Amazon is a great way to reach a wider audience while listing your product with a trusted brand. Since Amazon is such a big platform, you may be confused about how to start the selling process and how to utilize Amazon to fit your marketing needs. However, selling on Amazon can be made easier and more effective by following a few simple steps.
In this episode of Modern Marketing, Dr. Ryan Lowe is joined by our Director of Business Development Matt Roman to provide some tips on how you can start selling your products on Amazon. Matt has served as Purchasing Manager for LivPrime, an Amazon FBA business, and Executive Account Manager for Explosive Advertising Inc.
Subscribe to energyhill on YouTube!
The first step is determining if you want to be a full-on FBA or be a merchant. FBA, or Fulfillment by Amazon, is a service that Amazon provides to sellers to aid with product storage, packaging, and shipping. If you have a small product, FBA is a highly profitable option; you’ll easily eat the fees.
However, if the product is something big or oversized — for example, a canoe — then it would be more profitable to sell as a merchant. Otherwise, the fees will be too significant and it wouldn’t be worth it from a business standpoint.
It isn’t necessarily the size of the product, but its profitability. Check your profitability and margin, consider the fees, and determine which option is right for you. If possible according to your business model, you should utilize FBA.
Incorporating SEO is vital in marketing and naturally, Amazon. You want to optimize your listing with SEO keywords and there are great tools that you can use to assist with identifying those keywords. The more information and SEO you can incorporate into your listing the better.
Keep in mind that Amazon functions in its own ecosystem essentially. As a result, keywords for Google Ads might not be relevant to Amazon.
Helium 10 is a fantastic tool for SEO. “I’ve actually met the guy-- he’s great. They’ve built it from the ground up to not only launch your brand, your presence and to get your images and descriptions out there; but also, to optimize it to make sure that over time you are still ranking and indexing for the keywords you want, and get your ACoS down.” -- Matthew Roman shares.
Jungle Scout is a useful platform for resellers and for searching for profitable listings.
RevSeller is another great tool to consider. This chrome extension monitors best-seller rank and informs you how your product stacks up against other competition. For example, if you use RevSeller for a product that you’re selling on Amazon, it will compare your product with the other numerous products on Amazon and tell you specifically where it lands down the line.
Amazon uses both UPS and FedEx as shipping methods. From a seller standpoint, you will need to determine which works best for you. The QA — or quality assurance — process is truly an in-house decision and reflects what your business prioritizes. You can either do it yourself or hire a prep center to ship your product for you.
"For us, we had an account with UPS, and it made sense to use that anyway," Matt Roman said. "As far as your QA process, we took QA extremely seriously when we did it.
"We wanted to make sure that when the product was showing up to the person's house, it's everything they wanted it to be. There are no dents, no scratches, it looks great, it functions properly. It's an in-house determination, so if you want to do it yourself, you can. You can also hire prep centers, which are basically centers where they'll take care of your products per your guidelines and they'll send it out for you."
Amazon’s seller forum is a great community and resource of information that can assist sellers with keeping up to date with new or changing procedures. In addition, it's an opportunity to engage with like-minded Amazon sellers.
A good example is Amazon Prime Day; in the seller forum, you’ll be able to learn when Amazon Prime Day is months before Amazon would inform you.
Don’t expect the Amazon support team to fix the problem on the first try. Be patient and be prepared that the issue will take a while to solve. Keep any conversations from support so that should the same issue arise, you’ll be able to send the emails to their support team for a faster resolution.
"Shout out to Sean who is awesome and solved my problem in like 20 minutes," Matt Roman said.
There's plenty of advantage to partnering with a marketing agency when setting up your Amazon store. You don't have to do it alone. Here at energyhill, we would take care of all of those components for you and lobby [or advocate; Ryan said lobby in the vid] for you and your product.
We are a creative advertising and marketing company with excellent customer service and experience working with world-class brands. Contact us today for a free quote on how we can help your business grow.
