Why 80% of your products on Amazon don't sell?

Transcript:

So I get asked about this a lot.

Why only a couple of my products from my catalog sell, while others don't.

My business is kind of dependent on those products Himanshu. And I'm afraid because Amazon has a habit of suppressing the products because of a hundred odd reasons.

So, you need to understand that 80-20 rule or Pareto principle that applies almost everywhere, applies here too.

So, the Pareto principle says 80% of the business movement will happen by 20% of your actions.

Or in ecommerce or retail scenario, 80% of your sale will happen from 20% of your products.

You will always have Hero products. And mind you, this is not just with you or your business specifically.

This happens in offline retail as well. This happens with big brands as well. For that matter, they will have 100 products in the catalog, or 1000 products in the catalog, but only 100, 200 will sell out of those thousands.

So, those are their Hero products. For example, I can recall Cadboury has Dairy milk as a hero product.

Or maybe Parle Biscuit product line has Parle G their Hero product, which is the most well known product of the top selling product. In fact, if I talk about Tata Motors, they have Tata Nexon as their top selling cars.

So, this happens across industries, across categories, across offline and online commerce.

But I would like to add an interesting extension to this.

We know that this will happen, but what should we do about this? So, most of the top companies use multiple strategies to overcome this and sell the rest of the catalog.

They start bundling it with the top selling ones, so most of the time you'll see that certain products are bundled with certain top selling products.

You mostly see it in the grocery shops, right?

They start selling it on discounts as well, So if there are certain products which generally don't sell, they offer it at 30% off, 40% off, So that people start buying them.

And once they are habitual of the product, or maybe they like the product, they'll come back and buy at a premium price as well.

And thirdly, we could start showing low selling products more. And this again you see in the grocery shops.

So for example, if there is a particular productor product line or a particular brand that sells less, they start showing it in the front and put the top selling once at the back.

So that people see it more and they purchase it instead of buying the regular choices. So similarly, whatever you do, or let's say whatever the brands do in their offline strategies, you can apply those same strategies in online selling as well as an ecommerce or as an Amazon seller.

What you can do is you can create combos with your top selling products and start selling it. People know your top selling products already, they search them directly.

You have some word of mouth built around that product.

So people will search for it. And if they search it and they see that you are selling another product as a combo and it's a better value for money, they'll buy it because they already trust one of your products.

Now, the second strategy could be you can slash down your prices, or maybe you can add coupons to give price level discounts, offer discounts to your customers.

Third thing that you can do is you can also advertise your low selling products on your top selling products.

So, for example, let's say if I sell, let's say, a notebook and one particular notebook is a top seller, I sell a thousand units a day for that notebook.

And then there is another design that sells maybe instead of thousands of maybe 20-30 odd units a day, whatI would do is I would advertise that 20-30 unit while a product on my top seller, right?

What this will do is that the top seller already has certain ratings and reviews on Amazon.

People are trusting it already.

Conversions are good.

People will see that XYZ brand is selling this particular notebook, which has thousands of reviews, right?

So they will trust your brand.

They will trust the XYZ brand, and they will also explore the other options.

If you are advertising your bottom selling products on your top selling, they will be able to see your other products, other product lines, other designs, and they will be open to try that.

I've seen this strategy working on multiple brands, right?

And you can try that as well. So essentially, what I'm trying to say is what you do with your 80% of the products that don't sell will differentiate you as an online brand over the years.