It’s one thing to be under-optimized and another to not test for customer objections.
Nearly everyone skips this crucial step and then pours thousands into launches, which could have been saved by spending a few days and a few hundred dollars on critical feedback. Why? Because it’s boring, it’s not glamorous, or you assume you know your market—only to find out later that it didn’t work.
Testing two main images and asking which one is the best is not customer feedback unless the test image is optimized based on feedback from customers. Otherwise, it’s basically useless information. It just tells you “you created one image better than the other.”
Running an Amazon experiment based on brainstorming with your team to improve the tests is not customer feedback, unless you obtain statistically significant information from people outside your company.
If you are building a product, leveraging everyone else’s reviews to build a better mousetrap is fantastic, and you should be doing it. But who is checking your mousetrap? You can rush off, excited because you found products that are lacking and cobble together a new one, only to discover that you’ve created a new set of problems while solving others.
What if you are a market leader and a slew of newcomers scoop up market share, diluting your sales? You know you have the best quality product, so you double down on spending, drive external traffic, update your listing copy, invest heavily in images, and try out the latest marketing tactics. Then, finally, you turn to a third-party platform (which, of course, has its limitations).
You gather feedback from 50, 100, 200 people, asking them, “What would be your objections to buying this product?”—not what they like about it or what they would improve, but why they might not buy it. Even better, include your top two competitors in the survey for comparison. This approach is where you find valuable insights; it’s not perfect, but it allows you to extrapolate and build an optimization plan.
You may discover that a significant portion of the feedback indicates a preference for color, like “I like this one because it’s red and yours is blue.” Then, you might think, why not shift your strategy and lead with the blue variation? You will not find this information anywhere other than seeking customer objections to buying your product.
Selling to Your Shiny Object Syndrome
Understand that people will sell you pain points that do not exist.
Are you running DSP? The question is whether you have everything dialed in first.
Have you gathered customer feedback? If not, then why spend $5,000, $10,000, or $15,000 on DSP when you don’t know what your customer objections are first?
“Yeah, but PPC is getting expensive!”
It will be even more so if you haven’t received substantial feedback from customers. Return to the product, identify the objections.
You should run third-party traffic! So, you want to run third-party traffic on the listing because it is not converting? Traffic that is further up the funnel, away from the conversion? Could it be that you have customer objections you haven’t addressed or tested?
Have you tried the latest Amazon ad type that is in beta? It’s great for branding and getting ahead of the pack before everyone else jumps on it. But have you mitigated your customer buying objections?
This is not to say you should avoid the aforementioned strategies, of course, but it will be far cheaper to identify customer objections by asking real people or using third-party platforms first. Then test these strategies.
Knowing your customer objections does not mean your product will turn into a hero product and become a hit. However, it will save you from wasting months and large sums of money. The answers you receive may indicate it’s not a viable product to sell, and then you can get rid of it as efficiently as possible. Take your learnings and apply them to your next products and refine your process to improve your hit-to-failure ratio.
