For many small businesses, selling on Amazon can be an incredibly profitable venture. With approximately 183 million visitors per month in the U.S., this is a huge customer base to tap into, and one that’s much higher than other large e-commerce stores like eBay (96 million).
Thankfully, Amazon has made sure it’s pretty straightforward to start selling your products/services through their marketplace. But, that said, it isn’t just a case of creating a seller account, listing products and crossing your fingers. Instead, it will involve some savvy strategies and an overall awareness of your competition if you want to succeed. With that in mind, here are some simple tips to get your store up and running:
Consider the costs involved
When you’re starting out it can be difficult to calculate exactly how much money you’re going to bring in or how many products you’re going to sell, which is why you need to consider whether a Merchant Account is worth it or not. The fees are $39.99 per month and you’ll also come across other selling fees, but this account will give you access to unlimited sales.
Amazon advises that any business selling over 40 items each month will benefit from having one of these accounts. But when you’re just starting out, you might want to hold off signing up to this until you’ve established a customer base and some sales.
Maintain competitiveness with your pricing
Selling on Amazon is a no-brainer for many companies as it’s the largest and most popular platform available. However, because of that, a lot of other companies, like yours, have had this idea too. This means you’re going to face a lot of competition, with a lot of other businesses selling identical or similar things to yours. Some of these organizations may be able to distribute or produce these at a much lower price point than you. Others may have unbeatable offers that result in large amounts of traffic to their business page, even if they are making a loss in the process.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean you can’t achieve a competitive edge, but you need to make sure you’re on top of your game to stay one step ahead of your competition. There are a number of tools, including Feedvisor, that monitor your competitors’ pricing for you 24/7, which allows you to adapt your pricing accordingly so you’re always cheaper, even if it is just by $0.01.
Optimize your Amazon product listings
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a term you’ll probably be familiar with, particularly if you have your own online store. And, even though SEO can influence your search engine rankings, it can also have an impact on how you appear on Amazon searches.
Amazon has two primary factors when ranking search results – relevance and performance. Performance factors are something you build up over time as they’re based on how well you’ve faired in the past and how likely it is that you’ll succeed with your new purchases. This includes how many items you’ve sold, whether your products have images and descriptions, how competitively priced you are and what the average product rating is.
To improve how well you rank on Amazon, you need to retain a good selling history, and you’ll also need to make sure your products are relevant to the customers’ search terms. Inputting keywords into titles and product descriptions (like you would for Google rankings) are a great way of making sure you’re coming out on top as the most relevant retailer. However, you need to use individual words that may be searched for, don’t just group them together into phrases like you would for Google.
Incorporate Amazon with your current e-commerce platform
The majority of Amazon sellers will also have their own e-commerce platform, and because sellers are provided with an open API (application programming interface), it’s incredibly easy to integrate the two.
Through this, users will be able to find products and purchase them through your personalized storefront, which provides them with a familiar experience that’s easy to navigate while also promoting your individual brand in the process. Customers are also able to review products through this, too, which helps boost your seller performance.
Even though some companies do just use Amazon as their sole e-commerce platform, you may find it beneficial to create your own so you have another location for customers to make purchases. When you market this correctly, it can help bring organic traffic to your site, while also improving brand awareness and your online visibility.