Showing posts with label amazon seller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label amazon seller. Show all posts
Saturday, 4 March 2017
When to give up on a private label product - ASK JUNGLE SCOUT EP #4.1
Ask Jungle Scout is a weekly show where we answer YOUR top questions about selling on Amazon, FBA and the private label business!
This week's questions:
0:15 How many sales should you look for when trying to identify a niche in the UK instead of the US? Does 3000 sales within the first 10 results still apply?
2:30 How do you prevent seeing an inflated sales number in Jungle Scout?
4:30 Should you ever give up on a product, and if so, when ?
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
A Breakdown of the Five Top Options for Selling on Amazon
By The Selling Family
Does your head sometimes start to spin when you look at all of the different ways you can sell on Amazon? It’s great to have choices, but sometimes they can overwhelm us!
We typically say there is no right or wrong answer to the question about which model is “best.”
There are so many factors to consider, including your own experience, situation, tolerance for risk — and simply preference. We chose retail arbitrage because we like it and are good at it, but that’s not the model for everyone.
Today, we are going to help you sort through the choices by providing a definition of the most popular selling formats, then give you our recommendations for the best training programs and educational materials related to each.
By the time you’re finished reading this article, you should have a good understanding of what model is the best fit for you, as well as where you can go to learn more!
First, a rundown of the five models you’ll see the most. These include: Retail Arbitrage; Online Arbitrage; Wholesale; Private Label; and Drop-shipping.
Retail Arbitrage
Retail arbitrage is when you purchase a product at a retail establishment and then sell it at a higher price on Amazon. It’s essentially “flipping” merchandise, or what is often described as taking advantage of market inefficiencies.
For example, you might find an MP3 player on clearance at Walmart for $15 that it sells on Amazon for $35. After Amazon fees and its cut, you might make a profit of about $10.
Pros:
- This can be a really inexpensive way to get started selling on Amazon
- No minimum investment to start
- Easy model to understand
Cons:
- This can be the most time-consuming of the business models, as you have to physically find and restock inventory constantly
- Related to the above, this is not a passive source of income
- Mileage; you have to drive from location to location
Retail arbitrage is our specialty! It’s where we got started and originally found success — Jessica was able to replace her income in a few months and then bring Cliff home from his job in about a year’s time.
If you’d like to learn more about this model, check out our Amazon Boot Camp, where we take you step-by-step through the process of setting up your account through making your first sale, and teach you what you need to know to grow from there.
The course includes video modules, custom printable and checklists and a bonus section. More than 3,500 people have taken the course!
We also have an accompanying private Facebook seller group where you can ask questions and share your successes with thousands of other members.
Online Arbitrage
In online arbitrage, you do the same thing as with retail arbitrage, except that you do your sourcing online.
Instead of heading to Walmart, you might go to walmart.com. There are hundreds of websites available, from large chain stores whose names you recognize to a bunch you may never have heard of.
Pros:
- A true work-from-home model
- More sourcing opportunities available, as you don’t have to physically drive from one store to another
- Product is shipped to you, so you don’t have to lug it in your car — plus you usually receive boxes and packing materials that you can re-use when you ship your inventory to Amazon
- Source at any time, not just during store hours
- Good way to complement your retail arbitrage and add more product
Cons:
- This is a little more difficult to learn because there is so much product available and you can spend a lot of time looking in the wrong places
- It can be easy to buy too much
- Sometimes more difficult to tell whether the product on the retailer’s website matches the Amazon listing, so you can be more prone to error when purchasing
Over the last few years, we’ve added online sourcing as a major way to find inventory during the first three quarters of the year.
It allows us more flexibility to spend time with our young son, plus it complements the products we find when we do head to the store to do retail arbitrage. We can also buy in larger quantities.
We’ll teach you how to do the same in Online Arbitrage - ABCs of Online Sourcing.
Our video course is set up in four easy-to-follow modules. Among other topics, we teach you how to find good stores to source from; the key differences between sourcing product online versus at a brick and mortar store; our favorite tools; and ways to determine how much competition you’ll have.
Wholesale
With wholesale, you typically buy direct from the manufacturer - or from a middleman - and buy in larger quantities in order to get a lower price than you would at a retail establishment.
Pros:
- Lower purchase price means higher profit
- When your purchase price is lower than other sellers, you have a better chance at winning the Buy Box because you can go lower on your sales price if needed
- Buying in larger quantities allows your business to be more passive. It takes less effort to sell 100 of the same item than it does to sell one of 100 different items.
- You can scale your business
Cons:
- Larger investment of capital
- Bigger risk than retail arbitrage because you are buying larger quantities. There is always a chance you get stuck with large amounts of a product you can’t sell.
If you’re interested in pursuing this model further, we recommend the Unstoppable Amazon Academy by Robyn Johnson.
Robyn is the author of The Unstoppable Entrepreneur and hosts The Unstoppable Entrepreneur podcast. She has sold more than a million dollars on Amazon.
This course includes basics for beginners, but is designed for sellers looking to grow their business to $50,000 a month or more.
Some of the lessons and modules include: scaling retail arbitrage; Wholesale sourcing at higher margins; Introduction to Amazon SEO; hiring and training virtual assistants; business basics; and an introduction to bundling.
The Unstoppable Amazon Academy, which is a subscription, offers a monthly or annual payment option.
Private Label
Private label refers to the practice of purchasing a product and then putting your own branding onto it. Many times, sellers will purchase product from China and then attach their own brand, logo and marketing to it.
Pros:
- Little to no competition because you are the brand owner
- More control over price
Cons:
- Riskier than retail arbitrage and wholesale because the product typically has no ranking or sales history to draw upon
- You typically must purchase in larger quantities
For training on this model, we suggest Proven Private Label (PPL), a primer on how to start your own Private Label product line. You can buy just a book or go for the mentoring program (which we recommend).
The program teaches you how to find the “golden gaps” on Amazon, which are products people are searching for but can’t find.
It shows you how to find products and market them, and walks you through each step, from brainstorming to having your own Private Label product you can resell on Amazon, eBay, or elsewhere.
The teaching includes 6 mentoring modules, 20 PDF lessons and a private Facebook group.
Topics include how to choose your product; contacting suppliers; creating a listing; brand name, logos and packaging; and advanced strategies.
Drop-shipping
When sellers drop-ship, they purchase from a retailer or wholesaler and then have the order sent to the customer. We recommend against this practice.
Pros:
- Sellers don’t handle the merchandise
Cons:
- Lack of quality control; seller doesn’t have the opportunity to inspect the product, nor to ensure that packing and shipping is handled in a way you would approve of
This is not an area we have used or explored, so we don’t recommend any particular training for it.
Saturday, 25 February 2017
Becoming An Entrepreneur Is Hard - 5 Tips To Being A Successful Entrepre...
Becoming an entrepreneur is hard and it will never get any easier. If you want some tips to become a successful entrepreneur then make sure you watch this entire video.
Revealed: What the average Amazon seller’s business looks like
By Chris Dawson
How do your Amazon sales measure up against your competitors? It’s hard to judge sometimes, but Amazon do give some hints as to what their average seller looks like. Of course there’s really no such thing as average – e.g. some sellers will be 100% FBA, some will be 100% self fulfil and many will be somewhere in between – but today we’re going to try to define what the average seller looks like.
The Average Amazon Seller’s Turnover
We don’t know exactly how many third party merchants there are on Amazon, but two years ago Amazon revealed that there were over 2 million. We’re going to take a guesstimate at 2.25 million although there’s quite a large margin for error in that number.
The next data point we need to know is the total sales value from third party merchants on Amazon. Again we have to take an estimate at this number, but we do know for certain that Amazon took $22,993 million in seller fees. If we factor fees at 10% that equates to almost $230 billion in annual third party sales on Amazon.
Some simple maths ($230 billion divided by 2.25 million) gives us a turnover for the average third party Amazon seller of $115,000 annually or around £92,222 – That’s £7685/month so if your Amazon revenue is in that ball park, congratulations – you are Mr or Ms Average!
The Average Amazon Seller’s FBA Business
FBA delivered more than two billion items for Marketplace sellers worldwide last year. A simple division suggests that the average Amazon seller sells just 74 FBA items per month.
The proportion of sales going through FBA is currently running at more than 55% of total third-party units. This means that Mr or Ms Average will be selling around £51,000 annually through FBA or £4227 per month. The remaining £3431 of monthly revenue will be from self fulfilled items.
The Average Selling Price on Amazon
Knowing that the average seller shifts 74 items per month through FBA generating £4227 of revenue we can estimate an Average Selling Price of just over £57 per unit.
The Average Amazon Seller’s Growth
Amazon increased their seller fees by 37% from 2014-2015 and 43% from 2015-2016. This isn’t a fee increase, it’s simply down to sellers selling more. If fees grew at these levels then it’s reasonable to assume that sales grew in the same proportion.
Of course new sellers will have started selling on Amazon and some will have ceased trading. Until Amazon updates their seller numbers we’re guessing that overall growth is relatively slow and as above allowed a quarter of a million over the last known number, a rough 11% growth in the number of active Amazon merchants.
Allowing for an 11% growth in merchant numbers, this means the average seller should have seen their business swell by around 33% in 2014-2015 and 38.75% in 2015-2016.
If your Amazon business isn’t growing at least 30-40% year on year then something is wrong and you’re falling behind Mr or Ms Average.
How To Accelerate Your Amazon Sales
Amazon have revealed that active sellers worldwide using the FBA service grew more than 70% and that, outside the US, FBA units shipped grew more than 80%. More sellers are using FBA and those do are seeing their FBA unit sales skyrocket compared to sellers who self fulfil.
If you want to perform better than Mr or Ms Average, putting your products into FBA is the sure fire way to succeed on Amazon.
The Average Amazon Seller Summarised
The average Amazon seller will be turning over close to £8000 per month on Amazon and their business will be growing at up to 40% year on year. They will heavily use FBA, probably for their fastest selling lines, and will be selling internationally allowing Amazon to fulfil their orders around the world with FBA.
Mr or Ms Average will be growing their FBA business considerably faster then their self fulfil business and will enjoy an average price per unit of almost £60.
Whilst we acknowledge that some of these number are estimates, and others calculated using assumptions which may not be accurate, they do give an interesting insight into what the average Amazon merchant looks like. Some will have considerably higher or lower turnover both in monetary value and in the number of units sold.
We have only looked at turnover and units sold. Your profit is what really matters an margins between different products will vary wildly. You may have much lower cost products but higher margins and make as much profit as some turning over many times the same revenue as you.
How do you measure up against Mr or Ms Average Amazon seller? Are you performing better, worse, or have we just described your Amazon business?
Saturday, 18 February 2017
How To Sell Products On Amazon - My Amazon Private Label Product Researc...
Learn from this awesome tutorial from Online Seller Mastery.
What to Do When You Decide to Sell on Amazon
By Gene Ku
Virtually no retail sector has escaped Amazon’s encroachments. From Kohl’s to RadioShack to Staples to Walmart, retailers are hemorrhaging market share and closing stores at record rates.
But it’s not just lost revenue that has retailers afraid of Amazon. By selling directly instead of through Amazon, brands and retailers deepen customer relationships while gaining valuable data to inform marketing, sales, and merchandising. When retailers and brands sell on Amazon, they forfeit their rights to leverage that customer information and build loyalty.
And without data and direct customer access, retailers lose control. If retailers choose to sell on Amazon, they become subject to the e-commerce giant’s seller policies. By acquiescing to Amazon, retailers effectively limit their long-term ability to strengthen their products and fine-tune their marketing strategies.
Then, with Amazon in control and with competing merchants in the marketplace, retailers are pressured to drop their prices. If they refuse, others swoop in to undercut those prices, leading to an eventual race to the bottom. Other times, Amazon itself enters the space and beats everyone’s prices with AmazonBasics.
Then, with Amazon in control and with competing merchants in the marketplace, retailers are pressured to drop their prices. If they refuse, others swoop in to undercut those prices, leading to an eventual race to the bottom. Other times, Amazon itself enters the space and beats everyone’s prices with AmazonBasics.
The Gamble: Lose Control, but Gain Audience
While business leaders want to keep Amazon’s fingers away from their profits and data, they’re tempted by something every company craves: an incomparably large audience.
Across the world, the online retailer has approximately 310 million active users — roughly the population of the United States — all with their pocketbooks out and ready to spend. Many of those users start product searches on Amazon now, too, rather than Google. According to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, 38 percent of people first turn to Amazon compared to 35 percent who navigate first to Google when shopping online.
That audience, especially for small businesses that lack the financial muscle or marketing infrastructure to build their own, makes Amazon an enticing option. On the other end of the spectrum, established companies seeking to get their products to the greatest number of customers might also decide to capitalize on Amazon’s audience.
With Amazon, industry matters, too. Traditional merchants in its top verticals — toys and games, books, and consumer electronics, to name a few — may be unable to compete without selling on Amazon. Retailers selling seasonal products might also find Amazon advantageous because it enables them to list products for short periods of time and then pull them off the site when it makes sense.
Regardless of industry, however, retailers need to build high-quality products at the right price. Success on Amazon hinges on customer ratings, feedback, and sales velocity. Retailers that stand out in those categories become eligible for Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), which enables them to focus on the products while Amazon packs and ships their orders. Because of its massive, globe-spanning infrastructure, access to FBA is, for many retailers and brands, a major perk of selling on Amazon.
Don’t Just Survive; Thrive on Amazon
You’ll have to decide for yourself whether the pros of selling on Amazon outweigh the cons. But millions of merchants have already ducked under Amazon’s umbrella. If you decide to join them, you’ll need to learn how to succeed in Amazon’s world:
Create a product with a clear value proposition.
Amazon products rise and fall with their customer reviews. The first step toward great reviews and enviable sales figures, then, is having a rave-worthy product.
As you develop your product, focus on the problem you’re trying to solve for your target market. Then, test whether your product addresses that problem better than incumbents by putting it in the hands of real users. If it doesn’t — especially if it’s in an overcommoditized category such as consumer tech — keep iterating until customers have a clear reason to choose it over competitors.
Set an unbeatable price.
Believe it or not, there is a method to Amazon’s pricing madness. To increase sales without gutting profits, don’t attempt to set your prices by the overall market, brick-and-mortar pricing, or your instincts.
Instead, keep a sharp eye on competitors’ prices, and don’t be fooled by Amazon’s pricing games. To make shoppers think everything is cheap, the e-commerce giant temporarily slashes prices on its most popular items. Then, after customers have been lured in, it recoups profits by increasing prices on numerous less popular items.
Win the Buy Box battle.
Amazon grants the Buy Box to sellers who meet its performance-based standards, such as order defect rate, time on Amazon, and seller feedback ratings.
Products with the Buy Box represent 90 percent of sales on Amazon, meaning that earning it greatly and immediately enhances your exposure and your bottom line. Focus on keeping pricing competitive, improving sales performance, and decreasing order defect rate to bring your product into the box.
Let Amazon fulfill for you.
Before you opt for FBA, you should know upfront that it can cut per-item profits, depending on your existing infrastructure. But this is counterbalanced, Amazon is quick to point out, by better product exposure and the increased likelihood of winning the Buy Box.
Run the numbers with Amazon’s revenue calculator, and know the fees going in. Amazon, of course, charges merchants a percentage of total sales. Retailers that opt for FBA incur additional costs based on factors such as item weight and storage costs.
If, after going through the calculations, you decide that FBA is best for your product, the program is fairly simple to set up. If you struggle, Amazon’s Business Customer Service center can walk you through it.
There are risks inherent to selling on Amazon. It’s constantly collecting data about your product and customers, which it may use to carve out your market for itself. Even if it doesn’t, it’ll mercilessly take a cut of your profits.
But millions of merchants and brands have decided that selling on Amazon makes sense. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” these retailers reason. And with no end in sight to Amazon’s invasion, joining ‘em might be your best option after all.
Tuesday, 14 February 2017
Tools for Online Arbitrage: Sourcing, Research and Profit Calculation
By Richard Shrubb
Online arbitrage sounds like the perfect work-from-home business: If you have a computer, an internet connection, and a few hours to spare each week then you’re all set.
So what do you have to do to? It’s pretty simple: you buy products from ordinary online stores, then sell them for a profit on the Amazon marketplace.
But making money as an online arbitrage seller is not as easy as it sounds.
It’s not easy to find products to buy for less than the price on Amazon – much less, if you want to make a respectable profit. The price difference has to cover all of Amazon’s fees and any other expenses you have.
It’s also not easy getting a grip on Amazon’s constant and unpredictable price changes. A deal might look great at the moment you find it, only for Amazon’s price to fall off a cliff a few hours later and force you into a loss.
Then there’s the fees. Sure, Amazon tells you how their fees work upfront, but they’re detailed and complex. It’s easy to make a mistake and calculate your profit wrongly.
So in this post I’ll explain what online arbitrage is really like, and how you can use online tools to help with all of the main challenges: sourcing, price research, and fee calculation.
What is Online Arbitrage?
James Rugg, founder of Amazon seller tools company Daily Source Tools, and a former arbitrage seller in his own right, told us:
Arbitrage is exploiting a price mismatch between two marketplaces. For Amazon resellers that means finding things in retail stores and online that we know are selling for a higher price on Amazon.
Online arbitrage is not a risk-free way to make money. It requires some capital investment: perhaps a few hundred dollars (or pounds) to make a good start.
It also requires an investment of time. Not only are the fees complex, there are many rules, policies and good practices to learn if you want to sell successfully through the Amazon marketplace.
But there is a real opportunity out there. Ed Brooks, founder of online arbitrage product scanner ProfitSourcery, has also seen the potential at first hand:
My wife spends half a day a week on FBA and makes more money out of that than her part-time job as a librarian. Recently she found a Barbie convertible car on Tesco at a low price, bought 30 and has sold 15 in under a month. She’s made £225 profit on a £375 spend.
A big attraction is the low barrier to entry: if you can shop for products on the internet, then you can do online arbitrage. Can you make a fortune from it? Probably not. Can you supplement your income with some useful extra cash? Yes, you can.
What is Online Arbitrage NOT?
Retail Arbitrage
This isn’t “retail arbitrage”, where you buy products from physical bricks-and-mortar stores.
Retail arbitrage typically requires spending hours with a scanning app to find products at a low enough price to make a profit, then buying up as much of that product as you can get. It can be profitable, but it’s not what we are talking about in this post. With online arbitrage products are only sourced from online stores.
We interviewed Robyn Johnson just a couple of months back about her successful business based largely on retail arbitrage. It’s a great introduction to that topic.
Reselling
This isn’t reselling either.
The reselling model involves buying products from conventional business-to-business sources: wholesalers, manufacturers and distributors. With online arbitrage, you are buying from normal consumer-facing stores like Walmart and Target in the US, or Tesco and Argos in the UK.
Buying from wholesale has the big advantage that profitable products can be easily reordered, but it’s often not accessible for sellers just starting out. At small volumes, the prices are often too high to be profitable. At larger volumes, the high risk and capital will be difficult to justify.
We wrote about reselling recently in Five Ecommerce Business Models: Reselling, Private Labelling, Used and More.
Amazon-to-eBay Arbitrage
In Amazon-to-eBay arbitrage sellers do not buy any stock in advance, but simply take items that are available on Amazon and list them for a higher price on eBay. When an order comes in from eBay they buy the goods from Amazon and have them delivered directly to the eBay buyer.
Web Retailer covered Amazon-to-eBay arbitrage in detail in The Truth About Amazon to eBay Arbitrage. What’s the key difference compared to online arbitrage? With “mainstream” online arbitrage, products are purchased before they are sold. Also, with Amazon-to-eBay arbitrage, where there is no need to invest money up front, profit margins are often paper-thin.
Tools of the Trade
Arbitrage Deal Finders
Your online arbitrage business will never get off the ground if you can’t source products. Amazon is known for being extremely competitive on price, so it’s rare to find items for sale much cheaper elsewhere. But it’s not unheard of. There are so many online stores, and so many products being sold, that one-in-a-million opportunities come up every day – you just have to find them.
There are tools that completely automate the work of finding arbitrage opportunities, providing daily lists of products that can be resold at a profit. Tools in this category include ProfitSourcery (UK and US), ScanDroid Pro (US) and FindSpotter (US). The Web Retailer directory includes arbitrage deal finders, and prices range from around $20 to $100 per month.
A lower level of automation is available using browser extensions like OAXRAY and Cleer Platinum, both for Chrome. OAXRAY turns product search results from 21 different online retailers into spreadsheets of product information – including current Amazon selling prices and fees. The output is similar to that from the daily product lists, but it is driven by browsing through stores rather than the list service scanning automatically. OAXRAY is $99 per month.
Cleer Platinum adds links to product pages on Amazon, eBay and 20 other supported online stores, to the same product on major marketplaces and sourcing sites. It costs $97 as a one-time payment. A free version with a lower level of features is also available, called Cleer Pro.
Price and Rank History
If you use an arbitrage deal finder, why would you need anything else? One reason is that prices are always changing, and deal finders are only accurate at one point in time.
Amazon price trackers like camelcamelcamel and Keepa provide price history and volatility of several million products sold on Amazon. Both show how the price and sales rank have changed over time, providing an insight into the typical price and sales volume for a product. If an arbitrage deal is only profitable because of an abnormal – and possibly temporary – price jump on Amazon, it may be best to avoid it. Price trackers should make that easy to spot.
Keepa also shows how often a product has gone out of stock by Amazon themselves. Frequent stock-outs by Amazon can be a big opportunity to win sales while Amazon is out of the running.
ProfitSourcery have created a detailed guide What Makes A Good Product To Buy? which covers many of the factors for choosing profitable products beyond just a low buying price. It’s normally just for ProfitSourcery subscribers, but they have kindly provided it for free to Web Retailer readers.
Fee Calculators
Amazon provide their own revenue calculator which covers marketplace fees as well as FBA fees.
The North American Amazon revenue calculator covers Amazon.com, Amazon.com.mx, and Amazon.ca.
The European Amazon revenue calculator covers Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.it, Amazon.es, Amazon.fr and Amazon.de.
A number of tools link to the Amazon revenue calculator, including a Calculator Widget for Chrome which saves time by adding a link from Amazon product pages, and automatically populating the product’s ASIN.
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)
Amazon’s FBA fulfilment program offers two big advantages:
You don’t need to pick, pack and despatch orders yourself – that’s all part of the service.
You get increased exposure to buyers on Amazon, with an advantage in the Buy Box and Prime eligibility.
By using FBA you don’t have to keep stock at home while waiting for orders. Your products only need preparing (labelling, packing etc.) and shipping to an Amazon fulfilment centre. Even that is avoidable by using an FBA preparation service such as Amazon’s own or a specialist third-party provider.
Online Arbitrage FAQs
We asked Ed Brooks from ProfitSourcery and James Rugg from Daily Source Tools a number of questions that we frequently hear about online arbitrage – and product lists in particular. Here’s what they told us.
Isn’t everyone chasing the same deals?
Ed Brooks said:
Not everyone gets exactly the same list of products. There will be some overlap obviously! If you are on our Accelerated Plus program, you get around 300 products a month. It is very unlikely that everyone on that program is going to go after all those opportunities. Some people naturally gravitate towards electronics or babywear or whatever it might be. And we won’t take on a huge number of customers – we’ve got a limit.
James Rugg has a similar approach:
My USP is the exclusivity of my lists. I’ve got one that I limit to 60 people, and one that’s limited to just 25 people. If all 25 people went for a product, then some people would not make money on that item. But not everyone opens the list every day. Some do, but the majority don’t. My products have a sales rank in the top 1.6% and an average 96% net profit margin across both lists, so there’s plenty to go around.
What if the price drops suddenly before you have sold your stock?
Ed Brooks said:
We’ve got a direct link to camelcamelcamel. That shows how stable the price history of the product is. If you know that for the last year something has been continually selling for $20 then it is quite unlikely that it is going to drop to $10. If someone does undercut you, let them sell out and the price is likely to go back up to what it has been averaging in the past. With any business there is an element of risk but we try to provide enough contextual information to understand that. You have to use a bit of common sense.
Won’t you make more money if you ship orders yourself?
Ed Brooks said that FBA really is worth the investment:
We have very, very few problems with FBA. We have sent in 300 items at a time, and it has been fine. If you think of all the personal time to do the packing and go to the Post Office, it’s a huge time saver. It means that you can have a permanent full time job and do Amazon FBA.
Do you need a repricing tool?
James Rugg thinks that an automatic repricing tool is essential in the online arbitrage business:
Repricers are an excellent way to stay on top of price movement. The automation they provide is brilliant. If you are buying wisely then it is invalid to complain that repricers are causing a race to the bottom. Yes, you can use them wrongly, and someone new going for the Buy Box can burn through their stock in no time. You’ve got to be aware of your strategy and how you’re going to use them. They definitely make the business more efficient, and you’re at a disadvantage if you don’t use one.
How should sellers handle returns?
Ed Brooks said:
We sold 2,500 items in our testing program, and we had no more than 25 returns. That’s about 1%. People send the product back and you can sell it as used on eBay. When you first get the stock in you need to check it is in A1 condition. If a retailer sells you something in bad condition, you should always send it back to them. The key thing with returns is to provide people with good customer service. If you do that it keeps your Amazon account in good standing. That’s critical in everything from winning the Buy Box to having your account suspended.
Does online arbitrage scale?
Many people starting with online arbitrage just want to make a little extra money in their spare time. Those who are successful often want to turn it into a full-time income. We asked Ed Brooks and James Rugg if that’s possible.
James Rugg said:
Online arbitrage is a very good way of learning the ropes. But over time you should find lines that you want to hold in stock day in and day out. If you can do that, something like my list is going to become less necessary. I have clients who have been using my list for 18 months, but they are not relying on it as their sole means of product sourcing. Many do at first, but then they branch out to find higher volume items they can buy repeatedly.
Ed Brooks told us:
Try buying a few things that are going to sell fast before you spend hundreds or thousands. It really does work as long as you’re willing to put in a bit of time learning the ropes. There’s a real mix of people doing this. You have people like my wife who spends half a day a week on it. At the other extreme there’s a guy in the US who’s turning over $10 million a year. It is very possible to be earning $4,000 to $5,000 a month just using Amazon FBA.
On balance, I think that online arbitrage provides a low-risk way to start selling online. It’s not zero risk – you can certainly lose money, but probably not your shirt. And it’s not zero skill: although it’s easy to get started there is a lot to learn to become a real expert.
So if you have time to spare, and like hunting for online bargains, it could be a great way to earn some extra cash.
Or, if you have big ambitions in the ecommerce business, it could be a great way to learn but it’s probably not the road to your dreams.
(SOURCE)
By Richard Shrubb
Online arbitrage sounds like the perfect work-from-home business: If you have a computer, an internet connection, and a few hours to spare each week then you’re all set.
So what do you have to do to? It’s pretty simple: you buy products from ordinary online stores, then sell them for a profit on the Amazon marketplace.
But making money as an online arbitrage seller is not as easy as it sounds.
It’s not easy to find products to buy for less than the price on Amazon – much less, if you want to make a respectable profit. The price difference has to cover all of Amazon’s fees and any other expenses you have.
It’s also not easy getting a grip on Amazon’s constant and unpredictable price changes. A deal might look great at the moment you find it, only for Amazon’s price to fall off a cliff a few hours later and force you into a loss.
Then there’s the fees. Sure, Amazon tells you how their fees work upfront, but they’re detailed and complex. It’s easy to make a mistake and calculate your profit wrongly.
So in this post I’ll explain what online arbitrage is really like, and how you can use online tools to help with all of the main challenges: sourcing, price research, and fee calculation.
What is Online Arbitrage?
James Rugg, founder of Amazon seller tools company Daily Source Tools, and a former arbitrage seller in his own right, told us:
Arbitrage is exploiting a price mismatch between two marketplaces. For Amazon resellers that means finding things in retail stores and online that we know are selling for a higher price on Amazon.
Online arbitrage is not a risk-free way to make money. It requires some capital investment: perhaps a few hundred dollars (or pounds) to make a good start.
It also requires an investment of time. Not only are the fees complex, there are many rules, policies and good practices to learn if you want to sell successfully through the Amazon marketplace.
But there is a real opportunity out there. Ed Brooks, founder of online arbitrage product scanner ProfitSourcery, has also seen the potential at first hand:
My wife spends half a day a week on FBA and makes more money out of that than her part-time job as a librarian. Recently she found a Barbie convertible car on Tesco at a low price, bought 30 and has sold 15 in under a month. She’s made £225 profit on a £375 spend.
A big attraction is the low barrier to entry: if you can shop for products on the internet, then you can do online arbitrage. Can you make a fortune from it? Probably not. Can you supplement your income with some useful extra cash? Yes, you can.
What is Online Arbitrage NOT?
Retail Arbitrage
This isn’t “retail arbitrage”, where you buy products from physical bricks-and-mortar stores.
Retail arbitrage typically requires spending hours with a scanning app to find products at a low enough price to make a profit, then buying up as much of that product as you can get. It can be profitable, but it’s not what we are talking about in this post. With online arbitrage products are only sourced from online stores.
We interviewed Robyn Johnson just a couple of months back about her successful business based largely on retail arbitrage. It’s a great introduction to that topic.
Reselling
This isn’t reselling either.
The reselling model involves buying products from conventional business-to-business sources: wholesalers, manufacturers and distributors. With online arbitrage, you are buying from normal consumer-facing stores like Walmart and Target in the US, or Tesco and Argos in the UK.
Buying from wholesale has the big advantage that profitable products can be easily reordered, but it’s often not accessible for sellers just starting out. At small volumes, the prices are often too high to be profitable. At larger volumes, the high risk and capital will be difficult to justify.
We wrote about reselling recently in Five Ecommerce Business Models: Reselling, Private Labelling, Used and More.
Amazon-to-eBay Arbitrage
In Amazon-to-eBay arbitrage sellers do not buy any stock in advance, but simply take items that are available on Amazon and list them for a higher price on eBay. When an order comes in from eBay they buy the goods from Amazon and have them delivered directly to the eBay buyer.
Web Retailer covered Amazon-to-eBay arbitrage in detail in The Truth About Amazon to eBay Arbitrage. What’s the key difference compared to online arbitrage? With “mainstream” online arbitrage, products are purchased before they are sold. Also, with Amazon-to-eBay arbitrage, where there is no need to invest money up front, profit margins are often paper-thin.
Tools of the Trade
Arbitrage Deal Finders
Your online arbitrage business will never get off the ground if you can’t source products. Amazon is known for being extremely competitive on price, so it’s rare to find items for sale much cheaper elsewhere. But it’s not unheard of. There are so many online stores, and so many products being sold, that one-in-a-million opportunities come up every day – you just have to find them.
There are tools that completely automate the work of finding arbitrage opportunities, providing daily lists of products that can be resold at a profit. Tools in this category include ProfitSourcery (UK and US), ScanDroid Pro (US) and FindSpotter (US). The Web Retailer directory includes arbitrage deal finders, and prices range from around $20 to $100 per month.
A lower level of automation is available using browser extensions like OAXRAY and Cleer Platinum, both for Chrome. OAXRAY turns product search results from 21 different online retailers into spreadsheets of product information – including current Amazon selling prices and fees. The output is similar to that from the daily product lists, but it is driven by browsing through stores rather than the list service scanning automatically. OAXRAY is $99 per month.
Cleer Platinum adds links to product pages on Amazon, eBay and 20 other supported online stores, to the same product on major marketplaces and sourcing sites. It costs $97 as a one-time payment. A free version with a lower level of features is also available, called Cleer Pro.
Price and Rank History
If you use an arbitrage deal finder, why would you need anything else? One reason is that prices are always changing, and deal finders are only accurate at one point in time.
Amazon price trackers like camelcamelcamel and Keepa provide price history and volatility of several million products sold on Amazon. Both show how the price and sales rank have changed over time, providing an insight into the typical price and sales volume for a product. If an arbitrage deal is only profitable because of an abnormal – and possibly temporary – price jump on Amazon, it may be best to avoid it. Price trackers should make that easy to spot.
Keepa also shows how often a product has gone out of stock by Amazon themselves. Frequent stock-outs by Amazon can be a big opportunity to win sales while Amazon is out of the running.
ProfitSourcery have created a detailed guide What Makes A Good Product To Buy? which covers many of the factors for choosing profitable products beyond just a low buying price. It’s normally just for ProfitSourcery subscribers, but they have kindly provided it for free to Web Retailer readers.
Fee Calculators
Amazon provide their own revenue calculator which covers marketplace fees as well as FBA fees.
The North American Amazon revenue calculator covers Amazon.com, Amazon.com.mx, and Amazon.ca.
The European Amazon revenue calculator covers Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.it, Amazon.es, Amazon.fr and Amazon.de.
A number of tools link to the Amazon revenue calculator, including a Calculator Widget for Chrome which saves time by adding a link from Amazon product pages, and automatically populating the product’s ASIN.
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)
Amazon’s FBA fulfilment program offers two big advantages:
You don’t need to pick, pack and despatch orders yourself – that’s all part of the service.
You get increased exposure to buyers on Amazon, with an advantage in the Buy Box and Prime eligibility.
By using FBA you don’t have to keep stock at home while waiting for orders. Your products only need preparing (labelling, packing etc.) and shipping to an Amazon fulfilment centre. Even that is avoidable by using an FBA preparation service such as Amazon’s own or a specialist third-party provider.
Online Arbitrage FAQs
We asked Ed Brooks from ProfitSourcery and James Rugg from Daily Source Tools a number of questions that we frequently hear about online arbitrage – and product lists in particular. Here’s what they told us.
Isn’t everyone chasing the same deals?
Ed Brooks said:
Not everyone gets exactly the same list of products. There will be some overlap obviously! If you are on our Accelerated Plus program, you get around 300 products a month. It is very unlikely that everyone on that program is going to go after all those opportunities. Some people naturally gravitate towards electronics or babywear or whatever it might be. And we won’t take on a huge number of customers – we’ve got a limit.
James Rugg has a similar approach:
My USP is the exclusivity of my lists. I’ve got one that I limit to 60 people, and one that’s limited to just 25 people. If all 25 people went for a product, then some people would not make money on that item. But not everyone opens the list every day. Some do, but the majority don’t. My products have a sales rank in the top 1.6% and an average 96% net profit margin across both lists, so there’s plenty to go around.
What if the price drops suddenly before you have sold your stock?
Ed Brooks said:
We’ve got a direct link to camelcamelcamel. That shows how stable the price history of the product is. If you know that for the last year something has been continually selling for $20 then it is quite unlikely that it is going to drop to $10. If someone does undercut you, let them sell out and the price is likely to go back up to what it has been averaging in the past. With any business there is an element of risk but we try to provide enough contextual information to understand that. You have to use a bit of common sense.
Won’t you make more money if you ship orders yourself?
Ed Brooks said that FBA really is worth the investment:
We have very, very few problems with FBA. We have sent in 300 items at a time, and it has been fine. If you think of all the personal time to do the packing and go to the Post Office, it’s a huge time saver. It means that you can have a permanent full time job and do Amazon FBA.
Do you need a repricing tool?
James Rugg thinks that an automatic repricing tool is essential in the online arbitrage business:
Repricers are an excellent way to stay on top of price movement. The automation they provide is brilliant. If you are buying wisely then it is invalid to complain that repricers are causing a race to the bottom. Yes, you can use them wrongly, and someone new going for the Buy Box can burn through their stock in no time. You’ve got to be aware of your strategy and how you’re going to use them. They definitely make the business more efficient, and you’re at a disadvantage if you don’t use one.
How should sellers handle returns?
Ed Brooks said:
We sold 2,500 items in our testing program, and we had no more than 25 returns. That’s about 1%. People send the product back and you can sell it as used on eBay. When you first get the stock in you need to check it is in A1 condition. If a retailer sells you something in bad condition, you should always send it back to them. The key thing with returns is to provide people with good customer service. If you do that it keeps your Amazon account in good standing. That’s critical in everything from winning the Buy Box to having your account suspended.
Does online arbitrage scale?
Many people starting with online arbitrage just want to make a little extra money in their spare time. Those who are successful often want to turn it into a full-time income. We asked Ed Brooks and James Rugg if that’s possible.
James Rugg said:
Online arbitrage is a very good way of learning the ropes. But over time you should find lines that you want to hold in stock day in and day out. If you can do that, something like my list is going to become less necessary. I have clients who have been using my list for 18 months, but they are not relying on it as their sole means of product sourcing. Many do at first, but then they branch out to find higher volume items they can buy repeatedly.
Ed Brooks told us:
Try buying a few things that are going to sell fast before you spend hundreds or thousands. It really does work as long as you’re willing to put in a bit of time learning the ropes. There’s a real mix of people doing this. You have people like my wife who spends half a day a week on it. At the other extreme there’s a guy in the US who’s turning over $10 million a year. It is very possible to be earning $4,000 to $5,000 a month just using Amazon FBA.
On balance, I think that online arbitrage provides a low-risk way to start selling online. It’s not zero risk – you can certainly lose money, but probably not your shirt. And it’s not zero skill: although it’s easy to get started there is a lot to learn to become a real expert.
So if you have time to spare, and like hunting for online bargains, it could be a great way to earn some extra cash.
Or, if you have big ambitions in the ecommerce business, it could be a great way to learn but it’s probably not the road to your dreams.
(SOURCE)
Friday, 10 February 2017
7 Day Amazon Startup + Lifetime Access to The Private Label Collective
Over the next 7 days together we will find a product to private label on Amazon, research everything about the product, order a sample from suppliers, & have your Amazon listing and launch plan ready.
Wednesday, 8 February 2017
Ecommerce Product Photography: The Essential Guide
by Paula Jakubik
High quality product photography makes all the difference in ecommerce. Most sellers know that, but achieving it is not an easy task.
In this guide, I’ll cover all the essentials you need to know about ecommerce product photography. You don’t need to be a photography geek to get fantastic results, but you do need some crucial basics – and plenty of practice.
I’ll also explain the photo policies set by eBay and Amazon, which you must follow if you sell on those marketplaces, and special considerations for photographing difficult products: jewelry, clothing and large items like furniture.
I hope this guide helps you get on the path to some really awesome product photos and – most importantly – increasing your online sales. Any questions? Please fire away in the comments at the end!
General product photography tips
Shoot against a white backdrop
A white backdrop will make all the difference when you shoot your products. First up, it’ll reflect white light onto your product, which will help you produce a well-lit photo and really bring out the product’s color. Shooting on white will also help you avoid any color spills.
A white backdrop will also help ensure your camera’s white balance calibration is on point. Light sources have different color temperatures (measured in Kelvin) and while our brains can adjust to these temperatures automatically, a digital camera can only guess the true color of everything in the frame by using a white element as a reference point. By surrounding your product in white, you’ll be able to capture its true color and accurately represent your product.
The best kind of backdrop is a photography sweep, which is simply a backdrop that seamlessly transitions from the vertical to the horizontal surface. The sweep should be larger than your product and fill up the entire camera frame.
If you’re photographing smaller products, a shooting table is the best option because you’ll have more flexibility in terms of where you can set up. You can easily make your own by nailing two scrap pieces of wood to the back of a small table and clamping your sweep in place. White wrapping paper works really well because of its reflective quality, but anything clean and white will do.
If you’re shooting large products, investing in a professional sweep isn’t a bad idea, especially if you’re going to shoot frequently. It’ll come with a stand so you can easily set it up. Otherwise, you can improvise by attaching a sheet to a wall or draping it over something.
Use sufficient lighting
Sufficient lighting is the secret to high-quality product photography. Unless you know what you’re doing, stay away from professional, artificial lighting. It takes a long time to master and you’ll need a lot of equipment. Stick to natural lighting — it’s free and easy, and it can produce great photos if you use it correctly.
You want to use the sun indirectly, so the best place to shoot is near a window. You might want to diffuse the light further by covering the window with a white sheet or taping white paper over the window pane. Note that using any other color to diffuse the light will change the temperature of your light source.
The window should be positioned to the left or right of the product — never behind or facing the camera. This means the light will only hit the product from one side so you might need to use a fill light, which is just something you place on the opposite side of the light source to prevent harsh shadows and evenly light up the product. If you look at the two photos below, the shadows in the left chair are much darker, particularly on the underside of the product.
You can also buy a reflector (a professional fill light) or make your own. Simply grab a white piece of cardboard and fold it in half — the shinier the surface the better. Alternatively, you can use a regular piece of cardboard and cover it in aluminum foil.
Stabilize your camera
Stabilizing your camera will help you take clear, sharp images. The best way to stabilize your camera is to use a tripod (or a smartphone mount if you’re shooting on your phone). When it comes to tripods, you get what you pay for, but as you’re only shooting product images, you won’t need anything too fancy. There are many under $50 on Amazon.
Understand your camera
Photography is a very technical and complex field, and there’s a lot to learn when it comes to cameras. You don’t need to be a highly skilled photographer to take a product image that sells, but the first step in improving your product images is to learn how your camera works so you can make the necessary adjustments for better photos.
If you’ve invested in a DSLR, learn the basics of shooting manual. Your aperture is the hole within the lens that determines the amount of light that travels into the camera. It’s measured in f-stops and (this is the confusing part) the higher the f-stop number, the smaller the aperture. The aperture is also linked to your depth of field, which determines how much of the shot is in focus. A smaller aperture will capture everything in the frame, and a larger aperture will isolate the foreground from the background.
The shutter speed refers to how long the hole in the lens is open for, i.e., how long light has to travel through the lens. A smaller aperture lets in less light, so the shutter needs to be open for longer to produce a well-lit photo.
The ISO determines a camera’s sensitivity to light. The higher you go, the lower the quality of the photo. Never exceed 400 — you’ll see that the image starts to get grainy. This is called camera noise. If you can’t take a well-lit image with an ISO of 100 or 200, you need to increase the lighting, make the aperture larger or slow down the shutter speed.
Ultimately, the perfect aperture-ISO-shutter speed combo will depend on your setup and your product, but a basic understanding of each feature will help you figure out what to adjust.
You can also take high-quality product images on any new smartphone. Sure, you get what you pay for, and DSLRs definitely take much better photos, but there won’t be a huge difference in the end result unless you really know how to use a DSLR to its full potential.
The most important thing to remember when shooting on a smartphone is the phone camera adjusts to its environment. You can’t adjust the aperture, but you can choose a focal point by tapping on the screen. Smartphone cameras automatically adjust the ISO to the lighting conditions, so you’ll need a lot of lighting to keep it below 400. Alternatively, there are Android and iOS apps that give you control over this feature.
Remove the background
Removing the background is an easy way to give your products a professional touch. The appropriate background color will depend on the design of your store, but white is the best option in most cases because it doesn’t clash with any other color and draws attention to the product.
There are a few ways to remove the background from a photo, some harder than others. Generally the most difficult approaches yield the best results — the pen tool in image editing software like Photoshop works wonders and will give you a really accurate outline. You can try using alternative tools like the magic wand, but more often than not it doesn’t cut away the background in the right places, and sometimes cuts into the product.
Use a template
Consistency is key when it comes to product photography. Your products should all take up the same amount of canvas space, so when they’re displayed together, they are more or less aligned.
The best way to do this is to create a template. Create a blank file in any kind of photo editing software that has this basic function, and choose the size you want for all of your product images. The best size is anywhere between 1000 pixels to 1600 pixels on the longest side, but different platforms will have different requirements, so look out for those.
You’ll then need to paste all of your images into the template, resize them accordingly and save them as new files. Your products should take up the majority of the canvas; aim for 80-95% of the frame. If you’re using a more advanced photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop, you can create guides that will help you align your products exactly, which is definitely more effective than eyeballing it.
Note that you can’t increase the size of a photo, and stretching it will only make it blurry and pixelated. If your original photos are too small for your template, you should reshoot the products or make the template smaller.
eBay and Amazon image policies
If you’re selling on Amazon or eBay, you’ll need to stick to their product image requirements for your listing to go up. The most important thing to note is that to satisfy the image requirements for both platforms, your images need to be at least 1000px on the longest side, but I’ll go into more detail below.
And, if you’re not selling on either of these platforms, remember that Amazon and eBay are leaders in ecommerce. They know what sells, so it’s probably a good idea to take a leaf out of their book when it comes to product photography.
eBay
eBay’s product image requirements are pretty easy to follow. They require images to be at least 500 pixels on the longest side. That being said, if you want to enable a zoom function, eBay requires images to be at least 800px on the longest side.
eBay does not allow borders or text on images. It allows watermarks, but they need to have an opacity of no more than 50%, can’t obscure an item and should not take up more than 5% of the frame. In my opinion, product images look better without watermarks anyway.
You can also use stock images or supplier images on eBay if you’re selling a brand-new item, but make sure you have the right to do this. Check the conditions of use on the original photos.
Amazon
Amazon has strict product image requirements, and your images will be rejected if the requirements are not followed. Note that the main photo must be of the product only, with the full product in the frame and taking up 85% or more of the canvas (save your pretty in-context shots for additional “other view” images and social media). The background must be pure white (#ffffff) and the product needs to be in focus, professionally lit and with realistic colors.
When it comes to the image file itself, Amazon requires images to be at least 1000 pixels in either height or width. You can upload TIFF, JPEG, GIF or PNG files, but JPEGs are easiest to work with and are the default file type for photos. You need to be extra careful when naming your files; a file name needs to include the product’s ID, and can only be made up of letters and numbers. The image won’t upload if there are spaces, dashes or other characters in the file name. You also need to include the appropriate file extension (for example, .jpg or .png).
Product-specific tips
Jewelry
On one hand, jewelry can be pretty tricky to photograph because it’s small and highly reflective, and in most cases it doesn’t stand up on its own. On the other hand, the studio setup for photographing jewelry requires very little space, which means you can pretty much shoot it anywhere. Props are your best friend for jewelry photography — you’ll need to get creative and figure out what works best for your product.
Shooting against a white backdrop is more important than ever when it comes to jewelry, particularly for shiny or transparent pieces. Every other color will spill onto the product, and your camera might have trouble focusing against a darker backdrop.
One of the issues with jewelry being so small is that it’s often hard to get the entire product in focus. If you’re just starting out, you may find that the edges of your product are out of focus. If you have a DSLR, shoot with a small aperture and a slow shutter speed. The aperture will keep the product in focus, while the slow shutter speed will keep the image nice and bright and allow you to use such a small aperture.
Necklaces
The best way to capture a necklace is to use gravity and let it hang, the same way it would lie on a body. For long necklaces, jewelry busts work great because they’re easy to use and stand up on their own. For best results, the bust should also be white, but you can cover a different-colored bust with a white sheet for the same effect.
The issue with using a bust for a short necklace is that at least half of the chain will get cut off behind the mannequin, and this will leave you with a strange photo after you remove the background. The best way to shoot short necklaces is to make yourself a flat jewelry stand with some cardboard and a white piece of paper. You can rest it against a photo frame or easel to stand it up.
Bracelets
Bracelets should be photographed either from directly above, or from the front and slightly above. It’ll depend entirely on the product; more delicate pieces tend to look better from above, whereas pieces with a bit of height tend to look better from the front.
Earrings
Dangling earrings should hang in the product image. If you want to shoot them straight on, use the same kind of DIY flat jewelry stand as you would for a short necklace and pin the earrings to it, or use fishing line.
Rings
Rings can be shot from most angles, but you should pick an angle and stick to it for all your photos. Note that if your rings have a decorative element at the front like a pattern or gemstone, it should be the focal point of the product shot.
You can use clear glue dots, double-sided tape or Blu-Tack to keep rings in place.
Clothing
The hardest part of shooting clothes is deciding on the style of product image you want. Shooting on a model can help emphasize the style of your product if you find a model who embodies your brand values. However, this will limit your brand to a specific target market, and working with models doesn’t give you as much flexibility as you’ll need to find a mutually convenient time and place.
Shooting on a mannequin will give you a lot more freedom and will keep the focus on the products themselves. When choosing a mannequin, make sure you choose one that is standing ‘straight on’, as your product will look funny when you remove the background if the model is standing with her hip out or her arm on her waist.
If you do shoot on a mannequin, you should consider creating ghost images. They’ll give your products shape and dimension, and give your images a professional touch. To create a ghost image, you need to take a photo of the front of the clothing and a photo of the back inside out, and then digitally stitch them together. Click here for a detailed explanation of the process.
Alternatively, you could shoot your products ‘flat’, either on the floor or on a hanger. This is the easiest and cheapest way to shoot products, but this method makes it harder for the customer to visualize how the product will look when worn.
Make your life easier by having a couple of props on hand. Safety pins are great for keeping little things in place, while clothespins/pegs are great for improving the fit of the product. You should also keep an iron on hand to make your products look clean and wrinkle-free.
Large items (e.g. furniture)
The biggest issue with shooting large products such as furniture is the amount of space they take up. You’re going to need a space that’s at least three times as large as the product, along with ample lighting. A well-lit room is your best option, as direct sunlight will create harsh shadows. As mentioned earlier, buying a sweep will make your life a lot easier, particularly for products this size. You should also get a friend or co-worker to help you to move the heavier and bulkier items around.
If you’re using a DSLR, the trick is to stand far away from the product while zooming in as much as you can so your focal length is at its maximum. Shooting with a smaller focal length when you’re closer to the product may leave you with a slightly distorted product in the resulting photo. To get the entire product in focus, make sure you use a small aperture.
Although it’s best to shoot from the front for most products, furniture can be a little different. The best shot is usually one that captures the front, top and side of the product, so shooting from above and slightly to one side of the product is a good place to start. This angle helps people better visualize the product and gives the product some dimension.
Now it’s up to YOU!
Nail your setup, grab your camera, and give DIY product photography a go. Practice makes perfect, so don’t give up if your product images aren’t perfect the first time you shoot — it’ll take some time to figure out what works best for you given the equipment you have and the products you’re shooting.
Do you have any DIY product photography tips of your own? We’d love to hear them! Leave a comment below and share the knowledge!
(SOURCE)
by Paula Jakubik
High quality product photography makes all the difference in ecommerce. Most sellers know that, but achieving it is not an easy task.
In this guide, I’ll cover all the essentials you need to know about ecommerce product photography. You don’t need to be a photography geek to get fantastic results, but you do need some crucial basics – and plenty of practice.
I’ll also explain the photo policies set by eBay and Amazon, which you must follow if you sell on those marketplaces, and special considerations for photographing difficult products: jewelry, clothing and large items like furniture.
I hope this guide helps you get on the path to some really awesome product photos and – most importantly – increasing your online sales. Any questions? Please fire away in the comments at the end!
General product photography tips
Shoot against a white backdrop
A white backdrop will make all the difference when you shoot your products. First up, it’ll reflect white light onto your product, which will help you produce a well-lit photo and really bring out the product’s color. Shooting on white will also help you avoid any color spills.
A white backdrop will also help ensure your camera’s white balance calibration is on point. Light sources have different color temperatures (measured in Kelvin) and while our brains can adjust to these temperatures automatically, a digital camera can only guess the true color of everything in the frame by using a white element as a reference point. By surrounding your product in white, you’ll be able to capture its true color and accurately represent your product.
The best kind of backdrop is a photography sweep, which is simply a backdrop that seamlessly transitions from the vertical to the horizontal surface. The sweep should be larger than your product and fill up the entire camera frame.
If you’re photographing smaller products, a shooting table is the best option because you’ll have more flexibility in terms of where you can set up. You can easily make your own by nailing two scrap pieces of wood to the back of a small table and clamping your sweep in place. White wrapping paper works really well because of its reflective quality, but anything clean and white will do.
If you’re shooting large products, investing in a professional sweep isn’t a bad idea, especially if you’re going to shoot frequently. It’ll come with a stand so you can easily set it up. Otherwise, you can improvise by attaching a sheet to a wall or draping it over something.
Use sufficient lighting
Sufficient lighting is the secret to high-quality product photography. Unless you know what you’re doing, stay away from professional, artificial lighting. It takes a long time to master and you’ll need a lot of equipment. Stick to natural lighting — it’s free and easy, and it can produce great photos if you use it correctly.
You want to use the sun indirectly, so the best place to shoot is near a window. You might want to diffuse the light further by covering the window with a white sheet or taping white paper over the window pane. Note that using any other color to diffuse the light will change the temperature of your light source.
The window should be positioned to the left or right of the product — never behind or facing the camera. This means the light will only hit the product from one side so you might need to use a fill light, which is just something you place on the opposite side of the light source to prevent harsh shadows and evenly light up the product. If you look at the two photos below, the shadows in the left chair are much darker, particularly on the underside of the product.
You can also buy a reflector (a professional fill light) or make your own. Simply grab a white piece of cardboard and fold it in half — the shinier the surface the better. Alternatively, you can use a regular piece of cardboard and cover it in aluminum foil.
Stabilize your camera
Stabilizing your camera will help you take clear, sharp images. The best way to stabilize your camera is to use a tripod (or a smartphone mount if you’re shooting on your phone). When it comes to tripods, you get what you pay for, but as you’re only shooting product images, you won’t need anything too fancy. There are many under $50 on Amazon.
Understand your camera
Photography is a very technical and complex field, and there’s a lot to learn when it comes to cameras. You don’t need to be a highly skilled photographer to take a product image that sells, but the first step in improving your product images is to learn how your camera works so you can make the necessary adjustments for better photos.
If you’ve invested in a DSLR, learn the basics of shooting manual. Your aperture is the hole within the lens that determines the amount of light that travels into the camera. It’s measured in f-stops and (this is the confusing part) the higher the f-stop number, the smaller the aperture. The aperture is also linked to your depth of field, which determines how much of the shot is in focus. A smaller aperture will capture everything in the frame, and a larger aperture will isolate the foreground from the background.
The shutter speed refers to how long the hole in the lens is open for, i.e., how long light has to travel through the lens. A smaller aperture lets in less light, so the shutter needs to be open for longer to produce a well-lit photo.
The ISO determines a camera’s sensitivity to light. The higher you go, the lower the quality of the photo. Never exceed 400 — you’ll see that the image starts to get grainy. This is called camera noise. If you can’t take a well-lit image with an ISO of 100 or 200, you need to increase the lighting, make the aperture larger or slow down the shutter speed.
Ultimately, the perfect aperture-ISO-shutter speed combo will depend on your setup and your product, but a basic understanding of each feature will help you figure out what to adjust.
You can also take high-quality product images on any new smartphone. Sure, you get what you pay for, and DSLRs definitely take much better photos, but there won’t be a huge difference in the end result unless you really know how to use a DSLR to its full potential.
The most important thing to remember when shooting on a smartphone is the phone camera adjusts to its environment. You can’t adjust the aperture, but you can choose a focal point by tapping on the screen. Smartphone cameras automatically adjust the ISO to the lighting conditions, so you’ll need a lot of lighting to keep it below 400. Alternatively, there are Android and iOS apps that give you control over this feature.
Remove the background
Removing the background is an easy way to give your products a professional touch. The appropriate background color will depend on the design of your store, but white is the best option in most cases because it doesn’t clash with any other color and draws attention to the product.
There are a few ways to remove the background from a photo, some harder than others. Generally the most difficult approaches yield the best results — the pen tool in image editing software like Photoshop works wonders and will give you a really accurate outline. You can try using alternative tools like the magic wand, but more often than not it doesn’t cut away the background in the right places, and sometimes cuts into the product.
Use a template
Consistency is key when it comes to product photography. Your products should all take up the same amount of canvas space, so when they’re displayed together, they are more or less aligned.
The best way to do this is to create a template. Create a blank file in any kind of photo editing software that has this basic function, and choose the size you want for all of your product images. The best size is anywhere between 1000 pixels to 1600 pixels on the longest side, but different platforms will have different requirements, so look out for those.
You’ll then need to paste all of your images into the template, resize them accordingly and save them as new files. Your products should take up the majority of the canvas; aim for 80-95% of the frame. If you’re using a more advanced photo editing software like Adobe Photoshop, you can create guides that will help you align your products exactly, which is definitely more effective than eyeballing it.
Note that you can’t increase the size of a photo, and stretching it will only make it blurry and pixelated. If your original photos are too small for your template, you should reshoot the products or make the template smaller.
eBay and Amazon image policies
If you’re selling on Amazon or eBay, you’ll need to stick to their product image requirements for your listing to go up. The most important thing to note is that to satisfy the image requirements for both platforms, your images need to be at least 1000px on the longest side, but I’ll go into more detail below.
And, if you’re not selling on either of these platforms, remember that Amazon and eBay are leaders in ecommerce. They know what sells, so it’s probably a good idea to take a leaf out of their book when it comes to product photography.
eBay
eBay’s product image requirements are pretty easy to follow. They require images to be at least 500 pixels on the longest side. That being said, if you want to enable a zoom function, eBay requires images to be at least 800px on the longest side.
eBay does not allow borders or text on images. It allows watermarks, but they need to have an opacity of no more than 50%, can’t obscure an item and should not take up more than 5% of the frame. In my opinion, product images look better without watermarks anyway.
You can also use stock images or supplier images on eBay if you’re selling a brand-new item, but make sure you have the right to do this. Check the conditions of use on the original photos.
Amazon
Amazon has strict product image requirements, and your images will be rejected if the requirements are not followed. Note that the main photo must be of the product only, with the full product in the frame and taking up 85% or more of the canvas (save your pretty in-context shots for additional “other view” images and social media). The background must be pure white (#ffffff) and the product needs to be in focus, professionally lit and with realistic colors.
When it comes to the image file itself, Amazon requires images to be at least 1000 pixels in either height or width. You can upload TIFF, JPEG, GIF or PNG files, but JPEGs are easiest to work with and are the default file type for photos. You need to be extra careful when naming your files; a file name needs to include the product’s ID, and can only be made up of letters and numbers. The image won’t upload if there are spaces, dashes or other characters in the file name. You also need to include the appropriate file extension (for example, .jpg or .png).
Product-specific tips
Jewelry
On one hand, jewelry can be pretty tricky to photograph because it’s small and highly reflective, and in most cases it doesn’t stand up on its own. On the other hand, the studio setup for photographing jewelry requires very little space, which means you can pretty much shoot it anywhere. Props are your best friend for jewelry photography — you’ll need to get creative and figure out what works best for your product.
Shooting against a white backdrop is more important than ever when it comes to jewelry, particularly for shiny or transparent pieces. Every other color will spill onto the product, and your camera might have trouble focusing against a darker backdrop.
One of the issues with jewelry being so small is that it’s often hard to get the entire product in focus. If you’re just starting out, you may find that the edges of your product are out of focus. If you have a DSLR, shoot with a small aperture and a slow shutter speed. The aperture will keep the product in focus, while the slow shutter speed will keep the image nice and bright and allow you to use such a small aperture.
Necklaces
The best way to capture a necklace is to use gravity and let it hang, the same way it would lie on a body. For long necklaces, jewelry busts work great because they’re easy to use and stand up on their own. For best results, the bust should also be white, but you can cover a different-colored bust with a white sheet for the same effect.
The issue with using a bust for a short necklace is that at least half of the chain will get cut off behind the mannequin, and this will leave you with a strange photo after you remove the background. The best way to shoot short necklaces is to make yourself a flat jewelry stand with some cardboard and a white piece of paper. You can rest it against a photo frame or easel to stand it up.
Bracelets
Bracelets should be photographed either from directly above, or from the front and slightly above. It’ll depend entirely on the product; more delicate pieces tend to look better from above, whereas pieces with a bit of height tend to look better from the front.
Earrings
Dangling earrings should hang in the product image. If you want to shoot them straight on, use the same kind of DIY flat jewelry stand as you would for a short necklace and pin the earrings to it, or use fishing line.
Rings
Rings can be shot from most angles, but you should pick an angle and stick to it for all your photos. Note that if your rings have a decorative element at the front like a pattern or gemstone, it should be the focal point of the product shot.
You can use clear glue dots, double-sided tape or Blu-Tack to keep rings in place.
Clothing
The hardest part of shooting clothes is deciding on the style of product image you want. Shooting on a model can help emphasize the style of your product if you find a model who embodies your brand values. However, this will limit your brand to a specific target market, and working with models doesn’t give you as much flexibility as you’ll need to find a mutually convenient time and place.
Shooting on a mannequin will give you a lot more freedom and will keep the focus on the products themselves. When choosing a mannequin, make sure you choose one that is standing ‘straight on’, as your product will look funny when you remove the background if the model is standing with her hip out or her arm on her waist.
If you do shoot on a mannequin, you should consider creating ghost images. They’ll give your products shape and dimension, and give your images a professional touch. To create a ghost image, you need to take a photo of the front of the clothing and a photo of the back inside out, and then digitally stitch them together. Click here for a detailed explanation of the process.
Alternatively, you could shoot your products ‘flat’, either on the floor or on a hanger. This is the easiest and cheapest way to shoot products, but this method makes it harder for the customer to visualize how the product will look when worn.
Make your life easier by having a couple of props on hand. Safety pins are great for keeping little things in place, while clothespins/pegs are great for improving the fit of the product. You should also keep an iron on hand to make your products look clean and wrinkle-free.
Large items (e.g. furniture)
The biggest issue with shooting large products such as furniture is the amount of space they take up. You’re going to need a space that’s at least three times as large as the product, along with ample lighting. A well-lit room is your best option, as direct sunlight will create harsh shadows. As mentioned earlier, buying a sweep will make your life a lot easier, particularly for products this size. You should also get a friend or co-worker to help you to move the heavier and bulkier items around.
If you’re using a DSLR, the trick is to stand far away from the product while zooming in as much as you can so your focal length is at its maximum. Shooting with a smaller focal length when you’re closer to the product may leave you with a slightly distorted product in the resulting photo. To get the entire product in focus, make sure you use a small aperture.
Although it’s best to shoot from the front for most products, furniture can be a little different. The best shot is usually one that captures the front, top and side of the product, so shooting from above and slightly to one side of the product is a good place to start. This angle helps people better visualize the product and gives the product some dimension.
Now it’s up to YOU!
Nail your setup, grab your camera, and give DIY product photography a go. Practice makes perfect, so don’t give up if your product images aren’t perfect the first time you shoot — it’ll take some time to figure out what works best for you given the equipment you have and the products you’re shooting.
Do you have any DIY product photography tips of your own? We’d love to hear them! Leave a comment below and share the knowledge!
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