Selling on Amazon

Amazon is the purest intent channel there is. People arrive with a credit card saved and a search already typed. You win by showing up on the right searches with a listing that converts.

Setup

1. Seller Central account (Professional plan if you'll sell more than a few units a month).
2. Brand Registry once you have a trademark filed. It unlocks A+ content, brand protection, Vine, and more ad types.
3. Fulfillment:
   • FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon): you ship inventory to Amazon, and they store, pack, ship, and handle returns. You get the Prime badge.
   • FBM (Fulfilled by Merchant): you ship orders yourself. More control, usually no Prime badge.
4. Product IDs: each product needs a GTIN (UPC or EAN) unless you qualify for an exemption.

The listing is the landing page

• Title: what it is, the key feature, the size. Follow Amazon's category rules. Don't stuff claims you can't back up.
• Images: a white-background main image, then product, lifestyle, size, and how-to images.
• Bullets: mechanism and proof, not adjectives.
• A+ content: the visual story under the fold. It requires Brand Registry.
• Reviews: the biggest conversion lever. Amazon Vine can seed early reviews on a new product.

Keep stock up. Running low can cost you the Prime badge and your ranking.

Amazon ads

Sponsored Products (ads that look like search results) is where to start.

Structure

• An auto campaign as a feeder: Amazon finds searches for you
• Manual campaigns for the searches that prove themselves
• One campaign per match type (exact, phrase, broad) so you can see and bid each one separately
• Use negative keywords to stop campaigns competing with each other: the phrase campaign blocks the terms that already live in exact

Bidding

• The suggested bid is often what it takes to actually win the auction. It isn't what your margin can survive. Know your break-even before you raise bids.
• Bid highest on proven exact terms and lower on broad discovery.

The weekly loop

1. Pull the search term report
2. Move searches that converted into exact campaigns
3. Add searches that wasted money as negatives
4. Adjust bids on proven terms

Reading the numbers

• Sessions and conversion rate (Business Reports) show how the listing performs.
• ACOS is ad spend divided by ad sales. Compare it to your margin, not to someone else's ACOS.
• Total ACOS (ad spend divided by all sales) shows whether ads are lifting organic sales too.
• Watch partial weeks. Comparing a week of traffic to six days of orders makes conversion look worse than it is.

How Amazon differs from Meta

On Meta, you give the algorithm clean data and let it find your customer. On Amazon, you find the customer yourself by owning the right keywords and winning the right auctions.