Basics Of Selling On Amazon

Amazon is currently the 11th most visited website in the world, attracting 2.2 billion visits in just April 2023 alone. There is little wonder why there is so much interest from people wanting to capitalise upon this level of internet traffic by selling their own products on Amazon, to make extra money! 

How to Avoid Falling For A Scam

Every type of legitimate business venture has those who seek to attempt to scam and deceive you, you should always take precautions to reduce your chances of falling for a scam. When you get to the product-sourcing stage you should make sure that the company selling you those products is legitimate. A good way to find this out is by looking at customer reviews of that merchant, Alibaba a global online shopping marketplace has customer reviews and has a pledge to reimburse you if your purchased products don’t arrive or are not in the condition described. If you think you may have been the victim of a scam you should get in contact with a fraud recovery professional to maximise the chances of you getting your money back.

Amazon FBA vs Amazon FBM

Amazon FBA

Amazon FBA stands for Fulfilled By Amazon. This is where Amazon will receive the products you send, store, pack, and send them directly to customers. This can be convenient for you and your customers, as selling on Amazon FBA is an autonomous process. Once Amazon has received your products and you have uploaded all the relevant information about them onto the Amazon website. This option can be convenient for you if you don’t want to commit too much of your day-to-day time to your business. Once your product is live on Amazon and you have marketed your product you can almost sit back and watch the sales come in most cases. 

 

Amazon FBA is also great for your customers as they can receive almost guaranteed next-day shipping to their address anywhere in the UK from one of Amazon’s fulfilment centres dotted around the UK. Speedy delivery to customers also helps you as a seller on Amazon as products that are sold on FBA and are therefore available to be delivered faster are also shown more prominently to customers. You may have noticed that some Amazon FBA pages have multiple sellers selling the same product. Those sellers are competing with each other for the buy box that customers click to put the item in their shopping cart. 

 

Amazon FBA has many positive attributes for sellers to save them time and money in some cases and they know this! This is why they charge a premium of normally around 30-40% of the selling price of a product. However, this can depend upon the size and weight of the product.

This is charged as a fee that is automatically taken out of the selling price of your product before the seller receives anything. This is why it is important for sellers to understand the fee system that Amazon imposes, to ensure that you as a seller will still make a profit. It is not uncommon for sellers to find success in selling their products and then do the calculations and realise that they are actually going into the red every time a customer buys their product. Selling on Amazon is competitive so if you were to raise your prices you may find that your sales go down as customers shop with your competitors instead.

Amazon FBM

Amazon FBM stands for Fulfilled By Merchant, and the merchant is you! This is where you will have all of the stock you are selling to customers to hand, meaning that it will be either in your house, garage or a storage place that you pay for. Not only do you handle the storage of your items but you are also responsible for coordinating the shipping of purchased items to your customers. For this to work you need a thermal label printer so you can print out the address information of your customers. Another maybe more striking consideration you need to make is ensuring that you have boxes to send out your products to customers to give your items the best chance of making it to the customer in good condition. There are a number of websites that sell boxes to people with e-commerce businesses, just make sure that you already have a good idea of the box size you are after before purchasing anything. Picking a box size that is just slightly larger than the product you are sending can help you reduce shipping costs; So that each item you sell will be slightly more profitable.      

Research, Research, and Research

It may not surprise you but starting basically any business requires you to ensure you have done your research. If you are still in the pondering stage before you start your Amazon e-commerce journey it would be beneficial for you to understand the customer demand levels for different types of products and categories. Using analytics tools such as Jungle Scout or Helium 10 allows you to access useful information such as a fairly accurate estimate of how many customers are purchasing each specific product. You can also find an estimate of the revenue that the product is making. You can use those two pieces of information to start to understand if it is worth it for you as a new seller to get into that market or not. Some product categories and types of products may already have too much competition for the number of buyers in the market, by doing your research you can identify these markets and avoid them. 

 

Another function of Jungle Scout or Helium 10 is the keyword research functionality which allows you to search for a keyword such as shoes, the keyword research tool will then show you data for that specific keyword and other keywords that are relevant to the keyword. So for example you search for “coffee” the keyword research tool may come up with suggestions such as “coffee cup”, “coffee beans” and “luxury coffee”. You will be shown data for all of the keywords you enter and the keyword suggestions; from this you will be able to see how many people search for that keyword on Amazon, and how competitive those keywords are. Your goal is to find keywords that have a high amount of people searching for them and low competition and associate your product with them on the Amazon back pages. This means that your product will more likely rank higher in the Amazon search rankings, so you will have an increased chance of more sales because your product is more visible to customers. 

What Is The Best Way To Learn More About How to Sell On Amazon

This depends on your learning style. But a combination of YouTube videos, online articles and online forums. YouTube can be particularly good when you are first learning about selling on Amazon as when you are first learning about a subject you won’t necessarily know what you don’t know already. YouTube can be great for this as there are many YouTubers who will take you step by step in a series of YouTube videos telling you things that you need to know and what to look for to increase your chances of becoming a successful seller yourself. This helps give you a baseline of knowledge, allowing you to have enough insight into the topic to search for what you don’t already know.

In Conclusion

Selling on Amazon can be a good way to achieve passive income, however it requires you to carry out a lot of research to get up and running, whether you want to sell tech, souvenirs, clothes or anything in between. But this should not put you off, there is plenty of information out there you just have to find it.