Imagine being able to read your potential customers' minds - understanding exactly why they hesitated before abandoning your product. Amazon is turning this fantasy into reality with its new "Amazon Insights" feature, allowing sellers to gather direct customer feedback and optimize their product strategies.
Historically, obtaining such market insights required significant investment and was typically only accessible to large corporations. Amazon's decision to make this powerful tool available to all sellers at no cost represents a disruptive shift in the e-commerce landscape.
How Amazon Insights Works
The feature enables sellers to create short surveys that are sent directly to customers who have interacted with their products, including both purchasers and those who browsed but didn't buy. This provides sellers with immediate, targeted feedback to refine their marketing approaches based on both quantitative and qualitative data.
Accessing Amazon Insights
Surprisingly, the feature isn't directly visible in the Seller Central dashboard. Sellers must access it through a specific link provided by Amazon.
Precision Targeting Capabilities
Amazon Insights offers multiple pre-designed templates covering different objectives:
- Purchase Behavior: Understand customers' decision-making processes
- Product Awareness: Gauge how well customers know your product
- Product Opinions: Collect customer perspectives and suggestions
Sellers can also create fully customized questions tailored to their specific needs. The targeting options allow sellers to reach:
- Customers who purchased the product
- Customers who viewed the product
- Browsers who didn't complete purchases
- Customers who bought similar products in the same category
Pricing Structure
While Amazon hasn't fully disclosed pricing details, the program operates on a pay-per-response model. Costs will vary based on targeting criteria and audience size. Amazon requires a minimum of 100 responses per survey, indicating sellers will need to allocate budget for meaningful results.
User Experience
From the customer perspective, surveys are designed to be straightforward and easy to complete, which should help maintain high response rates.
Strategic Value for Sellers
The ability to understand why potential customers don't convert represents invaluable data for optimizing product listings, refining marketing strategies, and potentially adjusting product designs. Purchase behavior surveys appear particularly valuable for improving conversion rates.
Other survey types may offer more limited benefits. For private label sellers, expecting customers to be familiar with brands before encountering products on Amazon is unrealistic. Product opinion surveys may duplicate information already available through existing review systems.
Implementation Recommendations
To maximize the tool's potential, sellers should:
- Clearly define survey objectives before creation
- Precisely target the most relevant customer segments
- Design concise, easy-to-understand questionnaires
- Thoroughly analyze results to identify improvement opportunities
- Incorporate insights into continuous refinement processes
Amazon Insights represents a significant opportunity for sellers to gain direct customer feedback at scale. When used strategically, the tool could help sellers better understand customer needs, optimize their offerings, and ultimately stand out in Amazon's competitive marketplace.