Launching a New Product on Amazon: Where to Start

A product launch on Amazon is critical for every seller. In the olden days, it was impossible to launch on Amazon without a number of factors, such as optimized product listings, genuine positive reviews, and some advertising techniques.

Amazon is looking more and more at your trustworthiness as a seller, the relevance of your product, and the value you add to customers above all else. So, what are the new rules exactly? In our blog, we help beginners better understand the process and increase their chances of a successful Amazon product launch.

What is a product launch and where to start?

A product launch entails more than merely changing the status of a product in Seller Central from being in draft version to going on sale. New releases are more like promotional campaigns that begin before the product is available for purchase.

The Amazon A9 algorithm uses a number of variables to determine your product’s rating. The essential measures include click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate. It appears simple: sell some stuff, your rating will rise, resulting in more sales and, finally, your Amazon dream will come true. Regrettably, that is not how reality works.

Amazon will give you a set of impressions. It means that some customers will see your listing. When the customers click on your listing and buy your product (this is a conversion or CTR), Amazon will reward you with more impressions. More customers will see your listing. So the more clicks and conversions, the more customers will see your listing. It’s sort of a cycle, and it also works the other way: the fewer impressions you receive, the fewer sales you will make.

So, to successfully launch a product, you first need to optimize your listing. Simply put, getting a click will eventually land you a customer. If previously, sellers could use some tricks to bypass the algorithm, now it’s impossible to do so. In order to get the click, your listing must be optimized, which is the most challenging part.

The good news is that for starters, Amazon offers a so-called ‘honeymoon period, which gives a seller an initial boost in their organic rank. If a seller does everything right, it means an opportunity to jump into the top positions and stay there, even when the honeymoon is over and the real grind sets in.

What is a ‘honeymoon period’ in the Amazon product launch?

The ‘honeymoon’ period is an unadvertised time frame that allows new items to rank well right away and, more crucially, to remain highly rated.

While it may be tempting to delay your product debut in order to gauge the consumer reaction, doing so with an Amazon product launch loses this hidden, significant benefit.
Amazon does not provide details about this time, but it’s an approximately 30- to the 90-day period when the seller provides a new brand or product with an undeserved organic rank. Although your brand has yet to “earn” space on the first search results page, Amazon does this to evaluate your click-through rate, conversion rate, reviews, and other metrics to decide where your brand belongs in its seller ecosystem.

This opens up new possibilities. If you can improve the parameters that Amazon is examining, your product is more likely to sustain its amplified status after the honeymoon period is over.

Let’s look at the three best practices you should use to launch new items on Amazon effectively.

Work your listing content through

Optimized content will define your brand, influence purchasing decisions, and assist Amazon in determining whether you have a legitimate claim to victory over other companies.

There are two options for optimizing your listing. The first one is A/B testing, commonly used by Amazon sellers. However, there is one caveat with launching a product: there is nothing to try A/B testing on if it’s an entirely new listing. This means the Amazon algorithm has no historical data on your product, so it doesn’t understand how to position your listing. A/B testing can only be done on listing with a large amount of traffic, which is very expensive and time-consuming, so not suitable for new products.

When you try it with new listings, Amazon stores the negative historical data that you will later have to reset with long-lasting data that shows otherwise. Results will also not be accurate.

The other way is to optimize your listing as much as you can in a staged environment, prior to launching. Having accurate customer data is essential to test your listings properly. Why? Because when you already have all the data from real customers, you make sure that when the product launches it will match customers’ preferences. Validating your listing in an Amazon-specific environment will provide consumer-insight-driven information, will let you hit the ground running quickly, and achieve the highest chance of success.

Tools like Intellivy can assist you in researching what people look for, competitive keywords, phrases where you have a right to win, and the sales metrics required to rank for those terms. Include these phrases in your page material, particularly in the page titles. The material should seek to excite, engage, explain your brand’s narrative, and provide a memorable purchasing experience for your consumers.

Use rich visuals, lifestyle pictures, videos, and compelling thumbnails to promote your goods visually. Combine these with an informative, compendious copy. In addition, keyword-rich text overlays on your photographs help explain product characteristics and advantages concisely.

Get real positive reviews

Because your honeymoon period is limited, obtaining early and favorable feedback is critical. Reviews are important, and previously, there were different schemes that sellers were using to get those reviews: buying them, using manipulations, and over-relying on keywords. All of those techniques don’t work anymore, and the Amazon algorithm is only getting smarter.

The platform has been cracking down hard on anyone attempting to game the system and manufacture phony ratings, so you can get yourself into a bad situation trying to manipulate reviews. To address this issue, Amazon launched the Early Reviewer Program (for sellers) and Amazon Vine (for vendors) in the United States.

The thing that’s essential to getting actual reviews is getting conversions, by creating the best product listings based on customer feedback and data.

Add advertising to the menu

A solid advertising campaign that focuses on keyword targeting is the final pillar of your honeymoon strategy. Because sponsored advertising is taking over search results pages, you must look for possibilities to surpass the competition in the long run.

Conduct comprehensive research to identify which keywords you have a good chance of winning and how many units you need to sell in order to rank for that keyword. Concentrate on long- and medium-tail phrases that set your brand apart from the competitors.

Amazon’s algorithm will boost your product’s organic rank as you gather momentum and conversion rate. After that, you can invest in a bigger volume and more competitive terms.

After years of building our membership and fine-tuning our technique, our concept, dubbed Rapid Micro Testing, is now accessible to help you with the marketing challenges you experience as an Amazon Seller.

The Intellivy membership is made up of 28,000,000 consumers from the United States. They provide their candid opinion and aren’t scared to tell you where you can improve. It will help you develop a solid foundation for your Amazon brand, win the competition, and increase your CTR.

Are you seeking a powerful tool to validate your listings? Examine the Intellivy solution right now!