Did you know that Amazon is the biggest marketplace that exists today? Thanks to its customer service, its fast shipping and selling all kinds of products at a very competitive price, many users go directly to Amazon when they look for any product.
But what you may not know, is that approximately half of the products that Amazon sells, are not own, if not that they are from third-party companies or entrepreneurs . How can your case be.
For this reason, every day there are more people who want to take the step and register as a seller, in order to increase the sales of their business taking advantage of the visibility that Amazon has.
So if you have an online store and want to increase sales with another channel, read this guide carefully because I am going to tell you how to sell on Amazon step by step, and also, stay until the end because I will tell you 5 SEO tips and tricks for advance your competition. Lets go see it!
Advantages of selling on Amazon
If you have never considered selling your products on Amazon before, you may not know the benefits it can bring you. Therefore, before telling you how to sell on Amazon, I want you to know its main advantages.
Multiply the visibility of your products
The Amazon website is one of the most visited in the world, so if you are starting and still very few people know your product, or you simply want to increase your online store sales significantly, with Amazon you can reach a large number of potentials customers in a very short time thanks to the great visibility that this marketplace has.
Show your products to people interested in buying them
It is clear that your products gain visibility by putting them on sale on Amazon. But best of all, users who browse this marketplace have a high purchase intention . Therefore, you address users in an advanced phase of the purchase cycle and are more likely to buy than if they found you by other means.
No need to set up your own online store
If you do not have knowledge of web development to create online stores, and you do not have a good budget for someone to build it for you, selling on Amazon can be a good alternative.
You just have to create an account how I will teach you a little later and start uploading your products with their respective photos and features. It is very simple and does not require you to have technical knowledge of any kind.
Internationalization of your brand
Thanks to Amazon being present in numerous countries, you can make people from other parts of the world buy your products and thus multiply your sales. For example, if you create an account in Spain, you can sell on the 5 European platforms (Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.de, Amazon.fr, Amazon.it and Amazon.es) and thus reach a lot more people.
You build trust with your potential customers
Amazon is the most recognized online sales platform worldwide. We all go to this platform to buy almost any type of products because we know that it is a marketplace that works like a charm and that if we have any type of problem, or we want to request a return, we can do it without anyone asking us why .
Disadvantages of selling on Amazon
Selling on Amazon has many advantages. However, everything that glitters is not gold. Therefore, it is important that you know what disadvantages it may have before making the decision to upload your products to this marketplace.
Receiving payments through an intermediary
When a customer buys one of the products that you have put up for sale, the payment is actually received by Amazon. Then if all goes well, you can withdraw the money in the bank account you have selected.
However, if customers complain about the quality of your products, complain about the shipment or get bad comments and ratings, the payment can be delayed for weeks and even canceled.
You will earn less than if you sold them yourself
As we will see later, selling on Amazon is not free. They put at your disposal this great marketplace for you to reach many people but in return you will have to pay a fee.
Therefore, you have to subtract from your usual profit margin of each sale, what you lose by having your products on Amazon.
Amazon also has competition
Selling on Amazon is a good opportunity for many brands and entrepreneurs, so there are currently thousands of sellers in this marketplace, which translates into great competition in certain sectors . This can cause some sellers to put the same product that you have at a lower price, or that even Amazon, which is also a seller, prioritizes its own products in searches before yours.
Rates you must pay if you want to sell on Amazon
Depending on the quantity and type of products you want to sell on Amazon, you must create a type of seller profile and benefit from a fee or another
Therefore, before teaching you how to sell on Amazon, it is important that you know all the rates and types of accounts that exist to sell in this marketplace to know which one is the most suitable for you.
Fees and commissions for selling on Amazon
Depending on the type of account you choose, you will have to pay some commissions or others. At the moment we will see all that exist today and then we will see which one would apply in each account.
Rate by reference : it is the percentage that Amazon charges you for each sale and that is calculated on the total sale price of the product including shipping costs. Depending on the category to which your product belongs, the percentage can vary from 5% to approximately 45%.
Closing fee: it is a closed commission of € 0.99 on each product that is discounted from the benefits. It does not matter what type of product or its cost.
Rate per item sale : it is the cost that Amazon has for each sale you make through the marketplace. The most common are between € 0.81 and € 1.01 and only apply to books, music, DVD, software and video games.
Fixed monthly subscription fee: it is the fee that Amazon charges monthly for having products for sale in its marketplace to professional sellers. It has a fixed cost of € 39 per month.
Types of seller accounts
Before registering as a seller, you should know that there are 2 types of accounts : the individual and the professional. Each one has its characteristics and conditions, so let’s see each one in detail.
Individual Seller Account
This account is aimed at people who are going to sell less than 40 products a month and who only want to pay Amazon when they make a sale. Thus, if you want to start selling on Amazon little by little to prove that it works, this is the best option.
Example of commissions for each sale:
Pablo has a kitchen appliances store and he sells his € 400 ovens to test the platform. In this case, Amazon would charge the following fees:
- Reference fee: 15% = € 60
- Closing fee: € 0.99
- Article sale fee: does not apply to this type of products
Result: € 400 – € 60.99 = € 339.01
Professional Seller Account
These types of accounts are better if you sell online on a regular basis ( more than 40 products per month ) and want to get some of the advantages that these types of profiles have.
If you opt for this account, unlike individual profiles, you can sell in all Amazon categories, create new products that are not currently on the Amazon list, access more detailed reports on your orders, upload your inventory automatically And, most importantly, you will have the possibility to get your products to be purchased with one click .
Example of commissions for each sale:
Sergio has a smartphone store and puts his € 200 mobile phones to sell. In this case, Amazon would charge the following fees:
- Reference fee: 7% = € 14
- Sales closing fee: does not apply to PRO sellers
- Article sale fee: does not apply to this type of products
Result: € 200 – € 14 = € 186
How to start selling on Amazon?
Now that you know the rates, it’s time to get down to work and start selling on Amazon. The process to do it is very simple.
Decide what you are going to sell on Amazon
Whether you already have a store, or if you want to start a small business and start selling on Amazon to earn extra money, it is important that before registering you do a small search and really see the products that may be interesting.
Are the products you want to sell on Amazon in sufficient demand?
The easiest way to see if a product sells well on Amazon is to go to the category of that type of product and see the list of the best sellers . If the product you want to sell is in the top positions, it will be a good indicator. However, in this way we will not know the exact demand that this product has and it will take us a long time to do our study.
Are the products you want to sell on Amazon dominated by a few vendors?
Now that you know if a product has a lot or little demand, it’s time to see if the sector is dominated by a few sellers or not.
If it were the case that there are one or more sellers that agglutinate almost all sales, I recommend trying to sell another product on Amazon, since it will mean that those sellers have very loyal customers, have very good opinions and it will be difficult to anticipate them in Results listings.
Do your competitors’ products have many reviews? They’re good?
The amount of reviews a product has is a factor that Amazon takes into account when positioning a product in the search results. Therefore, if your competition has many reviews on the products you want to sell, it can give you an idea that it will be difficult to beat them.
However, if there are few products that have many reviews, and they are also distributed among several different vendors, it will be an indicator that there is not much competition.
You can enter the products and look at their scores and reviews one by one, or use the Jungle Scout extension again
But you should not only look at the number of reviews, but also the quality of these . If you see that the products that are in the top positions have mediocre or even bad ratings, it is a good indicator to launch you to sell yours.
In fact, if you are in that case, I recommend that you read the ratings that have 2 and 3 stars and see if your product can correct those deficiencies that are criticized in the similar products of your competitors. In this way, you can put on sale on Amazon a better product that will take positive reviews and with a better score.
What profit margin would you get?
Finally, before you start creating the account and putting your products on sale at Amazon, it is very important that you calculate the benefit you can get from the sale of each product.
It doesn’t matter if you already have your prices set because you already sell them at that amount in your own store. That price on Amazon may not be competitive and nobody buys you. Therefore, one of the first things that you have to look at, is in the prices of your competition and in thinking if you can really put a similar price.
If you can not put your products at a similar price, I recommend not selling them on Amazon, since all things being equal, users will choose the cheapest ones.
Create an account and sign up for Seller Central
When you know what products to sell on Amazon, the next thing you will have to do is register with the Amazon sales center providing the country, the type of company, a credit card, a phone number, your personal data and your bank details .
In addition, you must choose between the 2 types of accounts. Remember that there are 2: the individual seller and the professional seller. Most sellers opt for professional accounts, but you can always start with the individual account to try and later move on to the pro.
Create your first listing or listing of products
To add your first product, you must go to the “Inventory” section and click on “Add a product”.
Now Amazon will ask you to look for your product among those already sold. You can search by barcode or EAN code , or by product name directly.
Unless you’re selling an item you made yourself, you probably don’t need to create a new product.
IMPORTANT : If for some reason you do not have an EAN type code because you have imported your products from a non-European supplier, such as from China, you will have to create one to be able to sell on Amazon. There are several companies to get it
Once you have searched for your product, you will surely see several options that are already sold by other competitors on Amazon. Simply select it and it will take you to a page so that you finish filling in the missing data. The good thing about doing so, is that the product will already be in the appropriate category and subcategories, since this work has already been done by someone before you.
If no product like yours comes out, you have to create a new listing. That is, you should look for the category and subcategories that most have to do with your product to put it on sale there.
Then you can start filling in the product information fields such as title, brand, weight, color, etc.
Upload good photos of your products
In addition to the features, as you can see in the screenshot above, in this step you must upload the photos of your product and create the variants, in case you have them. It is very important that you do it well, since the graphic section is the first thing that the user will be fixed.
As you can see, the first of them puts a picture of quality and good size and the second has uploaded a smaller image and without taking full advantage of the image margins .
Tips for the images of your products:
- Upload quality photos so that when zooming you see the product details.
- Crop the photo by removing as much space as possible to the margins, so that the product occupies the entire image.
- Photograph your product from various angles.
- Cut out the object and put it on a white background.
I recommend you to invest as much time as possible in this phase, as it will make your products attract more attention and minimize returns . Why? Because if for example the colors of the photo of your product do not correspond to reality, the customer is probably not satisfied and will return and give you a negative review.
Put a competitive price on your products
Once you have completed all the fields, you will need to set a price for each of your products. This is something that you have to think very well, since it will directly affect the amount of sales you make and the return on investment .
Therefore, I recommend that before setting a random price, consider the following points:
Calculate the costs and benefits : put aside the costs you have when manufacturing or getting the product, and the management costs. Then, set a minimum price at which you would have to sell that product to obtain a profit margin.
Analyze your competition : see at what price your competition sells your products, or very similar items. Keep in mind that if a user sees your product cheaper at another vendor, this may cause him to opt for it and not for you.
Look at the prices of other stores : something you have to think about is that you don’t just compete with other sellers within Amazon. You also do it with external vendors that have their own online store.
Based on all this, you can already know what price you should put and if it is profitable for you to sell this product through Amazon.
Send the products yourself or have Amazon handle
After a person has made a purchase of any of your products, Amazon will notify you by email and with a notification in your Seller Central panel.
When you go to the details of the order, you will have all the details of the buyer so that you can send the product within the agreed period. However, if you do not want to handle the shipping and possible product returns, you can hire the Amazon Logistics service , also called FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon).
But what is Amazon logistics?
It is a service that allows you to worry about everything related to shipments and storage of your product and that can bring you many advantages.
When hiring it, you have to previously send your products to Amazon stores, so that when someone places an order in any of the 5 European marketplace, Amazon will manage it without you having to do anything and quickly send it to the recipient.
Advantages of Amazon Logistics:
- Shipping and return management: Amazon will be responsible for making all shipments and returns to buyers automatically.
- Customer service: Amazon will answer queries that users make to customer service in the local marketplace language.
- Get the Prime badge: By having this badge, your products will attract more attention from potential customers since they will have the product at home in a very short time due to fast shipping.
- It shows the badge «Managed by Amazon»: Users trust Amazon because they always meet the customer in time and quality, so they prefer to buy products managed by Amazon. If you have this badge, you will increase your sales.
- Get the “Buy Box”: The Buy Box allows the user to add your product directly to the cart, without having to see other purchase options of your competitors. By hiring Amazon Logistics, you will be more likely to get it.
In case you decide to use FBA for the logistics of your sales, after uploading your products to the inventory, you must select them and click on «Send or reset inventory.
After this, you have to put the units of each product and create their labels. These tags will be saved as pdf so you can print and paste them in the packages before sending them to Amazon.
Next you will have to fill in the shipping information, select the courier company that you want to pick up the package, calculate the costs and print the shipping label that you will have to paste on the packaging you are going to use. When Amazon receives your products, they will automatically become available on the platform.
Receive your income
Unlike what happens in your online store, where you have your own payment gateway linked directly to your bank, if you sell on Amazon, customers will use the gateways and payment methods of the American giant. Because of this, payments are received and managed by Amazon in its entirety .
This has its advantages and disadvantages, like everything.
The good thing is that you don’t have to set up a POS and you just have to worry about setting up your bank account. The bad thing is that you will not receive the income of each sale instantly, but Amazon will pay you when 15 days have passed.
Of course, something you have to keep in mind is that customers have the right to return your products if they are not convinced once they have been received. Therefore, Amazon can retain the amount of the sale for the necessary time until the claim is resolved , since for them the first thing is the customer.
5 Tips and Tricks applied in Amazon to increase your sales
As I said at the beginning of the entry, selling on Amazon has some drawbacks, such as high competition . There are already many companies and individuals selling their products, so you will compete with many other vendors unless you have a very innovative product.
But do not worry because I will tell you 3 good practices and 2 tricks that you can apply from now to improve the visibility of your products
Position your products on Amazon by relevant and popular keywords
If your product can be called in several ways and have different endings, it is essential that you do a good keyword search, so that you optimize the title and content of your product sheet focusing on that keyword.
If we talk about Google, it is very easy to find tools that allow us to find good keywords . However, Amazon is not so simple, since there are not so many tools and there are no monthly search volumes. This is because Amazon does not provide this data at the moment. You may use the suggestions of the Amazon search engine.
For example, if we have an iPhone case store and we want to know what type of cases are most sought, the suggestions is a good free resource that Amazon itself offers us.
These suggestions are relevant long tail keywords and highly sought after by users browsing Amazon, so we can get many ideas.
Create an optimized SEO product listing
Now that you have chosen good keywords, you would have to do the SEO On Page of the product sheet so that positions in the first results for the chosen keyword. But not only that, but it will also be important that you try to position for other related keywords and long tails.
Title
The title is the most important field when positioning your product and, in addition, it is the text that appears in the results listings after an Amazon search.
Therefore, it is very important that you include the main and related keywords in this section, as early as possible to give priority to Amazon. However, not only will you have to include keywords , it is also essential to insert other elements that we will see later.
Attributes
Attributes or enumerations are the characteristics that differentiate and make your product stand out.
Given that it is surely the second thing that users will read after the title, you have to find the balance between entering related keywords and sales arguments.
Description
The next section that we must optimize is that of the description. It is a section where we must describe our product using the main keyword and its derivatives . However, we must avoid putting a single block of text and use listings, highlight some words, make short sentences, etc.
Amazon Meta Keywords
Yes, you read it right. We all know that for years the meta keywords have not influenced the organic ranking of Google. However, this does not apply in Amazon, which for now if you take them into account to position , as long as they are not used abusively by putting exactly the same keyword several times.
In this regard, I recommend that you include long tail keywords, synonyms and features of your product.
Other factors
In addition to the above factors, there are many more variables that influence the positioning of your products on Amazon:
Average score: good scores on your products directly influence better positioning.
Number of comments : It is important to try to get many comments on your products, since Amazon takes them into account when positioning your products.
Quality of comments: if users rate positive comments from other people, Amazon will see it with good eyes.
Number of sales : if your product starts to sell well, it means that users like it and Amazon will take note of it by positioning it higher.
Create good titles and optimize them for Amazon’s internal SEO
Like Google, Amazon also places a lot of importance on the title we assign to our product, so we will have to optimize it following its best practice guidelines.
According to Amazon, a good title should contain:
- The brand brand and product line.
- The distinguishing feature.
- The material from which it is made, if applicable.
- The type of product.
- The color.
- Its size.
- The number of units that come in the package.
However, the title does not have an infinite length. In fact, the maximum number of characters changes depending on the device where it is consulted and where your product appears.
Depending on where it appears, the length is as follows:
Titles in search results from computer : Approximately 230 and 250 characters.
Titles in mobile search results : Between 65 and 80 characters.
Related article titles : Between 65 and 80 characters.
Therefore, we must include all or almost all the elements that Amazon indicates, but in an order that benefits us.
If it is a generic product that people search without including or importing the brand, it is best to first place the most relevant and searched keyword and then the brand of the product and the rest of the attributes that differentiate it and make it stand out. In the end we will put the size and the units, if it is important or several units are included in the same package.
However, there will be times that the word most searched by users is the name of the brand and model, so that will be what we will place at the beginning of our titles.
Increase the CTR of your results by sharing your product URL
Have you stopped to look at the URLs of Amazon products? The same product, depending on how it is reached, can have several URLs . For example, when you click on a product from the search list, some parameters that are not in the original product URL are added.
If for example I search for “iphone x cases” and click on the last result of the first page, the URL that is generated is different from the original one.
As you can see that the Amazon system automatically adds and that determines who comes to the second URL, are people who have searched and clicked on that result from Amazon.
And as happens in Google, one of the parameters that Amazon takes into account when positioning an article above, is a good CTR . Therefore, if we send traffic to that URL, sharing it on social networks, for example, Amazon will believe that people are clicking us from the list of results, which will result in an increase in the CTR and an improvement in its positioning.
Get ratings and reviews even if your products still don’t have much visibility
As consumers we are, we always have an opinion of the products we buy. However, we rarely leave it written as a review, especially if it is a good opinion.
The importance of reviews:
- It is proven that a product with opinions increases buyer confidence . So much so, that even some buyers do not buy products that do not have reviews because of the lack of confidence that this implies,
- Amazon’s algorithm always recommends in the top positions of the categories and search results those products that accumulate a few reviews .
And to get them, I bring you a couple of tricks that few people know.
Offer discounts in exchange for reviews
One way that sellers have to combat the lack of opinions and reviews on their products, is by sending the products for free or at a significant discount to people who are willing to make an honest review of the product once they have tried it.
The operation is simple. The seller publishes in Facebook groups focused on getting reviews of the “ad”. Then the reviewer pays the product, tests it and then scores it and makes a review about it. Finally, the brand returns the full amount or the equivalent to the discount agreed externally to the Amazon system.
This practice is not approved by Amazon , as it violates its policies, so I do not recommend it unless you do it very carefully and cautiously.
Request reviews from your buyers through Amazon
Did you know that through your Amazon Seller Central account you can ask for reviews from people who have already bought you?
Within your Amazon Seller Central account, in the Orders section, you have an order management subsection where you can see all the orders you have received.
There you can see the date, time, name and other information related to each purchase order. If you click on the name of the buyer, a text box will open with which you can send a message to the buyer asking him to review your product.
Of course, it is very important that in the field of ” Subject ” you select the option of ” Request for valuation ” and that in the message you send, you agree with Amazon’s policies. That is, it must be a brief and formal text, in which we thank the user for their purchase and in which we kindly and respectfully ask him to make an honest assessment of our product.
Mini Hack:
And if you have not had sales, make a very aggressive offer by reducing a good amount of the products you want to get reviews. This way you will be able to sell your product to more people that you can then ask to do reviews with the method just mentioned.
Is it worth selling on Amazon?
As you have seen, Amazon is a very accessible marketplace for all types of sellers, from entrepreneurs who want to launch a product and small businesses that want to try new channels, to larger companies that sell hundreds of products every day.
However, selling your own products on Amazon has its advantages and disadvantages, so before launching it, I recommend that you calculate well the costs of putting your products for sale on Amazon (in money and time), and the benefit you could have by selling your products at a competitive price.
Another consideration that I want you to take into account, is that I do not recommend selling on Amazon if you depend exclusively on this marketplace and have a very small profit margin . Why? Because just like you, you have been able to sell your products on Amazon, so can another one by lowering prices and forcing you to do it too.
Even Amazon itself, if it detects that a product sells a lot, can include it in its offer by negotiating better prices with your supplier or another similar one, and selling your product for a lower price .
In any case, if you decide to sell your own products on Amazon and want to tell us how you have been, your experience in this marketplace or give some advice to people who are thinking of making the leap, tell us in the comments!
