Amazon is undoubtedly one of the biggest e-commerce platforms on the planet. If you are a business looking to broaden the number of channels where people can access your products, it will no doubt be top of your list.

The good news is setting up on Amazon is easy and you could be reaching a whole new audience in next to no time.

Setting Up an Account

It takes just a few minutes to set up a seller account on the Amazon platform. All you need to do is put in your details, sign the participation agreement and put in your VAT registration status. Once that is done, you are good to go and can begin selling to Amazon’s millions of customers.

The site provides numerous easy to use tools to enable you to upload your product images and descriptions, take advantage of their very secure checkout and delivery service, and quickly begin selling.

Once someone buys your item, you can use the same tool set to print delivery labels and send out your product. An alternative to this is to take advantage of the Fulfilment by Amazon package where they store, manage and send off your product for you (for an extra cost, of course). This also allows you take part in the Amazon Prime scheme which can improve sales and reach. Once you have sold a product, the money usually goes promptly into your account, minus Amazon’s fees.

How to Increase Sales on Amazon

Once you have started using Amazon and have mastered the basics, the next step is to optimise customer engagement and, hopefully, your sales. There are plenty of ways you can do this:

  • Encourage reviews: According to research, we value reviews and check them out if we are thinking of buying a product. The problem is that about 90% of customers on Amazon don’t leave any feedback. Contacting buyers outside of the platform asking them to leave a review can increase that ratio. The more positive reviews your product has the better.
  • Improve Your SEO: Searching for items on Amazon is easy. Making your product more likely to turn up on the site searches is another thing entirely. When you put together your product description for upload you need to use the right keywords that give you greater visibility. The easiest way to do this is to check for similar products and look at what words they use. Another way to improve traffic to your product site is to build blogs and other content that feed into it.
  • The right price: One of the problems many people have with selling on Amazon is that it’s competitive – everyone seems to be jumping on the band wagon. Checking what similar suppliers are offering on price is important. You can automate this with certain software and that can make sure you stay competitive.
  • Advertising: There are numerous ways to advertise your listings to make the general public run to your online corner of the store and buy. One easy way is to build up your social media presence and reach out to the kind of customers who are likely to buy your product. Amazon are also looking to further develop their sponsored listings which is version of pay per click advertising that could also improve your visibility.

Using a third party service like Amazon has a range of benefits including access to a ready made, large customer base as well as the ecommerce infrastructure that is probably second to none in the world today. The downside is that it’s very competitive but that shouldn’t stop you from loading up your products and learning how to optimise your performance. Get it right and you could well attract a whole new range of customers to your ecommerce business.