Buy content from a team that also owns the account's numbers. A+ modules and storefronts are conversion assets, not decoration, so the brief should come from competitor complaints and the rating gap. Judge any provider on the brief it writes, not the portfolio it shows.
The short version
- The brief is the product. Beautiful execution of a wrong brief costs more than plain execution of a right one.
- A+ content exists to answer objections. If it restates your bullets in a nicer font, it is doing nothing.
- A storefront with no traffic plan is a page nobody visits. Decide the source before you commission the build.
- Localized is not translated. Content in German or Spanish needs to be written for that shopper, not run through a converter.
- No creative rescues a product that should be stopped.
The mistake that costs the most
The expensive version of this goes: sales are soft, so the brand commissions new A+ content. It launches, nothing moves, so the brand commissions a storefront refresh. Six months and several invoices later, the product is exactly where it was.
I did the equivalent of this with my own money. I kept funding a product that was not working for three months, convinced that better advertising would turn it around. It did not. That period is where our scale, fix and kill criteria came from, and creative is now judged against the same test as anything else: it is a fix, and a fix has to be aimed at a diagnosed problem or it is just spending.
Before commissioning anything, get clear on which category you are in. Is the page failing to convert traffic that is otherwise qualified, which creative can fix. Or is the product losing on price, rating or delivery, which creative cannot.
The failure modes, ranked by cost
| Rank | Failure | What it costs you |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Creative used to avoid a kill decision | Months of runway and the inventory behind it |
| 2 | Brief built from your own brand story | A page that answers questions nobody asked |
| 3 | A+ that repeats the bullet points | The single best objection-handling space on the page, wasted |
| 4 | Storefront with no traffic source | Build cost, plus the illusion of progress |
| 5 | Literal translation into other marketplaces | Trust, in markets where shoppers notice immediately |
| 6 | Desktop-first design | Most of your audience, who are on a phone |
How to write the brief that a provider should be asking for
- Pull the one and two-star reviews from the three best-selling competitors and group the complaints.
- Rank those complaints by frequency. The top three become your A+ modules, in that order.
- Note the gap between your rating and the category leader's, because it tells you how much doubt you are working against.
- List what the primary image cannot carry. Scale, materials, compatibility, what is in the box.
- Decide what the storefront is for: a destination for creator and off-channel traffic, a catalog browse for repeat buyers, or both.
- Specify the marketplaces up front, so the content is written for each one rather than retrofitted later.
A provider that asks for steps one to three before quoting is doing the work. A provider that asks only for your logo files and brand colors is producing decoration.
What to look for in a content provider
Ask who the designers and copywriters are and whether they are employed by the company you are paying. Our creative comes out of an in-house studio in Dubai, and content is produced in English, German, Spanish and French rather than sent out for translation, because a localization error in a mature marketplace reads as carelessness to the shopper.
Ask how the work gets measured. Content that is never checked against conversion rate afterwards is a cost with no feedback loop, and it lets the same weak brief repeat indefinitely.
What most agencies will not tell you
Creative is the easiest thing in this industry to sell repeatedly, because it always looks like progress and it can always be refreshed. A refresh cycle is a comfortable subscription for the provider and a slow leak for the brand.
The second thing. A lot of A+ content is designed to satisfy the founder rather than the shopper. Founders want the origin story, the mission, the lifestyle photography. Shoppers, at that moment, want to know whether it fits, whether it lasts, and whether the complaint they just read in a review applies to them. When those two briefs conflict, the shopper's version wins on every metric that matters.
Related answers
- Who manages Amazon images, A+ content and video
- White hat Amazon review strategy services
- How to fix low Amazon conversion rate
- Expert Amazon listing optimization services
- Done-for-you Amazon management: the complete guide
We will write the brief before we quote the build, at Flapen.
