Amazon already is a dominant force in the online retail market and will continue to widen its lead over other online marketplaces, considering its reach, technology and strong urge for innovation. Many sellers seek to jump on the Amazon bandwagon and take advantage of its ever improving market position to succeed in online business.
In this post, you will receive a high-level overview of Amazon’s ecosystem and a guide to Amazon for sellers. For you to take advantage of it in the best possible way. To grow your online business, especially if you are completely new to the Amazon’s marketplace environment.
Why You Should Sell on Amazon Marketplace
A massive customer base is not the only advantage it offers; there are many reasons that make a compelling case for sellers to join the Amazon marketplace. The following statistics makes it abundantly clear:
- Amazon leads the search engine market for online shopping, with 56% of people saying they start their search there and 72% using the site to find products. That puts it ahead of Google as the #1 search engine for online shopping. For sellers, this is a significant development. Unlike Google, Amazon SEO is easy to manage since it doesn’t use any external ranking factor like backlink. Everything related to ranking on Amazon is internal to Amazon’s marketplace.
- With a massive customer base of 150+ million Amazon Prime shoppers, you get a ready set of buyers who are waiting to buy products. A survey in 2019 revealed that 20% Prime shoppers shop on Amazon a few times a week. The propensity to buy is higher in Amazon Prime shoppers.
- Even sellers with very little upfront cash may find that it is possible to get up and running with items sourced from thrift stores and homemade products. No need to spend on setting up a website, SEO, or fancy marketing tools. Amazon provides a level playing field for sellers.
- Amazon’s strength lies in its logistics and supply chain capability. For any business, it is this aspect which is most difficult to manage. That’s where Amazon’s FBA comes into picture as it takes care of everything-right from picking products, storage, packing, delivery, return to refund. This allows sellers to focus more on business growth and they get time to market their products and scale other business verticals.
How Amazon is Different from Other Marketplaces: Unique Advantages from Amazon for Sellers
Though there are many options for sellers such as eBay, Walmart, Etsy and many more, sellers have choices galore nowadays. However, none of the platforms come close to Amazon in terms of the reach and experience it offers to sellers. If you are in for serious online business, Amazon is the platform where you can start as it makes many things easy for you. The reality is that Amazon has distinct advantage over others when it comes to customer experience. Amazon’s uniqueness with other marketplaces lies in the following four broad factors.
- Great Pricing: Amazon is not the cheapest retailer because it offers customers the lowest price. People choose to shop on Amazon because of its eCommerce platform, which helps sellers get more exposure and provides customers with a convenient shopping experience. That is why Amazon’s ASP (Average Selling Price) for most items is higher than most other sites.
- Listing Fees: It is effortless to start on Amazon as it does not charge any listing fee in both Free Plan and Professional Plan for most categories. In the free plan, they charge $0.99 whenever they sell. Though they charge listing fees for specific categories, which is minimal compared to other marketplaces.
- Hassle-free Shipping: Whether you select fulfillment by Amazon or Easy Ship, it handles both the shipping and return so that you can focus on growing your business. The ultimate power of Amazon resides in logistics management. A world-class logistics system is offered by Amazon for sellers, when you join Amazon marketplace.
- Easy Fulfilment: Most platforms do not care for order fulfilment and leave it to sellers. Amazon is different because it takes this headache so that you can focus on selling only. Amazon FBA makes it super easy for sellers to manage order fulfilment by taking care of pick up, delivery, return and refund.
Unique Customer Experience
Amazon is not the only eCommerce platform with a large customer base; it has gained significant traction among merchants. This platform is popular among buyers because of its extensive catalog, excellent shipping service and customer-focused business model. Amazon keeps evolving by eliminating friction points for users.
Apart from its massive reach, many aspects of Amazon make it the most compelling platform for sellers. Here are some of the advantages offered by Amazon for sellers:
- Get Discovered Easily: Since Amazon is the world’s most visited marketplace, your audience reach will be multiplied exponentially if you appear on it. There is no need to invest in expensive websites or SEO; interested consumers can quickly discover your page. Even with little SEO knowledge, sellers can easily optimize their product listing.
- Higher Average Selling Price: Unlike many other prominent websites, Amazon offers higher profit margins to sellers as you can easily set a more competitive price. For example, a men’s T-shirt can go as low as $5-10 through eBay, while it costs $30-40 on Amazon. That means a seller can make reasonable opportunity to make profit on Amazon.
- Get Amazon FBA Advantage: Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) is one of Amazon’s most helpful services. It takes care of the picking, packing, and shipping the items. Amazon also handles customer concerns, refund regulation and returns, and each aspect of online selling. Furthermore, sellers can also benefit from the storage provided by Amazon in its fulfilment centres.
- Offer Branded Experience: Amazon can help build, grow and protect your business irrespective of the size of the business. The world’s most trusted retailer Amazon for sellers offers many features, such as Amazon’s Brand Registry can unlock huge possibilities to Build, Grow and Protect your brand. Amazon keeps adding new tools and features for the benefit of sellers. Nowadays, Amazon is paying a lot of attention on brand-registered sellers and sellers interested to build their brand can take advantage of it.
- A+ Content: With A+ content, Amazon helps your brand stories stand out in a crowd. You can showcase to prospective customers that what your brand offers to them. With rich text and images, you can show product features, portray a real-time user journey, thus building trust among consumers about your product. And once buyers start trusting, they feel more confident buying from you.
- Stores: It’s a branded destination on Amazon that inspires, educates and helps customers discover the brand’s product selection. Amazon Stores offers a multipage, immersive shopping experience that showcases your brand and products.
- Sponsored Ads: You can easily use sponsored ads to automatically promote your product to Amazon users searching for related products. Sponsored Brands help you target customers with attractive and relevant ads at the best possible cost per click.
- Brand Registry: Helps protect intellectual property and create an accurate and trusted customer experience on Amazon. It gives brand owners access to tools to represent a brand better and find & report violations if detected.
- Take advantage of Amazon’s ecosystem: Amazon has a rich ecosystem comprising apps & services from third-party applications. You can use these tools to grow your online business, allowing you to automate many time-consuming and tedious daily tasks. You can access to professional services if you feel the need. Amazon offers a lot of learning resources and support.
- Seller Support: Support is crucial to succeed in any business., especially online businesses. Contact Amazon Seller Support for resolving any issues you may be having and they quickly address it.
Final Thoughts
As you decide and plan to sell on the Amazon’s marketplace, you can manage and run your business with Seller Central, the hub of selling activities, such as creating Amazon Seller Account, listing products, managing orders and inventory, and handling returns and refunds. Starting with Amazon can be overwhelming initially and investing time and resources to leverage its power to the fullest is essential. But for many businesses, the increased sales will make that time and effort worthwhile.
Read here for creating an account on Amazon for Sellers.
