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Is it Worth it to Pay For An Amazon Pro Merchant Account?
Amazon.com is the leader in selling books online bar none. I get about 80% of my book sales through Amazon.com and that has kept steady for over a year now. I signed up for Amazon’s Pro Merchant account about a month after I started listing online because I simply thought that I should to make more money. I’m not a huge planner and dished out my money without a thought. In hindsight, it was a good idea, but is it for you?
If you’re not familiar with Amazon’s Pro Merchant account, it consists of a monthly fee at the time of this writing of $39.99/month. Whenever you upgrade your seller account, it will give you a number of different features including the ability to create your own pages for your books if they don’t exist in Amazon’s database, the ability to take a spreadsheet and upload books in large quantities, not having to relist books that expire after a number of days that don’t sell and finally the removal of the $0.99 charge for every book you sell. That one in particular sounds pretty nice, right? You get to save on the buck fee for every book you sell? Just remember, that you are actually paying for that with your $39.99/month. With this in mind, if this sounds good to you and you’re thinking about a Pro Merchant account, keep these things in mind.
1. Do you sell more than 40 books/month?
If you’re paying $39.99/month and saving that $0.99 fee per book, if you’re not selling over 40 books/month, you will be losing money.
2. Do you require bulk uploading functionality?
Do you have a ton of books that you’d just like to put in a spreadsheet and upload to Amazon instead of having to list them one at a time?
3. Do you not want to mess with re-listing your books all the time?
With the Pro Merchant status, you can leave your books on Amazon inevitably, but is it really worth $39.99/month?
4. Do you have any books that don’t exist on Amazon’s site today?
Amazon’s book database is huge and it’s unlikely you have a book not in Amazon’s database already unless it is a very obscure book, but if you do, do you think it’s worth enough to list?
These are all the questions you need to ask yourself before signing up for Amazon’s Pro Merchant account. I hope that I was able to answer any questions that you had and more importantly, help you make an educated decision on if to spend the money on an Amazon Pro Merchant account.