Amazon Vendor Central: Tips for Managing Product Content at Scale for SEO
- Amazon Vendor Central is a program that Amazon uses to buy wholesale products from brands to help them discover new products and amplify the reach of brands.
- Relevancy, credibility, value, freshness, and background information are crucial attributes to optimize the content of the products.
- Strategic content management such as keyword research, optimized titles, and good product images are the keys to showing up in the search results.
In this Article
Amazon Vendor Central is a powerful platform for businesses looking to leverage the reach of Amazon’s expansive marketplace. It enables companies to create and manage product listings, set prices, and track sales and inventory directly from their Vendor Central accounts. Its ability to reach millions of shoppers has become an invaluable tool for businesses of all sizes, allowing them to become an Amazon vendor with ease. In this blog post, we will explore the features, benefits, and potential pitfalls to look out for in Amazon Vendor Central.
For some reason, Amazon Vendor Central is not as widely recognized as Amazon Seller Central. Yet, this is a powerful platform for brands that want to thrive selling wholesale and directly sell products to Amazon. It’s a complex platform, though, and many Amazon businesses understandably find it difficult to understand how exactly it works – especially when managing product content at scale. At the end of the day, selling starts with putting the right product content out at scale.
With Amazon becoming bigger and bigger, you have to think about the distribution muscle they bring to you as a vendor. Add to this the fact that the traditional distribution channels are slowly crumpling, and you immediately begin to see where the conditions of Amazon Vendor Central are headed. Could we be staring at an entirely new vendor model and Amazon quietly getting to the center of it just as it did with retail? Well, the giant is known to disrupt traditional commerce. Whatever the case, you want to be competitive and get your foot in there early enough before it becomes too crowded. And if Amazon’s massive disruption of retail is anything to go by, then Vendor Central could as well be the next golden platform to watch out for, making it essential for those who aim to be a successful vendor on Amazon.
We could go on and on about what this portends for the future of manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, etc. It’s interesting stuff but better not to focus on that today. This article is similar to a run-through of an Amazon Vendor Central training to provide you with knowledge about valuable tips for managing product content at scale and effectively helping you succeed on this powerful platform, ensuring your products are attractive to Amazon customers.
We’ll do a couple of definitions then proceed to the tips. Read on!
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What is Amazon Vendor Central?
Amazon Vendor Central is an invite-only platform that allows vendors to sell products directly to Amazon. In other words, you become a supplier to the online marketplace giant, meaning that Amazon will directly purchase and stock your products for onward retailing. The more they sell on Amazon, the more they will order from Amazon. This can open up a huge opportunity if your products become popular. It can also lead to potentially long-term relationships with Amazon that usually come with consistent demand.
How to Create Amazon Vendor Central Account
This model is helping Amazon discover great products from manufacturers and producers who could be making amazing products without the marketing muscle to push them to greater visibility. The process is very simple, there is no need for an Amazon Vendor Central Tutorial:
- You receive an invite from Amazon to join the Vendor Program.
- If interested, you accept the invitation and go through the onboarding process.
- Whenever Amazon needs your product, they send you a purchase order.
- You accept the order, process, and deliver the products to Amazon’s fulfillment centers.
- You get paid by Amazon.
Do you still need to do marketing in Vendor Central? Yes. Even though Amazon will buy directly from you, you’ll still have to do the usual marketing chores. This includes listing your products, organizing them, creating accurate product content, and optimizing SEO so automated product discovery tools can find your products and trigger orders. Remember that you compete with several other vendors selling the same products even in Vendor Central.
These are some of the key features you’ll find in Amazon’s Vendor Central:
A central orders area where Amazon sends you the purchase orders.
- Product content area where you provide the important product information including descriptions, prices, assets like images, etc.
- Marketing tools
- Payments area where you can check your payment status for all orders shipped to Amazon
- Advertising console where you get to manage all your advertising activities.
- Reports with comprehensive analytics on how your products are performing.
- Built-in safeguards designed to protect vendor’s product trademarks from hijacking, counterfeiters, and competitors who may be trying to pose as genuine vendors of the same products.
The ordering process is largely automated, meaning your aggressive marketing and dedication to building great products are vital for success.
Amazon Vendor Central and Amazon Seller Central - The Difference
Amazon Seller Central allows independent sellers and third-party sellers to directly list and sell their products to the end consumers on Amazon’s retail marketplace while remaining in control of product prices and margins. On the other hand, Amazon Vendor Central is Amazon’s invitation-only program that Amazon uses to buy products wholesale from brands (such as manufacturers). Amazon then goes on to sell these products in retail. This platform helps Amazon discover new products and amplify the reach of brands with great products but lacking resources to sell products directly on Amazon via seller central account. It’s also the perfect platform for manufacturers who don’t want to bother selling at retail and negotiating but instead want to focus on wholesale, sending their inventory to Amazon.
To simplify things further, think of Vendor Central as wholesale and seller central as retail platforms.
How product content impacts Amazon Vendor Central SEO
Like any other third-party and e-commerce platform, the importance of content remains largely the same. At the end of the day, marketing and selling revolve around product content; this is the same with Amazon Vendor Central. The way you position your content on the Amazon Vendor Central platform will dictate the level of success.
Here are some of the ways that product content impacts the platform’s SEO:
Relevancy: The Amazon search engines will use your product content to check relevancy with what Amazon wants. Including relevant and popular keywords in your product titles and descriptions can play a key role. Relevant keywords in product descriptions will ensure that search engines recognize what each product listing is about, helping it rank higher in search results. This is crucial for products on Amazon to stand out.
Credibility and Trust: One of the key items that search engines measure is the credibility of your content. In other words, they look for the overall value that implies your products are good. Linking your product content to external sites and platforms that are credible is one of the best ways to raise trust levels. For example, a link to a forum where users of your product have hailed it as being of high quality will influence the search engines to assign that product page a higher level of importance. You can also link to awards you have received, certifications, successful quality tests, mentions in top media websites, etc. Additionally, having a strong internal linking structure between related products when possible will tell search engines what types of items are related. This will lead to higher rankings overall. This will lead to higher rankings overall, enhancing Amazon marketing services.
Product Value: You can have voluminous product content, but it’ll bring zero SEO returns if the value is negligible. Search Engines can pick out valuable product content by looking at several critical things. One of these is the length of the content – product content in this case. Research shows that longer content ranks better on search engine results pages, so having longer, more detailed descriptions for your products in Vendor Central can help boost the ranking. Long content sends out a signal that there is elaborate value being put out, hence the length. But be careful not to put out long content to make it long. The quality of the content matters too. Crafting high-quality product descriptions filled with interesting and accurate information will help as it demonstrates to the search engines that the content has some real value, resulting in better rankings. This is a part of the benefits of Amazon’s focus on content quality.
Freshness: Like all other search engines, Amazon Search Engines love new content. They are actively measuring how frequently new product content is added and updated. This is a key ranking indicator. You must regularly update product descriptions with fresh information including images and videos. Additionally, never underestimate the power of small tweaks as well. Changed your packaging material? Adjusted some calibration in one of your production machines? Start sourcing your raw materials from sustainable sources? Make all this information updated and advertised in your product content. Search engines will take notice and award you some ranking points, showcasing how Amazon takes care of its listings’ freshness.
Background information: Back-end fields such as manufacturer name and model numbers can optimize products even further when correctly completed. They certainly impact Amazon’s algorithms when scouring and sorting through their vast inventory of products. So take your time and provide all the information asked for, even when it’s optional. This detail aids in fulfillment by Amazon services, ensuring that products to Amazon in bulk are properly catalogued.
Challenges in maintaining product content for Amazon Vendor Central to sell directly on Amazon
While it can work quite the magic once you get it moving it comes with, managing the product content over there can present several challenges. So, Amazon Vendor Central training might also be helpful for you but here are the top ones worth noting:
Product data challenges
As a vendor, you are responsible for keeping product data. This can be a significant logistical challenge as Amazon has different guidelines for each country, language, and marketplace. Additionally, you must ensure your pricing and quantity details are updated to match your inventory levels in near real-time. Vendors will struggle to keep track of the rapidly changing data requirement without proper oversight and management tools. Other product data challenges include the need for continuous optimization across multiple channels, quick onboarding into new markets, version control for frequent changes, and ensuring alignment between master catalogs and individual marketplaces.
Multiple excel spreadsheets
Not only do you have to take the time to incorporate each spreadsheet’s unique data into the larger inventory, but formatting issues can lead to discrepancies between versions of the same document. Having mismatched information or an out-of-date spreadsheet can create problems.
Moreover, if changes need to be made in multiple places simultaneously, such as altering SKUs or updating descriptions, reconciling all these various spreadsheets becomes an even greater chore.
Here are more issues that often come up when dealing with spreadsheets:
1) Duplicate data input: Some situations require you to enter the same data into different spreadsheets, leading to more work and potential mistakes.
2) Merging of information: Text and numerical information in different worksheets are difficult to combine into one coherent document.
3) Linking: Any changes made in one sheet can be quickly forgotten unless there is an easy way of linking the various sheets.
4) Uncontrolled versioning: Long documents have a higher risk of inconsistency between versions of the same spreadsheet;
5) Querying difficulties: Retrieving specific data can take a long without structured fields.
This detailed approach showcases how Amazon pays attention to seller central partners and encourages vendor recruitment, ensuring sellers on Amazon know about Amazon vendor central and the Amazon vine program, highlighting Amazon offers. Additionally, Amazo also promotes an environment where sellers can thrive, Altough Amazon continuously evolves to meet the needs of its vast marketplace.
Digital asset challenges
Nowadays, digital assets are increasingly important in product content, and Amazon Vendor Central is no exception. Marketers know that they must constantly create compelling product descriptions, images, and videos that match buyers’ expectations. However, managing these digital assets comes with complications. A key challenge is cost – high-quality media content requires time, effort, and financial investment to manage effectively.
Another challenge is content compatibility – you often have to tailor your digital assets across multiple platforms to ensure they comply with specific requirements. There’s also the problem of scalability – as products become increasingly diverse and new capabilities are added along the way, you may find it difficult to manage different versions of media files at once.
Assets in many locations
Having assets in many locations presents a major challenge since Amazon has different product content requirements for each country or region. It can be difficult to customize assets for each local Amazon marketplace and offer discounts and special promotions that apply differently across different locations, especially international processes. This challenge becomes even more complex when managing Amazon Logistics Services (ALS) requests since the Regional Content must also be managed for each region independently. Ensuring this information is up-to-date and consistent across markets is essential but can be time-consuming and expensive, particularly if the vendor’s assets are spread out over a large geographic area.
Get started: Managing product content on Amazon Vendor Central Guide
If you already have high-quality products, then content management separates you from succeeding in Amazon Vendor Central. Let’s say that the right approach to content management always makes all the difference. Apply these tips:
Prioritize keyword research
When you’re creating or updating your product content, it’s important to prioritize keyword research. This will help you identify the right keywords to target, which will in turn help your products rank higher in search results.
The best way to do this is using Amazon’s, Keyword Tool. This tool is designed to help you find keywords relevant to your products and with a high search volume. You can use these keywords throughout your product listing, including in the title, bullet points, and description.
Take these actions:
- Review the sales trends in your product categorization to understand the relevant industry terms or phrases associated with your goods.
- Examine search data and determine which keywords have maximum relevance to a product or category page.
- Incorporate any existing significant terms into your content strategy, ensuring all phrases align with Amazon guidelines. As you build up your list of relevant keywords, analyze their performance metrics to decide which ones bring in the most images by impressions, clicks, etc., and adjust accordingly.
- Regularly update your keyword list with newcomers that should be added based on the analysis of current metrics; do not omit crucial expressions due to minor changes in popularity over time.
Optimize product titles and product descriptions
The product title should accurately reflect the content and include relevant keywords. Try to keep it concise and eye-catching so that Amazon will be drawn in by your words. In the same way, product descriptions should provide thorough information that conveys your product’s value while utilizing all Amazon-recommended descriptive words and phrases. Additionally, make sure all details are correct and error-free. Start by considering the four main components of the title: keywords and phrases, brands, attributes, and descriptors.
- Keywords should be placed first in the title for optimization; include as many relevant words as possible to increase search visibility and presence.
- Brands are essential for establishing credibility, but carefully consider which to mention to stay within specified character limits. Of course, the brands you are going to mention are those that are your partners across different fields.
- Attributes should focus on specific qualities of the product or even customer preferences; these often make successful titles stand out from the competition.
- Descriptions should be comprehensive, accurate, and helpful. Aim for descriptions that help the end consumer solve a problem.
Focus on writing short & memorable key feature bullets
Your key feature bullets must be short and memorable so one can quickly scan them and understand your product. Rather than listing many features, focus on the most important ones and make sure they stand out. Use clear, concise language and avoid industry jargon that might not be easy to understand. And most importantly, be sure to proofread your features before publishing! A small mistake can make a big impression (not in a good way).
Make sure product attributes are complete & accurate.
This is key—if you want your product to show up high in Amazon Vendor Central search results, you must ensure that all the product attributes are complete and accurate. You can manage your product attributes in a few places, but the most important is the Product Detail Page. That’s where you get to demonstrate more about your product, so you want to ensure that all the information is accurate and up-to-date.
Enhance product images with appropriate metadata
It’s important to make sure that product images are clear and concise. But in addition to that, you also need to ensure that they are properly tagged with metadata. This might seem like a useless inclusion, but it’s quite important. By including metadata, you’re essentially giving Amazon’s algorithms more information to work with, which can result in your products being more easily found. To do this, you’ll need to edit the ALT text for each image. The ALT text is what appears when someone mouses over an image, and it should be no more than 125 characters. In addition to the ALT text, you’ll also need to fill out the image description field. This should be a brief sentence that tells Amazon what the image is of.
Ensure product content is consistent across all company channels
This is important for two reasons: first because it helps build a strong, consistent brand; and second, because it can help you avoid problems with Amazon’s policies. If you’re selling the same product on your company website, on other eCommerce platforms like eBay or Etsy, in brick-and-mortar stores, or even on social media, make sure the product content (including title, description, images, etc.) is the same on Amazon Vendor Central.
Continuously manage and improve your product content.
If you’re not already doing so, please start right away. Just because you’ve created great product content doesn’t mean it will stay great forever. Your product content should be a living, breathing thing constantly being updated and improved. As your products change and evolve, so too should your product content. To do this effectively, you need systems and processes to manage your product content. This includes having someone responsible for overseeing your product content, having a schedule for regularly reviewing and updating your content, and using tools that can easily update lots of content at once. It will quickly become outdated and inaccurate if you don’t have systems and processes to manage your product content at scale. This can hurt your sales and damage your reputation with customers.
How to manage product content with a PIM & DAM solution
A well-executed PIM and DAM solution simplifies the content positioning process and increases sales. Here are the key ways to manage product content with a PIM and DAM solution.
1.) Unify data and assets in a single source of truth
PIM and DAM systems makes it easy to unify data and assets into a single source of truth that can be accessed from any device and location worldwide. This allows all stakeholders to use accurate and up-to-date content no matter where they work within the Amazon Vendor Central ecosystem. With the right PIM & DAM solution, you can easily aggregate product information from your internal sources and store it in one accessible repository. This unified platform enables users to quickly access, view, enhance, manage, and distribute all necessary product content with a button click. In addition to consolidating information into one platform, an effective PIM & DAM solution should leverage powerful technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing to enrich and correct existing product data automatically.
2.) Manage and enhance product attributes
As you know, product attributes play an important role in identifying and distinguishing a product. These include size, weight, color, materials, design, etc. When you have products in the thousands, updating attributes or even inputting varying attributes for each product can be difficult. But with PIM & DAM, you can effortlessly change product attributes for thousands of products at once by using predefined formats. The good thing is that all these changes can automatically reflect across different channels and regions, considering different requirements.
3.) Use channel templates to customize content for different channels
The channel templates that come with product information management software provide a powerful tool to create unique content for each specific channel quickly and efficiently. By utilizing preconfigured templates, you can quickly put together the relevant information in a format that is acceptable for that particular channel. Templates also provide an additional layer of control by allowing vendors to specify which fields must be completed to meet the requirements for each destination. Additionally, channel templates help streamline systems by making it easier to move data between product databases and marketplaces with just a few clicks.
4.) Grade content for completeness & accuracy
The data in a PIM system provide an easy-to-use framework to check content for accuracy based on predefined standards, while automated quality assurance checks in digital asset management software will facilitate rapid assessment of completeness and formatting. Furthermore, these services are scalable, allowing for customization for different projects. With clear criteria for grading content completeness and accuracy, it’s easy to automate the process with a proven PIM & DAM system and keep entire digital repositories organized according to established standards. Additionally, the version control capabilities abolish potential errors caused by outdated materials. For example, automated flagging can highlight any missing pieces from within relevant metadata fields, so administrators will know exactly which components require completion or updating before publishing the final piece of work.
5.) Share products across all channels
PIM and DAM solutions easily store product information in one place, making it easy to look up any applicable data about items as needed. Data includes everything from SKUs and supply chain information to product descriptions and images. Having access to this information in a centralized spot means that teams can quickly share this data across channels. This ensures that customers get an accurate representation of products no matter where they purchase them. Furthermore, these solutions enable you to create multiple versions of content to customize it specifically for each channel while still keeping it all organized within one overarching structure. With this, you can quickly roll out campaigns across many different channels without having to recreate the data from scratch each time – a major time saver!
The thought of supplying Amazon can be an incredibly exciting prospect that can lead to increased sales and better brand recognition. However, getting to the top of the list isn’t easy. It requires dedication and consistency to ensure your products are visible and attractive to this platform. Fortunately, the right PIM/DAM tools can simplify different aspects of your content operations – from onboarding to continuous maintenance.
PIM and DAM tools are designed to give users maximum control over their product content and data, enabling them to efficiently update, manage and share product content across numerous marketplaces or channels with minimal effort.
We hope that the tips here will make your Amazon Vendor Central experience even better and you will better manage the product content on the platform.
Want to understand how the highly rated Catsy PIM software and DAM software can help simplify your Amazon Vendor Central content operations? Please book a demo to see it all in action.
Amazon Vendor Central is a web-based platform that allows vendors to sell their products directly to Amazon. Through Vendor Central, vendors can manage their product inventory, monitor sales performance, and create marketing campaigns. This platform also allows vendors to track and analyze customer data, set prices and promotional pricing, and receive payments from Amazon.
Amazon Vendor Central is a great option for vendors who want to take full control of their product listings, pricing, and availability. Vendor Central also offers more personalized customer service and promotional opportunities. However, it is more expensive than Seller Central and may not be the right choice for everyone.
Amazon Vendor Central Direct Fulfillment is a service offered by Amazon to its vendors, allowing them to store and ship products directly to customers. This service allows vendors to take advantage of Amazon’s large customer base and reliable logistics network. With Vendor Central Direct Fulfillment, vendors can reduce their own fulfillment costs and leverage Amazon’s marketing capabilities to increase sales.
Toggle CoVendors can develop their own Amazon storefront and manage their inventory, pricing, and more. It also allows them to access Amazon’s vast customer base, which can help to increase sales. This is especially beneficial to vendors who sell niche products that may not be widely available in traditional retail outlets.ntent
With Vendor Central, businesses can manage products, pricing, and inventory across multiple Amazon sites in multiple countries. This can be done through one central dashboard, making managing products and orders on multiple sites easier. Vendor Central also allows businesses to take advantage of Amazon’s global reach and increase sales.
