How to Launch a New Product on Amazon – Step By Step Guide

Launching a new product on Amazon is challenging, especially for newbies. In addition, not all potential sellers are experienced in creating Amazon listings, promoting products with Amazon PPC, and increasing sales.

Given the rising number of Amazon sellers in 2022, standing out in this ruthless market is not an easy task. However, once you start selling and getting paid, you will feel more sure about the success of your online store.

Table of content:

• Amazon Product Launch Checklist
  • Start by Learning How the Amazon A9 Algorithm Works
  • Successful Amazon Product Launch Starts with the Right Product Research
  • Integrate Brand Development with Your Long-Term Strategy
  • Work Out an Effective Marketing Strategy
  • Create Unexpected Value for Your Audience
  • Access the Tools That Speed Up Your Business Scaling
  • Optimize Your Listings
  • Update Your Listings to Prepare Them for Further Optimization
  • Keep Track of Your Customer Engagement
  • Consider Earning an Amazon Prime Badge
  • Create High-Quality Product and Brand Content
  • Drive Traffic to Your Listings from External Channels
    • Leverage Email Newsletter to Offer Exclusive Discounts
    • Capitalize on Influencer Marketing
    • Use Facebook to Connect with Your Prospective Buyers
  • Launch a Structured PPC Campaign
  • Follow Amazon’s TOS
  • Boost Sales Through Already Successful Amazon Products
  • Replenish Your Inventory
  • Mind Your A/B Testing and Optimization
• Final Word

Amazon Product Launch Checklist – Top 20 Tips for Brands

An efficient Amazon product launch implies more than the first couple of sales. You should also figure out product research, listing optimization, keyword research, and other steps. Read on to find out the TOP-20 tips on how to launch a product on Amazon.

• Start by Learning How the Amazon A9 Algorithm Works

Typical problem sellers encounter after Amazon’s product launch is a lack of sales. And this is where the A9 algorithm gets engaged.

First and foremost, you should remember that Amazon is not Google. While the search engine is about relevance, the marketplace is about sales. Therefore, despite multiple ranking factors, sales play a crucial role.

The only explanation for poor sales is that you might not rank high. And it ultimately results in low or no sales at all. The more it repeats, the sooner you run out of motivation.

Accordingly, if you aim to rank high on Amazon and boost your sales, consider figuring out the principles of the A9 algorithm.

• Successful Amazon Product Launch Starts with the Right Product Research

Deciding on the right product and a suitable business model is essential. There are several points to take into account:

• Clients. It may seem somewhat apparent, but ensure you reach out to the right audience. When doing product research, consider the following:
  • What are your client’s needs?
  • How often do they buy goods from you?
  • What problems do they experience when getting similar products?
• Desire. Make sure you sell the items you love and are fascinated with. It is the secret to creating product profitability in the long run.
• Competitors. The more competitors are there, the more challenging it becomes to rank a particular item. Therefore, it is crucial to examine what your competitors are doing and look up to them. You might choose a narrow niche and expand further since low competition will boost your sales.

• Integrate Brand Development with Your Long-Term Strategy

Branding has become obligatory on Amazon. Consequently, if you are passionate about your online store, you will pay attention to branding in your Amazon product launch strategy.

Define what you want to sell, how you introduce your brand to your audience, and what is your competitive edge. It will let you specify your business strength and potential buyers and create your brand story.

Yoni Mazor, CGO & Co-founder at GETIDA, had this to say on this matter:

“As a seller, it is imperative that you provide accurate, precise weight and dimensions for each of your products. If this information is inaccurately reported to Amazon, you may be overcharged for your inventory which will hurt your margins. For FBA store owners selling on international markets, pay special attention to the unit of measurements being used and precisely convert your measurements from Metric to Imperial or vice versa. Keep a close eye on your monthly weights and dimensions to ensure Amazon has not erroneously changed anything.”

• Work Out an Effective Marketing Strategy

Make sure your team of marketing specialists is experienced enough to present your product at its best. The primary objective of a successful marketing plan is customer retention. Therefore, consider devising a loyalty-focused marketing strategy. Think over the following aspects of Amazon’s new product launch:

• Promote strengths, not features;
• Learn how various sales channels work;
• Target the relevant audience on social networks. Define what they expect from your product;
• Prioritize your clients’ needs.

Yoni Kozminski, Co-founder & CEO at Escala, had this to say on this matter:

“Sellers take a bottom-up approach in the building process, which means they look at a product launch in a vacuum without considering all of the overarching business functions impacted by the launch.”

• Create Unexpected Value for Your Audience

On Amazon, buyers want to get a high-quality product on time. Unfortunately, fulfilling such customer service requirements is unlikely to earn your first reviews. Therefore, when you launch a new product, you must endeavor to create incredible value for your buyers, fostering them to leave feedback.

You can offer it in the form of discounts for further purchases or some helpful information that complements your selling items. Also, the common problem of all sellers is leaving review generation to chance and not being proactive.

• Access the Tools That Speed Up Your Business Scaling

An effective Amazon product launch involves a few stages, each with additional levels. Thus, consider deciding on the relevant tools that automate and simplify the launch phase. You are looking to access marketing, product, and task management tools to manage every stage of your product launch. Apart from that, get to know how ads and brand analytics work on Amazon. Learn the key metrics and why tracking them is essential.

• Optimize Your Listings

Listing optimization can be divided into three main parts:

1. Keyword research. Define all the relevant keywords and phrases associated with your selling item, and list them in order of relevance. Choose your primary keywords and leverage Google Keyword Planner to find Amazon-specific keywords. Alternatively, you can review what keywords your competitors rank for.
2. Keyword optimization. Once you have decided on keywords, set them in your listing title and description. Consider optimizing your keywords for Amazon SEO and customer intent. Understanding your clients is paramount for standing out on Amazon. Please ensure you know what they need and prepare your listings so that customers purchase from you.
3. Keyword tracking. As soon as you optimize your selling items with the relevant keywords, ensure they are compatible with your listing. Track the performance metrics (e.g., CTR, clicks, and conversions). Focus on high-performing words while excluding non-converting ones.

This is what Emilie Guillo, Co-founder & COO at Margin Business, thinks about the sellers making mistakes when writing or optimizing their listings:

“Many sellers forget about the cultural differences between countries and use, for example, US feedback to update or write a listing for another country. Yet, the complaint or positive feedback may be completely different in the targeted country.”

• Update Your Listings to Prepare Them for Further Optimization

You need to update Amazon detail pages to fulfill the dynamic requirements of your clients. Leverage the information from buyer questions and feedback to adjust your content. If customers may not understand your product’s features, attach an image clarifying them.

Change the title and description after publishing your listings to match the sales data. We believe it is best to update them once a quarter, but you can do it more often as you eliminate bugs from your product launch.

• Keep Track of Your Customer Engagement

You need to keep track of your customer engagement and account details. Otherwise, your productivity will decrease and impact your ranking and seller status. In addition, since clients are always eager to know more, all detail pages have a place for buyer questions, visible to all visitors.

Consider answering these to boost customer satisfaction. Remember that while some clients ask directly about your product, others have these questions in mind. In addition, buyer questions may help you define gaps in your content or problems you must address in your A+ Content. For instance, what your product is made of, its size, application troubles, etc.

• Consider Earning an Amazon Prime Badge

Always go for earning an Amazon Prime badge. It lets the buyer understand that your goods can be securely delivered to their home in a couple of days or even sooner.

Customer conversions skyrocket once a product earns the Prime badge, resulting in an average sales increase of over 50%. It is partly due to Amazon’s search algorithm that tends to place items that qualify for Prime shoppers who are more active in the marketplace.

• Create High-Quality Product and Brand Content

Often, sellers seek to start attracting clients through ad campaigns and promotions when introducing new items. However, they will waste their ad budget on low sales without high-quality content to communicate the product value and boost conversions. Therefore, double-check you create optimized content early in the product onboarding journey.

• Drive Traffic to Your Listings from External Channels

Initial sales are challenging to get on Amazon since items that rank below the first couple of pages are hardly visited by buyers. Thus, the main reason to use external channels is to present a list of your Amazon products to prospects who are ready to make a purchase.

Leverage Email Newsletter to Offer Exclusive Discounts

If you have an eCommerce store outside of Amazon with a database of emails ready, you can capitalize on it. Most users on the list likely purchased from you earlier or expressed interest in your assortment of goods. By offering them a discount through an email newsletter with a link to your updated product list, you significantly increase the likelihood of making multiple sales and creating an efficient Amazon product launch.

Capitalize on Influencer Marketing

Another way to attract your target audience is influencer marketing. For example, giving a discount code to an influencer in your field and asking them to add a link to your product listing can help provide social proof when product reviews are a fallback. Nevertheless, remember that you lose extra income when you pay massive commissions to influencers.

Use Facebook to Connect with Your Prospective Buyers

You have three options to connect with your audience via Facebook. They are:

1. Depending on the item you want to sell, you can pick appropriate Facebook Groups with an audience who, based on their preferences, can be suitable for your new selling items.
2. Another way to capitalize on Facebook opportunities when launching a product is through Facebook Ads. Facebook lets you reach prospects who might be interested in your offers.
3. Facebook Bot is the most efficient way to make your first sales.

• Launch a Structured PPC Campaign

We recommend making some changes to your current PPC strategy:

1. Initially, your aim is not to generate an income but to distribute your product.
2. As soon as you strive to make maximum sales, consider sticking to fixed bids rather than dynamic ones.
3. Using PPC ads for any of your efficient product listings has two goals. Firstly, you can draw the attention of prospective buyers who have already expressed interest in some of your items and potentially sell them. And secondly, if the target item already has many positive reviews, it may serve as social proof for the new item you are promoting.

• Follow Amazon’s TOS

We know that every new start is challenging. And although you may get fascinated with the idea of falling back on black hat tactics to speed up your Amazon product launch, you should know that it is not worth it. Lately, Amazon has been steadily cracking down on sellers leveraging SuperURLs or demonstrating suspiciously high sales rates. An attempt to cheat the algorithm will most likely result in account blocking.

• Boost Sales Through Already Successful Amazon Products

Remember that regular discounts on a new product are inefficient since prospects should find and buy the item. So you won’t be on the top of search results in the beginning. However, you may adjust any of your highly rated goods to solve this visibility problem.

• Replenish Your Inventory

Assess your sales and get ready to restock early. For example, you might pull until the last moment but run out of inventory before restocking. Therefore, inventory management is crucial since running out of stock negatively affects your rankings and sales.

• Mind Your A/B Testing and Optimization

Organic keyword rank is an excellent performance indicator of your new selling item. If you do everything right, your rank will rise steadily over the first couple weeks.

Apart from that, you may try A/B testing. But consider changing one variable at a time so that you can define what exactly matters.

Finally, research your competitors to see how their strategies differ. Learning from the experience of those who have already succeeded can give you an edge when deciding ways to improve your strategy.

Final Word

All sellers’ common question is, “How to launch a new product on Amazon.” Now we believe you are well aware of the necessary steps you should take. In the end, the platform prefers items with stable sales dynamics. However, following your long-term strategy, products can make their way into the crowd.