Amazon Softlines Category: What You Need to Know
Apparel is perhaps one of the most competitive categories on Amazon. As name brands flock to the platform, Amazon continues to step up their fashion game with their popular influencer-designed line, The Drop, as well as other Private Label brands. Just because the space is competitive doesn’t mean your brand can’t succeed. Today we interview Key Account Manager Greyson Carman who has vast experience in softlines to gain insight into the apparel space on Amazon:
Apparel Competition: Your Value Proposition
No matter what you’re selling on Amazon, it boils down to one key question: What’s your brand’s value proposition? In such a busy space, this needs to be clear to potential consumers.
For Amazon’s private label brands, their value proposition is the price. What do you have to offer? Find your “why” and use this to your advantage in your brand store when telling your brand story, as well as in your A+ content and product descriptions.
If you have brand recognition, use this to your advantage and invest in advertising. When it comes to advertising apparel, support your products by advertising at the color level to show the breadth of your catalog.
Setting Up For Success
To find success on Amazon in the apparel category, here are some key steps you can take:
1. Create Consistency
- Amazon should echo the brand experience your customers are having in your retail stores, on your eCommerce website, on social media, in pop-ups and anywhere else customers are interacting with your brand.
- While Amazon does have parameters you need to work within, there are ways you can work within Amazon’s confines to authentically represent your brand.
Read More: Building Your Brand: Creating Content that Connects on Amazon
2. Off Amazon organization and Internal Structures
- Maintain seasonal documents that clearly outline new products, updated products and dropped products for each season.
- Have meticulously organized internal documents and know who has/is in charge of what information. You need to know specifically when something is changing over.
- Regularly check for updates to Amazon’s required key attributes in Vendor Central or Seller Central. It’s a good idea to do this monthly/quarterly depending on the size of your operation.
- Have a deep understanding of the magnitude of UPCs. Every ASIN is mapped to one UPC, so make sure that you are not recycling your UPCs; this will cause future problems.
3. Understand Your Variations
- The customer experience is the only thing that matters. Make sure you variate your products in a way that your customers can easily understand.
- Combining your variations helps so that you can aggregate your reviews, however…
- Depending on how you variate your product and how many variations you have, your PDP may have two different appearances. Ideally, you want to variate your product so that colorways are shown in a color swatch and sizes are in a dropdown, like you see below.
“When working in softlines, I cannot express the importance of maintaining your catalog from both a merchandising and operational standpoint,” Greyson says. Creating brand consistency, aligning your team internally and having a well-organized catalog will help set you up for success in the competitive softlines landscape on Amazon.
Looking for that expert? We have a whole team ready to help: