Selling on Amazon? Dominate Your Category With This Trick

Ray Manley

Have you bought the weight loss supplement garcinia cambogia or any strings of “starry” LED lights on Amazon recently?

I may have written those product descriptions.

I’ve done a few Amazon product descriptions of these items over the last couple of years. When I took on the jobs I just focused on the format Amazon requires, the requirements my clients had given me, and crafting copy that touted the benefits of the products. (Which, by the way didn’t always align with what my clients wanted. But that’s often the line copywriters walk.)

The FBA business model

At the time I wasn’t interested in the business model my clients were trying to get off the ground. Now I see how they were leveraging “Fulfillment By Amazon” – virtually always referred to by the acronym FBA. Further, they were dealing with “white label products.”

Many of you know that this is a common strategy today, but if it’s a new term for you, a white label product is an item you buy from a manufacturer that you slap your own brand labeling on – the label is originally white…or blank.

There are many manufacturers that offer white label products and more sellers working with them and offering these re-branded products on Amazon, eBay and elsewhere. The competition is stiff and pricing is critical. Many white-label resellers buy merchandise through Alibaba.

Here’s the point: Dozens – if not hundreds – of sellers are offering the same items, yet there is always one product in each category that ends up as the bestseller. I went back to see how my product descriptions were doing. Frankly I didn’t even expect to find the garcinia cambogia to be offered because at the end of the project one of the partners unexpectedly died.

The folks who sold the LED lights had a long catalog of various electronic accessories and they were quite serious about their work, so I expected to see them still listed.

When I checked, the garcinia cambogia was still offered and so were all the electronics that I wrote up for the other people. The LED lights seemed to be doing very nicely with well over 1,000 positive reviews. The garcinia cambogia wasn’t selling. Their bottles of the product were the 500,000^th-plus “bestseller” in health and personal care while the best-selling garcinia cambogia supplement is #315 in health and personal care.

The key to a bestselling FBA product

I reviewed some of the best-selling items and made two important observations:

• Price is important, but not the sole determining factor,
  
• Bestsellers usually have the best product pictures.

I think garcinia cambogia best illustrates these two points. The top product in this category is not the lowest price per recommended dose, although it is very competitive in pricing.

The one thing that separates it from all the rest is its product photo. Virtually every other garcinia cambogia product photo shows the packaging. The best-selling garcinia cambogia shows the packaging, but with a flexible tape measure (the kind used in sewing) draped around it.

The power of a good product photo is also evident in other items. In the LED light string category, the products with dimmers that show the dimmers in the main picture, sell better.

Don’t just show your product

The important lesson here is that the best photos do more than merely show the prospect what the product looks like. They actually communicate a benefit of the product. The tape measure says, “You’ll lose inches from your waist.” The dimmer says, “You can create the ideal mood.” This sets these products apart from the others.

When customers on Amazon or eBay perform a search, they are presented with a long page of results. The easiest way to get a prospect to focus on your product is to have the best product photo on the page. Of course you want your copy to be SEO friendly, but it’s the product illustration that will initially catch the eye of the buyer – as long as it’s included on the first page of search results.

In the hyper-competitive environment of FBA selling, every detail is important. Be sure your product photo is the best and try to make it communicate an important benefit of your product.

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