THE INS AND OUTS OF SELLING ON AMAZON
The global e-commerce industry is currently taking shape, with more businesses that provide business-to-customer e-commerce services seeking to expand their reach in the market.
The e-commerce share of the global retail sales is currently about 17.5%, with global annual sales amounting to about $4.5 trillion. To be competitive enough in the market, you need to align your business with the opportunities presented in the e-commerce industry. Of the various e-commerce platforms and companies providing e-commerce services, Amazon has perhaps the largest share in terms of the customer base as well as resources to facilitate business-to-business and business-to-customer e-commerce.
Benefits of selling on Amazon
Selling your products on Amazon gives you tremendous benefits that are all aligned towards making your business succeed in terms of sales and profits. Among the various benefits, you get to enjoy when selling your products on Amazon includes the potential of reaching out to the global market. Here are some additional notable benefits that you would reap from aligning your business in the e-commerce industry through Amazon.
a) Amazon has penetrated the market
As far as market penetration and the ability to reach out to more customers in the market is concerned, Amazon is by far the best e-commerce company in the world. The giant online marketplace has marketed itself so well that it makes an average of 2 billion product sales in the market annually since 2014. These statistics are an indication and surety that selling on Amazon would definitely get your products appropriately marketed, thereby increasing the prospects of making sales.
b) A wide range of options and tools
Amazon offers sellers a wide range of opportunities when selling products. As a seller, you can choose between two competitive selling plans including the Individual Plan and the Professional Plan. Both of these options are optimized to meet your needs in terms of ambitions to sell and your budget.
Besides, Amazon offers the Fulfillment by Amazon service where you don’t have to worry about packaging and shipping purchased goods to customers. Such an option gives you the peace of mind necessary to focus on other issues of your business while Amazon takes care of shipping products to customers.
c) A strong back-end support
Amazon has a wide range of services at the disposal of sellers. The company’s back-end support system is well integrated with various e-commerce tools including the ability to track your inventory, credit card processing, and collection of sales tax where appropriate. Automation of the seller’s services ensures that your e-commerce business can operate seamlessly as you can visualize important aspects at the click of a button.
d) Less marketing demands
Amazon has integrated a well-informed system of marketing such that you don’t have to undertake your marketing efforts. By marketing its e-commerce platforms, Amazon gets to indirectly market seller’s products. Besides, customers who visit your e-commerce online shop and make purchases can be easily lured to other products that you offer in your shop. Provision of product reviews on your Amazon shop also acts as an indirect referral to other customers who may be looking for similar products. The company also offers some lucrative benefits to customers, thereby increasing their incentives to become repeat customers, something that can significantly boost your business’s performance.
How to start selling on Amazon
Becoming a seller on Amazon involves a few simple but necessary steps.
Step 1: Open a seller account
The first necessary step involves opening an Amazon seller account from www.amazon.com. There are two basic types of seller plans including the individual and professional account types. The individual selling plan gives you the necessary depth of flexibility and is designed to offer you advantages relating to reduced selling fees per month. With the individual account, you only get to pay about $0.99 per each sale you make. In addition, you also get to enjoy the flexibility of adding and editing new products on your Amazon seller account catalog while also benefiting from a host of other services including the customer service Fulfillment by Amazon.
The professional selling plan, on the other hand, has a flat rate pricing of $39.99 per month for your Amazon seller account. This plan is optimized for additional benefits including selling and shipping products to multiple countries, utilizing various reporting tools from the Amazon Marketplace Web Service, customized shipping rates, eligibility to get your products sampled for the Amazon product detail pages, as well as enjoying numerous other promotions that the company issues to sellers.
Other important seller information should also be provided including individual contact and postal addresses, social security numbers, bank accounts, and credit cards.
Step 2: Decide what you want to sell
The second step involves deciding on the kind of product you intend to start selling on your Amazon seller account. With over 20 possible product categories each with different requirements by Amazon, you can be sure to choose from any possible category, ranging from device accessories to automotive, baby products, beauty, and cosmetics, books, electronics, art collections, among other related products.
Besides, Amazon allows you to sell either brand new products or certified refurbished ones. Before selecting the right category of products you need to sell, you can do some little due diligence of research to establish the particular products that are popular on Amazon. The Amazon best seller statistics would give you an idea of items that are trending at a particular time.
Step 3: Add products to your seller account
The last key step involves adding your products to the Amazon seller account catalog. When adding the products, it is important to ensure that you adhere to certain key points that will guarantee that your products are visible to customers. Here are some of the key points to note:
a) Creating a suitable title
The product title should be well written to within 200 characters of length. The title should be informative and concise while also being enticing to online shoppers. The title should also incorporate certain keywords which are commonly used by shoppers to search for products on Amazon.
b) Adding the product images
After creating the title, you should then include appropriate images of the product you intend to sell as the images go a long way to helping convenience shoppers, thereby increasing the chances of selling your products. To ensure your images have the highest possible quality, you should use a white background when taking the pictures. The images should also be of high pixel density with the minimum recommended level of 1000 pixels to ensure that they are zoomable.
It is also important to ensure that you use actual shots of the product being sold and avoid downloading images from the internet as they may show slight variations with the actual product. Using different angle shots ensures that the shopper can visualize the image from all angles, thereby helping convince him or her.
c) Write a detailed product description
Product descriptions are highly important as they help the shopper understand more regarding the particular product. The description should contain information that discusses the key features of the product, how it is used in real life, as well as its benefits. You should, therefore, endeavor to use an appropriate language that discusses the product as a key problem solver and necessity in the shopper’s life. Portraying the product in such a manner helps convince the buyer to proceed and make the purchase.
Additional information that should be added includes the product’s technical specifications such as length, weight, volume, as well as how it is used or operated. Since your main goal is to convince the shopper to buy the product, you should ensure the description is accompanied by an appropriate call-to-action requesting the online shopper to complete the purchase. You should provide additional details relating to how they would receive the product in case they complete the payment and how much time the shipment process will take.
How to promote your product on Amazon for quicker sales
Enlisting your products on Amazon does not necessarily guarantee quick sales. You need to undertake further marketing efforts that are necessary to help generate and drive traffic towards your seller catalogue. Amazon does provide various avenues for ensuring that your product gets a boosted viewership by Amazon shoppers.
a) Product launching
You can utilize the opportunity provided when launching your product to help spread the word out there regarding the existence of your Amazon e-shop. Among the various tools you can utilize during the product launch phase includes the Amazon sponsored ad which generally helps to send traffic to your enlisted products. The Amazon Sponsored Ads is, however, available on the professional seller account platform and you can put it to use as long as you pay the necessary advertisement fee.
b) Amazon product promotion
After launching your product on Amazon, you can regularly utilize additional product promotions that the company offers from time to time. Using your Amazon seller account, you can create and manage different types of promotions.
Free shipping promotion – this promotion targets giving customers an opportunity to get their purchases shipped to their destination of choice free of charge upon successful purchase. You can choose all products within a certain catalog for this offer or even choose to offer it to the first customers who purchase a given product. Amazon gives you an opportunity to manipulate the free shipping promotion to help generate traffic towards your shop.
Money-off promotion – the money-off promotion gives you an opportunity to offer customers a certain percentage of discount from the buying price. The discount can either be in the form of a certain value of deduction or can also be in the form of a percentage.
Buy-one-get-one-promotion – the buy-one-get-one promotion targets specific products where you offer more than one items when a buyer meets a certain criteria that you set. The promotion is particularly useful in situations where you need to clear your stock in a catalog in order to introduce new products or you just intend to generate sales on your shop.
When running this promotion, emphasis should be made on offering products whose market price is clearly evaluated. For instance, it would be illogical to offer the buy-one-get-one promotion on a product that costs around $5,000 as that would amount to a significant loss. The promotion does not have to be such that the extra free product is of the same quality, nature, or description as the purchased one. You may choose to attach a $500-worth of product to a $20-worth of a free item.
External benefits promotion – the external benefit promotion targets giving buyers benefits if they return to make a purchase from your Amazon catalog. This promotion is highly beneficial as it generally increases traffic and return customers to your shop. Depending on your preferences, you may offer external benefits such as a percentage of discount for every return customer or free shipping for the second and subsequent purchases.
c) Amazon product reviews
You can also utilize the Amazon product review segment as an important platform upon which to attract new customers. Every customer who buys from Amazon gets an opportunity to issue an independent review of the product received. Among the various entities that customers can judge include the quality of the product, fulfillment of the order, as well as the general service they receive from you.
Requesting customers to offer such reviews which are then appended on the product helps attract new customers who may doubt the product’s quality. The reviews also come in handy as they give you an opportunity to improve on your products and services in cases where the feedback is negative.
In conclusion, selling on Amazon gives you an opportunity to attract customers globally. The Amazon seller account platform is well designed to give you control over your enlisted products while also providing an appropriate avenue to increase your sales. Utilizing the various opportunities that Amazon has put at the disposal of sellers will help boost your sales while positioning you to generate bigger profits.
About
The CSE team applies many years of ecommerce experience to successfully manage our clients’ marketplace accounts. Our team members are specifically adept at grasping your business and translating that into on online strategy and presence that delivers results within the Amazon Marketplace.