The dream for every Amazon seller is to gain the Best Seller badge in their category, and never is it more important than when a product’s peak season is coming up. At eBrands, we spend a lot of time focusing on how to most effectively gain the best seller badges for all of our products, so now that the holiday season is coming, or already underway, for many brands - we wanted to share a case study from one of our team’s successful efforts earlier this year.
To keep things interesting, we thought we’d pick one of our more unusual products to do the case study on, too. This led us to interviewing our brand manager, Diana, about how her team achieved the best seller badge in the run up to the peak summer sales season for their brand’s bat house products (you can find more info about the brand and all the great work it does here).
So what did you do first?
At the start of this year, we were moving between 3rd and 4th place in the ranking for the bat house category. We firmly believed that our product is the best in the category and the feedback from customers confirms that our belief is justified. The peak season for bat house sales is in the summer and we wanted to claim the best seller badge to take advantage of all the benefits that come with it during the peak season (especially those more effective PPC campaigns).
How did you increase your sales (and ranking)?
Visual Improvements
The first move we made was to improve the quality of our listing images (for not only the main images, but the secondary images, as well). We focused on three key areas:
- Design quality (crispness of the image, richness of colour, distinctiveness, etc…)
- Conveying the unique selling points of the product
- Demonstrating the positive emotional outcome of owning the bat house
Our second step was making sure that as we updated the images, we simultaneously increased our Amazon PPC advertising spend in order to maximise the impact of increased conversion.
However, while this generated some upward traction, it was not enough to unseat the best seller at the time - so we looked at a range of other options that we could use to give us the extra boost we were looking for.
Pricing Tactics
What we settled on was to anchor our short-term price a few cents below our competitor’s long-term price. This generated enough of a tilt in consumer demand to push us above the competition’s product. For a period we moved between 1st and 2nd place in the rankings but eventually the dual boost from the algorithm and search placements established us as the Best Seller in the category.
After you capture the Best Seller position, the algorithm favours you both in search results and advertisement placements, helping to cement your position. For example, our main competitor briefly challenged us with deep discounts to their prices. This move initially helped them to regain the Best Seller badge but the strategy was clearly unsustainable. A week after they had moved to discount their prices, we had already regained the badge by maintaining our current prices and gradually increasing PPC spend.
Patience
After holding the Best Seller badge for the full two weeks we began to optimise our profits by slowly increasing the price of the product. While we did this, we continuously checked the price sensitivity of our customers to the changes in the price. At the start of the process, we had initially dropped the price of the bat house down to around $31.95 from an initial price of $36.95, but by the end of the long process of gradual price increases we were able to reestablish our initial price - while also keeping the number one ranking for sales and the Best Seller badge that comes along with it. In addition, our position had been established strongly enough that even a large drop in prices by our competitors were unable to unseat us.
Were there any other actions you took during this process?
You don’t live in a vacuum.
We have outlined how we moved from step to step in gaining the Best Seller ranking, but these actions certainly weren’t the only things that the team did during this period. We were constantly looking for new ways to improve and grow the brand so that it could reach new heights and at the same time that the team were pushing towards the best seller badge through PPC, pricing and brand design adjustments, they were also looking at how to get Amazon Climate Pledge certifications, how to develop new product lines, and how to open new marketplaces and sales channels for the brand - and more.
Growing an Amazon sales channel requires you to be the best in many different areas, so always defining clear (and adaptable) strategies for your goals allows you to constantly upgrade your processes and brand quality so that your profit figures keep moving in the right direction.
Happy selling!
