Answering Common Questions about Amazon Product Variations

Maximize your profits on Amazon by implementing these strategies: expand product variations to align with consumer trends, eliminate unprofitable variations, and monitor your success consistently over time.

Tom Rohlf

November 20, 2023

Selling on Amazon isn’t as easy as uploading your product listings one time, kicking back—drink in hand—and waiting for the money to roll in. Amazon’s marketplace is enormous, which means that it’s easy to get lost in a shop that big. Smart, competitive sellers take action to ensure that their products are finding the right customers. Part of this process is optimizing product variations.

As an Amazon seller with a decade of experience, I’ve had more than enough time to experiment with my product variations. After all, optimizing product listing variations as an Amazon seller is an ongoing process.

Here are answers to common questions about optimizing Amazon product variations.

When Should I Expand My Amazon Product Variations?

Some sellers choose to expand their product variations when their parent product does well. That’s a fine strategy, but it’s not a data-informed decision. It’s much better to look at customer search volume to determine when to expand and how.

Within Amazon’s Brand Analytics, sellers can see which search terms shoppers are using to find your products. From here, you might notice gaps in your offerings.

For example, I sell baby clothes through my Amazon brand Cuddle Club. Shoppers can find my goods by searching “baby jacket” or “jacket for toddler.” If I notice a substantial search volume for something I don’t sell—like “toddler jacket with hood” or “baby hoodie”—I should probably consider expanding my parent ASIN to include similar jackets with hoods.

This can work for almost any brand. Leverage search volumes to estimate whether variations fitting your brand could attract new buyers or more conversions.

Pro tip: Sometimes it's not about what you sell, but how you sell it. For instance, I notice a lot of search traffic for gift-related keywords. Including variations of my products with a gift box in the image is a great way to signal to customers that my product makes for great presents. Sellers can use similar tactics around holidays, back-to-school season, or other customer-specific use cases.

When Should I Bundle?

Bundling products as a variation within your listing is a good strategy for jumpstarting slow product sales, promoting deals, and increasing shipping profits. Let’s touch on each of these one by one:

Improving sluggish sales. Can’t move your inventory? Bundling slow sellers with hot items can really move stuck inventory. For instance, you can sell your sluggish sun hats as a bundle deal with your rapidly selling bikini tops.
Promoting deals. Bundling as a product variation can be a great way to get ahead of holidays, clearance sales, and the rest. Bundling neckties with button-ups ahead of Father’s Day and advertising it heavily is a great way to boost sales.
Increasing slipping profits. If you see people buying your products in quantities of more than one, it’s time to start bundling. This is especially true for consumables like deodorant, toothpaste, diapers, or snacks. Why? Because something like 70% of the fees are due to shipping size and weight. The cost per item is very high. But as you bundle two items, the ratio between fees and revenue grows, as it does for ten items or twenty items. Therefore, sell as much as you can, as often as you can to maximize your profits. Pro tip: If you are advertising consumables, stick with the cheaper variations to bring in customers and upsell them on the quantity once they are on your listing.

What Kinds of Variations Should I Sell? What Will Be Successful?

I sometimes have people ask me what products are valuable to sell on Amazon. And the truth is that what you sell is really less important once you start selling it.

Let me explain what I mean. You probably arrived at the products you want to sell because you believe in what you’re selling or you believe that people are likely to buy it. But once you’re actually selling your products, there are so many ways to tweak your offerings to take advantage of trends in culture.

For instance, there’s always been a market for hot sauces. For a long time, habanero and jalapeno were the top sellers. But trends change. With the growing popularity of Hot Ones, a talk show that interviews celebrities over a plate of hot wings, consumer habits shifted. Sudden ghost pepper and Carolina reaper jumped in demand. Hot sauce sellers are basically expected to offer these flavors.

It’s all about riding the waves once they come. This is true for any product line. You can follow trends by investigating trends in search terms, social media, pop culture, trade journals, and beyond.

How Do I Know If My Variations Aren’t Worth Keeping? When Should I Shrink the Variations I Offer?

Leading indicators that you should cut or eliminate variations include spending too much on long-term storage fees or recognizing that the percentage of sales for your variations isn’t meaningful.

Selling on Amazon isn’t a free process. It costs money to keep your business running. This includes storage fees. If you are storing products that aren’t selling, you’re bleeding money. This might be okay if it's a new product that needs some time to pick up momentum, but when a product isn’t pulling its own weight, better just to eliminate the offering.

Now, it’s completely reasonable for a single product variation to result in 90% of your sales. But if other variations aren’t doing anything for you, it’s smart to cut them. Some product variations need time to cultivate an audience, cost very little to produce, or draw enough longtail keyword volume to the listing page as a whole that they are worth keeping. As the seller, it’s up to you to make this decision.

What Are Some Other Things to Look Out For?

If you decide to shut down a variation for any reason, just know that any advertising linked to that child ASIN will disappear as well. This can result in dramatic drops in your advertising.

A lot of sellers have discovered this the hard way. So before you remove a variant—even something as simple as a color, size, or flavor—double-check if there are any associated ads running. Redirect these ad investments elsewhere.

Measure the Success of Your Amazon Product Variations with Junglytics

Smart sellers love good data. Regrettably, the data coming out of Seller Central is too high-level and doesn’t provide the product-level or variation-level insights Amazon sellers need to succeed. Luckily, Junglytics does!

Junglytics is the most customizable business intelligence tool for Amazon sellers and agencies. With a few clicks, Junglytics users can create and save dashboards most pertinent to their goals. Our data analytics tool for Amazon sellers offers 40+ essential metrics.

See a comparison of conversion rates for each product variation:

Slice and dice your conversion by date, product type, and variant type.

Or dive into your return on ad spend (ROAS) to understand where to best allocate your ad spend:

Determine which variants are giving you the best return on your advertising investments.

Providing product variations is all about meeting customer needs. Junglytics is all about meeting the needs of Amazon sellers. By providing you with the accurate, easy-to-view data you need, we help you better manage your brand and meet customer needs.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tom Rohlf

Tom has been selling on Amazon since 2014 - He exited his first business (Playerten.com) in 2019 and is the CEO and Co-founder of Cuddle Club an Amazon native children's clothing brand.

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