The strategies that actually move the needle, minus the marketing fluff you've already heard a hundred times.
If you've ever searched for your own product on Amazon and found yourself on page four, you'll know the particular despair of being technically available but practically invisible. Or maybe you've got a Shopify store with a beautiful theme, great products, and approximately 40 visitors a month, most of whom were probably you checking if everything looked okay.
The problem in both cases isn't usually the product. It's the promotion. Both Amazon and Shopify require deliberate, ongoing effort to get products in front of buyers. The platforms are different, the tools are different, and the mistakes sellers make are different. So let's cover them separately.
Amazon's A10 algorithm (the ranking system that determines which products show up where) places significant weight on external traffic, conversion rate, and review quality. What it does not reward is a half-finished listing. If you run ads to a listing with weak photos and a vague title, you're just paying to show people something they won't buy.
The listing optimisation checklist before you consider any advertising:
Your title should lead with your most important keyword, then a core benefit, then secondary features. Amazon caps titles at 200 characters, but aim for 80-100 to keep it readable on mobile. The structure that works is: Primary Keyword + Key Feature + Size/Material/Variant + Brand. So instead of "Coffee Mug by BrandX" you'd have "Insulated Travel Coffee Mug, Leak-Proof Lid, 16oz Stainless Steel, BrandX".
Bullet points: you get five. Each one should start with a capitalised feature and explain the benefit behind it. Don't list features in isolation. "Double-wall insulation" is a feature. "Keeps your coffee hot for 6 hours so you can actually finish it" is a benefit. Buyers buy benefits.
Images are often where Amazon listings fall shortest. You need a clean main image on white (Amazon requires this), but the remaining images are your chance to tell the product's story. Show it in use, show scale, show close-ups of key details, add an infographic that covers the main selling points, and if you have a brand storefront, show the product family. Sellers with complete image sets consistently convert at higher rates than those relying on one or two shots.
Amazon runs a pay-per-click advertising system. Sponsored Products are the most common type and appear in search results and product pages. Sponsored Brands show banner-style ads at the top of search results and are available to brand-registered sellers. Sponsored Display lets you retarget shoppers who viewed your product but didn't buy.
The single biggest mistake with Amazon ads is running automatic campaigns and never going back to check them. Automatic campaigns are great for discovering which search terms buyers are actually using to find your product. But they'll also burn money on irrelevant searches. Check your Search Term reports weekly and add irrelevant terms as negative keywords. This is the difference between an ad campaign that improves over time and one that just costs money.
| Ad Type | Placement | Best For | Requires |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sponsored Products | Search results, product pages | Most sellers, any stage | Active listing |
| Sponsored Brands | Top of search (banner) | Building brand awareness | Brand Registry |
| Sponsored Display | On and off Amazon | Retargeting warm shoppers | Brand Registry |
Budget strategy that actually works: start by advertising your two or three best-converting listings rather than your entire catalogue. Concentrated spend on proven products builds sales velocity, which improves organic ranking, which reduces how much you need to spend on ads over time. It's a flywheel. Spreading tiny budgets across everything just means nothing gets enough impressions to learn anything useful.
Reviews on Amazon are currency. A product with a solid review count and strong average rating will outrank an identical product with none, all else being equal. But Amazon's rules around reviews are strict, and the consequences of breaking them are severe. You cannot offer discounts, free products, or anything else in exchange for a review. Sellers have had their accounts suspended for exactly this.
What you can do: use Amazon's built-in "Request a Review" button in Seller Central to send a single, Amazon-formatted review request after each order. You can also use package inserts to thank buyers and direct them to customer service if they have any issues, though you can't directly ask for a positive review or offer incentives.
If you're a brand-registered seller launching a new product, the Amazon Vine Program lets you send products to trusted Vine reviewers in exchange for honest reviews. These are not guaranteed to be positive. Vine reviewers are known for their directness, so this only works if your product is genuinely good. That said, for a new listing that needs initial social proof, it's a legitimate and effective option.
Because Amazon rewards external traffic, building promotion channels outside the platform has a direct effect on your rankings inside it. The most common approach is driving traffic from social media directly to your Amazon listing. TikTok, Instagram, and Pinterest all work for this depending on your product category.
Amazon Attribution is a free tool that lets you track which external sources are actually driving sales. If you're running a Facebook ad, a TikTok video, or a Pinterest campaign that points to your Amazon listing, Attribution gives you a trackable link so you can see exactly which channel is converting. Without it, you're guessing.
Influencer partnerships are particularly effective for Amazon sellers because the audience tends to be purchase-ready. A well-matched influencer with a genuine audience in your niche can drive both immediate sales and the sustained traffic signal that Amazon's algorithm rewards. Look for micro-influencers with strong engagement rates rather than large accounts with passive audiences.
The big difference between Shopify and Amazon is ownership. On Amazon, you're renting space in someone else's marketplace. On Shopify, you own the store. That means you build equity over time through SEO, email lists, and brand recognition. The trade-off is that Shopify doesn't come with built-in traffic the way Amazon does. You have to earn it.
Search engine optimisation for a Shopify store works similarly to any website SEO. Your product page titles, meta descriptions, alt text on images, and URL slugs all feed into how Google indexes your pages. The practical starting point is to write product titles and descriptions for humans first and search engines second. Clear, specific language that answers "what is this, who is it for, and why is it good" tends to rank better than keyword-stuffed descriptions anyway.
Blogging is underused by Shopify sellers and genuinely effective. A blog post that answers a common question your customers have, such as "how to choose the right size", "how to care for X material", or "the difference between A and B", can rank in Google and bring warm traffic to your store for months or years after it's published. Once they're on your site reading your helpful content, you have multiple chances to convert them into a buyer.
Here's the thing about social media: you don't own your followers. The algorithm changes, the platform tanks, your account gets restricted, and your audience disappears overnight. Email is different. Your list is yours. You can take it anywhere. And the return on investment for email marketing is genuinely impressive. Estimates across the industry put it at somewhere between $10 and $36 for every $1 spent.
Building your email list should start on day one. A welcome popup offering a discount or a free resource in exchange for an email address is the most common approach, and it works. Shopify's built-in tools handle this, or apps like Klaviyo and Omnisend give you more sophisticated automation capabilities.
The emails that drive the most revenue for Shopify stores are usually the automated ones rather than broadcast campaigns. An abandoned cart sequence (three emails over 48 hours reminding a shopper they left something behind) can recover a meaningful percentage of otherwise-lost sales. A post-purchase sequence asking for a review, suggesting complementary products, and offering a repeat purchase discount turns one-time buyers into returning customers.
SMS deserves a mention here because the open rates are striking. Email open rates hover around 20-30% for good campaigns. SMS open rates are closer to 98%. For time-sensitive offers like flash sales or restocked limited items, SMS gets the message read. The bar for intrusion is higher though. People are more protective of their phone number than their email, so make the sign-up incentive worth it and keep the messages sparse.
The platforms that work best depend entirely on your product category, but some general principles hold across all of them. Video content consistently outperforms static images for reach on every major platform right now. TikTok obviously leans heavily into short video, but Instagram Reels and Pinterest Idea Pins follow the same logic. If you're not creating any video content, you're leaving reach on the table.
For Shopify specifically, TikTok Shop is worth serious attention. The integration allows buyers to purchase directly through TikTok without leaving the app. Products that go viral on TikTok have been known to sell out overnight. It's not predictable, but being on the platform at all means you're in the game.
Influencer marketing for Shopify tends to work best through micro-influencers in your specific niche. Someone with 15,000 highly engaged followers in a specific niche will almost always outperform a celebrity with 2 million passive ones. Look for engagement rates above 3% as a rough benchmark. Use a unique discount code per influencer so you can actually track which partnerships drove sales.
Most Shopify store owners immediately think about getting more traffic when sales are slow. But if your conversion rate is 1% and the industry average is 2-3%, fixing the conversion problem doubles your revenue without a single new visitor. It's often faster and cheaper to convert existing traffic better than to bring in more.
Social proof is the single highest-impact conversion improvement most stores can make. Reviews, star ratings, customer photos, and "X people are viewing this right now" indicators all reduce the perceived risk of buying from a store a shopper hasn't used before. Apps like Kudosi, Yotpo, and Judge.me make it straightforward to collect and display reviews.
Upselling and cross-selling are another relatively easy win. If someone is about to buy a coffee mug, showing them "frequently bought together with this reusable pod" at the product page or checkout stage increases average order value without any additional acquisition cost. Shopify has built-in upsell features, and apps like ReConvert handle post-purchase upsells (offers shown after the sale is confirmed) which have surprisingly high acceptance rates because the buyer is already in purchase mode.
Abandoned cart recovery is worth setting up before anything else if you haven't already. Around 70% of shoppers who add something to a cart don't complete the purchase. A three-email sequence over 48 hours, starting with a gentle reminder, adding urgency in the second email, and offering a small incentive in the third, can recover a meaningful percentage of those lost sales. This is one of those automations that runs in the background earning money while you're doing other things. Set it up once, check it occasionally.
A great product and a solid content plan is a powerful combination. Our Social Media Marketing Toolkit gives you a full system for planning, scheduling, and creating content that drives traffic to your store, whether that's on Etsy, Amazon, or Shopify.
Get the Marketing Toolkit →