Selling Apparel on Amazon

Selling apparel on Amazon is no small feat. Some would argue it’s more complicated than selling on your own website, and it requires slightly different tactics than off-Amazon advertising and sales.

If you’re an apparel brand who is currently selling on Amazon, or is looking to venture into Amazon sales, you need to be aware of some tips and tricks that will make your apparel sales profitable.

We work with many clients in the apparel space on Amazon, and we’ve compiled some of our best practices for fellow apparel brands!

Our Tips on How to Sell Clothes on Amazon

Modifying Storefront for Seasons

The clothing industry is dictated by seasons, which means the products you’re selling are constantly changing. Your storefront should be modified based on the season you’re currently promoting. But don’t limit this to weather-based seasons. If you’re able, modify for other seasons or holidays, like back to school, wedding season, or Easter.

For one of our clients that sells face masks, 78% of all ad sales month to date are from Sponsored Brand Ad campaigns that link to the storefront. Their storefront has consistently proved to convert, especially when they modified their storefront to match their advertisements.

For this same client, we aligned our Sponsored Brand Ad campaigns with specific categories to effectively target shoppers looking for a certain type of product. Then within each of these storefront landing pages, we made sure to show top-converting ASINs first within the selection of products.

Advertising

We’ve waxed poetic about the importance of advertising many times before, but it’s especially true in the apparel space.

Because your products aren’t evergreen, you need advertising to gain visibility fast. You don’t have six months to increase your product’s visibility, because you’ll already be far into the next season by then. Advertising will give your new products the exposure and sales boost to gain  reviews, which will increase your product’s visibility in organic search.

On their own, these listings would not have been able to rank because of low visibility within the search results, as they would be new to the market with no sales history.

In addition, advertising is especially important because it generates reviews, which are crucial in the apparel space. Potential customers want to know about the quality and fit of your item (if it’s true to size, etc.) — and they tend to turn to reviews to find that information. Advertising is the quickest and easiest way to generate quality reviews on your product, which will encourage more customers to buy.

Large Catalog

Many clothing brands have a large catalog of items, which might include color and size variations, as well as different styles. Between parent and child ASINs, many brands have thousands of ASINs to organize and advertise.

It can be complicated to upload and advertise that many SKUs across Amazon and your dot com site. It’s important to have an organized system to keep track of all your items — or to outsource it to an agency who will handle advertising for you.

We upload 25,000–50,000 SKUs per update for one client, which requires not only a large amount of time to upload, but also time to manage and advertise those products so they gain visibility.

Brand Name vs Generic Clothing

One of the great conundrums on Amazon is selling branded items. Customers on Amazon are notorious for being non-brand loyal, which is why non-branded search terms are so competitive. However, with Amazon becoming more and more of a marketplace for brands and not just nameless products, many companies want to rely on brand recognition to sell their products.

Over the course of 60 days, a name brand athleisure line’s impressions were 4.6M, where generic impressions for athleisure were 24.7M. This seems to be the average for many apparel brands — we typically see about 5x more generic searches than brand searches.

Since brand name CPCs are about half of generic searches, and their conversion rate is 16% (versus a generic conversion rate of 7%), you definitely want to invest in branded search, even if it’s at a lesser volume than generic search. Branded campaigns typically don’t increase in price, and they don’t need as much time to optimize as non-branded campaigns.

It’s important to have a presence on both branded and non-branded search on Amazon. Similar to your dot com business, you’ll want to be visible, even if you’re not profitable. (This is all part of the Search Term Isolation bidding philosophy.)

If you’re establishing a brand on Amazon, be sure to design a storefront, and leverage Sponsored Brand Ads. It’s crucial that customers see consistency in brand look and feel across all channels, including Amazon.

Ready to boost your apparel sales on Amazon? Contact us today!