Whether you’re new to selling on Amazon or even if you’ve been at it for years here are ten things to keep in mind when using this complicated marketplace:

One

Be competitive on price

Competitor price analysis is essential. Price is the main way to stand out on Amazon. It’s almost not worth listing products that you can’t afford to price competitively. Do your research and only list the products that you can list cheaper or the same as others while still making a worthwhile profit margin.

Two

Don’t run out of stock

Keep on top of your inventory daily so you don’t sell things that you don’t have in stock. It might sound basic but if you’re selling through multiple channels, such as eBay or your own website, then it can be easy to lose track of inventory.

Three

Turn fails into sales

Review any item that hasn’t sold for 30 days, possibly you need to do another competitor price analysis, as there may have been a drop that has left you uncompetitive.

Four

Tip top titles

Keywords are important when it comes to getting your titles right, but you still have to be clear and easy to understand. There’s no point being the top of search if your result is complete gibberish to most customers. You should also avoid punctuation as people tend not to use punctuation when searching.

Five

Perfect pictures

Make sure your images comply with Amazon’s rules; at least 500×500 pixels with a white background. The whole product must be in shot and there can’t be too much space around it. To get your images on a white background you can use our clipping service.

Amazon also require that images don’t have any borders, logos, watermarks or any added text. If your images don’t match these guidelines you may not be able to list your product at all and may find your listings being pulled from the site altogether so it is important not to overlook imagery.

Did you know that Amazon and eBay guidelines now require all product images be placed on a plain white background? ClipItQuick.com operate a free image background removal service for eBay and Amazon sellers. If you want to see what your product images look like when professionally clipped then take advantage of our free trial now!

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Six

Consider going ‘Pro’

If you’re selling high quantities of products then you may save money by paying monthly for a Pro Merchant Subscription instead of paying a price on each product sold. You also get lots of other bonuses for going Pro such as Bulk Uploading and increased reporting options that might make it worthwhile for your business. Read more about Amazon Pro Merchant Subscriptions.

Seven

Follow up on sales

You can advertise at customers who buy through Amazon. Just because a sale was made through Amazon doesn’t stop you trying to convert that into repeat business. A common technique is through offers on follow up purchases. So if someone buys a print cartridge through Amazon, give them a discount off their next print cartridge or printer paper. This could be via email or by adding a card with delivery.

Eight

Think search bar

While customers can browse Amazon listings the vast majority of sales actually come from the search bar. So it is important to know how it works, the search box looks for keywords from the product title, standard product ID (which can be the UPC, EAN, ISBN), brand/designer, manufacturer and search terms. Get all of these categories right and you should hit that important front page of the search results. Experiment with different search terms and see what is most successful.

Nine

Think beyond the search bar

More search! As well as keywords Amazon also lends bias to availability and price so it is important to be competitive here too. It is a generally accepted trend that the best selling products generally rise to the top of search so have a look at these and see what they are doing differently to you, what is making those products sell?

Ten

Aim for the Amazon Buy Box

The Buy Box is literally the box where customers click to buy a product, getting your product to the buy box means customers will automatically buy from you and can lead to a huge boost in sales. Of course that means that getting the box is very competitive. Price is the most obvious way that Amazon decides who gets the buy box, but it also takes into consideration lots of other factors such as; availability, volume, refunds, customer feedback and number of A-z guarantee Claims.

There is no shortcut to getting the buy box you have to be a highly consistent and quality seller,here is a more indepth examination of getting the Amazon Buy Box.