It’s been clear for some time now that the growing competition on Amazon is continually making it more and more difficult for sellers to sell and be profitable at the same time. Smartly taking advantage of their own platform is none other than Amazon: by investing in their advertising services and giving the ad placements more prominent spots on the sites, they’ve created a continually growing revenue model for themselves. We’ll look below at some hypothesis on how this is impacting the sellers and brands that are selling / or are trying to sell on Amazon.
So, can you still sell on Amazon without investing in Amazon PPC?
NO
Giving the amount of paid placements now available on any Amazon site (regularly, the sponsored brands ad at the top + up to 4 sponsored products ads before the organic products + placements between the organic products and at the bottom of the page), it has become nearly impossible for sellers and brands to sell on Amazon without investing in Amazon PPC. First placements (no matter if they are organic or paid), are the most important ones for users. These placements inspire trust and tell the users that they are the most relevant for their search query. That is why most of them don’t even go to the second page of results ( according to Amazon, around 70% of its customers never click past the first page of search results). In this context, if you want to sell, you want to be present on the first page > the top results. As the top results are paid placements, you have to invest in Amazon PPC in order to sell.
MAYBE
If you have a strong brand presence and people search for your products directly, you are still likely that you will sell on Amazon. You will need to ensure that the content on your products is optimised for the search engine and that you are doing well in organic rankings. It is a gamble though and you will most likely lose sales against competitors bidding for your brand keywords. Sooner than later, your products will also drop in organic rankings as your competitors will get more traffic than you do> which will result in better organic rankings for them and, in the end = more sales for them.
YES
As we’ve seen above, having a strong brand name could still help you sell on Amazon even without investing in Amazon PPC. It won’t last for long though, and you will need to find other strategies to compensate for it. One of the strategies that can substitute Amazon PPC are price deals. Running a price deal is an alternative to Amazon PPC, one which will help you sell even more than by solely investing money in paid advertising.
Price will always be king and it is the same on Amazon. Running a 7-day Deal or a lightning deal will make wonders for your product. Amazon will add it to their deals’ page where your product will get greater visibility than in any other place (the deals’ page is the most accessed page on Amazon after the home page). The greater visibility and the actual price deal will help you sell.
While you will sell more with a price deal, ask yourself if you can do it profitably. Deals will help you sell on Amazon, but can you do it while remaining profitable?! We won’t go into further details about this topic in this article, but always look at your profit before running any strategy.
“Selling on Amazon” is becoming equivalent to “investing in Amazon PPC”. In order to sell on Amazon, you have to invest in paid advertising. While having a strong brand name could help you getting to users searching for your brand terms, it won’t help you grow and reach other potential buyers. You will also lose sales against competitors that decide to target your brand.
An alternative to Amazon PPC are price deals. These will get you a lot of coverage and greater visibility > which should in return convert to sales. You may not be profitable running a price deal though, or you simply don’t want to run price discounts for your brand. In this context, the solution for you is Amazon PPC.
Don’t forget to get in touch if you need help selling on Amazon.