Maria Jose Guerrero
Deciding your catalogue size as an Amazon seller is key to your e-commerce business profitability, both within and outside this sales channel. This decision must therefore be well-thought through and defined by the company's overall sales strategy. You need to weigh up the pros and cons of publishing your entire catalogue. You may decide to publish a large volume of products, or just higher sales volume generating products, or those that meet a strategic business objective. Also, your catalogue’s size and your pricing strategy will depend on your best or worst competitive positioning. We give you some tips from us here at Minderest to help you define the size of your Amazon catalogue to achieve the highest profits.
First, you should bear in mind that the product catalogue is the database that provides Amazon with all the necessary information about each seller and their items. Publishing different products with their features, according to SEO criteria, to achieve appropriate positioning is a task that requires considerable investment. Therefore, before you start selling through the marketplace, it is advisable to establish a sales strategy, starting by defining the catalogue size.
Pros and cons of selling all your products on Amazon
As a first option, you can choose to sell all your products on Amazon as well. On the one hand, this will allow you to reach more potential customers due to Amazon's enormous database, which has more than 175 million subscribers just on Prime. On the other hand, with more articles available, the chances of appearing on the search engines will be greater. However, the keywords and product descriptions need to be right.
Disadvantages of publishing the entire catalogue on Amazon
On the negative side, selling more products on Amazon requires more storage space and more stock. High demand on the marketplace requires e-commerce businesses to respond quickly to users’ needs. More importantly, if you consider processing and shipping times, Amazon itself will become one of your fiercest competitors.
You should also assess whether you have the logistics required to meet product delivery, or whether it will result in costs that will be hard for the company to shoulder. In addition, Amazon forces its sellers to meet delivery times marked on each dispatch to protect their marketplace brand image.
Selection of products for the Amazon catalogue
The alternative to this model is to select which products to sell on Amazon. To make this selection, it is a good idea to use a BCG matrix, a system which classifies products according to their sales volume and growth potential. Your results will allow you to classify your products into:
- Star products: the best sellers and those that require the most advertising and marketing.
- Cash cow products: the most consolidated, they sell themselves.
- Dog (or pet) products: with a low level of sales.
- Question mark products: items recently released to the market and about which you have doubts.
Then you can choose which products you want to sell on Amazon in a more precise way. For more information, you can read our post on the BCG matrix. We explain in detail how to perform this analysis of your product catalogue.
Finally, the decision depends on the objectives of the e-commerce business and the brand image you want to portray. A limited product catalogue can shift the perception that the brand is a specialist in a particular sector.
Whichever catalogue model you choose for Amazon goes hand in hand with the task of continuously tracking your products’ performance. You need to detect potential risks fast and take steps to increase your profitability. Likewise, you need to regularly monitor changes in supply and demand within the marketplace to adapt to users’ needs. To do this, you can use automated competitor price tracking tools on Amazon. They will help you adjust your prices to remain attractive to the demanding audience on this platform.
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