Somebody asked how you get your videos into the top carousel on Amazon, and videos like that are basically my bat signal — I see one and I have to come help. So let’s talk about it, and I actually have something of value to hand you here, because I am in the middle of a very large data analysis on exactly this question.
Short version: I have studied almost 10,000 products and somewhere in the neighborhood of 25,000 to 30,000 videos. And what Amazon appears to reward in the number one slot of an upper carousel is a lot more specific — and a lot weirder — than I expected.
Table of Contents
- Being in the Carousel at All Is Already Lucky
- What Amazon Actually Wants From a Carousel
- The Fingerprint of a Slot One Video
- The Two Findings I Did Not See Coming
- Why This Is Correlation, Not a Cheat Code
- What to Actually Do With This
Being in the Carousel at All Is Already Lucky
Before we get into optimization, let’s set the table. If you are in an upper carousel at all, you got lucky out of the gate — and I mean that as a compliment, not an insult.
A lot of these products have enormous backlogs of videos already sitting there waiting for a shot. Dozens of creators filmed the same item and are queued up behind each other. So when you get your crack at a visible slot, that is a genuinely big deal. It is not a thing that happens constantly, and it is not a thing you get to force.
Which is exactly why it is worth understanding what Amazon seems to favor when it does happen.
What Amazon Actually Wants From a Carousel
At the end of the day, what Amazon wants in these carousels is not complicated, and creators overthink it constantly.
Amazon wants videos that people are actually going to watch, and that help Amazon convert. That is it. Amazon is trying to make money. That is the thing that matters most, and every other consideration is downstream of it.
So if your video is good and it actually helps the shopper make a decision, you are already aligned with the thing Amazon is optimizing for. Everything below is about the packaging around that — the characteristics that seem to correlate with getting the prime spot.
The Fingerprint of a Slot One Video
Here is what the data keeps showing me about the number one slot in an upper carousel.
- It is almost always a horizontal video. Not most of the time in a squeaky-by-margin sense — predominantly, consistently horizontal. If you are filming everything vertical because that is what you do for short-form, understand that you may be quietly opting out of the best real estate on the page.
- It predominantly has a custom thumbnail. Not an auto-generated frame grab. An actual thumbnail somebody made on purpose. This one showed up over and over.
And I want to be clear about where this is coming from. This is not me eyeballing a handful of carousels and telling you a story. This is data pulled from Amazon across nearly 10,000 products and tens of thousands of videos.
If you have never made a custom thumbnail because it felt like extra work for no reason, this is the reason. That is also why we built the Oink thumbnail tooling — it was the single highest-leverage thing most creators were skipping.
The Two Findings I Did Not See Coming
Horizontal and custom thumbnail, fine — I could have guessed at those. These next two genuinely surprised me.
1. Enthusiastic tone ranked better in slot one than in other slots. Videos where the creator sounded actively enthusiastic showed up in the top position at a higher rate than they did elsewhere in the carousel. Same product, same category — the tone of the delivery tracked with position.
2. The more often you mention the product during the video, the more likely it was to rank in slot one. Not keyword stuffing your title. Actually saying the product out loud, repeatedly, inside the video itself.
I did not see either of those coming. And if you think about it from Amazon’s side, both of them make a certain amount of sense — an enthusiastic creator who keeps naming the product is a creator whose video is unambiguously about that product and is more likely to push a shopper over the line. But I would not have predicted that it would show up this cleanly in the numbers.
There are several other findings in this analysis that I am not going to get into here, because I do not want to get too far into the weeds before the work is finished. I will do a full video on the channel when it is done.
Why This Is Correlation, Not a Cheat Code
I want to be straight with you, because this is where people run off the road with information like this.
There is nothing you can do to force it. There is no direct A-to-B here. Filming horizontal with a custom thumbnail while enthusiastically saying the product name eleven times does not entitle you to slot one.
What I can say is this: when you look at 10,000 products and 25,000 to 30,000 videos, and Amazon keeps on average saying the same thing over and over again, you get a pretty high confidence level that there is a real correlation there. That is a meaningfully different claim than “I found the algorithm,” and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
What to Actually Do With This
So here is the practical takeaway. You cannot control whether you get a shot at an upper carousel. You can control what your video looks like when the shot comes.
- Film horizontal when the product allows it.
- Make a custom thumbnail. Every time. It is the cheapest edge on this list.
- Bring actual energy. Flat and monotone is costing you more than you think.
- Say the product name throughout the video, not just once at the top.
- Above all, make the video genuinely useful, because conversion is the thing Amazon is actually measuring.
Do those things, and when you get your crack at an upper carousel, you match the profile Amazon seems to look favorably on. That is the whole play.
The full carousel analysis is still in progress and I will publish all of it when it is finished. In the meantime, if you want the product research, thumbnail, and storefront tooling that makes hitting these standards routine instead of a project, check out Oink for Influencers.
