The Reasons Why Your Sales Are Declining
One of the worst experiences that you can go through as an Amazon seller is sending in a product that you’re super excited to sell, only to find that your sales are nowhere near where you expected them to be or even worse… they’re non-existent all together.
After months of hard work leading you to being absolutely certain that your product was going to be a smash it on Amazon but then seeing that your Amazon sales are down is likely to leave you devastated and questioning yourself how you could get it so wrong.
Over the years I’ve been contacted by hundreds of people in this scenario, but fortunately, in most cases after a little bit of digging, there has been an obvious reason as to why their sales have been drier than a desert, and once diagnosed, we’ve been able to fix the problem and start seeing positive results. So, here are 4 the most common reasons that I see that could cause few or no sales at all.
Search Suppressed
As an Amazon seller, you’ll soon come to realise that much of the website is run by bots that – in theory – have been programmed to help make the Amazon selling experience as fair and as pleasant as possible.
As part of their day to day routine, these bots scan huge amounts of product listings, searching for anything that’s not compliant, which include things from the type of product being sold and whether it’s permitted to be offered by the seller, to the content of the listing description and whether it includes any offensive words, or words that might suggest that the seller needs approval to sell that particular product.
If it finds something that it doesn’t like, then it will ‘search suppress’ your product, which means that it will no longer appear in Amazon’s search results, causing your sales to drop to zero.
To quickly check if the Amazon bots have removed your listing from Amazon’s search results, grab your product listing’s amazon identifier code – the ASIN – from the inventory dashboard within seller central and search for it on Amazon.
If the listing doesn’t appear, then that means your listing has been search suppressed by the bots and it’s impossible for a customer to find you. Common reasons that this might happen include:
- A title that is more than 200 characters long
- A main image that isn’t on a white background
- A main image that has text or a watermark on it
- Including a word in your listing that isn’t permitted
Typically, Amazon will tell you why your listing has been search suppressed on your inventory page, but if they don’t, a quick read through your listing to check for things like trademarked terms or a title that’s too long will usually help you to identify the culprit.
Fortunately, a suppressed listing is pretty quick to fix – just make the appropriate changes when editing your listing, wait 15 minutes, and your listing’s visibility should soon be restored. If you can’t find the reason as to why it’s been suppressed, raise a case with Seller Support, explain the issue, and ask them to check if your product has been tagged as an adult product, which is an occasional tactic employed by competitors that search suppresses you without warning.
If that is there case, there’s no need to panic – once seller support see that you aren’t selling adult products, they’ll permanently switch it back, and you can look forward to your sales increasing. Here’s a more detailed blog post on what to do when your Amazon product listing has disappeared.
Slow Day Of The Week
There’s no better feeling than logging on to your Amazon seller app on your phone, refreshing the page, and seeing that your sales have gone up and you’ve made some more profit. Whilst your subconscious might feel that what’s happening is magic and that you making money on auto pilot is going to continue to grow each and every day, it’s important to stay grounded and don’t forget that it’s people across the country buying your products, and those people make their Amazon purchasing decisions based on what’s happening in their lives, such as whether they’ve just been paid, or whether the weather’s too hot for them to sit in doors scrolling on their phones.
If you find that your Amazon sales have suddenly dropped or they’re not where you expected them to be, think about the broader picture and whether your customer base might be doing something else instead of buying products on Amazon. For example, my sales recently dropped on Amazon by around 30% for 3 or 4 days, and this was easily explained due to it being Easter and a lot of potential customers being away on holiday. I didn’t panic and start making big changes in my account. Instead, I saw the drop in my sales and then found a rational explanation.
With that said, if your Amazon product’s performance has started to suffer with no obvious explanation, then the easiest way to see if it’s just a problem impacting just you and not your competitors is to download the free Helium 10 Chrome Extension and then click onto your product listing where you’ll find your Amazon seller ranking over time. If you see that your product’s ranking is more or less in line with where it’s traded at historically, then in all likelihood, it’s everybody that’s having a slow sales day, and not just you.
Not Getting Visibility
If your Amazon product’s sales drop off a cliff with seemingly no explanation, then one of the first things to do is to compare the number of views that your listing is getting now with the views that it was getting when sales were good. Many people don’t realise that Amazon gives you this data along with a whole host of other useful information such as your product’s conversion rate.
To find it, log in to your seller account, go into reports and then business reports, where you’ll then be able to see how many sessions – or views – your product’s listing is getting on a daily basis. If you see that a reduction in customer sessions coincides with a drop in your sales, then you’ve found your culprit.
A drop in your product’s views could be due to a number of things, such as you’ve lost your position in Amazon’s search results, you’re no longer in stock, you’re search suppressed, or most likely – you’re not bidding high enough with your Amazon Pay Per Click campaigns, which you can verify by comparing your PPC campaigns impressions over time from within your Amazon advertising dashboard.
Poor Offer Versus Competitors
As a business owner, you always need to be aware of what your competitors are doing, and how your offer compares to theirs. It’s no different when selling on Amazon FBA. One reason why your Amazon sales may have dropped off a cliff is because somebody else’s product offering is more compelling than yours – which could be because customers perceive the value from your competitors to be greater than what you provide.
An important step that ever amazon seller should take – regardless of whether your sales have been impacted or not – is to keep a regular eye on new and existing competitors and note what they’re doing with regards to their price and what they’re offering. If you see that they’re running discounts to drive up sales, then you should be considering that too. If you see that they’ve made improvements to the product that customers like, or they’ve added something to their listing that increases the perceived value of the product, then those are both things that you need to be looking to do too. No business in the world is safe from competition, so never take your foot off the ball and always be looking for ways to improve in order to protect your sales.
So, if your sales have suddenly fallen or they’re not where you want them to be, look through all of your competitors by searching on Amazon or by scrolling down on your listing and clicking into the sub-category’s list of sellers. When doing that, look at their pricing, listing quality, reviews and so on, and compare them all to yours – if anything is better, make a note of it, and then make a plan of how you can look to make improvements.
Summary
Launching a product on Amazon and then seeing that your sales are much poorer than expected can be a pretty heartbreaking experience, but I’m confident that if you follow the tips that I’ve just run through, you’ll be able to discover what’s going wrong and how to put it right.
In relation to this post, read how you can find low competition Amazon FBA products in 5 minutes.
If you want to learn how you can create an Amazon FBA business yourself, then check out my free training where I’ll teach you everything you need to launch your first product on Amazon and scale to $5,000+ in monthly profit.
Or if you’re ready to begin your journey and want to start with the best chances of success, apply to become a member of HonestFBA’s training programme where you’ll receive guidance & support from our team of 7-figure Amazon FBA seller experts whenever you need it.
