Everything You Need to Know About Selling Your Product on Amazon
Amazon is one of the most trusted online businesses. As leaders in the field on internet retailing, Amazon has the e-commerce technology and the traffic to sell your products to a global market. If you’re an internet marketing newbie, quickly read through following features that Amazon offers for product sales.
Amazon Features
To give you a feel for the site, let us first take a look at the basic features offered by Amazon. Feel free to visit the site right now – do a search for any product and see what appears on your screen.
Features to notice:
- Results always contain a professional photo or some sort of graphic of the product.
- The price is made visible and it is combined with an offer, i.e. free shipping. Notice how the amount that is saved off of retail is made visible. This is an established advertising strategy – Amazon is telling people what the product is worth and that it´s presently selling for less than the amount that it is worth.
- Amazon mentions the number of items that are in stock and the estimated time that the product will take to get to the customer. Shoppers are more inclined to buy an item when they are aware that the product’s quantity is limited. Time expectation is also a useful feature for most customers and sellers.
- Amazon makes use of Cross-Selling and Up Selling. This refers to a concept of selling that is based on product similarity or asking the customer if they would to purchase another product that compliments the first one that they bought i.e. when a customer considers one product; Amazon makes a mention of another product that might also interest the customer.
- A ‘Look Inside’ feature is offered to customers who are shopping for books. This life-like feature allows the customer to have a closer look at the book.
- Reviews – The ‘Editorial Review´ section describes the product in great detail. Amazon also allows customers to review a product. These reviews are usually reliable, fair and act like testimonials about the product. All kinds of feedback can be useful for the seller.
- Added Extras – Amazon includes various other types of cross-selling and interactive devices i.e. customer discussions, a Listamania feature, Wiki Info etc. All these extras can be used to create interest around specific products or topics.
What CAN and CAN’T be sold on Amazon
Amazon permits sellers to place their products in the following categories: Books, Music, DVD, Video/VHS, Automotive, Baby, Camera and Photo, Electronics, Everything Else, Health and Personal Care, Home and Garden, Musical Instruments, Office Products, Software, Sports & Outdoors, Tools and Hardware and Video Games.
Please note that you will need to get a prior authorization in order to sell in the following categories: Apparel, Beauty, Cell Phones and Accessories, Gourmet, Grocery, Jewelry & Watches, Personal Computers (in Electronics category), Shoes & Accessories and Toys & Games.
The following products cannot be sold on Amazon: Magazines and Newspapers, Adult Toys, Gift Cards and Gift Certificates, Guns and Ammunition, Photo Processing, Prescription Medication, and Tobacco and Alcohol.
How it all works:
- Registration
- Upload Product Inventory
- Your Products get Spotted
- Your Product gets Purchased
- Shipping
- Money in Your Pocket
For you to start selling your product on Amazon, the first thing you need to do is register. This is a simple process that requires you to fill out a short online form to register as an Individual seller. If you think that you will need to process more than 40 orders per month you should register as a Pro Merchant.
Amazon has made it really simple for you to upload your product inventory. After your registration, you have three options for submitting information that is related to your product: Option 1: Use the Add a Product feature on Seller Central to create one product at a time. If you are unfamiliar with Seller Central, all you need to know is that it is Web interface used to deal with all aspects of selling on Amazon.com. You can use this tool to add product information, make inventory updates and later on, handle orders as well as payments though it. Option 2: Make use of the Seller Desktop. This is a free and user-friendly desktop application that you can use to add products in bulk or individually to your inventory. Option 3: If you want to submit info about many products simultaneously, make use of the inventory files to create multiple products.
By listing your products on Amazon, they reach millions of potential customers 24/7 – Amazon’s traffic, now also becomes your traffic.
Buying a product from Amazon is not only convenient, but also really simple and quick. Your product is easily purchased at the click of a mouse.
Essentially, you are in charge of shipping your product to its new owner. Amazon will notify you about the purchase via email when an order has been placed. All you have to do is, pack and ship your product to the customer. If you would prefer not to handle this section you could opt for the Fulfillment by Amazon option.
Amazon then does the payment to you via a direct deposit into your bank account. You will also be notified about this deposit via email as soon as your payment has been sent.
While we are on the subject of money, let me give you an outline of Fees involved in becoming a Seller on Amazon…
There are 2 major ‘seller’ packages that have been made available by Amazon.
If you are looking to sell only a few products or expect to have less than 40 orders placed per month, you would want to register as an Individual seller. The only fee involved here is a ‘per product sold’ fee of $0.99 – this means that you only pay $0.99 per product that you sell.
On the other hand, if you think that you will be selling much more than 40 products per month, you should sign up to be a Pro Merchant. Here you should expect to pay a standard monthly subscription fee of $39.99 as well as a minor referral and closing fee when your products sell. These fees are related to your products category.
Remember, for both selling options, there are no individual item listing fees and no credit card processing fees.
If you are new to e-commerce, you may be a bit concerned about the idea of doing financial transactions over the internet. Not to fear though- Amazon has developed a few handy features that may help set you mind as ease.
- Fraud Protection
- Credit Card Facilities
- A-to-z Guarantee Program
Amazon offers its sellers a world-class payment fraud protection service. They have devised a system that is ridden with personalized notifications that tell you exactly what is going on with your orders and payments at any given time.
Naturally, Amazon is licensed to perform secure transactions with most major credit card providers.
This program is particularly designed for the safety of the customer but it is important to be aware of a program of this nature as it has been created to establish a sense of business confidence between the customer, Amazon and you. The A-to-z Guarantee Program has been fashioned to handle situations where a customer: 1) Never receives a product or 2) Receives a product that is different to what was ordered. The customer is initially encouraged to contact you (the seller) personally if this type of product arises. If you cannot resolve the problem, the customer can then file an ‘A-to-z’ claim to Amazon. Amazon then sends you an email, which outlines the customer’s claim. You are requested to respond by mailing the order’s basic information and an outline of the fulfillment process. Amazon will then decide how the claim will be settled – this may result in you having to refund the customer.
So now that you know how to get yourself started, you need to learn a few tricks of the trade…
It’s all about the SALES, so what can you do to make sure that your products sell like hot cakes?
Tip 1) Keywords
Appropriate keywords are vital to high product sales over the internet. Keywords drive potential customers to your product, thus it is important to try to add product specific keywords to your Amazon product description as well as anywhere else that you may be writing about your product. If you want to get really high traffic from search engines, you might need to do a keyword phrase analysis of your main product. This can be done by using Google’s external keyword tool, or WordTracker’s free tool. It is essential that you choose suitable keywords, with the highest rankings.
Tip 2) Write about your Products
The more online content available about your product, the better it is for sales. It is important that you write interesting content that will appeal to your market, and make sure that it contains your product’s keywords. The next step is to publish this info all over the web. You can make use of the ‘Listamania’ or ‘So you’d like to{70c334fb92e874d1e6848b98072ad90d8e1e4d18d72219bf8863dcf279bcb8a9}u2026guide’ features provide by Amazon, but you can also feel free to blog about your product or make use of social media sites for further product publicity i.e. make friends or start a group with people on Facebook who possibly have an interest in the type of product that you are selling.
Tip 3) Online Product Promotion Companies
Feel free to do a Google search to find a list of top product promotion companies. There are many companies available that will aggressively market your product online – with this type of external help; you won’t have to personally take on the marketing of your product. The only downside about making use of these types of companies is that most of their services require you to fork out a hefty bundle of cash.
