How to Become a Successful Amazon Seller in 8 Easy Steps

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Did you know that 74% of Amazon sellers earn more than $1,000 a month? Also, 39% of sellers see more than $10,000 in sales per month.

Selling on Amazon is a great opportunity for everyone to build a sustainable passive income stream.

However, there are a few things to keep in mind when starting a business on Amazon. If you don't know what you're doing, you're likely to fail.

If you think selling on Amazon is a "Get Rich Quick" tactic, you are absolutely wrong.

It takes time and money to succeed.

As long as you're aware of that, you can quit your job, build your own business, and make thousands of dollars a month.

If you want to know exactly how to become successful on Amazon, you've come to the right place.

Here's what you will learn in this post:

• How to find a money-making product on Amazon
• How to set up your business
• How to optimize your listing for maximum sales
• How to launch your product on Amazon
• The "rarely mentioned secret" about how to get more reviews on Amazon

Let's dive right in.

Do You Really Know How to Find Money-Making Products?

First of all, you need to know what to sell. I HIGHLY recommend searching for products before you take care of other things like registering a business.

Why?

Unfortunately, most people give up before it even gets started. If you give up during product research, at least you haven't wasted any more time on other things.

That being said, let's focus on the exact strategies to find great products to sell. 

First, you've to realize that no goldmine automatically makes you thousands of dollars.

85% of sellers agree - selling on Amazon isn’t a get rich quick tactic. Here's a chart showing the average time it takes Amazon sellers to turn a profit:

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What you can find is a product with high demand and low competition. But you'll need to invest time and money to become successful.

When you start selling on Amazon, chances are high that you won’t be profitable right from the start.

You need to put money into promotion to make sales. Sometimes, you need to put much more money into it as you get out.

When you constantly make sales, you'll automatically rank higher in search results and start making passive sales.

From that moment on, your business will (in most cases) be profitable. But you can't ignore the costs to get there.

For example, you’ll need money for:

• Advertising on Amazon
• Advertising on Facebook
• Other forms of advertising

We’ll take a look at the best strategies to promote your product later in this post. For now, simply bear in mind that you need time and money to build a business on Amazon - it's not a get rich quick tactic.

Then, read through this powerful research strategy to find money-making products:

Sign up for Helium 10

Sign up for a free Helium 10 Account. You can also use this 50% discount code to use all tools.

Head over to Black Box and open "KEYWORDS":

Open ADVANCED FILTERS:

You're now able to filter keywords with exactly those parameters you're looking for.

What you need to do is to enter the parameters that indicate high demand and low competition.

If you're just starting, you can use the values below. You can also modify them by +/- 10%:

• Search Volume: 200 - Max
• Revenue: $5000 - Max
• Price: $15 to $50
• Reviews: 0 - 100
• Variations: 0 - 1
• Competing Products: 0 - 200

Now, go through the results and sort out keywords that refer to a big brand. Only search for general keywords.

The first keyword I saw was this one:

What you can see is that top-ranking products for this keyword only have 41 reviews and a rating of 4.1 on average.

When you head over to Amazon, you can see that there are only 36 competing products.

Next, check the whole niche with Helium 10 XRay. You can see that all products have a low review count and a decent revenue:

Looks GREAT!

But you shouldn't stop here. You've to run all products through Helium 10 Cerebro.

Cerebro is a tool that checks all keywords that products are ranking for on Amazon:

What you need to do is to check if all these keywords are competitive or not.

For example, "lock picks kit" has a total search volume of 354 and 353 competing products.

According to CPR 8-Day Giveaways, you only have to give away 8 products a day for 8 days to rank on the first page of Amazon search results.

Although this strategy is super useful, you should check out our definitive guide to find out what to sell on Amazon.

Calculate Profits

By now, create a comprehensive list of all your product ideas. Then, calculate the exact profit for each product.

No matter what you want to sell, the profit margin is the most crucial point to keep in mind.

Here's a chart showing the average profit margins of Amazon sellers:

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Only 8% of sellers say that their Amazon business isn't profitable yet. Most sellers make profits between 6% and 50%.

That's GREAT!

For the start, aim for a profit margin of at least 10%.

Here's what you need to do to figure out the profit margin of each product:

1. Sign up for a free Helium 10 account

2. Download Helium 10's Chrome Extension here

3. Choose a product

4. Check Profitability

5. Make sure that the profit margin is higher than 10%.

Calculate Costs For Promotion

Next, calculate the costs to get a product to the first page of Amazon's search results.

You can't calculate these costs exactly, however, you should know it roughly.

You can use Helium 10 CPR 8-Day Giveaway score to do so. It shows you how many sales you have to make per day for 8 days to rank on the first page of search results.

To be on the safe side, calculate your costs for 16-32 days.

For example, let's say Helium 10 CPR 8-Day Giveaway is 8.

So you need to make 64 sales in 8 Days and 128 sales in 16 days.

To calculate your costs, you need to know how much you've to pay per sale when using Amazon PPC.

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:

Of course, you should always aim to make profits, but there's no guarantee for it. However, the main goal is always to improve your ranking. As your ranking improves, you will start making passive sales.

What you need to do is to calculate your costs for one sale. Then deduct your profit and you'll know if you lose money or make money.

Create A Better Product

It’s incredibly important that your product is better than those of your competitors.

Amazon’s main goal is to make the most revenue possible.

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 later about the best listing optimization strategies. However, to get better customer feedback, you’ll need a better product.

In fact, customer feedback is the key to long-term success.

Great product = Great customer feedback = long-term success

Instead of searching for tricks to make more sales on Amazon and get rich quickly, focus on product quality.

It’s not enough to sell an “OK” product, you need to sell a super awesome product that blows customer's minds away.

To do so, 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.
• Indifferent-Quality-Attributes: Irrelevant. Customers don't care if they're fulfilled or not.
• Reverse-Quality-Attributes: Lead to dissatisfaction if present, but to customer satisfaction if absent.

While Must-be-Attributes and One-dimensional-Quality-Attributes are important, Attractive-Quality-Attributes are the ones that deliver real value.

The best way to find these attributes is to analyze the problems of your competitors. Here's a super helpful strategy to do so:

1. Sign up for a free Helium 10 account

2. Download Helium 10's Chrome Extension

3. Choose a product

4. Start Review Downloader

4. Choose "Only Verified Purchase" and <3* reviews

5. Go through the results and find all problems

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

Create an Amazon Seller Account

Creating an Amazon Seller Account is pretty easy. Yet, there are some important 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

Make sure that you have these things available when you want to create your account.

Furthermore, there are two types of seller accounts. Individual-Seller-Account and Professional-Seller-Account.

Here are the differences:

Individual seller account

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

Professional seller account

• You can sell as much as you want
• There's a monthly fee of $39,99
• You don't have to pay a fee per item

I highly recommend choosing the Profesional Account. The Individual account is only worth it if you want to sell less than 40 items a month and if you sell high-priced products.

Since you want to build a real business on Amazon, it's rather not suitable for you.

If you want to start small, I recommend switching to the Professional account as soon as you can afford it.

Choose Your Fulfillment Method

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

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

If you take advantage of Fulfillment by Amazon, you’ve to pay a little bit more fees than FBM Sellers.

Every seller has to pay referral fees and fees for the Amazon seller account.

Also, FBA Sellers have to pay storage fees and FBA fees (fees for packaging and shipping).

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I recommend checking out all Amazon Fees here.

In the end, you need to investigate which fulfillment method is more profitable. Therefore, you definitely should use Helium 10's Profitability Calculator as mentioned above.

Yet, I recommend going for Fulfillment by Amazon.

Why?

Because when you go for Fulfillment by Merchant, you have a TON of opportunity costs.

Opportunity costs are losses that result from not taking advantage of existing opportunities.

In the end, you have to ask yourself: What is your hourly rate?

Then, calculate your costs and profits and decide what's better for your business.

Set up Your Listing

A listing describes your offer to the customer. It is like a showcase of your product on Amazon.

You've probably seen hundreds of listings in your life so far.

Here’s how it looks like:

Overall, there are 3 billion product listings on Amazon.

Thus, you need to create a listing that stands out. You will do ten times harder to succeed on Amazon with a boring listing.

If you want to optimize your listing for maximum sales, read on, because I'm going to share some incredible insights with you 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, trust me, it only makes problems.

When you have the 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 for maximum sales, here are the basic elements of every Amazon listing:

• Every listing on Amazon has a 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 details.
• Present your product from different angles with your images.
• Backend keywords don't appear in your listing. Add them to your listing so that customers can find you in Amazon's search results.

Order Your Product

No matter if you go for FBA or FBM, you've to order inventory.

A good point to start is to head over to Alibaba and search for manufactures. There are also tons of great Alibaba alternatives that you can check out here.

Let’s say that 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 suit you best. On Alibaba, you can contact suppliers and negotiate with them directly.

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

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

If everything is fine, talk about product changes.

Do you want a blue bottle or a red one? 

Do you have other things in mind that you need?

You need to discuss 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 an order. I recommend ordering inventory for two months.

Why?

Because if you're out of stock, you'll lose all the rankings you gained through your promotion.

Accordingly, you will lose all your sales, and all your hard work will be wasted.

To prevent this worst-case scenario, order inventory for about two months.

Optimize Your Listing for Maximum Sales

There are lots of things to keep in mind when optimizing your Amazon listing. That’s why we wrote this detailed guide covering everything about the topic from A to Z.

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 uber important to know every keyword that can bring you customers.

You should use Helium 10 Index Checker to check if you're indexed for important keywords or not.

However, first of all, you need to know which keywords are important. Here are two useful ways to find them:

Use Helium 10 Magnet

1. Sign up for a free Helium 10 account

2. Start Helium 10 Magnet

3. Type in a seed-keyword, e. g. "drinking bottle"

4. Get hundreds of keyword suggestions

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

Use Helium 10 Cerebro

1. Sign up for a free Helium 10 account

2. Start Helium 10 Cerebro

3. Type in one of your competitor's ASIN

4. See for what keywords your competitors are ranking for

Here's also an article to learn exactly how to find your competitor's 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 where some technical detail is important, include it as well.

For example, if you're selling 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 so:

• Product-specific blogs
• Forums
• Your competitors

Optimize Your Bullets

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

Your best bet is to talk about all the benefits of your product. You can talk about technical details later in the product description.

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

According to Marketingexperiments, 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.

You've to explain the value of your product to the reader.

Optimize Your Product Description

Here's the place to talk about technical details.

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

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'll also buy somewhere else.

Thus, it gets even more important to study your niche.

Here're a few advanced strategies:

• 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 person.

Thus, optimizing your product photos is especially important.

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 make more sales on Amazon to learn more about optimizing product photos.

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 products.

Would you take the one with video or without video?

For sure you will 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

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 PPC

Uber important is an Amazon PPC campaign.

Keep in mind that your campaign may not always be profitable. Sometimes you will pay a little bit more than you will earn.

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

Before you start a PPC campaign, make sure you have at least 5 reviews. Normally, the fewer ratings you have, the worse your conversion rate will be.

Use 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 where you can see all your products. Here's what to do next:

Facebooks Ads

Facebook is still the leading social media channel. According to Statista, Facebook has 2.6 billion active monthly users.

Here's the development of Facebook users from 2009 to now:

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Facebook's targeting options do extremely well. Yet, you should keep in mind that Facebook advertising is push advertising.

People don't intrinsically search for a product like on Amazon or Google. You push them with ads.

However, Facebook Ads can have an ROI of 450%.

Using Facebook Ads, you should pay attention to the design of your ad. A boring ad only destroys money instead of really generating sales.

Here are average Facebook advertising CPCs according to wordstream:

Since we can't cover everything about Facebook advertising in detail, here's a complete guide that teaches you all the basics.

How to Get Reviews on Amazon

You get more reviews if you have a better product than your competition.

It's that simple.

If you can surprise customers with product quality, they will automatically leave more positive reviews.

We wrote a great guide about how to get reviews on Amazon which you should check out.

Anyway, here are two strategies you can implement right from the start:

Use Helium 10 Follow Up

Helium 10 Follow Up is an E-Mail Automation tool for Amazon Sellers. You can set up an automated email campaign that contacts customers after they made a purchase.

You can make sure if everything is okay and ask them for a review. You will not only get more positive feedback but you also be able to reduce the amount of negative feedback.

You can learn more about Helium 10 Follow Up here.

Utilize Product Inserts

An easy way to get more reviews is to use product inserts. If you want to do so, keep these things in mind:

• Give customers useful information about your product 
• You can ask for reviews, but you've to stay neutral. You're not allowed to encourage people to leave a five-star review.
• You can tell people to join your newsletter or follow you on social media. This will also help you with future product launches.

In Conclusion

To summarize what you've learned, here are the most important points of this article:

• Selling on Amazon isn't a get rich quick tactic
• You must sell products with high demand and low competition
• You need to have a budget to promote your Amazon product
• Promotion is important for success
• Selling a better product than your competitors makes your life a lot easier
• You need to investigate whether FBA or FBM is better for your business
• You've to create a much more attractive listing than your competitors