New Changes in Amazon FBA:

Amazon recently made a number of huge changes to what customers see on their website, changes which are going to have a big impact on how you should look to approach your Amazon FBA product research.

Sales Information

If you haven’t seen what Amazon’s been messing about with yet, then next time you visit the site, take a closer look at the information that’s displayed when you search for any product to buy or sell. What you should notice is that Amazon are now showing customers how many units a product has sold in the past month, as well as providing more granular detail on a product’s review score, with less emphasis being placed on how many reviews the product has in total.

Although the change to how reviews are displayed hasn’t been confirmed to be permanent yet, it is expected that at the very least certain aspects of the change will stay if it’s deemed its helpful to customers, which, along with displaying sales history, is going to have big implications on Amazon FBA product research.

Here’s an article if you want to know How To Do Amazon FBA Product Research The Right Way.

Telling customers how many units a product has sold from the Amazon search result page is undoubtedly going to impact whether the customer decides to click and make a purchase or not. Similar to how the number of reviews previously impacted click through rates, the number of sales stat is something that gives a product social proof, and in my opinion, the bigger the number a product has versus its competitors, the more likely the customer will decide to buy.

People’s purchasing decisions are often swayed by what others are currently buying and what’s viewed as ‘popular’ or ‘in’. We’re all guilty of doing this – even subconsciously – and Amazon knows it, which is why they’ve started to publicly display this information, because they know it will mean that the customer makes goes on to making a purchase rather than leaving empty handed.

But how does displaying sales figures on the search results page impact how you should do your Amazon FBA product research? If you’ve seen my articles or videos before, you’ll know about the importance of choosing a product that you can afford to sell so that you don’t keep running out of stock once it’s on amazon… well this now becomes an even bigger factor to consider, because if you can’t afford the same amount of stock as others in your niche are selling, then your sales stats are going to be tiny in comparison to others in your niche, impacting whether the customer clicks and ultimately decides to buy from you. The fact that amazon is now going to be displaying every product’s sales stats from the moment they start selling is also going to impact how you do your launch if you want the best chances of success. Having a slow and drawn out launch of a few sales a day is going to seriously hamper the longevity of your product and brand, because coupled with no customer reviews, that’s going to make your product listing look very unattractive from the search results page, and result in a low level of conversion and a higher risk of failure.

So, when doing your product research, pay attention to the sales numbers that are being publicly displayed by Amazon, and if you’re seriously considering selling the product that you’re looking at, you need to make sure that you can comfortably afford to buy the amount of units that Amazon is telling customers are being sold by your competitors from the moment you launch. That way, you can ensure that your listing always looks attractive and gets clicks and sales from customers.

Review Information

Along with showing the number of sales that a product is making, amazon has also recently started to change how review information is displayed to the customer on the search results page. Instead of showing the number of reviews received, they’re now starting to focus more on the metrics that give customers more granular detail on the quality of the product. This is another big change that will impact what product a customer clicks on in the search results, and is likely to give newly established products with very few reviews a fighting chance against the more established brands that have thousands of reviews.

So how should you ensure that you incorporate this change into your product research? Well firstly, when assessing any opportunity, pay less attention to the review counts within the niche, and more attention to the review score and the potential to make improvements to the existing offer. I’ve been saying this for a long time, but just because a number of sellers in a niche have a high number of reviews does NOT mean that the niche is saturated and or that it’s too late for you to compete. If you can find an opportunity where you can improve upon the existing product offering and give the customer a better reason to buy from you rather than others, then you’ve got a fighting chance of being able to compete with the more established sellers in the niche.. and that’s going to be especially the case if amazon does decide to permanently remove review counts from search result pages, because no longer will it be a deciding factor on whether the customer clicks or not. Instead, selling a high quality product that’s able to consistently get highly rated reviews

So whilst removing the review count and showing the number of sales a product makes may seem like minor changes to the customer that go hardly noticed, to us Amazon FBA sellers – they are huge and are likely to have a longstanding impact on how product research should be done if both made permanent to the Amazon platform.

For more tips on Amazon product research, read my 4 tips to Amazon sellers when looking for a product.

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.