How do you sell on Amazon? | Ep. #8

Tony wants to know: How do you sell on Amazon?

How do you sell on Amazon?
If you want to start selling on Amazon, here are the steps you must take:
Go to Amazon seller central, create an account as a seller, if you don’t already have one. (Here is a tip for you. don’t go to dot com, open seller central dot Amazon .ca, and open your account here. Now the benefits will be exactly the same and you can still sell in all north America, but instead of 49 bucks you will only pay 29)
That saves you 200 and something dollars each year when you go pro.

Before you list your product, there are a few things you should know;
– are you going to ship the product yourself, or is Amazon going to fulfill it for you
– is it your own product or PL or are you WS RA or OA?
– Does your product have a unique bar code UPC

click add a new product and now is where the fun starts.
Actually, let’s back up one second… on the top of the screen towards the center, you should see a little country flag with a drop-down to amz . ca, .com and .mx which is for Mexico etc
Make sure to pick your country first… elaborate.

Now that you chose the correct country you will go to inventory > add new product
It will give you the option to select the category ( pick the best cat that fits your product)

Now you will see the listing page with some mandatory fields ( marked in red)
Jump right in to the vital info tab
– This is where you will enter the title and your mandatory UPC
– Go to your offer and enter your price and even the sale price if you wish to sell lower at first to gain some sales velocity
– Pictures, This is super important. The north American audience buys with their eyes.
The title and the 5 bullet point will allow people to find you, but the pictures are more than likely what is going to sell your product.
Take into consideration amz’s rules for pictures. The main has to be at least 1000 pixel on 1 side and I think 800 on the other ( I usually do 1500 x 1500 max (so it’s not slow loading), have a white background, and nothing else except the product. Make sure the product takes over 80% of your picture size.

– Now we go over to the description, where the curious enough the description is not the most important thing. The 5 bullet points are the most important thing on this tab, and one of the top 3 most important things of the entire listing.
Make sure to use all 5
Showcase the benefits of using your product, show them what the product will do for them ( The result they get by using it) (Give a few examples like weight loss pills, will make them be skinny, not “this package contains 28 pills” or “scientifically tested in a lab”. Those are important also, but you can add them into the description.
The description allows 2000 char and I advise you to use them all. Here you can you a couple a very limited sample of HTML like bolding letters and creating paragraphs.
Now, you must remember that Amazon is a search engine, and like any other SA they depend on keywords or search terms to deliver to the client a good experience.
So you need to make sure your title and bullet points are filled with juicy keywords related to your product. If you are selling a spatula, don’t use keywords like a smart phone, or waterproof phone cover.

– Now you will enter some back end keywords on the keywords/ search term tab. This has changed several times over the last couple years. It used to take up to 5000 char at one point, but at the time of this recording it takes 2000 characters (which should be more than enough to trigger some indexation) I mean, you can get most if not all your keywords indexed, but lets be honest, not all will be 1st page results, and some that will become 1st page results could be not converting search terms. so you gotta keep playing around until you find the best converting ones for you.
One way you can go about it is to look up the converting keywords for your competitors with a tool like Scope.

The last tab you will enter your product size, shipping packaging size, etc
These are not super important, but I advise you to fill all fields that apply to you, because a 1% increase in visitors or conversions here, another 2% there will add up pretty quick when you start having big numbers.

Now that you have your listing done, you can send inventory to Amazon FBA, so your listing becomes prime eligible and amz will store it in their warehouse for free (Elaborate) and ship it to your customer for you.

That’s about it, for a quick overview, and if you are still wondering why I told you to go to Amazon and not to start with your own store, it’s because they have the buyers (370 million of them, ALREADY WITH CREDIT CARDS ON FILE AND A HUGE TRUST for the platform) So you don’t need to spend huge money and time developing your customer base and finding traffic. You use Amazon’s and they only charge you 15% OF THE GROSS SALE plus a pick and pack fee.

Hope this helps, and you go out there and totally kill it.

I would love a follow up in 5 or 6 months to let me know how it worked out for you.

This is the answer to:  How do you sell on Amazon?