Amazon Product Selection Best Practices

Hi,

I'm currently running a few small Amazon affiliate sites. I faced a problem that some of the products that I promote become unavailable at Amazon eventually. And in some more rare cases the customer review rating may become worse. When having a considerable number of products being promoted, it takes time to check this for each product, to replace the product with a new one if needed, to write the new review instead of the old one. This is not scalable at all.

Actually I see two questions here.

1. What are the best practices for selecting an Amazon product to promote, so as there would be a little chance that it will become unavailable soon? I personally assume that at least the following criteria minimize that chance:
- The product ships from and is sold by Amazon.com. (instead of 3rd party)
- The product page has many likes
- The product has many positive customer reviews
- The product is in the top of Amazon search results for the product type when ordered by best selling criterion (though it's inconvenient that you can't order by best selling and by relevance at once)
- No message on the product page like "Only 5 left in stock--order soon."
BUT - It's typically impossible to find several products meeting all the listed above conditions in a small niche. So maybe some other selection criteria should be used? And maybe some of my criteria are less important than the others?

2. Does an automated solution exist for tracking the availability and rating of the promoted products? At least, it could save much time spent on the regular manual checking.

Please share you thoughts/experience.

Thanks!

 

In my experience people will still buy if it has a rating of 2 or above. If it's below that then people won't bother. But if there are no other options people will settle for a poorly rated product.

Don't even concern yourself with a 3rd party or Amazon. You get a commission either way and some people will just choose the 3rd party anyway. Other people will always order from Amazon 100% of the time.

All you need to do is get someone to click on your affiliate link. If they choose to order something else within 24 hours you still get a commission.

Amazon puts a message up if there are as many as 10 (or so) products in stock so don't even worry about this. If people have money to spend, they'll spend it.

For me personally, I promote stuff that is price high. That's how I choose products to promote. If they choose to buy something priced lower, I still get a commission. It works out for me in the end.

 

Thanks a lot for reply.

I look at the described problem from another angle though. It happens sometimes that I spend time investigating a product, write a comprehensive review for it. Then, a few months later, I check the Amazon page for that product and see the following message:
"Currently unavailable.
We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock."

Of course, a person that followed that link may pick and buy something else, it also happens. But this is less effective, as my review pre-sells exactly that item, so the chance that the visitor will buy exactly that item is greater in case if it is available. Furthermore, having links to unavailable items makes my website look less professional.

The same thing with the review rating, people are more likely to buy a product with the positive feedback.

No doubt, I will still have the sales in both cases, but it's all about the conversion rate.

That's why my questions are how to select products in small niches (as the problem more actual for them) from the point of their long-term availability and how easy it is to automate availability and rating monitoring for the promoted products. Probably the actuality of these questions depends on the strategy being used.

 

The same kind of problem exists in CJ too when a merchant ceases o be a member there. I think this is a problem that is difficult to be controlled. It is one of those unforeseen problems.

 

I agree that such a problem is hard to be controlled, but it seems too frustrating to work in vane replacing products so often.

Actually I'd like to update this thread a bit, as some Amazon products being sold for more than a year and having multiple positive feedback tend to disappear even faster than I finish writing the review for them.

First of all, maybe my current strategy isn't viable? I mean writing reviews for concrete items. It pays off in better conversion and good content for SEO, but I'm not sure it's so cool from the point of time/revenue ratio.

However, if still to stick to this approach, what do you think is worth to do with the links to unavailable products and the corresponding reviews? The variants:

1. Leave obsolete links and reviews as they are, thus keep the content for SEO purposes and preserve higher rankings; and to hope that visitors will buy something else anyway when they are at Amazon (though the conversion rate will be lower and they will consider my site low-quality).
2. Delete obsolete links and reviews and add the new ones. Requires time to be spent on this and SEO value is lost.
3. Move obsolete links and reviews to some separate page named something like "Product Archives" and add the new ones to the current page. This also requires time but keeps SEO value (though already not for the initial landing page). BTW, I'm not quite sure how Google will treat moving content from one page to another.

Thoughts?

 

hi rboa, just write what my mind
- go to a hot new releases product with in stock more than 10
- has min. 5 rating and 4 star
- has min. 5 review
- has price $150<
- take action now, there are many product you can promote, just do and you can know what the method that works

 

Hi clariafox, thanks for your reply.
About the number of products in stock - I initially thought that it is better to be not specified at all, it looked something like "unlimited" to me and the evidence of the long-term sales intent (i.e. the seller won't just sell off the remaining items and that's it). However, it turned out that this is not always true - for one of the products it became "1 product left in stock" and then "Currently unavailable" within one day
So, should I really generally prefer a product with some distinct yet high enough number of items in stock (expecting that they will be renewed on demand) over a similar product with the number of items in stock not specified?

 

I prefer not to promote low priced products myself but I don't think it's a complete waste of time. If you can get large numbers of traffic and high volume of sales it's a good way to bump up your commission payout to the next level.

As long as you're honest I don't think it matters that you don't own certain products. Readers generally won't expect you to own absolutely everything, and you can make it clear from your review that you're reporting on your research findings about a product rather than reviewing it based on your own experience.

I usually don't worry about geo targetting as most of my sites are for .com and just a few specifically targetted towards the UK market, however I think there are options such as geo targetting plugins etc. if you're using Wordpress.

 

Amazon sourced/shipped products tend to be delivered quicker resulting in your commissions posting sooner which at the end of the month can make a difference. As for product selection criteria if you use stuff that's a best seller, 4 star, lots of reviews, etc you'll be sadly disappointed with your sales as those products are being promoted to death. I have much higher conversion rates than usual and sell a good bit of stuff monthly and I just pick products that people buy on impulse and things I personally like/use/own.

An ounce of personal experimentation is worth a pound of everyone else's advice.

 

You have a lot of the right signals already for choosing reliable products; review ratings, offers from Amazon, stock levels etc.

For me it ultimately comes down to analysing the niche. If it is something like iphone 5 related it will eventually move on and the products won't be around forever. But if you take a niche like tupperware boxes then you know there aren't going to be many changes in that world.

You should also think about using a script or solution that will update the products for you. If you use a good Amazon website builder or plugin it will check when products are unavailable and remove them from your site. It will also populate your website with new products in that niche.

Another thing to try is use a website like camelcamelcamel.com - it will show you the history of a given product in terms of price and availability.

But don't get too hung up on this.. products will come and go and you can't always predict that.