How Influencers Can Help Brands Selling on Amazon

Technology makes it accessible for anyone to produce content, which has opened up a whole new avenue of advertising. There are many content creators that are producing content and gaining audiences’ attention, and as long as there is attention, there is advertising space. Most major online platforms are very well-populated with influencers. However, Amazon is not. Amazon isn’t a platform for content, which is why it doesn’t create influencers. However, Amazon is starting to make it so that influencers from other platforms can have a presence on the site. It’s no secret that you can use social media to boost your sales on Amazon.

Amazon’s influencer program

The basic idea of the Amazon Influencer Program is that influencers can have their own storefront where they post listings of products they bought themselves, are sponsored by, or are endorsing.

The influencer can register, and if they are eligible they will get their own page that can be customised at their own discretion. Currently, in order to be eligible, you need to have a presence on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. The criteria doesn’t state how many followers you need to have in order to qualify. However, you need to prove that you are active on the platform. Influencers get small commissions from every purchase made from anyone using the link on their page. This is very similar to the Amazon associates or Amazon affiliates programs. The main difference being that affiliates are posting links on their own websites or platforms, leading traffic to Amazon. With the Amazon influencers program, followers are directed to what is essentially a personal consumer catalog of the person they admire. Currently, pages can only be designed in a limited manner. However, it’s enough to make it unique or custom-made to fit the influencer’s audience. For example, you can group products under any type of category.

Influencers can organise their favorite products any way they want. We expect that Amazon will provide more and more customisation options, especially if the pages start bringing in more traffic and prove to be a good investment. This might be a very impactful change to Amazon as a whole since people are left with their own search terms, and the search bar when they are shopping. Sure, they might find a product somewhere else and click on a link, or type in a name in the search bar. However, there has never been a real system for curating items, other than through the organic ranking that is guided by the A9 algorithm.

Influencer Amazon pages

In the future, some pages might simply become places people go to when they want to see new and interesting items that are out there to buy. People might also develop a habit of checking out an influencer’s Amazon page when they see them using an item in a video or social media post, expecting to then be able to find it. In the near future, you might use influencer pages to figure out what items are best to sell on Amazon as you do your product research. There are many interesting ways in which the addition of this new Amazon feature will greatly influence the way shopping is done on the site.

Amazon sellers

The reason you want to be indexed on as many keywords as possible when you are working on your listing optimisation and PPC is so that you can create as many possible routes for a shopper to reach your product. Having your listing featured on an influencer’s page is something you would certainly want. In fact, you would want to be on as many of these pages as possible. From the perspective of Amazon, an influencer will only be making money through small commissions on each sale coming from purchases made from their page. However, this is not the only way an influencer can monetise their page. You can treat the influencer page the same way you would an account on social media or a website. They will have a certain number of views of their page, which they can use to leverage a negotiation with an Amazon store. This way they can have the product featured on it.

Purchasing funnel

The greatest advantage of this new addition to Amazon is product placement and the fact that you now have a very well-organised system for it. An influencer can make money from using your product in their content, and get paid for that alone. On top of that, they have a funnel to make additional money off of Amazon from every sale that comes through using their own page. This creates a new type of value an influencer can bring to the table, as well as an incentive to keep a given product on the page. The best thing about it is that once a product is on an influencer’s Amazon page, they are incentivized to keep it there since they will be making money from Amazon, and not from the seller. This is a great win-win scenario for both the influencer and the seller with whom they are collaborating.

Amazon’s goal

Amazon is always looking for ways to be incorporated into our lives. Its goal is clear – they want you to buy as many things from them as opposed to buying them from a brick and mortar store, or other platforms. This might just become standard for anyone that has any sort of following to have an Amazon influencer page. This way they can benefit by making commissions, the shoppers can benefit by getting a shopping experience curated by a person they want to emulate, and of course, Amazon can benefit because people will be shopping more on their site. On the other hand, it might just become another Amazon feature that is there but that most people aren’t aware of how to fully utilise. Only time will tell.