What You Need to Know About Amazon Softlines Category
Apparel is perhaps one of the most competitive categories on Amazon. However, just because the space is competitive doesn’t mean your brand can’t succeed. Today we interviewed Key Account Manager Greyson Carman, who has extensive 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, you should ask yourself 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 price. What does your brand have to offer? Make it clear in your brand store, as well as in your A+ content and product descriptions.
If you have brand recognition, use that to your advantage and invest in advertising.
Setting Up For Success
To find success on Amazon in the apparel category, here are some key steps you can take:
- Create Consistency
- Amazon should echo the brand experience your customers have in retail stores, on your eCommerce website, on social media, and anywhere else customers are interacting with your brand.
- While Amazon does have parameters you need to abide by, 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
- Off Amazon Organization and Internal Structures
- Maintain seasonal documents that clearly outline new products, updated products, and dropped products for each season.
- Check for updates on Amazon’s required key attributes in Vendor Central or Seller Central monthly/quarterly depending on the size of your operation.
- Understand that every ASIN is mapped to one UPC, so make sure that you are not recycling your UPCs.
- Understand Your Variations
- The customer experience is the only thing that matters on Amazon. Make sure you arrange your products in a way that your customers can easily understand.
- Ideally, you want to variate your product so that colorways are shown in a color swatch and sizes are in a dropdown as 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. Be successful in the competitive softlines landscape on Amazon by:
- Creating brand consistency
- Aligning your team internally
- Having a well-organized catalog
Looking for that expert? We have a whole team ready to help: