How to Use BigCommerce to Sell on Amazon

Want to make the most of your new BigCommerce store? Learn how to use BigCommerce to sell on Amazon to drive sales from the most powerful sales channel online.

Image source: https://unsplash.com/photos/rymh7EZPqRs

If you own a BigCommerce store and want to optimize your business to match consumer behavior (and reach more customers), you need to start selling on Amazon.

Now, you might ask: what’s so great about the platform? Well, there are a few things that make Amazon a must-do sales channel for almost any brand. 

First and foremost, Amazon gets mindboggling amounts of traffic. According to Similarweb, it’s the 4th most-visited website in the US (preceded only by Google, YouTube, and Facebook). 

Secondly, it’s people’s go-to place when they want to shop. A recent report from JungleScout revealed that 63% of people start their product searches on the platform. 

And, of course, don’t forget that Amazon is a revenue-generating machine, with people having spent a whopping $121.23 billion on the platform in Q2 of 2022 alone.

So, if you’re ready to grow your business and you want to use BigCommerce to sell on Amazon, here’s how you can do it.

Technical Setup

In order to start using BigCommerce to sell on Amazon, there are a few things you first need to do:

1. Set up an Amazon Seller account with a Professional Selling plan.
2. Upload at least one product image, which will be called your store’s “main” image.
3. If you’re selling items that haven’t been sold via Amazon before, you will have to provide a unique ID (MPN) for every one of them.
4. Select the “Enable Track Inventory” option and adjust stock levels.
5. Set your degault currency to USD.
6. Enable shipping to the United States.
7. Know that there are 11 product categories you can sell on Amazon.

From here, setting up new Amazon listings will only take a few clicks (Products > View > Storefront > Create Listing). This will create an Amazon product listing identical to the one in your BigCommerce store, with the option to do some customization.

As for orders, they’ll appear on your Orders screen, but remember that billing will be handled by Amazon — all you’ll get is a shipping address and an automatically generated anonymous email address.

Strategies for Boosting Amazon Sales Success

Once you’ve done the basics and listed your products on Amazon, it’s time to go a few steps further and take action to help your products stand out. After all, with more than 12 million unique items and 6.3 million sellers, saying it’s a competitive sales channel would be an understatement.

Now, there are multiple ways you can ensure your listings win the Buy Box, attract your audience, and, most importantly, sell.

Optimize Listings

The first thing you must do when trying to stand out on Amazon is customize your listings to ensure they attract shoppers’ attention. Here’s why.

On your ecommerce website, customers (usually) have a pretty clear idea of what it is you’re selling. 

For instance, brands like LARQ specialize in self-cleaning water bottles and pitchers, which is why they don’t need to include the search term “self-cleaning water bottle” in every one of their product titles. But on Amazon, there are thousands of different water bottles available for purchase. So, the additional descriptor “self-cleaning” makes for an essential piece of information when attempting to attract customers.

In addition to creating custom product titles that help with Amazon SEO, it’s also important to do the same with your product descriptions. Include relevant keywords, make listing descriptions easy to read and understand (with bullet points and formatting), and make sure you choose attention-grabbing feature images to prevent your products from being looked over in favor of more attractive listings.

Boost Brand Trust and Authority

Despite its many advantages, Amazon has one big drawback: it’s a sales channel filled with fake reviews. In fact, the problem is so widespread that the organization has 12k employees whose job is to spot fake reviews who removed more than 200 million instances of fraudulent feedback in 2020 alone.

So what does this mean for merchants looking to start selling on Amazon? It simply shows that they must take action to position their brands as trustworthy and authoritative, which can be done in a couple of simple steps.

The first way of boosting brand authority and trust on Amazon is by looking for ways to optimize listings with reliability in mind. This can mean anything — from including trust badges in product listings (as done by Levoit below) to pointing out relevant returns and refund policies that will allow consumers to shop with greater peace of mind.

The second strategy for promoting brand authority is to make sure your Amazon storefront looks equally attractive to your BigCommerce website. Sure, the platform may not provide a whole lot of customization options. Nonetheless, taking the time to populate the homepage with attractive visuals, like the ones on the Garmin store, will help you present your brand in the best possible light and prevent it from coming off as sloppy, unreliable, or straight-out scammy-looking.

Employ PPC Advertising

Finally, as you integrate your BigCommerce store with Amazon and work to widen your brand’s online presence, don’t forget that, in some cases, simply having the best products isn’t enough to grab your audience’s attention.

Just as you’d have to do when trying to reach consumers through Google, selling on Amazon might also necessitate PPC advertising — at least from time to time. This won’t only allow you to have your products suggested to your audience. It might also allow you to boost conversions, which will, in turn, positively affect your Amazon store’s performance.

Of course, when investing in Amazon PPC, you need to know what you’re doing. Relying on automatic targetting or bidding on relevant keywords is likely to get your ads displayed to the right people. But truth be told, it’s also a great way to lose money. So, if you’re not entirely sure what you’re supposed to do to ensure success and a high ROI, the better option would be to leave the PPC management to an agency that will guarantee next-level results.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, using BigCommerce to sell on Amazon is relatively easy, thanks to the great integration of the two platforms. 

However, remember that successful Amazon sales aren’t as easy as listing your BigCommerce product in an as-is state. To attract customers and generate sales, you will have to do a bit more than that. That may mean additional work, but rest assured that the results will be worth the effort.