Amazon sellers today need every tool and edge at their disposal to stay competitive, as building an empire like Rome can’t be done in one day. It’s a full-time job and has to be done one brick at a time, which makes the possibility of extra tools to help you along very appealing. Amazon has a fairly decent reputation in assisting their merchants be the best they can—just a short while ago, the marketplace introduced their latest assistance device in the form of an app, letting merchants sell their products from an iOS device. RepricerExpress breaks down the Seller app and shows you the specific areas it will benefit you the most.
Listing Creation
Currently, the desktop version of Amazon (via Seller Central) has three different ways for merchants to create listings:
- Add a Product Listing Tool: This method is particularly useful if you’re selling fewer than 100 products, as your inventory line is at a manageable enough size to create listings one by one
- Volume Listing tools: When you’re in the bigger leagues and have a much larger inventory to deal with, such as being a professional seller with a professional account, save yourself time by creating one inventory file and then loading your entire line in one fell swoop
- Build International Listings Tool: Let’s say you want to branch out into different Amazon marketplaces to get a wider reach than before. This approach lets you create listings in your primary Amazon marketplace, and then “copy and paste” it into target marketplaces.
How the Amazon Seller App Helps
You can create listings just by scanning the UPC code of the item, and then tweaking it from there. One risk to watch out for is making sure you both choose a category and choose the right one, otherwise Amazon will notify you of a policy violation. Scanning it leaves open the possibility that you can bypass the category selection entirely, but it’s still a really cool, fast and effective way at creating listings.
Pricing and Profitability
When you sell on Amazon, the unfortunate part is the item price isn’t what goes into your pocket. There are shipping costs, international return costs, fulfilment centre costs, conversion costs, and more, as well as the mandatory taxes and duties. Although Amazon does offer tools to consolidate these charges, they do add up over time and do represent a sizeable investment on your part.
How the Amazon Seller App Helps
Once you create a listing (by scanning!), then enter in how much the item costs. In turn, Amazon Seller will factor in their selling and fulfilment fees, and show you how much profit you can potentially make off each product you test. We wouldn’t recommend living and dying by the estimate the app gives you, but it does provide you with a pretty good ballpark figure that more or less gives you a starting point. After that, you can modify your listing price as you see fit, and use repricing software to help you out with the details.
Customer Support
As you probably well know, Amazon has two different ways of handling customer support, either through Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) or when you go at it alone.
- FBA: With this choice, Amazon handles everything, from the local languages used in each marketplace to being available 24 hours a day.
- Merchant fulfilled: You’ll be in charge of everything, including having to communicate with customers in languages you may not speak. Plus, your buyers will expect you to get back to them quickly, which may be a problem with time zones and sleep schedules.
How the Amazon Seller App Helps
The app lets you respond to customers’ messages right away as though you were penning a Facebook missive. This is especially handy because people — not just Amazon merchants — tend to carry their smartphones around with them far more readily than laptops. The other neat feature is you can contact Amazon Seller Support directly if you have any questions, helping you become a trusted ace seller even more quickly. Remember the policy violations we talked about in the beginning? Being able to communicate with Amazon via the app is one way you can avoid that, with too many policy violations leading to a suspended account.
The best part about the new Amazon Seller app is it’s free. While it’s only available on iOS right now, Android phones do have other options, although they cost money. However, Amazon’s working hard at getting an Android-ready version for everyone else to use so all of you can climb the ladder to Amazon glory. Until that happens, though, content yourself with our stellar repricing software, which is free for the first 15 days you take it for a test drive.
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