The reason Amazon is what it became today is because it heavily focused on two factors to win consumers over. 1) customer obsession to provide the best customer experience possible. 2) Within that customer experience, it made sure the customer found the best possible price on the web at Amazon, even if it meant taking a loss to acquire that customer.
Over the years, this has really made it harder and harder for other retailers, specifically smaller retailers to compete as profitability is what drives the long-term life of most businesses; in Amazons case, it was growth since it became a public company.
Now, if you are a retailer that has products that Amazon has as well (hard to believe these days that wouldn’t be the case,) and they beat you on price, how are you going to compete? The fact is that Amazon may not be the only one beating you on price, just the most obvious one that the consumer can easily find. 9 out of 10 consumers check Amazon.com first to check pricing when shopping online, so its important you take a good inventory of your websites products and see where your pricing isn’t competing well.
- Content: This has always been the best defense and offense against Amazon. The more value you can provide to the consumer finding your product through good content or seeing good content once they land on your website, the greater the chances of that consumer giving priority to shop on your platform over Amazon. The fact is that most pages, still until today, are lacking in great content when it comes to having very good content on Amazon. That has changed over the last 3-4 years with Amazon stressing to brands and retailers about the importance of creating A+ page (content) that really helps sell the product by enhancing the content and educating the consumer. Make sure you take the same approach when you build out key product pages. I’ve seen many examples where retailers are even giving Amazon better content than their own page.
Where can you compete on content with Amazon?
- How-To articles
- Guides
- Q&A
- Relevant News
- Testimonials
TYPE OF CONTENT TO OPTIMIZE:
- PRODUCT IMAGES: Pictures are worth a thousand words. If you look at the top selling products on Amazon, you’ll see a few things in common and one of them is having on average 5-7 product images. Not only do the products themselves have images but they also contain some sales advertisements with stats, sales copy, etc.
- PRODUCT COPY: While this one may be obvious, I can tell you going through thousands of websites, product copy is not always easy to come by. Customers want to know exactly what makes this product where their money should go. Make sure to list features, benefits, whose it for, etc. Try to answer every question you can about it.
- PRODUCT VIDEO: If you can add video to your product page, even better. People consume video as its an easy way to quickly consume content as they browse the web.
2. Deliver Quality Sales Service: Notice how I didn’t say customer service (that’s #3) What I mean by sales service is what Amazon doesn’t have is where you can succeed. The fact is when someone is shopping for a product and they may have questions before buying it, Amazon only provides content. An e-commerce website with live chat is a much more friendly, convenient and better experience to consumers who have questions about the product before buying it.
3. Delivery Quality Customer Service: While I think we can agree that Amazon delivers a great customer experience with prime shipping options, etc , what Amazon does not offer is personalized customer service.
TYPE OF CUSTOMER SERVICE YOU CAN OFFER:
- PERSONALIZED PHONE CALLS: Maybe consumers don’t like to be called, but if I bought a product and someone called to make sure I got it already, if there was any questions about it, that can go a long way.
- REWARD LOYALTY: The more consumers buy from you, reward this through some type of reward program to keep them coming back.
While Amazon is dominating the e-commerce space, there are still plenty of businesses and websites able to sell and compete in this space. A few things such as the above can help you stand-out and stay competitive in todays landscape.
