Boasting 310 million active users, Amazon is an eCommerce giant capable of generating immense awareness of your product. Optimizing your product pages to maximize this awareness is key, and every company should understand precisely how Amazon determines their brand’s ranking. Through the A10 algorithm, Amazon now assigns rank primarily on ‘brand health.’
Understanding what Amazon defines as ‘brand health’ becomes vital to ensuring your brand dominates product categories, especially since Amazon almost always prioritizes ‘healthy’ brands above ones that it deems to be less ‘healthy.’ A higher search rank directly translates to better selling potential. The concept is an indicator of how well a brand performs in its market, and several key components affect it. Keep reading to learn what good ‘brand health’ looks like on Amazon.
What Determines Your Brand Health on Amazon?
Amazon primarily uses three metrics to determine brand health: price competitiveness, Amazon Prime eligibility, and in-stock rate. Together, these components essentially determine how well a brand fulfills its positioning in the marketplace, as well as the customer experience the brand facilitates.
Amazon will thus rank products that are competitive in their respective market, leading to the best customer experience possible. Let’s break down the three metrics that determine brand health, and more importantly, what your brand can do to fulfill each criterion.
Price Competitiveness
Always keep an eye on your product’s prices compared to the competition. Amazon will automatically monitor product pricing across the market; Amazon will also favor ranking reasonably-priced products that fall within market parameters. But when you start charging too much for your products (in relation to the competition), your brand health on Amazon will slowly deteriorate.
Since Amazon is a customer-focused retailer, the platform wants to ensure that shoppers receive the best deals on a given product. Amazon will subsequently decrease the organic ranking of brands that consistently charge higher prices. While charging a higher price for your products may seem tempting, keeping prices reasonable to stay brand healthy on Amazon will prove far more lucrative, given the immense loss in reach your brand will experience if Amazon decreases your organic ranking.
Amazon Prime Eligibility
Amazon examines each product Amazon Prime eligibility by reviewing performance in the last 30 days. Products that fulfill the following recommendations are considered Prime eligible:
- All shipping of that product is carried out by an Amazon-approved carrier.
- The product is consistently shipped quickly at least 99 percent of the time.
- The product has a cancellation rate of less than 5 percent.
Generally, you want as many of your products to become Prime eligible as possible. Please note that out-of-stock products or inactive listings will never count toward prime eligibility.
In-Stock Rate
Since Amazon does not want companies listing out-of-stock products, the eCommerce giant rewards companies that consistently have products in stock. The higher a product’s in-stock rate, the higher its brand health will become. Amazon calculates the in-stock rate of a product by taking the percentage of page views of that product where it was shown to be in-stock in the last 30 days. Through this, Amazon calculates the frequency of that product being in stock when shoppers examined its listing. Products with higher percentages rank higher in Amazon’s brand health measurements.
Most importantly, the Inventory Performance Index used by FBA sellers will calculate in-stock rates differently. Amazon does not use this rate to determine brand health, only the in-stock rate of listings on Amazon.
Other Brand Health Factors to Consider
Aside from the three main pillars of Amazon brand health, remember to monitor two other metrics through Seller Central: Account Health and Voice of the Customer. Your company’s performance on both is an additional factor Amazon uses to determine brand health. Your account health rating (AHR) is an aggregate measurement of various factors, including your business’ adherence to Amazon policy, shipping consistency, and overall customer satisfaction.
Like the In-Stock Rate, the higher the AHR is, the higher Amazon will rank your product’s brand health. The voice of the customer metric informs Amazon how customers rated their experience with your product. Amazon will average out these responses to calculate your brand health; in other words, customer feedback directly affects brand health, so be sure to listen and respond to customers keep customers feeling heard throughout the purchase and shipping process to resolve any issues.
Maximize Amazon Success with Premiere Creative
Managing and consistently updating listings to maximize brand health can feel like an exhausting and confusing process, that can take your time and resources away from creating new products or listings. To maximize your Amazon brand health, consider partnering with a full-service digital marketing agency to manage and maintain your Amazon brand health.
At Premiere Creative, we help brands boost their organic rankings on Amazon, and our team of eCommerce specialists are well prepared to help your business fulfill your Amazon goals. Improving brand health is just one of the many Amazon services we offer; call us today at (973) 346-8100 to discover how we can help improve your long-term Amazon success.