Wondering how to sell on Amazon for beginners or dummies? Looking to sell using Amazon FBA? Want to learn about how to sell on Amazon FBA Step-by-Step? In this article I will share with you how can you start selling as prime and Amazon FBA seller successfully before even creating your first Amazon account.
No matter you are in The USA, Canada, UK or Australia, you can use this step by steps guide to start your Amazon FBA or Prime selling business
How To Sell On Amazon For Beginners – Ultimate Amazon FBA Guide
Today, Amazon is already a household name in all around the world; it’s is no doubt that it is the king of the online marketplace.
However, a beginner may see selling on Amazon intimidating and confusing, given the excess amount of information online. you may ask “Why do I need to sell on Amazon?”
Why do you need to sell on Amazon?
- Firstly, Amazon is the biggest online marketplace in the world, along with millions of prime member, you can easily cash in their existing user base.
- Secondly, Amazon can handle warehousing and fulfillment for you (FBA)
With Amazon FBA, you can ship your inventory to Amazon and let them manage it for you.
You can run your business remotely without worry about warehousing and shipping. - Amazon has substantial online traffic, approximately 1/3 of the USA shopper only buy from Amazon, if you don’t sell on Amazon, you leave lots of money on the table.
Now that we have discussed why you should sell on Amazon, the rest of this article will walk you through the processes on how making money on Amazon works.
So how to sell on Amazon FBA as a newbie, please check this article?
How To Sell On Amazon FBA For Beginners
Step 1
Looking For Product To Sell On Amazon
The first question you may ask is “how much funds do I need to get my business running on Amazon?”
In fact, the capital you need to start can be quite small, and there are so many ways you can source your products.
Firstly, you can choose to do “arbitrage” whereby you buy goods from both a physical or online store and then list them for sale on Amazon.
Secondly, you could get your stocks from wholesale Suppliers and resell them on Amazon.
Lastly, private label manufacturers allow you to change and customize your branded goods
and then resell them anywhere you wish, including Amazon.
Mind you there are other methods of finding goods for sale on Amazon, and they all work in the following ways:
Retail/online Arbitrage
It simply means when you buy goods in physical or online retail stores and then resells them on Amazon.
To take advantage this technique, The seller has to look for retail clearance and stock reduction sales.
And when they find an excellent deal, they make use of some seller software, Those apps then estimate and report the profitability of the items. Those apps let them know if they can make a profit after taking all costs into consideration.
The capital required to start this way is relatively small, If you are short of money, then around USD 300 should be enough to start this business method.
Wholesale Suppliers
This is the most commonly used technique, you buy in bulk from a supplier and resell them at a margin.
The key benefit of this method is that you can get much better margin than retail arbitrage. However, it requires some capital to start.
Also, to avoid getting stuck with unsold supplies, you must carry out proper research before ordering from your suppliers.
Selling Private Label Products
This option allows you to buy goods from the manufacturer and customize them under your brand.
You can change the color, package or even design for those private labeled products.
The primary advantage is that it makes your product unique and stand out. Since you add a unique selling point to it.
However, it cost a lot of money since you have to buy goods in volume
Manufacturing & Handmade Goods
You can put up hand-crafted goods that you made for sale on Amazon.
You may need to research how much it would charge you for such items and for this method to be profitable.
Dropshipping Goods
If you are running on a shoe-string budget, then you could consider doing drop shipping.
With drop shipping, you don’t buy any inventory. Otherwise, You list those products for sale first, while you make a sale, you send the order detail to the supplier and pay for only the product you sold.
Keep in mind that it may not fit any business. The concept relies on your dropship vendor to dispatch items you sold.
The problem with dropshipping is that the profit margin is relatively low.
And you might have to deal with complaints about quality, shortages, and problems with late delivery of products.
Also, this technique is seldom used by sellers on Amazon because the conditions for drop shippers are quite stringent.
How To Sell On Amazon For Beginners Step #2
Select And Set Up Your Account
To sell on Amazon, the first thing you need to do is to open an account. You can start either as an Individual or Pro Seller.
The Pro account offers more features and costs $39.99 for each month,
The Individual accounts go for $0 per month, but Amazon takes approximately a $1 fee for every item you sell.
Even though most sellers prefer the Pro accounts due to its outstanding features, you could start with an Individual plan to minimize your risk, especially if you are using the retail arbitrage method to source your inventory.
On the other hand, the Pro Seller account is suitable if you are putting money into wholesale or private label products.
Creating Your Product Listing
Your next step to do is to create a listing of your product, which can be carried out in a couple of ways.
You may decide to include your goods in current product listings or create a fresh one for your product.
The most straightforward option is just to add your items to current listings and is the preferred method for most beginners on Amazon.
Bear in mind that if you are listing a product already on sale, you may not get the needed exposure initially, but as competitors run out of stocks, your items then become available to buyers.
But you can make your product the customers top pick by offering free shipping, a reduced price or using FBA (fulfillment by Amazon).
There are essential tips you should notice when listing your product on Amazon and they include the following:
- Although there might be multiple listings, make sure you select the best listing.
- Always look for highly-ranked listings with clear images and excellent information.
- Your profit should be on your mind all the time
it becomes very important that you perform research on all fees and costs and products. - You may take advantage of scouting apps and the Amazon profit calculator when researching your product source.
- Even as a beginner, for Amazon to store and ship your goods and to be “Prime-eligible,” you should ensure that you enroll for Amazon FBA just like most highly rated sellers.
Owners of Amazon Pro seller account may add fresh listings of their goods in two ways, and they are:
- Creating new listing manually
It can be time-consuming if you have a lot of product to add.
This technique is ideally suited for most items, especially when you don’t have a lot of products to add. - Bulk Uploading lets you create lots of product listings straight away by uploading a spreadsheet that contains each one of your items.
If you sell goods on your site, then you may link your products directly to Amazon as well.
Step #3
Manage Inventories
How well you can manage your inventory determines the level of your success on Amazon
Amazon will lower your seller ratings if you fail to ship a product displayed as being “in-stock” on time.
And if you failed to maintain your seller matrix, your account will be suspended by Amazon
So keep in mind always manage and fulfill your inventory properly.
There are some options that you may employ to manage your inventory -such as FBM, FMA or tried party fulfillment company.
It is crucial you update your inventory frequently, to maintain a high rating on Amazon as a seller.
Note that as you make the sales, your inventory count decreases automatically on Amazon, and you may need a robust solution if you have similar items on your site or retail store.
The concept of managing inventories is very much like the listing of products on Amazon and can be done either manually or via bulk upload.
- You can manually update inventory levels after selling some few items by merely altering the Available units from your dashboard.
- You will need a sophisticated solution to manage a large stock or to reconcile inventories between your site or store and Amazon.
how to sell on Amazon for beginners
Step #4 – Fulfill Your Amazon Orders
The final stage in selling on Amazon is to deliver your orders.
Based on Amazon’s standards, you should always fulfill orders on time, and if you fail to do that, it will hurt your seller rating.
And if you failed to maintain a suitable matrix. Your account can end up suspended.
As you sell on Amazon, you should be ready to either dispatch orders yourself or let Amazon handle it.
There are a few ways you can achieve this goal, and they include:
Shipping orders by yourself (FBM Fulfillment by Merchant)
This method is also known as Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM), which requires Amazon merchants to ship their orders out to customers from their warehouses.
If you decide to adopt this method, Make sure you have proper inventory management in place.
Or having relative small orders.
Allow Amazon to fulfill your Order
This method is Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)
With this method, you ship your product to Amazon.
Amazon handles almost everything for you – warehousing, customer service, and fulfillment.
And you only pay for a relative small warehousing and fulfillment fee.
On the other hand, the benefits of Amazon FBA are immense and include the following:
- Your items will likely be listed as “Prime products” on Amazon and get more traffic.
- Amazon makes your items qualified for Prime free 2-day shipping
- Your product listings will get better ranking on Amazon
- It instills confidence in buyers that they will get their goods
- You will make more sales!
how to sell on Amazon for beginners
Step #5
How to optimize your product listing for maximum result?
This is one of the most important parts of this guide, since the better your listing look, the higher conversion you will get, and your rank will increase
Image guidelines:
You should make sure you have several images (5-7 is usually a better rule of thumb) so that buyers can have an idea of your product from all different dimensions.
You will notice there are a quite a few on the home page that talks about specific organization and their standards, but the basics include using a professional photo (no drawings), the props and products should fill 80% or more of the image frame, no watermarks, and image pixel dimensions of at least 1200 or larger in either the width or height is preferred.
To enhance your product images, check out the following ideas:
• Display the product in use
• Have an image of the product packaging
• Include pictures that show the size of the product
• Display the product from several angles
product title:
250 character is the word limit (for most categories) of it. The following are some of the best practice takeaways for writing killer product titles:
• Remember your title is being written for humans, when people see your product title, they need to understand it and want to check it out.
• Something of added value should be included, such as product importance or a key element that makes your product different from your competitor.
• Your priority target keywords should be included, and make sure they’re useful and relevant.
Just as with Google title tags are very essential, but instead of 65 characters, you get 550 with Amazon. Also unlike Google, the more detailed and the longer the title, the better. With Amazon it does not have to be compelling or grab a buyer’s attention; it just has to give off relevant information for someone to make a buying decision. For this reason, using all of the 550-character limits is advisable. You should be aware that the products with keyword-rich and long titles surpass those that are simple and clean while surfing through Amazon homepage. Below is an example that explains just that:
how to optimize the listing
It can be difficult to get used to this after coming from optimization for Google, but it’s an essential step. According to an Amazon help page, a particular formula should be followed to help create your titles. For example, the formula for many products may be:
Brand + Model Number + Model Name + Product Type, Color
An example of using this formula for a title would be:
StoreAid KSM150PSER Artisan 6-Quart Mixer, Empire Purple.
Again it’s not the best title, and it is not the same as something you would use on Google, but this is how it works on Amazon! You only have to have your keyword displayed once in your title (that is right, keywords in your description are less relevant), so again, that’s why you see some of the organizations above using several different keywords all in one title.
Product features:
Now an opportunity to include lots of bullet point features about your product is provided. we recommend that you have 6 or more points in your listing. 1000 characters are the official character limit.
Salient takeaways:
• Put yourself in the shoes of the buyers, what do they which to know? Why should they purchase your product over other competitors? Do not forget to add value!
• Put the essential features at the top of the list; many buyers will skim read
• Try to answer any viewer objections that might come up – you can also attach to this with any questions you get about the product over time
• Include any warranty and guarantees you are offering.
• Explain what the product comprises of – is the high material quality?
• Does the product find a solution to a problem? Explain how
specifications
Specifications are not the same as Features – this is the section of the page where you list the physical and technical details of your product. This includes color, shipping weight, size, publication date (if you’re doing books), tech. Specification and many more. You can see this top-ranked product for the “home sound system” search term using its product specifications to the maximum.
Focus on a description and use the bullet-point content form
Under the title, you often see bullet points for a product on Amazon. This is the best place to add keywords and display what you’re all about. It’s close to your photos and shows the title, so make sure you don’t omit this step. Below example shows what the bullet points look like:
Because the bullet point characteristic is so prominent, sometimes organizations get confused about the description and forget to add it altogether (it’s not compulsory after all!). The description still shows further down on your page. This does not mean that it’s not as essential, it’s just not as relevant as the bullet point section. I would still add a description, not get bothered too much about keywords, and make it short but detailed and pretty all at the same time. Below example shows where the description shows up:
product description
Here you have a whole 2000 letters to talk about your product, what it does, what it is, and why it’s the greatest product on the market in your niche.
• Keep sentences simple and short – between 10 – 30 words
• Lead with the characteristics and advantages to the customer, and discuss the product secondary to that
• Make the viewer believe that your product is a must have and something they need
• Keep the description related– use language that can be understood easily by everyone.
• Add your target keywords but don’t make it difficult to read
• A storytelling approach to your product is advisable.
category & sub-category
Sellers probably did not realize this, but once a buyer has entered into a category – every other search they try out on Amazon will be limited to that category by default. Check the example below for proper understanding:
It can be seen here that a simple search for “dog food” actually brings three categories deep into product catalog of Amazon, indicated by the red lines in the picture above. The blue box displays that we will stay in the Dog Food category until we either manually tell Amazon to show us All Departments or return to the homepage.
When product listing is being set up, it is advisable to put your product in the most important, narrow category available.
search terms
In addition to categories, one can also specify the search terms that you want your product associated with.
It is better to regard the 50-character search term fields given by Amazon as a big 250-letter text box in which you can enter every possible search term that related to your product.
retention factors & customer satisfaction
Negative Feedback from the Seller
Why do I list negative feedback of the seller specifically, as opposed to seller feedback alone in general?
Interestingly, Amazon will claim not to track positive feedback of the seller; at least, not because of their product search algorithm.
Instead, they track negative feedback of the seller rates or frequency. It doesn’t matter how poor the feedback is – all negative feedback doesn’t differ, and it all counts against you at the same rate regarding search result rankings.
To be simple – as a third-party seller trying to win the buy box (as shown below), your seller feedback must be as high as possible. However, negative feedback rate is the only criteria with a known effect on product search results.
source keyword
This is one of the largest hidden ways that Amazon determines a listing’s importance to a given product search. This is also another example of how Amazon keep track of every single minutia of a buyer’s activity on their website. Take a look at this link to a listing for a White & Decker electric drill, and see if you can tell what search term was used to find it:
The source keyword is at the right, at the end of the link – &keywords=electric+drill – that instructs Amazon that the source keyword was “electric drill.”
Therefore, if I were to buy this electric drill, Amazon would understand that this listing is highly essential for the term “electric drill.” The next time a buyer searches for that term, this listing would be more likely to be displayed at the top.
The following consists of a little Amazon ranking hack that can be done to take advantage of this factor:
1. Construct a link for your product listing using the “&keyword=your+keyword” query (append the code inside the quotes to your product link).
2. Use a URL shortening website like bit.ly to create a shareable URL to that link.
3. Drive traffic to the shortened URL.
You are tricking Amazon into assuming that these viewers performed a product search for your target keyword anytime a sale was made from one of these shortened keyword URLs.
Order Processing Speed
Amazon is aware that one of the nice ways to make buyers happy is with accurate and fast shipping. Therefore, a seller or a vendor who has shown efficient and consistent order processing is more likely to get a better ranking than a vendor who’s had issues with inaccurate or slow shipping.
Perfect Order Percentage (POP)
The total number of orders that went perfectly and smoothly from the time that a buyer clicks “Add to Cart” to the product arriving at the selected destination is measured by POP
If you have a great Perfect Order Percentage, that means you have a great in-stock rate, prompt shipping, and accurate product listings. Since Amazon wants its buyers to rank top-POP sellers above bottom-POP ones, this is very important
In-Stock Rate
Buyers hate it when they request a product but can’t have it. One of the most commonly used reasons for this problem is when an item is out of stock, or when a seller doesn’t take proper track of their inventory.
Regardless of who you are, (a third-party vendor or a first-party seller), keeping up your inventory is crucial to maintaining high rankings, both in product search results and in product’s buy box.
Some of the big buyer satisfaction metrics are Pre-Fulfilment Cancellation and Percentage of Orders Refunded. In each case, It has been discovered by Amazon that sellers with low in-stock rates tend to have higher refunds and cancellations, which of course is not suitable for buyer retention.
Order Defect Rate (ODR)
ODR is the opposite metric of POP.
Every time a buyer complain about an order, that’s considered an order defect. For orders to defect, the following must occur:
Any shipment problem
Negative buyer feedback
Credit card chargeback
A-to-Z Guarantee claim
The Order Defect Rate would be counted towards by each of the examples above by itself, which is the number of order defects compared to the total number of orders delivered over a given period. Amazon instructs all sellers to aim for an ODR under 1%.
Note! Customer-removed negative feedback does not count towards your ODR. So, it advisable to resolve every one of your customers’ complains.
Packaging Options
This is a criterion that I didn’t use to think Amazon measured, but after a while, I’ve seen things like this in product search results:
However, packaging options are one of the things that Amazon has found their buyers care about. But, even if it wasn’t true, it’s the best way to separate other similar products (and rank higher through an increased conversion rate) from your listing
Exit Rate
How often does a buyer exit Amazon.com Immediately after viewing your listing? That is your exit rate.
If your page has an exit rate that’s above average, Amazon takes that as a sign that you have a poor-quality listing. Usually, a higher exit rate is because your listing isn’t fully complete or because your product has a poor in-stock rate.
Step #6
How To Optimize Keyword Get Ranked On Amazon?
So, it’s super essential to understand what keywords you are ranking for and targeting. This can help in listing optimization, but it’s just generally great practice for improving profits and sales.
There’s a cool manual tweak where it can be seen directly if one is ranking for a specific keyword. Simply type in your Increase profit to check if Amazon is ranking you for it:
(image: get keyword ranked)
If one isn’t ranking for keywords that one should be, one can go back to his/her product listing and check if you have included the keyword, if there are any stray punctuation or typos.
Many people have found that altering their keywords in the listing makes their rank to change almost as soon as possible (sometimes within several hours for listings with minimum history). So keywords can be tested manually by experimenting. For example:
1. Check where you rank for a keyword by searching for the particular keyword and finding your listing directly on Amazon
2. Add the keyword to your features or your title.
3. Now search for the keyword again and check if your ranking has improved
Step #7
How To Promote Your Amazon Listing And Drive Traffic To It?
All Relevant Categories must be Filled
The term “Browse Tree Guide” may have been heard from some different sources. This refers to Amazon’s sub-category and category structure. When a product is being searched on the homepage, they are taken to a list of results, but once they select those results, then anything done from that point forward will be within a certain category (Amazon takes care of all, so the buyer usually has no idea). If you’re not categorized appropriately and are not in that category, you’re out of options. You are required to select categories when managing your page, so select wisely! Just choose something at the very least.
Use the Sponsored Products Feature
This is an Amazon PPC advert option that gives you the opportunity to create ads on Amazon that will display up next to search results for the keywords specified. All required to be done to get started here is choose your keywords and your products and then set bids for the amount you want to spend. This will help optimize your sales rank, which will hopefully optimize your organic listings.
Sponsored Product advert looks like this:
Duplicate Content Must Be Avoided
It may seem obvious, but it is essential to remember that all of your product pages on Amazon must not use the same content that you’re using on your e-commerce page. Because they are two different search engines using the same content is a common mistake business make, the most common example being the description, but this can always still cause duplicate content issues.
An ASIN must be Listed in Your Product Field
This was something that Journal for Search Engine mentioned here that can help drive traffic to your page even if you’re not ranking. Getting your product listed on a product page is what you want to be able to do. This is a great option if the price with an almost identical product can be competed for. Below is an image of what this means:
Step #7
Sign Up For My Free Video Training Now
Thanks for reading this “How To Sell On Amazon For Beginners“ guide, I hope you have learned something so far
I tried to cover as many things as I can in this short article, and I know you do want to know more about it
but if you want to learn more about How To Sell On Amazon For Beginners, or selling on Amazon FBA as a prime seller
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Author of the book “AMZ Business Jumpstart”, Amazon Seller, Founder Of Ecom Income Blueprint, I started my first Ecom business since I was 25 and now I am dedicated to helping people creating the lifestyle they want, You can Click here to learn more about how to start your Amazon FBA Business
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4 Comments
Administrator
January 12, 2018Hi thanks a lot 🙂
Joshua Petrullo
January 11, 2018Hi my friend! I want to say that this post is awesome, great written and come with almost all vital infos. I would like to see extra posts like this.
Administrator
January 9, 2018yeah it is 🙂 thanks for sharing
Ndayishimiye Boaz
January 8, 2018Amazon is a great place to start an online business compared to other online business models:
1. It’s less risky,
2. It’s proven to be profitable in long run.
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