How To Sell On Amazon – The Ultimate Guide to Getting Started

You've probably heard that almost half of the things you order from Amazon are sold by third party sellers, not Amazon themselves. 

You've also undoubtedly heard that Amazon is taking over the world, and is clearly the king of online retail with about 43% of ALL online retail sales happening on Amazon in 2016.

If you're putting 2 and 2 together, you might see how your ability to sell on Amazon combined with their immense reach could add up to huge potential sales for you. 

So how do you go from nothing to successfully selling on Amazon? 

That's exactly what we're going to teach you today. 

Why Believe Us? 

While there are bigger Amazon sellers out there, we've been in the game for several years now. We started selling with a retail arbitrage approach, we also did some private labeling, and have now created a few different successful brands of our own that we sell exclusively on Amazon. 

Between my personal brands and (mostly) Spencer's various products, we've sold well over $1M of products on Amazon at this point. 

More recently, we've even sold one of those brands for a handsome, 6 figure price.  

So we've been where you are, and we've tried a variety of different things when it comes to selling on Amazon – some worked and some didn't. 

We'll try to let that experience help you get on the fast track to succeeding with Amazon. 

Your Seller Account – Individual vs. Professional

The first step in this process is to sign up as a seller on Amazon. 

You have 2 different plans you can sign up under – individual and professional. Here's a quick look at the difference from Amazon's FAQ page:

If you're just dipping your toe in at this point and money is tight, feel free to start with the individual account. You'll be able to add products and get familiar with the system, but once you ramp up selling then the professional account is the way to go. 

In simple mathematical terms, once you're selling 40+ items per month then the professional account pays for itself. 

Another key item in the comparison table above is the ability to earn top placement on product detail pages. 

You want that. 

This is usually referred to as “winning the buy box” which means when multiple sellers are offering the same item, you're eligible to be the default seller when someone clicks the “add to cart” button. 

Another way to help win the buy button is to use Amazon fulfillment for your orders, rather than shipping out orders yourself. This is called FBA and quite simply, it's a game changer. 

Let's talk more about what it is and why it works. 

What Is Amazon FBA? 

Let's start by defining an acronym that has changed the lives of many Amazon sellers: 

FBA

This simply stands for “fulfilled by Amazon.” 

That means as a seller you have the option of tapping into Amazon's world-class network of warehouses (AKA fulfillment centers) and letting Amazon handle all the delivery/shipping/returns for you. 

If you've got some experience selling on eBay or other platforms, you already know that boxing up orders as they sell and running out to the post office or UPS store is arguably the worst part. 

Without FBA, a big day of sales might leave you looking like this: 

via GIPHY

If you sell through your initial inventory, you can always order more and probably even get better pricing by ordering a larger quantity. 

Breaking even on your first batch of products is a good goal. You may have to sell some discounted units to get the ball rolling, but you can always sell more product once you have an established listing with reviews and organic rankings on Amazon.

Shipping Your Product

Remember that the ultimate plan is to use Amazon's FBA program to ship your products to customers when they order. But before that can happen, you've got to get your products from the manufacturer to Amazon. 

I'm not an expert in all the nuances here, but let me give you the short version of how it works. 

You'll need to find a logistics company/freight forwarder to represent you during the shipping and customs clearing process. A typical arrangement you'll hear from manufacturers is “FOB” pricing, meaning that they'll deliver the goods to the nearest shipping port, but it's your responsibility from there. 

So what you'll want is to find a company that has a team in China and the US who can have one of their reps arrange getting the items on a ship in China, then have people here in the US to do what is needed to get the goods past customs, and ultimately send them to you or directly to Amazon. 

Depending on the size and value of your items, you might just be able to get by with air shipping via UPS or DHL. 

I know this is an intimidating part of the deal for new sellers, so be sure to find a company that specializes in this process who can answer all of your questions. Here's one example of a company that focuses on FBA sellers specifically, but there are plenty of others out there too. 

Once you've got a logistics partner on your side, this whole importing process becomes very simple because they can cut through all the confusing terminology and help you know what's going on. 

Here's an excellent interview and write-up on this process when you reach this point. 

Feeling overwhelmed? Don't let something you don't understand stop you from trying this. Countless people have figured it out, and you can too. There will always be some reason for not taking action, don't let import intimidation be one.

Creating Your Product on Amazon

Before you can ship anything into Amazon's fulfillment center, you have to have a product listing on Amazon. 

I'm going to give you the summary, but if you need it here is a more detailed overview from Chris Guthrie. I'll try to spend more time here focused on the strategy behind a well optimized listing as opposed to just a step by step walkthrough of how to create one. 

When you're in Seller Central, you're going to start by clicking “add a product” and then you'll want to look for this little link to create a brand new product from scratch: 

Let me help with a few important points on completing your listing: 

Choosing A Category

Sometimes the category for your product is obvious. You'll type in that you're selling a coffee mug and Amazon will suggest common subcategories like this: 

Unless your mug fits better in a category like “travel mugs” just go with the most obvious, general choice  – like “Home & Garden – Kitchen – Mugs.”

If you're completely bewildered and not sure which category you fit into, then try looking up a similar product on Amazon and scroll down to the details. You'll see their best seller rank in their chosen category, which should help you at least decide on the higher level category to choose. 

I'll admit that sometimes this is confusing – like is my hiking accessory more for “sports” or more for “outdoors?” I've found that the category is usually less important than the other details such as…

Optimized Title & Description

Having a keyword-focused strategy for your listing is very important. There are 4 major places in your listing where you can include the keywords you hope to rank for: 

1. Product Title (most important)
2. Product Description
3. Bullet Points
4. Search Terms

To illustrate this point, if like my earlier example the keyword I really hoped to rank for was “neck massager with heat” then that phrase really needs to be in my title! 

You don't want something like this: Massage-o-matic 3000 By Home Massage Depot

Instead you want something more like this: 

See how much more descriptive that is? 

Now when people search thing like “shiatsu” and “deep-kneading” they've got an opportunity to show up in the results. 

The same goes for your description. Check out this one: 

Compared to this one: 

Again, the second one is much more descriptive and uses subheadings to break things up a bit. You've got 2,000 characters you can use, so you might as well make the most of them and give people all the details about your product and how it's going to benefit them. 

Now there are the bullet points, which are arguably even more important than the description because they appear near the top of the page. Here are some bullet points that leave something to be desired: 

Here's a much better looking set of bullet points: 

What Keywords Should I Target? 

If you're not sure what keywords to target, I'd start by looking at the best selling products in your category on Amazon. What kinds of words do you find in their title and description? 

Also here is a free Amazon keyword tool to give you some other ideas. 

Your main keyword(s) will probably be fairly obvious, but you also want to make sure you're using your product description and behind the scenes keyword fields to include other variations and words people use when searching for products like yours. 

For example, if you were selling a product that helped reduce cat hair and that product could also be used for dogs, make sure “dogs” and “dog” are in your listing somewhere. 

The best tool I've used for doing keyword research and making sure your listing is optimized is Helium10. I was amazed how helpful it was. Click here to do a free trial.

Do I need a UPC code? 

Amazon does require a unique product ID in order to create your new product listing, which is most commonly a UPC code.

UPC codes, like import rules, are one of those things that seems to hang people up and prevent them from ever launching a product. 

There are plenty of places like this that sell GS1 registered UPC codes that work for Amazon. We've used them and it was fast, simple, and worked as advertised. 

High Quality Product Photos

The final essential item you need is high quality pictures of your product. 

I've been able to launch a pretty successful brand with pictures taken on my iPhone 6, so I'm not necessarily saying you need to go to Olan Mills and get paid product photos taken with scenic backdrops. 

However, you should make sure that you have good lighting and you take photos that show what your product does (ideally in use by a real person). 

If you have a small item, it might be worth spending $40 on a little photo backdrop/lighting set like this one on Amazon. 

You'll be surprised just how professional your photos can look on a small budget.

Launching Your Product on Amazon

Back in the good ol' days of 2015, the Amazon launch strategy was pretty simple. 

You'd go out to one of many review services and give your product away at a very steep discount and in exchange, people would agree to leave an “honest” review. 

The result was that you'd get a lot of sales in a short amount of time, plus you'd usually get some positive reviews rolling in within a week or two so people who saw your product were more likely to buy it. 

The problem is that reviews like this started showing up everywhere: 

A lot of people felt that these incentivized reviews affected the trustworthiness of Amazon's review system, and apparently Amazon agreed. In October of 2016 they changed the rules and banned incentivized reviews. 

Immediately the launch strategy for many sellers had to change, and while there is more effort involved you can certainly still do successful launches in 2017 & beyond. 

Having A Successful Launch

Here's the deal – if your product stinks, you probably won't sell much of it in the long run. Eventually the bad reviews, product returns, etc. are going to catch up with you – so the first step is doing everything we've talked about in terms of creating a product that has demand, and is made with quality. 

Once you've done that, then you can worry about having a successful launch because you know when you get your product in front of shoppers they will want to buy it, and they'll want to leave a positive review about it. 

You Can Still Discount Products 

The first thing to make clear is when Amazon banned incentivized reviews, they didn't take away the ability to do a promotion or give discounts. They just said you can't give those discounts almost as a bribe to get people to leave a review. 

However, if you give someone a coupon – they are still able to leave a review for your product. 

So discounting and promotions are still a big part of launching a new product. In fact, you can even pay for a service to manage the whole process for you like Viral Launch, which we've used recently. 

They will help you distribute coupons to buyers, all within the rules, with the goal of helping your well optimized listing move up in Amazon's rankings for your target keywords. 

If you don't want to use a paid launch service, you can start by just doing a sale price in Amazon and running a sponsored campaign to make sure people see your product when they are shopping Amazon. 

Maybe your brand has a presence on Facebook – you can use that platform to give out a special launch discount coupon. 

The key is that you want to start getting some sales early on, even if you're taking a loss at the beginning. Ultimately, you're after some reviews, and you can't get reviews until you get some sales.

Automating Review Requests

Since you can no longer ask people ahead of time to give you a review in exchange for your coupon, it's more important than ever to use email follow-ups to ask people to leave a review after they purchase. 

We use Salesbacker to automate this. 

Most people, even if they like your product, simply won't remember or ever find a convenient time to go back to Amazon and leave a review. Even with email follow-ups in place, expect your percentage of people who leave a review to be in the single digits. 

Since the review percentage is so small, it's important that you automate your review follow-up sequence for 2 reasons: 

1. Encourage people to leave a positive review
2. Try to stop negative reviews before they happen

We send people 2 emails after they purchase as follows: 

Your Order has Shipped

Since Salesbacker is tapped into Amazon's API, it knows when a customer's order has shipped and can generate an email to send when that happens. Our email looks like this: 

The purpose of this email is to make a connection to the buyer, so they know we're a real small business and that we're appreciative that they bought our product. 

We also let them know very clearly that their satisfaction is our top priority, so if they have any questions or issues we are only an email away. 

Another thing we do with email #1 is explain how to use the product, when necessary. Think of it as a small FAQ where you can educate people on tips to assemble the product, turn it on, etc.

Have You Had A Chance to Use The Product? 

The second (and final) email we send comes 7 days after they receive their product. Hopefully at that point they've had a chance to use it and are in a position to leave a review.

We don't beg people to leave a review, but we re-emphasize that we want them to be happy and as a small business their feedback is super important to us. 

While we don't use language like “please don't leave a negative review!” we do ask that if they have an issues with the product, please contact us directly and we'll take care of it. 

I've had people respond to this email several times and let me know about some issue that I can handle for them, like a defective product, and that person will end up leaving a really positive 5 star review. 

More than likely if I hadn't have sent the email, they would have just contacted Amazon for a refund and left a poor review for the product. 

Your goal here is to say something to the effect of “if you love the product, do us a quick favor and leave a review. If you don't love the product, let me know and I'll make it right!” 

This formula has worked well for us, but feel free to customize it to fit your product. 

Maintaining Long Term Success

Automating review follow-ups is one of the most no-brainer, set it and forget it kind of things you can do from day 1 to help maintain a steady stream of positive reviews and just as important, stop negative reviews before they happen. 

Both of these are hugely important for long term success on Amazon.

Here are a couple other things you can do to not only make a splash when you launch, but keep the sales rolling in. 

Improve As You Go

One of the advantages of doing a small order at first is that you can make improvements to your product before your larger second order. I've found that most reviewers who leave a negative or a lukewarm review usually have some really specific suggestions on what can improve. 

Implementing those suggestions when it makes sense will help you avoid those bad reviews in the future and generally make for happier customers as you go forward. 

On several of my products I've made small iterations and now have a much better product than I did at my initial launch, thanks to customer feedback. 

Build A Brand

The people who do really well on Amazon are concerned with building a brand and a business – not just selling a product. That's not to say you can't make a one product business and do very well, but for long term success you should be thinking about turning your first successful product into a second successful product under the same brand name. 

Then, it might make sense to create a website and start generating your own traffic and sending people to buy your product on Amazon, or even your own ecommerce store so you're not fully relying on Amazon to generate sales. 

That's the exact model Spencer followed for his home goods brand, and he was able to grow and sell that business for over $400K in just over 2 years time. 

Wrap Up

Hopefully you've found this guide helpful on your journey to selling on Amazon. 

We don't have all the answers, but we've tried to share what we've learned thought a little trial and error over the last 3 years. 

Like anything else, there are going to be things that come up along the way that you won't know the answer to – but that's ok. I'm a big believer in trying things before you know all the answers, because there will always be a “what if” that stops you from taking action. 

Don't let a “what if” stop you.

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How To Sell On Amazon – The Ultimate Guide to Getting Started