How to become a seller on Amazon

Jagannath Bhardwaj
6 min readMay 14, 2020

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Amazon sells $ 4,722 worth of products every second. That’s approximately $ 283,000 a minute. Unbelievable, right? External sellers, i.e., companies or retailers who offer their goods for sale on Amazon, are responsible for a large part of these sales. You can also sell products on Amazon. You can even use it to build a multi-million dollar business. Here, you will learn how to become an Amazon seller and the benefits.

On average, Amazon manages to send 1.6 million parcels a day. According to a survey, over 50 percent of all people who shop online start their search on the globally known and established Amazon platform. So, if you are not present on the platform as a trader or reseller, you will miss half of the potential market. But don’t worry because it is, of course, not too late to start. We’ll explain how to start your Amazon business in this Amazon seller Guide.

Anyone can sell on Amazon, but, the path can be bumpy at times. Anyone who has set everything up for this can enjoy maximum process automation.

For one, Amazon offers sellers a broad audience of potential customers. Amazon’s extensive range of business management and sales tools also make it easy for sellers to go way beyond what they could do alone. And you don’t just have to sell tangible products to use Amazon’s incredible marketplace: Amazon Home Services enables B2C service providers to connect with customers in their areas.

How to set up an Amazon seller account?

To set up your Amazon seller account, you first need to choose a seller category, provide some information about your business, and learn about Amazon’s seller policies.

Keep in mind that certain products require sales approval, and, if approved, only sellers with pro accounts are authorized to sell those products. Before deciding on an account type, read the comprehensive list of Amazon products that require special approval to see if you need the green light before becoming a seller.

Information needed to Create your Amazon seller account

After you choose which category you want to sell in, you can set up your Amazon Seller account. To complete your account setup, Amazon will ask you:

Set up your Amazon sales plan

The good thing is that setting up an individual or professional Amazon reseller account does not take a lot of time and effort. You are ready within about 10 minutes. However, it is vital to be prepared and have your EIN or government id on hand.

Amazon then will ask you various questions about things like the shipping service and the type of Amazon fee you will be charged. You also need to provide answers to questions about your tax situation to make sure everything is set up legally for your new online business.

After you answer all the questions and complete the survey provided by Amazon, you would have completed setting up your Amazon reseller account and can start selling products. Keep in mind that it’s worth checking Amazon’s fulfillment options during the setup to make sure you have the right shipping service.

You need to know about Amazon FBA a little

Amazon FBA means Fulfilled-by-Amazon. From the perspective of an Amazon FBA (Fulfilled-by-Amazon) third-party provider, this e-commerce a business model is simple: First, you send your products to an Amazon warehouse (fulfillment center), then your products are sorted and inventoried by Amazon employees and they only have to be selected from their place on the shelves when a customer places an order, packaged in a box and delivered to the customer’s front door.
The entire process is carried out by Amazon. All you have to do is send the product to them, make a list, keep the product you’re selling in stock, and take care of the marketing and promotional side of things.

If you are looking for a product on Amazon and there are two offers — one for 20 bucks and one for 40 bucks — which one would you rather choose?

Why be an Amazon seller, instead of creating your own site?

The good news is that Amazon authorizes us to sell on their online platform, and benefit from the enormous web traffic they have. They do the hard work: they bring potential customers to your Amazon store, so you’re going to sell your products, great isn’t it?

So let’s say it honestly. Yes, Amazon works on commissions. But these costs (especially when you are just starting out) is ridiculous compared to the money required to invest in marketing, to sell your products with your own online store.

Five reasons to sell your products on Amazon

  • You don’t need to create a website: Creating a website takes time, especially when it is an e-commerce site. Not only do you have to create your site “technically,” but you also have to build trust around your store, which sometimes takes months or even years. With Amazon, you can take advantage of an easy-to-use platform and start selling products with just a few clicks on the site.
  • You don’t need to generate traffic yourself: You have to generate a lot of traffic on an e-commerce site for it to become profitable. Traffic generation does not happen overnight. Again, this often takes long months. Selling on Amazon allows you to benefit from significant traffic without having to do SEO! Amazon has about 100 million unique visitors per month.
  • You can delegate logistics to Amazon: Amazon offers the “Fulfilled by Amazon” (FBA) program, which takes advantage of the logistics infrastructure of the American giant. Amazon takes care of the storage and delivery of your products (worldwide) after each order.
  • No complicated merchant account to manage: Amazon handles payments and refunds for you. You are paid every 14 days directly to the bank account that you have entered. Amazon is probably the most comfortable and most flexible marketplace.
  • Amazon’s customer support is beyond reproach:Amazon customer support is renowned for its responsiveness and quality — whether you are a customer-buyer or a customer-reseller. You can contact Amazon for any request or question and you will assuredly have a rapid response. Note: When you sell on Amazon, Amazon takes care of the customer service.

Here I need you to understand that you have to butter both sides of the bread at the same time. You are not waiting for your friends and family to buy your products or hope that your giveaway campaign will generate enough sales to rate your product. But, you are attacking this product on all fronts at the same time. You optimize your listing, give away giveaways and pay Amazon to display your listing above all the rest at the same time.

Ads sponsored by Amazon, also known as PPC (Pay per Click), are an essential marketing tool for your FBA business.
If you resell on Amazon, your product will be buried somewhere on page 20 of the search results, making it difficult for potential customers to find you. However, sponsored ads give you the ability to get to the top of search results after you’ve launched an automated PPC campaign. Amazon offers you the option of downloading a report that shows you all the keywords and their relevance that can lead customers to your product listing. After you receive this report, you can use the best performing keywords and use them to build your manual PPC campaign to optimize ACoS (advertising costs for sales). Lowering your advertising costs will significantly improve your profit margins later.

You finally did it. We have everything covered, from finding a product to launching it! To scale your business, just rinse the same steps to bring more products to the market. This increases not only your profit but also your business. If a product doesn’t go very well, others have to solve the problem and keep your business profitable.

Obviously, there is more to sell on Amazon than many people think. You can’t just add a phone number to your account and enter some necessary product information like you could when selling products on eBay. There are various Amazon reseller fees to think about, as well as different strategies to consider if you want to become one of the company’s best sellers.

Selling on Amazon: From beginner to professional- Final Words

The beautiful thing about being an Amazon seller is scalability. Every retailer has the chance to start small and to advance his business in a relatively short time. It takes a lot of patience, creativity, diligence, and a little capital to get started. Then nothing stands in the way of the FBA adventure.

Originally published at https://www.onlinetrends.in on May 14, 2020.

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