How to Market a Product Listings Website

4. Encourage Reviews: It’s no secret that reviews are extremely important. We have likely all bought something on Amazon or from any other platforms and in many of those cases the decisions came down to which product had the better reviews. Furthermore, as I mentioned at the beginning, reviews on Amazon will have an impact on other channels, including your Shopify site, since customers tend to do research on Amazon first. On that note, Amazon recently made a change to its review policy that you may have heard about. The summary of it is that Amazon is banning reviews for discounted products for Professional Sellers. Previously, many brands would provide discounted or free products to customers through a variety of channels including review sites in exchange for a review. A recent study of over 7 million reviews showed that the average rating for incentivized reviews were meaningfully higher than non-incentivized reviews. Such example is graph of incentivized reviews. The good news is that the recent change makes things more of a level playing field since brands were essentially penalized for not getting incentivized reviews if their competitors were. So, what can you do to get reviews? Email follow-up. Sellers are allowed to send follow up emails to customers related to a specific order, and there are several automated services available that can help you manage this process. The guidelines are here, but in summary you ma not: send emails with marketing or promotional messages have links to other websites demand, ask for, or incentivize positive reviews You can, however, send a few emails confirming you have received an order, and also following up on an order requesting them to leave feedback. There are tons of best practices out there, but I’d recommend sending no more than 2 emails: one during the order confirmation and one a few weeks after the product was received. Avoid making your emails feel too ‘spammy’ or aggressive, and give customers an outlet to share negative feedback directly with you prior to writing a negative review. Services such as Feedback Five or Feedback Genius can automate the process and make your life a lot easier. 5. Run Sponsored Product Ads Amazon has a robust ad platform that allows you to market your product to customers on Amazon. Amazon Sponsored Product Ads is a PPC (pay per click) model that allows you to promote your products along search results. Placements on desktop can be above, alongside, or below search results as well as on product detail pages. • Desktop ad placement on Amazon Placements on mobile appear below search results and on product detail pages. • Mobile ad placement on Amazon I could write an entire guide about Sponsored Ads but here's a simple three important steps to get up and running quickly: Step 1: Start with automatic targeting. This allows Amazon to use its powerful search algorithms to suggest an exhaustive list of potential keywords for you. This requires you to pick a flat default bid across all keywords, but the goal here is to get data on how various keywords perform. Step 2: Once you have at least a few weeks’ worth of data (the longer the better), start evaluating your automatic targeting campaign to determine which keywords performed the best. You will want to transition those over to a manual campaign, where you can now focus on only the most relevant keywords that performed well for you. With a manual campaign, you have the ability to adjust bids by keyword Step 3: Continue to iterate your manual campaign for keywords and bids. Data is your best friend, but if you feel strongly that you should include additional keywords that haven’t yet performed well, test various bid amounts. Different bid amounts can yield various placements and yield varying results, so continue to test until you find something that works well. 6. Take Advantage of Promotions Promotions including Lightning Deals are a great way to sell units at an increased velocity, ultimately leading to more reviews. The goal is not to always be on promotion or providing deep discounts, but if you can sprinkle these in towards the beginning of your product lifecycle on Amazon, it is a great way to gain additional reviews and build relevancy so other customers can find you. Sellers can also opt in for their products to be included in the Early Review Program. For instance Amazon actually randomly selects customers who leave reviews and provides them with a small reward (such as a $1-$3 Amazon Gift Card) to thank them for sharing their unbiased review. There is no guarantee that this reviewer will provide a positive review, but it is a great opportunity for sellers to with new products. 7. Drive External Traffic Many brands forget about this part, or reserve all external channels to point to their online store. While there is obvious value in directing external traffic blogs, Facebook Ads, Google AdWords, influencers, etc.) to your own site, those same tactics will also work to promote your product listings. Strategically decide which channels make sense to direct to Amazon. For example, bloggers, vloggers, and other influencers often love directing traffic to Amazon because they can collect an affiliate commission on any customers purchases that come from their custom link. Final Thoughts Amazon can be a very competitive and complex marketplace, but if you spend some time optimizing and promoting your listings, you'll be in a much better position to compete. Don’t get distracted by trying to game the system. Instead, focus on what you would want to see if you were the customer: clear and descriptive pages, competitive pricing, reputable and high quality reviews, and a trustworthy and responsive seller. If you can focus on the things that matter and do so with a professional and credible demeanor, you are already ahead of many competitors. Now go get selling.

Dear Vikram Thank you for your reply. I should have added that this site is Industry-specific. A quick check on G2Crowd and Capterra shows that neither has an anywhere comprehensive enough listing for this Industry. The site that I am trying to find a new owner for does not wait for vendors to seek listings, rather it proactively researches available products to produce a comprehensive listing that provides (in particular) smaller and start-up companies to understand what options are out there. The site lists over 1,000 vendors against just 4 on each of the two sites mentioned above. Larger enterprizes, of course, are actively sold to by the larger vendors and (mostly) would avoid using smaller vendors in any case. Kind regards, Colin