Sometimes selling online is a matter of trial-and-error, and sometimes it’s reading what others have gone through so you can make the best decision(s) for yourself.
Amazon is a truly massive marketplace with millions of products and hundreds of thousands of sellers all competing to make sales and capture market share. It’s a vibrant, living e-commerce ecosystem that is full of opportunity.
Being in one of the biggest marketplaces comes with it countless advantages for Amazon, which often enjoys pride of place in Google’s organic search results. With Amazon gulping up more and more of Google’s organic product explorations, it is becoming unavoidable that most small businesses are going to need to migrate at least some of their stock over to this platform.
- Source the best products.
We all instinctively understand that for any given product categories there are a variety of brands that offer a range of quality, service and pricing. You can pay $10 for a watch or $10 000, depending on what you’re after.
As a seller, knowing how to select the precise products to stock and sell is vital to your success. But, it’s not always straightforward. The difference between success and failure can sometimes come down to which variation of a specific product you decide to stock. But, is there a detailed make or model that sells well than others? It is to research the items you want to source for your store. By tracking their sales and price performance over time, combined with research into their customer reviews and ratings you should be able to source improved stock and sell additional.
- Spy on competitors.
Once you are selling it becomes important to understand how your products compete with other items. In particular, what you want to know is:
- When competitors’ products are selling well
- Why they are selling so well
In a situation in which you have a product that is, fortunately, generating one or two sales a day. It’s great. There’s a bit of cash coming in. Except, what if you come to know that the nearest competing product started selling five or six units an hour? Would you still be happy with one or two sales a day, or would you want to know why the other product started selling more?
Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to get this material by setting a sales rank alert. Remember that the Amazon sales rank gets quicker and quicker to 1 the more sales it makes. So, if the sales rank rapidly breaks out of its normal range of between say, 3000-5000, and breaks the 1000 mark, it has started selling more than traditional. A sales rank alert can alert or advise you of this in virtually real time.
- Track prices.
Amazon sellers are probably quite acquainted with Amazon’s pricing tools that aim to help automate the arduous task of keeping prices modest. For example, you can automatically adjust prices always to be the lowest price offer to capture the Market. But, automation is not always the answer. It may be that occasionally you need to be the lowest and sometimes you want to increase prices. In fact, it may be that you wish to price items based on the price of an opponent. In this case, it is vital to track prices using a precise, hourly price tracker. Many free price trackers only collect one or two data points each day and so don’t capture much (if any) of the instability in Amazon prices.
