Amazon Marketplace

Amazon Marketplace is an essential tool for today’s brands and online sellers in an increasingly complex ecommerce environment. What’s known as the world’s leading marketplace, is also one of the most powerful advertising channels and product search engines. But to make the most of it, where do you start? Here’s everything you need to know in order to leverage Amazon to its full potential.

Sell on Amazon: getting your products on Amazon

Selling on Amazon is not black and white – meaning, it’s not as simple as just listing your products and gaining sales. In order to understand how to sell on Amazon, let’s examine each piece of the “selling on Amazon” puzzle.

What is Amazon Vendor Central?

Amazon Vendor Central was specifically created for brands and manufacturers to sell their products, in bulk, to Amazon. From there, Amazon lists the products as their own, managing the pricing, storing, shipping, and customer service. Therefore, Amazon vendors, also known as first-party sellers, do not sell directly to the consumer, rather taking a bit more of a hands-off approach – while still making sales. First-party Amazon sellers reap many benefits from using Amazon Vendor Central, but of course, there are also a few drawbacks. For instance, while they definitely see an increased revenue overall, Amazon usually pays a lower than market price per item – as is typical in wholesale. However, it may not be everyone’s cup of tea to have zero control over the market price of your products. Moreover, Amazon Vendor Central gives manufacturers access to Amazon A+ Content, which integrates multimedia into the Product Detail Page in an effort to convert more shoppers. Visit this post for a complete list of Amazon Vendor Central of pros and cons.

What is Amazon Seller Central?

On the other end of the spectrum exists Amazon Seller Central, the home to third-party Amazon sellers (brands and online retailers) who sell on Amazon marketplace itself. These sellers list their own products on Amazon and remain in control of the pricing, fulfillment method, and product content (as long as the item doesn’t already exist on Amazon). If you decide to sell on Amazon through Seller Central, you’ll also need to choose between three different order fulfillment methods. Since Amazon has set new delivery speed standards across the globe and takes shipping very seriously, these three options are worth looking into in more detail.

Order Fulfillment options on Amazon

While the option “Fulfilment by Amazon” is already set in stone in Amazon Vendor Central, Sellers have a bit more freedom to select the option best fit for their business. Here are the three options, along with what you need to consider with each:

What is an Amazon Product Detail Page?

Although many factors go into whether or not your product sells well on Amazon, among the most important is the way in which it’s presented. This is where the Product Detail Page comes in. Once a shopper clicks on your listing either on Amazon’s search engine results page (SERP) or through category search, they land on the details page. A Product Detail Page is essentially your chance to inform and convince shoppers that they need to buy your product now. In it, you have plenty of opportunities to share compelling, informative, complete, and rich product information. The details page is fuelled by your Amazon product feed, so your Amazon product data needs to be top-quality in order for it convince shoppers to buy. Here are the key elements of an Amazon Product Detail Page:

Amazon product feed requirements for marketplace sellers

Because it has no shortage of buyers or sellers, Amazon product feed rules and requirements are notorious for being quite strict. With many category-dependant attributes and specs, it can be difficult to know what you should and should not include in your Amazon product feed. Because of this, the higher the quality and quantity of your Amazon product data, the better. That said, here are the mandatory fields your Amazon product feed must include, regardless of which category:

The basics of Amazon SEO

At the end of the day, Amazon is a product search engine, which means product visibility is all about ranking well on the search engine results page. But what about those hundreds of sellers all sharing a listing – who makes the sale? This is where product buyability comes in. Here’s an overview of each part of Amazon SEO:

So what determines product relevance and how you rank as a seller? Quite a few things actually have a great impact on this variable. To read the full list and learn how you can leverage your Amazon product feed for Amazon SEO, check out this post. By now we’ve covered the basics of what you need to know in order to sell on Amazon marketplace: the Centrals, Amazon SEO, and Amazon product data feed requirements. But as we touched on in the beginning, just selling on Amazon marketplace is no longer enough. Even if you’ve leveraged your Amazon product feed for Amazon SEO, made use of the right keywords, and optimized your Amazon product data, you could still lack product visibility due to tough competition. So what else can you do? The answer is to make use of the variety of ad formats available to sellers with products on Amazon.

Advertising on Amazon for retailers and brands

Advertising on Amazon used to come with many different acronyms like AMS, AMG, and AAP. However, after realizing how complex it was for advertisers, Amazon unified all three systems into the simply 'Amazon Advertising.' Amazon's ad portfolio includes everything from product display ads to programmatic ad buying functionality. However, before anything else, it's recommended to start with it's self-serve PPC search ads, which are similar to Google Search Ads.

Amazon integration

Now that we’ve covered how to sell and advertise your products on Amazon, it’s time we highlight the necessity of high-quality product feeds. In order to stand out from the crowd and maximize your revenue potential, your Amazon product feed needs to be top-notch. Remember, your success on Amazon can only be as good as the product feed you provide. So where does Amazon integration come in? One of the most efficient ways to ensure high-quality Amazon product data is through Amazon integration. Find a product feed management software capable of the task, and you can save a ton of time, all while creating the perfect Amazon product feed. Amazon integration allows you to create a single, perfectly-tailored Amazon product feed. By merging all of your Amazon product data into one master feed, you can effectively cleanse and standardize your data in bulk. This way, you can rest easy knowing your Amazon product feed is current, consistent, and complete. For more info, help, and tips check out our suggested reading on the topic below.