How to Become an Amazon Seller in 8 Easy Steps

For example, assume the Helium 10 CPR 8-Day Giveaway Score is 8. Accordingly, you need to make 64 sales in 8 days. To be on the safe side, you should calculate your costs for 16-32 days.

To calculate your costs, you need to know how much you’ve to pay per sale for Amazon advertising.

If you run ads on Amazon, you have to pay per click (CPC). The average CPC is $0.97, while the average conversion rate is 9.47%.

Here’s a great infographic showing these average values:

You need to divide your CPC by your conversion rate to get the cost per sale. Then multiply this cost by the number of sales you have to make to get your product on the first page of search results.

Of course, you also make revenue when generating sales. You get your real costs if you deduct your costs from your revenue.

Create a Better Product

Amazon’s primary goal is to make the most revenue. They mainly take three criteria into account to determine a product’s ranking:

• Click-Through-Rate
• Conversion Rate
• Customer Feedback

To get a better Click-Through-Rate and Conversion-Rate, you need to optimize your Amazon listing.

We’ll talk about the best listing optimization strategies later. However, to get better customer reviews, you’ll need a better product. Customer feedback is the key to long-term success.

Great product = Great customer feedback = long-term success

It’s not enough to sell an “OK” product. You need to sell a product that blows customers’ minds away.

To achieve that, you need to understand the kano-model. It consists of five attributes that influence customer satisfaction:

• Must-be-Attributes: Basic features that customers only become aware of when they’re not fulfilled.
• One-dimensional-Quality-Attributes: Customers know them. They eliminate dissatisfaction or build satisfaction.
• Attractive-Quality-Attributes: Provide satisfaction when achieved, but don’t cause dissatisfaction when not achieved.
• Indifferent-Quality-Attributes: Irrelevant. Customers don’t care if they’re fulfilled or not.
• Reverse-Quality-Attributes: Lead to dissatisfaction if present and customer satisfaction if absent.

While Must-be-Attributes and One-dimensional-Quality-Attributes are important, Attractive-Quality-Attributes are the ones that blow customers’ minds away.

The best way to find these attributes is to analyze the problems of your competitor’s products. Here’s a great strategy to do that:

If you really want to beat your competition, fix these problems with your product. It’ll only make your life easier in the coming months.

How to Set Up Your Amazon Business

Create an Amazon Seller Account

Creating an Amazon Seller Account is very simple. However, there are some essential things to consider.

First of all, here’s what you need to create an Amazon Seller Account:

• The legal form of the company
• Trading license (valid trade license)
• Proof of identity (identity card/passport)
• Bank account
• Credit card
• Valid phone number

Ensure that you have these things when creating your Amazon Seller Account.

Furthermore, there are two types of seller accounts. The Individual Seller Account and the Professional Seller Account:

Individual Seller Account

• You can sell up to 40 items per month
• There is no monthly flat fee
• You need to pay a fee of $0,99 per item sold

Professional Seller Account

• You can sell as many products as you want
• There’s a monthly flat fee of $39,99
• You don’t have to pay a fee per item sold

I highly recommend choosing the professional plan. The basic selling plan is only worth it if you sell less than 40 items per month.

Choose Your Fulfillment Method

After creating your Amazon Seller Account, you need to choose a fulfillment method.

There are two options: You can go for Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM) and store, pack, and ship products on your own. Or you can use Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) and outsource all these tasks to Amazon.

You only have to send your products to an Amazon fulfillment center, and they handle the order fulfillment for you.

If you take advantage of Fulfillment by Amazon, you’ve to pay more fees than a FBM Seller. Every seller has to pay referral fees and fees for the Amazon seller account. FBA Sellers additionally have to pay storage fees and FBA fees (fees for packaging and shipping).

Here’s a comprehensive guide about Amazon fees.

Finally, you need to figure out which fulfillment method is more profitable. Therefore, you should use Helium 10’s Profitability Calculator, as shown in the section Calculate Profits.

Keep in mind that you have lots of opportunity costs, if you choose Fulfillment by Merchant. These costs are losses that result from not taking advantage of an existing opportunity. For this reason, you have to consider your own hourly rate in the calculation.

Set Up Your Listing

Your listing describes your product to customers. You’ve probably seen hundreds of product listings in your life so far.

Here is how it looks like:

Overall, there are 3 billion product listings on Amazon.

Thus, you need to create a product listing that stands out. As a new seller, you will do ten times harder to succeed with a bad listing.

We will talk about the best listing optimization strategies later in this post. For now, you only need to know how to set it up.

First of all, you need a Fulfillment Network Stock Keeping Unit (FNSKU).

To get this number, you need a UPC. A UPC is a barcode, as you have probably seen it thousands of times in your life:

You can buy a UPC on the official site of the GS1. I highly recommend not to buy your UPC Code elsewhere – it only makes problems.

When you have your UPC, you can create a listing on Amazon, and you’ll get an FNSKU.

While we will discuss later in this post how you can optimize your listing to increase sales on Amazon, here are the basic elements of every Amazon listing:

• Every product page has a product title. Usually, the title includes further details like size or brand.
• Bullet Points are the place where you should convince your customers to buy your product. Clearly explain the benefits of your product.
• Answer customers’ most important questions in the product description and explain technical product details.
• Present your product from different angles with your product images.
• Backend keywords don’t appear in your listing. Add them to your listing so that customers can find your product in the Amazon search results.

Order Your Product

If you don’t manufacture your own products, you need to find a supplier. Alibaba is an excellent point to start your research for manufactures, and there are also great Alibaba alternatives to find quality products.

Let’s say you want to sell drinking bottles. Head over to Alibaba and search for drinking bottles:

You will find thousands of manufactures:

Go through the list and search for the ones that are best suited for your product. You can also contact suppliers and negotiate with them.

When searching for a supplier on Alibaba, make sure to choose suppliers that have a Gold Supplier Membership.

Also, check how many companies the supplier works together with and what these companies say about the supplier.

If everything is fine, you can talk about product changes. Do you want a blue bottle or a red one? Do you need other changes? You have to clarify everything and then order one or two samples.

Once you know all costs, go back to the Helium 10 Profitability Calculator and check your profit margin.

If everything is okay, you can place a bulk order. I recommend ordering inventory for two months.

Why?

Because if your inventory management fails and you’re out of stock, you’ll lose all the rankings you gained through promotion. Accordingly, you will lose all your sales, and your hard work will be wasted.

Optimize Your Listing to Increase Sales

Most Amazon customers don’t look past the first search results page when searching for a product on Amazon. So, it’s critical that your product ranks high in the search results. With listing optimization, you can make your product more visible and increase your sales.

Keyword Research

First of all, you need to do extensive keyword research. Amazon only indexes your product for a keyword if you mention it in your listing.

That’s why it’s really important to know every keyword that can generate sales.

You should also use Helium 10 Index Checker to check if you’re indexed for an important keyword or not.

To find out which keywords are important for your product, you can use the following strategies:

Read this article here to learn exactly how Helium 10 Magnet can help you find keywords.

When you’ve researched all the important keywords, it’s time to optimize your listing:

Optimize Your Title

It’s important to make your title descriptive. Tell customers what they’ll get from you. If you sell something for which technical details are important, include them as well.

For example, if you sell a drinking bottle, you might include the capacity.

To get all this information, you’ve to study your niche.

Here are just a few starting points to do that:

• Product-specific blogs
• Forums
• Your competitors

Optimize Your Bullet Points

Bullet points are the place to convince potential customers to buy your product.

So, it would be best if you mention the benefits of your product in the bullet points. You can talk about technical details later in the product description.

Customers see the bullet points first, and they want to hear their benefits, not technical details.

According to Invespcro, only 2.2 % of businesses have a useful value proposition.

I think this number won’t be much higher on Amazon. Thus, this could be a great opportunity to separate your listing from the competition.

Optimize Your Product Description

Here’s the place to talk about technical product details.

In a retail store, people can always ask someone if they have questions.

But on Amazon, there aren’t any employees. If people don’t find the information they need, they will look for it elsewhere.

Accordingly, they will also buy somewhere else.

Thus, it gets even more important to study your niche. Here’re a few advanced strategies to do that:

• Check Q&A on Amazon
• Check negative reviews of competitors
• Use Helium 10’s Review Downloader

Optimize Product Photos

75% of Online Shoppers rely on product photos when they decide to buy a product or not.

Furthermore, 22% of returns occur because the product looks different in real life.

Therefore it is really important to optimize your product photos.

If you’ve great photos, you’ll not only make more sales, you also will get fewer returns.

To get the most out of your pictures, focus on these three points:

• Make sure your images are of high quality
• Focus on Value
• Make dominant pictures

You should also check out our article on how to increase your sales on Amazon to learn more about optimizing product images.

Use A+ Content

Using A+ Content, you can include images to your product descriptions or upload a video to your listing.

Here’s how it looks like:

Imagine if you had to choose between two similar products.

Would you take the one with video or without video?

For sure, you would buy the product with video content.

Video content can improve your conversion rate by up to 144%.

However, to use A+ Content, you need to enroll your trademark in Amazon Brand Registry.

How to Launch a New Product on Amazon

The most crucial success factor is promotion. That’s why we wrote an entire article on how to launch your product on Amazon.

However, here are the three strategies that have the most impact on your product launch:

Amazon Advertising

Amazon Advertising is crucial to your product launch. Keep in mind that your campaign hasn’t always to be profitable. Sometimes you will spend more than you will earn.

But your rankings will increase due to growing sales. Consequently, you will automatically make more sales in the future.

Before starting an Amazon advertising campaign, make sure you have a few reviews. Usually, the fewer ratings you have, the worse your conversion rate will be.

Deal Pages

One of the best ways to promote your product is to list it on deal pages. If you offer your product with a 70% or 90% discount, it will be easy for you to sell it.

A great way to list your product on a deal page is to use Jungle Scout.

Like Helium 10, Jungle Scout shows you how many products you have to give away every day for ~ two weeks to get in the top 3 of search results.

Here’s what to do:

1. Log in to Jungle Scout

2. Go to Launch > Promotions tab

Then, Jungle Scout takes you to a dashboard on which you can see all your products. Here’s what to do next: