When an Amazon product page is considered “retail ready,” it means that the page displays every piece of content—including all visuals and each line of text—in a way that is likely to attract the most potential buyers.
“Getting shoppers to the product page is so important, but if they aren’t able to see the product in use or get questions answered they may have about your offering, the trip to the product’s Amazon page is a waste,” says Alyssa Sparza, Content Director of content26. “The shopper will quickly leave the page and find a competitor’s product instead.”
If buyers struggle to determine what your product will look, feel, and function like in person, it’s much less likely that they’ll click the “Buy” button. So, how do you get an Amazon product page retail ready?
Is Your Product Page Retail Ready?
When your product page is retail ready, a buyer should be able to easily find the information they need to decide to purchase. The primary areas to focus on are:
- Product Title
- Product Description and Bullets
- Images
- Customer Reviews/Star Rating
- Inventory
- Featured Offer (aka The Buy Box)
- Enhanced Content
Product Titles: Make sure your product title is succinct (around 80 characters is ideal), accurate, and includes all essential information: brand and product name, any variant (color/flavor/material), and the product’s size, quantity, or measurement. For more detailed information, please see our guide to Amazon product titles.
Descriptions & Bullet Points: Use direct and evocative language to detail a product’s features and benefits in the product description, and use bullets to quickly draw the shopper’s eye to the most salient information. An ideal product description is no longer than one paragraph and is written with clear, easy-to-understand sentences and naturally integrated keywords. Emphasize your brand and product’s story: what makes it special, unique, and worth purchasing? Bullets should be short and scannable: 80 characters max, focused on one key product element, and dense with natural keywords. For more tips on crafting and formatting bullets, read our guide here.
Images: Images help buyers envisions ways they might use a product in their lives, so make sure all visual content on your product detail pages is high quality and high resolution. Carefully select your featured image—the eye-level, mid- to long-shot that best highlights your product—to immediately capture a buyer’s attention, and provide images from multiple angles (or one 360-degree shot) or video that shows the product in action.
Beware: not all images are created equal! A frequent problem with less effective product pages, Sparza says, is omitting important product details in favor of trendier, more visually focused content. “The last thing you want is to replace vital information your potential customers are searching for with another banner image that doesn’t provide any additional product information to your customers,” she says.
Customer Reviews/Star Rating: Why do ratings and reviews play such a huge role in retail readiness? Positive product reviews and high star ratings encourage consumers to take a risk on buying an item they haven’t seen in person. Brands cannot directly alter or affect customer reviews, certainly, but it’s critical they monitor reviews regularly and address customer concerns quickly, to keep ratings high. Products should have a star rating of at least 3.5 out of 5, with a minimum of 15 positive reviews, to be considered retail ready.
Inventory: Staying on top of your inventory is a major component of retail readiness. Always make sure your product is in-stock and ready to ship, your shipping policies are clearly stated (with estimated delivery date), and update the product page if stock or shipping times change. If a product included in an Amazon Ads campaign isn’t available, Amazon will automatically pause the sale of that product—or the entire campaign, if it’s a one-product campaign.
Featured Offer (Buy Box): The Featured Offer, also called the Buy Box, is a prominent part of every product detail page, but one of the trickier aspects to understand. When a shopper clicks on the ‘Add to Cart’ or ‘Buy Now’ button on the PDP, they are purchasing that item from the selling partner presenting the Featured Offer. When multiple sellers are selling the same product, only the seller who “owns” the Featured Offer/Buy Box will get the sale. To determine which product receives the Buy Box, Amazon considers product reviews, price, fulfillment, customer experience, and more. Because 83% of Amazon sales go through the Featured Offer/Buy Box, owning it is the best chance you have of selling your product.
Enhanced Content: Enhanced content (A+) can expand on your product and brand story in an engaging way, through rich media such as additional visuals, videos (Premium A+), comparison charts, and more. This allows you to highlight your product’s primary features, uses, and benefits in a visually striking way; to tell your brand story more fully, and create positive brand awareness through shared brand values. Don’t sleep on enhanced content, which can increase Amazon sales by an average of 3 to 10%.
How Do I Improve Retail Readiness?
Retail readiness plays a monumental role in getting your product in front of consumers, and content26 is here to help. For more than 15 years, content26 has created high-quality product content, including Amazon A+, essential, and Brand Stores content, for over 650 brands.
We know how to showcase your product’s features and benefits for ultimate retail readiness, and how to employ smart Amazon Ads and search optimization strategies to convert that readiness into sales. For more information on what we do and how we can help brands like yours, drop us a line.
