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4 Tips to Becoming a Successful Amazon Seller
With eBay undergoing its most dramatic transformation since its inception, many sellers are looking at Amazon as a potential marketplace for their goods. There are many good reasons to look at Amazon. It is a large marketplace, larger than eBay. Its customers are less bargain sensitive than eBay customers. And Amazon handles all the payment processing so there are never any issues about a winner making a payment.
But Amazon is not the same marketplace as eBay. And just as there are specific steps to take to be a success on eBay, there are specific steps that need to be taken on Amazon.
Amazon offers a few different account levels for merchants. The first tip is deciding which account level is right for you. The regular account level – the marketplace seller – is an account that lets you list product that is currently represented in Amazon’s catalog for free. That’s right, there are no listing fees. You only pay when you make a sale. The second account level – the pro merchant account – is much more flexible. It allows you to list items that are not currently in Amazon’s catalog. And it gives you a discount of $0.99 per sold item off the fees charged to a regular marketplace seller. So if you make more than 40 sales a month and/or find yourself needing to make new Amazon catalog entries, the pro merchant account is the way you want to go.
The second tip is to understand that creating a listing on Amazon is very different than on eBay. Amazon is totally catalog based. You need to find the exact product in Amazon’s catalog to match the item you have for sale and then you tell Amazon that you have one or more of that particular item. If your item is not in the catalog, you cannot sell it on Amazon (unless you have a pro merchant account which allows you to create new catalog entries.)
The third tip is to be sure that you rank the condition of your product accurately. You can identify if it is new, slightly used or more than slightly used. They have several levels of condition to help you choose the proper condition to convey to potential buyers. Additionally, they allow you to describe the condition of the product to convey further details to your customer. Unlike eBay, this descriptive text that you can add must be focused on the condition of the product. It is not designed for you to insert a “salesy” message.
The fourth and final tip is on pricing. You need to price your product to be competitive for that specific item. This is going to be determined both by the sales rank of the product (viewable from the product description) and the number of competitors. If a product has a very low sales rank number, it sells on Amazon very well and that means that third party sellers don’t need to worry too much about being the least expensive offering. Anything in the lower to mid price ranges will generally sell pretty quickly. Conversely if the sales rank number is very high, that means that the item sells only occasionally on Amazon. In this instance, you will want to price your item as competitively as possible to ensure that the buyer chooses you rather than another seller.
Of course, if there are not many sellers, you have more flexibility in the price you ask if the item is selling very well on Amazon. So understanding sales rank and its effect on the selections of offerings of that item available for sale will be very important for your success.
eBay sellers should embrace Amazon as a second sales channel for their goods. As long as they recognize that Amazon is a different marketplace with its own set of rules and methods for doing business, they can do very well on Amazon. In fact, many eBay sellers find that they do much better on Amazon especially since there are never any listing fees to slowly erode profits on the slower selling items. With their no cost marketplace seller account, learning how to sell on Amazon is truly risk free.