Sell on Amazon like a pro – These tips help you to succeed

Tuesday, 16. February 2021 | 0 Comments
A quarter of all sales in online retail in Germany are generated by Amazon. This makes the online store the biggest in the country. It also opens up the possibility for external sellers to sell products via Amazon and generate revenue. In the following article, we will show you how this works and how you can maximize your profit just like one of 40,000 entrepreneurs on the platform.

 

1. Choosing the right product

Before registering you should have already decided on a product that you want to sell on Amazon. It is important here, that your product does not depend on a season or a current trend. It should be interesting for customers in the long-term, so it generates profit for you constantly. Here, it is worth taking a look at already existing and popular categories on the platform: These include, for example, technology, household, fitness, pet supplies, and toys. In each category, there are so-called “bestsellers”, which are marked as such because they are bought particularly often and rated well. Based on these favorites, you can see what your target group likes to buy and what features they particularly value.

The best would be to choose a product that you already have some knowledge about. This allows you to optimize your product and stand out from the crowd of other sellers. Also, you can create an excellent description, which is often the decisive criterion for a purchase decision. The product should be neither too expensive nor too cheap. Very expensive products are rarely chosen, and particularly cheap products give the impression of being of inferior quality. In addition to that, the profit margins here are so low that a large number of products would have to be sold to generate sufficient sales.

2. Registration as seller in Amazon

The next step is to register as a seller. There are different rates here that you can choose, depending on your planned sales behavior. If you only want to earn a little extra money, the “Individual” rate is a good choice: Here you pay 0.99 euros for each item sold. If you want to sell commercially, you can choose the “Professional” rate, which comes as a flat rate option for 39 euros a month. Here, the costs even include additional features such as an optimized overview of the sales figures and the possibility to place advertisements.
Finally, you should collect all the payout reports provided by Amazon in your seller account to be able to account for all transactions if necessary. If you are unsure, various programs, such as GetMyInvoices, can help here, simplifying the preparatory accounting. Invoices are automatically collected and even matched with the corresponding bank transaction. This saves you both time and annoying paperwork.
 

3. Compliance with Amazon guidelines

 
The online giant has a reputation to lose. That’s why Amazon pays such close attention to its sellers’ compliance with its policies. Failure to do so can result in the blocking of products or even entire merchant profiles. Therefore, you should know the platform’s rules even before you start selling.

Speaking of rules – Amazon’s algorithm decides which products appear first and are therefore ordered most often by customers. How exactly these algorithms works is not known. However, excellent reviews from customers and a high number of sales can help you get to a higher position in a search query.

4. The international marketplace

Amazon is a sales platform that operates internationally with its Marketplace. The nearby environment alone offers enough opportunities to expand abroad and thus increase the reach of your products. Mastering one or more foreign languages is undoubtedly an advantage here – but not a must. In the so-called Pan EU program, Amazon takes care of both the processing and the customer service. Any language barriers are thus a thing of the past.
 

5. The customer is king

Amazon is known for its excellent customer service. Besides the wide range of products, it is one of the main reasons why so many people trust online stores. Therefore, the platform pays close attention to receive returns or bad reviews as rarely as possible. Especially with new sellers, who often still have room for improvement, bad ratings can quickly end up unforgivable: If the ratings are repeatedly negative, you have to reckon with a request from Amazon to improve them. If this does not happen, the account may be blocked.

Therefore, especially at the beginning of your activity, you should pay attention to the impeccable quality of your products. It is also helpful to enclose a small note with your goods, on which you ask to contact customer service in case of dissatisfaction, to solve the problem. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos advises starting with the customer’s wants and needs and working backward from there to offer a product that truly meets the buyer’s needs.

If you don’t trust yourself with sufficient capacity, you can rely on “Fulfillment by Amazon” (FBA): This service on the part of Amazon offers you its own storage capacities and also the shipping and customer service is taken over by Amazon.

6. Fast, faster, Amazon

Those days when an online order would take several weeks to arrive are long gone. Amazon is also a pioneer in this area and has not only made delivery within two days but even on the next or the same day the norm. The expectations of the customers are therefore very high and in your seller account orders are noted that were sent or delivered too late.

If you have your orders processed via FBA, you don’t have to worry about this, because the goods are shipped promptly from Amazon’s warehouse with the Prime label. If you handle the shipping yourself, you can choose the shipping service provider yourself, but you have to expect a delivery time of two to three days. If you manage to ship your products on the same day, you can get the Prime logo and send your goods with Amazon’s shipping labels in the future.

7. Optimizing the product page

You need an impressive product page to offer your products successfully. This should not only contain images and a description as accurate as possible, but also an identification number (EAN) and an article number (SKU). Your images should be displayed in a high resolution and the text should not contain any grammatical or spelling mistakes to guarantee a serious appearance. Your description should also be SEO-optimized, i.e., contain the keywords that buyers search for on Amazon. You can find these keywords, for example, in the titles of successful products of the competition.

 

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