Most sellers who struggle on Ozon make the same handful of mistakes. Some of them cost money quietly for months. Here are seven of the most common ones and what to do about each.
Mistake 1: Choosing products the wrong way
We start with the product because a bad choice makes advertising expensive. You can no longer use ads as a tool for scaling and growth. The third problem with a badly chosen product is that you put in a lot of effort and get no result.
The fix is simple: do not choose products based on opinions or someone's recommendation. Choose them based on numbers.
Always decide based on metrics, market size and the level of competition. Not because someone said this product can make money. That is not how it works.
Where do you find the numbers? First, run a competitive analysis on Ozon: what is the market size, what is the level of competition. Start comparing these metrics. That is already far better than entering a product blind. The second way is to analyze popular products on Ozon.
This is much clearer information than a decision based on someone's opinion. So run the analysis, look at the numbers, compare them, and only then decide whether to enter the product. This is the most frequent mistake I see right now.
Mistake 2: Low product quality
The second mistake is also very common, especially among beginners. Experienced sellers are usually fine here, but newcomers often are not. It is selling a low-quality product.
What I mean: you enter a product, buy it in China or from a wholesale market, take it without checking quality or defects, and start selling. When you sell a low-quality product, you get very low ratings on the listing. Reviews come in saying the product is bad, the quality is weak, it broke, it did not turn on, and so on.
And you start paying a lot of money for that logistics.
Return costs eat a large share of your margin. That is why we now watch the return rate very closely. What else do low-quality products lead to?
Falling conversion and ranking
Your conversion drops. Here is how it works: when a listing has a low rating, shoppers who might have ordered see the rating falling and bad reviews coming in, and they back off. They may look at the product, add it to the cart or not, but they decide something is wrong with the quality and they will not order.
A person visited the listing but did not order and did not add to cart. That lowers your conversion. And when conversion falls, your SEO ranking falls immediately, along with your position in Ozon search, meaning in the free results.
When conversion and ranking fall, sales from search results and from ads fall right away. So the return rate deserves close attention now. Low product quality makes advertising expensive.
Rising ad costs
When conversion is low, the product is less likely to be bought, and ads get more expensive. People see the product through an ad and may even click, but it does not turn into a purchase. The shopper compares several products: yours from the ad and a neighboring one from the regular results.
They see your low rating and low quality. Why would they buy it? So they do not.
How to fix it
Do not sell a low-quality product. Pay close attention to quality, to returns and to pre-sale inspection of the goods.
Mistake 3: Not running the numbers
This has a big effect on results and needs serious work. The third mistake I see often when sellers come to us is that people do not run the numbers. It is not rare for even experienced sellers who have traded for one, one and a half or two years to come in.
They say: my margin is 5, 7, 10 percent. We sit down, break down the unit economics fully in our spreadsheet, calculate, and it turns out the actual profitability of their store is 0 percent, 1 percent, minus 2 percent, and so on. This happens often: even experienced sellers do not know how to calculate unit economics correctly.
They miss some costs, overstate others, understate others. A person thinks: I bought at one price, the Ozon commission is this, logistics is that, and everything else is my net profit. No. Ad costs, promotion costs, packaging, taxes and so on are not accounted for.
All these costs, including returns, affect the profitability you get. They have to be built in. I have named only some of them, because there are in fact many costs, and all of them belong in your unit economics.
What happens without the calculation
Often the seller has no idea what prices to set. I sell like everyone else: I go on Ozon, see that on average everyone sells at one price, and I will sell at about the same or cheaper.
The seller has no clear understanding of how much they earn per product and how much net profit they want from it. They do not know what price to set. The second problem is that they often sell at a loss.
People do not run the numbers and do not know whether they are making money. Then, when we start calculating, it turns out someone has been trading at a loss for years. This happens often too.
How to calculate unit economics
Calculate unit economics. There is no clever shortcut here.
You simply sit down, take each of your products and your store, and break down every cost you carry into its components. For each product, write down each cost, add them up, subtract, and calculate margin, net profitability and so on.
All of it has to be calculated. How? The first way is the Ozon calculator.
Take a smartwatch, for example: enter your price, weight, all dimensions, volumes and so on, press calculate, and you get a set of the main costs. Then look at which costs you carry for each of your products. The second way is a unit economics spreadsheet.
Build a separate Excel sheet and look at which costs apply to each product. That works too. Unit economics is something every seller needs to work with.
Mistake 4: Not understanding the target audience
The fourth mistake, which I also see often, is that sellers do not understand who actually buys their product. In reality, completely different people buy it. What does that lead to?
It leads to the wrong messages and the wrong benefits in the listings. For example, they think their product is bought by men, auto mechanics, someone like that. But in fact, if you look at who buys it, it may turn out to be women on maternity leave buying it for the kitchen.
Say that is the situation. When the seller thinks the audience is one group but in fact it is a completely different one, they write completely different messages on the product listing. These mistakes, when sellers do not understand who buys their product and who their target audience is, usually lead to the wrong messages on the listings, falling conversion, falling search ranking, and advertising that gets expensive and performs poorly.
And the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. What to do? Analyze the target audience profile: who buys your products, why, and what problems they solve with them.
Believe me, surprises are very common. Even if you have been selling for a long time and think you know your audience, run the analysis and you will often be surprised: your product is used in completely different situations from what you imagined.
How do you analyze the audience profile? You can look at competitor analytics in your niche, as we discussed. The second point is analytics on popular products: who buys which products.
Mistake 5: Skipping paid advertising
Together, all of this gives you the target audience profile, which is very important. The fifth mistake I see often is that sellers do not use paid advertising. They trade on Ozon and say: advertising is very expensive now, the rates are inflated, it is impossible to sell.
As a result, people do not use paid ads and leave a lot of money on the table. What does that lead to? When a seller does not use ads, sales are low.
I would not say ads are the key tool for growing sales right now, but they are a tool for boosting your product. No ads means no boost, no extra push for your product. Yes, you can sell through SEO and get customers from search results and free sources.
It is good when SEO works. But advertising specifically amplifies sales and the volume of customers you can reach. Without ads you cannot grow: there is no tool to amplify your sales.
What to do? When you do not know what will work in your specific case and your store, test different tools: pay per click, pay per order, promotions, reviews for points and so on. If your ad cost share (ACOS) is high, find out why it is higher.
Maybe the problem is the product, the packaging, the ad setup or the numbers. Look specifically at what caused the high ACOS in your case.
Mistake 6: Testing too few products
Moving on. Mistake number 6 is testing too few products. What does that mean?
People often come to Ozon with a limited budget and therefore cannot buy a meaningful quantity of products. They enter one product, two products, and in the end often miss. People often do not know how to choose a product.
It is very rare to hit the right product without some deep analysis. And this mistake, testing too few products, means they miss and end up unable to earn. I often notice that when you enter a product, it is very rare to get it right straight away.
It is rare to understand immediately that this specific product will bring you profit. Why? Because the more products you test, the higher the chance you hit a product that sells and starts earning well.
So test at least 5 to 10 products, and preferably more.
Mistake 7: Low content rating
The next mistake, number 7, is a low content rating. The content rating is a score from 1 to 100 for how well you have filled in your product listing.
You probably know this if you already sell on Ozon; if not, here it is. The principle is that the higher the content rating you get, the better. Why does a low content rating perform badly and a good one perform well and drive sales?
Because when your content rating is low, your SEO does not work. A low content rating tells us that we have not packaged the listing, have not worked through the text, have not worked through the images. When the content rating is low, the Ozon algorithms see that our listing is not filled in, and there is no point giving such a product a large volume of traffic, because it will not sell.
So when you have a low content rating, your SEO does not work. We see this often. And second, the algorithms do not understand who exactly to promote your listing to.
When you have not worked through the texts, keywords and SEO, and have not invested in the content rating, packaging and keywords, the algorithms do not understand who to promote your product to and who will find it useful. The better you work through SEO and keywords, the better the algorithms understand who to promote you to, both in the free search results and in paid advertising.
Packaging, product listings and content rating now strongly affect your ranking and the sales you get. The closer you get to a content rating of 100, the better for your store.
What needs to be done? Work through the text content of the listing: description, specifications, additional characteristics. Every field must be filled in.
Second, visual content: infographics, video, video covers, rich content. All of it has to be worked through for your product. Only then will the content rating be high.
Takeaway
We have covered seven key mistakes that hold back sales on Ozon. To avoid them, work with the numbers, analyze the market and take a systematic approach to every stage, from product selection to ad setup.
