If you’re an online retailer looking to sell on Amazon, this guide is for you. A Guide for Selling on Amazon Amazon is an incredible marketplace, connecting millions of consumers to your products each day. However, it’s highly regulated...
If you’re an online retailer looking to sell on Amazon, this guide is for you.
A Guide for Selling on Amazon
Amazon is an incredible marketplace, connecting millions of consumers to your products each day. However, it’s highly regulated – and with good reason. With so many sellers, you need to have strict selling rules to optimize the customer experience. Otherwise, you’d have wildly different pages from seller to seller, which is jarring for shoppers.
Unfortunately, for many sellers just starting out, this can lead to headaches and delays if you’re not careful, so here’s everything you need to know to have a pain-free selling on Amazon experience.
Getting Started Selling on Amazon
Whether you’re a new brand or just new to selling on Amazon, it’s important to understand how the platform works. There’s a method to the madness, and once you get it, you’ll be able to target your audience better and increase sales. As you look to get started, you’ll want to follow these six key steps.
1. Register Your Trademark
Trademarking your products and brand helps protect your intellectual property, but it can also help you as you begin to sell on Amazon. The trademark can be through the United States Patent and Trademark Office or through another internationally recognized organization, and if you have questions about what is accepted, Amazon lists them on its website. They also offer an IP Accelerator to help you kickstart the trademarking process.
Trademarks are important because it helps give you access to Amazon’s Brand Registry, which helps protect and grow your brand, backed by all that Amazon has to offer you.
2. Create Your Amazon Seller Central Account and Brand Registry
Once you have your trademark or are actively applying through Amazon’s IP Accelerator, you’ll want to set up your Amazon Seller Central account and register your brand with Brand Registry. During this process, you’ll have to answer personal questions to protect against fraud.
You may need to provide identity documents, join a video call, and more, but it’s essential that you complete the registration for both Amazon Seller Central and Brand Registry to get the most out of the Amazon experience.
Brand Registry gives you the tools you need to optimize and grow your sales. It will also help you crack down on any copyright infringement and boost the customer experience. If you want to be successful on Amazon, you have to have access to Brand Registry.
3. Create Listings
Your product page is what entices customers to purchase your product, so you need a great-looking page to convert shoppers to buyers. The two most important features of a listing page are the images and the text.
As you’re choosing photos for your listing, consider the following visual elements.
Product Photography: Make sure your images are clear and properly centered, and fill up the white space. This will ensure your product will look good no matter what device the customer is browsing on. More than one image is ideal to properly showcase your product. Explainer Images: Utilize infographics to provide additional information on your product directly on the images. They can include features, benefits, logos, and any other information that is relevant and helps set your product apart. Videos: Include videos to give a 360-degree view of your product or show it in action. You can repurpose existing videos to maximize their value.
In many cases, the text in the listing can mirror what you showed in your images. However, they are arguably more important because they can be parsed to up your SEO. Make sure your products are accurately linked to your storefront. If your brand is already registered, type it in the dropdown so you can link the listing with your account. If it doesn’t automatically populate, make sure you manually link them to optimize your presence.
Additionally, you want your title and your bullet points to include keywords and phrases. These can also be listed in the backend of your product page. By doing so, you’ll ensure that when customers search those phrases, your products are popping up.
Now that they’ve landed on your page, your product description should compel them to buy. Include features, safety ratings, answers to common questions, and more. This is your place to share why it’s a great product and what makes it different from similar products.
Keep in mind there are some values that cannot be changed after listing. They’re called hardened values, and they include your brand name and the UPC. Even if it looks like you can edit them, you can’t.
If you notice a mistake, you’ll have to create an entirely new listing, and you’ll lose all reviews and sales history for that item. If you have a lot of reviews, you’ll have to start over again to build credibility.
There are also spaces for you to tell your brand story and offer opportunities to purchase more than one product at the same time. These virtual bundles help increase the average order value. You can showcase the deeper breadth of your assortment while encouraging customers to buy more. It’s a win-win.
4. Verify FBA Eligibility
When you use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), you send Amazon the products, and they handle the rest. However, not all products are eligible as some products may be considered hazardous and require additional documentation. After you create your listing, verify the product’s FBA eligibility.
You can do this by creating a dummy shipment. By seeing the process, you will identify any additional work you need to do to get your products shipped. You may need to send product information, testing information, safety data sheets, and more. It may take several business days to process, so the sooner you complete it, the better.
Once that’s set, send in a small number of products, between 50 to 100 items, to start. You’ll be ready to go for your first order!
5. Solicit Reviews
If you’re launching a brand new product, consider participating in Amazon Vine. This is Amazon’s official review program that gives away products in exchange for authentic reviews. Customers are more likely to trust products with reviews, so you can build trust as you establish your foothold. For best results, enroll the maximum number of eligible products into the program, which is currently 30. This should be factored into your first FBA shipment.
Outside of Amazon Vine, you can also request reviews from customers once they have purchased. After a specified window, you can send a targeted email asking them to review the product. On average, this can increase your reviews between two to three times, and the more reviews your product has, the better.
6. Start Advertising
Once your page is ready, and you’ve got some reviews under your belt, it’s time to start advertising!
You want to start small with advertising – crawl, walk, then run. First, focus on your main keywords. There are plenty of tools available that can help you identify what those could be, so if you’re unsure, consider investing to identify those keywords that are relevant to your product. If you don’t, you’ll end up wasting a lot of money.
Once you’ve seen some success and understand keywords, you can start product targeting campaigns and sponsored display. Start small and level up to avoid overspending. Analyze the results to see where you can double down, invest more, or even scale back.
Amazon has a lot of tools available to help you boost your product listing and drive sales, and look for new ones in 2023, including engaging directly with some of your followers.
Leveling Up Amazon Listings
Selling effectively on Amazon requires a strategy. It’s more than just putting up a listing and hoping for the best. At the end of the day, shoppers have a lot of options, so anything you can do to help promote yours as the best option will help drive sales and boost profits in the long term.
Doing work on the backend before you launch your listings can ensure a smooth launch. An appealing and informational product page drives trust, so revamp your page with SEO in mind, integrating it into your title, bullets, brand story, and more. Reinforce your messaging with top-notch photos, infographics, and videos, test out your eligibility for FBA, and build your review base.
Amazon’s looking at the big picture, so you’ve got to do things in the right order. By following these steps, you can save yourself pain and frustration in the long term.
And if you’re a retail-focused brand looking for help with Amazon, we’d love to connect.
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