How often are you utilising the ‘frequently bought together’ feature on Amazon? If the answer is ‘not at al’ then you could be missing out on a valuable source of revenue. At eDesk, we’re always interested in making sure you maximise every source of revenue, so keep reading to learn how to make money out of another source on Amazon.
How Frequently Bought Together Can Make You Money
This upselling feature on Amazon shows shoppers related items that are relevant to what they’re currently browsing or buying. For example, if they’re looking at sleeping bags, frequently bought together items could include sleeping pads, tents or tarps. Consumers have the ability to add all the items to their cart or select just the ones they want.
What’s important to note is that while Amazon gets to decide which items bundle together in frequently bought together, there are things you can do on your side to manipulate things a bit.
Here are some of the top ways of going about it.
1. Create a Promo Campaign to Highlight Particular Products
This strategy has a few neat consequences. The first and most obvious one is that buyers love specials, and driving a promo campaign will increase traffic to your page and potentially hike up sales. Another is that the more buyers buy the products featured in your promo campaign, the more likely it is for Amazon’s algorithm to associate those together on its own.
On your end, design your promo campaign to look like this: feature related items at a discount when bought with the target product. Going back to our camping example, if your target product is a tent, then the discounted items can be things like the sleeping bag, sleeping pad, tarp, camping chair, headlamp, rope, water bottles and cookware.
Incentivise buyers to purchase as much as possible by lowering the overall amount, and you’ll help ‘teach’ Amazon that these items should be placed in the frequently bought together algorithm. Just remember to include the ‘Add Both to Cart’ button when finalising the promo campaign!
2. Research Items to Bundle Together
Bundling is a great way to both increase sales and target Amazon’s frequently bought together algorithm. For starters, you can include slow-moving items into the bundle and reduce the chances of long-term storage fees, as well as create hype around new products you’re introducing. And, as with the previous example, the more people buy the items in the bundle, the more Amazon will associate them together on its own.
For this strategy, combine your heart and head. Make a list of items you have in your inventory you would like to sell, then look at trends and data to see how viable the combinations would be. Once you hit gold on which bundles work best together, unbundle them so buyers start purchasing them together — but as separate items. If traffic and conversions keep up at similar rates to when you had the bundle special going, then Amazon’s algorithm will start to notice.
3. Get Other Sellers on Board
This strategy can require a lot of work to pull off, but can also be one of the most beneficial ways of hacking frequently bought together. How it works is you research sellers who are doing well with items you want to pair with, partner up with them, and then let Amazon’s algorithm take over.
It can help to make a spreadsheet with cells for ASIN, Amazon listing, the storefront URL, contact name and contact email. Fill out your spreadsheet with as many products as you can think of that would pair well together — look at your search term report to find out what ASINs buyers look for when they purchase your SKUs. Get in contact with those products’ buyers (LinkedIn can be a good resource) and take your plan for mutual selling to them.
To sweeten the deal for them, propose something like becoming an Amazon Affiliate (such as offering a 10% commission) or a coupon code on your own products. Cementing relationships with other sellers will take time, but there’s no reason why working with other sellers can’t be to your benefit on Amazon. Just take care to ensure that the frequently bought together products don’t place you in direct competition with each other or the other sellers won’t have much reason to partner with you.
Get More Positive Feedback Easily
No matter which strategy you use to hack Amazon’s frequently bought together, one of the most important things to keep in mind is that regular positive feedback helps generate new sales.
eDesk’s built-in Feedback functionality helps you improve your online reputation with perfectly timed requests for reviews on Amazon, eBay, Google and Trustpilot.
