Amazon has made many changes to the Seller Central platform of the past year or so by adding new features for Sellers to take advantage of. One of our favorite additions by far has been the Seller Central Coupons. This feature provides some incredible benefits for Sellers and has become a central pillar of the marketing strategies we develop for our clients.
Coupons are able to drive sales by increasing visibility, traffic and conversion rates – all factors that will help your products move up search engine results pages. We have achieved incredible results for our clients utilizing coupons to boost sales.
In this post we will share with you the benefits of using coupons, how we select what products to use coupons on, and some of the results that AMZ Advisers’ clients have achieved.
The Benefits of Using Seller Central Coupons
There are 3 main things that we see as benefits of using coupons on Seller Central. One clear benefit is the visibility that your products gain when using coupons. Coupons can help your product stand out on product search engine results pages as they display a little coupon notification next to your listing. It is similar to how available promotions are display on the search engine results page, but the coupon notification provides an orange icon that stands out more than the plain text of the promotion notifications.
Products with coupons are also displayed on their own page under Amazon’s Today’s Deals section on the home page. Shoppers can browse products that have coupon offerings and then filter down by categories. This section is probably more likely to be found by savvy shoppers looking for a deal, but it again is added visibility you would not have otherwise. Partnering your coupon with a paid advertising campaign can also increase your visibility drastically. Over a two-month period one of our clients went from 1,383-page views per month to 14,165-page views with only coupons and automatic advertising campaigns implemented.
A less obvious benefit to many sellers is the impact that coupons have on customer conversion rates. Conversion rates are one of the key elements to your profitability and a huge relevancy signal to the Amazon search algorithm. We believe coupons psychologically make an Amazon offer more appealing to a customer. Amazon shoppers tend to purchase the lowest priced product with quality being equal. By offering a discount through a coupon you may be able to take advantage of this shopper tendency and convince them that they are getting a good deal.
Our research and testing have shown that shoppers are 47% more likely to buy a product with a coupon then without one with quality and price being equal.
We’ve also found that coupons provide a great return on your advertising dollars. Small Amazon Sellers don’t have the available marketing budget that large manufacturers have, so making every dollar count is important. We borrowed one metric from advertising campaigns to look at the effectiveness of coupons. Looking at an Average Cost of Sale (coupon spend/total sales), we’ve found that coupons tend to perform at about 10%. With keyword bids constantly increasing on Amazon this can be a good direction for sellers to redirect their advertising money.
How to Select Products for Seller Central Coupons
While coupons can provide great benefits to a product listing we do not recommend applying blanket coupons across all your products. Constant discounts can cheapen your brand and cost you unnecessary revenue. It’s important to know how to analyze your listings and determine which would benefit the most from utilizing coupons. There are two metrics that we use to determine what products need coupons.
We analyze a product catalog by going to the Business Reports section of Seller Central. Depending on whether your listing is a variation listing or a standalone, you will need to go to either Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Parent Item or Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Child Item.
The two most important things to look at on these pages are your page views or sessions, and your Unit Session Percentage – also known as your conversion rate.
The largest benefit you can get from coupons is by identifying your highest traffic listings and looking at their conversion rates. The average Amazon conversion rate is about 8%. You should look at introducing coupons for products that have a significantly lower conversion rate than that. The coupons will help encourage customer purchases and drive that number up. The benefit received from applying coupons to products significantly above 8% is very limited. Those are already great conversion rates and applying coupons to those listings will only cost you more gross revenue with more than likely only slight increases in conversion rates.
Case Study: How Implementing Seller Central Coupons Can Increase Your Sales
We are going to share a recent marketing strategy that we put in place with a client that helped them grow sales by more than 300% in two months. This client approached us after having had solid sales through the fourth quarter, but sales had dropped off drastically since then. By the time we started working with the client they were doing about $18,000 a month in sales – down from a $40,000 high.
We developed a marketing strategy utilizing coupons and sponsored ads for their account. We took a look at their sales data and identified their top traffic listings that could benefit from coupons. They’re top 5 traffic listings had an average conversion rate of .93% – well below the Amazon average. Their top traffic listing had over 5,000 page views and a conversion rate .15%. There was a huge opportunity for coupons to drive their sales through the roof.
By the end of the second month, the client had grown their overall account sales to more than $75,000 per month – better than they had ever been before. The conversion rate on their top product increased from .15% to 3.56% – an increase of 2273%. Traffic also increased as a result of the advertising and increased conversions from coupons. The listing went from 3,481 views in the starting month to 7,321 – an increase of 110%. And the best part was the incredible low spend on coupons. About $1,700 in coupon spend led to more than $33,000 in sales. Total advertising spend was less than $4,000 with a 17.1% ACOS. Implementing coupons had a drastic impact on this clients sales, and the account has continued to grow in the months that followed.
Coupons have been one of the most valuable additions to the Seller Central platform – but one that we find to many sellers do not know how to use. Analyzing your listings and finding the opportunities for the largest coupon benefits is the starting point for this strategy. The discounts offered do not need to be large – the simple presence and visibility is enough to convince customers to try your products.
Don’t sacrifice your revenue or brand reputation unnecessarily by constantly running coupons. Use them to boost your product performance heading into high sales periods or to improve an under-performing listing. Follow these steps and you will see incredible performance from Seller Central Coupons for your account!
About the Author: Amazon Seller Central Coupons
Mike Begg is the co-founder of AMZ Advisers, AMZ Lens and Precisely. Mike and his team have been able to achieve incredible growth on the Amazon platform for their clients by optimizing and managing their accounts, creating in-depth content marketing strategies and running effective off-platform marketing campaigns.