How To Sell Your First Item On Amazon
This is the easy part. Once you ship your package off to Amazon and they receive it, your items will be available for purchase.
Now, you sit and wait for your items to be sold.
If you are selling a more popular item, the wait isnt that long. In my case, I listed 8 items, and they all sold within 15 days.
Pro tip video games sell fast!
Why Does Inventory Management Matter On Amazon
You can be doing all of the right things on Amazon to get people to your listings, but if you arent in stock, youll lose 100% of your potential sales.
Effective inventory management is more important than ever, especially if youre an Amazon seller. In the past year, Amazon has introduced monthly long term storage fees for slow-moving inventory, increased FBA fees, and launched the new Inventory Performance Index metric.
There have also been improvements to the basic inventory management features available in Seller Central. What these changes have in common is a mission to help Amazon merchants manage their inventory more effectively.
Are you struggling with managing your inventory properly? Do you keep running out early or having trouble fulfilling orders properly? . Here are the that can help
First off, what is the Buy Box?
The Buy Box is a section on the right side of an Amazon product detail page where customers can add a product to their cart or make an instant purchase. Amazon generates over $150 billion in sales every year. Of those conversions, over 90% occur using Amazons Buy Box.
If you sell on Amazon and want to increase sales online, winning the Buy Box is pivotal. Retailers featured on Amazons Buy Box for product pages sell more products.
- Promotional messages such as Sale
- Suggestive commentary such as Best Seller
- Symbols
When Selling On Amazon:
- You can add new products to the Amazon catalogue whenever you want.By using Fulfillment by Amazon, we take care of customer service, product shipping, and all logistics.You can check our help pages within Seller Central to help answer any questions you may have. Our seller support team will help you manage your account.Sell your products in Canada, United States, and Mexico. You control what you sell and where you sell it, managing your business from a single seller account.Earn a better location on the product detail pages.Customize the shipping rates of your products.
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If You Haven’t Submitted Your Documents
Sign Up For An Amazon Seller Account
In order to set up your Amazon seller account and get started selling on Amazon, youll need to choose a seller plan, provide some information about your business, and understand Amazons seller policies.
Choose a Seller Plan
When you sign up to sell on Amazon, youâll choose one of three different selling plans, depending on the scale of your business:
- Amazon Individual Seller: If you own a very small business and plan to sell fewer than 40 items per month, you can sign up as an Amazon individual seller. This will cost you just $0.99 per sale, plus a few other transaction fees.
- Amazon Professional Seller: If you plan to sell more than 40 individual items per month, youll need to sign up for a professional account. Amazon will charge a subscription fee of $39.99 per month, plus some transaction fees on each sale.
- Amazon Vendor: If you manufacture products yourself, you can sell these goods as a wholesale business to Amazon. They will handle product listings, fulfillment, and shipping, and when they run out of stock, they will order more from you.
Be aware that certain products require approval to sellâand, if approved, only sellers with professional accounts are eligible to sell those products. Some products that require approval include specific software, laser pointers, and hoverboards.
Amazon recommends that you use the professional seller plan. Image source: Amazon.com
Create Your Amazon Seller Account
Image source: Amazon.com
Set up Your Seller Profile
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How To Decide What To Sell On Amazon
First and foremost, before you can actually get into the details of setting up your account and creating your listings, youll need to decide what youre going to be selling on Amazon. The products that you decide to sell, after all, have a large impact on the way you set up your store and the way you conduct your business.
So, how do you decide what to sell? When it comes down to it, there are nearly endless options for products you can sell on Amazon. To have the greatest success, however, here are a few tips to keep in mind:
- If possible, finding and operating in a niche market can give you an advantage when selling on Amazon. With a niche market, you find a particular space with a customer base that is highly engaged and interested in purchasing your product. Instead of operating in a highly competitive market against big-time sellers and companies, youll have a better chance to stand out and meet the demand of your customers.
- Demand: Although operating in a niche market is great, you still need to ensure that there is a demand for the type of product you want to sell. Again, youll want to avoid products that everyone is sellingâespecially big companiesâwhere the competition will be too difficult. This being said, to evaluate , you can perform a Google search for your potential products, look at listings on Amazon and other sites, as well as use a search volume tool, like SEMrush, to see how many people are searching for your potential product in any given month.
How To Sell On Amazon For Beginners
One of the first and most important decisions that you will need to make when you create your Amazon seller account is whether to sell MFN or FBA. In order to help you answer the question of , let’s dive into the various pros and cons associated with these two models.
What is the meaning of Amazon FBA, and ? The “FBA” in Amazon FBA stands for “fulfillment by Amazon,” and this program is exactly what it sounds like: a program that enables you to let Amazon handle the fulfillment of the products that you sell. When you create an Amazon FBA login and enroll in the program, you’ll be able to ship your products in-bulk directly to Amazon’s fulfillment centers. When you sell a product on the platform, the product is then packed and shipped by Amazon employees from one of the fulfillment centers that you sent it to, taking the burden of product fulfillment off of your plate. While going with the Amazon FBA business model and reducing the workload that you are personally responsible for may seem so far like an easy choice to make, there are some drawbacks to Amazon FBA as well that must be considered.
If you’d rather avoid the fees associated with Amazon FBA altogether, selling MFN/FBM is your only other option. MFN stands for “merchant fulfillment network , and selling MFN/FBM essentially means that you are solely responsible for the storage and fulfillment of the products that you sell on Amazon.
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How To Give Your Amazon Creative A Boost
Amazon branding is crucial for building your brand equity, building a connection with shoppers, and establishing trust. The good news is that there are more tools than ever at your disposal to build your branding on Amazon.
Here are a few ways to start the process of optimizing your creative on Amazon:
- Work with an agency to transfer your brand equity to Amazon using A+ Content, EBC, and Stores.
- Analyze Amazon customer reviews to understand what trigger words customers are searching for .
- Pull your advertising search term report to understand what words consumers are searching for when they purchase your products.
- Create comprehensive detail pages, images, and copy. By pairing attractive content and imagery, youll be able to more effectively communicate why consumers should buy your product.
More resources on Amazon Creative:
Now lets get into the game-changer: Amazon advertising.
Accept Amazon Pay On Your Website
Amazon customers save their shipping and payment information in their Amazon accounts for later use. You can let them check out with this saved information on your own website by accepting . Not only does this spare customers from having to enter information on your website, it also signals that your business is secure and trustworthy.
Customers checking out with Amazon Pay can complete their transaction much more quickly, especially when shopping on mobile. They also appreciate not needing to “give” their information to another business, which can help earn you more customers who might otherwise be hesitant to buy from a brand they’re unfamiliar with.
Shift4Shop makes it simple to add Amazon Pay to your website, alongside any other payment methods you prefer to use. With more alternative payment solutions than any other platform, Shift4Shop lets you tailor your online store to any type of customer, anywhere.
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What Are The Amazon Seller Account Fees
The selling plan you choose determines your monthly subscription fee. Adding inventory, selling products successfully, shipping orders on time, providing good customer service and advertising your items will also affect the cost of maintaining an Amazon Seller Account. Additional fees may apply depending on services used or if you have registered for a professional selling plan
Use Retail Arbitrage To Source Amazon Products
In retail arbitrage, you purchase deeply discounted retail products and resell them on Amazon. It sounds simple, but doing it rightmeaning profitablytakes some work. Retail arbitrage sellers are absolute pros when it comes to hunting up discounted and clearance deals in local stores and matching them with hot sellers on Amazon.
The secret is knowing whats selling well on Amazon on any given day, and for how much. You also need to clearly understand your cost of selling that item on Amazon. Amazon seller fees run about 15% of your selling price, and shipping orders can take a big bite out of your profits if youre not careful.
Luckily, there are tools to help you spot profitable bargains. Amazon pricing apps are the retail arbitrage sellers secret weapon. These are smartphone apps that let you scan item UPC codes and match them to current listings for that product on Amazon.
These apps deliver a wealth of information to help you price your products including the average selling price and buyer demand, your shipping or Fulfillment by Amazon costs, and your potential profit.
Using this information, you can decide if you should buy a product and how much inventory to stock based on the current demand and your profit potential.
You can also see detailed storage and shipping costs if using FBA for fulfillment. The FBA fulfillment option has its own costsbut managed right, it can be far cheaper and less time-consuming than handling fulfillment yourself.
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Why Is Amazon Asking Me To Pay After Signing Up As An Individual Seller
Weve received many reports from people who try to sign up for an Individual account but then are still asked to pay the $39.99 fee for a professional account when they complete the account sign up process.
We finally have an answer as to why this is happening.
As soon as you click the Start selling button, you start the process of setting up a Professional account.
The first step is entering your name and email and clicking next:
As soon as you click next, your email address is connected to a Professional account, even if you do not complete the registration. If you back out and try setting up an Individual account at this point, you will just be directed to set up a Professional account again without any indication that this is happening.
We just dealt with this issue with one of the students in our Accelerator. Here is the email that she got back when asking about this problem:
First thing to note the part in the email where they say to choose the Individual plan AFTER clicking on Start Selling appears to be wrong. From what we can tell, this is how you get in the problem in the first place. There isnt actually an option to choose what account you are registering for if you click that button. You get a Professional account.
Alternatively, you can use a new email that isnt connected to an Amazon account yet.
Selling On Amazon Vs Selling To Amazon
Which program you choose to use to sell on Amazon depends on your store, fulfillment abilities, ROI goals, and many other variables.
Vendors who sell to Amazon avoid some headache with logistics, but are limited with their scope and ability to market products. Selling on Amazon is an option that is more suited to sellers who would sell to Amazon but want to take advantage of more exposure and other benefits of the Amazon Marketplace.
The biggest difference between Amazon sellers and vendors is whos actually selling the product.
- Sellers list, price, and market their products themselves.
- Vendors sell their products to Amazon-employed buyers, who then list and resell the products to Amazon users.
Heres a breakdown of other considerations when youre selecting between Vendor Central and Seller Central.
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Run Sponsored Product Ads
Amazon has a robust ad platform that lets you market your product to customers on Amazon.
Amazon Sponsored Product Ads is a PPC model that lets you promote your products along search results. Placements on desktop can be above, alongside, or below search results, as well as on product detail pages.
Three things to keep in mind when running Amazon PPC ads:
One: Start with automatic targeting. This allows Amazon to use its powerful search algorithms to suggest an exhaustive list of potential keywords for you. This requires you to pick a flat default bid across all keywords, but the goal here is to get data on how various keywords perform.
Two: Once you have at least a few weeks worth of data , start evaluating your automatic targeting campaign to determine which keywords performed the best. You will want to transition those over to a manual campaign, where you can now focus on only the most relevant keywords that performed well for you. With a manual campaign, you have the ability to adjust bids by keyword
Three: Continue to iterate your manual campaign for keywords and bids. Data is your best friend, but if you feel strongly that you should include additional keywords that havent yet performed well, test various bid amounts. Different bid amounts can yield various placements and yield varying results, so continue to test until you find something that works well.
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Evil Strategy #: Amazon Sellers Can Leave False Positive Feedback On Your Products
Similar to the negative feedback strategy above, there are groups of malicious sellers who are leaving mass amounts of positive reviews on listings as well.
Now you would think that getting a bunch of positive reviews on your listings would be a good thing.
But because Amazon has been cracking down on sellers who buy 5 star reviews, Amazon now has algorithms in place to detect unusual spikes in positive review activity.
Well guess what?
If your listing all of sudden gets 100 5-star reviews, Amazon will detect this anomaly and instantly suspend your account.
As a result, not only do you need to monitor your negative feedback but you also have to be on the lookout for 5 star reviews as well!
The downside is that if you get banned for positive review manipulation, its really hard to prove your innocence. After all, why would someone else purchase 5-star reviews for listings they dont own?
Create A Unique Brand & Grow Your Amazon Fba Business
After researching your product and youre confident you want to continue selling your product in your Amazon business then its time to think about logo and branding design.
I want to include this in the beginning because you want to have this done with your next large order.
This is crazy:
You can hire a kick ass freelancer from freeeup for $12 dollars an hour or even more if you want and they can design a logo for you within a day.
Then you can use them anytime you need design work done.
They can help you with:
- Packaging Design
- Logos
- Infographics
Its such a simple process to hire one of these workers and their customer service is outstanding. Freeeup will recruit, interview, and hire online workers then place them into your business effectively saving you time to grow your company.
Lets say it takes the designer 2 hours to design your logo. Thats $24 USD
Can images like this make all the difference?
Yes, they can
You can also use tools like Canva to make incredible images for free!
Requesting a Logo on Alibaba
Look:
At the very least if you dont want to register your brand, you can test the validity of a product with a logo on it.
Branded products usually get priced higher than unbranded products so its something worth testing.
Pro Tip: If you arent making consistent sales you shouldnt worry about registering your brand on Amazon. Create a name to sell your products under and it can be a generic name to start.
Requesting Logo for Amazon Products on Alibaba
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