A Comprehensive Guide To Becoming A Successful Amazon Seller

Sharline Shaw

Becoming a successful Amazon seller is not something that happens overnight.

You have to familiarize yourself with Amazon to create a strategy that will amp up your selling journey.

It’s also not just about posting a product and waiting for buyers to stumble upon it.

More importantly, you must exert a lot of effort.

Becoming A Successful Amazon Seller

What Can Amazon Offer To Its Sellers?

Aside from helping your business become more profitable, using Amazon is beneficial and easy.

You can use the Seller Dashboard, which simplifies e-commerce for those who have zero experience.

Because it also takes care of the legwork, you can focus on growing your business instead.

Additionally, you get to enjoy the following benefits.

1.Seamless Compliance With Sales Tax

Sellers that ship to nonlocal states must pay sales tax, as mandated by the current economic nexus law.

To make it easier, Amazon collects taxes on behalf of its sellers in compliance with the marketplace facilitator law.

Consequently, this makes filing for taxes a lot easier as the marketplace takes over the responsibility of remitting taxes.

2.More E-commerce Features

Amazon offers numerous features to its sellers, which encourages more sellers to utilize its platform.

With Amazon, sellers can benefit from promoted deliveries, seamless refund and return processes, and prime membership for customers with subscriptions.

On top of that, Amazon has a customer service system that allows access to customers of third-party sellers.

These customer service agents are responsible for handling refunds and other customer queries.

Moreover, this can significantly reduce your responsibilities as a seller as Amazon handles the shipping and delivery of the parcel.

It gives customers a better overall experience while also freeing up time for the sellers.

3.Eliminating The Need To Build A Business Website

Developing a website requires a lot of time and effort. The process can get tedious as it involves designing, testing, and maintenance.

On top of that, building a website of your own requires money.

Fortunately, selling on Amazon takes away the need to develop a website from scratch. All you need to do is leverage the platform and post your products.

4.Leveraging Amazon’s Credibility

Amazon makes a profit through commissions from third-party sellers that post and sell their products on the site.

As a seller, you get to leverage the existing platform and trustworthiness of the brand, making it easier to gain credibility for yourself.

Trying to sell on another less reliable platform might make it harder for you to earn customers’ trust. The same may be true if you just use your website.

It’s no secret Amazon is a brand many people trust.

So when you use Amazon, customers may automatically trust you as they’d unlikely doubt your business is illegitimate or you won’t ship the product at all.

Such a level of credibility is irreplaceable. Because of this feature, sellers can utilize Amazon’s following and brand influence for their benefit.

This business model has allowed Amazon to continue to thrive since 2006.

Today, Amazon continues to grow, and almost half of its revenue was brought by third-party sellers leveraging the platform.

Even during the lockdown, the platform was still able to ship out third-party products regularly.

Thus, it’s safe to say many buyers trust Amazon as well as its sellers.

If you’re an Amazon seller, selling on the platform is a great way to expand your e-commerce business.

Even if you have a website of your own, starting an Amazon account can still pay off because you get to take advantage of its existing customers.

More importantly, you can clear the doubts of customers who may be reluctant to buy from lesser-known e-commerce sites.

How To Become A Successful Amazon Seller

Becoming A Successful Amazon Seller

Being familiar with the opportunity and benefits you can gain from Amazon isn’t enough.

You won’t enjoy all the benefits mentioned above without starting your selling journey.

To help you with this, here are things you can do to become successful in Amazon selling.

1.Make A Seller Account

To be an Amazon seller, you must first have an account.

Go to the website and complete the registration and verification needed for the Amazon Seller account.

If your requirements are complete, this process should take nothing more than just a few minutes. So before you start creating an account, ensure you have the following information at hand:

  • Contact details: You need to provide your phone number and other contact details as Amazon will try to get in touch with you during the registration process. Remember to keep your phone nearby to avoid any delays.
  • Bank information: Signing up to be a seller requires a Pro account. There are also other costs, such as advertising expenses, which you can charge to your credit card. For this purpose, Amazon will ask you to provide your banking details. If you make a sale, Amazon will also need a bank account to transfer the money to.
  • Tax identification details: Because Amazon, along with other marketplaces, now collects taxes, you’ll be required to provide your tax information. This information includes your federal tax ID number, social security number, and state tax ID number. Don’t forget to double-check this to ensure a seamless process.
  • Business information: You should also provide information about your business, including your business address, name, and contact information.
  • Business email address: You need to have an email where Amazon can send you notifications about your account. If you don’t have an email, create one. When done, don’t forget to check your email account during the signing-up process.

2.Figure Out What Product To Sell

Before listing products on the website, determine first the products you want to sell.

If you want to be a wholesale seller, it’s best to read a wholesale guide for Amazon.

On the other hand, if you plan to be a retailer, look for a reliable retailer’s guide.

Be careful with this step as your products will be the bread and butter of your e-commerce business.

Your products will determine what your store would look like and how your business would operate.

Because there’s an almost never-ending list of items, picking a product to sell may be overwhelming. Here are a few things to consider when doing this step:

  • Niche: This is the market with a specific base of customers who are extremely fond of certain products. Operating in a particular market offers an advantage as you’re functioning inside a specific space instead of competing against high-end sellers and brands.
  • Product demand and competition: Once you find a niche, it’s essential to see whether a product is worth selling. You can determine this by analyzing the product’s demand. Make sure customers want to spend money on the product you’re planning to sell and stay away from products with low demand. Thus, avoid products that everyone’s already selling. This way, you can stay away from the competition. To assess demand for the product, check search engines, other SEO tools, and even Amazon listings.
  • Product prices: It’s best to go for a product that won’t require a lot of upfront costs but are sellable at decent amounts. You might get tempted to purchase products that are way too expensive and sell them for an even higher price. But doing so would only reduce the probability of a customer buying them. In turn, this lessens your possibility of succeeding in the business.

3.Pick A Fulfillment Method

Next is to select your fulfillment method. This refers to storing, packing, shipping, and other processes you need to complete to deliver your products to the customers.

For this, you can choose between Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM).

These fulfillment options have their advantages, and knowing them would help you choose the right one for you.

a.Fulfillment By Amazon

FBA enables Amazon sellers to transfer logistics to Amazon’s distribution centers.

This means you don’t need to deal with packing, delivering, and other customer service functions. Other benefits of FBA include the following:

  • Eligibility to be an Amazon Prime member
  • Decreased shipping price
  • Reduced fulfillment responsibility
  • The opportunity of doing fulfillment in multiple channels
  • Chance to take advantage of the Buy Box

b.Fulfillment By Merchant

In contrast to FBA, FBM enables the seller to be hands-on when shipping products.

FBM is a new feature Amazon offers. However, this method only accepts sellers that are proven reliable.

The good thing about FBM is sellers that opt for this method may still be able to sign up for the Amazon Prime membership.

Additionally, sellers shipping heavy materials will have fewer charges as they can be exempt from overweight fees. Here are more advantages of using FBM:

  • Full control over shipment
  • Reduced fees
  • Eligibility for Amazon Prime

4.Consider Ranking Optimization And Buy Box Optimization

Whether it’s ranking optimization or Buy Box optimization, it encompasses different features and benefits, depending on your products.

So the optimization you choose should consider the type of product you’re selling.

Typically, Amazon products fall under three categories and require different optimization strategies:

  • Private label products: Products owned by a single seller are better off with ranking optimization as its focus is ranking on top of search engine result pages. Because you own the product, you have control over its details. These include the title, description, and other relevant information or pictures, which are all helpful for ranking optimization. With this option, you’re more likely to succeed in increasing product visibility.
  • Third-party products: Third-party products, on the other hand, can benefit more from Buy Box optimization as this method relies on enhancing the Buy Box itself. This is the white box at the right side of the product details, which customers use to add products to their carts. However, it’s not available to all sellers. Only the ones with excellent seller metrics can win the Buy Box.

Because you don’t own the product you’re selling, you have less control over the product information you use.

As a result, optimization may be unpredictable, so you need to understand the platform’s algorithm and requirements.

While it isn’t a sure-fire way to win the Buy Box, it’s still best to know them to adhere to the platform’s algorithm.

The importance of doing this is Amazon sales get 82% from the Buy Box.

This is even higher in the case of mobile purchases. This means you’d be more likely to increase your sales with this feature.

  • Products from known brands: Products manufactured by known brands are exempt from Buy Box optimization rules. Therefore, manufacturers should use ranking optimization methods.

5.Advertise As Much As Possible

Aside from optimizing your ranking and Buy Box, you also need to advertise.

This way, you can boost your visibility more, which is essential to gain more traffic. However, you need to go beyond utilizing keywords when using Amazon advertisements.

Here are some things you can consider to ensure success when advertising:

  • Amazon coupons: These would allow you to create compelling promotions, especially for ready-to-buy clients. You can even use them to target customer segments and provide specific or percentage-based discounts.
  • Sponsored brands: With these ads, there are more chances of reaching customers with no final buying decision yet. These banner ads will appear on top of search results, showing your logo, selection of products, and other features that make your brand unique. As a result, clients would become more familiar with your brand and portfolio.
  • Sponsored products: This type of advertising shows your products. This is where keywords are essential so your products will appear on relevant search results. Subsequently, buyers will see your products if they’re related to the keywords they used to search.

By using these various ads, you can reach more potential clients that are in different buying stages. Even if you have to pay for these ads, the return may be higher as you can direct more clients to your listings.

The Bottom Line

While many people make it seem that selling is easy, it is not that easy to become successful in this endeavor.

Opening a seller account and listing products are not enough to earn six digits.

You need the combination of the right products, optimization techniques, and advertising to gain traction.

Try following the guide above and see where it takes you.

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Sharline

Article by:

Sharline Shaw

Hey I'm Sharline, the founder of Leeline Sourcing. With 10 years of experience in the field of sourcing in China, we help 2000+ clients import from China,Alibaba,1688 to Amazon FBA or shopify. If you have any questions about sourcing , pls feel free to contact us.

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