Small Business Resources, Business Advice and Forms from AllBusiness.com
 

The Amazon Seller Marketplace

Friday, February 24 2006

Do you sell products on the web as your home-based business? Have you thought about using the Amazon Marketplace? The Amazon Marketplace is an association with Amazon.Com where you can sell your stuff right alongside Amazon.

If you enter a search in Amazon, you'll usually see a link on the results page called "Used and New available from:" with the lowest price alongside. If you click that link, you'll see Amazon Marketplace seller offerings. The Amazon Marketplace seller program has several advantages.

Exposure and Built-in Traffic- You can use Amazon's built-in traffic to expose your products and your business to buyers. Amazon, by the way, has something along the lines of 50 million registered users.

Complete Mini-Store - The Amazon Marketplace handles all the storefront components for you - including a payment system. This means you don't need to use PayPal, a merchant account, or any other external payment system.

Of course, it also has some distinct disadvantages.

Price Driven - The listings are vertically arranged by price (lowest at the top of the list). This tends to generate little 'price wars' which, for various reasons, don't work as a long term business strategy.

Final Value Fees - They don't call them 'final value fees' but they're similar. It's the chunk that Amazon takes out of each item you sell. These fees can range from 6% all the way up to 15% depending on the category. These high fees can be somewhat justified by the fact that Amazon is acting as the payment processor. For example, if you had to use Paypal, you would have to pay about 3% for each item sold anyway. Still, this is a fee you'll have to take into account when pricing your products on their marketplace.

The Amazon.Com seller marketplace can give your home-based business an extra sales channel from which you can sell your products. To get more information about their programs, here is the link where your can request information.

Latest Comments in  posts

Hi--My name is Andy Bruce and I have spent an inordinate amount of time (and my own money) developing a Web site devoted to allowing smaller sellers (50 to 5000 items) reprice and analyze their online listings for free. My wife is an Amazon seller and was shelling out $40 a month to a certain not-so-hot repricing tool. As a programmer that offended my sense of amour propre and so I built a repricing engine for her. Enter tooyen.com--I have personally built this free online Amazon seller repricing service. Developed in the spirit of true Open Source software, I don't ask for names or passwords or any of that garbage. It's all about making it as easy for small sellers to move their online merchandise as large sellers, using a search engine philosophy. You don't pay to search for an item on Google, why should anyone pay just to analyze and reprice their Amazon listings? Anyway, the site is functional now and will be fully live within a month. It's all about love and Letting the Monkey Do It (Tooyen herself). I hope you check it out. Thanks for your blog! Andy Bruce www.tooyen.com ...
By: Andy Bruce on 3/5/06 at 12:00 AM
Found out today my 4 figure payment from Amazon which I thought was in my checking account, against which I am writing checks, is being withheld for 45 days, from 5/17, so that they can evaluate seller performance, in the interest of the customer. Interesting that this period ends on the last day of the fiscal year (What a coincidence!!) -Amazon can show lot of cash on hand, and 45 days being 1/8 of a year, at say, 4%, on many millions of dollars, they get a 1/2% bump of free money. And I thought stock price manipulation was illegal----isn't it? Hmmm. I cannot pay my bills now, or purchase inventory, but guess what? I have a pile of orders to ship and not a dime to pay the postman the rate itself, let alone delivery confirmation and Staples supplies they expect us to eat. So after 1/2 hour of discussion with Amazon people who refused to give their names, refused to involve the correct people, and read from shitty script without any semblance of caring or LOGIC, I immediately de-listed over 100 CDs and DVDs, raised the price on everything about 40% across the board, and posted a yard sale for them, in order to get up the cash to mail this stuff. And all this in response to nothing-no allegations, no inquiries, no charge, no ability to confront witnesses, and sentence has already been imposed! Meanwhile, Amazon does not get their cut on 60 items a week, (or 100 per week if I had some seed money) the customer no longer has access to best prices on the web, USPS and Staples lose business, and oh yeah, I have to sell my clothes at a rummage sale to pay postage. Anything left, God willing, I may be able to eat. Forget about bills-they get paid when I get paid. If I get paid. Not your problem, I know. I do have a favor to ask however. Stockholders get 1/2% bump free money on last day of fiscal year, big sellers can raise prices again, and MPL here gets an Amazon Enema.
By: Michael on 6/1/06 at 12:00 PM
http://www.pricepicture.com tracks music CDs on the Amazon Marketplace and has a free Music Bargains Report that is updated daily.
By: Robert Sherrod on 6/12/08 at 2:28 PM
You must sign-in or sign-up to comment on this post.