Amazon's "Personal Shopping Experience" and How This Benefits Authors

Amazon’s Personal Shopping Experience

As an author you should already be familiar with Amazon.com and how it operates. This online distribution site is one of the most successful business’ to date and part of this is due to the fact that they give each user their own personalized shopping experience. Online shopping is becoming an increasingly preferred way to buy. Consumers can search the internet for the best deals, review/research products and have them ordered and shipped directly from the seats of their own homes.  Convenience is key here and Amazon has recognized this fact early on.

Amazon.com realized that giving its users a customized shopping experience is an essential element for their success and a way to differentiate themselves from competitors. Amazon has implemented their “recommendation” system as a way to individualize each user’s time on the site.   A product of any sort can typically be bought on over 10 online outlets at any given point, so finding a way to retain customers is a huge goal for any online company.  Amazon has overcome this barrier with their infamous “Recommendation System”.

When you make a purchase on Amazon.com their internal systems monitor and track your actions. They systematically record which books you view, how long you stay on a page, what you vote on and anything you review or include in your Listmanias (to be discussed later).  All of this data is then computed to help make thoughtful and useful recommendations to its users.  To break it down if you buy Product A, Amazon will simultaneously recommend to you Product B and C because they are “like” in nature. Meaning that it’s users have told them that these two books are in some way related or share a similar target audience.

How This Benefits You, the Author:

Now this should be seriously be peaking your interest as an author.  Because of the systems Amazon uses this allows for extreme potential in regards to increasing your book’s exposure.  Amazon realizes that by shopping online the consumer loses the ability to “browse” through aisles of a book store, flip through the pages, or read the back cover. So in order to inform readers of new titles they may have never heard of Amazon associates products together based off what their users tell them!

Let’s take an example. Say you wrote a new children’s poetry book and it has just hit the market.  If you are a first time author getting your book out there is extremely hard and time consuming. However if your book was to be associated as “just like” those of bestselling children’s poetry author Shel Silverstien, this would instantly increase your book’s exposure on Amazon and connect you with thousands of potential customers.  This would be a major accomplishment for your book and one that is completely within your grasps to achieve. The best part is you can use Amazon to market your book and get it associated with other products at absolutely no cost to you.

Over the upcoming weeks I will be going over the material below in-depth. These are all methods you need to utilize on the site as they will directly impact the promotion of your book.  Activity is what triggers Amazon’s systems and what lets them know your book is relevant enough for them to include in their recommendation lists.  The below concepts are what you need to work on in order to appear on Amazon’s radar and thus in return increase your sales.

-          Author Central

-          Amazon Profile

-          Reviews

-          Tags

-          Votes

-          Listmania

-          So You’d Like to Guides

-          Discussion Posting and Community Participation

-          Feeding Traffic

-          Integration with major Social Media sites

By focusing on the above elements you can personally feed traffic and activity to your book’s Amazon page. Amazon needs to be regarded in the same manner you would Facebook and Twitter. This is one of the cheapest and easiest ways to market your book and a  marketing outlet you cannot affort to overlook in the future.

Kait