8 simple steps to Know how to become an Amazon Seller

Whether you’re looking to start a successful side business or are ready to take the leap and be your own boss, becoming an Amazon seller presents a great opportunity. However, contrary to what some internet marketers would have you think, it is not a get-rich-quick scam.

To be effective, it is necessary to have a sufficient budget, to work diligently, to do extensive study, and to demonstrate some commitment. Indeed, many individuals who begin their Amazon adventure fail before they have an opportunity to succeed.

However, with diligence and study, you can optimize your chances of starting and growing a successful company. We’ll take you through the process of becoming an Amazon Seller stepwise in this tutorial. Let’s jump right in!

1. Finding the right product to sell on Amazon

After deciding to become an Amazon seller, the first step in your quest of how to become an Amazon Seller is to select what you want to sell. Your research at this step is critical to the success of this approach. The data you collect and the product decisions you make based on that data will decide whether your whole project succeeds or fails. Finding profitable possibilities requires much more than copying the popular products or brands and competing against goods with subpar Amazon product pages. Prior to making a choice, you should do an extensive study on the goods, competitors, keywords, and industry trends.

Prior to generating ideas, you’ll want to familiarise yourself with the different selling techniques. Which choice is ideal for you is determined by your objectives and ambitions:

• Retail arbitrage is a fantastic place to start for an Amazon newcomer. Retail arbitrage, or RA, is the practise of visiting retail shops such as Walmart or Target, purchasing cheap goods, and then reselling them on Amazon at a profit. What’s wonderful about this approach is that it allows you to get your feet wet with Amazon without making a large initial commitment. Online arbitrage is similar to traditional arbitrage, except that merchants purchase cheap goods online and then resell them.
• Private Label is undoubtedly the most scalable strategy for selling on Amazon. With a private label, you locate a generic product and a company capable of mass producing the product at a reasonable price. After that, you customise the product by adding your logo and company information and selling it as your brand.
  
• Wholesale refers to the act of purchasing goods directly from a big brand (such as Nike, L’Oréal, or Fisher-Price) and reselling them on Amazon. The distinction between private label and wholesale is that with wholesale, you purchase goods directly from an established company and resell them under their brand name.

This tutorial focuses on private labelling since it is the most scalable solution while being a realistic choice for novice sellers. To get started with a private label, begin by brainstorming product ideas. Although the options are almost limitless, you cannot just randomly select a product and expect to profit. The most effective technique for identifying the greatest product ideas is via data analysis. This will assist you in identifying goods that already have a market, resulting in a strong sales potential for you. To collect this data, the most effective method is to utilise a product discovery programme that includes market analysis skills.

Product Discovery is our preferred product discovery tool. This tool generates a list of good product ideas that fit your budget and sales objectives. As a new vendor, you may quickly identify product marketplaces in which you can compete by using a few basic criteria.

For your first product, the following market requirements should apply:

• Decent revenue: A range of USD 10,000 to 25,000 is suggested
• Low reviews: A maximum of 250 reviews we suggest
• Search volume: It is to recommended to have a minimum of 5000 searches
• Sales to review ratio: The ratio we recommend is a minimum of three. (This indicates that the average monthly sales are three times more than the average number of reviews.) In a competitive industry, reviews are the most difficult barrier to overcome, therefore you must ensure that you have a sufficient number of sales chances to collect reviews and compete with current vendors.

As a starting point, you should adapt these parameters to meet your own needs and requirements. Personalized inputs will provide greater outcomes, so be creative with your approach!

After compiling a list of goods in which you’re interested, you’ll need to verify your concepts. Again, you must rely on reliable data to guarantee that you choose a product that will help you succeed. Market Intelligence is integrated with Product Discovery, allowing you to get straight into validation. This procedure assists you in avoiding oversaturated marketplaces or markets with poor sales potential. When you use Market Intelligence to evaluate your ideas, you should consider the following things:

• Barrier to entry: How straightforward would it be to join a market and compete against established brands? If there are already many established, successful companies with significant sales and a large number of positive customer evaluations, your chances of success are slim. A market with little competition and strong demand is excellent for new vendors.
  
• Profit and Revenue potential: How much money can you earn selling this product? Profitability is the ultimate barometer of a company’s performance, and each business will have unique objectives. Market Intelligence displays the monthly revenue generated by each current product, which assists you in determining the potential revenue generated after your product is up and running. Bear in mind that you must use market averages, not simply a few outliers, in order to properly forecast revenue. Additionally, keep in mind that you will incur expenses associated with production, shipping, and Amazon fees. (To assist with this, we’ve included a cost calculator).
  
• Monthly sales: Each month, how many units are sold? To determine how many items you need to buy from the manufacturer (which is usually located in China, resulting in lengthy delivery delays), it’s necessary to establish the current level of demand for this product on Amazon. Consider the number of units sold per month for goods appearing on the top few pages of search results for the product’s primary keywords, bearing in mind that you’ll likely need to buy at least two months’ worth in advance.
  
• Market trends: How the product performs throughout the course of the year? Particular marketplaces are seasonal, with sales increasing at certain periods of the year in response to holidays or seasonal shifts. You’ll need to anticipate these patterns for inventory purposes, and if you’re not a fan of seasonality, it’s better to avoid goods that are in high demand during specific periods of the year.

The Amazon marketplace may be intimidating, particularly for novice sellers, but by using tools such as this to collect data and assist in the discovery of great product ideas, you can improve your chances of success.

2. Open an Amazon Account

After selecting a product to offer, you’ll want to establish your legitimacy by creating a Seller Central account. This will serve as the center for your online company. This is where you will create product listings, manage your inventory, and access your reports.

You’ll begin by providing a valid email address, after which you’ll be asked to provide the following information. Ascertain that you have all the necessary information on hand to expedite the process:

• Your Business address and name
• Your telephone number
• Bank or Credit Card information
• Tax information

When you begin earning sales, Amazon will transfer funds straight into your bank account after every two weeks and will inform you that the funds have been sent.

Following the Next button, you’ll input your billing details. Additionally, you’ll choose an account type throughout the registration process. You have two alternatives:

• Individual: This account type allows you to sell up to 40 products per month and limits you to 20 product categories. Although there is no monthly membership cost, you will be charged $1 each item sold.
  
• Professional: With this option, you’ll have access to thirty product categories and the ability to sell in more restricted areas, pending clearance from Amazon. This account has a monthly fee of $39.99.

If you’re just wanting to sell some old books, an Individual account is probably what you’re searching for. If you want to sell goods through Retail Arbitrage, you must first choose your level of ambition. If you want to sell more than 40 items each month, a Professional account is recommended. As a brand-new seller, you are not required to pay $39.99 each month until your product is actually sold. You may simply upgrade to the Professional plan just before your goods arrives at the warehouse.

3. Choose the Fulfillment Method

The third step is to choose a fulfillment method for your goods. Fulfillment includes the storage, selecting, packaging, and delivery of goods to consumers. FBA and FBM are the two options:

• FBA: With the FBA model as a seller, you send your goods to an Amazon fulfilment centre, and Amazon picks, packs, and ships them when a consumer places an order. Additionally, Amazon handles customer support problems such as returns. While this is an easy-to-use approach, it is critical to understand that extra costs apply.
  
• FBM: You sell your goods on Amazon and then manage all elements of storage and order fulfilment on your own. Additionally, you are liable for any shipments that arrive late, are lost, or are damaged.

4. Create Your Amazon Listing

This stage requires you to enter Seller Central and begin building the product listing, which is the page on which a shopper may learn about and buy your goods. A product listing provides you with the chance to explain about your product, what it accomplishes, and why customers should purchase it. When describing your product, it is critical to be as precise as possible. Additionally, you should provide all essential information, such as ingredients, materials, dimensions, and everything else a buyer may need.

To list your goods on Amazon, you must first get a unique product number from Amazon, referred to as FNSKU. To get one, however, you must first obtain a UPC, a bar code. The standards group GS1 US creates UPCs, which you may get from their website. To begin the FNSKU procedure, you must first acquire a UPC, which may take some time. Then, after you’ve got it, you can begin creating your Amazon product listing.

The most critical component of an Amazon listing are the keywords, and their success is directly related to how you utilise them. You might create some fantastic content for your listing, but unless you include the keywords people use to search for your kind of goods, your listing will go unnoticed. Later on, you’ll concentrate on optimising your listing for the top keywords in order to achieve good organic search results and drive visitors. For the time being, you’ll get familiar with the process of creating a listing and the information that must be provided.

The following components comprise a product listing:

• Title: It is the most critical part of your listing since it is what Amazon prioritises when ranking keywords. Along with your primary image, the title is the first thing buyers will see in a search results list. Bear in mind that the product title should accurately describe what your product is and what it accomplishes. This may include providing measurements or number counts for some goods. Additionally, it is critical that you put the most critical keywords here.
• Bullet points:These bullet points are referred to as product features on Amazon. This section allows you to expand on and highlight key features of your product. It is also the place to add any essential keywords that were omitted from your title.
• Product description:In your product description, you may go into more depth about your product and elaborate on the points addressed in the bullet point section. While conciseness and keyword placement are critical in the title and bullets, your product description is where your brand voice may be established.
• Backend keywords: This part does not show on your live listing, and therefore is invisible to your consumers. This is the section where you should include any relevant keywords that were not included in the main body of your listing. To maximise exposure, you may add foreign-language keywords with misspelt terms.
• Photography: Each listing may include up to nine product images. The hero picture is the first and most significant image in your photo collection. This is the primary picture consumers view when they go over to your product listing page from search results or your listing page. Along with your hero picture, you may include photographs of your product in action, referred to as lifestyle photos.

5. Finding a Manufacturer

As an FBA seller, suppose you’ve chosen to offer private-label goods. What source do you use to get your inventory? This step’s objective is to provide a response to that query. It’s time to do research on prospective manufacturers and choose the most suitable option for your company.

Alibaba is one of the most popular sourcing platforms for private-label merchants. This site is an excellent location to start your search for a foreign manufacturer capable of supplying large quantities of your product.

At the time of making this decision, do your homework and choose a reputable business to deal with. Alibaba offers its own quality assurance measures, such as participation in the Verified Supplier and Gold Supplier programmes. These certifications are verified by third-party organizations outside of Alibaba and attest to the authenticity of the company. When viewing a supplier’s product page, you may see data on their response rate and the amount of transactions they’ve completed in the past six months.

We suggest compiling a list of at least ten vendors and contacting each one individually. Alibaba has a message system for contacting manufacturers; just click on the Contact Supplier button on its product page to do so.

You’ll be searching for a variety of distinct qualities while evaluating each one. You’ll want to avoid any language problems and locate someone who will communicate well with you. Take note of how fast a supplier replies to messages; they should be able to give adequate responses to your queries, as well as pose pertinent questions about sizes, colours, and other requirements. Additionally, finding a supplier that has experience dealing with other sellers on Amazon and is acquainted with Amazon’s standards is desirable. Additionally, you’ll want to know how adaptable they are if you need to make adjustments to an order after it’s been made.

Pricing is also critical, as you’ll want to find a high-quality product within your budget. Once you’ve obtained pricing from each supplier, use Viral Launch’s FBA calculator to see if you’ll earn a profit. To determine your potential profit, you’ll need to know your cost of goods sold, your shipping expenses to Amazon, and your product’s selling price on Amazon.

After speaking with each supplier, limit your list to 2 or 3 and contact each of them to obtain product samples. Additionally, purchase some competing goods from Amazon and compare them. After you’ve reviewed everything, you may choose a supplier to work with.

6. Order Your Product & Ship it

After deciding on the best source for your goods in the previous stage, you can now make your first complete purchase. We suggest ordering enough goods to support at least a two-month inventory run.

Due to the fact that you’ll be buying from an international provider, you’ll have a few payment options:

• Telegraphic Transfer or Bank wire : This is the most risky option, since you are paying straight to the supplier’s bank account before receiving your purchase. This technique needs the fewest fees of the others. Although manufacturers often prefer these types of payments, we would suggest an alternative method, particularly when establishing a new supplier relationship.
  
• PayPal/Credit Card: This is a more dependable and secure form of payment, but it comes with a higher cost. Many Amazon sellers prefer this approach due to the added security and option to cancel a payment. However, some manufacturers would not take these for a big purchase owing to the associated costs.
  
• Escrow service: Alibaba offers this payment method, which is a hybrid of the preceding two. Although your money is transferred to the supplier, Alibaba retains it until you confirm delivery of your goods. This is an excellent medium ground; seek for manufacturers that would take Alibaba pay or something like, which protects both you and them.

Prior to making your payment, you’ll need to choose the shipping location of your products based on your selling strategy. Additionally, you must provide the supplier with FNSKUs, pallet labels, and box labels.

If you choose FBA, the shipment will be sent to one of Amazon’s fulfilment centres. You must notify Amazon that your purchase has been sent by establishing an incoming shipment in Seller Central. However, if you choose FBM, the manufacturer will ship your goods straight to you or to the warehouse of your choice. You can coordinate shipment logistics with your freight forwarder and manufacturer.

At this point, you should consider scheduling an inspection. You may have your inventory inspected by a third-party inspection firm to ensure it meets your requirements, either in your country or in the US. Alibaba offers an inspection directory to assist you in locating an inexpensive supplier in the country of origin. To guarantee the best quality, we suggest an inspection on your first purchase, followed by inspections on every few orders afterward.

7. Optimize Your Listing

This step returns us to the product listing that we began in step 4 in order to do some SEO. The objective here is to guarantee that your listing reaches the maximum number of customers looking for your goods. As previously said, it is critical to choose the most relevant keywords when producing a listing that achieves a high search rating and generates visitors.

You may have already begun collecting essential keywords during the previous product research phase, but if not, doing keyword research on your product will provide you with a list of the most important keywords to add. You’ll want to craft a title that combines the top keywords deftly, and the first five words of your title are critical for ranking. An example of a good title for a first aid package is as follows:

“Emergency Preparedness Medical Materials for Travel, Car, School, Office and Home — 150-piece compact basic kit with a complete variety of medical supplies in order to treat common accidents.”

Our Listing Builder tool makes the process of creating a listing simple and quick by assisting you in building each aspect. Once you’ve entered your backend keywords, description, product features/bullet points and title, you’ll get an optimization score indicating the effectiveness of your listing. If it needs more effort, the score will indicate this, and you may continue to add keywords from the presented list to improve your score.

Once you’ve created an optimal listing, you can now copy it into the Seller Central and take the first step toward establishing your Amazon company. For additional information, be sure to go through our in-depth tutorial on how to improve your product listing!

8. Start Driving Sales

Your Amazon selling career officially starts today. Once you’ve finished your product listing and prepared your goods for shipment, it’s time to go live.

However, there is much more to it than just posting a product listing and hoping for the best. To improve your chances of success, you’ll want to boost your visibility. We suggest the following strategies:

• Running a PPC campaign.
• Offer customers a product giveaway, also called product launch.

PPC Campaigns

These are basically the “sponsored content” ads that you’ve likely seen when browsing Amazon goods. You bid on the placement of your advertising in a sponsored advertisements area for a particular keyword relevant to your goods in these campaigns. When a customer searches for that term, your advertisement displays, and you pay Amazon a modest fee for each click on your advertisement. This helps you get early exposure and exposes your goods to a larger audience than you would elsewise.

Product Launches

Product releases are another method to increase your product’s exposure. These will assist in launching your listing by offering drastically reduced discounts. This assists Amazon’s algorithm in classifying your product as relevant to the keywords in your listing, with the aim of improving your product’s ranking in search results. The higher your product ranks on Amazon, the more sales opportunities you have. The majority of consumers never go beyond the first few pages of results, which is why page-one rankings for big keywords are critical.

For a launch, you may engage with an Amazon seller coach who will choose a high-volume keyword for your product that will generate the most relevant impressions possible. Following that, your coach will do study to estimate the number of discounted units you should distribute. Typically, the reductions wind up being about 90%. A substantial discount helps guarantee that your giveaway units are bought on time. Your coach will calculate the number of items to give away based on page-one rivals’ sales. The majority of our launches last between seven and ten days since we’ve determined that this is a long enough length of time for Amazon to record the sales while still being brief enough to restrict the quantity of goods given away.

The ultimate consequence of your product launch is that the listing will appear on page one of Amazon’s search results, giving you considerable exposure to customers and the potential to drive large sales. Both sales and rank have an effect on one another. As your sales grow, your organic ranking increases, which increases your exposure and helps drive sales. Your ranking will continue to improve as your sales increase.

The Advantages of Selling on Amazon

1. Amazon is a huge and rapidly expanding marketplace.

There’s something to be said for Amazon’s incredible reach, to be sure. More than 200 million individuals buy on Amazon every month, according to statistics. In order for smaller businesses to grow, platforms such as Amazon may offer exposure to a consumer base that they would not otherwise be able to reach. Amazon is home to more than 200,000 companies that generate more than $100,000 in revenue each year. There are also about 25,000 vendors on the site that earn in excess of $1 million each year.

2. Amazon has shown to be a successful platform for brands.

Even big and well-established businesses with a high volume of visitors may reap the benefits of selling on Amazon. Amazon’s traffic significantly outpaces that of any other store, and it is critical to have a presence in the places where your customers are spending their time. If there was a shopping mall where the majority of people shopped, such as the largest mall in any city, wouldn’t a store desire to be at that location? Amazon is the largest shopping mall you’ve ever seen in the US, according to the company.

3. Availability of world-class logistical services

Another advantage of selling on Amazon is the ability to have your orders fulfilled by Amazon. Businesses may benefit from Amazon’s extensive supply chain capabilities by selling their products on the website. If a business chooses to participate in Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) programme, it sends its inventory to Amazon, which then handles the inventory storage inside its facilities, delivery, and customer support (including returns).

4. Selling on Amazon is a very simple method to get started in the eCommerce industry.

Starting a business on Amazon is a very simple process. You will not be required to host your own website, develop a logistics network, or worry about delivering your goods on time to your consumers if you use our services.

Instead of having a complicated website, your listing pages on Amazon will serve as a representation of your business on the platform. Perhaps the sight of Amazon’s product pages, which are kept to a bare minimum, makes you feel sick to your stomach.

Concluding Remarks

By now you must be having a clear idea of how to become an Amazon seller. Remember that your online business, regardless of whether you intend to use it as your primary source of revenue or as a side pastime, deserves to benefit from every advantage available. One of the most straightforward methods of building a strong foundation is to use one of the tried-and-tested online marketplaces such as Amazon, which provides you with much more power than you would normally have with your own shop.