If you regularly get into a trending market fast, you may have had the same experience a few times of having the market almost to yourself for a while, and then suddenly getting flooded out by lookalike competition.
There are a few things you can do, but you need to do them fast. Let’s assume that you have spent some effort on setting up a good brand, choosing the right niches, and creating a good presentation. If you’ve found a trending market a good few times before everyone else, you’re obviously not stupid.
#1 Check your product. Are the other products as good as or better than yours? If they’re not, you need to rewrite your marketing copy, so that you really stress the key points of differentiation. You also need to stimulate reviews – put an appeal for a product review in your product insert (pay attention, Amazon has rules on what you’re allowed to say). Customers pay a lot of attention to reviews and if you have a good volume of sales, and get plenty of reviews, they’re more likely to buy your product than a similar one with only two reviews.
#2 Consider ‘mystery shopping’ some of your competitors to give you more information about what they’re selling, and how. Is it the same product with a different color/brand? Or a slightly different one? Is the packaging the same, or cheaper? What extras are or aren’t they including? That might give you a clue to some differentiation – “We’re the only guys who include the batteries”, or “INCLUDES support package”, for instance. Or you might create a bundle with one of your other complementary products.
#3 Check your reviews. Are there particular aspects that you can address without changing the product, either in the marketing or the accompanying materials or packaging? For instance, a product that customers found hard to use at first, but then loved, may simply need a “Let’s get started!” leaflet talking them through assembly and first use.
#4 Check your product images against your competition. Better still, ask a few people you trust and who have good visual sense to compare them. Or if you’re both using the same or similar drop-shipper images, at least make sure yours is branded! Better still, add a video to your page showing your product in more detail, being used, or a case study – be imaginative. Visitors who see a video on the product page are 60-85% more likely to buy.
#5 Start driving more traffic to Amazon from your own content. If you’re only blogging one a week, up that to daily. If you’re blogging daily, blog three times a day. And don’t forget to link those blogs to Facebook and Twitter. If your products lend themselves well to Instagram and Pinterest, or TikTok, leverage that too. If you need to outsource, use guest bloggers or social media experts, do it, as long as the product line is worth it. A lot of new entrants probably won’t put anything like that much resource into their sales.
#6 Check your price. Are all your competitors offering special deals to undercut you? You’re in a bit of a poker game, because you don’t know how well funded they are. If they have just bought the shortest run of product they can to try to make a bit of money, dropping your prices hard and fast could clean quite a few of them out of the market, hopefully leaving you the clear leader. If not, you’re going to lose a bit of money, in which case clean out your stocks and …
#7 Exit. Find a new product that’s trending and get ready to make super profits again!