Selling on Amazon: How do you get started?

The entry of Amazon India offers many opportunities for webshops and other retailers. Since the end of January, it has been possible for companies to sign up for sales via amazon. Amazon is already very large in India with millions of users and sellers. Amazon’s dominance is expected to continue to grow. And a lot of companies in India hold their hearts too. But there are also opportunities. Do you want to get started selling your products on Amazon in India? We help you get started with our step-by-step plan.

How do you start selling on Amazon.in?

The idea of ​​offering your products through Amazon sounds super cool because you can reach a lot of people. You would think it is easy to set up: upload products on Amazon and sell! Unfortunately, it is a bit more complicated.

We explain in 5 steps how you can start selling on Amazon India.

1. Create an account
2. Upload products
3. Calculate costs
4. Add enhanced content
5. Perform a retail readiness check

We go through these steps in this article so that you can get started!

1.Create an account

Both webshops and individual sellers can register with Amazon to sell something. First, check if you can sell it! Amazon has started in the India with the launch of no fewer than 24 product categories. You can think of dog food to car parts. It is important that the products you sell fall under one of these 24 categories. Second-hand sellers are not yet allowed to sell on Amazon.in.

If you meet these requirements, you create a seller account, also called a Seller account. There are two types of accounts.

• Basic account [Free]: This account is suitable if you sell less than 40 items per month.
• Professional seller account: If you are going to sell more than 40 items per month, a professional account is recommended. This account costs 2,825 Rs per month.

Certain specific product categories require approval and you are required to create a professional account. This applies to foodstuffs, jewelry, shoes and accessories, and watches.

2 Upload products

If you have chosen one of these two accounts, you must of course upload your products from your webshop. There are two options for this, namely:

Option 1: Excel template

You can upload your products via an Excel template. You can easily generate this template yourself in your Amazon Seller Central account by following the following steps:

1. When you are logged in, click the Stock tab and choose Add product via upload.
2. In the tab Download a stock file you can generate a template. Download it.
3. Also, export all your products from your webshop in an Excel file.
4. Now you can easily transfer the data from your webshop Excel file to the Excel template from Amazon. There are extensive and clear instructions in the Amazon template, read these carefully when filling out!
5. Once everything is correct in the template, you can check the file and upload it to Amazon.

We recommend that you first have the file checked by Amazon (there is an option for this) and then upload it permanently. This way you prevent errors in your upload file.

This option contains quite a few manual actions, which makes it time-consuming. Fortunately, there is also another way to put your products on Amazon.

Option 2: API Link

If you have a webshop, you can choose to transfer your products to Amazon via an API link. This is easy with the new API link of EffectConnect for webshops of Lightspeed, Shopify, Magento, Woocommerce, and Prestashop. How are you doing this?

• You enter your Merchant ID in the EffectConnect environment and link your Amazon account with your webshop.
• Once paired, you can enable syncs to send the price and stock to Amazon.

That saves a lot of work with Excel files! This option is only recommended if you have an existing webshop. Keep in mind that you will have to spend at least 8,542 Rs per month to link your webshop via EffectConnect. If you already use another channel to link other marketplaces, you could ask if they also have an Amazon.in link.

Whichever option you choose, once your products are uploaded, they will be assigned an Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). This is Amazon’s SKU code that identifies all products in the Amazon catalog. Keep it handy for the next step!

Calculate costs

You probably expected that selling via Amazon also entails costs. These costs differ in a monthly fee for your account and costs per sold product.

Regardless of whether you sell something or not, the monthly fee costs are passed on to you.

How do you know where you stand? The commission you have to pay to Amazon depends on the way of selling. You can choose from Fulfillment by Amazon or to sell everything yourself. We will explain both options.

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)

With Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), you ship your products to Amazon fulfillment centers. Packing, packaging, shipping, and customer service for these products are provided by Amazon. Amazon has full control over your stock that you have sent.

At Fulfillment, by Amazon, you pay “fulfillment costs” as a commission. To calculate this you use the FBA calculator. Enter the ASIN of your product and the calculator will calculate the commission for you.

Sell ​​yourself

If you sell yourself, you are responsible for logistics, returns, and customer service. You keep control and manage your own stock. As a commission, you pay a referral fee for each product sold. This fee can be 7-15% of the product price.

You can do the costs for selling yourself in three ways:

1. Manually calculate costs per product based on the above percentages
2. Use the FBA calculator to calculate the commission for self-sales. This is also displayed in the calculator.
3. Easily see your referral fee per product in Amazon Seller Central. There you will see exactly the referral fee per product in the Preview of costs column in your stock overview.

Whichever option you choose, it will take a while to calculate the costs, but then you also have something. Do you already have a webshop? Then my advice is to start the settlement yourself first. Wait a moment to see how successfully you can sell through Amazon and then make the decision whether you will switch to FBA.

4 Add enhanced content

Once your products have been uploaded, it is important to add extra information about your products such as descriptions, tables, etc. This type of content can inform consumers well about the product they are considering ordering. Amazon calls this “enhanced content.” Here you have five templates where you can add extra content such as extra images and text on the detail pages of your product. Use this content to tell more about your brand and the story behind your brand.

Free tip: Make sure this content is always up-to-date otherwise it will no longer be relevant information. Amazon likes relevance and a well-designed product page.

5 Perform a retail readiness check

When are you ready to start selling on Amazon? Then do the retail readiness check. This is a checklist, designed by Amazon, with which you can check whether your product page is set up correctly.

Retail Readiness Checklist

Using the Retail Readiness checklist, you can find out whether you are ready to start selling. The following requirements are addressed.

1. Product title, description, and images
2. Customer reviews
3. Star ratings
4. Stock
5. Buy Box
6. Enhanced content

Product images are retail ready as:

• The image corresponds to the product
• Images are clear and professional
• Use additional images to demonstrate important product features.
• If you have added videos, they must also meet the above requirements.

Customer ratings and star ratings are retail ready if:

• Each ASIN has a star rating of 3.5 stars or more
• Each ASIN has a minimum of 15 customer ratings

Product title and descriptions are retail ready as:

• Product is accurately described
• Important descriptive functions such as size, color, and size of packages are used

Enhanced content is retail ready if:

• Images and texts have been added to the product description
• Value proposition and brand story are emphasized
• Additional information has been added.

Furthermore, the stock is retail-ready if products are in stock.

If you meet all the requirements of the checklist, you are retail-ready and ready to sell on Amazon!

Completely lost or do you want to know more?

We can well imagine that selling via Amazon India sounds attractive but also takes up a lot of time and energy. These are quite big steps and it takes quite a bit of work and time. Fortunately, Maatwerk Online Amazon employs certified advertising experts. We are happy to take the workaround Amazon Marketing off your hands! Together we get more customers from the internet.

Also Read:  4 Ways to Get Product Reviews on Amazon