[Journey] More Clicks, More Sales: Upgrading My First Workflow

After impressions, the next two jobs were getting people to click and getting them to buy, so that's the part I upgraded next. The design, the keywords and the price all mattered.

If your products are getting seen but not clicked, or clicked but not bought, this is what I changed and in what order. It picks up right where my first workflow upgrade left off, the one about getting more impressions, which you can read here.

How did I think about clicks and sales?

Simple. I put myself in the buyer's shoes.

What does a shopper look at before they click? And what do they look at before they buy? Everything I tested came from those two questions.

What gets someone to click?

On Amazon, the first thing a shopper sees is the main image. Unfortunately, there isn't much room to play there. Amazon has a lot of rules for it, like showing just the product on a white background, so there wasn't much to improve.

What did matter at this stage was the design. A design that resonates with the people you're targeting is what gets the click.

The other half was keywords. More impressions only help if they come from the right people. Showing up in front of shoppers who have nothing to do with your niche doesn't help at all, so the keywords need to be highly relevant to the niche you're going after.

How did I find the right price?

Price was the next big one. I tested it $1 at a time, up and down, and left each price for weeks before coming back to the results.

Both directions have a trade-off. Going down brings more sales, up to a point, but the margin on each one shrinks. Going up costs some sales, but you make more on each one. So I kept moving until going lower stopped adding profit and going higher stopped hurting sales. That's the optimal spot.

For my mugs, it landed here:

$15.95, plus $4.95 shipping.

That price seems to have given me the best click-through and conversion rates, and it still holds today. It's the right price for me, but yours might be different. Check it against your own supplier, because everyone's costs and profit margins are different.

One thing worth knowing before you start moving prices on Amazon: raising a price too fast has a catch of its own, which I ran into and wrote about here.

What did the listing tests actually change?

Once a shopper clicks, they see a few more things: the secondary images, like infographics, plus the bullet points and the description.

I ran a lot of tests here. I posted listings with just one image. I posted them with lifestyle mockups. I posted them with lifestyle mockups plus infographics. And I tried a few different strategies for the bullet points and the description.

The point of all those images and bullet points is to remove friction. Any question a buyer might have that could stop them from buying, the listing is supposed to answer.

But with print on demand, the product is pretty straightforward as it is.

A mug is a mug. A t-shirt is a t-shirt.

Across my own tests, I didn't see a substantial difference in conversion rates. Not between one image and many. Not between different kinds of images and infographics. Not between different bullet point or description strategies.

Is it worth testing your listing?

It's good to have, and it's not a bad thing to test. But it's not a game changer, and it took a lot of tests to find that out. So I wouldn't put a lot of time into it. Your time is probably better spent elsewhere.

That's the next round of changes to my original workflow, after the impressions fixes. At this stage, getting off the ground matters most, and so does putting your time toward the things that actually count and staying on track with your goal.

I'm writing all of this up in the order it actually happened. If you want to follow it step by step, you can join the email list.

Thanks for reading along,
Nick T