Which product launch methods work in 2018?
This will be a summary of a youtube video that Scott Voelker did on his The Amazing Seller Channel.
He was answering a question from one of his listener – Jacob, asking the new update that amazon did which is giving away product will not boost the BSR ( Best Seller Rank ) anymore and wants to find out if this is true and there is any other method he can use.
Scott answers his question starting with 3 main product launch methods.
1. Old method – Product giveaway method
This is a method that sellers commonly used in order to boost their BSR and sales by giving away products for free or for heavily discounted price( more than 90% discount from list price ) in an exchange for a good review.
Since the amazon shut down these kind of free product giveaways by deleting customer reviews who purchased product pretty much for free and not really boosting product BSR,
If you are still using this method you may get disadvantages selling an amazon in the future.
And also the only reason why sellers do free product giveaways is to rank on amazon which less likely to happen now, and it will not even cover the cost of the product most of the time – definitely don’t want to lose money just to boost BSR which may or maynot be working anymore.
Products with lots of reviews are generally more competitive, so finding a niche product with low reviews & competition will not need product giveaways and we can use 2 other methods we will discuss below.
2. Recommended Method – 10 – 50% discount or lower price product launch
Building an email list who is passionate or interested about your product or using an influencer and giving them discount coupon is the recommended method that will help you get your BSR up and boost your sales for short amount of time.
You can do this by using 10 -50 % off coupon code for certain amount of days you want it to be discounted and send emails that you built to let your customer know there is sales going on for limited time.
This will be an ideal way to guarantee your BSR boost from every sales including discounted products.
You can even lower your price not using coupon code (unless discounted price does not cover your product cost.) and in this way, you are just lowering your list price for couple of days which will be normal for amazon to raise your sales rank.
Keep in mind that if you just want specific amount of product that you want to be discounted, it will be better for you to make same amount of coupon codes to manage your inventory.
P.S. – Try not to build email list from the review groups. Once amazon caught customer who is doing reviews for discounted products all the time, they will delete all their reviews including reviews that they did on your product.
3. Amazon advertising method – PPC ( Pay Per Click )
Pay per click is keyword bidding advertisement that amazon offers for the sellers.
When you are using PPC, you are driving customer traffic through keywords by paying amazon to help you be front of the customer. This will not go away unless amazon makes a ridicules changes on their platform.
Pay per click will help you rank on amazon by showing up on customer’s search results, so it is essential to keep spending on PPC to reach 1st page or be first product that customer searched for.
We recommend sellers to do product discount coupon giveaways using email lists or influencers to boost sales and BSR in short amount of time, and using PPC to help rank on keyword result in order to keep ranking on customer search results on amazon.
