How to sell and be profitable on Amazon? 7 tools that will help you!

Many have already bought on Amazon, but how do the workings of the world’s favourite marketplace work?

With its reputation, Amazon manages to attract both buyers and sellers. So, you want to try your luck and sell on Amazon? Or are you already there and you want to be profitable on Amazon? We’ll show you in this article the keys to success to get your business off to a good start!

Amazon is not the only channel on which you can grow your sales and be profitable, you can learn more about setting up your own online store!

How to sell on Amazon: how it works

Before embarking on the big bath, it is very important to understand how the marketplace works to sell on Amazon. The latter is aimed at both individuals and professional sellers.

Two options, depending on the volume of the sale, are then available to you:

The low-volume individual or seller

This section concerns sellers of less than 40 items per month. Items can be sold in the following categories: Auto and Motorcycle, Industry, High-Tech and Computers, Baby Toys, Books, Music, DVD, House and Garden, Tools, Travel, Sports and Leisure. The fee is 0.75 pounds per item plus sales and management fees depending on the category of the item

The professional salesman

For sellers of more than 40 items per month, this requires a subscription to a pro plan. In exchange for 25 pounds per month, this package gives many advantages:

• A decrease in fees, there is no longer the 0.75 pounds of fees per item sold.
• Access to more tools.
• The absence of the 60-day constraint, which requires the re-sale of unsold items.

How to be profitable on Amazon?

Finding the right product

The competition is very tough, it is very important to follow some rules to select the right product to market and be profitable on Amazon. First, there are 3 ways to sell on Amazon:

• Sell a brand’s product by purchasing from it.
• Selling a white-label product, these products are cheaper, but the value is less well perceived for customers. This makes it more difficult to sell them.
• And finally, sell other suppliers products, getting supplied by suppliers like Alibaba. This solution is probably the most cost-effective because it allows you to make more margins.

Finding a niche market

Find your place

It’s hard to find a product that isn’t on Amazon, as many categories are already saturated by several sellers and even by big brands. That’s why competing and getting a place among them can make you lose money. You have to find your place among the hundreds of millions of products referenced if you want to be profitable on Amazon.

To do this, you have to identify the competitors present in each category and then sub-category, in order to have a more comprehensive and accurate view of the market and current trends. And so, detect the product with the most potential.

Google Trends is a good trend indicator for a product, you can follow the evolution of the interest of a product over several months and years.

Find a product with high demand

A product with strong consumer demand, will allow you to be profitable on Amazon. No need to search for the best items for hours, there is a section on Amazon’s website that groups the best sales by category (Amazon Bestsellers), the most requested or the sales barometer.

These rankings are updated every hour, they are very good indicators for filtering products that do not have a high sales potential. In addition, it is much easier to target buyers’ requests, while being aware of the market rates of other sellers, who may have already achieved your goal of being profitable on Amazon.

There is also a premium tool to study the Amazon market, it is AMZ Shark. This tool allows you to track the sales of your products and those of your competitors. To find new niches on which to position themselves. And track the positioning of your products according to the keywords chosen, to arrive in the best results. Free for the first month and £215 per month.

Another tool, Junglescout, which also offers the same possibilities as AMZ Shark. The basic version is £28 and the full version is £35 per month.

A price not too low

As Amazon is a very competitive platform, it is necessary to know how to align with the prices of its competitors, while anticipating the arrival of a new seller. Selling on Amazon involves many costs: in fact, the brand charges a commission on each product sold. Therefore if you want to be profitable on Amazon, announcing a low price is not the best strategy. It is recommended to sell a product whose selling price can be double its purchase price.

To calculate the potential revenue of a product, the American brand has set up a recipe calculator, to test different prices of a product already present in the catalogue. This calculator takes shipping costs into account.

Try the calculator….

An easy-to-ship product

There is a need to limit delivery costs. Indeed, delivery costs inevitably impact the profitability of the product. Moreover, too high a cost of ports often tends to hinder the purchase of Internet users, which is why the lower the shipping costs, the more likely the product is to be sold. It is therefore advisable to favour light and small products, which will be easier to transport if you want to be profitable on Amazon quickly enough.

Amazon FBA

Amazon has set up a storage service for sellers, where deliveries and after-sales service are fully managed by them. Just send your stock to an Amazon warehouse, the logistics points are then deleted. This service saves a lot of time and saves on storage costs. In addition, the products will be available at Premium delivery and will appear in a better position in the results.

Amzrefund, Amazons' complementary tool FBA, is a software tracking of lost or damaged inventory in Amazon warehouses. It allows you to get a refund, by sending the refund requests to Amazon. The software in exchange takes a 12% commission on the sums that Amazon must repay.

How do I generate traffic?

Nothing better than optimizing its traffic on Amazon to gain a competitive advantage. Generating more traffic offers the opportunity to boost sales, while improving its ranking in results and creating a relationship of trust with Internet users. This gives you extra chances to sell on Amazon!

A complete product sheet

To optimize the SEO and its referencing on Amazon, it is essential to work on the content of the product sheets. To do this, you have to work on the keywords and put yourself in the buyer’s shoes, wondering what you would enter in the search bar to find a product. The choice of keywords and title will therefore be based on the relevance and search volume in Amazon queries.

On the other hand, you should always try to give the most complete description possible of the product, using the chips, describing the size, weight, colour etc. You have to have a precise overview without even clicking on the product. For example, below, the number one product in high-tech sales, the product listing is very detailed and the photos explain how the tool works and installs.

The quality of the photos is also important, the goal being to create a more eye-catching visual than those of your competitors. This is especially the case for ready-to-wear, where photos with mannequins have a real added value. Seeing the product worn is much more attractive and concrete than a simple photo of the product not worn for the e-shopper.

All this is to give the buyer confidence, giving him as much detail as possible, because the best showcase of an item is his product listing. Customer feedback is paramount, Internet users read a lot of reviews before the purchase, having good returns is synonymous with reliability. It also affects the Amazon algorithm that uses the title, keywords, description and reviews to highlight the products.

The use of external traffic

It can be interesting to bring external traffic to your product listings via channels other than Amazon, this allows you to reach more potential customers. And above all these customers are brought directly to your product listing without going through the competitive offers. There are different ways to bring traffic:

• Email campaign redirecting directly to your product listings
• Sponsored ads on social networks
• Promotion on social networks
• Blog article, to highlight its products

Influence marketing, creating partnerships with influencers to promote its products. As is the case with "What’s up Moms "the first YouTube channel dedicated to parenting in the United States, which recommends products on Amazon.

Depending on the type produced all these different options are not going to be effective, it is necessary to test and keep the one that seems the most promising according to the results obtained.

Bonus: 7 tools to make it easier for sellers to analyse

In addition to the various tools presented previously in the article, we will present 7 tools to make your decisions and analyses simpler. With these tools nothing can escape you, and you will multiply your chances of being profitable on Amazon.

• Amazon AMS, allows you to create ads on Amazon. The aim is to increase product sales by improving visibility among targeted Internet users. Advertisements appear first in the Amazon search engine based on the keywords chosen. Click pricing model, with a minimum campaign budget of £0.87.
• AMZcockpit, is a self-responsive software approved by Amazon. It takes care of simplifying the customer experience, for example by managing invoices. You can create templates. Tool that is important to ensure that you have positive feedback on the service as well as a good image with Internet users. 3 available fares (from £16.99 to £40.99 HT, per month) depending on the size of the business.
• Sunpricer, which analyses the prices to be optimized according to the prices charged by other sellers, by adjusting the price up or down. Tool also allowing to have Buy Boxes that account for 80% of sales on the marketplace. Important to increase margins and adjust to the competition, and especially to be profitable on Amazon. 14 days of free trial and then price depending on the number of products to optimize.
• PpcScope, a tool for sellers who sponsor their Amazon products. It promotes return on investment by analysing advertising performance (like Google AdWords). It also offers optimization actions based on the results of Amazon ads issued. 21 days of free trial, then a cost ranging from £1.99 per month to £72.99 per month.
• KeywordToolDominator, allows you to get the most searched keywords by customers on Amazon. Useful to enrich its product listings and find new niches to exploit. The full Amazon license is $49.99.
• Forcastly, still a tool for those who use Amazon FBA, Forcastly is software that helps manage its inventory. The software uses an algorithm to analyse the right time to replenish and thus limit storage costs. As we know, logistics is often synonymous with unnecessary expenses, so this tool is the solution you need to reduce your costs and make sure you’re profitable on Amazon. 14 days of free trial, then a price from $80 up to $240 per month.
• Amzscout, is a niche detector. The tool compares the potential benefit between several hundred items depending on the category you are looking for. It is also possible to have the seasonality of sales, its trend according to the years. It is then possible for the seller to have the best sales opportunities on Amazon. There are 7 days of free trial, with 2 paid versions, one at $44.99 per month and the other at $199.

Conclusion

The choice of the product that will be sold on Amazon is crucial for a seller and must be the result of a well-considered decision. There are many criteria to consider as well as the use of the right tools to sell the right product. You need to find the right positioning for your product and find the niche market with high potential, while saving costs.

Once the right product is found, it remains to be known to sell it by giving envy and confidence to the internet user through a detailed description. While trying to take advantage of the Amazon algorithm in order to generate as much traffic as possible via the various channels made available to the seller. There are many tools that help you save time, make the right decisions and increase your profitability on Amazon.

Are you ready to be profitable on Amazon and especially to become one of the best sellers?