How I Reduced My Listing Creation Time From 40 Hours to 40 Minutes

It is the lifeblood of any e-commerce business: new products.

All the smart sellers are continuously looking for new opportunities to add products to their mix, and keep sales on an upward trajectory. Over the past three years, I’ve launched somewhere between 30-40 new products, primarily on Amazon.com, and while this is a completely necessary part of a growing business it can also be incredibly burdensome and time consuming.

Between the research for the keywords, the drafts upon drafts and then fine tuning of copy, and then the photos — oh, the photos! To create a professional looking, and high-converting Amazon listing takes time, and lots of it. I estimate that on average, I spend roughly 40 hours to create and fine tune a listing, broken down like this:

• 3 hours of keyword research over 30 days
• 2 hours inputting keywords into proper places in listing (front and back end)
• 3 hours researching, finding and then briefing photographer
• 5 hours looking at competitive listings for ideas and points of differentiation
• 5 hours writing copy over 30 days
• 2 hours going back and forth with photographer for changes
• 5 hours making minor tweaks/changes to copy
• 10 hours over 60 days split testing different titles/images and copy
• 5 hours in just inputting elements into the listing each time a change is made (including HTML formatting)

Obviously, each product is different, and some take longer than others, but that is a lot of time! We sometimes don’t realize how long these things can take, because they may be spread out over days or weeks. This kind of time-intensive but also really important work can make it incredibly difficult to scale a business, and slow down the growth of a seller big time!

Recently, I found a way to cut the amount of time I was spending to create new listings for products on Amazon by 90 percent. That’s right — it went from an average of 40 hours to just 40 minutes. And that 40 minutes includes the time I now spend inputting the details (new photos, copy, keywords) into the actual Amazon listing. Pretty amazing!

That “secret weapon” is a service called AMZ Dream. This is a group of professionals, located right in my backyard here in North Texas, who do nothing but craft beautiful, custom, and — most importantly — high converting Amazon listings. They do it all — title, bullet points, HTML description, and even front and backend keywords. They even give me a starter list of keywords to target for my Sponsored Products campaign. But that’s not all — my favorite part of their service is the beautiful product photos I receive in just days after placing my order.

If you’ve been selling for any length of time, you know how difficult it can be to find high quality photos for your product, at a price that doesn’t completely break the bank. The team at AMZ Dream has solved this for me once and for all, and provides both white background and in-use lifestyle shots for all of my products. They are creative, well composed and really stand out from the competition. Seriously, if you take any of their main image shots and compare them to similar products being sold, they are eye-popping.

Here’s how simple having a new product listing professionally built by AMZ Dream is:

• Find the AMZ Dream package I want, and order it (5 minutes)
• Fill out the AMZ Dream intuitive product wizard with info on my new product (5 minutes)
• Send the product to AMZ Dream (10 minutes)
• Review the delivered results days later (10 minutes)
• Upload the content and photos to new Amazon listing (10 minutes)

By saving dozens of hours per new product listing, I can devote that time towards other important tasks, like building our team, finding new marketing opportunities, negotiating with our suppliers or researching even more new products.

My only wish is that I’d found a simple, effective way to outsource the entire product listing process way, way sooner.

Note that AMZ Dream has packages available for just product images, just copy and keywords, or the whole listing (my favorite). I told them I was going to feature them in a blog, and they wanted to give you a chance to try out their services at a 20% discount. Just use coupon code PODCAST at checkout for 20% off any of their services.