Amazon Best Sellers Rank: an ally for eCommerce businesses

Amazon is currently much more than just another sales channel for online businesses. With the right strategy, incorporating your products into this marketplace can be key to improving the performance of your eCommerce business. There are resources for this such as the Amazon Best Sellers Rank, which includes a list of the best-selling products over a certain period of time. It’s updated every hour to incorporate the most recent transactions and historic data on products, comparing them to others in the same category. The objective is to offer customers a selection of products from within its immense catalogue. How could this be of benefit to retailers? We’re here to explain just that.

To begin, you should keep in mind that Amazon grows at a faster rate every year. Last February, Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon Prime had exceeded 150 million subscribers worldwide and estimates indicate that the website receives a monthly average of more than 200 million visitors. All of these people, all around the world, search for items based on keywords, but their final selection will be conditioned by the label of “#1 Best Seller”. Knowing this, it’s useful for eCommerce businesses to have information about the products in the ranking and improve their own positioning in Amazon to earn that valuable label.

What information can you get from the best-selling products?

Analysing the products categorised as best sellers by Amazon at a given moment will allow you to obtain information about the market trends and the demand to adapt to them. Since the beginning of June, for example, there has been an increase in sales of beach and pool toys. This is an indication that consumers are already looking forward to their summer holidays, despite COVID-19. So, you can start promoting certain seasonal products or designing specific marketing campaigns for this time of year.

Even though Amazon doesn’t offer many details about how it calculates this ranking, everything indicates that the current algorithm can predict future sales. This is why a newly launched product may be better positioned in the ranking than an older one.

On the other hand, there are tools for monitoring your competition that analyse the prices and strategies of Amazon as well, such as the Minderest price tracker. So, if you identify your competitors’ products as best sellers or see that they have a good position in the ranking for a category that interests you, you could consider modifying your pricing strategy to be more competitive and increase your total sales in the marketplace. This strategy doesn’t have to be the same one that you use in your online store. It will depend on your needs and your knowledge of your customers.

How to improve your positioning on Amazon to move up in the ranking

With this data in hand, there can be no doubt that the best way to improve your placement in the Best Sellers Ranking is to increase your total sales on the platform. For this, you should first improve the positioning of your products and increase their visibility by using SEO on Amazon to achieve a better conversion rate. The following tips will help you achieve this:

• Choose a good selection of keywords and adapt them to the spaces for text Amazon offers in the product sheet: title, bullets, and description.
  • Title: include the keywords that appear a high number of searches in your product’s name since this is the first criteria that Amazon uses for indexing. Try to retain the structure of “product-brand-model” while including as many keywords as possible.
  • Bullets: these are spaces with 200-character limits where you can quickly describe the product. You should include a minimum of 5 bullet points. Many shoppers don’t go further than this section and won’t read the description.
  • Description: include the complete specifics of the product. Here, you should include all of the keywords that you identified.
• Prepare a good strategy for the launch of new products to promote a high number of initial sales.
• Start PPC campaigns on Amazon. They’ll be cheaper and more accurate than the ones on Google. These appear as sponsored products rather than advertisements. The main benefit is that they improve organic traffic in the medium term since Amazon rewards the products that sell most.

Take care of your clients and encourage positive reviews. Word of mouth is the oldest marketing technique and one that always works.