Amazon are aggressively promoting Amazon Business on their home page with an interstitial pop up. This isn’t Amazon’s normal style and the fact that it’s such an intrusive form of advertising demonstrates the importance they are placing on attracting business buyers and why you should be considering signing up if you haven’t already done so.
Interstitial pop ups are so intrusive that they attract a Google penalty on most sites. Amazon won’t be particularly worried about this as anyone who types in the Amazon URL will be starting their search on Amazon. As it blacks out the entire page there is no option but to read the advert or at least notice it as you dismiss it before you continue shopping. When you see Amazon taking such aggressive marketing there is no doubt at all that they see massive growth potential and to take advantage it’s time to sign up.
“Amazon Business, Do you shop on Amazon for work?” the pop up reads, with the suggestion to sign up for a free Amazon Business account to access features including Business Only Pricing, Downloadable VAT Invoices and Pay by Invoice.
[Editors note] Amazon really need to check their code – they’ve forgotten to close an HTML list tag so the advert displays /li> as can be seen in the image above. Red faces somewhere!
Why merchants should consider signing up for Amazon Business
Amazon Business not only offers free facilities to businesses who wish to buy on Amazon, but it is also free to Amazon merchants who want to make their products available to Amazon business customers.
Amazon have told us that half of all units sold to businesses are from third party merchants, with more than 30,000 sellers in the UK having accessed the Amazon Business Seller feature set.
Amazon also revealed to Tamebay that sellers who have adopted the VAT Calculation Service have on average increased their B2B sales by more than 50% within the first month – it’s the value of registering (for free) as a Business seller and getting enhanced visibility with the Amazon Business badge displayed against your products. Plus you also get a better chance of winning the Buy Box as your offers will be displayed net of VAT.
What type of products sell on Amazon Business
The products you’d expect to perform well
Amazon Business offers more than one hundred million products in a wide range of categories and as you might expect these include the types of product you’d typically associate corporate customers purchasing:
- Laptops, office supplies and storage solutions, through to office furniture and commercial grade printers
- Industrial safety and contractor grade power tools through to thermal imaging cameras
- Janitorial supplies and cleaning products through to industrial grade high pressure washers
- More than 50,000 types of lab supplies, including microscopes, test tubes and high-speed centrifuges
The type of products you may be surprised to perform well
What you might not expect is the huge range of other products that are being sold on Amazon Business, some of the best performing categories in the top 20 include
- Health & Personal Care
- Lawn and Garden
- Apparel
- Grocery
- and Home Entertainment
Are my products suitable?
It’s important to remember that whilst businesses will obviously buy office supplies and the like, they are equally likely to make purchases as corporate gifts, kitchen appliances for the office canteen, groceries for meetings, incentives for staff and businesses such as media companies could buy just about anything perhaps for use as film props. Don’t think that because you don’t sell office supplies that your items aren’t suitable to sell on Amazon Business because there’s a high chance they will.
3 Responses
This worries me, we currently get the 1.4% +20p rate from paypal.
Its all well and good offering to beat paypal’s standard rate but most high volume sellers are not on the standard rate so get reduced rates based on monthly turnover.
Another thing that worries me is that we use Paypal virtual terminal for telephone payments, these phone sales and ebay sales combine to get us low rates, if we stop taking paypal through ebay our virtual terminal rate will also shoot up as we would probably not meet the volumes required for the low rate.
Amazon advertising is a real money spinner for Amazon with very little costs involved and a high profit margin possibly higher than %70. Any company that lists products on Amazon they have to get those high ratings and good reviews for their products to list higher on search results. The only way to get those good reviews and ratings is for the product to be seen and then bought. That means the product has to be seen by listing higher on search results. The only way to achieve that as a new product is to advertise the product with Amazon. Where through advertising the products lists higher on search results and is more likely to be seen and bought which then enables customers to write reviews and give star ratings where with that a product will then naturally rank higher.
There for for any company to list products with Amazon it becomes essential to advertise those products with Amazon for large corporations or small, medium enterprises.
The advertising revenue that Amazon generates will enable international expansion at a faster pace.
eBay did in fact reduce the estimated delivery window for Hermes from 3-5 days to just 2-3 days back in June of this year. In fact, since they also failed to notify anyone that they made this change, as a result, we ended up with a massive spike in Late Deliveries.
Before change (3-5 days delivery)
0.58% Late Delivery
After change (2-3 days delivery)
2.47% Late Delivery
As a result, since Hermes Tracked is NOT GUARANTEED as a 2-3 day service, nor is it capable of meeting eBay’s targets (i.e. the targets set for sellers), we’ve had to move to a 2 Day Handling Time just to get the late delivery metric back under control.
Had we been notified of this change by either eBay OR Hermes for that matter… we would of made the change much sooner to mitigate the damage to our Late Delivery Rate.