The Amazon Flywheel Effect for Amazon Seller explained

There are days on Amazon, where one product just seems to be taking off: All the sudden you 2x or 3x the normal amount, it shots up in the rankings, and then eventually it goes back to the normal level. What you just experienced is the power of the Flywheel effect for Amazon Seller. Every Brand that sells its products on Amazon should know about to take advantage of it.

Starting Point: Increased Exposure for your Amazon Listing

Maybe you increased your ad spend on that day, or customer start clicking & buying more of your products. There are multiple ways to increase your exposure as a brand or seller on amazon’s marketplace. The easiest way being increasing your ad spend (if you have good click-through-rates). Other ways could be promoting your listing on Social Media, setting up coupons, or setting up a deal in sellercentral.com.

Increase Exposure should lead to More Sales

This is the most critical part: You need to have your listing optimized! You can get all the clicks, views on your listings, but if the listings doesn’t convert into sales, you can’t take advantage of the Flywheel Effect. The two most critical parts are:

• At least 3-4 high-quality images that show your product from different angles. But also pointing out key features that set up apart from your competitors
• Have 5 bullet points, with high-quality copy. Your goal should be that, if a buyer only reads those, that he/she/they have all the information about your product.

Now back to the Flywheel effect: Ideally, the increased exposure should now lead to more sales. In theory, if your conversion rate stays the same and you get more clicks and views on your listing, you should see more sales.

More Sales lead to a Higher Ranking on Amazon

The Amazon Rank is Amazon’s way of determining how easily this products sells on amazon.com to their customer base. These rankings get updated every (milli-) second, and are Amazon’s bread&butter. As a customer centric company (or customer obsessed), Amazon’s priority is to only show the most relevant products on their marketplace to their customer base, and that is determined by their ranking.

Amazon’s ranking system also determines which products they show on product detail page areas for “Featured Items You May Like” or “Inspired by your recent shopping trends”, etc. So if your products gets more exposure, and your sales are up this will lead to a better and better ranking.

…A Higher Ranking Leads to More Exposure!

Now we’ve gone full circle: Amazon’s Algorithm determined that our listing should have a better ranking, the listing starts to receive more exposure, traffic and awareness on Amazon’s platform. This will kick off the flywheel effect for you: Now you’ll even see more sales, your ranking gets even better, which will again lead to more exposure and so on! These are days Sellers and Brands on Amazon are living for!

The Flywheel effect can also work against you!

There are slow days, where you just seem to make no or a low amount of sales on amazon. You’ll notice your sales rank slowly but steadily plummeting, your organic sales disappearing: You just experienced the Flywheel effect working against you! However, also keep in mind: There are slow days for everybody.

There are couple of ways you can get out of it:

• Take a close look at your listing again: Do your keywords maybe need an update? Are the picture up to the high standard that customer expect? Are you taking advantage of ALL the picture slots that are available?
• What is your competition doing? Take a look and see what the competing listings are doing: Which unique selling points do they promote? How are their pictures? etc…
• Double check your ad spend: Did you eliminate non-performing keywords? Are you taking advantage of all the advertising formats? Is it time to up the ad budget?

Summary

It is essential to understand the Flywheel effect for Brands, if you want to or are already selling on Amazon’s marketplace. The dynamic between exposure, sales and rankings on amazon are your number one factor of success (next to selling a good product, of course). To even be able to get to stage where you can take advantage of the Flywheel effect, you MUST do your homework: Fix your listings, get fantastic product pictures, edit your copy, take advantage of A+ Content!

Afterwards, the easiest way to increase exposure are Ads, Ads, and Ads. If you need any help, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us! We’d be happy to take a look at your amazon account! Contact us now to make sure you can take advantage of the Amazon Flywheel effect!