Why Shopify Is My Favorite Tool for Amazon FBA
You read the title correctly. Shopify is my FAVORITE tool for Amazon FBA! More than Helium10? Yep. More than Jungle Scout? 100%.
Having a Shopify store can be one of the best things to happen to your amazon listing - but you have to understand how to use the tool properly.
1️⃣ Use Shopify to Test Product Ideas First!
99% of sellers on the amazon platform are running something called a “direct response model”. This means you are only trying to service those members of the audience who are in the buying phase of the customer journey.
This model has 3 stages - Attention, Conversion, and Deliverable.
An Amazon listing and a Shopify store are both Conversion assets. Meaning it is where people go to buy their choice of product, like a cashier in a market store when buying something in person, if that makes sense.
Shopify has some huge advantages over Amazon here:
- Shopify allows you to capture and use customer behavior data (which is key for listing copy, and advertising optimization). Amazon gives you NONE of this information.
- Shopify gives you a way to better present the benefits of your product to the market, whereas an amazon listing is all setup the exact same as the other listings.
Combine the above two points and you have an unreal product-market fit validation tool😎
2️⃣ Customer Data = Gold. Amazon Give You None.
What this advantage means in practice with regard to the subject of “external traffic to amazon”: When I send traffic to a Shopify store, and I have a Facebook pixel setup on the store to track conversion events, I can setup customized audiences based on engagement behavior and run follow up ads to high value audiences.
In other words, everyone that I drive to my Shopify store that goes as far as starting the checkout process but then leaves the store - I can tell Facebook to run my follow up ads to ONLY those people because they are clearly showing the highest purchase intent.
I run split tests on my ads taking one path back to my Shopify store to checkout and the other with an amazon attribution link to my Amazon listing for the same product. My prices on my store are a couple dollars higher than my amazon listings so one of two wonderful things are going to happen:
1) This high intent audience sees my ad and the perceived discount for going to amazon and goes through to buy at what is actually full price on Amazon and those conversions mean a big boost in rankings.
2) They see the ad and go search for me on amazon and buy there as a method of brand lift….which gets me both a keyword boost depending on what they searched and ranking juice from the full price conversion.
3️⃣ Letting the Market Develop The Product.
I can get a sample made and a few nice photos of a product I think the market might like. I can setup a coming soon page on my Shopify store (or lander like Carrd.co - both will have an email opt in).
The power here isn't just customer data and the ability to collect interested emails. The problem with the amazon platform is that you have A LOT of other links and products grabbing for their attention. On Shopify you can engineer the whole experience for higher conversions without all that extra noise.
I’ll run ads to those pages and depending on the engagement I’ll either go ahead with product development, OR I’ll know that it may not be a great idea and not waste my money.
The "golden nuggets" aren't just the data numbers. Instead, I can see the comments and tone of feedback on the ads themselves.
I can also take whomever is subscribing via email and have more direct conversations with them as reader surveys to better optimize the product offer and the listing copy.
If it works, then guess what?? I’ve already got a captive audience to nurture as a launch list to fire at an amazon listing with my new product instead of the Shopify store if I want once the inventory gets to the FBA warehouses. Honeymoon period anyone?😁
Or I can go ahead and setup the product page on my Shopify store and run the custom audiences and retarget in setup like I mentioned above.
🔥 If you want more conversions on your Amazon FBA listings, this is the best way to A/B test and optimize the pieces while your inventory is being manufactured and shipped.
Once I test a few products like this and find my standout winners on the Shopify store (the ones that sell way above the others), I’ll order just those products a bit deeper and send the extra to amazon…..
ADVANTAGE: By having all of the direct end user interactions, I’ve used real time market feedback to sort the best version of my product page copy, listing imagery, etc., and what products I know the market is hungry for. I also did this without having to deal with the limitations of the amazon platform (or the black hat crowd🙄) while trying to establish my products on the platform.
As you can see, you still need an understanding of at least one off amazon traffic source to get people to the store for the process to work (and not everyone is at that stage in their journey). To dive deeper into that, see my free Full Funnel Framework Bundle:
BONUS TIP: For those already with inventory in the FBA warehouses and wanting to run Shopify alongside your amazon listings, use an app called ByteStand to get your Shopify store purchases automatically fulfilled via FBA.
If you liked this article, see more like it below and tell me what you think in our Community, where I talk about this sort of thing with over 10k sellers every day!
And if you really want the inside track...👇👇👇
