Amazon Product Launch A-Z: How to Launch a Product on Amazon

If you’re going to be successful in this game, you need to know how to launch a product on Amazon.

Competition on Amazon in 2023 is sky-high. There are more than 2 million sellers on Amazon’s US marketplace alone. If you want to launch a product and get traction, you need a good Amazon product launch strategy.

This guide will show you how to set up and run a successful product launch on Amazon. We’ll guide you through each stage of the process, so you can craft a winning strategy you can replicate again and again.

What Your Amazon Product Launch Strategy Needs to Cover

When you launch a product on Amazon, your goal is to generate the momentum your product needs to start selling organically.

This primarily means getting your product to show up when people search for relevant keywords. For example, if you’re selling a hiking backpack, you want your product to appear when people search for things like “hiking backpack”, “sports backpack”, “travel daypack”, etc.

It’s an added bonus if you’re able to land things like the Amazon Best Seller badge, or get a place on the “Amazon Hot New Releases” or “Amazon Movers & Shakers” pages.

Your launch strategy is your plan to achieve this.

An Amazon Product Launch strategy can be broken down into the three broad categories:

• Pre-launch: setting the foundation for your launch to be successful.
• Generating sales: getting your first customers, and showing the Amazon search algorithm that your product is one that people want to buy.
• Maintaining sales: your plan for how to keep your sales going when you dial down your investment in paid traffic.

There are a number of ways to approach each step, and some best practices that you can follow to increase your chances of a successful product launch.

Keep reading for a step-by-step guide on how to launch a product on Amazon.

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Step One: Pre-Launch

Before the fanfare and excitement of your actual product launch, you need to set a strong foundation for your product.

Your launch is usually going to involve a decent investment in marketing to get your initial wave of sales. Your pre-launch process will ensure you’re in a position to continue having success once you turn this tap off.

Here’s what to cover before you get into the meat of your product launch.

Product research, validation & keyword research

Research and validation is possibly the most important step of all.

Let’s imagine you rush ahead to launch your product, and skip this step. You pump thousands into marketing your product launch, only to find that your product is no good, or there’s no one searching for your type of product on Amazon.

You’ll be dead in the water, unless your marketing is really that good.

Before you start, you need to ensure that:

• Your product fits a need or desire for consumers today.
• There’s room for your product in the market (the market is not over saturated with entrenched competitors, or if it is, your product has a point of difference).
• There are a decent amount of people searching for products like yours on Amazon.

If you can’t meet either of these points, you’ll need to go back to the drawing board.

Use software tools to find the rough volume of search terms related to your product, which will give an estimate of the demand there is for products like this. Then type these search terms in and see the products that come up in the search results.

You don’t want to be competing against huge, well-known brands or products with thousands of reviews. But it’s good if there are a few successful products, as it means there’s demand for this type of thing in the market.

The final step is to ask yourself what separates your product from those already being sold on Amazon. Is yours cheaper? Higher quality? Has additional features that the competition does not? You need some way to justify launching a new product and taking a share of the pie from existing competitors.

Take your time figuring out all of these points before you move forward with your launch.

Creating your listing

How you create your product listing plays a big part in the success of your launch, as well as your post-launch success.

You need to set up for two distinct goals:

• Optimizing your listing for Amazon SEO
• Convincing shoppers to buy your product after landing on your product page

Keyword optimization is key for the first goal. While you need conversion-optimized copywriting, effective images and A+ content, and the right pricing to maximize your conversion rate of viewers into sales.

Let’s look at each of these components.

Keyword optimization

Keywords are the foundation of a successful Amazon product. They tell the search engine what your product is, and determine which searches your product does and doesn’t show up for.

As mentioned earlier, you should have done extensive keyword research before launching your product, to make sure there are enough keywords with enough search volume for your product to make money.

When you create your listing, you should include all these keywords somewhere in your title, bullet points, product description, and backend keyword fields.

Don’t over-optimize. Repeating a keyword 20 times in the bullet points alone is not going to make your product rank higher for it. It’s more important that your listing reads well, and that a large range of phrases are mentioned.

Include the most important keywords higher up. Keyword space in your title should be reserved for your most valuable, relevant keywords, which will help your product generate more clicks from search results and PPC.

Then use your bullet points to add any other hyper-relevant keywords, and long-tail keywords that reference different use cases for your product. This will both help you rank for these searches, boost your conversion rate for people who click through from the search results

Conversion-focused copy

Keywords are just one part of setting up your listing. The other side of the coin is how you will convert shoppers into buyers of your product.

The consequences of poor copywriting are major, particularly when launching your product. You’re going to be sending a lot of traffic (potential buyers) to your listing, so if your copy is not convincing enough, your amount spent per sale goes up significantly.

The bar for convincing customers your product is worth their money is high, as Amazon listings have no shortage of related products and ads from competing sellers to draw customers’ attention.

To maximize conversions, stick to copy that is short, choppy and easy to scan. Large blocks of text are not good for Amazon listings, as most people have a short attention span when shopping.

Focus on benefits, not features of your product. This means writing about how your product helps the customer, rather than its physical features.

The site Marketing Examples outlines this beautifully:

It’s a bit of an art to create a product listing that finds the perfect balance between keyword optimization and conversion optimization. But if you can get this right, you can expect to be a step ahead of other sellers in your niche.

Images & A+ Content

In addition to your copy, make sure you “wow” potential customers with high-quality images, video, and A+ Content (formerly Enhanced Brand Content).

These help spice up your Amazon listing, and do wonders for your conversion rate. Visuals can also be used to promote your brand and create a lasting image in your customers’ mind.

Pricing

When you put up a new product on Amazon, you also need to set your pricing. You may not think of this as a part of a product launch, but pricing can greatly affect the success (or failure) of your launch.

If you price your product too high, you may struggle to get enough sales. While if you price it too low, you won’t make enough profit to afford more inventory.

You want to find the sweet spot where you’re making as much profit as possible, but you’re not pricing yourself too high above the competition, where the price will drive customers to buy from other sellers.

During a product launch, it’s not a bad idea to drop your pricing or discount your product, as you can afford to sacrifice profit to generate sales velocity to get your product off the ground.

However, it’s not the best idea to change the base price during this time. The reason being, Amazon’s algorithm doesn’t like when your pricing jumps up in big increments. If you price your product low during the launch, then put it up a lot afterwards, you might see your rankings drop as a result

Instead, it’s best to use one-off or limited discounts for your launch period, such as Amazon coupons or discount codes.

Think about this before you kick off your Amazon product launch, as you’ll need to factor in the cost of discounting your product when budgeting your launch expenses. Thus, you may need to put aside capital for several shipments’ worth of inventory, as you may not be making much (if any) profit for a short time.

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Step Two: Generating Sales

Now we get to the key part of your product launch: getting people to buy your product.

You need a proactive strategy to get your first few sales. That’s because, initially, you don’t have any visibility. Your product likely isn’t showing up for any keywords, so you need to go out and find people to buy your product.

Once you do, if you get enough sales to show Amazon that your product is capable of being a best-seller, you’ll get visibility, and start making organic sales.

That’s the nuts and bolts of a successful launch. As long as you have the foundation in place, as we talked about in step one, your product lives and dies on how well you’re able to drive sales during the launch process.

Of course, getting your first few sales is easier said than done. You’re most likely going to need to run paid marketing campaigns to get sales during your launch – unless you have certain assets already in place before your launch.

Here are the most common ways to get sales during your Amazon Product Launch.

Amazon advertising (PPC)

While organic search is king, on Amazon you can pay to “jump the queue”, by investing in Amazon PPC, or Sponsored Products Ads.

This lets you bid on your target keywords, to push your product to the top of the results page for these searches.

You can also buy sponsored ads on other areas of the Amazon platform, like product listings, which can be very effective.

This makes Amazon PPC a powerful and popular tactic for product launches. When your product doesn’t yet have the history of sales needed to rank organically, you can pump money into aggressive PPC campaigns to generate the necessary sales momentum.

The problem is, you usually need a few reviews to run Amazon ads effectively. If you run sponsored ads for a newly launched product with no reviews, you’ll struggle to convert sales, as you lack social proof (a necessary part of selling products in e-commerce).

Amazon PPC can be great during a product launch, but only once you have at least 3-5 reviews. Try starting your Amazon ads midway through the launch phase, once this goal is met.

Off-Amazon advertising (external traffic)

You’re likely going to look to advertising channels outside of Amazon to get a lot of your launch sales.

The main reason is that these are easy to scale, as long as you have enough of a budget. You can proactively reach potential customers, and use clever marketing to convince them to buy your product.

You’ll want to give an offer as well – something like an “exclusive launch discount” coupon code, to entice people to take a chance on a new product.

So where exactly can you go to promote your product? Off-Amazon advertising channels (aka external traffic) can include the following:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Google Ads
• TikTok Ads
• Pinterest

There may be other social media platforms or advertising channels that work for you, but these are the big ones.

Also consider partnering with influencers to promote your product launch. It takes work to find the right people to work with, but if you can, influencer marketing is incredibly powerful.

Learn more about influencer marketing for Amazon products in this post.

Email marketing

The best sales generation strategy for a product launch is launching to an email list.

If you have an engaged list of people interested in your brand, product line or niche, you can send people to your product without spending anything on paid ads. The only cost is the labor of setting up your email campaigns (minimal), and the cost of discounting your product (necessary most of the time, but still much lower than the cost of running ads).

The obvious issue is that many sellers won’t have an email list. If you’re a brand new Amazon seller, this probably is not an option. But if you’re business has already been operating a while, perhaps on another ecommerce platform, or you’ve put in work to build a pre-launch list, you should absolutely use this during your launch.

Overflow sales

Like with email marketing, this won’t be an option for all sellers. But if you’ve got an established self-hosted online store (on Shopify, WooCommerce, etc), you can use overflow sales from your website to launch your products on Amazon.

To do this, either direct your regular checkout to Amazon, or add an option on your site for people to buy from Amazon.

This might seem stupid, as you’re probably making lower margins through Amazon than on your site, due to the extra fees. But the benefit you get from added visibility on Amazon, should your launch be a success, is often worth it.

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Step Three: Maintaining Sales

A lot of the time, if you’re able to drive a lot of sales for your product during the launch process, your launch is going to be a success. But in some cases, your sales can fall off as soon as you stop paying for them. Yet you can’t continue to spend big money on ads indefinitely, or you’ll never make a profit.

You need several things during your launch to ensure your sales continue, even when the paid traffic tap is turned off.

Translate sales into rankings

Selling products is important, but search rankings are the real carrot.

You want your product to rank for keywords, and start generating organic sales from Amazon search.

Generally speaking, strong sales velocity will result in organic rankings for your product.

However, sales don’t always correlate to rankings.

You need to ensure, first, that your product listing is well optimized for keywords. That way, the sales you get will go towards ranking boosts for the right keywords.

Additionally, your sales will only translate to rankings if you sustain them over an extended period of time. Aim for at least 7-21 days of steady sales. This is better than a large spike, followed by a quick drop.

Reviews

Lastly, you need to get some product reviews.

Product reviews are critical for ranking, generating clicks from the search results, and converting customers that land on your page.

The first few reviews are the hardest to get. Once you’ve got enough to maintain a good conversion rate, you should start getting reviews organically on between 1-5% of your sales.

However, when you don’t have any reviews, it’s difficult to get sales from people shopping on Amazon, through organic search or Amazon PPC campaigns.

And without sales, you can’t get reviews.

That’s why review generation needs to be part of your product launch strategy. Without product reviews, you’ll struggle to get any meaningful traction in organic rankings and sales.

Learn more: the best, most effective and safest ways to get reviews for your Amazon product today.