I was listening to NPR yesterday (as a Comms pro, media consumption is an all day everyday thing), and my ears perked up when Amazon was mentioned. But this wasn’t the typical big box e-tailer story. This piece was about how Amazon is now also dominating search. According to an NPR/Marist poll, customers conduct nearly half of their product searches on Amazon—that’s up from 35% just last year (as reported by CNBC). And as found in the same poll, 69% percent of Amazon Prime members start their search on Amazon.
What this means is 1. If you’re not selling on Amazon, it’s worth consideration (and we can help you) and 2. If you are on Amazon, you better make sure you’re paying attention to your product descriptions.
We already know that when it comes to natural products shoppers, they do their homework before purchasing. There are over 14,000 dietary supplement brands listed on Amazon and the number of natural products is even higher, so how do you stand out? Here are five ways to boost your product descriptions:
- Make it Visual: Nutrex Hawaii does a good job of this with their BioAstin product listing. They show the visual benefits, their seals, and verifications.
- Showcase the Science: Science helps sell. Consumers want to know that what they’re buying has research behind it. Doctor’s Best does a good job of this with all of their product listings. They include a summary of the research with references.
- Be Transparent: Consumers want to know what’s in the bottle, where it came from and the background behind it. Amazon has done a good job of this with its Amazon Elements line, which my colleague Scott wrote about earlier this year. Each product listing includes data to trace the source of the ingredients.
- Be Responsive: Monitor your listings and respond to consumer questions and review.
- Go Beyond Traditional Search: Keywords aren’t the only king when it comes to search. Voice home assistants like Alexa also play a role. As also found in the NPR/Marist poll, 12%of regular online shoppers have used a voice home assistant to purchase products. Your web team should make sure they’re building skills for Alexa to use for voice queries.
More to come on this topic in the future. For now, for our US friends, we hope you have a healthy and happy 4th of July.
~Traci