When Jeff Bezos started Amazon back in 1994 few could have imagined, other than maybe Bezos himself, that it would grow to be the eCommerce giant that it has today. As the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon has customers in every corner of the globe, and the good news is you can use it to build your own eCommerce business.
The reason it is possible is that a huge part of Amazon’s operation is allowing independent sellers to place their goods for sale on their website and then taking a percentage of each sale.
For businesses, the obvious advantage of selling on Amazon is being able to set up an online store without having to build a website. Another huge benefit is the ability to use Amazon’s logistics system for storage, distribution, and delivery. For anyone wanting to start an Ecommerce business will need an eCommerce web design.
If you already have products to sell making them available for sale on Amazon is a relatively straightforward process. There are some initial admin tasks as giving each product a unique Amazon code and setting up how you wish to be paid by Amazon but these are straightforward.
Practical matters include sending the products to Amazon, creating the sales copy for the product’s page and ensuring you have excellent images of the products to display on that page.
Once this has all been completed then you are pretty much ready to sell with the only missing piece of the jigsaw being traffic to your product page. This is achieved in many ways with some free and some paid methods open to you.
The paid methods include Amazon’s sponsored ads program which allows your products to appear in prime locations in search results when Amazon customers enter a search term that relates to your product. As with Google Adwords, proper keyword research is required as is constant monitoring of your campaign stats to make sure you are getting the best return on your ad spend.
Driving traffic to your product page for free will first involve making sure it is optimized correctly for the keywords you want to rank for within Amazon. Elements on the page such as the title, bullet points, and description will need to be written in a way that both sells the product and allows your main keywords to be recognized within Amazon’s search algorithm.
External marketing and SEO will also help to drive traffic with the use of press releases, blog posts and social media to generate backlinks to the product page.
For those new to eCommerce who do not yet have a product to sell, researching what currently sells well and then creating a product which compliments it or improves upon it is a great way to get started. Another effective way is to bundle two or three products together to make a single product.
Sourcing these products may take a fair amount of research and testing of samples but it will be worth it once you find a reliable supplier with prices that allow you a decent profit margin.