Review of Listing Categories

Some prime members buy big ticket items. I television sets as well as everyday items like supplements and personal care. Steve. The potential to reach a large and loyal customer base has many big and small businesses, flocking to Amazon to list their products for sale. For this reason brands on Amazon have a lot of competition.

In order to get their product seen by shoppers, they must break through the clutter with optimized content on their detailed pages. We reviewed optimization tools in their previous module, but even the most targeted and keyword dense listing will not be seen by potential customers. If the listing is not in the right category.

Reviewing a category listing provides valuable insight into the competition and the opportunity being in the right category allows to shop or to find your products and make a sale. Amazon provides an enormous selection of product categories and sub categories to choose form. These categories include all kinds of items from fashion accessories, like watches to home decor items like rugs to sporting equipment like baseball bats.

The available selection of items for sale is infinite. Amazon pre-selected categories and brands have to choose from the defined options available. It’s prudent to choose the most appropriate category for your portfolio or products. Choosing a top level category is just the first step. Top level categories are broken down into sub categories, which are broken down further into sub sub categories.

And so. Selecting the wrong category can be detrimental to search page rankings. It also means your target audience might never see your brand. Let’s take a look at how this breakdown works. Here is an example of the category tree. You can see many subsections as we keep drilling deeper down. We see here many options available.

Take your time to review all the options. Choosing the right category ensures a product can be found during an organic search. Let’s start at the highest level we see here, the result of inputting the search term shoes. This generic term has resulted in over 100,000 searches result. But we all know there are all different kinds of shoes, shoes for running, shoes for walking, shoes for hiking, shoes for men, shoes for women, shoes for babies, the list goes on as a brand that is selling a men’s hiking shoe.

Being in the shoe category is not enough. We saw earlier that inputting the search term shoes delivered over 100,000 results. Now let’s add men’s hiking to the search field that narrows the results down to over 20,000. And if black is added to the end of it, it brings it further down to over 10,000 results. But watch what happens when we click on the hiking shoes category, it brings the results down even further to 552.

From this example, we can see how important it is to be in the right category. So potential customers can find your brand. Selecting the right category, not only increases searchability. It also provides information about competitors. If we continue with this example on the left side of the page, we can further drill down to see at a glance there brands that are selling similar products by clicking on, see more.

It brings to view all the brands in the category.

We can also sort by price point. If the 50 to $100 price range is selected, the search results are further defined to 238 results. This type of category, drill down helps to shopper to find the exact item they are looking to buy, but it also provides a seller with the opportunity to see the competition’s assortment easily.

A seller can glean how dense each category is by quickly doing a category drill down. They can’t determine how tough or easy the competitive landscape is by glancing at the categories.

Shoppers can also drill down into categories during an organic search. There is a dropdown next to the search field by clicking on it, a customer can also select a category of products they are looking for in this dropdown. We can see clothing, shoes, jewelry, and then men by selecting that. Then inputting the search term shoe.

It brings up the results in a more defined way. It’s also important to note that some categories need approval from Amazon before a product can be listed. Other categories have restrictions or conditions associated with them. Amazon provides a listing of all categories. So be sure to review it. So, you know, whether or not your products need any special pre-authorization or certification prior to posting it’s time now to take a look at your brands categories, are they classified correctly to reach your target audience?

Are they in the right industry? Are they in the lowest subcategory possible for the rains or products you offer, be sure to review all the categories and look at the competition within each one. This will provide valuable insight into the opportunity on Amazon. And most of all, by being in the right category to target shopper will find your products and the opportunity for you to make a sale is greater.