Amazon is one of the largest marketplaces in the world – and it’s accessible to anyone who wants to sell on it. Today, we’re sharing 10 essential tips to help you skyrocket your earnings when selling on Amazon.
1. Win the Buy Box
A massive part of making sales on Amazon is winning the Buy Box. This places you in the position where most consumers will purchase from you as you’re the main merchants that they will see. Although the algorithm for the Buy Box is kept under lock and key, there are a few things that help to boost your rank.
This is the Amazon Buy Box. As you can see, one merchant “wins” the Buy Box and is the default merchant customers buy from. The alternate sellers underneath are also winning the buy box – the New (7) merchants are the ones “losing”.
Tricks to win the Buy Box:
- Using Amazon FBA. Amazon’s Buy Box is calculated using seller’s metrics and how good the customer experience merchants provide. Fulfillment (the shipping out of a product) is one such aspect of the customer experience. If you use Amazon FBA, Amazon take care of fulfilment for you – which usually gets you higher on the Buy Box.
- Landed Price. Although the listing price is also a factor, the landed price (everything once Shipping and VAT is included) is a higher factor. If you list a product for £10 lower than everyone else, but charge £10 for shipping you’ll gain no advantage.
- Seller Rating. Amazon operates on a point system rating – perfect sales are worth a certain amount of points and problematic sales result in a deduction of points. These points accumulate to form the brackets that merchants are put into. Sellers with a higher rating (ie in a higher bracket) will be favoured in the Buy Box.
- Lower Shipping Time.
2. Get a Pro merchant subscription
Amazon sellers with a Pro Merchant subscription don’t have to pay individual transaction fees. You’ll pay £28.75 a month to list products on Amazon and you’ll be able to benefit from several perks exclusive to Pro Merchants. These include uploading listings in bulk, enhanced reporting to make managing sales easier, the ability to list high value items with no pricing limits and the freedom to add new, unique listings to the Amazon Marketplace.
3. Handle customer issues
Bad feedback can be the difference between sales and losing customers to competitors who respond to inquiries in a quick and friendly manner. However, ignoring customer issues can lead to bigger problems than just losing a customer or two – negative feedback will put off potential customers. In addition to that, this will affect your Buy Box rankings, which will harshly knock your earnings.
4. Craft well-written, optimized product descriptions
Your product descriptions should be optimised so that both search engines and Amazon users can find it – so having one sentence is not enough!
Always remember that too much information can be as off-putting as too little so limit your descriptions to around 200 words. Focus on the features and benefits of the product and use bullet points to detail the most important aspects of your product that customers need to know. Your product title should also include the kind of keywords that bring potential customers straight to your product without having to search too hard.
5. Support your products with social content
It won’t do you any harm to spread the work about your online business through social media channels. In fact, using Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other platforms to share the products you’re selling on Amazon can really help increase views, and engaging product videos can show potential customers why they should be buying from you.
This has the additional benefit of allowing you to develop an audience for your brand, should you ever choose to leave Amazon. One drawback to selling on the Amazon marketplace is that Amazon is very strict on keeping their customers Amazon customers as opposed to your customers. This means that you can’t draw customers to your separate website outside the Marketplace – which makes you reliant upon Amazon for business. Building a social following is a great way to maintain identity in your customer’s eyes.
6. Consider using FBA
Amazon FBA is Amazon’s fulfilment service. This works by shipping your stock to an Amazon warehouse, where they store your goods, package them and ship them to your customers. Not only is this easy (and often cost-effective) – FBA sellers usually see a boost in earnings as they gain access to the “Prime” customers as their goods are now covered under Amazon Prime. In addition to all this, using Amazon FBA also helps you to win the buy box!
Even better . . . if you import your stock from another country, we can import it directly to Amazon for you!
7. Make sure that you know and are following the rules
Amazon have a lot of rules in place for how you can sell using their marketplace. It’s better to know them in advance than unwittingly break them and be booted off the platform.
A great list of things to avoid doing on Amazon is: Selling on Amazon: The Seven Deadly Sins That Lead to Suspension
8. If you are using FBM (fulfilled by merchant), ship out as quickly as possible
This is for a multitude of reasons. One: you’re competing with people that use FBA and have the man-power of Amazon behind them, so you need to stay in the race. However, your shipping time actually affect how Amazon views your shop and whether you’re prioritized.
In addition to this, customers can (and will!) complain that your goods took so long to reach them. This negative feedback drags down your account and . . . well, you don’t really want to find out.
9. Ensure that your product is high-quality!
Ensuring that your product is high-quality is essential for success on Amazon. Reviews, ratings and comments all mean that prospective customers will know if your product is low quality – which means that you’ll have less people buying it.
Choosing the right manufacturer for your goods is essential to producing high quality goods to sell on Amazon. While it may sometimes feel like searching for a needle in a haystack, there are a few ways that you can easily ensure that you’re working with a trustworthy supplier and sourcing high quality goods. We have two posts on this topic that are particularly helpful to read:
12 Unmissable Tips For Sourcing High Quality Products For Your E-Commerce Store
Controlling Quality Issues When Importing From China
10. Market your goods outside of just Amazon
Although the Amazon marketplace is vast with an active userbase, it’s still worth marketing your products outside of Amazon. Driving traffic to your goods means more sales, which means more money! Marketing is an essential aspect of any business – and a business run on Amazon is no different!
Contact Shippo
We hope this quick list of tips was helpful – now go out there and utilize them! If you have any questions about selling goods on Amazon or importing in general, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
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