How To Sell Home Decor Items On Amazon – Part 1

No matter how attractive your home decor items are, they may go unnoticed, let alone sell like hot cakes, until you take to a leading marketplace like Amazon, and more importantly, give your customers every bit of information that they might be looking for.

So, when you upload your products, or get an Amazon product upload services company do it for you, try and facilitate an informed decision making process, instead of beating around the bush or sharing irrelevant details. Here’s what you’ll need to work on:

Product image(s)

First things first, max out your image use. That’s what all the successful sellers do. And if for whatever reason, you can’t follow suit, try and use at least 5-8 images for each of your products. Also, make sure that the customers are able to actually “see” your product, and that there are no distractions, none whatsoever, since they can’t really walk into your store and physically hold it in their hands. For this, you need to ensure that your photographs have a white background, all of them. Not to mention, uniform lighting is next on the list. Under lit or over lit product photos would leave the customers rather confused, giving them yet another reason to buy the product from your competitors. Here’s a cheat-sheet. Take a printout, if need be, or create a sticky note, whatever works for you, but do keep these pointers handy:

• Go for all sorts of photos, including individual shots, lifestyle shots (whatever you sell, whether it’s a hanging planter vase or a decorative mason jar, it can easily be photographed while being used), scale shots (the ones that give a better idea of the actual product size), detailed shots, group shots, and of course, packaging shots.
• Blurred images are a big no-no.
• If you are to click the product photos all by yourself, make sure you know the drill – right from creating your own light box (or light tent) to using a tripod and then picking up the right camera, there’s a lot to be taken care of.
• Last but not least, give some serious thought to post-processing or editing, especially if you want your images to have that polished look, one that can make or break your sales. Free editing tools do make for an attractive proposition, but truth be told, they are not easy to use, and may not live up to your expectations. It’s better to reach out to an Amazon product upload listing services company, and get their experts to enhance the quality of your product images.

Bonus tip: As an Amazon seller, you need to do the best you can to make it to the coveted list of approved brand owners, those who are eligible for Enhanced Brand Content (EBC), because once you get through, you’d be able to include “enhanced” images while describing your product. In plain English, this translates into higher conversions and increased traffic. And well, EBC will also enable you to leverage subheadings, paragraphs, and a couple of other design functionalities, but that’s a different story.

Here’s another one: Your product images can also help you put up a brave front against listing hijackers. Just make sure you register your brand with Amazon, and once that’s been taken care of, start showing off your logo in all your product photos, thereby making it easier for your customers to tell knock-offs from the originals.

Product title

Come up with one that compels the visitors to click on your listing. Here’s an example:

Hand Painted Bird & Flower Motif Vase & Wall Decor Container – Best For Succulents, Air Plants, Mini Cactus and More, Colored Ceramic/Wood (Set of 3)

Now this one takes up to 149 characters, but did you notice how we have smartly tried to include all the important keywords and search terms right in the beginning, in the first 107 characters to be precise? You just cross-checked it, didn’t you?

Anyway, that’s been done to avoid truncation. See, Amazon’s been known to shorten the titles to 112. So, it’s better if you stick to the recommended character count, or at least try and wrap up the most important part of your title well within the said limit. And guess what, doing so has its fair share of advantages. You do right by Amazon, give your click-through rate a much-needed boost, and optimize your title for voice.

Bonus tip: Try and test your product title on Echo and see how it performs. Make changes accordingly.

Product description

It goes without saying that your description has to be convincing. And that’s only possible, if you co-create your product description, and make your customers assume the honorary role of an Amazon product listing copywriter for you. This in turn would require you to analyze your competitors and while you are at it, scour through their reviews so as to listen to what your customers (both existing and prospective) have to say. Let’s look at a dummy review:

These decorative mason jars are fun to use. I took out the LED lights, and used them to decorate the living room for my son’s birthday party last week. I think I’ll use them again around Christmas.

There you go. The review gives away a DIY idea, one that you can include in your product description, and take the customers by surprise. They’ll be expecting to see your product’s specifications, or at best, the cliched and rather customary “gift it to your friends and family on different occasions” punchline, but if you get their creative juices flowing and engage with them, they’ll click on the buy button right away. Or would they? Here’s how you can make sure they do:

• Take to experiential marketing, and build up a narrative. Think of your product description as an infomercial, and use it to convince your buyers that your product can help improve their day-to-day lives, especially if they have had to settle for an inferior option so far. But at the same time, keep it simple and short. You ought to, more so because Amazon’s guidelines leave room for only 2000 bytes of data, and if you keep on blabbering, and inadvertently miss out on important information, there’s no going back.
• Don’t rush them into making a purchase. Superfluous adjectives and phrases like “hot selling” and “great value” won’t do you any good. And neither would the customer testimonials, definitely not if you include them in your description. They are very much a part of a product listing’s anatomy, ageed, but are better used in the right place at the right time.
• Avoid HTML tags. And for if some reason, you do feel the use them to your advantage, at least avoid the ones that are no long allowed. Examples include, but are not limited to:
  • <p style=”color: yellow;”>Colored Text</p>
  • <p style=”font-family:consolas;”>Consolas Text</p>

     

Bonus tip: Amazon doesn’t advocate the use of HTML, so it’s imperative that you tread carefully. Start off with <b>Place Text Here</b> (for bold), <p>Place Your Text Here</p> (for paragraph), and other relatively safe options.

• Use an active tone to increase the readability of your product copy. Here’s an example:

This one’s passive, and has a readability score of 5.

Now, let’s try and improve the score, and also change the tone from “passive” to “active”:

Need we say more?

Before we wrap up, you must know that an Amazon product listing has three more elements, namely, bullet points / features, reviews, and ratings, and make no mistake, these are all at least as important as the ones we have already discussed, if not more. We have covered these in detail in Part 2. Check it out here!

Till then, keep working towards making your home decor listings saleable, and if you are not sure how to, well, you are in for a treat. Experts at Data4Amazon do. In fact, they are well-versed with pretty much everything Amazon related, right from Amazon store setup to Amazon listing optimization. Write to them at info@data4amazon.com, and don’t forget to include your individual requirements. We are not a “one-solution-fits-all” company, and are sure you ain’t looking for one either!

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