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Amazon: Retail Readiness Checklist
Amazon: Retail Readiness Checklist

A comprehensive checklist for brands and sellers who have recently launched products on Amazon and/or who are new to Amazon advertising.

Mitchell Bergin avatar
Written by Mitchell Bergin
Updated over 11 months ago

Succeeding on Amazon requires careful planning, preparation, and execution across various aspects of your retail operations.

This checklist provides an overview of each item's significance, as well as workable approaches, solutions and pro tips to help you optimize your presence, performance, and profitability on Amazon.

We highly recommend considering this checklist before launching your products and before starting to advertise.


👉 For additional details and solutions for each item on the list, please select the toggle-down button. 🔽


ASIN Product Listing

Sufficient Inventory

Sufficient stock level is an essential component when selling on Amazon. In a competitive environment with high consumer expectations, low stock levels can be a costly setback.

Running low or having depleted inventory directly results in missed sales opportunities.

Missing sales opportunities, diminished product visibility, and a negative impact on the advertised value of the product are the consequences of low inventory.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

Your FBA sell-through rate is a measure of how well you are balancing your FBA inventory. For Amazon sellers, this is updated daily in Seller Central. Whether you use FBA or not, a high sell-through rate shows that you carry popular, fast-selling items. You want to reach a healthy balance between incoming and outgoing inventory.

​Pro tip: Ideally, Amazon suggests to have enough inventory to meet demand on a rolling 4-week basis. Anything less than that could lead to losing the buy box.

Product Compliance

When selling products on Amazon, it is important to be well-informed and adhere to Amazon's guidelines regarding product safety and compliance. This means ensuring that the items you list meet the platform's standards for safety, quality, and legality.

Non-compliance can lead to account suspensions, negative customer experiences, and potential legal ramifications.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

Ensure that listed items meet Amazon's standards for safety, quality, and legality. As an advertiser, you are responsible for complying with applicable laws, regulations and best practices. If you are unsure whether your product is compliant, please review Amazon’s Restricted content, products and services list.

Amazon's Manage your Compliance dashboard: Within the Account Health tab, you can see an overview of the current status, and submit any requested compliance documents. This video walks you through how to use this dashboard in Seller Central.

Ad Creative

Product Title

Amazon's search algorithm heavily depends on keywords within product titles.

Accurate titles not only boost visibility but also contribute to higher click-through rates (CTR) as customers find what they are looking for more easily. A precise and relevant title increases the likelihood of your product appearing in search results.

Incomplete or incorrect titles may result in missed opportunities and wasted ad spend as customers use specific keywords to search for products.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

Strategically crafting titles with relevant keywords optimizes visibility, and ensures your product is seen by the right audience.

The title should strike a balance between incorporating relevant keywords for search engine optimization (SEO) and delivering essential information to the consumer. It should seamlessly integrate top search terms, ensuring it is easily digestible and aids in facilitating an informed decision-making process.

​Pro tips:

  • Amazon brands/sellers also have the ability to add backend keywords which can help with relevancy. Read more on this: Amazon Backend Keywords

  • It is advised to do your own research on Amazon. What products and ads are most appealing to you? Search keywords in and out of your own category and review which products you are drawn to based on the image and title. 👀

Image Quality

Product image is often the first thing customers see when browsing on Amazon.

Images with clear details help customers to make informed decisions, reducing the likelihood of returns or dissatisfaction.

Consistent, high-quality visuals contribute to brand trust and credibility on the Amazon platform.

Uploading images with incorrect dimensions, blurry visuals, distracting backgrounds, or inadequate lighting can be detrimental.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

It is suggested to have 5-7 images, and your main product image must:

  • Accurately represent the product as a realistic, professional quality image and not be a placeholder.

  • Have a pure white background (RGB color values: 255, 255, 255). This allows Amazon to create a consistent shopping experience for customers across search and product detail pages.

  • Show the product as 85% of the image.

    ​Pro tip: Remember that when shopping online, products cannot be felt. Use your images and videos to get as close to the feeling of the product as you can. This will improve your conversion rate (CVR)!

Product Specifications and Description

In Amazon advertising, your product description plays a crucial role. Customers want to know how the products will benefit them and make their lives better. Given the limitation that consumers on Amazon cannot physically interact with products, your words become the primary means of conveying information. It's essential to refrain from making exaggerated claims and maintain objectivity in your product descriptions.

Consider your product’s dimensions, materials, care instructions, and warranty details when writing your description. Overstated product claims erode customer trust and impact brand credibility.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

After you start to receive reviews, we advise to look over all the reviews for your products as you may find feedback or complaints that provide useful insight, so you can then update your product's description to be more accurate.

Pro tip: We suggest using A+ Content in your product detail page, which is at the lower half of your product page. You can position your brand and bring products to life by adding lifestyle photos, comparison charts, and enhanced product descriptions! Read more here: Showcase products and share your story

Review Management

Sufficient Customer Ratings and Reviews

Managing customer feedback is vital for daily Amazon operations, and as your business grows, getting more reviews becomes equally essential. Reviews help to identify issues, address concerns, enhance product offerings, or differentiate from competitors.

A product with few or no reviews may appear less trustworthy or credible to anyone who is looking to buy the product. In the absence of reviews, shoppers may form negative assumptions or perceptions about the product.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

Amazon Vine Program:
Building momentum and credibility for your brand can take time especially when you launch new products with no advertising history. Luckily, Amazon’s Vine Program is an excellent option to gain customer ratings and reviews and build credibility for your brand.

This link outlines the steps and other important information to get started: Read more and get started with Amazon Vine here

​Pro tip: If you already have a brand presence then you can also rely on branded searches for new product launches. Customers who have bought from you in the past are already aware of your brand's quality and will benefit from the halo effect.

Responding to Reviews

Timely and effective responses to negative reviews are critical for maintaining a positive seller reputation on Amazon.

Reducing Impact on Sales: Quick reactions to negative feedback help mitigate potential damage, showcasing proactive customer service and addressing concerns to prevent lasting negative impressions.

Failing to respond promptly and professionally to negative reviews or customer concerns can damage reputation and credibility. If the product is new or if you are new to the platform, this mistake can affect sales directly as customers actively look for reviews before making the decision.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

Make sure to respond politely to negative reviews in a timely manner, and with a personal touch. It’s a good practice to thank the reviewer for their honesty and for taking the time to write a review.

Pro tip: It is advised to respond and provide a solution to a negative experience and/or provide details to contact your customer support.

Offering

Pricing

Price could be the final driving factor whether or not a shopper decides to buy your product. Having said that, lowering the price too much could possibly undermine your brand's perceived value and quality.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

Consider your competitor’s prices when deciding on your product’s price points.

Instead of consistently offering lower prices, a strategic approach involves providing occasional discounts. Discounts create a sense of added value and urgency among customers. By offering discounts, you maintain the perceived value of your brand while providing customers with a temporary opportunity to purchase at a lower cost.

You can read more about discounts here Amazon promotions: Use offers and coupons to promote your products

Utilizing Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)

Amazon tends to favour FBA sellers when determining the Buy Box winner due to the reliability and speed associated with Amazon's fulfilment network. Winning the Buy Box increases sales opportunities as most customers tend to purchase products featured in the Buy Box.

Advantages of FBA

  • Reliability and Speed: FBA leverages Amazon's robust fulfilment network, known for its reliability and speed. This translates to faster and more dependable shipping for customers.

  • Impact on Advertising Performance: Enhancing advertising performance is possible through "FBA + Prime," as it has the potential to boost the Conversion Rate (CVR) of products. This improvement contributes to enhanced advertising effectiveness, considering the inverse correlation between CVR and Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS).

  • Prime Eligibility: FBA products are often eligible for Amazon Prime, providing customers with faster and free shipping options. This can attract a larger customer base, including those who specifically seek Prime-eligible products.

  • Customers often trust products fulfilled by Amazon due to the reliable and consistent delivery experience associated with the FBA program. This trust can enhance customer satisfaction and encourage repeat business.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

Offering Variations

Offering variations upon launching products on Amazon is a strategic move that enhances customer choices, boosts visibility, and provides a competitive edge, contributing to a successful and dynamic product launch.

Offering variations, such as different sizes, colors, or versions of a product, allows you to provide customers with a diverse range of choices.

Grouping products together centralizes reviews and ratings by consolidating customer feedback and evaluations for a set of related or similar items.

Variations maintain brand cohesion, allowing you to showcase a range of products while keeping a consistent brand identity across different options.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

👕 Creating product listings with variations on Amazon allows customers to see all their buying options (colour, size, style) on one page and can help increase conversion.

Video: How to create product listings with variations on Amazon Seller Central

Start Establishing a Brand

Brand-building journey on Amazon is pivotal for enhancing product offerings, building customer trust, and creating a distinct identity in the competitive marketplace.

Neglecting the development of distinctive logos, colors, fonts, and messaging that resonate with your products, target audience, and business goals can lead to missing out on sales opportunities.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

Enrolling in Amazon’s Brand Registry is the first step to become eligible for many brand building programs including A+ Content, Sponsored Brands, Amazon Stores, and Customer Engagement email marketing campaigns.

If you are interested in learning more about how to build your brand, you can visit: Grow your brand on Amazon


Prepare for Advertising

Consider your advertising budget

Understanding your budget allows for effective allocation of resources, ensuring that your advertising campaigns align with your financial capacity while maximizing impact.

Failing to understand the realistic costs of advertising may lead to setting overly optimistic budgets, resulting in a budget crunch.

Not considering the competitive landscape and budgeting accordingly may result in being outpaced by competitors with more strategic financial planning.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

When you prepare for advertising, it is crucial to consider the budget you have available to allocate to your ad campaigns. Sponsored ads customers invest a few hundred, to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month on advertising.

When you first start advertising, it can take some time to reach profitability, but it is definitely worth the investment to become a profitable Amazon business.

More on budgeting can be found here: Budgets – Basics and Best Practices for Sponsored Products

Keyword Research

Keywords are fundamental to how customers find products on Amazon. When shoppers search on Amazon, the specific phrases they use are referred to as "search terms" rather than "keywords." These search terms are the actual words or queries customers enter into the search bar.

It is important to note that your products can still appear in search results for specific search terms even if they are not explicitly added as keywords. However, their visibility might be limited, potentially placing them on the 5th page or beyond.

To secure a prominent position on the first page of search results, advertising becomes a strategic tool. Advertising on a specific search term has the potential to elevate crucial metrics such as Click-Through Rate (CTR), Conversion Rate (CVR), and sales velocity in comparison to competitors. This heightened performance can play a pivotal role in enhancing the organic rank of a product on Amazon's platform.

Establishing a fundamental set of keywords ensures that your advertising efforts are strategically targeted towards the most relevant and receptive audience.

The effectiveness of advertising on Amazon is influenced by the choice of keywords, and understanding their dynamics is crucial. Jumping into advertising without a solid keyword foundation can result in a wasted budget, as campaigns may not effectively reach the intended audience

High-frequency keywords are often more competitive, leading to higher CPC. Broader terms like "shoes" may have lower CVR than specific terms like "women's running shoes size 8". This combination of higher CPC and lower CVR can result in a high ACOS. Consider brand awareness and product positioning when selecting keywords.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

🎯 Keyword targeting is an option for both Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Here are some tips to get started on your keyword targeting:

  • Find keywords to target. Be specific and use keyword combinations that clearly define your products’ characteristics, materials and benefits.

  • Use keywords directly from your product’s title.

  • If you’re looking to introduce your product to shoppers who are already familiar with your brand, you might want to focus on branded keywords, which includes your own brand’s name. Consider the following types of keywords: Brand, generic, competitor, flagship, long tail and seasonal.

  • Add any common misspellings of search terms (if you have them available).

Product Grouping

Product grouping allows you to create targeted advertising campaigns based on similar products, ensuring that your ads reach the most relevant audience.

By grouping products strategically, you can allocate your advertising budget more efficiently, focusing on high-priority products and maximizing return on investment.

Initiating advertising without defined product groups may result in unstructured campaigns, diluting the impact and efficiency of your efforts. Also, without product grouping, budget allocation becomes less strategic, potentially spreading resources too thin across a broad range of products.

Failing to group products based on audience relevance can lead to ads reaching the wrong customer segments, reducing campaign effectiveness.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

Best practices for grouping your products for advertising:

1. Attribute-based grouping
2. Historical data-based grouping
3. Price-based grouping
4. Objective-based grouping

To read more about each of these product grouping suggestions, please visit: Strategic Product Grouping for Amazon Ads

Leverage Optimization Software

Leveraging advertising optimization software is instrumental for sellers aiming to maximize their campaign efficiency, boost visibility, and drive sales.

As an Amazon ads Advanced Partner, Perpetua emerges as a powerful ally, offering a suite of tools designed to enhance the effectiveness of Amazon advertising strategies.

Workable Approaches and Solutions

Benefits of optimizing ads with Perpetua:
💫 Save time and resources by minimizing the need for human interaction on manual tasks that come with managing PPC ads (bid adjustments, keyword harvesting, etc).

💫 Increase your Share of Voice & Organic Rank by allowing Perpetua’s ad engine to identify optimal strategies that target ad placement and conversion rate.
💫 Optimized ad spend ensures that every dollar you spend is being used efficiently and as strategically as possible, helping you perform towards your ideal ACoS to maintain growth.

If you haven’t started using ad optimization software, and you are interested in learning more, click to get started: Unlock your growth with Perpetua


Article last updated January 2024. If you find this information to be out of date, please contact hello@perpetua.io

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