The Pros & Cons of Selling on Amazon

March 15, 2018

Selling your product on Amazon has become a necessity…

Becoming an Amazon Seller can be a daunting and time consuming task.  What starts as a seemingly straightforward process can quickly turn into a dozen rabbit holes that can have serious implications on the success of your business.  I wanted to talk about a few of the things you should consider before diving head first into selling on Amazon ON YOUR OWN.

PROS

Traffic

Amazon has a lot of traffic…the key is playing the game to get in front of it.  It’s *usually not as easy as just putting a product on amazon and immediately getting hundreds of thousands of visitors a day.  It takes

Trust

When you are selling on Amazon, you automatically earn trust from Amazon’s customers.  Truthfully, a lot of Amazon customers don’t even realize that they aren’t buying “from amazon”.  This can be a double edged sword because you have to play by Amazon’s rules.

Scalability

If you focus on the right things, you can get your product ranked pretty quickly and start to scale your sales.  Amazon has a ton of traffic (197 million users per year) and if you get ranked in the top 10 for some keywords, you can LAUNCH your product very quickly.

CONS

Control

Amazon tells you what you can and cannot do when you sell to “their customers”.  You can’t include certain types of marketing materials in your packaging for the products you are selling on Amazon.  You can’t try to direct the customer away from Amazon to purchase directly from you at a later date.  This is a very common cause of Account Suspension that you need to be aware of.

Diversity

Make sure you don’t put all of your focus into Amazon.  Build a separate website for your products and brand, sell on Ebay or other marketplaces, and build a customer list as early as you can.  This will serve as a backup in case you lose your Amazon account or amazon decides they don’t like you anymore…for whatever reason.

Customer Service

Customers from Amazon can pretty much demand anything they want from you with the threat of bad reviews.  You do have recourse if you document everything perfectly and submit it to Amazon to appeal a bad review…however, especially in the beginning, its just easier to give an angry customer what they want…which can cost some money.

Conclusion

Thousands of products are launched on Amazon every year.  Some fizzle out immediately, others hang on for a few months, and some become the “Amazon Choice” bestsellers.  There are a few important items to focus on that can help improve your chances of making it to the top!