Have you ever wondered what it takes to succeed as a seller on Amazon? Dalia, the Handmade Mastermind and creator of the Mastering Amazon course, made over $600,000 on Amazon Handmade last year. She joins us today on The Jam to share the top 3 habits of highly successful Amazon sellers. Stick around!
Back again and we’re not mad about it!
Today, we have a special guest joining us who is a regular on The Jam and who we love chatting with! We have Dalia Abdalla, the Handmade Mastermind and creator of the Mastering Amazon course.
Highly successful amazon sellers have these habits in common
We’ve got a fun topic to talk about today. We’re going to be talking about the top three habits of highly successful Amazon sellers. This is going to be a good one!
Dalia: I know your audience is mainly Etsy sellers. I know some of them do sell on Amazon, but a lot of these tips can be used anywhere online. I’m excited to get started with the first habit!
#1 Habit of Highly Successful Amazon Sellers: Spend Time Optimizing
Dalia: The majority of me and my team’s to-do list isn’t fulfilling orders. I’d say seventy percent is spent on optimizing. And it is not just SEO, but it’s quite a few things to make sure that the customer experience is a fantastic one. What that translates to is higher conversion rates.
This sounds simple, it’s just three things. But you’re learning every day from conversations with your customers, their messages, and reviews.
Looking for variations
Dalia: My team and I typically look for opportunities to optimize our listings in terms of variations being offered. But we also look for opportunities to optimize our photos and descriptions. This sounds simple, it’s just three things. But you’re learning every day from conversations with your customers, their messages, and reviews.
Do these conversations sound familiar?
“Hey, what color does this come in?” And you’re like, “Did you read the description?”
Or “Does it come in this variation?” And you’re thinking, “Look at the photos.”
It’s through these everyday conversations that I started to understand how people shop.
Learn from the messages
Dalia: When you’re shopping online, it’s not like having somebody in person telling you, “Hey, this is what’s available.”
You don’t get that back and forth with someone. So not everything gets seen. Some things get missed. Not everybody has the same shopping behavior. It’s important to learn from your customer messages, and it’s as simple as asking yourself, “What do people keep asking me?”
For example, my Etsy photos now include the ink and envelope color at the bottom of the photo. My website has it in a certain place as well. You can learn a lot about opportunities for optimization through your messages. Ask yourself, “What messages do I get?” And where there’s one message, there are many customers that think the same.
Customer reviews
Dalia: A couple of other ways we optimize is through our reviews. Not just your own, but your competitors too. For example, you might have to look through and say, “What are they frustrated with?”
You could see what customers are happy with, especially from your competitors’ reviews. You could optimize this on your listings or your experience or your packaging, whatever it may be. But you’re getting data from customers. You’re literally getting the information directly from them.
To become a highly successful Amazon seller, don’t brush it off
Dalia: I think the biggest issue I see with sellers is they take that feedback and they brush it off as if they’re right and the customer is wrong. It’s not about right or wrong here.
Online is not a perfect world in terms of shopping. Everybody’s behavior is different. The key is to keep learning from them and adjusting your listings to make a much better shopping experience based on the feedback you’ve received.
I have plenty of examples. I’m sure your listeners can think of examples as well.
You don’t have to agree
This doesn’t mean you have to agree with all the feedback you receive. We can agree that if customers are talking about something consistently, that’s something that’s important to them. However, if there were a handful of customers that wanted you to do something that was off-brand for you, you could agree that you understand they may want whatever that is. But from your brand perspective, you’re not going to fulfill that request.
Remember, folks are also learning
Personally, we’ve been buying online for a long time. But we have to remember that everyone hasn’t been at that same pace. Believe it or not, there are a lot of people that still aren’t doing a lot of buying online. So it’s not as intuitive to them like, “Oh, did you look in the description?”
“What do you mean, the description? Where’s that? What dropdown? What is that?”
So some people are still learning about shopping online.
Laughing & tackling the issue
Dalia: I have a lot of older customers buying stationary for themselves. Once in a while, when they purchase, I get a return request immediately. They might say something like, “I didn’t mean to purchase this.” And I’m thinking, “How does that happen? You put it in your cart. You saw the price at checkout.”
So this is my approach and I hope your listeners can take something from it.
I laugh about the issue for a moment and joke about it. Then we say, “Okay, but for real, what are these customers experiencing?”
Checking the process first hand
Sometimes I get my assistants to use their phones and act like they’re checking out to see what they experience. If I really need to, I get a third party involved. I know this is crazy, but this is a habit of highly successful Amazon sellers. I might get my sister to walk through our process to see if she understands it. And some people (to be honest) just don’t check the price.
We tend to put our own biases and experiences on people. So I had to realize my customers were probably checking out without checking the price or not realizing something was still in their cart. People use their cart to save items and can forget to remove items they decided they didn’t want.
#2 Habit of Highly Successful Amazon Sellers: Focus on Getting Reviews
Dalia: Another habit of highly successful Amazon sellers, is we focus on getting reviews. I want to make it clear that everybody starts out with no reviews. Every single person that sells online. Essentially, it’s a numbers game. Not everyone that purchases from you will leave a review, we all know that. Your job is to work on getting as many reviews as you can.
One approach
Dalia: One way my team and I approach it is if I had to rely on repeat business, what would I do differently? How would I make sure that every single person that comes to me and purchases, has the best experience?
By the way, this is kind of difficult when you’re selling as much as some sellers. We sell a lot. But we still don’t let that get the best of us. We make sure we step back and see if we can implement even something small that can impact the customer experience. That will influence getting a positive review.
Conversion rate improvement
Dalia: Over time, positive reviews that go on Amazon will help improve the conversion rate. Again, people will still buy without reviews. It happens to me all the time when I put new products up. So don’t worry about that. On two of my best sellers, the conversion rate is 25% which is insane. This is because of how many reviews I built upon it. We took it so seriously.
#3 Habit of Highly Successful Amazon Sellers: Analyze Your Numbers
Dalia: Don’t forget to look at your numbers. On Amazon, it’s called business reports — stats, analytics, whatever you want to call it. It can be numbers from your regular organic traffic, or it could be ads (if you’re running ads). Regardless, you should know your numbers. You should understand what’s converting, what’s not, what needs improvement. This can be overwhelming for a lot of sellers. I completely understand. First, you should know where the business support section is on Amazon.
What you’re looking for
Dalia: What you’re looking for (the easiest thing people can do) is what has a high number of views. And you could sort by highest to lowest. You could say, “What has a really high number of views, but not a high conversion rate?” Here’s why: You could go to those listings and let’s say you have a big opportunity listing. You already have half the battle won. People already see you, you’re already visible in search, so how do you optimize to get more of those sales? You could track it.
Looking ahead
Let’s say if you check the last 30 days and your conversion rate was 3%. After you make some changes, look for the next 30 days and see if it’s improved. That’s what I typically do. And the same thing applies to ads. Ads are a little more complicated, but the simplest thing you can do is look at your organic traffic and analyze those numbers.
We absolutely agree
Numbers are a hugely important thing! If you’re not looking at your numbers, first of all, you won’t know what to be optimizing and what to be spending your time on. You’re also not keeping track of what’s working. If you did do optimizations to things, are those new changes working? Are the new photos better? Are the new keywords giving you views and visits to your listings at that point?
Dalia: Exactly. I just document it in my calendar. If I have to follow up in 40 days, I check. You don’t have to write all the numbers down, meaning you could easily go back to your reports and check the previous 30 days. As long as you’re writing down those dates.
Watching the numbers when you’re a highly successful Amazon seller
Do you ever find that you’re watching the numbers, but they get to a point where they’re optimized up to your top conversion rate? Let’s say you’re converting at 20%, and that’s just what your shop is doing. You’ve done that for all your listings, and it’s not really moving. Do you ever get to that point? Where you’re just watching the numbers to make sure they don’t go down?
Spending time on what’s lower
Dalia: If something’s converting around the 10-20% range, I typically don’t spend time on it. I spend time on the ones that are lower. We could argue that I can probably make it a little bit higher, but my time is best spent on items that have a high number of views that are not converting as much.
Sometimes when I do optimize things, it’s not per listing. I sell stationery. So let’s say I don’t have a color chart (of course I do), but if I didn’t and I was like, “I’m gonna add a color chart, that seems like it would help conversion rate,” I would add it across the board to my listings.
Focusing on the experience
Dalia: I don’t particularly look for dropping numbers. There are months that I do better than others. It can drive you crazy to compare. And I do know the highs and lows. I keep a side-eye on those. But I’m always in it every single day and my team will tell me. I might take a look and see if there’s something I should be concerned about, otherwise, I don’t super focus on that. I focus on how to continue to improve the experience.
For those that freeze
For people who open up their Amazon business report or their Etsy stats, and their head just kind of starts spinning and they freeze up and don’t know what to do, how would you not only recommend that they get over that wall or that mental barrier that they might have, but make that into a habit? What should they do to keep coming back to do that repeatedly? Since it’s important.
Prioritizing is key to becoming a highly successful Amazon seller
Dalia: For me and my team, it’s about prioritizing. We understand the importance of sales. The biggest thing here is sales and customer experience. When you start to have that mindset, it might be easier for most people just to schedule in their phone.
Set it to remind you every 30 days, every last Friday of the month, whatever it is. It’s helpful to tackle this in bite-sized chunks. Just check the top three highest viewed items and see what you can do to improve their conversion rate.
Breaking it down
Dalia: Breaking it down helps it to become more manageable. Sometimes we don’t know where to start and just by saying check the top three highest viewed items, can really help with not becoming overwhelmed. And of course, if they’re really overwhelmed, get my course. That section of the course (particularly the business report section and the ad section), are broken down into manageable videos because I teach the way I learn.
Learning in bite-sized chunks
Dalia: I have ADHD, and so I need things broken down into bite-sized chunks so I know how to begin a project and end one. A lot of my students absolutely love that I break it down in that fashion. It’s easy for them to digest and apply, and I just make it much easier to do.
Dalia’s course
You mentioned your course here, we also talked about it in a previous Jam. So if people want to go back and learn more about it, that’s a good deep dive for them to go to. Could you give people a high-level overview of what your course is about?
Mastering Amazon and becoming a highly successful Amazon seller
Dalia: It’s a system that I used to get my Amazon shop to where it is today. It breaks down into keyword research (you guys know I absolutely love keyword research). Then, of course, it is optimizing your listings. That’s a huge section because there are quite a few things that you need to optimize: SEO, photos, all that stuff.
I also cover additional things you could do to increase your results such as Amazon FBA, as well as ads. And the last one is tweaking, which is essentially like optimizing. It helps to identify things in your business reports, things in your ad reports, and what to do and how to do it, which is fantastic. It literally walks you through all of this and holds your hand. Through the course, people are able to grow their Amazon shop, make some money, and get found in search.
Final thoughts
You mentioned it was Amazon, but like you said, it can apply to anyone in the eCommerce space. Which is fantastic! Thank you for taking the time to do that. If people want to find out more about you, where should they head for that?
Dalia: The easiest place to find me is my Facebook group, the Handmade Mastermind, and at thehandmademastermind.com.
Awesome, thank you! Well, thank you again for joining us, Dalia. It’s always awesome to have you and talk with you.
Happy selling, everyone!
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