Top 5 Headaches Selling on Amazon

Let’s face it, if you are serious about selling your products and growing your business, you need to have a strong presence on Amazon. But merely getting your products listed on Amazon can be a puzzling and time consuming task. Then, once they are listed, getting to show consistently in the “buy box” and showing up when a potential customer searches for your type of product can seem nearly impossible.

What’s a business to do?

Understanding the 5 Headaches to Selling on Amazon goes a long way to avoiding them. SPOILER ALERT: there are expert, quality partners who can help you list, promote and sell your products on Amazon. They take all the time, grief and confusion about successfully selling on Amazon off your plate and they only succeed if they drive sales for your business. More on that in a bit, but first let’s learn about those top 5 Headaches.

Top 5 Headaches Selling on Amazon

1. Getting Set Up To Sell on Amazon is Getting Harder Every Day. Amazon gets more complicated every day. It is not uncommon to have your listing denied by Amazon. Now what? For the inexperienced, it can begin a cycle of never ending emails, sending forms, waiting for responses, and perhaps multiple denials. Who has the time or expertise to decipher the corrections that need to made in order to meet Amazon’s criteria. And if your account were to get suspended (see #3 below) for some reason, it may require a lawyer to get your account reinstated – if that works at all. Amazon is constantly evolving with new rules and platform changes that can impact your business. The number of things you have to learn to setup an effective account can be overwhelming.

What’s the solution? There is a lot of online information available to help set up your account. Amazon itself has a decent tutorial. But even with all that information, dozens of accounts are denied every day. If you are serious about selling on Amazon, talk to respected Amazon partners who can help you set up your account quickly, easily and without the worry of being declined.

2. Okay, I’m set up on Amazon. But I rarely if ever see my products and sales are slow to non-existent. What’s going on? Your account is not properly set-up to be optimized within the Amazon system. But how are you supposed to know that. Again, there are tutorials that provide information, but there is both art and science to creating a strong account with powerful product listings. Getting it only half-right can have a seriously detrimental effect on sales over time. If your competitors have it figured out better than you, well, you know what that means.

What’s the solution? Make sure your photos and descriptions are top-notch. Include valuable keywords within your product description. If you are not sure of what keywords are being searched on Amazon for your product type, there are online tools to point you in the right direction. By working with a strong Amazon re-seller, they provide the experience and expertise to create professional product profiles with stunning photography. In this competitive environment, you cannot afford to leave the content and product imagery to anything less than professional.

3. Two words: sales velocity. Sales velocity – the rate at which your product sells – is the key factor in Amazon’s ranking system. It is the old adage, “the more you sell, the higher you rank on product listings,  and the higher you rank, the more you sell!” This effectively creates a barrier to entry with new brands entering the Amazon marketplace. And without sales, your product can wither in the Amazon desert, condemned to solitude.

So how can you create enough sales to get in the game? There are several ways to drive sales:

a. Use your list of customers from other channels to market your products on amazon.

b. Create attractive Giveaways/Discounts. This can work well, just be sure and set up your giveaways and discounts correctly (see #1) or you can spin your wheels and not get anywhere.

c. Advertising on Amazon. Yes, there is an advertising network on Amazon. If you are not selling many products, you may have to bid a higher price and set aside a higher budget to get your listings to show. But there is no substitute to having your products show at the top of the page when someone searches for one of your important key words or terms. Referred to as pay-per-click (PPC), there is an art to creating profitable campaigns. As always, there are good tutorials that can help set these up.

d. Advertise on Facebook, Instagram, and Google. Each of these platforms have advertising networks that operate similarly to Amazon. Driving ad traffic directly to your Amazon product pages can drive sales, creating sales volume.

At this point are you thinking, “This is going to take a lot of time and potentially a lot of money to invest…just to get competitive on Amazon!” You’re right. Once again, the solution is to partner with a trusted and experience Amazon partner who not only can set up all these accounts for you. A select few ar large enough and experienced enough to even buy your product from you (you don’t write them a check, they write you a check!), and then invest their own money to advertise on your behalf. That’s a good partner!

4. Reviews. We all see them…and they almost always affect our buying decision process. If one product has 856 reviews with an average of 4.8 stars, and a similar one has 2 reviews for 4 stars, which one are you buying? Similar to sales velocity, reviews have a big impact on how well your products will sell on Amazon. The more you sell, the more you receive reviews. But if your competitors have large numbers of reviews and you do not, you may always be fighting an uphill battle.

What to do? Organic reviews can take a long time – people don’t love writing reviews. But if you can tap into automated technology that can encourage reviews, the battle gets easier. Amazon offers its Early Review Program, and there are other applications that can help streamline your review-requesting process. Again, it just takes time and money, something most of us do not have in abundance… A solution? Following our theme, work with an expert who knows how to drive reviews for your products. It will save you a lot of headache and stress. And if they are one of the partners that pays you to sell your product, they do it for free because they know the more reviews they can generate, the more of your product they will sell.

5. If you’re one of those folks who loves completing your federal tax form, this point is not for you. For the rest of us, and especially if you have been following the news about pending litigation requiring all jurisdictions to charge local sales tax, you know how burdensome figuring taxes can be. The day is coming when each sale in another might require to you register as a company in that state. That is a lot of effort to determine how to charge the customer and how to account for it on your business’s taxes.

The solution – work with an Amazon partner who buys your product from you. You only have one transaction to one buyer. It literally could not be any easier. Let the partner deal with the intricacies of the tax law. You have one transaction to report which saves time, reduces stress, and helps your business grow.

So who are these mythical Amazon resellers who buy your product, spend their own money to advertise on your behalf, never have you sign a contract, and even provide a portal for you to track sales performance? While there are many resellers who do some of those things, there is one who does it all – ZQUARED.

ZQUARED has been an Amazon reseller for over eight years and has one of the highest consumer ratings on Amazon: over 25,000 reviews with a 4.9+ rating (out of 5). ZQUARED works daily with leading brands across the world to deliver value and accelerated sales. Do the services provided by ZQUARED make sense to you? Contact them for a free consultation and see if it makes sense for you to drive more sales with less headache on Amazon.