When you walk down a store aisle, what do you see? Products lined from floor to ceiling with brands pulling you in, giving you options to discover and compare. As a brand, you want to combat the competition – providing the customer with all possible options organized together in one place, so they have no reason to look elsewhere. Comparable to merchandising a store floor, variating products together on an Amazon listing is a must – making products more discoverable, creating a better user experience, and increasing sales.
Variations allow brands to combine related products together onto a single listing. When a variation relationship is created, a parent and child relationship is formed – the parent product is a non-buyable product used to house the buyable child products that differ by the variation theme assigned. Grouping together products differentiated by a variation theme – size, color, flavor, style, or another classification – shows the shopper all possible buying options in one place. Whether it be an art set variated by size or a pack of tuna variated by flavor, variations give the shopper the option to discover and compare the product varieties.
While product variations are a no brainer in providing the shopper with the best possible user experience and utmost convenience – letting shoppers engage with the listing and find exactly what they're looking for – the brand will also benefit from:
Creating the best shopper experience is the overall goal of variating products together, and Amazon appreciates these technical contributions, as they ultimately add up to a better customer experience on Amazon as a whole.
As you develop a strategy for cleaning up your catalog, start by stepping into the shopper’s shoes and deciding what you’d like to see on a listing. What makes sense together? What doesn’t? The key is to not clutter or confuse the shopper, but rather provide them the options they’d be looking for based on their initial product search.
Once you have a strategy in place, dig in and categorize your catalog into product-related groups. Prioritize the no brainer products that should be together and keep it simple with one or two variation themes – three is the max, but that gets messy. As you continue to variate products in your catalog, keep the shopper in mind and keep it relevant.
Variating your Amazon listings is like merchandising a store aisle. Create the best possible shopping experience by providing the shopper with all available product options – stopping them from having to look anywhere else. At the end of the day, creating variations will create the best possible shopping experience and best of all, drive more sales.
Check out this blog post for additional technical optimizations brands need to monitor.