Editor’s note: This is a guest post by Patrick McDaniel from Amzaar.com
It’s that time of year again; Amazon sellers in all corners of the world are scrambling to get their inventory stocked and listed as they prepare for the busy holiday sales season on Amazon. Of course, there are challenges throughout the year, but at no other time could being ill-prepared cost you as much.
If you’re a seasoned seller, then you know that Amazon business growth is becoming harder. There’s increasing competition to win the Buy Box, and there are inherent difficulties associated with getting your products in front of shoppers. So, there are several aspects of selling during the Amazon retail rush and beyond that constantly require attention.
It’s about more than keeping your items in stock and maintaining a competitive price. It’s maintaining strong seller and product feedback, managing product ads, manufacturing, packaging, logistics, customs, and optimizing your listings and photos. All this while obeying Amazon’s guidelines and adhering to their ever-increasing customer-centric policies.
The aforementioned tasks are mundane and time-consuming. While, as a business owner, you understand that a squeeze now will yield juice later, ask yourself how much you really make per hour. One piece of advice any successful entrepreneur will give you is that you have to have a goal of what you want your time to be worth.
For you, as an Amazon merchant, time becomes more valuable as you decrease costs, streamline your operations, and get your products in front of more customers. Here are some suggestions:
- Use software to automatically re-price your items. That way, you can beat your competitors without constantly monitoring your listings to change the prices on your hundreds of SKUs manually throughout the day.
- Other countries celebrate Christmas, too. Have your listings translated, and sell abroad to capitalize on the Amazon retail rush on an international level.
- Less than 5% of your customers are leaving product reviews and seller feedback? There are services out there that notify you when you have negative feedback and new product reviews. These services can even be set up to automatically solicit feedback from your customers.
- Audit Amazon to see if they’re making bookkeeping mistakes that are costing YOU, especially when it comes to FBA inventory.
- If you sell several SKUs of popular items, and maintaining the Buy Box is of paramount importance to you, then repricing software is critical.
- If you’d like to reach out to customers outside of Amazon, then a multi-channel fulfillment solution is worth looking into. This works very well with FBA, as Amazon will automatically fulfill your orders for eBay, Shopify, Etsy, etc.
- If you’d like to expand your operations to include an international customer base, it’s definitely worth looking into services that provide international shipping and assistance with customs.
- Product description translations and currency converter services may be of help, especially in the run-up to the Amazon retail rush.
- Scouting for new products to sell and finding out how much of your existing products should be procured can also be made easier.
- Use an analytics tool to crunch the numbers and predict selling success.
These are just a few examples. There are seemingly endless other services available to Amazon merchants. They can allow you to stay on top of your growing business while getting hours of your life back and increasing profits.
Every business model is different, of course – some sellers are mom-and-pop operations, some are private label, some are handmade, and some are multi-billion dollar established brands. You have to look at your Amazon selling endeavors objectively. Determine what can be improved on, and even what you loathe doing, so you know exactly what operations you want to outsource to sustain your Amazon business growth.
Oftentimes, companies providing these services offer a no-obligation free trial that might just make a difference come this Black Friday, Cyber Monday and beyond. One fantastic place to find all of the vendors that provide these services is Amzaar.com. It’s like a shopping window for Amazon sellers, and a showcase for companies specializing in different facets of selling on Amazon.
Analyze your business, think about what you’d like to do better, and what the most time-consuming tasks are. Do some calculations, and figure out what you need to do to make your time more valuable; then see who can help you reach your Amazon selling goals. Try letting technology work in your favor, so you can focus on the big picture of growing your business.