Signing up with Amazon was easy, the hard part was listing products on Amazon. The process of getting my inventory online involved a lot of data entry, repetitive typing and clicking and choosing from dropdown menus.
Oh, and photos. Lots of photos!
The Power of Photos
Did you know that you can add photos to your personal listings on Amazon?
I didn’t until I started selling there, I had never seen a single photo on the marketplace listings.
But when I was putting my books up for sale on the site, I noticed there was a place to upload photos and I really wanted to make sure my listings were complete, so I took photos of everything and uploaded them.
So, on my seller’s page for the item, I have a nice image of what I am actually selling. This helps prevent someone saying that what I sold didn’t match the description when the description is a photo of the actual item.
Plus, photos catch the eye and distinguish my listing from all the others.
Remember, I said I was aiming for niche markets without too many bulk sellers? Well, there are always other sellers.
It would be a real challenge to find something that absolutely no-one else is selling, and even if you did someone would probably soon join you in the niche. But at least when dealing in rarer items you don’t have to deal with the 1p + postage bulk sellers.
The Art of Pricing
And that brings us on to pricing. There’s an art to pricing and a million other websites that talk about how to turn the best profit, so I’ll just skim the surface.
So, how do l price my products?
I price partly based on experience – I have some experience in retail so I have some understanding of price psychology, the effects of 99p vs. £1 in a price, all that sort of thing – but the fluid nature of Amazon prices, always undercutting and being undercut by someone else makes it hard to use that psychology.
Add to that my own ideas of what I think would be a suitable price for an item – I’m in a niche market based on my hobbies, so I have a rough idea of what people would pay for what I’m selling – and what others are selling for, and that gives a price.
RepricerExpress makes it very easy for me to price efficiently and effectively.
I’m no expert on pricing, but there are plenty of places to get more thorough advice based on deeper experience and economic theory.
Amazon Data Entry
Let’s get back to the data entry.
That was the biggest part of getting listings ready for the marketplace, and after doing that I am so glad I never did data entry work. It’s dull, repetitive and seemingly endless, but at least part of that is because I am a bit of a completionist.
For every entry you list on the marketplace there are five pages of fields that you should fill out.
Five whole pages.
Of course, one of those is just for photos to be uploaded (which is slow as you need to upload one at a time), and another is for item description and keywords (which are worthy of an article all on its own), but that still leaves three pages of data fields for each item you are listing.
Some of them may be irrelevant to what you are listing, but I always feel you should fill all the rest if you can.
Completionist, I know, but more info means more possible hits. People search online for the oddest things, so why not take advantage of that possibility by having all the info there?
The downside is that all that takes time but once it is done it’s done. And you can worry about the next item to be listed, even kick back and relax while you wait for something to sell.
Next time – my first sale!
Thank you for reading.
Sarah
Special Offer
Selling on Amazon and want someone to take care of your price to ensure you get the maximum profit and sales on your items. Join thousands of Amazon sellers, sign up for your 15-day trial of RepricerExpress, Amazon repricing software (no credit card required), and see what all the fuss is about!
Read more from this author:
