Why Should You Use Amazon To Sell Your Products Online?
Online retailers seem to have a love hate relationship with Amazon; either embracing it as a sales tool or fearing it as a profit suck. I see many young online entrepreneurs fear Amazon for cutting into profit margins, and that attitude is fine if you have other solid sales channels in place. If you don’t; the truth is, Amazon can be a very helpful tool for fledgling sellers to build brand awareness and revenue.
Trust is hugely important in online sales and the majority of new online retailer have established NONE. Equally important is Distribution; for which most newbies have no established channels. These two aspects of creating sales alone are enough to kill a fledgling business before it even gets off the ground.
Amazon has fast become one of the best known venues for online retail across the world, and the statistics show proof that many retailers see an increase of nearly 50% in sales when they begin selling through this sales channel. For some retailers, using Amazon means forgoing their own website sales, but it also means an increase in traffic to your site as consumers begin recognizing your brand and taking an interest in your company.
As with any retail outlet of this kind, Amazon has pros and cons. On the one hand, it can certainly mean an increase in online sales, but it also puts you in direct competition with other brands within your market, making it more important than ever before to use keywords in your titles and product overview. This means taking some serious consideration regarding Amazon before making any decisions.
So the question stands: why should I use Amazon to sell my products online?
More Buyers Means More Money
As mentioned above, utilizing Amazon.com has shown an increase in many retailers’ sales by up to 50%, but this isn’t the only reason to use this outlet to sell your goods. Unlike your own company site, Amazon sees an influx of approximately ninety million shoppers each and every month. This means almost ninety million different individuals are performing searches, choosing products, and checking out successfully.
It has been suggested that Amazon brings out roughly eighty thousand dollars in sales every minute, making them a prime location to list products and build a brand following. This certainly isn’t to say that your products will bring in sales every minute of the day, but it definitely opens doors that would otherwise be closed on a single company website.
Consumers Trust Amazon
Amazon has already built a strong brand, and by connecting your product or business to this brand, consumers can see that you have a trusted product as well. Amazon allows customers to rank products with ratings and comments, which means that other consumers can see what people think about the item that you have up for sale before they buy it. This is an attractive feature to the home shopper, who isn’t getting the ability to hold and see their product up close the way that they might in a shopping mall or brick and mortar retailer.
Gaining the trust of the consumer population can be tricky, and if you’re a new business just getting your foot in the door, Amazon can make it easy to create a following and market your product without all of the hassle of doing it by yourself.
Less Hassle With Ecommerce
Ecommerce software is pretty easy to come by these days, but it isn’t always cheap or easy to use. By working through Amazon, you have access to predesigned software that is tried and tested. You know that it works, and the setup is something that consumers are familiar with and have used before. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t have your own online retail abilities through your website, but if you haven’t gotten to that point yet, or you’re unsure about your ecommerce options, Amazon makes it easy to sidestep all of that at first and focus on sales and marketing.
Amazon also offers you the ability as the retailer to go through the consumer process, if you haven’t already. This gives you a rarely appointed behind the scenes look at the ecommerce system you will be using from the perspective of the shopper. You can go in, load up a cart and checkout the same way that somebody would if he or she was buying your product.
Integration Ability
If you do have an ecommerce platform set up and ready to go, and you’re not new to the business that you are dedicating yourself to, then Amazon can still help increase sales and simplify shopping with automated listings through the API. You can integrate your sales so that updated inventory and descriptions already in use on your site are all available on Amazon as well. This means less hassle, but twice the availability to consumers across the world.
Amazon helps open the doors to retailers who only ship to one country, don’t yet have an ecommerce software setup on their website, and need a little extra help getting their products recognized and trusted by the public. Whether you are a small privately owned business, a highly recognizable company with an already trusted product, or an entrepreneur looking to get your head in the game, Amazon can help.
