The second stop on our journey through the Digital Marketing wilderness has brought us to the daunting jungle of competing with Amazon. Competing with Amazon for ecommerce sales is like trying to find your way through a thick and overgrown jungle. They are both large, intimidating and difficult to navigate. We encounter many clients who are at a loss for strategies to take on Amazon in an effective way. Due to the company’s size and reach, Amazon has extremely strong customer service, competitive pricing, and brand recognition. But don’t worry! As always, DMi Partners is here to guide you through that frightening jungle to reach the other side of ecommerce efficiency and high ROI! By using methods aimed at improving on-site purchase incentives and user experience, you can set yourself up to attract purchasers to your site instead of Amazon. Here are our top 7 recommendations:

1. Amazon Links
Problem: Affiliates often prioritize Amazon links over linking directly to the brand’s site because Amazon typically has a higher conversion rate and provides a better revenue return for publishers.

Solutions: Brands need to offer affiliate partners something unique and competitive to entice affiliates to prioritize linking directly to the brand’s site vs. Amazon. Brands should think about limited time offers on shipping, free gifts with purchase, highlighting exclusive products that aren’t available through Amazon, extending vanity or discount codes, and offering a commission rate that is more aggressive than Amazons Associate Program. Additionally, brands need to think through how they can better connect to the affiliate audience to drive higher conversion rates – are there certain products that sell well with that affiliates demographic that the affiliate can highlight? Would a co-branded landing page with the brand and affiliate help the affiliate’s audience feel more connected to the brand and provide a better consumer experience? These are all things to consider when trying to drive more consumers direct to you site instead of Amazon.

2. Lower Prices
Problem: Your products are popping up on Amazon at a price lower than your own ecommerce site. This often occurs because resellers or wholesale partners of our clients are trying to offload inventory and are willing to do so at little to no profit. This undermines our clients’ efforts to drive sales through their own site, because shoppers will easily sniff out the lower price on Amazon and shop there.

Solutions: It’s critical to lock down this type of price undercutting in your reseller and wholesale agreements. By restricting your partners from selling your product lower than your on-site price, you’re ensuring a level playing field. This requires some foresight when writing your partner contracts, but it will protect you in the long run.

3. Customer Service
Problem: Amazon has very strong customer service, both in customer satisfaction and consumer relations. Everything is ‘easy’ with Amazon, from checkout to the returns process.

Solutions: Utilize a competitive return policy and make the returns as easy as possible on the consumer. Partnering with companies like Happy Returns can make a huge difference in customer satisfaction. Rothy’s utilizes this service and makes returns simple for their shoppers. If someone needs to return a pair of Rothy’s they just bring them to a nearby Happy Returns partner. They will scan the item, get the details for what product the shopper would like to exchange their item for (e.g. a new size or color), and that’s it. The returns partner takes care of shipping the item back and the new exchanged shoes arrive within a couple days. Experiences like this leave a lasting impression and help build brand loyalty. Another thing we can take advantage of over Amazon in regards to customer service is in human interaction. While it may be next to impossible to get a person on the phone at Amazon, you can make it easy to talk to a real human at your company. Highlight your customer service phone number and utilize live chat on your site. Myprotien.com products are available on amazon, but most of their customers buy directly from their site. This is largely in part to their extremely accessible customer service team (of real humans), who are educated on the product.

4. User Experience
Problem: It is very easy to find what you’re looking for on Amazon, and when you do find that item, it’s even easier to order it.

Solutions: Take steps to improve your user experience. This goes beyond having a strong search function. User Experience has come a long way over the last 5 years, and because of that users are expecting simplicity and perfection in their browsing experience. We must remember to cater to that. Make sure your navigation is structured in a way that makes sense and that the labels you use leave a strong information scent. Utilize an intuitive product filter that gives plenty of options without becoming overwhelming. Make your products easy to find, and use “similar products” or “you might also like” widgets on product pages. Last but not least, make the checkout as streamlined as possible. Utilize a one page checkout that only gathers pertinent information, encourage creating an account to save the user’s info for a quicker checkout in the future, and offer multiple payment options. Apple pay, Paypal, credit card, and ironically enough, Amazon Pay. What better way to compete with the ease of Amazon checkout than offering users the option to pay with their amazon account?

5. Re-purchasers
Problem: Amazon pushes repurchasing way more effectively than your site, so once someone purchases your product on Amazon, it’s hard to win them over to your site.

Solutions: There are several ways to increase shopper loyalty and likelihood to repurchase on your site. We have implemented “subscribe and save” functionality on ecommerce sites to mimic Amazon’s subscription option. Additionally, strategically timing repurchase emails to your shoppers when they are likely to need a replacement can keep you one step ahead of your customers’ decision making. If you’re asking them to come back and buy again before they go to Amazon, you will be more likely to retain their business.

6. Customer Reviews
Problem: Customer reviews on Amazon are so beneficial for consumers when they are deciding on purchasing something.

Solution: Bad Reviews come easily. Good Reviews do not. Customers love the ease and access of the reviews listed on Amazon. Not to mention they are able to aggregate a large number of them. So chances are if you have a question about a product or condition of an item, it is there! Incorporating product reviews on your site can be a daunting task, but it doesn’t need to be. One way to ease into this would be to utilize Facebook’s review functionality at first, then move into on-site reviews. In order to get the reviews rolling in, there are several strategies you can use – asking customers directly via phone or chat, sending email requests a certain amount of days after a purchase, offering incentives for submitting reviews, and promoting the reviews you already have. Consumers admit that they actually like to see a mix of both positive and negative reviews.

7. Welcome to the Jungle
Problem: For whatever reason, you need to sell your product on Amazon. Maybe it’s your sole ecommerce channel, or maybe you’ve made the business decision to sell your product via your own site and Amazon. That’s ok! Amazon does a lot of things right. But as we’ve laid out above, it’s hard to stand out from the noise on Amazon.

Solution: If you can’t beat them, join them! But do it intelligently. By investing some of your marketing dollars in Amazon Ads, you can get more share of voice for searches related to your products. And it is often worthwhile to do an audit on your Amazon store copy, settings, and creative, and consider hiring a specialist that can optimize your store’s and products’ layout. Amazon can be an intimidating jungle, so it’s worth investing the time to make sure your store is rising above all the clutter and shining bright!