Can you really make a lot of money on Amazon?
Part 3
Suggestions for Amazon Sellers Arif Rajan gcspvt.com
Here are three suggestions to help you sell more easily and profitably on Amazon, especially if you’re new to the platform.
Setup of Taxes:
Set up your state tax collection options on Amazon as soon as you open your seller account.
Many people believe that Amazon automatically collects sales tax on purchases made through the Amazon marketplace, regardless of the state in where the item was purchased. Amazon now exclusively handles sales tax transactions on behalf of merchants in Alabama, Connecticut, Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and Washington as a “Marketplace facilitator.”
Unless you’re in one of the eight states for which Amazon acts as a Marketplace facilitator to collect and remit sales taxes for you, it’s up to each seller to specify which state they want Amazon to collect a tax from and to manage the remittance of the taxes to the appropriate tax jurisdictions across the country.
Online retailers have access to a variety of tax remittance services. Taxjar.com, Avalara.com, Taxify.com, and Vertexsmb.com are four common possibilities. Always keep in mind that the seller is ultimately responsible for paying sales taxes to each state.
A vendor may elect not to collect state sales tax and instead absorb it as a cost of doing business and factor it into the profit margin of each product. The responsibility of remitting sales tax to states, on the other hand, is not discretionary.
Profitability:
Too many merchants are more concerned with top-line sales figures than with bottom-line profitability. Typically, sellers will state things like “I want to sell $1 million a year on Amazon” or “If only I could sell $10 million a year on Amazon,” neglecting the expenses that will take up practically all of that money.
Being a big seller on Amazon has little long-term benefits, however Amazon has begun to recognise this and now offers larger sellers a dedicated Amazon account executive to assist them navigate the red tape and optimise their business.
For many sellers, it’s far better to focus on bottom-line growth, account for all expenditures up front, and work from a knowledge of your Amazon business’s genuine profit level. Sellers that try to reduce costs and increase their bottom-line earnings quicker than their top-line sales have a better chance of succeeding.
This usually necessitates an SKU-level understanding of product profitability, which includes overhead and some indirect costs in the profit calculation for each SKU.
It isn’t as simple as average everything and focusing solely on your overall sales and margins. Consider each SKU you sell on Amazon as having its own profit and loss statement, market forces, and amount and forms of competition.
Third-party software vendors have addressed this issue to some extent, allowing sellers to track costs by SKU and add in overhead, shipping, and other associated product costs to generate net profits by product as well as an overall profit and loss statement.
Listing Optimization:
You can improve the listing quality of your catalogue by utilising some of the data sources provided through Amazon’s Seller Central dashboard. Many sellers consider the process of creating and optimising product listings to be a one-time event, and they move on to other operational concerns.
The first thing you should do is look at the Sponsored Product Ad campaign reports on Amazon. You can see the specific phrases that were linked to Amazon customers buying your products in the reports from the Sponsored Product ad campaigns, which is a major potential.
You’ll discover certain keywords leading to sales that you never expected to be effective if you examine these reports on a regular basis (especially for automatic targeting campaigns).
Lifting those terms into the generic keywords provided to the backend of your product listings will boost their SEO discoverability, or the likelihood that they will appear in Amazon’s search results when a customer searches for them. This approach should be repeated every three months or so to ensure that customers’ behaviour in response to specific terms hasn’t altered.
If you’re an Amazon fan, be aware of the potential problems that can arise while selling on the marketplace. Amazon, like eBay and other online selling platforms, isn’t for everyone. It’s simply a matter of figuring out which is a better fit for your company.
