I ended my last blog post with something quite flippant, along the lines of ‘and now I just need to sell them.’ This makes it sound like this is the easy part. It’s really not. Selling a product is actually pretty hard.
I’ve now had a product to sell for around 4 days. There have been sales. I’m now checking my Amazon Seller Central account almost as much as I was checking the UPS tracking link, so I know this for sure!
To sell on Amazon you need to firstly get found. To get found you need both sales and reviews and to get reviews you need to sell some – which makes for quite a vicious circle.
Driving sales
Here are some of the things I’ve done in the past few days which I think have helped / will help to drive sales:
- Asked people to buy it! It really was as simple as emailing my mailing list, plus asking friends and family (where appropriate) to buy a box. Once again, thank you to everyone who’s done this.
- Gave some away. I have some lovely friends with new babies, or babies due soon and I’ve given them all a box as a gift. This obviously isn’t a ‘sale’, but I hope very much that they’ll review it, which will improve my rankings on Amazon and help other people to find me and hopefully buy it.
- I ran a Facebook competition. This went really well and, while I’m not sure how many sales I’ve got from it, it has definitely driven brand awareness, as I’ve had thousands of views. I’ve never had that much when paying for posts, so I’m pretty confident it’s worked and I’m clocking it up as a success.
- I’ve contacted bloggers and asked them to review the product / run a giveaway. I’ll do a separate post about this in the new year, but I’m pretty excited about this! I’m working with some amazing bloggers and I can’t wait to hear what they think about the swaddles.
I am by no means a natural salesperson (in person anyway), so I think that overall this is going to be a challenge for me. I feel pretty confident in my writing and am sure I can write good sales copy (in time, if not right away) and I’m very happy promoting myself on social media, but face to face I come a bit unstuck.
We met friends for dinner last weekend and one of them asked about my business. On the drive home, my husband commented that I was really down-playing everything and not selling it at all. I think, as much as I believe in myself, and the product (I’m aware I sound like an Apprentice contestant here!), I find it really hard to say ‘look at me, I’m great, this is great’, etc, so I naturally shy away from it.
I really need to get over this as my plans for 2017 include starting to network (face-to-face as well as virtually) and also trying to get products into retailers and onto other sales channels.
It’ll be challenging, but should also be fun. Staying in your comfort zone can be pretty dull.
p.s. What I really need right now is reviews (on Amazon and on Facebook), so all of you lovely people that have brought a box, please review it. It’ll make my Christmas!