This week, we’re going deep on everyone’s favorite topic: NUMBERS! More specifically, PERCENTAGES. Most specificalliest, AMAZON ORDER ITEM SESSION PERCENTAGE RATES!

Why the hell should an Amazon seller care about the Amazon Order Item Session Percentage Rate? Because it’s a measurement of your conversion rate. Sexy, huh?

Let’s say 10 people checked out Marital Bliss on Amazon yesterday and 1 person bought a copy of the game. Amazon would say we had 10 “sessions” and 1 “units ordered.” Our Order Item Session Percentage (which I’m just going to call “conversion rate” from now on) would be: 10%.

So, what happened to the other 90%? Where did they go? Why didn’t they buy our game? How can I convince them that our game is better than whatever else they were considering?

Let’s find out.

Establishing a Baseline

Like any good experiment, you first have to establish a baseline. I did a bit of research and found a few different sites making claims about Amazon’s overall rate. The consensus seems to be that:

• The average Amazon conversion rate is somewhere between 10-15%.
• And the Martial Bliss conversion rate for January was 13.88%. Not too shabby, but can it be better?

The power of a picture

Product images are critical to influencing conversion rates on Amazon. I didn’t bother to find a source to back up that claim, but it’s probably true. Hopefully my legal team won’t make me retract that.

Last year, we had one image and it was this:

There’s some room for improvement.

Shortly after we became Amazon sellers, we updated our product images to this:

Ok, that’s a bit better.

In case you’re wondering, I took those product photos in my garage, and I will definitely do it differently next time.

Anyway, the updated images were an improvement… but they felt sterile. We wanted people! We wanted some diversity! We wanted some fun!

Also, I stumbled upon this really interesting old Netflix article describing which images got the most clicks (Spoiler alert: complex emotions and villains) and that was the last push we needed to convince ourselves to make some round 2 updates.

So, it was back to the drawing board. In a perfect world, we’d commission a photographer and some models and capture actual unique images of people using our game. Heck, we may still do that later this year for new products and  for some of the updates we’re planning for Marital Bliss.

But, in the short term, we relied on ye olde stock photos, and Photoshop. The downside of stock photos is that literally for a few bucks anyone could go buy the exact same photo, and do whatever they wanted with it. Seriously. Do these look familiar? The upside, is that they’re affordable, accessible, and with a little Photoshop elbow-grease they can work well to sell your product.

After some back and forth, and different iterations, here’s where we landed.

Measuring Results

After all that work we’d better darn well have seen some improvements! Well, I have great news to report. We made the updates on January 28, and measuring results from then to now our conversion rate is…. 23.1%!

Our conversion rate went from 13.88% to 23.1% after updating our images. Nearly a 10% increase. Hard to beat that!

But, wait! Being the astute reader that you are, you may find yourself saying: “Dude, you’re cherry picking your numbers. January 28 through February 16 coincides with Valentine’s day. Of course your conversion rates are going to be higher around a holiday.” To you, I say… QUIET!

Actually, you might be right, and only time will tell. We’re pleased with the initial bump, however we’re aware that part of that increase may be associated with the holiday. In fact, a big reason we made the v2 image updates a priority was to have them published before Valentine’s day in the first place.

I’m definitely going to be monitoring them moving forward, and am excited to see how it plays out. Rest assured, if I find that the conversion rate reverts back to something similar to our January numbers… there’s no way I’ll ever post about it on here and tell everyone. Sheesh!

What’s the most important thing you look for when shopping on Amazon? What do you think about our image updates? Leave a comment and let’s get a conversation started.