These are the key metrics Amazon uses for their algorithm:

  • Be familiar with all the Amazon reseller rules – They can be very strict. If you follow their rules closely, your store’s “performance score” will improve. Your products will be listed on top against the competition and awarded in the “buy box” for the product.
  • Always ship on-time, earliest as possible. Fast shipping will improve your store’s performance score. Customer will provide good reviews.
  • The customer is always right when selling on Amazon. Take the lost if you have to. If you get too many bad reviews, too many customer complaints, Amazon will punish you in your “performance” score, your store will lose visibility and position. If it gets worst, Amazon will kick you off. So it’s not worth fighting with an Amazon customer. Amazon will always stand behind their customer unless the Customer is blatantly wrong or abusive. 

If you do all these things, your store and products will show more in the “buy box” and appear above your competitors.

Yungi Chu
Yungi Chu is the owner of HeadsetPlus.com and third-party seller on Amazon.com for the last five years.

One basic part of Amazon’s algorithm is that if someone clicks on your product description and does not purchase it, your listing is penalized for that click. Amazon favors listings that have a high conversion rate, meaning people click and then buy that product at a high rate, as this means more sales for the platform.

Stacy Caprio
Founder, Growth Marketing

The most important factor in the algorithm is the use of keywords, it doesn’t matter how good your product is. If you are using the wrong keywords to describe your product, you’ll never make it on to the first search page.

Making the first page is so important to sales as 70% of Amazon searches end on page one. Another very important factor is Amazon reviews. On Amazon, bad reviews count for a lot because they’re trying to emphasize customer service. Their thinking is that if you provide good customer service, you should be able to keep your bad reviews to a minimum.

Nate Masterson
Nate Masterson is the CMO of Maple Holistics, a company dedicated to cruelty-free, natural, and sustainable personal care products.

The basics to understand Amazon’s algorithm (A9) is that it is an organic product ranking system that is composed of direct and indirect factors used to match users’ search queries to products they are most likely to purchase. This means, that half of the battle of marketing your product and selling your product on Amazon is making sure your products get found. Given that Amazon is now the #3 search engine (behind Google and YouTube), many ad agencies have now created divisions which develop Amazon algorithm strategies. It’s no longer just about Google, people are flocking to Amazon for all intents and purposes and to knowing its algorithm is now very important

Robb Hecht
Robb Hecht serves as an Adjunct Professor of Marketing at New York City’s Baruch College preparing students into the future of customer first A.I. & 5G driven marketing & technology careers and toward the jobs of tomorrow which may not yet exist today. With a career background including R/GA, FCB, Havas, Omnicom, and Google, Robb has worked with clients like AT&T, Pfizer, Owens Corning, Cigna, Johnson & Johnson, GSK and Pepsi, and coaches and empowers Millennial and GenZ students to build DTC direct to consumer businesses which leverage the power of data strategy, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon & A.I.

Amazon’s ranking system works in a two-step process. After the search is typed into the system it:

  1. Pulls up the most relevant results from a “catalog” of product listings.  
  2. Then, Amazon sorts the results into an order that is “most relevant” to the user.  

Amazon, just like Google, sees SEO in a similar way.

Chinh Nguyen
Chinh Nguyen has more than 10 years of digital marketing experience and is responsible for the company’s overall inbound marketing programs. Prior to joining Finale Inventory, Chinh held leadership marketing roles at a number of high-technology companies in support of software, solutions, and educational products.