If a How to sell on Amazon article actually existed, one that:

• taught the basics of becoming an Amazon Seller
• how to set up an account in Amazon Seller Central
• how to find products to sell
• How to sell them on Amazon
• the shipping process
• Whether to send products into an Amazon Fulfillment Center
• vs. shipping them first to an FBA Prep Center
• vs. shipping them one by one from your home or place of business

…that article would actually have to be a complete course, or at the very minimum, a series of articles, and even then, it would likely be incomplete.

Selling on Amazon, much like selling on eBay, is something that millions of people can already put on their resume. The Amazon marketplace is huge, and while they are not the world’s largest retailer (yet), they have become the world’s largest online retailer, one Amazon sale at a time.

So you want to sell on Amazon. Easy enough – Open a Seller Account, and list some products for sale.

Here are the simple steps to get started:

How to Sell on Amazon – Opening an Amazon Seller Account

Step 1: Go to https://services.amazon.com

From there you can click the “Start Selling” link.

Step 2: Fill out the short form. Enter your name, email address that you want to receive communications from Amazon through, and choose and enter your password twice. Click “Next”.

Step 3: After clicking Next, you will then enter your business, tax, and banking information to set up your account. For additional information, there are two basic types of Amazon Seller Accounts discussed here. Go through the sections of […]

Amazon Prime has many benefits, and FREE two-day shipping is one of the better ones. But if you are an Amazon seller and are buying things from the Amazon website with the intention of reselling them (on or off Amazon), it is against the Amazon Terms of Service to use your Prime membership for these orders.

“But what if you choose something other than the Free two-day shipping?” you ask…

Let’s take a look at an example: I placed a countertop microwave oven into my shopping cart in both my Amazon Prime account, and my non-prime account in order to see the shipping options. Today is Nov 13th.

The Prime account has these 2 options for shipping :

Get it Nov. 15 – FREE
Get it Nov. 18 – FREE (plus receive a $1 reward for select digital items for having all Prime orders delivered together one day per week)

Since I am a Prime member, I automatically get free 2-day shipping (Nov. 15), or I can opt for the combined Prime delivery (one delivery day per week), in which case Amazon will give me a $1 credit on a digital purchase.

The non-prime account has these options:

Get it by Nov. 15 – $31.51 shipping (Prime is FREE)
Get it by Nov. 19 – $17.31
Get it sometime between Nov. 19 and Nov. 22 – FREE

As you can see, no matter which of the non-Prime shipping choices I make, the Prime option is BETTER, and costs Amazon more money. Non-Prime members have to pay over $31 to get the microwave by Friday, but Prime members get it for FREE. Non-Prime […]

If Amazon sellers had to eliminate all tools except one from their arsenal, it would be a safe bet that most would want to hang on to Keepa, the Amazon price tracker. But  knowing how to use the data that Keepa provides to make informed buying decisions requires some practice. Let’s take a look at a Keepa graph to see what we can find.

AMAZON SALES RANK, as revealed by Keepa

The green line on the Keepa graph represents the sales rank at the time that Keepa looked at the product. The more Keepa users that look at the product on Amazon, the more times Keepa will see the rank, and the more times the change in rank will be recorded on the Keepa chart. It stands to reason that a larger number of sellers will be looking at the products that are currently popular, so Keepa will likely have more information on popular products than on non-popular products. When you look at an item for the first time, Keepa may actually have no information on that product at all.

The current rank shows how that product is positioned in its category in relation to all of the other products in the category. Sales ranks on EVERY product change every time ANY product in that category sells. If there are 1000 products in a category and only 100 of them sell in a day, those 100 will move up in rank and the other 900 will move down in rank. Since the sales take place at different times of the day, the ranks are constantly changing. Since most Amazon categories have hundreds of thousands or […]

Recently I did a training video for my sourcing team where I demonstrated some interesting and surprising data regarding Keepa and Jungle Scout, two very important and highly recognized tools used by the Amazon FBA selling community. Here is a summary of what was discussed:

There is an item on Amazon that I sold 52 units of in a recent 90 day period. I was not the only seller at the time. My Buy Box percentage was 60% for this item. If all things were equal, based on that information, one could likely conclude that the item sells around 28 per month. For a fact we know that it sells at least 17-18 units per month on average based on my sales alone.

Let’s see what Keepa and Jungle Scout think.

Keepa

Most sellers count each spike or drop on the Keepa chart as indicating a sale. Based on this, Keepa shows 23 sales of this product over the same 90 day period of time. That averages to slightly fewer than 8 per month, which is less than half of my sales alone during that period.

Jungle Scout

Jungle Scout requires the user to click their Chrome browser extension icon while they are on the product page or the search results page, and it shows an estimate of the number of monthly sales based on their algorithm. For this item, Jungle Scout estimates 6 sales a month during the same time frame.

Here is the takeaway:

Keepa is not seeing everything that takes place on every Amazon page. If no one with Keepa has […]

People in the US and around the world shop online for convenience, selection, and lower prices. Comparison shopping online is easier than running from store to store, and it allows the shopper to look at ratings and reviews prior to making the decision to purchase. Many smart buyers have found ways to increase their savings by using coupons, joining cash-back sites, and even pre-buying discount gift cards.

Many apps and websites have popped up over the years that make finding these discounts as easy as 1-2-3.

You can save money

1) before you buy (Discount Gift Cards)
2) when you buy (Coupons)
and
3) after you buy. (Cash-back)

Your only limitation is in your ability to find the most discounts. Let’s take a look at three very different options that all work (together) to save you money.

In part one of this 3-part series, we are looking at Discount Gift Cards.

***
Gift Cards are a HUGE business here in the US. Supermarkets, drugstores, convenience stores, gas stations, and even the big super stores all have racks and displays full of various gift cards from every store and restaurant imaginable. Any time you need to buy a gift for someone and don’t know what to get them, or if you need to mail a birthday card with a small “gift” inside, the Gift Card makes the perfect choice. Or you might think it does.

Unused Gift Cards

The fact is, as much as a Billion dollars in giftcards go unused every year. Most states have begun imposing regulations on how long companies must honor gift cards. Only a few short years ago, gift cards were allowed to expire without ever being redeemed, making for a huge windfall for the companies that sold them, as well as the retailers that never had […]

Sometimes, when researching products to sell on Amazon.com, it’s important to be able to go beyond the top 100 best-sellers that Amazon automatically shows in the Amazon Search Results when you click “Best Sellers” after you have chosen a category.

Fortunately there is a simple solution that allows you to see 400 pages worth of deals in a given category or subcategory in the Amazon Search Results. For Amazon sellers, this can be the difference between knowing of a few items that are profitable, and totally mastering the category.

Simply choose your category on Amazon.com and leave the search bar blank. You will be taken to that category’s main page. From here, find “Best Sellers” at the top of the screen. Clicking on this pulls up the top 100 items in that category.

To move beyond the top 100 best sellers, simply put the left bracket symbol and the right bracket symbol in the search bar with nothing in between them. So, your search bar should look like this: [].

Once you put the two brackets in the search bar, click to search, and you will now be able to view 400 pages of returns.

PRO TIP:

Instead of clicking through one page at a time, if you would like to jump ahead in the Amazon Search Results, simply change the page numbers in the URL and click Enter to go to that page. Make sure you put the page number in TWICE, as shown in this image.

Hopefully this has helped make your searching […]