Amazon is a marketplace, but 52% of consumers also report starting their product search on Amazon. As a result, regardless of the size of your brand or the nature of the product, Amazon provides a platform with millions of eyeballs every day. EMarketer estimates Amazon reached $16 billion in total health, personal care, and beauty product sales in 2018, a 37.9% increase over 2017. The third-fastest-growing category for Amazon represents 44% of all online health and beauty e-commerce.

Putting your best foot forward in the highly competitive Amazon environment requires the creation of well-designed product pages that deliver customer experiences that convert to sales. Research across 16 experiments investigating 13 unique design elements shape four dimensions of the online customer experience (informativeness, entertainment, social presence, and sensory appeal) to determine how to best influence purchase.

To succeed at converting sales on Amazon, you need to convey more than just information on product pages; you must entertain, convey a human touch, and mimic sensory sensations that products evoke offline. A one-size-fits-all approach regardless of the number of products no longer works.

The Research Shows:

Two primary criteria: 1) the trustworthiness of your brand and 2) the degree to which customers can evaluate the product by reading about it rather than experiencing it can increase purchase intentions up to 10%. Online customer experiences have four dimensions: informative, entertaining, social, and sensory. The strongest influence on purchase is entertainment followed by the informative, social, and sensory aspects. The relevance of each dimension is contingent upon the specific product and brand.

The Design Guide:

• Step 1: Know your brand and be able to answer two questions: 1) How much do current and potential customers know your brand? 2) How easily does your product convert to an online selling format?
• Step 2: Inventory and audit your design assets before you create the product page to determine what assets can be repurposed and what new assets may be needed to create a customer experience on Amazon.
• Step 3: Create a customer experience using the dimensions of entertainment, informativeness, social presence, and sensory appeal, and determine which aspects to strengthen by combining product and brand knowledge with assessment of your digital assets.

To learn more about developing product pages that convert to sales, read the full article in HBR.