There are many good tips for how to list your product on amazon. Unfortunately, if you come across the wrong advice, there will be significant gaps based on the products or services they are trying to sell you.

When you're a smaller company and don't have unlimited budgets, or maybe a solopreneur making your first foray into e-commerce, gaps and blind spots can bankrupt you.

Like one Amazon Consultant for over 10 years and the CEO of an Amazon software company, I can tell you firsthand the three most common reasons why entrepreneurs fail and what to do instead.

Connected: Selling on Amazon? Take these 5 steps to knock your sales out of the park

1. Building an Amazon brand instead of a brand

A cursory search of Google and YouTube will tell you that the ticket to success on Amazon follows this formula:

1. Find products with high or medium demand and low competition.

2. Sourcing products from manufacturers.

3. Get a trademark for your brand name.

4. Put your brand on the products.

5. Send the products to Amazon FBA fulfillment centers.

6. Optimize your listings.

7. Run PPC ads.

This sounds good in theory, but the nuance lies in the old adage of not just predicting the car, but predicting the traffic jam.

This results in a poor customer experience for Amazon customers because the Amazon marketplace is flooded with tens to hundreds of the same products, all with different names on them, because they all have the same software telling them to get the same products.

That's only part of the problem with that model.

Courses, articles, and YouTube videos that teach this model focus on “hacks” and shortcuts that revolve around listing optimizations that also contribute to a poor customer experience for the Amazon customer.

They leave out the basics of selling and building a brand for you should focus onwhich includes:

This results in a flood of ugly listings with customers forced to read 50 different ways to say “avocado slicer” instead of a premium customer experience.

So if you're an Amazon seller and want to provide the ultimate experience and only the best products to your customers, how do you solve this problem? You make it harder for “private label” sellers to rise to the top and appear to customers.

Amazon does this through its algorithm by prioritizing KPIs outside of Amazon such as external traffic, brand website and more – as well as KPIs within Amazon that inform Amazon about brand awarenesslike brand searches.

This eliminates our next category.

Connected: New Amazon sellers should avoid this huge beginner's mistake

2. Not focusing OFF Amazon

On the surface level, you're used to thinking that Amazon is a closed ecosystem and focusing only on what you can see on Amazon. This includes:

• Keywords

• hearing

• PRICE

• A+ images and content

• VIDEOS

• Bullet points

• PPC

From there, you focus on pricing strategies, giveaways, bottom-list optimizations, and other more common ways to increase your sales on Amazon fast. But that's only half of it.

There are two pillars of success at Amazon:

1. On Amazon

2. Outside of Amazon

Since you are used to being an “Amazon brand” and not a “brand”, the non-Amazon component is ignored.

To be clear, if you sell an avocado slicer and want to appear at the top of Amazon searches when someone searches for “avocado slicer,” you want to focus on building your brand outside of Amazon to increase rankings. your and importance on Amazon.

To build your brand from Amazon, focus on these Best practices:

• SEO for your brand website

• PR

• Brand mentions on social media

• Amazon Influencers

• Getting featured on “Best of” and “Top” lists on blogs and YouTube videos about what you sell

Amazon crawls the web for information on products sold on its marketplace and uses that information to prioritize what appears in search results and ads.

Plus, I mentioned “branded searches” earlier – where customers go to Amazon and type your brand name into the search bar – and how that helps you rank higher for non-branded searches like “avocado tool”. The list above shows how you build brand awareness that results in brand searches.

Connected: How to get your first 100 sales on Amazon

OFF Amazon is also a great place for it learn more about your customers, which can help you with your images and copywriting. By spending more time where your customers live online, you'll learn more about how your products ease their pains, solve their problems, and fulfill their desires.

Amazon prioritizes and showcases strong brands with customer recognition that provide a great customer experience in their marketplace. This can be you if you focus on being a “brand” rather than an “Amazon brand”.