You could be up and selling on Amazon within a few hours assuming you have everything ready to go to launch an account and to launch your listings. 

Creating a Seller Central account with Amazon US is very straight forward.  You can use your existing Amazon customer account or create a new one.   

You will need the following: 

• Bank account and routing number
• Internationally chargeable credit card
• Government-issued ID
• Tax information
• Phone number

After your account is created we recommend filling out your profile, shipping and other settings and beginning to list your products.

To list your products on Amazon you will need to have all of your product information available to setup your listing.   See below questions for all the recommend things to have ready to launch a new listing.

More info on getting started can be found here

For Amazon Seller Central accounts there are 2 available plans: 

• The Individual selling plan costs $0.99 per sale.
• The Professional selling plan costs $39.99 per month, no matter how many items you sell.

In most cases we recommend the professional plan, it has more features and is more cost effective for anyone planning on selling more than 40 items per month.  More info on the different plans can be found here

Aside from the above account fees amazon has a range of other fees that may apply: 

• FBA fees: these are for sellers using fulfillment by amazon.  Amazon charges an FBA fee for each unit sold dependent on size and weight tiers.  If you plan on using your own fulfillment and not FBA you will not pay this fee, but you will pay a higher referral fee.
• Referral fees: these are percentage based tiers based on the price of your product and your product category.  Most products sit in the 10 to 15% tier.  More info
• Labelling fees: If you choose to have amazon FBA label your products this is usually around 50c
• Inventory placement fee: If you prefer to send inventory to only 1 fulfilment centre Amazon charges an inventory placement fee. Again based in size tier, approximately 40c per unit.

Below is a breakdown of costs on a unit level to determine your gross profit margin: 

• COG’s: These are your cost to product the product
• Freight: Costs to ship the product to Amazon FBA
• FBA: Fulfilmment costs by amazon. Cost to handle and ship your product to the customer, depends on weight and size tiers. Use calculator below to work out
• Referral fee: the cost per unit to sell on Amazon’s platform depends on price and product category, this is usually between 10 and 15%
• Returns: depends on product category, but budget for about 2% of sales price
• ACOS: Amazon ads cost.  This is essential for selling on amazon.  This will be higher for new products.  I usually budget about 5% of sales price overall. 
• Storage Costs: Amazon charges storage fees for items that sit around too long (use calculator)
• Inventory placement fees: Cost to send product to one FBA centre.  About 40c per unit
• Labelling fee: Cost for Amazon to label your products (you can do it yourself to save this). About 50c per unit.

Deduct all of the above from your sales price to get your gross profit margin!

Amazon provides an excellent calculator to help you define all these costs and compare to FBA vs self fulfilment, you can find it here

Yes, it is possible to gain some control over your listings.  Amazon has provided tools to brand owners and resellers to do this. 

The main step involved is to enrol in Amazon’s brand registry. 

We go into more detail in this blog post: https://www.oneegg.com.au/blog/amazon-solutions-brand-owners/

If you are just getting started with a small amount of products we recommend manually adjusting pricing to get a feel for the sales potential of your product and where it sits within the market. 

However, as soon as you can support it, we recommend using a repricing tool.  Repricers allow you to automatically update prices in real time based on the competition and other important metrics.  If you are a reseller, a repricer is even more essential as it allows you to grab more buy box percentage

Repricers allow you to ensure consistent sales volume and that you are maximizing your profit margins.  

We have written in depth about how to best use repricers here

If you’re selling your product on Amazon FBA in the USA, there is now a way to easily expand to selling in Canada, Mexico & Brazil.  The program is called Remote Fulfilment with FBA and is only available to FBA sellers.  It’s as simple as enrolling in Seller Central and then Amazon replicates your listings into those other markets.  More information found here

Note that some listings are not able to be replicated due to cross border issues, so you need to check on a case by case basis.  If this is the case, you can still open seller central accounts in those other countrist and send your products direct to FBA centers within those countries

There are mixed opinions on whether Amazon sellers should try and sell off Amazon to supplement their sales on Amazon.  I’ll give you the main pro’s and con’s:

The 2 key reasons to build your own website and sales channel is to a) own your audience and b) diversify your marketing channels to reduce risk.  While you are selling on Amazon, you are essentially ‘renting’ your audience in the sense that you do not have full control over how and when you can engage with your audience.  Building your own website allows you to build your own customer lists and engage with your customers when, how and where you want.  Having your own customer list is a business asset in and of itself.  It also allows you to diversify against the risk of something happening on Amazon and losing all of your traffic and sales.  There are other good reasons as well such as having more control over the creative and branding of your product.  

The big downside to selling off Amazon is the cost.  To generate the same traffic that Amazon does to your products is going to be very challenging, and arguably cost far more than it would to invest in Amazon itself.  Money and time spent on building a site and traffic to your site, might be better suited in investing in Amazon ads, improving product listings or launching new product variations.  

Ultimately the decision is different for every business.  At some point it will probably make sense for a business to diversify into other traffic channels off Amazon.

This is not exhaustive, but as a quick list, the key things to worry about when launching a new product are: 

1. Keyword Research: review top keywords your main competitors rank for
2. Build listings: Imagery, text content, A+, videos
3. Enrol in vine to generate reviews
4. Setup auto emails to customers
5. Ads setup: On Amazon + off platform ads

Amazon Advertising works on a pay-per-click model. You only pay Amazon for your placement when somebody clicks on your ad. The cost of Amazon Advertising can vary depending on the type of advertisement, and on how you choose to allocate your budget. Amazon Sponsored Ads are assigned a daily budget, whereas Sponsored Brands can be allocated a daily or lifetime budget.

There are several ways you can utilise Amazon ads to drive business performance:

Amazon Sponsored Ads

Amazon Sponsored Product Ads help you to improve the visibility of your products with keyword-targeted pay-per-click display ads. Sponsored Ads are shown in search results and on product detail pages.

Amazon Headline Search Ads (Sponsored Brand Campaigns)

This type of Amazon ads enables you to promote multiple products alongside, above, and below the results on a search results page. Your ads are displayed when a shopper uses your targeted keywords in their search query.

Amazon Product Display Ads

Amazon Product Display Ads are PPC ads that are shown on customer review pages, below search results, and on product detail pages. This type of Amazon ads is excellent for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities and can also be displayed on cart abandonment emails and follow up emails.

Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS) is the percentage of Amazon advertising spend for every dollar you gain in revenue from attributed sales of your marketing campaign. It’s a key Amazon marketing metric.

To calculate your ACoS, you need to use the following formula:

Total Ad Spend/Attributed Sales = ACoS

For example, if you spend a total of $100 on advertising for every $400 you make in advertising attributed sales, you’re ACoS would be 25% for the marketing campaign.

$100 Ad Spend/$400 Total Sales = 0.25 ACoS

Blended ACoS is the percentage of ad spend to total sales – not just advertising attributed sales.

It’s vital that you look at the relationship between attributed sales and organic sales to determine the efficiency of your Amazon Advertising and to inform future marketing campaign decision making.

For example, if your ad attributed sales and organic sales are increasing at a similar rate, it proves the effectiveness of your advertising and that there is room to grow your ad budget and expand your reach. However, if your attributed sales are growing, but your organic sales are decreasing, it highlights that your Amazon Advertising may be cannibalising your organic sales.

While some marketing agencies will make the mistake of focusing on regular ACoS alone, our experience and expertise can help you to utilise blended ACoS to gain a better understanding of the impact of your Amazon pay-per-click marketing to ensure that your strategy is delivering growth of both your attributed Amazon marketing and organic sales.

Pricing is a vital factor in product search ranking and conversion rate optimisation. Products with a successful sales history rank higher in search results pages. Testing and optimising your price points can help your products to achieve a higher ranking in the Amazon product search algorithm.

Just like Google, Amazon uses a ranking algorithm to provide shoppers with the most relevant products and best value deals in search results. Amazon only utilises data from the Amazon platform to inform its ranking algorithm.

Along with targeted keywords, pricing is the ranking factor that you have the most control over. We provide advanced Amazon marketing techniques that go beyond what most marketing agencies provide. We help our clients optimise their price points to get a competitive edge in search results and boost their visibility and sales.

Yes, very interestingly, it does.  This is an interesting nuance of Amazon.  The more you invest in Ads, the more traffic is driven to your listing.  Sales velocity increases which drives organic rankings.

This is interesting because other platforms like Google have the exact opposite policy.  They claim that investment in advertising has no effect on organic results. 

Read more about this in an article we wrote on Search Engine Land