Why your Items Aren't Selling On Amazon
Posted: November 21st, 2020
Why your Items Aren't Selling On Amazon
Let's talk about why aren't your items selling on Amazon? Let's say you found a great item. It makes 150% ROI, but it's not selling. I'm going to go through five reasons why your item might not be selling on Amazon. It could be just one of these reasons. It could be a combination, but I'm going through five reasons that we've learned throughout our time selling on Amazon of why our items are just not selling.
Amazon Online Arbitrage Leads List
High Rank
Let's go ahead and get started the first reason. And this is probably one of the most common reasons why your item is not selling on Amazon is because it has a high rank. So the lower the rank, the better on Amazon. So the closer to zero, the better, the higher, the worse, the less likely that item is to sell. It varies in each category of what exactly is a good rank, depending on how high that category goes. We like to look at rank more in terms of percentages than just the number that you get with rank. So we try to stay within top 1% to 2%, um, less than 5%, definitely, but ideally 1% to 2% at the most.
If your item has a high rank, it's just not selling that frequently. It might be selling 10 units a month and that's just not a lot of sales volumes. So that's a really common reason why the item isn't selling. It's just not a popular item on Amazon. In this case, what I recommend is you can wait if that item does sell at all, if it does sell 10 a month, then you have some potential. If it sells two a month, you have a lot less potential. So you can wait, but you got to keep in mind the fees. If not, you can just cut your losses, recall the item and move on. You just have to learn from this and look at the rank. Look at the Keepa graph before buying the item. So that's the first reason just it's a high ranked item. There's just not a lot of sales volumes so it's just not moving.
Pricing Not Competitive
The second reason is also a really common one which is pricing issues. And this one's a little more complicated to manage. There's a lot of different issues you can have here with pricing. So first off, if your pricing is not competitive, you will not get the buy box. And therefore you are very unlikely to get any sales. 80% of sales come from the buy box on all listings that does have an active buy box. If your pricing is not competitive, you're already in a bad position because the likelihood of a buyer clicking to see all and then finding your listing to purchase it is low. You want to be rotating through the buy box. So if your pricing is not competitive, you're going to have a hard time selling that item.
The tricky thing here with this is your pricing may be competitive at one point, and then it may not be later. You have to constantly keep up with that pricing. So you have two options. You can manually reprice try to keep up with it as often as you can. This works okay, if you have a limited amount of listings where this gets tricky is if you have tons of SKUs, it's very difficult to keep up with them. So what I recommend and what we do is using a repricer. A repricer is software that automatically reprices your items based on the rules that you give it. For example you can set a minimum ROI or profit margin. You can set all kinds of different rules on how it does its repricing, but it reprices frequently up to every 15 minutes. We use be BQool for repricing, highly recommend it. It just really helps you stay competitive. If you're not staying competitive with other sellers, it's going to be very difficult to make sales on that item. Other people are winning the buy box instead of you because your pricing is not competitive and not keeping up. So that's the second reason why your items aren't selling the pricing. Your pricing is not competitive.
Listing is Lacking Information
The third reason why your item is not selling is there are issues with the listing or the listing is lacking information. We've all seen it on Amazon. That one listing with only one picture, that's like either very far away or just not a great picture. That listing that has a title that doesn't really make sense. You know, the listing that has one line for the description, just the listing is lacking. That can be a huge turnoff to buyers. It just doesn't make it very appealing to them. So if the listing is lacking, it is possible that the item is not going to sell as frequently.
This one, though, you can make updates to the listing and fix this problem. You can update the title, the description, all of that. You can optimize that listing so it is more likely to sell. This is a problem that you can fix. You really can do something about this. And when you do that you could make the sales rank better. The sales rank could go lower. It could sell more frequently because you did optimize that listing as well. So there's a lot of potential here with this. We've all seen these listings where you look at it and you go, no way people are buying this, but the sales ranks is okay. So obviously people are buying it, but you can optimize that listing to improve it. So keep that in mind. If you do see a listing that you just think is terrible, there is something you can do about that as an Amazon seller. So that is the third reason why your items aren't selling the listing is lackluster to say the least and luckily this is something that you can improve.
Too Much Competition
The fourth one, this one is a lot to unpack. There's too much competition, or the listing is over saturated. This is every Amazon sellers, worst nightmare, but it happens from time to time. So sometimes when you get on a listing there were only three sellers. And then you look at it five days later now there's 50 sellers on that listing. It happens, especially with really, really popular items that are easy to source. What happens in this situation when there's too much competition is you get less of a piece of the pie. If that item sells a 100 a month and they were two sellers on it, when you got on it, you're the second seller on it. It would be 50, 50 each, right? You get 50 of the sales. I get 50 of the sales. It's not a hundred percent how it works, but you can estimate that you would get half of those. So you would get 50 of the estimated monthly sales of a hundred. If 50 people pop up on the listing, now you get to have2 of the estimated monthly sales of a hundred, right? Over-saturation and too much competition can cause a lot of issues. And you're not getting as much of that or the same sales as you thought you would.
Another issue is we've all seen this with over-saturation goes the price, the price tanks, because everyone has a repricers on. It's getting very competitive. Some people are just trying to sell out and move on. People get worried because there's so many other sellers on it. So you will see the price go down as well, sometimes in this situation. Then you're stuck in a hard position because you can't go that low on your price. It's lower than what you wanted for that item. Then you're stuck not being able to sell it because the other sellers are too low. This situation, what we do is we just wait it out. We wait until they're gone and until the price goes back up to what our minimum ROI is. In general, with too much competition on an item, there's a couple of things you can do. One, you can try to get out as quickly as possible. That also depends on how much stock you have that. It might not be a viable solution to you. You can play the waiting game and you can wait for some sellers to sell out. You can expect that an item when there was too much saturation that a lot of people aren't going to come back, they're going to move on. They're going to notice that. You can just play ball. You can play ball and go with the flow of what's going on and try to sell as much as you can and just get out after that. Keep it at your price and just kind of wait, but you can play ball with it as well. It doesn't have to be an end all situation. If it is an item with high estimated monthly sales. If it is an item with lower estimated monthly sales and you're seeing 50 sellers, you are going to run into a bit of an issue. Fortunately, from our experience, we don't see this too often, but when we do, we just try to make our money and move on from that item. So that is the fourth reason your items aren't selling on Amazon. There's too much competition on that specific ASIN
Seasonal Item that is Out of Season
The fifth reason your items aren't selling on Amazon is because it's not the season for them to sell. This is a really easy and common mistake to make. So for example, you find this really great item, you source it and then you send it in and it's not selling. And you're just confused. Then you think about it. You sit down, you think about it and you think, wait, this is a swimsuit it's November. That makes sense. That's why it's not selling it's because it's a seasonal item. So that's the fifth reason why it's a seasonal item and it's not that season. Another good example right now it is November 5th when I'm writing this. And it was just Halloween after Halloween, no one's buying Halloween costumes. All that stuff is just dead in the water. It's just going to stop selling. If you look at it on November 1st, it's going to tell you that it has high estimated monthly sales. It's going to look like a great item to source, but it's not because that holiday is over. Same thing with any holidays like 4th of July related stuff, Thanksgiving related stuff, anything Christmas related, not Christmas gifts but Christmas decor, any of that type of stuff. As soon as that holiday is over the demand for that item is going to drastically drop and stores are clearancing out that item as well. So you're also competing with like super dirt cheap prices in store.
The only option in some of these cases is to wait until next year, if you want to, I would not recommend keeping it at Amazon till then, because you're going to get hit with fees. You can recall it, send it back in the next year. If you want to, or you can just cut your losses, you can try to lower your prices and just get that item sold as quickly as possible. I will say it is November 5th and we have some Halloween items left that we are FBM and people are buying them today on November 5th with expedited shipping. I would give it a couple of days after the holiday, at least to try to sell it. But usually as soon as that milestone comes, it's not going to be a good item anymore. Holidays are a big one, but just general seasons. For example what do people buy in the summer versus the winter? I know pools were really big this summer with the pandemic and everything. A lot of people were putting pools back in their backyard. Like the inflatable ones that's not going to do so well in December, right? Because in most places, the weather is not going to work for that. Just keep that in mind with seasonal items. For me personally, I really look at the data and sometimes I don't even think about what the item actually is itself. I'm just looking at the Keepa and like, you know, the numbers and all that. But some of the things it helps have that practical thinking of as well of what type of item is. And does it make sense for, to sell right now? So that is the fifth reason why your items are not selling they're seasonal items and it's just not that season or holiday anymore.