3 Steps to Improving your Amazon Business Catalog [List]

Regardless if you’ve been handed an inventory of products you know nothing about, or if you’ve been maintaining your catalog for years, there may be a few things you haven’t considered when managing your products.

Although there are many resources to choose from within Amazon’s Vendor Central Resource Center, the following actions are some simple ways to improve the findability of your products:

Create variation families

If you have many items with similar features, be sure your customer can see them all immediately. By using Amazon’s variation form, you can associate your products with one another using up to two variation options. The most common variants include color, style and size.

Variation swatches help your customers find similar products without having to go back to the Amazon search results**—**decreasing the chance they will settle with someone else’s product!

Add additional images and videos

Go beyond your main product photo and show additional product shots! It’s difficult for customers to visualize some features of your product without a clear photo of how it works or adapts in different situations. Does it accommodate men and women with a simple adjustment? Show photos of your product being used by both!

Keep in mind that large images make a greater impact on sales:

The 1000×1000 pixel image size allows Amazon to offer customers their Hover-to-Zoom feature… which they’ve found has a dramatic effect on conversion rates. StartupBros, How to Rank Your Products on Amazon – The Ultimate Guide 

In addition, although images can be uploaded easily to your image library, videos will have to be requested through a case file. Simply create an Excel file with two columns that list your ASIN and video link.

Here are the requested video specifications as of January 2016:

• Number of Files: 1 per video.
• Formats: MPEG-2 (.mpeg), Windows Media (.wmv), QuickTime (.mov) or FLV (.flv).
• Minimum Video Quality: At least 720px wide, at least 872 kbps. Either 4:3 (standard) or 16:9 (widescreen) aspect ratios work equally well. Aspect ratio is the width divided by the height: if a video is 720px wide, then a 4:3 aspect video will be 540px tall and a 16:9 video will be 405px tall.
• Maximum Size Allowed: 499Mb. (best results if under 100Mb.)
• Length of File: Unrestricted

Refine product keywords

An important rule of search terms is they should only contain words that are not part of any other piece of information on your product’s listing.

For example, if a user were to type “long blue dress,” each word of their query must exist somewhere in your fields**—**title, item bullets, description or keywords.

If your product is listed as “MyBrand 012345678 Evening Dress (Navy),” your product should also include the words “long” and “blue” within one of its fields. You might add an item bullet that describes your dress as “Long, flowing material tailored to flatter any figure.” The word “blue” however might be more appropriate to add to the product’s search terms, so it doesn’t clutter your description or bullets.

Once you request your keywords to be updated using an item maintenance form (found in the Resource Center), you can verify your product has been updated by pasting in your entire string of keywords. If it finds a match, you’re all set!

An example of search terms for the example above might include the words “strapless;girl;size;beaded;prom;blue;flower;maxi;formal.”

As of March 2016, keywords should be:

• Separated by a semicolon (save space by not using any spaces after semicolons)
• A maximum of 200 characters including semicolons (use a character counter like lettercount.com to double-check)
• As simple as possible**—**if you create a compound term, it will search for that full term only

Break away from using the minimal content required and go beyond entering redundant keywords**—**help your products get found by adding variations, images and videos, and spend some time considering the best keywords for your products! Your customers will be glad you did.