Scenario: You have hit upon a marvellous product idea, and your dream is to sell it on Amazon’s Marketplace.
Reality: Go through these steps before unveiling your Amazon online business, as there are some pointers to consider.
And these things are essential requirements before you set up an Amazon sellers account for the first time. By thinking ahead on these matters, the process of getting set up as an Amazon seller will be much less stressful with IO Scout , and hopefully – plain sailing!
Product Sourcing
What to sell, and how to get hold of what to sell are key components to any Amazon selling business. And it is a case of conducting thorough market research before investing in a shedload of stock.
There are lots of platforms to help you with your product research. Some tools include highlights like:
Product Finder
Find your next best-sellers with the Product Finder tool.
Product Tracker
Use the Product Tracker tool as access to product ideas, and export them to a CSV file with ease. Also used for managing your inventory, and being a super-organized Amazon seller!
Amazon FBA or FBM?
A decision will need to be made regarding the route you take.
FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) is the service offered by Amazon to look after the handling, distribution, customer service queries, and refunds.
FBM (Fulfilled by Merchant) is doing it yourself!
FBA works like so:
- You arrange with Amazon how many product units you want to send to Amazon Fulfillment Centres to be put into the storage area.
- These product units get put together with the inventory on Amazon.
- Consumers place orders for your products through your Amazon listings.
- These goods are then loaded, and distributed to your shoppers.
Of course, this lovely FBA service is chargeable. In order for you to make an informed judgment regarding whether to take this service or not, these are the costs involved with the FBA service.
FBA Costs
FBA Fees
FBA fees differ on the size and weight of your goods.
FBA Storage Fees
FBA storage fees cover the charges for your goods warehoused inside Amazon’s Fulfillment Centres.
Monthly Amazon FBA Fee
This fee is arraigned for Professional status on Amazon’s Marketplace. Professional status works for businesses who receive upwards of forty orders in a thirty-day period. An Individual plan also exists for Amazon sellers who are selling on average less than forty orders a month.
Professional Selling Plan vs. Individual Selling Plan
The next step is to think about whether you will require a professional or individual selling plan for your new online business. And basically, it comes down to the volume of products you sell (or intend to sell). Upwards of 40 products in a month will warrant the professional selling plan. Currently, there is a fee of $39.99 for the Amazon professional selling plan, whereas Amazon individual seller pat $0.99 to Amazon for each item that is sold.
If you are unsure, you can always start with the individual selling plan, and upgrade at a later date when your online selling business really starts taking off! And regardless of the plan you choose, the set up is the same when it comes to creating your Amazon seller account.
Decide on your method of selling
There are lots of ways and methods to get involved with selling on Amazon, and here are some key statistics:
- 71% of Amazon sales are attributed to Private Labels
- 26% of Amazon sales are attributed to Wholesale
- 20% of Amazon sales are attributed to Retail Arbitrage
- 25% of Amazon sales are attributed to Online Arbitrage
- 8% of Amazon sales are attributed to Drop Shipping
- 6% of Amazon sales are attributed to Handmade Sellers
How to create your Amazon Seller Account
Traverse your way to the wonderful home page of Amazon.
This is the exciting bit, and the “behind the scenes” bit, if you will.
You can either now log-in to your existing Amazon account, or create one.
Next you will be prompted to pop all the legal information in regarding business name, address, and tax details, along with billing information. You can choose the selling plan next (FBA or FBM).
Amazon will ask for some more information regarding the products you plan to sell on Amazon’s Marketplace:
You can either complete this information now, or come back to it at another time.
Some verification steps will need to be undertaken, to ensure the authenticity of your online business, and safety requirements.
The subsequent actions will help you to manage your inventory on the Amazon Seller Portal.
In your Amazon Seller Account portal, navigate to:
- Click Manage FBA Inventory on the dashboard
- Select the box to the left of your item, then click on Action on 1 Selected , which is located just above the item listing
- Click Send/Replenish Inventory
Note: There is a simpler route if the item is already listed as an FBA listing, and it’s simply a case of selecting the Send Inventory option.
- Select Create a New Shipping Plan option, and also Case-packed products . This relates to sending over and above 1 product unit to Amazon. Ensure all SKUs are noted in the one plan.
- Navigate to Continue to Shipping Plan
- Next, you’ll be asked to provide the amount of units and cases you intend to send to Amazon’s warehouses – then go ahead and click Continue.
Scaling up your online selling business
In order to future-proof your online trading business, a good way to go about this is to start your own Amazon Store. This involves the build of your own branded business. Once you understand the keys to success to selling on Amazon, and you’ve built up a nicely established online selling business.
Launched in 2017, Amazon stores are a visually rich platform where you can display your products, and create a lovely shopping experience for your customers. Due to the nature of Amazon stores, by having one you automatically enhance your consumers’ shopping pleasure, and drive more sales, as it makes it even easier to buy from you, and therefore, your brand.
Having your own established brand ticks the following boxes:
- Gives you a chance to get your brand out there to customers you haven’t reached before.
- Gives your existing customers a new look at your brand, and to tempt them into buying from you again.
- You can create slideshows of your products with images, text, and videos, and is wonderful for launching new products, and making a huge fuss about it!
- Heightens your SERPs within Amazon in an organic manner.
The key component that propels Amazon businesspersons to set up their own Amazon Store is to encourage more sales – sales with their existing customers, and sales with their brand-new customers. If you make your Amazon Store a really appealing place to be, and a pleasant shopping experience, more sales will come. It’s a very accessible method to shop, and one which purchasers love – so why not go ahead and create that very platform for them to enjoy – and buy from you?
Your Amazon Store is not restricted to desktops, either. The mobile shopping experience is second to none, so you can capture your prospective shoppers’ interest whether they are browsing your Amazon Store on their own computer, or mobile, or out and about.
Advantages of an Amazon Store
- Easy to set up, with customizable templates for you to simply follow, and populate with your products.
- You don’t need to be a web developer! Setting up an Amazon Store does not require any coding knowledge or skill whatsoever. Bonus.
- Visually rich, Amazon Stores are a pleasant place for your customers to be – as they immerse themselves in your product images and videos.
- You can create more than one page of products, depending on your own unique business requirements.
- Your Amazon Store can be tailored exactly to your own specifications, making it unique to your business brand, and to stand out from the rest of the competition.
- You have the option of social sharing integration with your Amazon Store, to drive more engagement, traffic, traction to your products, and, of course, sales.
How to get started with your Amazon Store
Amazon make it simple for you to start an Amazon Store, and it is just a case of following the steps online. The requirements before are that you will need to register with Amazon Brand Registry Program. This Brand Registry confirms your business has a professional platform, and offers you many perks, such as advertising tools and marketing features.
When you submit an application for the Brand Registry, you’ll need to go ahead and give these details:
- The name of your business brand
- The serial number of your business brand with the USPTO
- The names of the countries in which your items are produced and delivered.
- The picture of your brand name on an item
- The picture of your items’ label
- The picture of your item
Bear in mind that Amazon only register those businesses which have a registered trademark. These trademarks must be issued by the WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) in these areas:
- USA
- Brazil
- India
- Japan
- France
- Germany
- Spain
- UK
- European Union
- United Arab Emirates
- Canada
- Mexico
- Australia
- Italy
Usually, the Brand Registry procedure takes from 24hrs to a month. Which is quite a wide timeframe, but being on the Amazon Brand Registry is a necessity, so this step cannot be skipped if you want to become an Amazon Store Seller. You’ll receive a code which you can use for verification purposes.
Some of the advantages of the Amazon Brand Registry Scheme are:
- Correct product listings
- Different product listings
- Product variants
- More product sales
- Removes bad product listings
- Ensures authenticity of products
- Delivers enhanced image searches
- Delivers shoppers accurate information about a product
- Enables complete management of your own brand at all times over your item listings
- Enables ASIN bulk search features to save time
Once you have gone through these steps, creating your own brand Amazon Store is entirely free.
You should already be in possession of an Amazon professional seller’s account to be able to register with Amazon’s Brand Registry Scheme, and subsequent creation of the Amazon Store.
Amazon Store Insights
You will be keen to learn about the interactions and engagements with your product pages on your new Amazon Store.
Your Amazon insights include:
- Sales
We all want to know how many sales we are making, right? Navigate to the Sales toggle, and you’ll be presented with the predicted sales on your products in the last two weeks. Amazon produces sales data insights not on the day of sale, but the day of the buyers’ visit.
- Units Sold
The Units Sold tab displays the predicted units that your buyers purchased in the last two weeks.
- Views
The overall amount of views that a single product page obtained. You can filter this to display different periods of time, if you so wish, and this data does include views on a repeat basis.
- Views or Visitor displays the amount of average unique pages that have been seen by a shopper daily.
- Daily Visitors
The overall number of unique devices or people who saw the pages of your Amazon Store in a single day.
As of last year (2019), you can now view insights data in 6 new ways from the Amazon Insights platform – these include Sales/Visit, Sales/Visitor, Orders, Orders/Visit, Units/Order, and Sales/Order .
Businesses are allowed to see and export the top 100 source tags (previously this was limited to 30 source tags).
You can use these insights to make informed business choices, based on the aims of the business.
Amazon Stores provide a whole new opportunity of a way to sell on Amazon. And for most, this opportunity can be very successful and lucrative.
It is undeniably the next step for the Amazon entrepreneurs who are ready to explore the potential Amazon has to offer its sellers, as many have done before (and will no doubt continue to do!)
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, this article will have given you the head start you need to your Amazon selling business.
The process of starting your online selling business on Amazon is not exactly difficult, but some fore-thought is required to enable a smooth process, and being really clear about which route you are planning before starting your Amazon seller’s account is crucial. Make informed decisions along the way to encourage the smoothest of sailing!
