need to take a step back and take apart a few elements that will help guide your overall marketing strategy and even your Amazon PPC campaigns.

We have been specialists in launching new products and brands on Amazon for well over a decade. In fact, by now, we’ve done it for over 100 businesses, having a vast amount of experience in nearly every category on Amazon – from grocery to electronics, children’s toys to homeware, appliances, etc., you name it!

Want to drive more customers to your online store? Want a better optimized listing that pops up high in search results? Want great customer feedback with every purchase? Then understand this: Amazon’s main metric behind getting products ranking high organically is down to something called sales velocity.

When a seller establishes regular patterns in sales, Amazon gets continuous fees (in other words, generates profit consistently) where these products and their respective sellers are maintaining a constant qualitative customer experience – boom, that’s what Amazon wants! And this is what you too should want. Whatever keeps Amazon happy keeps you in business. So, the next time you run your ad campaigns, especially at the launch phase, keep this in mind!

Understanding the Amazon Flywheel and Fixing the “Catch-22 Problem”

To get your product to rank high, you need lots of sales and great reviews, right? Your ad campaigns and PPC campaigns need to be spot on as well, yes? But here’s a bit of a roadblock: HOW does a product get great sales and reviews on Amazon’s search engine if it’s a brand product?

Ah, that’s where we come in! During the product launch process, we will identify quality potential customers for you who are ready to buy what you’re selling. We do this on a daily basis: help people discover and purchase products that are relatively new and unknown on Amazon.

It’s important not to get fooled into thinking that reviews or even the first few reviews alone carry all the weight in terms of ranking. We’ve actually discovered that products generating more positive reviews, even up to 25, will see their results massively drop off. So, the only true metric – the only real metric to watch – is a constant stream of orders.

On a side note: don’t ever consider adding any fake reviews in a bid to improve you ranking! That’s going to hurt your overall ranking and even Amazon product launch strategies more than you know.

So, a constant stream of orders is what we need to focus on as part of our Amazon product launch strategies and that means:

Sessions > Orders > Ranking > Reviews > Higher Position > More Sessions > More Orders > More Reviews > Even Higher Position and so on…

Amazon Product Launch Strategy and Post Launch Strategy: Who This Service Is For

From optimizing your product listing page and coming up with a unique brand story to helping you come up with a unique brand title to devising your advertising budget – to thorough keyword research and getting your listing ready for social media platforms – we’re a full service Amazon business that takes care of it all.

We believe success on Amazon isn’t necessarily down to just a great product title or Amazon PPC ads/paid ads, for example, but a long-term approach to keep your Amazon account health and customer experience good.

So, in a nutshell, our service revolves around what launching a product on Amazon is all about (and much more but we don’t want to overwhelm you with the details!), and it is mainly geared towards smaller businesses who have only a small handful of product sales to begin with (or perhaps, none), and really want to get their products moving.

Amazon Product Launch Checklist and More: Your Amazon Ranking Specialists

Aside from crafting a customised launch strategy for your product and helping you devise Amazon PPC strategies, we also do the following:

Find real “quality” customers from external sites and social media
No fake sales, refunds, or cash-for-review nonsense
Customers get to try and test new brands, helping you build authority as a new seller
A single fixed fee of £599/$720+VAT for a launch process + launch strategy or £799/$960+VAT to launch the product and consult on the post launch strategy.

Need a New Product Launch for a Fixed Price?

Launch Strategy for More Successful Product Listings

Want to get the best start on Amazon?

As part of your product launch strategy on the Amazon marketplace, keep the following in mind:

Your product listing needs to be convertible. What that means is that to get the ball rolling in a really competitive marketplace, it needs to target potential customers with all the hallmarks of a great listing. For example, it should have both short and long tail keywords used according to the target market and customer behaviour or demographic. It should have high quality video and images, A+ Content (highly preferable) and bullet points which must not only be saturated with the right Amazon PPC keywords but also eliminate any friction your prospect may have in buying your product.
After gathering your customer data, our team ensures that your product is competitively priced, compared to other products who are using the same leading specific keywords – having a premium brand or a robust Amazon advertising strategy alone doesn’t automatically guarantee that people will notice your product in the early days.
Fulfill the delivery criteria set out by Amazon, so this means not dispatching or delivering late.
Always use a TRACKED delivery service, that is, if you are not using Amazon FBA or Amazon Vendor.

General Tips for a Successful Product Launch

Results tend to take time. Your sales and marketing funnel may take time to convert. However, while engaging with us, you’ll find that even though the ranking changes may take time, you’ll often start seeing impressions and session data inside Amazon in just a few days.
A good product launch on Amazon has to do with a lot more than just paid advertising, using a good keyword research tool like Google keyword planner, or even bringing in the relevant Facebook groups. Yes, all these marketing strategies are important but keep in mind that Amazon absolutely loves “off-Amazon” or external traffic that converts well. So, that’s going to be part and parcel of what we do to help you improve sales performance via generating more external traffic.
A high portion of Amazon customers happen to be “Prime” customers, meaning that those sellers will want their products to follow services related to Prime. We’re experts in this area and can guide on the best way to fulfill orders as a Prime seller. We’ll also ensure that your initial PPC efforts bear fruit in the early stages.
Do not wait to go out of stock! Additionally, make sure that your account and customer experience metrics are always as per Amazon’s optimum standards! Always keep this in mind when thinking about your product’s key features. Ultimately, it will help you attract customers by the dozens.

Your 3-step Guide to Easily Launch Your Product on Amazon

The three-step strategy is useful as long as you have already done thorough product research and have an SEO-optimised product listing in place that’s ready to go live. These two steps are not only necessary in terms of listing optimization and visibility on search engines but especially in terms of helping with a smooth product launch.

Have another look at the product launch checklist above to see if you missed anything. At the same time, however, it’s important to regularly consult your Amazon product launch agency at every step, as that will ensure a smooth and hiccup-free launch experience.

Without further ado:

Step 1: An Offer No One Can Refuse

Price cuts are a tried and true way of kickstarting demand (without selling practically free products!), especially if people already know in the back of their minds that they are getting a sweet deal. However, there are other genuine ways to make an offer downright irresistible:

Upsell through an already successful Amazon product during the new product launch – Giving away a regular discount for your new product may not always go down as you intended. After all, people still need to find the product in order to benefit from it.

Initially, your rankings may not be very impressive, so what you can do is use one of your own products, which are high-ranking, to overcome the visibility problem with this one. Don’t have any high-ranking products, whether you’re selling sponsored brands or not? Not to worry; apart from tweaking your ad copy a little, you should consult your Amazon launch agency who can help devise a tailored marketing strategy to get you noticed and rank high.

Another very important aspect of this is to come up with a discount structure which successfully ties your new product in with one of your best-selling ones. This is an important strategy to incorporate as it allows your customers to avail a discount only if they buy the two products together: the high-ranking one along with the new one, that is.

This can be done by accessing ‘Inventory’ under ‘Manage Promotions’ in your third party sellers’ account. You can find many shoppers potentially through this step alone!

A key thing to note is that this will only work if the new product complements the best-selling one.

Divert off-Amazon traffic to your listing – As we briefly discussed earlier, initial sales on Amazon can be problematic and will usually not rank well. In fact, lower-ranking products in Amazon’s first view SERPs (search engine results pages) are not even viewed all that much by potential buyers. Therefore, to get your product listing in front of as many potential buyers as possible (who will also not hesitate to pull the trigger as soon as they find what they need), you must use external channels.

How do we do this? By finding a connection with our target bases, so, this essentially means early product adopters. Next, we’re going to offer discount codes to our email list only and exclusively. Go ahead and build a fresh emailing list of you have to – just do it, it will pay off big time, especially in the long run. Most people on this list would have likely bought from you already, or expressed some form in interest in your product range. By offering them exclusive discounts in exchange for subscribing to your email newsletter (containing the new product link), you will be able to dramatically improve your chances of having a really successful product launch on Amazon.

Step 2: Get Those Positive Reviews in (Lots of ’em!)

Customer reviews are very, very important, primarily because you will need them for conversions. Not only that, but you need them to make your Amazon PPC campaigns and overall Amazon advertising more successful.

By working closely with your Amazon launch agency, you can generate consistent positive reviews through ethical and organic means only, while also adhering to Amazon’s TOS.

Step 3: Launch a PPC Campaign as Part of Your Launch Strategy

The final step of our product launch process is to really push our product out there. This means making it as visible as possible through a bespoke PPC ad campaign. The majority of Amazon product launches suffer in terms of ranking in the early days and so PPC marketing will help to offset this.

When coming up with your PPC Amazon advertising, keep these golden points in mind:

Bid really aggressively because the goal is to get your product out there and not to make a profit (for now).
Turn off dynamic bidding and stick with fixed bids because the idea here is to create the most amount of sales, irrespective of cost.
Make sure Amazon Product Targeting is integrated with your PPC strategy. By attaching a PPC ad to one of your existing (and successful) product listings, you can easily catch people’s attention who have already shown interest in one of your products, so there’s potential for upselling them.
Additionally, if the targeted product has already received great reviews, that may be all the social proof you need for the new Amazon product launch ad!

Your launch agency will continue to monitor and optimise your PPC campaigns, ensuring that you are bidding aggressively enough while avoiding any unnecessary spending whatsoever.

Understanding the Cost of Launching a Product on Amazon

Nearly all new sellers have this nagging question that they can’t seem to push out of their mind: “How much does it cost to launch a product on Amazon?”

Well, that’s a perfectly fair question (despite being a nagging one!) as it’s important to understand how the costs breakdown works.

To answer “How much does it cost to launch a product on Amazon” simply and in a straightforward way, Amazon offers a pricing calculator. On this page, you’ll also find a detailed breakdown of costs but to put it simply, you might have to pay £0.88 for each item sold. That’s it, in a nutshell.

Need to learn more about “How much does it cost to launch a product on Amazon” or how to create the most successful Amazon product launch? Our Amazon launch service is ready to assist you and make your new product launch a raving success.

How Long Does It Take to Launch a Product on Amazon FBA?

The time it may take to launch a product on Amazon FBA may vary. So, between conceptualisation and the first sale, you could have a wait time of a few weeks to a few months.

There are multiple factors which affect this timeline, such as sourcing, shipping, product complexity, market research, and listing optimization.

How to Channel Off-Amazon Traffic to Your Listing

Use Your Social Media Channels as a Mode of Marketing

Let’s use Instagram for this example as people are far more likely to check your Instagram page for product features and highlights than any other social media page. Start with showing your products only to people who are most likely to buy.

Having an FBA account helps as this will let you easily create social media promotion codes. Just go to ‘Advertising’ and then ‘Promotions’. Now you’ll get external traffic to your listings!

Affiliate Marketing Is Your Friend

Affiliate marketing is one of the single-most effective ways of driving external traffic to your product listings on Amazon – we don’t care what anybody says otherwise! Affiliates hold the power to entice people to buy products through the links they supply.

The Amazon Affiliate Program works very similarly, so take advantage of this to connect with a variety of bloggers and influencers who can produce unique content for your specific product category. Come up with a product promotion strategy and wait for more sales to come knocking on your door!

Consider Joining the Amazon Vine Program for Reviews

New product launches tend to do poorly in rankings initially, which is why positive reviews can help big time. The Vine program works by providing trusted reviewers only (Vine Voices) who will review products for free, offering unbiased and honest opinions. These serve as powerful social proof that your product is authentic and does what it says it will do.

Once you get a handful of reviews in, this will help build a better conversion rate and consistent sales for your products.

Promote Your Product on Deal Websites

Everybody loves a deal or special offer and this is where deal websites can help you get a good amount of external traffic.

Shortlist 2-3 sites and then narrow it down to the one you want to go with. After enrolling and partnering with the site, wait for your Amazon product listings to go up!

Just keep in mind that most of these sites charge a fee.

Use Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads have stood the test of time in the online marketing world. If you already have an established Facebook group, then Facebook ads will work wonders.

By advertising your products on Facebook, you are effectively cutting down the time needed for launching or introducing a new brand or item. Plus, it increases sales, which means your organic rankings will increase on Amazon’s SERPs.

Just don’t make the mistake of sending traffic directly to your Amazon listings. Instead, execute your Facebook ads in this order: Facebook to landing page, then promo codes to sales.

Come up with an attractive Amazon landing page to help you capture the email addresses of prospects and create a Facebook page as well – if you already have a business page then you’re all set. For more great tips on advertising strategies, and how to acquire more external traffic to increase your chances of a prosperous product launch on Amazon, contact Chris and his team for a free initial consultation.