How to sell on Amazon for beginners? What should I do if I want to start Amazon business? Can I succeed in Amazon selling without any E-commerce experience？
Today’s post will walk you through how to sell on Amazon for beginners by giving you the most important 6 steps. If you are confused about how to start your first Amazon business, this passage will be very helpful. So keep reading and start building your Amazon store.
1.Create your Amazon business proposal
The first step is planning. You must have a clear business proposal no matter how small your beginning business is. Remember to keep an active mindset so that you will better build your business plan according to the reality of the situation.
As you need to have a plan in place to ensure everything on the right track, you should consider your business missions, products and services, marketing and sales, and profits, and so on as the essential elements in making business plans.
You need to spend a lot of time researching the market, predicting the trends, figuring out profitable products you want to sell, and investigating your competitors, as well as you need to know about how much you can spend on product sourcing, marketing, and promotion. Then create a rough plan for your business schedule and a budget table for relevant business activities.
When you register for Amazon sellers to set up an Amazon store, you need to choose to sell on Amazon as an individual seller or a professional seller. Then you can create a business plan based on your choice.
Individual Amazon seller VS professional Amazon seller
No matter you are Amazon personal sellers or Amazon professional sellers, you can register on Amazon platform and make money on it. However, there are some differences between these two kinds of sellers. If you are not sure which one you should choose, the following messages will be helpful to guide your decision-making.
The biggest difference between an individual Amazon seller account and a professional account is the price. Amazon will charge $39.99 per month for professional sellers and it covers all sales for that month.
While the monthly fee for an individual seller is free. Individual sellers cost $0.99 for each item, which means every time you sell an item, you need to pay $0.99 to Amazon.
So if you expect to sell more than 40 items per month, it’s better to choose a professional seller account. But if you are just starting out and want to reduce cost risk, the individual seller account will be more suitable for you. It can help to control risk at the beginning of your business because you can pay a small fee for per sale rather than paying a flat monthly fee to make sure you can get profits every month.
2. Market research and product selection
According to your business plan, market research will be an important part before you choose a product to sell. By analyzing the market and judging the development trend of the industry, you can choose a worthy product industry to invest in. During this process, there are many useful tools you can use to analyze and I will detailly introduce them in the sixth part –Master Amazon auxiliary tools
A profitable product can hugely decide your success, you must ensure your products meet the needs of customers and they are competitive. So it is important to find a profitable niche. I highly recommend that you look for products based on your interests because you will learn more about the area you’re interested in and it’ll be easier to get started.
An important sign of a product worth investing in is that it has enough selling points, which are either highly relevant to the customer’s practical use, or cater to a certain fashion trend, or have a strong emotional resonance with the user, namely, arouse the user’s interest. The following tips will provide a reference to select a profitable product:
- Practical value
- Customer recognition
- Emotional impact
- Transportation costs and risks
- Market demand and competitiveness
- Substitutability and improvability
- Seasonality
- Brand potential
If you have an initial idea of what you want to sell, you will also need to track your competitors in the market research process to verify its selling possibility. Another thing is to collect sentiments for the products, it will provide you a more objective angle.
3. Find a reliable supplier
There are many ways that you can source goods to sell on Amazon such as flipping, retail arbitrage, online arbitrage, wholesale, private brand customization, brand distribution, and so on. While no matter which model you would like to choose, a reliable supplier plays a key role in your business.
But how to find reliable suppliers? That could be one of the big hurdles most Amazon beginners faced. I will provide you some suggestions on where to find suppliers and whether they are reliable or not.
Where to find suppliers
The first place is the wholesale market. You can purchase from some of the local wholesale markets. The advantage is that it is easier and you can go to the market to select the products, so you can be sure to buy the products you expect.
The downside is that you may not be able to get a competitive price for your product, and your product is likely to look similar to others, which is not good news for your Amazon sales.
The second way is to import from China, as we all know that there are many manufacturers which can provide you a cheap making cost and high-quality goods. The advantage of importing from China also includes that you can easily find cheap factories to process the products you want and can create your own brand, as long as you already have a complete product design and can afford a huge product development budget.
The third place is very easy for everyone to access-Online wholesale websites. Now more and more Amazon sellers prefer to stock from wholesale websites because they don’t need to stand long-distance international travel and can select at home. The more options online provide them a better choice. Although the disadvantage is that sellers may take a risk of being cheated, its convenience and low cost still make many people happy to use it.
Once you have chosen a supplier, you can place a small order or buy some samples, you can check the quality and it is also a good chance to test the market. Try to record the key specifications of your product so you can communicate with the supplier about the revisions smoothly.
Try to hire a third-party inspection company to check your raw materials, production processes, and finished products before shipping because product quality inspection will largely reduce your business risk.
4. Create product lists and manage inventory
After you place an order with a supplier, you can transport the goods to the Amazon warehouse and create your goods list in time and put your products on Amazon for sale.
There are many steps to create a list. You need to take product pictures and edit them to get clear and high-resolution images. You also need to add the right text for your product, preferably one that fully describes the functionality of the product and explains its usage scenarios. This will make your product easier to understand. Try to provide enough information about your product and make it appealing to customers.
Once your product can be brought by customers, it is important to ensure your inventory. It may be difficult to control your inventory as a beginner you cannot predict the final sales. Replenish your inventory properly can keep your product inventory level available for your market and sales.
So you need to keep an eye on the inventory to make sure you have enough products to sell, as we all know that international shipping can take a long time. This will reduce your loss of sales due to low inventory.
More importantly, being out of stock can affect your product Listing’s ranking. Once you’re out of stock, your good record will be cleared, and when you restock, Amazon will re-rank your product.
For example, your product was on the front page of Amazon before, but after you sold out, it may be 10 pages later. Even if the replenishment comes back, it is hard to say whether your product can return to the front page again.
5. Track customer reviews and optimize product lists
As a shopping habit of many people, many people are likely to refer to the feedback left by other buyers before buying items online. Shopping evaluation is not only important for buyers but also good feedbacks for sellers to help adjust the product list. It is important to follow up with buyers so that they would like to leave their shopping experience and feedback.
You can write emails or do a questionnaire for the customers to know about their comments about your products and services. A lot of positive feedback will make potential customers trust you easier and increase your sales.
Tweaking your product pages and optimizing your product listings based on the feedback you receive will also make your Amazon store more profitable. No one can create a perfect store at the beginning, you need to constantly modify and optimize according to the suggestions of customers, which will make your store more in line with the market demand and increase your income.
Updating the product frequently, adding the product description, modifying the product picture, changing the product price and so on are all feasible optimization methods.
6. Master Amazon auxiliary tools
As an Amazon new seller, there are many skills and technical tools you need to learn to use. They can simplify your analysis and save you time and cost. I will introduce several basic tools in this post, you can use these tools selectively according to your specific situation to create better Amazon sales.
Keyword research – Helium 10 or Google Keyword Planner
If you don’t have a mind about what to sell on Amazon, the thing you need to do is to research the market. Keyword research will be very helpful as it can provide you a vision of customers’ needs.Helium 10 is a tool to search keywords in Amazon accurately and you can find sales history on it. While Google Keyword Planner shows the search volume on Google.
Product research – Jungle Scout.
Jungle Scout is used to searching products, you can find data of similar products on it, you can also use it to get relevant product data to help you with product analysis and its database even can help you find some manufactories. This software can help you filter all the products in the Amazon catalog so that you can find the type you want in a short time.
Profit calculator-Amazon Revenue Calculator
AmazonRevenue Calculator is a basic tool in Amazon seller central, you can find it in Amazon services. You can use the calculator to see if your products are profitable enough by adding all the costs and your selling price to it.
Rank Tracker -Helium 10 or Jungle Scout.
Both Helium 10 and Jungle Scout can track your organic ranks and sponsored PPC ranks so that you can know the position of your organic listing. You can optimize your store based on rankings or plan your advertising budgets. Better rankings will lead to more sales for your store, so once your Amazon store is open, keep an eye on the rankings and find ways to improve them.
Feedback tracking-Feedback Genius
If you want to collect more feedback from your customers you can send emails to set up connections with them. Then you can ask them about their feels about your products or let them leave a review. Feedback Genius will help you save time in sending messages and communicate with your customers.
Final thought
Thank you for reading and you can share it with your friends who need it. While today we have introduced 6 steps to Success for Amazon Beginners. I have to say you still have a lot to learn as an Amazon beginner, and I’m going to keep you posted about Amazon store openings, so stay tuned on our website.
We are the best sourcing agent in China to help importers source the products with the most competitive price, 20% of our clients are Amazon sellers. So if you want to source products from China or import from China to sell on Amazon, please do not hesitate to contact us.
