Venturing into Amazon, one of the most popular ecommerce platforms worldwide is a watershed moment for you as a business owner. You’ve heard success stories about it here and there and decided it wouldn’t hurt to give it a shot.
At the same time, you know enough that it’s not always peaches and cream; bigger opportunities bring greater challenges. So, consequently, you want to know more important information before going all out on the platform.
It’s worth taking the time to understand the basics of Amazon selling. Not only will it help you find incredible opportunities to grow your business, but it will also help you avoid costly mistakes. So take a peek at our list of eight things to remember as an Amazon seller!
Selling on Amazon: 8 Things to Remember
You may believe you already know enough about Amazon simply because you used to shop there. However, it works differently from the perspective of a seller. Unlike buyers, you have more to learn and work on, from platform policies to comprehensive marketing strategies. And if you take them lightly, you’ll be prone to costly errors.
For this reason, it’s necessary to know what you’re getting into before taking further action. Here are eight things you must know about selling on the Amazon marketplace.
1. The Competition is High, But So Are the Opportunities
Millions of sellers are active on Amazon, so it’s not surprising that fierce competition exists. It can be challenging to stand out, especially for new and small businesses. But it’s not impossible! Despite the high competition, there are still plenty of exciting opportunities available.
There are a plethora of tools and services available to make your strategies, optimization, and inventory management systems simpler and more effective. They even include off-Amazon services like Amazon DSP. If you’re willing to put in lots of work, you can get access to more opportunities and make the most of them to gain a competitive edge.
2. Amazon Charges a Lot of Fees
Prepare your budget because Amazon has many fees, some of which are hidden. You want to ensure you have enough to earn profits rather than just paying seller fees. So before getting deeper into your Amazon venture, learn about the costs involved.
These fees are Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) fees, seller account fees, shipping costs, and sale-related charges. They may also vary in price depending on various factors, such as product category, account type, selling price, etc. Learn everything you can about these before spending money.
3. Fulfillment by Amazon is a Convenient Solution
You might’ve heard about the benefits of FBA and want to become an Amazon FBA seller. That’s understandable; fulfillment is one of the biggest challenges for ecommerce sellers. Implementing an accurate and timely fulfillment process when selling online is difficult, but that’s how you stay in business long. You must ensure that the product reaches customers smoothly.
The FBA service helps you ease up the process by fulfilling orders in your stead. Send your products to their fulfillment centers, and Amazon does the rest—picking, packing, and shipping the orders. They can also be in charge of processing returns and providing customer service for those orders.
That said, FBA isn’t the best option for everyone.There are a lot of things that you should consider, Amazon fees and other expenses like e-commerce sales tax. It can be too costly for your business, so evaluate it before signing up.
4. Optimized Listings Can Guarantee Success
Having an Amazon seller account and publishing product listings are just the beginning. They’re not enough to guarantee a sale, so you must optimize for the best results.
For example, people might search and find your product but not buy it for various reasons—lack of details, bad reviews, or low-quality images. All of these can be solved with optimization.
5. Learn about the Buy Box and Unique Selling Point
In addition to your optimization tasks, seek more top-tier opportunities to help improve your search ranking. For example, two notable factors give you better visibility to buyers: the Buy Box and Unique Selling point (USP). The Amazon Buy Box features a product with competitive pricing.
You need to become a high-performance seller to win that spot. Customers also love a business with a USP. It shows what makes you different from the competition and appears in bullets or a single sentence. Analyze feedback and optimize your copies to find and solidify your USP; that way, you can explain to customers why they should choose you.
6. Familiarize Yourself with Amazon’s Policies
Amazon can be strict with its policies; you should learn the dos and don’ts to avoid account suspension. Of course, you can reinstate your account, but prevention is always a better route to take than cure.
Take some time to review Amazon’s policies. Some essential regulations you should start with are selling policies, program policies, product and listing restrictions, product detail page rules, and the seller code of conduct.
7. Integration Makes Data Management Easier
If you’re running an ecommerce business, chances are you’re using more than one sales channel. For example, you have an official business website or sell on other marketplaces like Walmart or eBay. In that case, we recommend integrating Amazon and your other sales platforms with your backend systems.
Ecommerce accounting data, for instance, can be difficult to track and can cause costly errors. So, to make things easier, sync all your information and automate some processes. This way, you can skip the tedious manual data entry and save more time and money.
8. Being a Customer-Centric Brand is Important
One of the best lessons you can learn from Amazon is being a customer-centred brand. This means that the core of your business decisions, especially the processes related to product and service delivery, should aim to increase customer satisfaction.
Another significant customer-centric behaviour to note is good customer service. Communication is vital when it comes to online transactions; with a barrier between you and your customer, you need extra effort to meet their needs. Respond quickly and professionally to queries, disputes, and other concerns. Doing so will help increase customer retention.
Key Takeaway
Amazon sells millions of products, and customers research and evaluate them before making a purchase decision. But they don’t always have the time and patience to search for everything, so they’ll likely rely on products that appear first and appeal to them.
So if you’re planning to join the huge marketplace, do your best to stand out from the rest! First, find out what you can expect from the platform. What are the challenges and opportunities for Amazon sellers? How can you avoid costly errors, and what methods can you implement to leverage those opportunities?
We hope that this discussion has significantly helped you understand Amazon selling better!
Author’s Bio:
Corrin Romkey is the managing director of Seller Interactive, a top agency in helping brands grow on Amazon. His content marketing expertise has led him to work with brands such as Toyota and GoDaddy. He will use his vast skills to help D2C brands succeed through Amazon SEO services.
