Amazon Badges and How to Get Them

Earning a nifty badge from Amazon (or in the case of promos, making one yourself) is a solid way to spice up your listings.

Although badges are made with customers in mind, particularly so they can make better-informed purchases, they can help boost your conversion rate—or at the very least, give you some sweet bragging rights.

This article will look at the different Amazon badges and how you can take advantage of them as an e-commerce seller.
 

Here's a quick bird's eye view of some badges that are up for grabs.

Amazon Badges

	Best Seller	Amazon's Choice	New Release	Discounts and Promotions
How and where it appears	Orange badge that appears in search results and next to category on product page	Black badge that appears in search results page and next to keyword on product page	Orange badge with #1 New Release; Appears on the same place as Best Seller	Green/Orange badge that appears right underneath the regular price on a product detail page
How to get it	Have the best-selling product in a certain category	Have the best-performing listing for a particular keyword	Have the best-selling product in a specific category; Only available for the first 90 days after you launch your listing	Run a promotion or discount from your Advertising interface on Seller Central

The Amazon Best Seller Badge

The Best Seller badge is the most sought-after Amazon badge of all. It has almost instant benefits, but it is also the hardest one to earn.

This coveted orange ribbon appears on:

• The top-left corner of a product image on a search results page; or
• Right under the star ratings and beside the category on the product page itself.

As the name suggests, the Best Seller badge is awarded to the best-selling product in a particular category or sub-category. Amazon lists up to 100 Best Sellers for any specific category.

Naturally, items with this badge show up first when someone browses a certain category, say, men’s shoes.

Whoever has the badge changes quite often, and last we checked, you won’t be notified when one of your listings is currently rocking this badge.

In any case, aiming for this orange ribbon will boost your product’s visibility, since customers will check the best-selling products out before anything else.

How Do I Earn The Best Seller Badge?

Sales velocity is the name of the game for the Best Seller badge.

The best sellers ranking is updated hourly to reflect the recent and historical sales data of every item sold.

Here are some techniques we used to earn the Best Seller badge:

Optimize your listing.

Take the time to fine-tune your listings for SEO on Amazon, which is something you should be doing anyway, even if you’re not aiming for the badge.

Some solid keyword research will help you make a good title and product description. Be careful not to overdo it and run the risk of sounding too robotic and repetitive.

You will also do well to make your products stand out with good images, especially since a lot of buyers base their purchases solely on pictures.

Aim for specific categories.

We've talked about how changing categories is an easy way to earn the Best Seller badge when we unveiled the 7 Amazon Hacks Every Seller Should Know.

Earning the Best Seller badge is much easier when you’re targeting categories that are not that competitive.

For example, you’ll have way better chances of earning the Best Seller badge for men’s trail running shoes than for men’s shoes.

Remember that simply switching up your categories is not enough to earn this badge. You must list your item in a relevant category. In fact, listing your product in a totally unrelated category hurts more than it helps.

Offer your products at the best price.

It’s not called the Best Seller Badge for nothing.

One way to make sure your product is the highest-selling is to offer them at the most competitive prices.

Consider offering discounts or promotional campaigns, both of which are badges in and of themselves, but we’ll get to those later.

Related Podcast Episode: 7 Advanced Hacks for New and Experienced Amazon Sellers

The Amazon’s Choice Badge

This black ribbon appears on the same place as the Best Seller badge, and it seems to have priority over the Best Seller ribbon in case your listing is good enough to have both badges at the same time.

It was rolled out shortly after Amazon Alexa was released to help Alexa users shop quicker. So, when you tell Alexa to order something for the first time, say, basketball shoes, it will automatically go to the item rocking the Amazon’s Choice badge for that keyword at that particular time.

This badge is keyword-specific, which means that your listing can rock the Amazon’s Choice badge for multiple keywords at the same time. For instance, a certain high-end mouse can be Amazon’s Choice for both high-performance mouse and gaming mouse.

How Do I Earn The Amazon Choice Badge?

So, how does Amazon choose Amazon’s Choice?

While the Best Seller badge mainly takes into account categories, the Amazon’s Choice badge relies heavily on keywords.

Also, since it’s Amazon’s Choice, it should come as no surprise that most of the products with this badge are, well… sold by Amazon itself.

To avoid competing with Amazon, which is a losing battle, make sure to target keywords for which Amazon does not sell stuff under its own private label brands.

Amazon has kept the metrics for earning this badge somewhat on the down-low, but we’ve run our own tests (so that you won’t have to), and here are some of the things that worked:

• Keep your return rates down
• Maintain high review rates
• Ship products right away (ship with Prime, basically)
• Have high conversion rates

The Amazon New Release Badge

The second orange ribbon on this list, the Amazon New Release badge is available for the first 90 days from when you start selling your product.

Check out this guide for our secrets to launching our products on Amazon to a New Best Seller.

Earning this badge is not as cut-and-dry as shooting for the Best Seller badge, but the same best practices still apply:

• Optimize your listings
• Make your product stand out
• Maintain an excellent sales record

Extra Savings, Coupons, and Discount Badges

Nothing speaks more to customers than deals and discounts. It should go without saying that offering your products at the lowest possible price is a surefire way to pump up your sales.

Discount badges appear either as orange or green ribbons on both search results and product detail pages.

To Prime members, they appear as green banners on the product page, while to non-Prime members, they take the form of green text right next to the Coupon badge.

We’ve covered what coupons (and other promotions) are in this Ultimate Guide to Amazon Promotions. To start, head over to your Amazon Seller Central account and go to the Advertising section.

You can create either percent-off or dollar-off discounts. Dollar-off deals seem to be more effective, since it’s more straightforward.

You may add both a Coupon badge, which the customer can clip, and an Extra Savings badge, which will allow the customer to select from all available promotions you’re currently offering for that product.

Offering coupons isn't free, though. Amazon will take a fee for every time a customer clips your coupon.

Prime Exclusive Deals, Black Friday, Cyber Monday

These badges are basically still just promotions, but are dependent on big events.

One thing to take note of is that your deals should be submitted around a week before the actual event. If you craft your deals too late, your listings might not be eligible for the corresponding badges.

To prep for big events, head over to your Advertising interface and select Prime Exclusive Deals.

Deal of The Day and Limited Time Deal

Still pretty much in the same family as the previous two, these badges refer to deals that run for short periods of time only.

They primarily show up on Amazon’s Today’s Deal page (or Gold Box page), which is one of the most visited pages on the entire marketplace.

The Deal of the Day badge shows up as an orange badge right above the item’s price. It goes to whatever Amazon’s algorithm considers to be the best deals for customers for that particular day.

On the other hand, the Limited Time Deal is a red (or sometimes gray) banner sandwiched between the star rating and the price. It’s usually seen on items that are offered under a 7-day deal crafted by Professional Sellers.

Both work to drive your product’s visibility and are good ways to boost your sales.

Just like the Discount badges, these two come with a price. Amazon charges a base merchandising fee for every 7-day deal that you run.

Editorial Recommendations

Alright, this one’s not exactly a badge, but it affects your listings in the same way in that getting an editorial recommendation gives your listings some sort of authority. Consider it a vote of confidence from third-party experts on a certain product category, just like when a movie gets positively reviewed by critics.

Editorial Recommendations appear as snippets on the top-left area of a search results page, and there’s usually a link that takes the customers to the full article about the featured products.

They are usually written by third-party content creators or influences, such as Wirecutter, which is a product review site owned by the New York Times.

These articles can feature several items from different brands, but you want a spot in the top three, since those are the ones that show up on the snippet.

How Do I Get an Editorial Recommendation?

This feature is part of Amazon’s Onsite Affiliates Program, which is an extension of the Amazon Associates program. In other words, the content creators who write blurbs about your items get an incentive when customers purchase your products off their articles.

There are certain criteria to satisfy before your product can quality for an editorial review:

• It should have at least 100 reviews;
• It should have a rating of at least 4 stars;
• The seller should have at least 30,000 in sales; and
• It should belong to the top 20 percent of Amazon’s best sellers for a particular category.

Other Amazon Badges

Every now and then, Amazon will experiment with a new badge and test how the market responds (and sometimes catch some flak for it).

A couple of experimental badges we’ve seen in the past couple of years are the Top Brand badge and the New badge.

The first one appears as a gray banner below a product image on the search results page, and it’s usually only for household names, such as Speedo for swimming goggles and Nike for sneakers.

A lot of people view this badge as a roadblock for small private label sellers, but it is possible to earn it in a niche category.

The New badge is a red banner that shows up on the top-left corner of a product image in a search results page.

Being an experimental badge, no one really knows how it works, but we imagine it still goes to products with optimized listings (sensing the pattern yet?) and good quality.

Conclusion

Amazon Badges help boost your organic traffic, which boosts your conversion rates, which leads to even more traffic, and so on. You can even look at it as a way to gamify your selling experience—not many sellers can boast that their products have been Amazon’s Choice before.

For consumers, these eye-catching badges represent product quality and it tells them that you are serious about running an e-commerce business on Amazon.

Ever had any Amazon badge on your listings before? Leave a comment down below!