Amazon is huge. No, strike that, Amazon is enormous. As a matter of fact, there’s room on Amazon for every seller out there to be successful. For instance, according to CNN Money, Amazon Prime now reaches nearly half of households in the United States alone.
Moreover, as of 2015, the site has more than 300 million active accounts. Yes, you definitely read that right. So there are plenty of chances to succeed in your business endeavors, you just need to deliver the right products, to the right people at the right time, and how hard could that be, right?
Well, if you don’t have any experience at all, it could be quite hard. Even worse, if you don’t know where to start, it could seem downright impossible. So in order to help you start on the right foot, here are a couple of basic facts about the platform that will prepare you for success.
Three Vital Things to Know About Amazon
1. The Buy Box
When a people are browsing on amazing, they usually navigate to a product’s main page on one of the “offers links” bellow the product description in order to see majority of sellers available at the moment. But the site also gives sellers the ability to compete for the “Buy Box” – the yellow CTA bottom that is actually responsible for more than $56 billion of site’s $62 billion sales. So naturally, you have to know about it and you have to learn how it works.
2. The Order of the Offer List
One of the key features of Amazon is that a number of different merchants can compete for the same item. This means becoming the featured merchant with the aforementioned Buy Box is difficult to say the least. However, even if you never manage to win the BB listing, it’s still important to know how it operates. Most things Amazon prizes actually fall in line some of the best ecommerce practices, which include:
- History as a seller – people who have a long and of course, a positive selling history on the site have a better chances of getting the top spot for a certain product.
- The number of reviews – user-reviews have a huge effect on your sales, and depending on how positive or negative they are, they could easily make or break your business.
- Competitive pricing – and here we have the most important factor, because people always look for low prices on Amazon; you just need to keep in mind that also includes the shipping costs.
3. Fulfilment by Amazon
This program – more commonly known as FBA – involves sending your merchandise to the nearest Amazon fulfillment center to be fully stocked. Basically, when a person buys something from you, Amazon will ship the item instead of you. The biggest benefit of this program is that it allows you concentrate on other aspects of your business, while Amazon handles shipping duties. But that’s not all, some of the other benefits – as this article from Via Trading explains – include getting extra momentum toward winning the Buy Box, extending the reach of your items via Amazon Prime, just to name a few.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1. Who benefits the most from selling on Amazon?
In most cases, three kinds of merchants perform pretty well on the site – and those are people who are selling unique products, like jewelry companies; people who sell niche products for certain demographics and people who sell used goods and refurbished. With that in mind, you should also know that people with their own sites and people who sell merchandise on Amazing using Shopify have more credibility than other sellers and are usually more successful.
2. How to increase the number of user-reviews on the account?
The first thing we should point out when talking about user-reviews is that sellers on Amazon are strictly forbidden from paying for reviews. People who engage in this practice often have their accounts deactivated and some of them, according to Tech Church, also get sued. So if you want to amass good reviews, you should definitely try give your customers a great shipping experience and maintain a good communication, so they want to leave a good review and vouch for your Seller Account on their own.
3. Are there any policies a new seller should know about?
This is quite an easy question actually, and the answer is even simpler – why, yes, there are a couple of policies you should look over before you start selling. And simply because talking about these policies would take up too much time and spice, here is a short list of policies you should look before doing anything:
Final Thoughts
Now that you know the basics of selling on Amazon, you have a little bit of thinking to do. The first question you should ask yourself is – is Amazon the right place for you and your business? You need to think about your possible profit margins and see if they’ll be enough to absorb the fees the platform charges its users. If they are in fact enough, then you should start listing them as soon as possible.
