Over a year ago we launched an ebook about eBay billed as “50 things every eBay seller needs to know.” It looked at some of the more basic things vital to every eBay seller that may not be immediately apparent to those who haven’t been trading on the eBay marketplace for long.
And now we’re penning something similar for rookie Amazon sellers and asking for your help. One of the most engaging aspects of the eBay ebook were the useful and heartfelt tips we included from experienced eBay sellers who answered our call on Tamebay to share their pearls of wisdom. And we hope you’ll be as generous again.
In this new ebook, we’ll look at some of the key Amazon basics like starting to sell, perhaps using FBA, utilising Amazon to sell globally and also things like Sponsored Ads and private label selling. And we’d love for you to cast your minds back to your days as a fledgling Amazon seller and share your thoughts on what you’d wish you’d known as you began on your Amazon journey. What killer tip would have saved you a lot of work? Which tools are must have lifesavers? What was your biggest mistake? (Obviously we’ll credit you in the ebook and you’ll have our eternal gratitude too.)
Your starter for ten: What do you wish you’d known when you started selling on Amazon? Email me direct at [email protected] or make a comment below. Thanks.
5 Responses
Two things:
1. Your sales is likely to skyrocket, so you invest heavily and enjoy great sales, only for the second point below to happen.
2. You wake up one morning and find your account suspended without any warning or any knowledge why and things get compounded when you realise the suspension department is probably the poorest in terms of communication.
Amazon will suspend your account or products randomly with poor to no explanation and make it very difficult to get re-instated.
I wish I had known that the majority of products I uploaded and listed on my very first day on Amazon, would soon become so popular with piggyback listings making a dash to be the first to sell for 1p, that I was priced out of the market.
The listings are active a decade later and full of sellers with insane prices.
Instead of “be careful what you wish for”, it should read “be careful what you list there”.
That within 12 months the seller support would go from excellent to the very worst in the world bar none.
That Amazon will actively help Chinese manufacturers sell direct taking more money out of the uk tax purse. And it’s not as if Amazon will pay any tax.
I can’t understand why the government just sit back and let it happen.
1. The ‘seller support’ team is an army of mostly useless Philippines based operatives who rarely understand the cadence of us Brits, and rarely they understand the problems you have. For such a large company, they really need a ‘proper’ English speaking team [such as Dublin like eBay have]
2. Never sell customised products. An utter crapshoot trying to get the personalised information from customers who are too stupid to read how to leave a message. The poor amazon messaging system also doesn’t take into account broken-emails provided by customers.
Customers can message you and open A-to-Z’s complaining they’ve not got their item [because they haven’t left a personalised name, for their personalised item] , but if their email is invalid, you will get a bounce-back response. The only option is to refund the item. 40% of customers do leave personalised information, but then they’ll message wanting to change it after it has been printed.
Honestly, do not bother. Although Amazon Handmade was launched last year. We have made a few of these listings which have done quite well. On handmade listings customers cannot buy without typing their customised message. Heaven. If only you could convert listings to handmade.
3. Use tracking. We sell small items so tracking isn’t worth it. Or if we jacked up prices to include tracking, we wouldn’t get sales. People rip you off left right and centre, we have daily ‘replacements’ from people who have ‘not received’. We know 95% of these are telling porkies, but there’s NOTHING you can do to fight it. If there’s no tracking, you will get shafted 100% of the time if customers claim to have not received their order.