With reports this week suggesting that an increasing number of sellers are now opting to move more of their inventory from eBay to Amazon, this week’s blog will focus on how to sell successfully on Amazon. In previous blog posts, we detailed how you can set up a seller account on Amazon and how you can source products to sell. This week, we are going to look at how to sell successfully on Amazon and ways to boost your Amazon sales and profits.
Seller Tip 1: Improve your Amazon SEO
Think of Amazon as a search engine and you’ll have a better idea of how to strategically approach selling online.
Familarise yourself with the ins and outs of Amazon’s search engine algorithm, and you’ll be in a better position to get your search terms, keywords and copywriting in order.
Seller Tip 2: List your items correctly
Now you know how Amazon’s search engine algorithm works, take some time to research your competition.
Search your items and note how you rank compared to the competition in terms of listing description as well as price.
Seller Tip 3: Price your items competitively
If you’re the most expensive, you’re unlikely to get many sales. If you’re priced too low, you won’t make much profit.
The key is to find the sweet spot between these two. This may be 1p lower than the competition, although note that the Buy Box winner is decided by more factors than solely price.
If you have a large inventory, repricing manually may not be viable so you may want to use repricing software like RepricerExpress to save time.
Seller Tip 4. Choose the right pricing strategy
If you’re selling expensive or inexpensive goods, then you should be pricing as such.
Generally, you don’t want to be 10% more expensive than any Fulfilled by Merchant seller, and you don’t want to be more than a couple pennies less than the least expensive seller.
One exception for the latter is if you see the two of you getting into a price war — back out, because a pricing war usually leaves no winners, and it’s a better idea to rescale your marketing strategy than to keep lowering your prices.
Popular seller strategies including raising your price if your competitor runs out and pricing one penny lower than your competitors.
Seller Tip 5. Identify your most profitable items
Your most profitable items are your cash cows and you want to treat them just as richly as they’ve been treating you.
Analyse your selling reports to identify your profitable items by looking at sell-through rate, profit margins and price trends, and then bring in more to keep maximising your return on investment. Make sure you keep good stock of your hot items.
Seller Tip 6: Customer service
Once you’ve done the hard part and gained a sale, it’s important you don’t drop the ball. Ensure all the order information is correct, package your item appropriately and ship to the address provided. If you use Fulfilment by Amazon, you will only need to ship your items directly to Amazon and they’ll take care of the rest including any returns.
Seller Tip 7. It requires effort and hard work
Just because you’ve got a small handful of moneymakers doesn’t mean the game’s over and you can relax. In fact, far from it. Now that you’ve hit upon a little bit of success, it’s time to dig your teeth in even more firmly.
You’ve shown a knack for finding SKUs that are good profit-earners, and you’ve got to keep diversifying your inventory. Your biggest earners won’t always be that way and if you can find other SKUs to handily step into place after, you’ll be setting yourself up nicely for the future.
Introduce new items slowly by starting off with your existing brands and suppliers to keep an edge of familiarity in place.
Conclusion
Hopefully by following our seven seller tips, you can join many of the existing Amazon Success Stories. Overall, sellers need to abide my Amazon’s rules and guidelines. Failure to do so may result in an account suspension.
As seller tip 7 states success won’t happen overnight and requires effort and hard work. Hopefully we’ve given you some food for thought and sound advice for growing your Amazon business and increasing sales and profts. One final tip is to make sure you’re prepared for sales spikes around Thanksgiving and the Christmas period—you don’t want to run out of your hot products at the busiest time of the year!
