How to sell on Amazon.
Seeking on how to sell on Amazon is one of the most asked question.Amazon is among the best online shopping website.
Amazon offers two options for selling your products.
- Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA).
In this arrangement, you can allow Amazon to store your products in their warehouse and pay monthly inventory storage for your stored products. In this case, Amazon caters to issues that deal with customer support.
- Ship goods yourself.
This option is also known as Fulfilled by merchant. In this arrangement you store and ship your own products and handle all the issues that are related to customer support. Matters of addressing inquiries are left to you. It’s best suited for businesses with bulky and slow-moving goods because when such goods are stored in the Amazon warehouse, it can be costly to pay for the inventory fee.
How to sell on Amazon.
Selling on Amazon requires that you take some steps that are just as important as those taken when you want to sell on any other online selling platform.
Here are the basic steps:
- Conduct Market Research
Conducting market research is important because some categories like jewelry or DVDs require approval before listing whereas some products are federally regulated and hence restricted completely.
You therefore need to know the exact level of restriction the product you want to sell has. You also need to research what products are trending and popular. After deciding on the product that you want to sell, you look at the listing of the product and evaluate the level of competition. The product should be on demand but with a lower barrier entry.
When you are already settled on a product, look for a supplier. You should make a point of seeing a sample of the product from the supplier to ensure that what’s in the photo is the exact level of product that you would give your customers.
You can then calculate your cost per unit to ensure that your chosen product has viability on several options which include, among other things, profitability.
- Set up seller account
The requirements here are bank account and routing number, credit card, government-issued national ID, tax information, and phone number.
When in possession of these details, you can go to Seller Central and choose a selling plan. The Individual Selling Plan suits those who sell less than 40 units per month. It is more of ‘pay as you go plan’.
The Professional Plan is best suited for sellers who sell more than 40 units per month and need access to APIs and advanced reports.
- Add products
There are two ways you can use it to add products. You can use an existing listing of an identical product or create a new listing. A listing has the following features: product identifier(GTIN, UPC, ISBN, or EAN), keywords and searches terms, category description, price, the number of available products, stock keeping unit (SKU), product name, and brand.
When doing your description, you need to optimize it by researching keywords for search engines. The keywords you add should be the ones that people search for in search engines. Make sure the description is good and if you can’t write a good one, you can hire a professional to write for you.
Images also matter and the photos taken should have a white background with a minimum dimension of 500×500 pixels. You can use a lightbox to take the product images. Alternatively, companies can take photos of the products and send them to you.
- Win the Buy Box
Amazon prioritizes the most authoritative sellers and this is normally calculated on some signals processed by its algorithm.
Good merchant status
To be in this status, you need to prove a record of good sales for at least three months.
Fulfillment
Customer management matters a lot to Amazon. You are therefore called upon to be ultimately responsible for customer management.
Shipping times
Amazon is strict on delivery time and insists that their customers should get products on time. It is an agreement that you enter when you sign to sell goods on Amazon.
Price
Customers should get favorable prices. If you are in a position to give the best prices and the rest of the parameters are normal, you stand a good chance to rank above other competitors in Amazon’s Buy Box.
Reviews and ratings
You should try to influence customers to write reviews about your product and the services you offer. The quality and quantity of the opinions matter. You should look at the reviews and if there happens to be a problem, you handle it before it skyrockets.
Response time
It is a requirement when registering with Amazon that you would respond to your customers within 24 hours. You are expected to follow that regulation, failure to which you stand to be penalized.
- Work in recruitment
You should now work toward driving traffic to your products and generating sales. Provided you comply with the guidelines and respect the rules of the game, Amazon rewards the products that sell best. If the SEO works at it’s best, you are better placed to win Buy Box more often.
Amazon’s Pay-per-click, although limited, is not as expensive as Google Facebook ads. It just works on the principle of ranking the product with the best parameters the highest and making it to occupy prominent space in searches
over others.
Your focus should now be sales. Anything that drives sales like email marketing, SEO in commercial search engines, social media, and all other means that generate referred traffic to your site should be given attention.
SUMMARY.
Amazon is the largest online retailer and so selling goods on their platform gives you an opportunity to expose your brand to the works.You should also look at best products to sell on Amazon.
When selling on Amazon, the individual plan requires that you pay $0.99 every time you make a sale and on the professional plan, you have to pay $39.99 per month regardless of how you sell. There is also a referral fee that is charged depending on the category of the products you deal with. It’s a dedication to the amount of the total transaction.
