How to Build an Optimal Amazon Listing

What’s up, guys? And welcome to the Amazon solved podcast.

How do you build the optimal Amazon listing? So, obviously, building an optimal listing on Amazon is very, very important because it is going to significantly improve your sales on Amazon. So in this episode, I want to cover in detail exactly what you need to build the most optimal listing on Amazon, both for the highest click through rate and the highest conversion rate on Amazon. So without further ado, let’s dive right in. You guys know me.

I’m Mina Elias, aka the Egyptian Prescription, founder of the Trivium group. We, as of right now, have 65, 67 people run 140 brands on Amazon. Two of them are my own, two of them I’ve invested in. Anyways, I have a lot of experience split testing different parts and pieces of listing on Amazon to drive the highest click through rate and conversion rate, as well as launching a lot of products, hundreds of products. And I’ve made a lot of mistakes.

So I’m here to deliver something that you guys can learn from all of my mistakes. Anyways, let’s jump right in. So there’s two things to consider to build the optimal Amazon listing. First, one is what is needed for the highest click through rate ever. And the second thing is what is needed for the highest conversion rate ever.

And the important thing to keep in mind for both is that don’t do this once and forget about it. So a lot of people I notice, will create a really good listing and then stop and say, okay, I have an optimized listing. Let’s drive traffic and let’s forget about the listing. But unfortunately, as with everything, there’s always continuous improvement happening around us. And as a result, if you had a great listing today, six months from now, all of your competitors could be a lot better.

Also, you’re not 100% certain that this is the best listing, right? Because what could happen is you could split test your price and realize that you have a much higher conversion rate at a slightly different price. Or you could split test your main image and realize that you have a much better image, much better click through rate. So all these things are things that happen through continuous improvement that you have to keep in mind. So let’s run through in the search results what is needed for the most optimal listing.

There are seven factors that I see in the search results. Number one is the image. Number two is the title. Number three is the star rating and the review count. Number four is the price.

Number five is like coupons or discounts. Six is the shipping speed, like is it prime, not prime? And then seven is the badges bestseller badge, Amazon’s choice badge. So I’m going to cover each one one at a time. And this is stuff to think about as you’re building the listing.

But also once you’ve built the listing, these are things to think about as you try to continuously improve the listing. So first of all, on the main image, the main image is crucial, crucial for you to drive the most amount of traffic to the listing. This is where people see like, you launch campaigns and you create all these impressions, people seeing you, but not necessarily clicking on you. So for them to click on you, they need to be attracted to the image. Not only that, the image needs to clearly communicate why this product solves the problem and why this product solution is better than everyone else’s solution that’s on the page.

It’s almost like a bodybuilding competition. So things to know about the image, main image needs to completely fill out the box, right? And add elements in the main image that speak to your customer in terms of the value proposition and in terms of giving them information. So, for example, you can talk about the serving size, if that’s important. You can enhance the flavor by like, let’s say it’s a lemon flavor having slices of lemon, it’s a mango flavor having slices of mango, and so on.

Let’s say it is carb free. You can have like a label that doesn’t actually exist on the product that says carb free. You can manipulate what your product looks like through the packaging by maybe enhancing certain keywords, making them a lot larger. So if this is like BPA free, then you can have BPA free as a big label on the product. Maybe it looks like it’s on the packaging so that they’re going to peel it off and it’s not going to make the product look ugly.

Things like that cooking like pots and pans, very quickly, what size are they? Maybe a line right through the pot or the pan that says 28 inches, 26 inches, whatever it is. So things like that. And again, remember, what does the customer care about? One easy thing to do, go into all of your competitors reviews.

Go to the five stars. Go to the one stars. Pull that shit. By the way, you can actually do this by downloading the helium ten chrome extension and using review insights, and then go into any one of your competitors. You can just export all of the select number of reviews you can do.

Export all the five star and export all the one and two star. And then you feed Chat GPT, you say, hey, I’m going to give you all of the one star reviews for a product. Okay, now I’m going to feed you all the five star reviews of the product. Okay, now I’m going to give you all the one stars over another product and feed it and then say, okay, can you summarize all the things that people loved in the product and why they gave it a five star review and summarize all the things they hated in the product and why they gave it one star and two star reviews? You can also do this manually by reading, right, the good old days before AI.

But yeah, I mean, have it summarize that stuff and then say, okay, cool. They really care about the flavor. They really care about the serving size. They really care about the BPA free. They really care that it’s eco friendly.

They really care that it’s slim, that it’s durable, that it’s long lasting, that it’s whatever it is. What do they care about and what do they not want? And then try and communicate that in the main image in the packaging. So when someone types in like I’m looking for an electrolyte powder, they immediately are like, okay, cool. I want something that’s sugar free, carb free.

I want something that has a lot of servings. So you communicate that right there. You don’t like that it doesn’t dissolve. So you put completely dissolves right on the packaging. Of course, it doesn’t actually have to be on your label, right.

You can use Photoshop, it’s all 3D renders. You can manipulate the label to highlight certain things. Now don’t go too much because you could get caught by Amazon. But if it’s subtle, things like that, you’re enhancing words or adding words that didn’t actually exist. Or you put a label and then you put something on the label, Amazon’s not going to catch that.

They’re not checking for the stuff like that. So that’s on the main image. Right. By the way, the reason that I’m spending a lot of time on the main image, it is so crucial for your click through rate that it makes a massive impact. One thing that we do, any client we bring on, the first thing, I’m like, let’s look at their main image.

Let’s take their main image. And this is in the next step, right. Go to product pinion. P-R-O-D-U-C-T. Product.

And then pinion. P-I-N-I-O-N like opinion, but without the o. Productpinion.com. And then pull in your top competitors. Put your image, if you have a live listing on Amazon, you can pull it right in.

If not, you can just upload the image and you can input the data like title reviews and price and that stuff manually. And then you can tell these shoppers, like surveyors, like between 50 to 100 surveyors say, if you are in the market for credit card holder, which one would you choose and why? And then have them poll and say, and give the results and say, okay, I would choose that one because of this. I would choose this one because of that. Now that’s one way to also get feedback on what matters to the customer, but it’s also another way to say we take our clients product, we put it up there versus the competitors and we see what people are saying.

And if we notice they’re not winning, our client, our brand, is not winning. Then we’re like, why are other people winning? Do we have that thing? Like is it part of our solution? Like maybe they say it’s like long lasting or the elastic band doesn’t wear out.

So we say very durable or like lifelong lasting band or something right on the packaging. Even though that’s not actually what shows on the wallet, they’re not going to know because it looks like it’s part of the product. And immediately we can see a spike in click through rate, which means we don’t touch the campaigns, we don’t even do advertising, we keep all the ads the same and then the sales double because we’re getting twice as many people in because of the main image. So that’s why I’m spending so much time on the main image anyways. So main image, very clear, sharp, 3D, render, not photographed.

So it’s very easy to see, fills the square, the white space, communicates your value proposition and why you’re better than everyone else. Now we go into the title. Title needs to be obviously very SEO optimized, should have the main keywords first, like electrolyte powder, for example. That needs to come first. And not only that, it needs to read well.

So for example, like electrolytes powder, hydration supplement for blah, blah, blah, something like that. Something that you can understand, not keyword stuffed, like electrolyte powder, potassium, sugar free electrolytes, like something weird like that. So yeah, that’s the title. Then we move on to the star rating. Going to make a massive difference.

If you’re a four star, which is like a 4.24.1, whatever, you’re going to show up as four stars. If you’re a 4.3, you’re going to show up as four and a half stars. The change and the amount of revenue increase that we see from going from a 4.2 to a 4.3 is massive. So if you can help it, make sure that you push reviews if you’re at a 4.2 or even a 4.1, because just getting to a 4.3 is going to make a massive impact on your bottom line. And then the number of reviews count, obviously.

So the more the better. Forever get more and more and more. There’s a couple of ways to go about this. Everything that involves asking someone for a review, unless it’s just say, hey, please leave us. Review is against terms of service.

So any sort of reimbursement, whatever. But what you can do is if you guys follow these guys post purchase pro, what they do is they have these insert cards that have a ton of value that really incentivize you to scan. So let’s say you’re like an electrolyte powder and you’re like, get this guy to better hydration, get this guy to a keto diet. Sign up for three months free myfitnesspal sign up for three months free for this. Get one session free at class pass.

So all of these benefits that they just negotiate because they’re like, yeah, we have like x thousand number of people buying this product every single month. We’re going to give you exposure to all those people. Give us a deal. And they’re like, oh, hell yeah. If you’re going to expose it to that many people, we’ll give you a deal.

And then as a result they get this deal and you get people to opt in and then you message them, you know, hope you’re enjoying the product, please leave us a review. Get reviews that way. Or you can go like cold DM style, do cold DM and try and get reviews anyways. So that’s star rating. Price matters.

So Amazon is a very, very price sensitive platform. So people really care about the price. So having a really good price is going to make a big difference. Split test your price and let’s say you’re at 39 99, try going to 43 99, try going to 3799-3499 et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Try all of the different prices and see what is going to contribute the most to your bottom line.

Besides that, you’ll also notice if you have a product that comes in a pack or has a weight or whatever, there is going to be like a price per count or a price per ounce or a price per serving, et cetera. There’s usually like a price per that’s small in gray and people really care about that. So I’m right now looking at two products, virtually identical. Two electrolyte supplements. Everything is exactly the same.

Both of them are 90 servings. Both of them cost 39 99. One says $1.6 per ounce. The other one says 3.8 /oz I’m assuming this is probably an Amazon glitch. Something happened.

Someone in the back end changed something accidentally. But this, I mean, I’m telling you, people look at this and they’re like, oh my God, this is so expensive per ounce. And they don’t think through it, say, okay, 90 servings, $40. They don’t want to do the math. Another thing is coupons.

So coupons, dollar amount, coupons percent. All of these things will potentially improve your click through rate. So split test them and conversion rate too, by the way. And the thing with coupons from what I’m seeing is 50% will actually like they’ll opt in, but they won’t actually claim the coupon or clip it. Which basically means a lot of people will say, oh, I want the 5% coupon.

But then there’s another step by Amazon to clip it and they forget to do that. So they don’t actually get it. So if you do like a $10 off, that’s going to be effectively like $5 off. Something to keep in mind. Also, lightning deals and seven day deals, very dependent on your product.

I’ve seen lightning deals for some products kill and do amazing and for other ones worthless. Same with seven day deals. Actually no, I think seven day deals across the board. I’ve seen it perform phenomenally well. If you are blessed by the Amazon gods and do get access to seven day deals, 100% take advantage of them.

And then finally I want to talk about shipping. So FBA versus FBM. If you’re ever FBM and your competitors are FBA, you will lose. By the way, FBM is fulfilled by merchants. So when you fulfill from your warehouse, FBA is when you ship in bulk to Amazon’s warehouses and they ship it to the customer because they can control it.

They know how long it’s going to take for them to get the product. So as a result, they are much more inclined to encourage FBA. And that’s when you get the prime badge unless you do seller fulfilled prime, which is almost impossible to get approved for. So anyways, look at the shipping time of your product. If today is April 20 and it says you can get it April 22, great.

If it says, oh, you’re going to get it April 27. That could significantly hurt your click through rate and conversion rate. So someone might click on it and be like, oh, I love this product. And then they scroll and like, oh, it’s going to come in a week. I don’t want it anymore.

So that’s one thing to keep in mind when you’re looking at the listing from a search perspective. Like this is when I type in electrify powder, whatever credit card holder, the search loads, and then I see the product. The things that matter are main images, title, star rating, review count, price per whatever shipping time. Oh, and the one thing that I forgot to mention was badges. The best seller badge is very nice and will significantly drive traffic.

And you get it by having the lowest BSR in a subcategory. And then the Amazon’s choice badges, you get it by having the most number of conversions for a certain keyword. So it’s probably a lot easier to get it for longer tail keywords and much, much harder to get it for the broad, high search volume keywords. But anyways, I mean if you can get it, great, they’re going to help. If not, it’s not something to lose sleep over.

Now we go into the listing. So we go from the search page into the listing. The other things that are going to affect your listing and how to build a really optimized listing is the rest of the images. So main image, we talked about it. The rest of the images, they should sell your product without you having to say anything else in the bullet points or anywhere else.

If I’m looking at your product and I know why I should buy it, why it’s better than everyone else. And that’s communicated to me through the images, that’s when I’m most likely to convert. So each image should showcase like feature benefit. Why it matters to me, why this thing solves my problem better, why I’m better than everyone else. And it should hit on all of the different pieces, all of the different value propositions that you have for your product.

So if it’s natural, if it’s organic, if it’s fast acting, if it’s a before and after, if it’s someone using it, and the benefits, just every single image should sell, sell, sell. And it shouldn’t just be pictures. It should really have big scannable text like hydrate fast overnight skin protections, stuff like that. Whatever random stuff. I’m just making stuff up, but I shouldn’t need to read a lot.

It should be like big text boom, right into your face. So that’s the rest of the images. You get to add certain number of videos as well. So make sure to take full advantage of those videos. I think you can add like up to six, something like that.

You’ll have a main image and then five listing images and then like a bunch of videos. Or you can have like, I think seven images besides the main image if you don’t do that. So there’s that. The videos most likely people are not going to watch through with audio. So make sure to have a video that when you turn on again, talks about the product in a lifestyle way.

Fast changes, communicates the value proposition. Text pop ups on the screen. So now we move on to the bullet points. So bullet points SEO optimized. Most people will read just the first part of your bullet point and then you’ll probably have like a dash or a colon or whatever.

So that very quickly should summarize why your product is better than everyone else, why it’s going to make my life better as a shopper, and then the writing after it. Not only should it include a lot of SEO, but it should also add any of the other specifications or types of things that people are looking for in a product. Like if you’re looking for compatibility, things like that, that’s like the best place to put that kind of stuff. By the way, above the bullet points, there’s going to be a section where it says like the brand name, the item type. Let’s say if it’s a supplement, it’ll be like the diet type, the flavor, benefits, age range, things like that.

Make sure that you fill that out as best as possible because all of that stuff really matters to Amazon. Then beyond that you’re going to have the a plus content. So you’re going to have the from the brand, which is the brand story a plus content, and then you have the regular a plus content. So when you’re doing the from the brand like brand story a plus content, that is where you want to create a very strong, touching message about the brand, the founders, who they are, and then upsell the rest of your products. That’s the best place to do it.

So if you’re looking to do a heartwarming story, that’s where I would do it. And then in the rest of the a plus content, I suggest using the big module, which is, I think it’s 960 by 600, like big rectangular images. Image, image, image, image. And again, it’s just like the listing images. It’s very image heavy, big text scannable, easy to read badges.

Does this, does that, helps with this, helps with that. Very easy to scan through and realize why this product is better than everyone else. Then from there, if you keep scrolling down, you’ll notice that there’s videos for this product and that’s the best place to put videos from influencers. So you can use like Amazon live influencers or you can hit up just random influencers on Instagram, whatever, micro influencers most likely because you don’t want to spend that much money. You can also use a platform like join brands, joinbrands.com.

That’s where you can have influencers create the video. I think it costs like $60 a video, not much. And it’s a great way for social proof. Best is if you have someone like unboxing and using the product, it’s going to build a lot of trust. And then there is a section for Amazon posts somewhere where it’s like the Instagram of Amazon.

Again, utilize that as much as possible. Post a lot of images with the product. It’s not going to help that much, but it’s going to help you out a lot. Then we move to the customer questions and answers. This is the best place for you to build an faq and this is where you want to ask as many questions as possible.

You can use your own buyer account. So the stuff that you buy on Amazon with, you can use your own buyer account. Ask as many questions as possible and then respond with your own SEO optimized answers. Keywords stuffed, all that stuff that really, really helps with indexation and I’ve seen it really help a lot. You can even mention competitors keywords and it helps with indexing there.

It’s pretty smart. And beyond that is reviews. So when you’re building out the reviews section, obviously, like I said, you can’t really ask for reviews within terms of service. But sure you can ask a few friends, family, et cetera to leave reviews with images. So make sure that you have them take a lot of images because that will help.

Not professional anything, typical iPhone images. It really builds a lot of trust. If some of them do some videos in the reviews, that will also build a lot of trust. But yeah, that’s essentially how you build a really well optimized listing for Amazon. I’ve gone through every single portion on the search side and then the rest of the listing which is going to improve the conversion side.

So hopefully this was helpful. Guys, again, this is Mina Elias with the trivium group. If you guys are looking for us to audit your account. Give you a free audit. Run through the listing.

Show you everything that can be improved in the listing and how to improve it. Give you resources. Run through all of your campaigns, portfolios, campaign names, campaign structures, keywords, organic, rank, all of that stuff. And not just say what we think we can improve, but how you can do it yourself. So even if you don’t want to hire us, you could do it yourself.

Go to the website triviumco.com. Triviumco.com, and says get a free audit there. So go get a free audit. I mean, it’s free. It’s 45 minutes video.

Super, super valuable. All right, guys, see you in the next episode.