Having a successful Amazon product launch is what will determine if you have a strong start or not. And positive reviews is one of the highest-ranking factors.
The online world fast so a weak Amazon product launch means you’ll fall behind if you’re not forcefully pushing forward.
Now that doesn’t mean having a strong Amazon product launch is hard. In fact, it can be easy if you use leverage.
Leveraging the right tools and platforms that is and the latest best practices when it comes to a product launch that passes Amazon’s terms of service.
Let me ask you a question…
Have you been wondering how to effectively launch your product on Amazon successfully?
If you’ve ever launched your Amazon product to crickets or found difficulty in launching your products in the past or you still haven’t wrapped your head around how you’re going to launch your first Amazon product then you’re in for a treat today.
It’s actually one of the ways successful sellers launch strong brands on Amazon. The secret is using rebate sites.
Rebaid.com is a deal site that helps you get an extra boost of traffic to your new listing on Amazon. I’ve followed this site and I really like these kinds of sites and I got so much value from these guys, so I reached out to these guys and today I have the founder, Brendon.
Brendon Fields is an 8-figure Amazon seller and last year he founded Rebaid.com and today he’s going to teach what he’s learned over his 7+ years of selling on Amazon when it comes to Amazon launch, tips and tricks, and how to have a successful launch on Amazon.
Amazon Launch Technique They Don’t Tell You About
Over the years I’ve seen a lot of changes on Amazon and after generating over $12 million in Amazon sales I began working on software to further grow my business. Thereafter I decided to make my tools and platforms available publicly so in the spring of 2019 my rebate platform because available to Amazon sellers.
The best strategy change year on year and what works this year may become obsolete next year. The role of a launch platform is to help you strongly launch your product on Amazon. So if you’re just doing listing optimization alone or just PPC then you’re not utilizing all the best practices which means you won’t be getting the best out of your product launch.
Amazon has cracked onto a lot of launch strategies such as super URLs and all the other synthetic like launches. Amazon has become more sophisticated and Amazon can easily detect super URLs now. So today we’re going to talk about the strategies that currently work.
So let’s get into it…
Steps to A Successful Amazon Product Launch
All successful Amazon product launches accomplish this:
- Shoppers search for the product on Amazon by typing the keyword phrase. For example “yoga mat”
- Shoppers choose their product and buy it at full price (no large discount codes used). Back in the day for Amazon a sale was a sale even with a 99% off discount code and it helped sellers launch their products but that doesn’t work anymore.
- Shoppers are satisfied with the product. This means a high review rate and low return rate and repeat buyers.
It must resemble the natural shopper’s journey as much as possible.
That’s the beauty of rebates. Shoppers are paying full price for your products and then getting their discount AFTER the sale as a rebate.
You’ve probably seen this at stores where they’d sell you a washing machine and then get a rebate of $100 or something. So the same concept is now applied to eCommerce.
But if shoppers aren’t satisfied with your product then you’re going to get a lot of returns and you’re going to notice your product listing drop in the ranks because Amazon will detect it as a low-quality product.
So there’s really two things to keep an eye one, conversion rates and return rates. Conversion rates need to be high and return rates need to be as low as possible.
It’s worth mentioning that launch platforms are only meant to get “good” products to the top of the search results so you can’t just use it to launch a poor product using them thinking that you’re going to game the system.
Once the good products are up the ranks with the help of the platforms, that’s when strong products will perform well on a long term basis.
So if you’ve sourced the cheapest product and you weren’t concerned with the quality then you can certainly launch the product successfully but if it’s a bad product then it’s going to fall back down and you would have wasted whatever money you spent on that product launch.
So that’s something to pay attention to. A good unique product is the secret to success.
Amazon wants to show the best products to shoppers for that particular keyword so if there’s something that indicates to Amazon that your product isn’t the best then it won’t rank at the top.
Role of Launch Platforms
A lot of launch platforms pitch complex strategies. What you need to remember as a seller is that the number one role of a launch platform is traffic. I call them the 3 pillars of success on Amazon are:
- Traffic
- Conversions
- Feedback
All you’re doing when using a launch platform is traffic to your listing and those traffic and sales will lead to improving your rankings.
Launch platforms are not there to get you sales or getting reviews although they could. But the main purpose of launch platforms is an initial surge of traffic to your listing.
What Is Rebaid?
Rebaid is a rebate platform where shoppers browse for rebate offers. They’re going to be taken to Amazon to buy the product and then once that is done, they receive a rebate check 5 weeks later after the seller has verified the order and the transaction is completed.
Rebaid has approximately 100,000 shoppers and we’ve had 2,000 sellers who have launched using Rebaid and the average seller creates 7-8 campaigns which mean they’re coming back so it must be working well for them which is something we’re proud of.
A unique feature with Rebaid is we allow sellers to create a URL which contains the keyword phrase that you want shoppers to find your product with, the shoppers will then browse the pages to see your product and buy that way.
By having shoppers search for your product using your target keyword and then buy as a result will help improve your rankings on Amazon as that’s a powerful signal for the Amazon algorithm.
It’s really the “juice” of the Amazon algorithm. It’s basically getting shoppers to type your target keyword and buy your product as a result of searching for that keyword. It counts on Amazon as an “organic sale” which is really powerful.
Everything is done for you on Rebaid. You don’t have to send to the customer the rebate or anything. Rebaid handles everything.
So if you’re doing 5 rebates a day then we make sure to send those rebates to those shoppers and we handle everything so it’s really simple and you’re in control.
All the rebate checks are sent 5 weeks after their order which is a deliberate time because it’s outside the window of returns on Amazon. But we do have a list of trusted shoppers who get it within a week of shoppers who have used the platform for a while and are unlikely to return the product after receiving the rebate and the second safeguard to that we’re able to reverse that direct deposit if the shopper returns the order.
Pitfall Sellers Fall Into
Sellers will pick a keyword phrase that isn’t the best fit for their product. So for example say they sell a bell for a kids bicycle and they do their keyword research and think “bike seat” gets more searches than “bike bell” and the pitfall is when you use our platform or any other platform you can get ranked for a keyword that isn’t the best fit for your product because to some extent it’s somehow artificial to get a shopper to search for a certain keyword phrase and then buy your product.
But once your product hits the open market and you’re no longer using a launch platform. If organic everyday shoppers are not buying your product after searching that keyword phrase then you’re not going to stick to that first page as per best amazon agency or wherever you ended up when you had your successful launch.
So more important than targeting a high traffic keyword is targeting the most relevant keyword to your product what shoppers are actually going to search for years from now and buy your product.
How Rebaid Fulfills the Essential Launch Principles
Most shoppers are happy with your product because it’s a good quality product and then within the bounds of Amazon policy is to get a review from shoppers who are happy with your product but we make it clear that reviews are not in exchange for rebate payments.
It’s essentially you giving them a good deal for a product but they’re not required to leave a review for the rebate.
The power of our system is that we send an SMS message to shoppers to remind them about leaving a review or some other post-sale action such as asking them to sign up to a newsletter or follow them on their brand’s social media page etc. 97% of messages are read within the first 3 minutes of them being sent. Compared to email which has an average open rate of 22% that many platforms use.
And of course, the text messages are completely customizable so you can add any links and texts in the SMS message.
We make sure to send this message with their payment notification so it doesn’t feel intrusive to the shopper. For example, “your rebate check has been mailed, thank you for shopping with rebaid…” and then just below that the sellers message.
We’ve found that to be an effective strategy because the payment being sent softens it up for the shopper before you ask them for the review.
Best Practices for Rebate Campaigns
Start Small and Scale — If it’s your first time doing rebates then its best to start small, offer a few units of your products first just to see how it goes and then scale from there. You also want things to look natural even if you’ve done rebates before.
Like if you offer 200 units from the get-go and they’re sold within an hour… it’s not really a natural and Amazon can catch onto that. I mean you don’t want to get a 100% conversion rate on all your stock from day one. That would look extremely suspicious to the Amazon algorithm.
You have to make it look as real as possible by offering a few units slowly so it looks natural. So you start small and you scale as your product is generating organic sales because you’re starting to climb up the ranks after each successive day.
We hear from sellers that they jump from page 10 to page 2 and then it stops. And what’s happening there is that it takes even more sales to go from page 2 or 3 to get to page 1 because the top sellers are doing much much more sales than all the other pages combined. So bear that in mind when you’re doing your launch and know it takes time the higher you get.
Consider a High Rebate % — This is one of the pitfalls we see with sellers, is they don’t recognize the product launch phase is an investment. In almost all cases you’re not really going to generate profit during the launch phase. Just think of it giving away your product to increase your order velocity to improve your organic rank and hopefully start getting more full-price organic sales on Amazon. So that’s an important thing to remember.
That’s why you can generate a few sales with a 50% rebate but to be successful in a competitive category then you’ll have to generate 25+ sales a day which for that volume means you’ll need to offer a 90-100% rebate on your product.
Usually what we see when someone invests $3-10K on their product launch and you’re successful with that product launch (i.e. rank on the first page) then you can see a return on that in a month or two. I mean once you get ranked you’re going to start getting a lot of sales and recoup that investment and hopefully keep generating a lot of profitable sales in the years to come.
In the investment world, you won’t hear about anything with a return on investment in two months. So it’s not a long time and Amazon is attractive in that way.
Pretty much everything you’re working towards on Amazon is getting on that page one.
Combine Rebates with PPC Campaigns — Amazon is really competitive these days so utilizing all the tools available to you will help you with your launch. Getting that synchrony where you’re targeting the same search terms with PPC campaign and Rebates all at the same time will just send Amazon a lot of signals for ranking you for that keyword. That’s the launch one-two-punch right there.
The Three Pillars Of Amazon
Just a reminder to myself I have next to my computer the 3 pillars of Amazon. Traffic, Conversions & Feedback (high review rate, low return rate, etc.) and other signals that indicate to Amazon that your product is making shoppers happy.
So I think it’s important to be deliberate to attribute everything in your Amazon business to one of those three things. So like I hear a lot of sellers talk about getting professional product photos taken and say it helps them get more sales or it will make their product look better. But what I want you to think of it is in terms of those 3 things. So for product photos, it’s mostly a conversion rate thing.
When you think of it like that it more simple and helps you be more scientific. So for example take a snapshot of your current conversion rate (so you have a before snapshot) and then go and improve on let’s say the bullet points in your listings and then monitor that over the next few weeks and ask yourself are my conversions going up.
And if you’re using a launch platform then look at the traffic stats. And so on and so forth. Attributing everything you do to one of those 3 things just gives you a lot of clarity to what you’re doing to grow your Amazon brand.
Pro Tip: If your product is in the bubble of oversized and standard size products then go to sell.amazon.com/pricing to check out the sizing chart and if you’re in the bubble then have your supplier make your packaging smaller so that it’s a standard sized product. This can save you a lot. I once had my supplier shorten my packaging by 2cm and that saved me 80cents per unit.
Get Your Successful Amazon Product Launch Started
So if you want to have a successful product launch and avoid launching to crickets then I definitely recommend you get started with rebates while it’s still legally allowed within the Amazon’s terms and conditions.
Start your listing with 2-3 rebates a day and scale it from there until your product hits page one.
As long as what you’re selling is a good product that adds value to people’s lives then there’s no reason for you not to be successful.
Selling on Amazon has become more competitive but it’s still possible to have a super product launch that helps you climb the page ranks on Amazon and build your brand. As long as you abide by Amazon’s rules while getting the traffic, conversions and the feedback you’ll be on your path to success.
