If you’ve browsed on Amazon before, you’ve probably seen a number of different badges on product listings. From Best Seller to Sponsored, the e-commerce platform offers sellers a variety of ways to have their products stand out from competitors and appeal to shoppers.
One particular badge you should know about is the Amazon Choice Badge. Receiving this badge not only boosts your product’s visibility but also builds trust and credibility among customers.
If you’re not familiar with the Amazon’s Choice Badge, you don’t need to worry! In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about it, including what it is, how to get it, best practices for earning it, and things to avoid when trying to obtain it. Let’s get started!
What is the Amazon Choice Badge?
So, what is Amazon’s Choice? Amazon Choice is a label the e-commerce platform assigns to products that best match the customer search term. Products that meet specific criteria for having competitive pricing, fast shipping, and are high quality can also be awarded with an Amazon’s Choice Badge. At the end of the day, Amazon prioritizes what matters most to customers: availability, fast shipping, price, and review ratings.
For any Amazon Choice products that exactly match what customers are looking for when they enter a specific keyword search, they become candidates for an Amazon Choice Badge. Essentially, this tells customers that these products are popular among other shoppers based on that keyword and are the most relevant. Customers are therefore able to quickly find the products they’re looking for and avoid a drawn out purchasing process.
As an example, here is what comes up when I search “water bottle” on Amazon:
Although this specific water bottle brand is not the best-selling item in its subcategory, it was awarded the Amazon’s Choice Badge because it has a relatively high product ranking, better customer reviews and frequent purchases, and is returned less than other products. For these reasons, Amazon believes this specific product best matches the keyword “water bottle.”
Benefits of the Amazon Choice Badge
Having the Amazon Choice logo on your listing offers a number of advantages that can improve your product’s performance and attract more customers. Below are some of the main benefits of obtaining the badge:
- Increased organic traffic: Products with the Amazon Choice Badge often appear at the top of the search results page, making them more likely to catch shoppers’ attention and drive traffic to the product listing page.
- Boosted trust and credibility: Shoppers see the official badge as a recommendation from Amazon which indicates that the product is trustworthy. This helps attract potential customers and builds credibility in your brand.
- Higher conversion rates: Products with an Amazon’s Choice badge usually have higher conversion rates because customers feel more confident purchasing a product that has been recognized by Amazon itself. The badge serves as a form of “social proof” that the product is worth buying, so shoppers are more likely to choose officially recognized products over others.
- Increased sales: With more traffic to your product listing and higher conversion rates due to the help of the Amazon Choice badge, you’ll generate more sales for your business.
- Enhances brand loyalty: Once you become Amazon’s choice product, customers will subconsciously think of your brand as more legitimate since your product has been officially recognized by Amazon. Because of this, shoppers are more likely to remain loyal to your brand and continuously purchase from you in the future.
- Better customer reviews: Having the Amazon Choice logo on your listing may help you get more positive reviews and fewer negative ones. With a quality product, Amazon will recognize your efforts as a seller and vouch for you, so customers have less doubt when purchasing your product. With higher customer satisfaction, they’ll be more likely to leave better reviews and higher ratings.
Amazon Best Seller vs. Amazon Choice: Key Differences
There are a number of different Amazon badges on the e-commerce platform. You might have even heard of another common badge called the best seller badge which appears as shown below:
Many shoppers and first-time sellers confuse these badges with each other, but they actually aren’t the same thing. We’ve outlined some key differences between the Best Seller vs. Amazon’s Choice badges:
| Amazon Choice Badge | Best Seller Badge |
| Given to products that best match the target keyword | Given to products that have sold the most in their category or subcategory (i.e. has the highest number of sales) |
| Designed to help customers quickly find relevant and reliable products | Designed to help customers find the top-selling products in each category or subcategory |
| No set time frame for earning the badge; can vary from a few weeks to several months | Updated every hour on Amazon |
| No limit to the number of products that can be Amazon’s Choice | Number of best seller products is limited based on the total number of categories in Amazon’s catalog |
Tips and Best Practices on How to Get Amazon’s Choice Badge
So, what is Amazon’s Choice based on? As we briefly mentioned before, many Amazon recommendations are determined by key factors such as fast shipping, low return rates, and good customer reviews and ratings. When trying to achieve the Amazon Choice badge, you’ll want to keep these things in mind. Below are some helpful tips and best practices on how to get Amazon’s Choice badge.
1. Optimize Your Product Listings
The first step is to optimize your product listings for SEO to improve your visibility to shoppers. In order to do this, you’ll need to conduct keyword research and build out a strategy to target certain ones to include in your listings. Using a third-party software like Viral Launch’s Keyword Research tool can be incredibly helpful since you can view data such as search volumes, competition levels, historical trends, and more.
When optimizing your listings, you should prioritize high-volume and relevant keywords so Amazon knows what your product is and when it should appear in the search results. Additionally, you’ll want to avoid highly competitive keywords since you’ll have more difficulty ranking for them. For more information on how to use our Keyword Research tool, check out our video tutorial here.
Pro Tip: If you’re an experienced seller, sign up for a free trial and use Viral Launch’s Listing Analyzer to evaluate your listings’ performance in real time. This tool provides valuable insights into how you stack up against the competition.
2. Optimize Your PPC Campaigns
Once you optimize your product listings, you’ll also want to optimize your Amazon PPC campaigns. By including target keywords in your PPC campaigns, you can increase the chances of your product showing up higher in the search results when a customer searches for a specific keyword. This is especially important if you have a newer product that you recently launched since it likely won’t show up in the search results right away.
The more customers purchase your product after searching a specific keyword and clicking on your ad, the higher your chances are of receiving the Amazon Choice badge.
For additional insights, automation, and optimization of your PPC campaign, you should consider leveraging software like Viral Launch’s Kinetic PPC tool. It provides in-depth keyword and search term insights, automatic bid adjustments for better ROI, actionable insights for better ad spend, polished campaign performance monitoring, and more. Start a free trial today and see how you can elevate your PPC campaign strategy.
3. Price Your Product Competitively
Price plays a big factor in whether or not your product receives an Amazon’s Choice badge. This is because Amazon wants products in the marketplace to be priced fairly and competitively so customers get the best deals possible.
How you price your product depends on various factors and your business goals. However, at the end of the day, your product should sell profitably and attract potential customers from your competitors.
4. Gather Positive Customer Reviews and High Ratings
One of the top priorities of sellers should be to garner good customer reviews and high ratings as much as possible. Having a highly rated product builds trust and credibility among shoppers and encourages potential customers to purchase from you.
Since not all customers leave reviews after making a purchase, you may need to provide some incentives. For example, you can send personalized follow-up emails encouraging customers to leave a review or offer specific rewards for those that do. Or, you can try using the Amazon Request a Review feature which is available in your Seller Central account between 5 and 30 days after an order. After you hit the “Request a Review” button, Amazon will send a product review request to the customer. While this feature is useful to remind past buyers to leave a review, the downsides are that you aren’t able to follow up on the request or customize the message.
5. Maintain Your Stock
Customers are likely to purchase from competitor products rather than wait for you to restock your inventory. For this reason, you should ensure that you have enough stock at all times to avoid running out and losing out on potential revenue.
6. Leverage Amazon FBA
As we previously mentioned, a big factor in receiving an Amazon’s Choice badge is fast shipping. If you use Amazon FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) to fulfill your orders, you have better chances at receiving the badge since Amazon handles all your logistics and customer service inquiries. If you fulfill orders yourself via FBM (Fulfilled by Merchant), make sure you ship orders out as fast as possible to ensure that your customers receive their orders on time. At the end of the day, Amazon prioritizes products and brands that provide good customer experience, so utilizing FBA will make things easier for you on the seller side.
Additionally, using FBA automatically makes your business prime eligible. This means you can take advantage of and provide the fast shipping and same-delivery services for your customers.
7. Sell High Quality Products
This might seem obvious, but selling a good quality product is the best way to try and earn the Amazon Choice badge. Quality products naturally earn more sales, positive customer reviews, and higher ratings. You can do thorough keyword research, optimize your listings, and invest heavily in marketing, but if your product isn’t good at the end of the day, it won’t sell well.
What to Avoid When Trying to Earn the Amazon Choice Badge
Now that you know how to get Amazon’s Choice badge, we’ll leave you with a few things to be aware of and avoid when trying to earn the badge:
- Over-optimizing product listings: Including keywords in your listings is necessary to gain organic traffic and visibility on search result pages. However, avoid keyword stuffing (using too many keywords in your listings) which can make descriptions sound unnatural and ruin the user experience.
- Ignoring customer reviews: Positive customer feedback and reviews always bring good news and attention for businesses. However, you should never ignore negative reviews since addressing them is part of providing customer service. Instead, you should address any questions or concerns customers have about your product and ensure a better experience in the future.
- Poor inventory management: Managing your inventory is essential to prevent out-of-stock situations and unhappy customers. Moreover, customers are likely to purchase from competitors if you run out of inventory, so maintaining your inventory at optimal levels helps to avoid potential lost revenue.
Final Thoughts on the Amazon Choice Badge
As a seller, getting the Amazon’s Choice badge for your product should be a long-term goal. Not only does it provide the social proof you need to gain customers’ trust and build credibility, but it also helps you drive more sales and revenue. At the end of the day, it all comes down to taking the right actions: optimizing your product listings, offering competitive prices, and encouraging positive customer reviews.
Check out Viral Launch’s suite of seller tools to see how our solutions can help bring you one step closer to achieving the Amazon Choice badge and generate more sales!
Additional Resources
- Check out our complete guide on Amazon Best Sellers Rank to increase your organic rankings, improve your online visibility, and boost your sales potential in the long run.
- Looking for ways to boost your sales and make your brand stand out? Check out The Seller’s Edge Podcast’s episode on next-level Amazon tactics to learn more.
