As more Internet savvy clients retire, they may be looking for ways to generate income, and selling on Amazon.com is one avenue to accomplish this. Become a Bestseller on Amazon.com, a step-by-step book about online selling, helps newcomers navigate the complicated shores of e-commerce.
The effort is worthwhile: Amazon.com is the largest online retailer in the world, generating $232.9 billion in revenue in 2018 and a net-income growth of 30.9%. About 50 percent of all sales on Amazon.com marketplaces come from third-party sellers, that is, independent sellers. Forbes reports that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the richest person in the United States, with a net worth of $131.4 billion. (Bill Gates is no. 2 and Warren Buffett, no. 3.)
One of the many who have joined the Amazon.com way of selling is Adam Wilkens, whose Become a Bestseller on Amazon.com describes his experiences as a sales representative for Amazon manufacturers. Wilkens founded Dotcom Reps LLC, a sales management and consulting firm for manufacturers that sell directly to Amazon.com and other large Internet retailers. Wilkens makes two points that stand out: “You need to be detail oriented to be successful on Amazon.com,’’ and, in dealing with the Amazon.com way of selling, “Sometimes you need to weed through all of the information and acronyms.” He includes a five-page glossary of these Amazon.com acronyms at the back of his book, and readers are advised to absorb them before starting on the book’s main content.
Two selling plans are available on Amazon.com, Wilkens says: Professional or Individual, with individual sellers paying 99 cents for each item sold, as well as closing fees which range from $0.45 to $1.35 per item. Professional sellers also pay variable closing fees plus a referral-fee percentage, ranging from 6% to 25%. Professional sellers pay $39.99 per month, but are exempt from the 99-cents-per-item fee. Those selling more than 40 items per month are eligible for the Professional category, thus saving more the more they sell.
Wilkens describes the Amazon.com seller procedure, beginning with basic salesmanship: know your customer. He tells us that the end user, that is the person who is receiving the package (that has been stored in an Amazon fulfillment center, at a fee), is not necessarily the buyer. For instance, the buyer of gifts and seasonal purchases is usually not the end user.
He says that in describing a product, the longer and more detailed the content, the better. “I want you to max out character count in each field of the title, bullet features and product description.” Buyers feel most comfortable when they possess “rich” information about a product -- multiple images with multiple views and in various colors, too. Be aware that Amazon.com sees all products in competition with each other, so a seller must fine-tune a product’s description for the algorithm that determines which items will be displayed to the buyer. To bolster his point, Wilkens includes a page from Amazon.com’s Best Sellers’ entry on “WiFi Alert System.” Unfortunately, this image, along with most of the 32 other Amazon.com images in the book, have reproduced too faintly to be read easily.
Wilkens says Amazon.com products sell better when their entries include videos and product variations. Time is of the essence, too: “I cannot emphasize this enough; every second in the decision-making process counts. The least amount of clicks to complete the sale matter.”