In the online world, your reputation is everything. It’s the biggest deciding factor people use in determining if they’ll buy with you or your competitor. And if the saying ‘the first impression is a lasting one’ is sacrosanct, then it’s 10 times truer online. FeedbackExpress has three simple ways you can bolster your Amazon reputation and keep swinging the odds in your favour.
1. Understand Things from the Customer’s Point of View
In a brick-and-mortar shop, buyers have the luxury of picking up an item and asking you questions about it. Because they interact with you and the product physically, they can feel pretty confident in knowing exactly what they’re walking away with.
But not online.
And that’s why you have to think about things like a shopper. If you were browsing products online, what sorts of signs would you look for that’d tell you you were making a good buying decision? Are there plenty of good reviews — and if so, what do they say? How are the photos? Do they show the item from various angles? And how detailed is the product description? These are just a few of the things you should be thinking about.
Related: 7 Ways to Optimise Your Amazon Product Listings
2. Bolster Your Product AND Service Reviews
I had to replace the battery on my MacBook recently. And because it’s an Apple product, I knew the battery would be expensive so online was the first place I looked (less overhead tends to equal lower costs). I’d narrowed my search down to two different batteries and then hunkered down to look at the details.
The first one was Prime-eligible, but more expensive than the second. Before I clicked ‘Buy’ on that one, I took a closer look at the second product. Sure, it wasn’t Prime-eligible, but it did offer free shipping (even though the suggested shipping time was a week+). But an interesting theme arose from the seller reviews: nearly every single one of them said they were amazed at how fast they received their product from that seller. I decided to take a chance and went with them — and got the battery two days later Not only did I save a bit of money with them, but I also got Prime-worthy delivery as an added bonus.
Moral of the story: it pays to have as many (good) reviews as possible. And while buyers will overwhelmingly look at the product reviews over the seller ones, don’t skimp on those either. It all matters.
3. Answer Questions and Concerns as Quickly as Possible
Another little anecdote. This summer, my phone started failing on me and I couldn’t ignore having to buy another one. I plotted Prime Day as the day I’d get a new one, and started researching phones well in advance. But I also wanted real-life information and asked questions on the page of every single phone I was looking at. Some sellers got back to me in under an hour, while with others, I didn’t get an answer until I woke up the next morning.
And you know what? Those sellers who took longer to respond to me dropped down to the bottom of my list. Reading in between the lines, I looked at their response time as an extrapolation at how they’d handle other aspects of the buying process. If there was something wrong with the phone, would they also take a long time in remedying the problem? Or was this a one-off? I couldn’t take the chance because I couldn’t walk to their shop and ask them directly.
How you respond to a potential buyer speaks volumes about the kind of seller you are and you have to decide what kind of message you’ll want to send. Will it be, ‘I care about making the buying process as simple and hassle-free for you as possible’? Or will it be, ‘This is a stupid question and I can’t be bothered to respond to someone who should really just google it themselves’? Every buyer wants to know they matter, even if they know on an unconscious level all that matters is their money ending up in the sellers’ hands. But they’ll never part with that money if they think they’ll be robbed of it.
