As the latest innovation to the Amazon product page, Amazon Premium A+ content is piquing the interest of many forward-thinking brands. We recently hosted a webinar aimed to give brands guidance in deciding whether Premium A+ content was worth the investment.
Since Premium A+ is still relatively new (it officially launched on January 1, 2018), webinar attendees had a lot of questions. For this blog post, we answer some of the questions asked during the webinar that we didn’t have time to answer.
If you have additional questions or are ready to get started with a Premium content project, get in touch. Amazon A+ content (both premium and standard) is our specialty.
What is the eligibility for Premium A+?
Currently, Premium A+ content is only available to select Amazon vendors. Amazon sellers are not eligible for Premium A+ content. As we mentioned in the webinar, one way to check whether you’re eligible is to see whether you are given the option to add premium modules in Vendor Central.
Do you have any data suggesting Premium A+ drives higher conversion on Amazon? Also, do you think Premium A+ is equally effective as a product marketing tactic, i.e. to educate customers within the broader ecommerce ecosystem?
Amazon has not released any data on Premium A+ driving higher conversion rates, and it’s too new for there to be any ROI data. Amazon has said that Basic A+ has been shown to increase sales 11%, although results vary based on content quality, price point, and product category.
We’ve been working with the University of Washington to study various components of Amazon content. Preliminary data drawn from user studies and A/B testing conducted by the University of Washington shows that customer intent to purchase is higher for luxury products when a “vivid” online presentation is used. “Luxury,” in this context, denotes products that aim to please, as opposed to fulfilling a basic need. Examples would be name-brand fashion items, expensive electronics, gourmet foods, etc. The UW research describes the most effective elements of a “vivid” page, two of which are only available in Premium A+: (1) embedded videos, and (2) large-size images.
Meanwhile, because of the continued growth in mobile shopping, the exceptional mobile UX of Premium A+ suggests it is a good investment. It’s easy to imagine that a few years from now, as Premium A+ grows in popularity, mobile shoppers will become impatient with the old (less mobile-friendly) Basic A+ product pages.
How broadly adapted will Premium A+ be by lower price point items? how do you demonstrate ROI on lower price point items? Will the price go down over time?
With no current data on ROI (the program is too new), we can only speculate. Most of the examples of Premium A+ we’re seeing currently are for items with a price point of $30 or higher. That said, given the resources that Amazon has dedicated to developing these new modules, we can infer they ultimately want to sell Premium A+ to manufacturers across all industries, across all price points. Our best advice—because we don’t know how much Amazon will charge your company for Premium A+—is to make sure your product story and visual assets are robust enough to justify entering into a negotiation with Amazon to pay for this service. If you do decide to publish Premium A+ to your pages, we recommend tracking sales and traffic for 3 – 6 months and comparing those figures to what you’re seeing on Basic A+ pages for similar products.
Does Premium A+ show up on the Amazon app?
All of the Premium A+ pages we have built for clients to show up whether you’re using the Amazon mobile app or just opening up a web browser on your phone/tablet. If you are scrolling up and down the length of a particular product page and not seeing Premium A+, it might be that this content was built during beta testing and has limited functionality.
Do you have a recommended order of widgets to maximize the Customer Experience?
This is entirely dependent on the assets you have available. For module 1, start with whatever best captures your product’s top features visually—often this is an embedded video, banner image, or clickable feature map. For module 2, we recommend the image carousel due to its mobile functionality (swipe left/right). If your imagery doesn’t tell the product story absent accompanying copy, you may need to use the left/right-aligned image, which allows you to add a longer feature paragraph. Lastly, we always recommend incorporating a comparison chart to keep consumers “in brand.”
Do you have resources you can point to for building effective comparison charts?
We’ve written about the dos and don’ts of comparison charts before.
Comparison charts are another area where Premium A+ represents an improvement over Standard A+. With Premium, you have the option of using a module that compares up to six products but only displays two products at a time, with a swipe-left/right functionality. This is ideal for mobile phones where a full-size chart can be overwhelming and even illegible.
A second improvement is the presence of “learn more” question marks that hover over the text fields in the left-hand column. This allows you to expand on a feature that you’re comparing (as well as get around the strict character counts). For example, if you are comparing a selection of sugar-free beverages and you want to compare the stevia in each, a hovering question mark next to the word “stevia” allows customers to click and learn more about stevia and its benefits.
It seems the vendor-built Q&A leaves a lot of room for white lies about potentially underwhelming technologies from one model to the next.
That’s true. For what it’s worth, we often think of product detail copy as content “merchandising” rather than “marketing.” Whereas marketing copy occupies a place higher up in the sales funnel, merchandising copy is geared toward customers who are looking for straightforward answers to questions before they click the “buy” button. This calls for journalistic/informative copy that would lessen the conflict between the dynamic Q&A and the vendor-built Q&A.
Do we use Webcollage to build these templates, or is it built out directly on the Amazon platform? If we use Webcollage, does this limit what we can do?
The modules shown during the webinar are strictly Amazon-specific and can be accessed through your Amazon Vendor Central portal.
How does this compare to some of the modules Webcollage offers? Do we know how effective these are on Webcollage. How does Premium A+ compare?
The good news is that we’ve found nearly all of the new Premium A+ modules can be approximated using the Webcollage tool, although they’re not interactive in the same way. For example, Webcollage does not offer an image carousel where users can swipe left/right or click on buttons to read about the various features. That said, as you point out, the interactive feature map is very similar, and Webcollage already offers modules to accommodate video, banner images, and comparison charts.
The most important difference to keep in mind is that Webcollage’s syndication partners (Walmart, Best Buy, etc.) ultimately determine how Webcollage content will render on their sites, whereas Amazon’s design templates always render the same on Amazon.com. Some of Webcollage’s syndication partners, for example, will omit a comparison chart or video, even if it’s been built into the content. Some of them display the content as a pop-up “mini-site,” others show it as “inline” content.
Lastly, page width differs by retail site, and a lot of retail sites cram product detail page content into a narrow column. This means that a wide banner image, or interactive feature map, may be shrunk down when published to these sites.
If we include a Premium A+ video, will it also show up at the top of the page on Amazon?
No, you will still need to manually deliver video via Vendor Central to publish it above the fold.
