What is Good Profit Margin for Amazon Sellers?

Today let's talk about profit margins. One of the questions that I get over and over again as I'm trying to teach people how to drop ship on Amazon, is whether or not smaller profit margins that you typically find with drop shipping and wholesale are better than the margins that you get for retail arbitrage and other ways of selling on Amazon. In order to really answer this question I really think there needs to be a huge mindset shift when it comes to understanding profit margins and what it means in a long term sustainable business.

Thrifting and Retail Arbitrage Skew Margin Expacations

If you're like me, you probably started selling on Amazon by going to different types of thrift stores, garage sales and retail stores. Typically, when you are selling products from places like that, you are used to seeing margins anywhere from 30% all the way to 300% from the items that you sell. Now, that can be absolutely awesome but it also excuse how you look at selling products on Amazon altogether.

How much margin do typical retails stores make on their products? This is a very important question to understand if you're going to really be aware of whether or not your profit margin is going to help sustain your business over the long haul. The typical retail store has a profit margin anywhere between 8% to 20% and more often than not, it's closer to the 8%. That being said, one thing that you find at the retail store, as opposed to people who sell thrift items and garage sale items, is consistency. The retail store has suppliers that they can consistently reach out to and buy product from. They never have to go out and spend hours sourcing that product. They simply have to put in purchase orders for products that they're selling within their retail store.

Consistency and Sustainability Always Trump One-Time Big Margins

All that being said, when you factor in the time it takes to source products even if you are selling a product that has a 300% margin because that one product, typically, is only going to sell once, meaning that you're not going to be able to sell it ever again because you're only able to find that product one time. The fact that it has a 300% margin diminishes in value overtime. Personally, I would prefer to have a product that sells at 10% but sells multiple times over a year period. Because it's able to sell multiple times, over the year I'm going to sell more from that product if our price is same as the other product. I'm going to sell that product much more than I would. I'm going to be able to make a profit far more than I would with the other product that I was only able to sell once at the 300% margin.

When you're thinking of profit margin, you have to think of it as how long am I going to be able to sell this product overtime? For me, this is one of the reasons why I chose drop shipping over any type of retail arbitrage, private label or online arbitrage because I want to be able to have something that can sell multiple times throughout the year.

A Quick Example...

Let me give you one more example of this concept. Say you had a product that you found for $10 that you are able to sell for $100, that is a ten times markup on that item. On the flip side, say you also found a supplier that was able to sell you a $10 item and you're only able to make $1 out of that item but you sold 10 of those a day. With the first item you made your cash right away. You were able to profit $90 in one shot, good for you. However, it would only take you ten days with product to reach the same amount of profit from the item that you sold at a ten times markup. On top of that, after those 10 days if you're still able to have your supply replenished overtime you are going to make far more profit than you would with that one item that you're going to sell at a huge markup one time.

All of these being said, I prefer having the lower profit margin but high sustainability and consistency as opposed to finding items at high margin but only able to sell once. In my opinion, it's far more preferable to sell wholesale private label or drop shipping on Amazon than it is to use the retail arbitrage and online arbitrage model.

Sure, the profit margins are very high with retail and online arbitrage or with finding items at garage sales and thrift stores, but overtime I can far surpass the amount of profit for product with wholesale or drop shipping and continue to grow my revenues and profits by stacking replenishable products on top of replenishable products overtime.

(SOURCE)

- What a great read! Definitely keeping this in mind. How about you guys?

Don't Make These Two Mistakes When Selling On Amazon FBA

- Make sure you're doing things right when you're on Amazon FBA! This video will help you avoid these mistakes.

Break Out Of A Content Rut – 4 Tips For Fresh Keyword Ideas

By Jake Cain

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about Niche Site Project 3 is casually following along with some of the success stories many of you have shared on the NSP3 Facebook Group.

In particular, it’s cool to see people like Ada Wilkinson post an update about making her first dollar online ($14.80 to be exact) because I can remember that having that same feeling of excitement a few years ago.

Heck, I can remember how excited I was when my first website had a visit from a person not named Jake Cain. Just the thought that someone else was benefitting from my life-changing advice about baseball stadiums was an extremely gratifying feeling.

Today I am going to share a few tips that can be applied to nearly any site, but I’m hoping it will be particularly helpful for those of you who have moved past the initial surge of content on your site and are now wondering “what’s next?”

I’ve found that it’s easy to hit a wall where you feel like you are tapped out of ideas and don’t really know what else to say on your website that you haven’t already said.

I’ve been in that kind of rut several times, and here are a few things that have helped me move past it.

Finding Keywords For A Keyword Tool

One of the more challenging situations I found myself in was in 2015 when I was pretty much running the show for Long Tail Pro‘s marketing.

One of the things Spencer hired me to do was to breathe new life into the Long Tail Pro blog by creating fresh content that pulled in organic traffic and ultimately helped sell more software.

While I had done that kind of thing for my own niche/authority type websites, I hadn’t really done it as my “job” where I had actual expectations to meet.

It was pretty intimidating.

To make matters worse, when I started doing keyword research for the Long Tail Pro blog I was finding it very difficult to uncover low competition keywords in our market.

Up to that point, I’d never really worked on a site that was in an online technology business.

If I were to start a site in a low-tech niche like “raising chickens” the path to getting organic traffic would probably be a lot easier. I could likely do better SEO, build strong links with outreach, and find those golden nugget low competition keywords because most of the competing sites don’t really think like that.

They just love raising chickens and want to blog about it.

But when you start blogging about blogging… and internet marketing in general – the competition is stiff.

It seemed like every content/keyword idea I had featured a Google top 10 littered with results from Neil Patel, Brian Dean, ProBlogger, CopyBlogger, you name it…

What was I going to write to outrank those guys?

My idea was to shift my focus to some lower hanging fruit that I actually thought we could rank for. Here’s the question I asked to help me discover more keywords for Long Tail Pro:

1. Who Else Can Our Product Help?

The advantage I had was that Long Tail Pro already had a sizeable footprint in the online marketing landscape. Many of the big thought leaders in the space already recommended Long Tail Pro and were affiliates for the product.

So really, if someone was searching more general things about the best keyword research tools or getting more traffic to a blog – they were probably hearing about Long Tail Pro already – even if it didn’t come directly from us.

So I started thinking about it this way:

What kinds of people could benefit from Long Tail Pro but have probably never heard of someone like Pat Flynn?

My answer was very small business owners.

In my experience, many non-tech small business owners are so focused on other parts of the business that the online marketing side of things doesn’t get much time and attention. So the odds of that kind of person going to search Google for “best keyword research tools” were very low. They probably don’t even know what keyword research means exactly.

So what would they search?

Well, I started thinking more general and discovered there were low competition keywords for things like “Marketing Ideas For Insert Business/Industry Here.”

While the search volumes were pretty low, I knew that I could offer a few simple marketing ideas for that type of business – one of which would be the concept of using their blog to get people on their business website.

And oh by the way… we have a software that can help you with that.

By following the same principle, I also discovered some nice keywords around non-Wordpress website builders that are often focused on small business owners. Products like Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly who all have customers that could really use Long Tail Pro – they just didn’t know it yet.

So I discovered that people look for things like “Weebly SEO” and “Squarespace SEO” and what that really translates to is “How can I get more search engine traffic?” – which we could help with.

The end result is that LongTailPro.com did (and still does) rank well for a number of keywords just like this, which have produced a bunch of fresh leads for the business.

How You Can Use This

Really this is an exercise in creative thinking. The people who don’t even know enough to be aware of your solution – what kinds of things are they asking?

If you’ve tapped out of keywords for your bird watching site, maybe focus your attention on activities for seniors, things to do on vacation, lists of non-strenuous activities, etc.

If you can win those keywords, you have an opportunity to put bird watching on their radar as something they might enjoy, and then turn them into a reader and/or customer.

2. Siphon Celebrity Attention

When searching for keywords, being able to think like your searcher is critical. A lot of people want to emulate celebrities in one way or another, and I’ve found that understanding that idea can really open up a bunch of content ideas you may be missing.

For instance, your fitness website may never rank on page 1 for something like “get 6-pack abs” but I’d be willing to bet there are people looking to get abs just like a certain celebrity.

So they might search things like “Get abs like Channing Tatum” or “Spencers Haws’ ab workout” since both Channing and Spencer are well known for their washboard abs.

If you can do a little research and put together a nice piece on how they do it – you’ll have a much easier time ranking and picking up that traffic than you will with a more generic keyword.

This is an idea I first heard about in the context of YouTube on the DigitalMarketer blog.

They were featuring the strategy of a successful YouTube basketball channel called ILoveBasketballTV and one thing they did was create different videos for all the different player-specific searches like “how to shoot a basketball like Steph Curry.”

What you’ll find is that if people are searching these things on YouTube, they’ll also be searching them on Google.

In fact, I went a little deeper into this strategy with Ryan Spadafora on one of our coaching calls and how he could apply it to his site about being a better baseball player.

How You Can Use This

I’m guessing your niche has celebrities at some level. If so, use them to your advantage! Maybe it’s just a post here or there or maybe it becomes a whole category or series of posts on your site.

How to fix my hair like ____________

How to run fast like ______________

How give a speech like ____________

You get the idea.

3. UberSuggest

In the world of free keyword tools, Ubersuggest is probably my favorite.

In fact, it actually would be a fantastic resource for finding ideas you can use that involve celebrities or notable people in your niche.

Ubersuggest simply takes whatever you type in and then produces a list of all the auto-complete suggestions for that phrase. I’m sure you noticed that search engines do this for you as you’re typing:

Ubersuggest will take your phrase and then pull the suggestions for every letter in the alphabet, so you are usually left with hundreds of ideas that you may not find in the keyword planner:

If you run a blog about decorating for events, this kind of list would be perfect to run through a keyword tool and find out how often each one is searched.

Even if you have an idea like “how to decorate for a pool party” that doesn’t show much search volume but your gut tells you that it’s something your readers would be interested in – go for it anyway.

The most popular post on my baseball stadium website is focused on a keyword that showed “0” monthly searches at the time that I wrote it. However, I knew there had to be more people than me looking for tips on taking kids to a baseball game so I wrote it anyway.

How You Can Use This

This one is pretty straightforward – just jump over to Ubersuggest and start typing in the first part of common questions or problems in your niche.

Maybe your DIY site has a popular article on “How to build your own smoker” – go get suggestions for “How to build your own” and see what other kinds of projects people are looking for.

4. The YouTube Override

A minute ago I shared an example of where I ignored keyword search volume for a gut feeling.

So it caught my attention when I read Chris from RankXL talk about his strategy for basing blog posts off of popular YouTube videos. He calls the idea “YouTube Curation” and pretty much says that he’ll find blog post ideas by doing searches on YouTube related to his niche and then looking for videos that have a lot of views and/or a ton of upvotes – showing that people liked the video.

Chris figures that if people are finding the video on YouTube and it’s well received – then it makes sense to do a blog post on his site about that same topic. Chris says “I rarely do separate keyword research when writing articles through YouTube curation. I don’t care if it says 0 searches in the Keyword Planner” 

In other words, even if your keyword tool says that topic isn’t worth doing – let the success on YouTube override that and do it anyway.

This strategy can be especially helpful if you have a niche with a bunch of tutorials or demonstrations showing people how to do things. If 200,000 people have watched how to make their own mosquito candle, then doing a post about DIY mosquito candles is probably something you should consider – no further analysis required.

I’ve used this strategy quite a bit for one of my sites in particular, and it has produced traffic and social shares from blog posts that were relatively quick to create. I’ve also used a few of these in emails I’ve sent to my list, just because I felt confident that it was something they’d enjoy checking out.

How You Can Use This

Simple – go to YouTube and start searching for topics that your audience would search. You should start pretty general and see what kind of videos come up. From there, start checking out the videos that get the most views as well as videos that were recently published and are already picking up traction. Those could be good topics to cover on your blog.

When it comes time to create content, you can even embed the YouTube video into your post if it supplements your writing. Just work on creating an even more compelling title than the YouTube video and focus on building content that your readers will enjoy.

Wrap-Up

If you feel like you’ve said all there is to say or if you’re in a content rut of some kind on your site – I hope some of these ideas will help you find fresh keywords and start creating new content that your audience will truly enjoy!

I’m sure some of you have your own ways to bust out of a slump when it comes to content, so please feel free to share what works for you in the comments below.

(SOURCE)

- Need new keyword ideas? Read this and tell us what you think!

Split Testing – The Amazon Seller’s Secret Weapon [Webinar Recap]

By Gen Furukawa

Recently Greg spoke with Andrew Browne, co-Founder of Splitly, on how (and why) split tests are the the best way to dominate your niche as an Amazon seller. Here is a full replay of the webinar, and a written summary below.

What is split testing?

If there is one mantra that all digital marketers live by, it is “Test everything.” In an environment where everything can be precisely tracked and measured, why leave anything up to chance? Or even worse, intuition. Test it. And then test it again!

You would do this by running Split Tests, often interchangeably called AB Tests: a way to run a randomized and controlled experiments between two or more versions of a website, measuring specific metrics like sessions, conversions, conversion rate, and most importantly, profit.

Traditionally, when running a split test on a website, you would select an element of a page to optimize, and create two (or more) versions of the page to determine which version generates the best outcome. This is a straightforward process on websites, where you can make infinite alterations to website pages with services like Optimizely and VWO.

However, split testing is a different beast for the Amazon seller. Why? Because you have to play by Amazon’s rules, of course! Amazon requires sellers to enter data within a structured format, and traffic can only go to one product page. Therefore, in order to run split tests on Amazon, the listing must be changed once every day, at 12M PST (when Amazon refreshes its sales and traffic data every day).

The 2 Tests To Quickly Improve Your Bottom Line

There are two high-impact tests that are highly recommended as first tests to run on your Amazon listing.

1. Test Your Pricing

The first test is changing your price. Whether you are in a low-priced and competitive niche, or a high-priced niche, you will want to optimize your price to attract and convert your customers.

A good baseline to start is by testing your price by 10% higher or lower than your control price. Increasing the price could position the product as a higher-quality product. As a result, sessions and conversion rates may decrease, because you will lose the price sensitive consumer. However, the upside is that profit margin per sale may increase, therefore overall profits may increase. The outcomes of this test are incredibly interesting.

Lowering the product price by 10% may make your product more attractive to price-conscious consumers, and make it more appealing than your competitors’ offerings. However, the reduced price is most likely coming directly out of your profit margins. Will you be able to increase your conversion rate, and overall sales, enough to increase your daily profits? We have seen some very successful examples of this happening.

2. Test Your Main Feature Image

The second high-impact test to run on your Amazon listing is testing your main feature image. Why? Because your Feature Product Image is the first impression a person has with your product, and they have a fraction of a second to decide whether it is worth clicking on your listing or not.

This is especially important for private label sellers, who are often competing against people selling very similar items. For example, if you were looking for a ring for your special booboo, how would you decide which ring to click on:

It is difficult to stand out amidst a selection of products that look similar, which is exactly why it is important to split test different images. We have seen significant improvements in click through rates, and overall conversions, with different main images. Have you seen any notable improvements by testing different main images?

In Conclusion:

An important thing to note is that while running one test is an accomplishment worthy of high fives, the job does not end there. The true value of split tests emerge as you run tests repeatedly, to really hone in on the factors that move the needle positively. It is imperative to run follow-up tests to continue to optimize your listing and avoid the ills of complacency that can torpedo an Amazon listing.

The key takeaway for split testing, and I suppose for life in general, is to just get started. Greg shared a cool example from the bamboo marshmallow sticks, Jungle Stix, how just a two dollar change in price increased profits by 33% per day. Compounding that over the course of a month, that is a $1584 difference, and over a year amounts to $19k. The small things definitely do add up.

You can learn more about split testing, and Splitly website.

(SOURCE)

- Interesting! We'd love to hear how split-testing worked out for you. Comment it below!

4 Common Roadblocks Amazon FBA For Beginner

- Are you just starting to sell on Amazon and don't know where to begin? This video may help you!

Amazon expands warehouses in the UK

The new fulfillment center will utilize Amazon Robotics technology, which has been shown to decrease the amount of time it takes to process orders. In addition, the technology will reduce the amount of space needed to warehouse goods. The fulfillment center is scheduled to open in 2017 and will employ roughly 1,500 people, bringing the total number of Amazon UK employees to 15,500.

The new fulfillment center will allow Amazon to expand its product selection through its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service. Third-party sellers on Amazon can elect to fulfill their orders through FBA, which means that Amazon will store their products in one of several Amazon fulfillment centers and will then pick, pack, ship, and provide customer service for the respective products once an order is placed. Through the implementation of Amazon Robotics, the new fulfillment center will be able to store 50% more items per square foot.

Opening a new fulfillment center could pave the way for more third-party sellers to participate on its online marketplace. With its latest fulfillment center, Amazon has the potential to store additional products for not only existing third-party merchants, but also for new entrants.

However, the recent rise of Amazon third-party sellers has led to a price war among sellers, forcing them to lower prices in order to maintain sales. Amazon’s third-party merchants may look to smaller online marketplaces, such as Etsy, to stay competitive. This could have negative repercussions, though, given the immense number of online shoppers who currently use Amazon.

The parcel delivery industry — a segment of the shipping sector that deals with the transportation of packages to consumers — is booming thanks to e-commerce growth, and players outside the industry want a piece of the pie. 

Evan Bakker, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on the future of shipping that looks at efforts by Amazon, Alibaba, and Walmart to handle more of their own shipping and concludes that big retailers are well positioned to disrupt the parcel industry.

Here are some of the key points from the report: 

• Transportation and logistics could be the next billion dollar opportunity for e-commerce companies. The global shipping market, including ocean, air, and truck freight, is a $2.1 trillion market, according to World Bank, Boeing, and Golden Valley Co.
• There is much at stake for legacy shipping companies, which have seen a boom in parcel delivery as e-commerce spending has risen. Twenty different partners currently share the duties of shipping Amazon's 600 million packages a year, with FedEx, USPS, and UPS moving the most.
• Amazon, Alibaba, and Walmart have so far focused on building out their last-mile delivery and logistics services but are increasingly going after the middle- and first-mile of the shipping chain. 
• Amazon has already made major moves across each stage of the shipping journey. It launched same-day delivery service, which it handles through its own fleet of carriers, cutting out any third-party shippers. The company also recently began establishing shipping routes between China and North America.
• Walmart's interest in expanding its transportation and logistics operations is almost purely related to cost-savings. It's begun leasing shipping containers to transport manufactured goods from China and is making greater use of lockers and in-store pickup options to cut down on delivery costs.
• Alibaba has begun leasing containers on ships, similar to Amazon's Dragon Boat initiative. This means that Alibaba Logistics can now facilitate first-mile shipping for third-party merchants on its marketplace.

In full, the report:

• Sizes the market for the shipping industry.
• Explains how the industry operates in broad terms.
• Suggests why major e-commerce retailers should disrupt the space.
• Outlines the shipping initiatives of Amazon, Walmart, and Alibaba.
• Concludes how these moves might impact traditional carriers.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. » START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. » BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the future of shipping.

(SOURCE)

The Value of Feedback For Amazon Sellers

by The Selling Family

Amazon seller feedback is your social credibility on Amazon, the world’s largest product search engine. It tells shoppers if you’re worth buying from. If your score is high, you’re considered reputable. If your seller feedback score is low you’ll lose sales to competitors. Seller feedback only measures a seller’s timeliness, product packaging, boxing as well as responsiveness and helpfulness. The seller feedback score has nothing to do with product reviews.

Why is Amazon seller feedback so important?

There are a myriad of reasons as to why seller feedback is so important on Amazon—both positive and negative.

Consequences of Negative Seller Feedback

• Account suspension
• Lower chance of winning the buy box
• Lower search ranking
• Fewer sales
• More time spent resolving customer issues and less time growing your business

Consequences of Positive Seller Feedback

• Higher chance of winning the buy box
• Increased sales
• Higher search ranking
• Mitigate account suspension and A-Z claims
• Increased shopper trust

How Amazon Measures a Seller’s Feedback

Amazon measures a seller’s performance based on four criteria: order defect rate, pre-fulfillment cancellation rate, late shipping rate, and refund rate.

Order defect rate (ODR)

This is used to determine the percentage of orders in the past 365 days that have received negative feedback, A-to-Z Guarantee claim, or credit card chargeback. If your ODR is greater than 1% then you risk getting your account suspended. The best way to avoid the metric from dipping is by maintaining a low negative feedback rating and working with customers to resolve issues.

Pre-fulfillment cancellation rate

Amazon defines this as “the number of orders canceled by a seller prior to shipment confirmation divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest.” If your pre-fulfillment cancellation rate is greater than 2.5% then you could face account suspension.

Late shipping rate

Amazon defines this as “the number of orders with shipments that are not confirmed by the expected ship date divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest.” If your late shipping rate is greater than 4% then you could face account suspension.

Refund rate

Amazon defines this as “the number of orders refunded by a seller divided by the number of orders in the time period of interest.”

Amazon uses seller feedback to measure the customer service experience a seller provides. A feedback score is given to each seller and is rated on a 0 to 100 scale with 100/100 being the best possible score, and 0/100 being the worst possible score. This score is based off of the number of orders completed in the past 365 days.

Product reviews are important for the products you sell because they are a direct reflection of a shopper’s experience with what you sell. Amazon is the internet’s biggest product search engine so getting positive, high-quality product reviews will be a key element in your products getting noticed in such an information-driven and competitive marketplace.

You can view more here about how Amazon calculates the Seller Rating.

How to Monitor Seller Feedback

Sellers can view their feedback score from the Seller Central dashboard. Within the dashboard, go to Performance>Customer Satisfaction>Customer Feedback to view feedback. You can download a feedback report there, too. Sellers can get a bird’s eye view of their account health. Amazon displays the target percentages sellers need to stay below in order to avoid suspension.

What Can You Do If Your Feedback Is Lacking?

You can’t please everyone. Some shoppers are just unhappy people and will find any reason to leave negative seller feedback and product reviews. There’s not much you can do in those situations. But if you find you’re receiving more negative or neutral feedback than usual, you need to identify the problem and fix it.

Feedback Genius is the perfect tool to remedy an Amazon seller account back to good health. The program has features to help sellers improve and maintain their seller feedback. You can create automated email sequences based off of specific order events. Its email templates and notifications have helped many sellers increase and improve positive seller feedback.

Any seller can use Feedback Genius to track negative and positive feedback. A crucial Feedback Genius feature isNegative Seller Feedback Notifications, which inform you when a shopper leaves negative feedback. This allows you to respond promptly to resolve the shopper’s issue. The same kind of feature is also available for negative product reviews. Feedback Genius’s dashboard gives you a great overview of product reviews and seller feedback for one week, one month, three months, six months, and one year.

With linear data like this you can track how customers react to changes and practices over both a small and big scale.

Small scale: if someone leaves you feedback saying your product description is vague. You can quickly update your product description.

Big scale: if you notice in your notifications that over the past two months your customers are growing increasingly frustrated with your communication you can set up more automated emails to be more attentive.

Informed changes like these will help you reach your online selling goals.

How to use customer data?

You can sort your seller feedback into sections of “What I’m doing right” and “What I need to improve.” Sort the positive feedback that compliments replicable aspects of your store into the first category. If you get 50 customers in the past month who compliment your packaging, add them to the list and create a message to respond to the complement. Save the message for further use when you get more positive feedback. For example,

“Thank you [[Customer Name]], I’m so glad your product arrived safely and you found the packaging easy to open. Please let me know if there is anything else I can do for you. Best, [[Seller Name]]”

All negative seller feedback that point out faults in your store suggesting you need improvement, should go into a second category. Every single negative feedback should be handled immediately. One unhappy customer could be the difference in another potential buyer deciding to purchase from you or from winning the buy box. Let’s say a shopper disliked the packaging (important for merchant fulfilled sellers). If the shopper is unhappy with the packaging you should address their complaint with sympathy and curiosity.

Dear [[Customer Name]], I’m sorry to hear that your order arrived in a damaged condition. I know you were looking forward to using [[Product Name]] today. Please let me know what I can do to make your buying experience better. Best, [[Seller Name]]

Empower your business with seller feedback

The more positive seller feedback you receive the more attractive your seller account will be to shoppers. By focusing on the seller feedback telling you what you are doing right, and what you can improve, you can better your customers buying experience, and increase your profits. Feedback Genius makes getting, responding, and tracking seller feedback incredibly easy and simple. Sellers should ensure that they are listening to their customer’s feedback so they can stand above their competition and avoid account suspension.

Special Offer Just For The Selling Family Readers!

Try Feedback Genius for free for 30 days—no credit card required—and get 500 extra messages after your trial with promo code JessLar.

(SOURCE)

- Great tips on customer service! We hope this article helped your business. Tell us how it's going by leaving a comment below!

Amazon is shutting down RA & OA! Is it panic time?

By Jim Cockrum

Many sellers are nervously reacting (and overreacting) to some recent developments at Amazon that some are claiming could change or end RA and OA (Retail Arbitrage and Online Arbitrage).

There’s simply no need to panic and there’s EVERY reason to be optomistic! We’ll give you the FACTS as to why this is 100% true for ALL online entrepreneurs in our community.

From Amazon’s perspective, these new changes are all about protecting some of the major brands on Amazon from counterfeit duplicates. We applaud this initiative!

Listen to this short recording with my partners Brett Bartlett and Nathan Bailey as we go through this topic from every angle.

Keep in mind that we have tens of thousands of products across multiple platforms including Amazon and we are running a $25million annual business online between the three of us – and we have zero panic about these changes.

EXAMPLE: Brett has an 8 figure business on Amazon himself with multiple thousands of different items – and he’s been entirely unaffected by the latest changes by Amazon.

Listen to the full audio here: http://provenamazoncourse.com/brandrestrictions

(SOURCE)

- What do you guys think?

The Truth Behind Selling on Amazon FBA and What New Sellers Don't Know...

- Stop what you're doing right now and just watch this video! 

The New Policy To End Amazon Listing Hijackers: Important Update

By Greg Mercer

If you are an Amazon seller, you may have received an email with the foreboding subject line, “Important Information about your Seller Account”. However, the policy updates will actually be favorable for sellers. In short, Amazon will require approval to sell some private label brands. Sellers need to seek approval by August 30th, 2016. If you do not obtain approval before 8/30, the listings for these products will be removed. OK, sounds serious, I’m not going to call that bluff…

This is what the email looks like:

Why is Amazon starting this new policy, with such a short turnaround time? My hypothesis is that they are addressing the growing problem of listing hijackers. I wrote about the Amazon’s listing hijackers in this post, which is a helpful read to see what a pesky and troublesome problem they can be

Here are the exact steps that Amazon sent out for how to seek approval for the affected products

1. In Seller Central, click the Inventory menu, and then select Add a Product.
2. Search for the ASIN you want to sell.
3. In the search results, click the Listing limitations apply link next to the ASIN.
4. Click the Request Approval button to start the application process.
* Three invoices for affected branded products that combined reflect your acquisition of at least 30 units in the past 90 days; or
* A letter of authorization from the brand owner confirming that you are authorized to sell affected branded products.

I think that this will encourage private label sellers to go through the Amazon Brand Registry program to register their brands in order to gain approval.

A Note On The Amazon Brand Registry

The Amazon Brand Registry is a helpful way for private label sellers who manufacture and sell their own products. By registering your private label brand with the Amazon Brand Registry, you are officially noting with Amazon that you are the brand owner. This makes it easier for private label sellers and brand owners to list their own products on Amazon, and protect their listing against listing hijackers who would attempt to sell a counterfeit or second

There are additional benefits to the Amazon Brand Registry, which is noted as the following by Amazon:

Influence the product detail information for your branded products: As the registered brand owner, you will have increased influence in editing the information on product detail pages for your registered branded products, which then helps you to specify the correct titles, details, images, and other attributes for your branded products.

List products without standard product IDs: Registering your brand enables you to specify an alternative key attribute that you can use to list your branded products instead of a standard product ID (UPC or EAN).

I set up my brand registry in about two minutes. It is super simple, it can be done in two quick steps, assuming you have a landing page set up for your product. If you don’t have that, fear not, it is much easier than it sounds. I would recommend purchasing a cheap domain on GoDaddy, and directing it to a free WordPress.com theme. It doesn’t take any technical skills to set up your website, just following the instructions carefully.

Step 1: Complete The Amazon Brand Registry Application

Calling it an “application” sounds more intimidating than it is. This is Step 1 of 2:

And this is Step 2 of 2:

After completing the two pages, you get this notification of completion!

Why Is This Policy Change Important?

 This policy change is important because it restricts how people can sell a private label brand. It is now not so easy for anyone to sell just any product, which means that you will have to have registered a brand in order to sell the brand. I am not completely sure at this point whether this will effect only major brands, or any private label brand. I will certainly update this as it becomes more clear (Amazon’s policies are never crystal clear right away). Moreover, I am not positive yet whether this application is necessary only for brands which have gone through the Amazon Brand Registry.

I think what is clear though is that many sellers will get their brands registered. And with a process that is so simple, as noted above, why not?! This is a good step to take in order to protect your brand against hijackers, so that the whole problem of listing hijackers will be a thing of the past.

One interesting ripple effect will be on people who do retail arbitrage–buying products at a steep discount and reselling them for a profit on Amazon. This new policy change may not effect some of the large Retail Arbitrage sellers, however, the smaller sellers may have to make significant changes to their business. This means maybe shifting towards private label sales.

In Conclusion

There is still a lot that remains murky on the details. The most important actionable takeaways from this policy update are twofold:

1. If you’re selling other brands, apply for approval as soon as possible
2. Register your brand ASAP

These are simple steps to take, and could prevent major headaches in the future. In an ecommerce environment that is getting more competitive, and which relies on brand differentiation and customer loyalty, I think that this just forces our hand to do what should have been done already.

If you have any different interpretation of this policy update, or have received direct feedback from Amazon’s Seller Support, please share your thoughts with the community in the comments section below! Likewise, I will share any updates that I receive as soon as possible.

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