How to sell on Amazon

Amazon is one of the largest online marketplaces where brands can meet with their target clients and sell their services.

Amazon retail is still on the rise as more businesses reach out to their customers through Amazon. 

The above is proof that Amazon is a must-use site to increase your brand awareness and generate more sales for your business.

But the question is do you know how to sell on Amazon? Do you have a strategy to tap into the power of Amazon to grow your business?

Well, if you don’t know how to sell then this article is for you. You will know all about the ins and out of Amazon so you can lean on its influence and grow your business empire.

Ready to learn? Let’s start.

Open Amazon account

You must have an account before you can use Amazon services. Amazon has two business accounts that you can create depending on how you want to market your business.

1. Amazon seller central account
2. Amazon vendor central account

We will talk a bit about each of these accounts.

Amazon seller central account

For this account, business brands or merchants sell their products directly to customers through the Amazon website. 

You reach directly to amazon customers and sell your services or products. You act as a marketplace or a third-party seller. 

You can use this seller central account and let Amazon do all your business operations through the Amazon FBA program.

How the FBA program works

Through the FBA( fulfillment by Amazon) program businesses gibe Amazon power to make orders, shipping, customer care, delivering and receiving orders on their behalf.

Here is how the system works.

Brands sent their products to Amazon. Since Amazon will be selling the goods on your behalf, you first sent them the products you want them to sell. But before this, you must have your seller central account.

Create product listings. Add your products to the Amazon account. You can add one product at a time or all of them in bulk. 

This is done through your inventory-management integration with Amazon API.

Prepare your products. Since your products are to be transported to Amazon warehouses for storage before the sale, they need to be ready. 

Ensure all your products are secure before they are transported. Once everything is ready to transport, ship your products to the Amazon warehouse ready to be sold to the end customers. 

Amazon will let you know where you will send your products. They have different warehouses for storage.

Your product sales. When a customer orders your product Amazon takes the order, packs and delivers the product to the customer. 

Amazon Prime customers receive many benefits and have increased business sales. Since Amazon handles your product sales, it takes care of your customer concerns.

Here are some of the awesome benefits businesses enjoy with the FBA program. The program comes with its costs, disadvantages, and benefits. Check out below.

Here is the FBA pricing model.

And here are the storage charges of the program.

Here are some disadvantages of this program.

• It can take time before you make significant profits
• You will need to have specific ways to update your product inventory.
• You give most of your product control to Amazon as they do all the hassle work for your business.
• You need to be in constant check for your inventory especially during holiday seasons when there are more sales.
• The program is not free and it can eat into your profit margins and affect your business if most of your products are inexpensive.

Amazon collects all your product sales for two weeks. They deduct their charges and deposit the rest of the cash to your account.

Tips on how to successfully sell on FBA Amazon account

Build a personal brand

This is one great way you can stand up on amazon. Clients like to engage and do with reputable brands online. 

Have a professional business website and include your customer testimonials. This helps build more trust with your potential customers and engage them in your business.

Understand your target buyers and offer high-quality products that help them solve their pains.

Research your competitor

You are not the only business in Amazon. Before you join the program research the type of products your competitors offer and know the most profitable ones. 

You can use tools like AMZ Scout to gather product sales information.

Then ship to amazon the products clients want and those that have high profits. Consider your product sales rank and optimize products that have a high sales rank.

Don’t go all in the program

You can start by testing the waters. Place a handful of your products on the program. Ensure you organize and streamline your products in the program.

Leverage on the data of the sales to increase your profits and include more products to the program.

Have high-quality product photos

Quality photos attract buyers to your products. Your photos are the only way buyers can learn about your products online as they can see the picture of the product. 

Ensure you have clear quality photos that impress and catch your buyer’s attention. 

You can see the above photos are clear and attractive. Optimize your product titles and include keywords target clients use when they search for products online.

Selling directly to Amazon customers

If you don’t want Amazon to sell for your through their FBA program, you can sell your products yourself. 

If you use this approach, you will have all the control over pricing, shipping, return policy, and others. 

You can use this approach to give detailed information about your business policies that can strengthen the bond between you and the customers and lead to more sales.

You can find more Amazon Seller Tools in this blog.

Here are some things to do with this account

Protect your business with Amazon Brand registry

If you are not careful other businesses can use your business details on Amazon to sell their fake products. This can ruin your reputation and negatively affect your brand sales.

You need to protect your business with the Amazon brand registry. 

It helps brands build trust and sale their business by protecting their business trademarks on Amazon. Check out some of its benefits below.

Read this article to learn more about the Amazon brand registry.

Other things to do with your account

Here are things that you must do to increase your chances of selling on Amazon.

Update your product information

You need to offer your potential buyers all the information they need about your products. If you have new products you are offering let your potential clients know about them. 

This will help you build more trust with the customers as they know you care for them and want to give them the best products or services. 

See the product information for the product below.

Explain your pricing models

Clients hate unexpected charges during purchase. You need to give your potential customers all the costs they expect in the product buying process. Clients trust you more if you are honest with them.

Let the potential client know about the return policy, your shipping prices and strategies to help them plan their purchases in the best way.

Provide business name and logo

Your online selling journey is a trust-building process. You need to use all the ways you can to earn your clients’ trust. 

One way to achieve this is to have a clear business name and logo. Use your logo on your website and across your social media accounts to build credibility with buyers.

Contact information

Customers will always have questions about the products they need to be answered. Ensure you include your contact information they can use to reach you. 

Amazon also will be updating you with notifications or technical updates and all need to be in touch with you and your business. 

You also need to have a working bank account where Amazon will send your payment from the product sales.

Amazon Vendor Central Account

This account is referred to as a first-party seller account. You sell your business products to Amazon on a wholesale basis. 

You only open this account through invitation by Amazon. 

After the invitation, you create a vendor central account, and you act as a product supplier to Amazon. 

Once you supply the products Amazon has ordered, they pay you and then sell the products on their terms. Some products have high demand all the time. 

Amazon selects brands that create such types of products and sends them in an invitation to create a vendor account so they can sell their products to Amazon.

Amazon also invites new brands that create attractive and high-in-demand products. 

When amazon identifies your business and sees it could be a potential client, they send you an invitation through email. 

They express their interest to sell your product. If you are interested they go ahead and explain their business terms of working.

You can enroll for the Amazon Vine Program where you can collect product reviews to help you offer better products, increase buying chances and generate more cash.

Amazon retail analytics

With the vendor central account, you can access retail analytics where you can learn more about things like:

• Market trends to improve your business sales on Amazon
• Geographic performance to know places where your products have a high demand
• Customer purchase behavior so you can know how to plan your marketing strategy.
• You access customer reviews on your product so you can improve and provide better products.

With the vendor central account, you can place your wholesale product price when listing your products. 

If Amazon is not okay with your pricing they can ask you to adjust it. You can offer the same pricing as them or lower a little bit. 

However, if you don’t want their pricing at all you can place your product stock as unavailable.

You are free to use product display ads with vendor central account which is only available to brands with vendor central accounts.

However, sponsored brands and product ads are available to both seller central and vendor central accounts. 

If you have a seller account, you will need to enroll in the Amazon brand registry to use sponsored brand ads which are not the case with vendor account.

Amazon presents you with a working contract before you can start using the vendor account. 

Amazon reviews the contract each year. It is important to carefully read the contract before you sign a vendor central account agreement with Amazon. 

You can negotiate the vendor fees, which Amazon refers to as allowances. The last thing you want to see is huge unexpected deductions from Amazon.

The main fees Amazon charges vendor accounts are

• Damage allowance for products which is hard to have stock returns like electronics
• Freight allowances to cater for the cost when transporting products to Amazon warehouse.
• Market development allowance to cater for the catalog maintenance and your product marketing activities.

Tools available to Amazon vendor central accounts

Vendor automation

This tool can be of great help for businesses that use vendor central accounts and do direct fulfillment of their orders. 

It helps you generate shipping labels and confirm your product shipping to Amazon.

Jazva

The software can help with inventory tracking on different channels. Here is what you can get with the tool.

TPSynergy

This software helps improve vendor ratings with EDI document submission. The tool makes it easy to pay customers with automatic invoice submission. 

Here are more awesome services you can get with the help of the TP Synergy tool.

Conclusion

To grow your business sales and ROI, you need to reach out to more customers to sell your products or services. 

Amazon is an amazing place where you reach customers and sell your products. Take action and create an amazon account that will suit your business marketing strategy. 

Most importantly, ensure you deliver products that will help your customers solve their pains as this will build more trust with them. 

They will recommend your products to other buyers, increase brand awareness make more sales and grow your brand online.