Aurora Living — From Stagnant Listings to Category Best-Seller on Amazon

The Client

Aurora Living is a direct-to-consumer home decor brand selling wall art, decorative lighting, and accent accessories, with Amazon India as its single largest sales channel. Before working with NextAxis Digital, the brand had been leaning heavily on aggressive discounting just to keep sales volume from sliding further — a pattern that was eroding margins without fixing the underlying problem. The catalog spanned more than 140 active SKUs across six product lines, but the founder estimated that fewer than a third of them were pulling any meaningful organic search traffic at all, with the rest surviving purely on paid placement.

The Challenge

A catalog audit found the root causes quickly. Product titles were thin and unoptimized, bullet points read like internal spec sheets rather than benefit-driven copy, and backend search terms were largely empty across the catalog — meaning entire categories of relevant customer searches never surfaced Aurora Living's listings at all. Marketplace advertising spend was concentrated on broad, generic keywords with a poor advertising cost of sale, because the underlying listings weren't converting well enough to justify the traffic being bought. Review volume was thin and inconsistent, ratings varied wildly across otherwise similar products, and weak social proof was actively hurting buy-box competitiveness against better-reviewed competitors selling near-identical items. Several of the brand's best products, by unit economics, were among its worst performers on the platform simply because nobody had ever revisited their listings since the original launch upload years earlier — the copy, images, and category placement all predated the brand's current positioning.

Our Strategy

We treated the catalog and the advertising account as one connected system rather than two separate projects, working through Amazon account management across four workstreams:

• Full listing overhaul: keyword-researched titles built around real search volume, benefit-driven bullet points that led with the customer outcome rather than the material spec, and structured A+ content modules that walked shoppers through use cases and room styling for every hero SKU.
• Backend search term optimization: every listing's hidden keyword fields were rebuilt from scratch using a full search-term gap analysis against category competitors, unlocking traffic the storefront had never been eligible to appear for.
• Sponsored ads restructure: campaigns were split into branded defense, category conquesting, and exact-match harvesting tiers, with aggressive negative keyword pruning and SKU-tier ACOS targets replacing the old one-size-fits-all budget approach.
• Review generation program: a structured post-purchase follow-up sequence, built within Amazon's request-a-review guidelines, systematically lifted review volume and evened out rating consistency across the catalog.

A pricing and promotion calendar was layered on top, aligning discount timing with peak sales sessions rather than running as a constant, margin-eroding baseline. Listings were also prioritized in tiers based on unit economics and search volume potential, so the highest-opportunity SKUs were rebuilt first in month two rather than working through the catalog alphabetically, which meant the biggest revenue gains started showing up well before the full catalog overhaul was finished.

Execution Timeline

The Results

Within six months, Aurora Living's monthly sales grew 318%, and conversion rate across the catalog improved 61% as better titles, imagery-supported A+ content, and stronger review counts made listings genuinely more persuasive rather than just more visible. Several hero SKUs earned the category best-seller badge, and reliance on constant discounting eased as organic conversion strength took over more of the workload previously carried by promotions alone. Marketplace advertising spend became measurably more efficient as the underlying listings it was pointing to finally converted at a rate that justified the traffic. Average review count on the top twenty SKUs roughly tripled over the engagement, and the spread between the brand's best- and worst-rated listings narrowed considerably, which mattered directly for buy-box eligibility on the accent lighting line where competition was fiercest.

Key Takeaways

• Catalog SEO and sponsored ads restructuring compound each other — better listings make ad spend more efficient, not the other way around.
• Backend keyword optimization unlocked entire categories of search traffic that on-page changes alone could never have surfaced.
• A structured review generation program has an outsized, compounding impact on marketplace conversion rate and buy-box share.
• Prioritizing listing rebuilds by unit economics, rather than working through the catalog alphabetically, brought the biggest revenue gains forward.