So you’re already selling on eBay? But have you considered selling on Amazon? There are a lot of reasons why you should be expanding onto Amazon marketplace, in fact, there are very few reasons why you shouldn’t be selling on Amazon!
Amazon’s culture of trust
For starters, the customer bases of eBay and Amazon barely overlap! Amazon and eBay buyers are quite different and only a small percentage buy from both websites regularly. In other words, if you’re not selling on both marketplaces then you’re missing out on a huge chunk of sales.
Amazon’s reputation for great customer service carries a lot of weight with potential buyers. Many people chose to buy from Amazon rather than eBay because there is an inherent trust regarding delivery timescales and returns. And even if the buyer isn’t aware that their order is actually being shipped from a third party marketplace seller rather than Amazon itself, third party sellers have a few straightforward guidelines to follow regarding despatch time and customer support to ensure that Amazon’s reputation is upheld.
This culture of trust simply doesn’t exist on eBay to the same extent, perhaps because eBay seller standards vary more and scams involving eBay and PayPal are well documented.
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£4.47 billion sales with a fast growing customer base
Amazon attributes over 33% of its sales (around £4.47 billion total in the UK in 2013) to its marketplace sellers. So £1.47 billion in sales is being generated by its marketplace sellers, of which you could be one. That’s a big chunk of a huge pie.
Better yet, whilst eBay may be three times bigger than Amazon, Amazon is growing at a much, much faster rate. So expect to see that sales figure rise and rise over the coming months and years.
Straightforward selling fees
Amazon takes one fee when your product sells. There’s no insertion fee or separate transaction fee. The fee is a percentage of the value of the sale and varies depending upon the category you list within. We covered this in more detail in our article, eBay vs Amazon Selling Fees.
eBay’s fees by comparison are a complex beast. You’ve got both insertion fees and final value fees to take into account as well as PayPal transaction fees which are taken separately. This is complicated by the fact that eBay fees are deducted from your bank account monthly whilst PayPal fees are taken before the money is even transferred to you! All of this can be a bit of a minefield when trying to calculate how much money you’ve made on your sale.
Fulfilment by Amazon
Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) is a service offered by Amazon whereby they store your goods in one of their many warehouses and manage your shipments and returns, for a fee of course. This could potentially save on costly warehouse space and additional warehouse staff and enable you to keep your overheads down. You can even use FBA to ship your eBay orders. You can read more about Fulfilment By Amazon here.