Ecommerce merchants are wise to pay attention to what Amazon is doing regarding their approach to online merchandising and what tools to have on their product pages to drive traffic and conversions.   Given Amazon’s conversion rates are around 4x the average ecommerce conversion rate…knowing what they are doing, why they are doing it, and what approaches you can also utilize on your ecommerce site can help lift your own conversions and sales.

This post will take a close look at what Amazon is doing with it’s Product Questions and Answers capability, covering how they have implemented this feature on their product pages and highlight some hidden gems that drive impressive results.

How Amazon Product Questions & Answers Engages Customers

When you visit a product page on Amazon, you’ll notice that they have a preview of the product Q&A engagement right under the product title.  See how that is displayed, pointed out in the following screenshot…

That let’s the visitor know that the product question & answer capabilities and content available.  You’ll see a bit further down the page that there is a more “in your face” call to action right above the product details and specifications, where they ask the user to enter any product questions that they may have through a simple field.  See how that is displayed here….

This gives the customer the ability to ask their own specific question with the goal of removing any information barrier that may exist on their journey of purchasing the product.  The tool will autosuggest existing answers to them if the content is already available, saving them the time of needing to read through (and successfully find) the information within product descriptions, product specifications, etc.

Finally, below all the product information that the seller has made available, you can see that they have the full Customer Question & Answer functionality and content for that product available as displayed here…

This gives the customer another engagement point to ask their product question if they didn’t find it within the product information above, and also shows the current question and answer content that is available for that product.

All of these options on the product page give customers easy access to the product Q&A capabilities and content, ensuring that they can get their product questions answered and get on with the sale.

This all seems simple enough, and many of you undoubtedly have used the functionality yourself….but there are some details in the way that Amazon has implemented product questions and answers that ecommerce merchants need to recognize and learn from in order to not miss out on some great opportunities for their own sites to use product Q&A to drive new organic traffic and drive conversions to their site.

There are a couple treasures hidden in plain site with how Amazon has implemented Q&A that most people don’t recognize and they’re driving both organic traffic and conversions to Amazon’s products.   Let’s dig into the details of how Amazon has implemented this capability to get the most out of that Q&A content and engagement.

Landing Pages for Each Product Q&A Thread

The first treasure I’ll point out has a notable impact on product question and answer content getting indexed in Google (and other search engines) and growing consistent traffic from customers who are asking similar product questions on those search engines.   Let’s look closely at how Amazon publishes the Q&A content on the product page.  Take a look at the question title on the page…see here:

That question title is a link.  When you click on the link, you’ll see that it goes to a page that is a specific page designated to that specific Q&A thread…see here:

Now, let’s focus on what this does for Amazon….having a specific page for every single product Q&A thread.   What it does is allows Google to recognize the question title as anchor links to the question details page and therefor be recognized as a page that covers that question.   Google crawls to those pages, indexes those pages, and then shows them in search results when customers are asking similar product questions on Google.

See an Amazon product Q&A landing page as the second organic search result here:

You see in the above image that the second result is Amazon’s product Q&A landing pages which are  getting indexed and that is driving brand new customers to that content.  The first organic featured snippet result is an Answerbase customer, as we power product Q&A landing pages for ecommerce merchants with their own sites (the merchants can have those landing pages on a subdirectory or subdomain of their site) and we ensure those pages are optimized for search with the appropriate page title and markup on the page.   Better optimized pages will lead to better matching to what the inquiry is, and better click-through.

The visitors to these product Q&A landing pages click to see the content, see the answers to their questions, and then many purchase the product from the site that is providing the information they’re looking for.  You can see it works for Amazon’s product Q&A content, it works for our customers who use Answerbase to power these pages, and it’s important for ecommerce merchants to also support product questions & answers in this manner as well…so you can ensure that your content is available within organic results, lifting both traffic and sales on your site.

Most people engage with Amazon’s product pages and don’t ever realize that those landing pages exist….but they do, and it’s helping Amazon drive traffic and sales.

As a provider of product questions and answers, Answerbase has seen that these landing pages can significantly increase the organic traffic to a merchant’s store.  We have a case study where one of our customers increased their organic traffic by over 4x previous levels and Q&A content is now responsible for over half of the overall traffic to their site (they have consistently created GREAT content, and that is what Google is looking for).  A typical organic traffic trend to that product Q&A content looks like this:

It’s important to note that the above chart is ONLY organic traffic and ONLY traffic to those Q&A content pages.  As you continue to answer customer questions about your products, you not only help convert those customers but it builds those landing pages which start to show up in search engine results….and lead to year over year organic traffic growth to that Q&A content.

Another notable thing about the traffic coming into those pages, is we’ve seen that the average lifetime value of customers that come in through the product question and answer content is up to 2x higher than our customer’s normal Google traffic.   That speaks volumes on the intent of the users who are asking those questions on Google (and other search engines).

As a merchant you are wise to implement product questions & answers on your site in a similar manner, so that you can leverage all of the product knowledge of you and your team…and ensure that knowledge is driving new traffic and conversions.

Getting Answers from All Available Product Information

The second detail we’d like to highlight in how Amazon manages their product questions and answers functionality is uncovered when we look at the ask question field, see here:

When you start typing in your question, it will autosuggest answers….but it will look for those answers within all of the product information that is available.  That means it will look through the product description, product specifications, Q&A’s, reviews, etc…..and ensure that if the information is currently available, it’s going to be presented to the customer to read.  See an example of some results here:

This helps ensure the customer gets the answers they’re looking for and don’t have to wait for a response.  It also reduces the number of questions that need to be managed by the seller….while still being able to convert those sales.

Answerbase sees that up to 75% of the product questions answered convert to a new sale, so the ability to effectively answer the customers questions in the quickest possible way will increase your conversions and sales.

How to Put Lessons from Amazon to Work

If you don’t have a product Q&A capability on your product pages, it’s important that you get one and start to build that valuable content in order to grow your conversions and traffic.   Not all product question & answer providers are equal.   Answerbase’s product question & answer capabilities will ensure that you are able to take advantage of your content through dynamically creating new Q&A landing pages and driving conversions, so we’d happy to service you with these capabilities if your current provider is falling short with how they are managing that engagement and content.

We hope this post has been informative and encourage you to Schedule a Demo if you’re interested in hearing more about what product questions and answers can do for your ecommerce site.