How FBA Affects Product Discoverability

Amazon uses two terms to define a given product’s potential for sale: Discoverability and Buyability. In this installment of our FBA series, we will be discussing how FBA increases a product’s Discoverability and makes it more profitable for your business.

Discoverability is the ability for a product listing to be found on Amazon.

Unlike eBay or other online marketplaces, Amazon caters to the buyer rather than the seller. For this reason, the website is built around the products rather than the sellers who provide them, and the search engine is built to filter products in a way most useful to customers. Thus, third-party sellers on Amazon must increase discoverability of their products if they want their items to get sold.

FBA and Discoverability

Many sellers ask themselves how utilizing FBA can improve their discoverability, if at all. When it comes to getting people to see your products, FBA products are indeed more discoverable for 2 main reasons:

Amazon Prime members

There are over 25 million Amazon Prime users. These customers spend more and shop more often on Amazon than the standard consumer. Most importantly, they intuitively shop for Prime-eligible products and will filter search results to show only Prime offers, effectively eliminating all non-FBA offers.

In other words, non-FBA items will many times not show up in search results for Prime members.
Amazon’s stellar reputation:

Even if an Amazon shopper does give your product a chance to show up on the search page, ASINs which feature an offer that shows ?Fulfilled by Amazon? are more desirable to Amazon customers, both Prime and non-Prime, than ASINs which don?t feature this.

This is because the shopper can expect an efficient, trackable delivery and exceptional customer service from an FBA product.

In turn, an ASIN that gets clicked on enough times indicates to Amazon that consumers like this product, and so it ultimately receives better visibility in search results.

In other words, FBA also makes your product more desirable to all Amazon shoppers, getting you more purchases and, subsequently, higher priority in search results.

Here’s a breakdown of which factors affect discoverability, and which of those are impacted by FBA:

Discoverability Factors Impacted by FBA

• Sales Performance History
• Relevance (product content)
• Search Keywords
• Product Images
• Product Reviews
• Sponsored Products
• Fulfillment Method
• Landed Price
• Inventory Quantity

In short, when deciding whether to use FBA, a seller should also factor in the higher discoverability it will cause. Want to learn more? Download our Guide to FBA!