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Newbie Help – Simple and Effective Tips for Selling on Amazon FBA

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Amazon Newbie Help - TaughtToProfit.com

You already know that Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer. What you may not know is that Amazon is a large online marketplace that connects buyers to sellers. Over 33 percent of the items sold on Amazon are sold by third-party sellers, and not Amazon directly.

What Is Amazon FBA?

FBA means Fulfillment by Amazon. When you register as a seller on Amazon FBA, you will be required to send your entire merchandise to the nearest Amazon Fulfillment Center(s). Your items go live on Amazon and if a customer buys them then Amazon ships the items to your customer, handles the customer service, and handles any returns and/or refunds.

Many sellers on Amazon have experienced a significant surge in sales since switching to Amazon FBA. It is estimated that over 65% of buyers on Amazon will not buy a merchant-fulfilled product, and will pay a higher price to get it from Amazon (or an Amazon FBA seller). With many millions of buyers using Amazon Prime, many would rather pay more for the great experience, free Prime shipping, and free returns that Amazon offers Prime members. While fees on FBA are higher than a merchant fulfilled service (where the seller handles the shipping, customer support and other responsibilities), the potential for sales and profit is a lot higher.

Amazon completely handles the shipping of your items when they sell via FBA. When you join Amazon FBA, you will have more time left for product research and sourcing, and other essential tasks, and don’t have to worry about the shipping.

Simple and Effective Tips for Selling on Amazon FBA

Tip #1: Register as a professional seller on Amazon, not as an individual seller – As a professional seller, you will not be charged the extra 99¢ per sale, in addition to the 15% sales commission, like individual sellers are. So the more you sell, the more you will save on fees. As a professional seller you can create listings for products that are not sold on Amazon and create product bundles as well.

Tip #2: You should have a reasonable start-up capital – It takes money to make money on Amazon. You will need a little start-up capital to get started. You will need this money for the supplies and inventory. Do not let this deter you since many have started with a paltry $50-100 and built up to over $100,000 in sales in their first year!

Tip #3: Persist through the hard times – It is not going to be easy in the beginning. You will probably lose money initially, or make a small profit at best. The learning curve can be steep on Amazon. The profits will come with experience and a lot of hard work. Never give up and you will find success!

Tip #4: Know the rules – Amazon has lots of rules and regulations and it is vitally important that you read up their Terms of Service. Make a note of Amazon’s policies related to your activities on the site. Do not just presume that your way is the way Amazon would want something done. Amazon’s Condition Guidelines, for example, are very different than most sellers would rate items, especially if they are coming from a background selling on eBay. Read Ryan’s article titled “Amazon Condition Guidelines – Most Sellers Get This Wrong” for more information.

Tip #5: Be responsive to customers – Be sure to answer any queries from customers within 24 hours, otherwise that failure to respond promptly will count as a demerit against your account. Set up your account so that all questions are sent to your email, and check it regularly.

Tip #6: Be accurate with the product description – You cannot afford to make any mistakes with the product description. If there are any discrepancies, this can lead to negative feedback, returns and possibly the suspension or removal of your Amazon selling privileges.

Tip #7: Bundle multiple packs – It is very hard to compete on Amazon with single-item sales alone. So to set yourself apart from other sellers by selling your items as bundles and multi-packs. While it is a little more work, this will pay off in the long run.

Tip #7: Use large images and stick to Amazon’s image guidelines – Amazon requires all images to be a minimum of 1006 pixels. There are other rules to be followed with the images. For example, the product should be displayed on a plain white background, so consider a service like FotoFuze to make your images perfect.

Tip #8: Ask for product reviews – If you have listed your own unique product, multi-pack, or bundle and a buyer leaves a feedback saying that they like the product, send them an email to thank them for the feedback and request them to leave a review for the product. Positive reviews can boost your sales by at least 40% on Amazon.

Tip #9: Do your best to remove negative feedback – If you get a negative or neutral feedback, email the customer immediately and offer a sincere apology. Request them to remove the feedback and explain how and why the mistake was made. In most cases, customers remove a negative if convinced about your sincerity. Also consider that you may be able to get the feedback removed automatically upon requesting it be removed from Amazon, read more about that here. If you are serious about success then consider a service to help you get 1000% more positive feedback left for you than average like the one discussed here.

Finally…

Maintain the highest standards for your inventory, how you rate the condition of the items you ship to Amazon FBA, and how you treat your customer. Amazon wants the customer to have the best possible experience, and if anything about how you are selling would contribute to a poor user experience then Amazon could suspend or permanently remove your selling privileges. Be professional, treat your customer right, and Amazon will reward you with great success!

OAXray – The Best Online Sourcing Tool Available

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OAXray - The Best Online Arbitrage Sourcing Tool - TaughtToProfit.com

OAXray is an online arbitrage sourcing tool that literally saves you countless hours of time that would be spent retrieving data for each item on a site. OAXray is a extension that does hours of online sourcing work in a single click.

OAXray Supports Over 50 Sites - TaughtToProfit.com
OAXray Supports Over 50 Sites – TaughtToProfit.com

If you are on any of the over 50 sites OAXray supports and want to research all 50 items on a particular page, how do you do this? The manual way of researching those 50 items would take you probably two hours at least to get sales rank, calculate ROI, see what the lowest FBA seller is selling for, compare with numerous other sites for the lowest price, and much more. If you have done any online arbitrage at all then you know that two hours is probably a low estimate of how long it would take to get all that information about 50 items. I just tested it right now, and for 59 items on a page at Walmart.com I clicked the OAXray button and about 30 seconds later I had all that information and more for those 59 items.

In a real world scenario if none of the items on that page had a good return on investment, then you would have just wasted over 2 hours of your life and have no items with any profit potential to show for it. With OAXray you would have spent 30 seconds and determined nothing was worth buying, and then you could move on to the next page of items to research. It is also worth noting that you can have OAXray researching multiple pages at one time, so you do not have to wait for the results in order to move on to the next page to research. It will open a new tab for each page you are scanning with OAXray.

OAXray scans the page you are on, and then finds a treasure trove of information that enables you in a glance to see what items are worth buying for resale and what items should be skipped. It has features like a Buy List, where you can add each item you find with one click to the list, and even export that list into an CSV file. Below is an example of the results it shows:

OAXray Example Results - TaughtToProfit.com
OAXray Example Results – TaughtToProfit.com

Keep in mind that this is only part of the data it pulled, and this is from a single click and about 30 seconds of time. You can see how in a glance you would be able to tell what to buy or not buy and then you can move on to researching the next page. You can research thousands of items in the time it would take you to research dozens manually. This is a huge benefit for people who do online arbitrage or who are considering it. The biggest reason I hear from people about why they do not do online arbitrage is they do not find anything worth buying and it takes too long to find profitable items. With OAXray you can find items that are profitable in a matter of minutes, and also filter out a lot of items that are not going to be profitable.

If you are interested in OAXray then please go to them through our link below. We have partnered with OAXray to get you a free trial that is double the normal free trial time. You will find out real quickly how OAXray can immediately revolutionize your online arbitrage experience and increase your productivity by 1000’s of percent.

OAXray - Try It For Free Today!
OAXray – Try It For Free Today!

Feedback Genius – A Must Have For Amazon Sellers!

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Feedback Genius - Automated Amazon Feedback System - TaughtToProfit.com

If you have sold on eBay and started selling on Amazon one of the major differences you will notice in how buyers interact with sellers is in feedback. Very few people leave feedback on Amazon for sellers, and even fewer will leave feedback when they buy from a seller via Fulfillment By Amazon. If you sell on FBA exclusively your feedback is even less, because people buying via FBA do not even think about feedback because they consider it buying from Amazon directly.

For me personally, I experience about 45% of my sales generating a feedback on eBay, while on Amazon it was around 1% of my sales resulted in a feedback being left (and this was mainly via Merchant Fulfillment, the amount of feedback left from FBA sales was even less)! This is a huge difference, and it can dramatically affect sales if you happen to get a negative feedback. People who are unhappy are more likely to leave feedback in general, and with already low percentages of sales ending up with feedback being left on Amazon, any negative or neutral feedback can drop your total feedback percentage dramatically. (Keep in mind that on Amazon Negative AND Neutral feedback both count against your feedback percentage. The feedback percentage on Amazon is the total positive feedback received minus any negative or neutral feedback. This is different from eBay where the percentage is based on the total feedback received minus negative feedback, and neutral feedback is exactly that, and is neutral in regards to your feedback percentage.)

I have tried in the past to send each customer an email asking if their product was satisfactory and if there was anything I could do to ensure they were completely satisfied. This was time-consuming, but it did generate more feedback than normal. I needed an automated system to manage feedback on Amazon, and the solution I found was Feedback Genius.

Feedback Genius is a system that completely automates feedback requests to your buyer. It will also send you a notification if you received a negative feedback, so you can be sure to get it removed immediately as I mentioned in a previous article found by clicking here. Many sellers do not keep up with their feedback and may not realize they have a negative lowering their feedback percentage and harming their sale; so having a system immediately email you a notification when you get a negative feedback can make you more money with increased sales. Sellers must understand that some buyers will skip buying from you if you have problems in your feedback. When you know the negative feedback exists then you can work to get it removed as quickly as possible, and this will minimize the potential damage the negative feedback can do to your income. I want to also point out that another extremely useful automated system called AMZSuite and it will automatically get negative feedback removed, among many other things like reimbursements. It is worth adding to your toolkit.

In the past I was manually sending customers feedback requests asking for them to leave feedback, but with Feedback Genius you can do the same thing while actually providing the customer a helpful service. You can set Feedback Genius to send the customer an email notifying them when their shipment is out for delivery and gently asking for feedback if they are satisfied. This helps those customers who may not be actively tracking the shipment and this type of feedback request is not as annoying as a seller cold-contacting the customer for the main purpose of requesting feedback. Not only is this a nice email to send your customer, but it will dramatically increase the amount of feedback you receive. My feedback improved by 1,000% in the first 2 months using Feedback Genius!

If you are a new seller or established seller, Feedback Genius will be very beneficial to your profits. You need to generate more feedback on Amazon as it instills trust in you as a seller, and this could be the difference between you getting the sale or your competitor getting the sale. While you could have an employee manage your feedback, or use other software that is available, the simple reality is that in this business efficiency is very important and Feedback Genius efficiently manages your feedback, builds it in an easy way, and keeps you notified if there is any negative feedback received. For those of you selling your own products via Private Labeling, it also provides assistance for building reviews and dealing with negative reviews for your products. Feedback Genius is a must-have service for the Amazon seller and I highly recommend it.

Feedback Genius - 30 Day Trial

Cleer Platinum – Making Online Arbitrage Sourcing Easier

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Cleer Platinum is a Chrome browser extension that gives you quick access to a variety of sites and sourcing opportunities online. It places buttons to access information for the particular item the button is under on the site you are sourcing from. For example, the below image shows the buttons it creates on Walmart’s site.

Cleer Platinum Walmart - TaughtToProfit.com

The “E.C.” button is eBay completed listings for that item. This is valuable even if you do not sell on eBay, because it can show you the demand for a given item. The “E” button is for an eBay search for current listings for that item. The “A” button is for Amazon’s listing(s) for that item. For most of the popular sites you will be sourcing from online Cleer Platinum will add the buttons under each item to make research easy with the click of a button. What if Cleer Platinum does not add buttons to a rare site you are sourcing from? They made it easy with the ability to search for an item on ANY site using Cleer Platinum and highlighting the item and choosing which site you want to research the item on.

Cleer Platinum Manual Researching - TaughtToProfit.com
Cleer Platinum Manual Researching – TaughtToProfit.com

With Cleer Platinum creating buttons on most sites or giving you the feature to highlight and research from any site, it covers all your online arbitrage research needs.

Cleer Platinum Amazon - TaughtToProfit.com

You can see on Amazon it has numerous buttons for each item, like CamelCamelCamel, Keepa, Alibaba, AliExpress, Shopping.com, Google, Ebay Completed Listings, Ebay Current Listings, and you can even search all of those sites with one click by clicking “All.”

If you source products or research them online, you can immediately see how Cleer Platinum would save you a lot of time. I use it regularly, and they are constantly adding features to it. There is only a one time fee, so you do not have to worry about endless monthly fees. If you want to watch a video showing it in action then please go to: https://goo.gl/zm3N1u

Here is a little description from their web site:

“Cleer Platinum:

> Works for resellers, book sellers, even private labelers
> Answers ‘can I make a profit on this item?’ with as little as 1 click
> Has a lifetime 100% money-back guarantee, no questions asked, no tricks
>Now includes BONUS tools and guides (over $50 worth)”

The Lazy Person Works Smarter, Not Harder

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Work Smarter Not Harder? TaughtToProfit.com

“Work smarter, not harder.”

-Lazy person’s motivational saying

The first time I heard this saying something about it bothered me. When I pondered it the reason why it bothered me became readily apparent. This saying is often an excuse for laziness and it also encourages a belief that working less hours in a day is somehow the desired goal in life. Why should we desire to not work harder? Why should we desire to only work smarter? Why not do both by working smarter AND harder? Less work is only desirable to many because they do not enjoy their work, in which case a change in occupation could be more important than a catch-phrase of “work smarter, not harder.”

We should be striving to make our work more efficient and productive, but this does not mean that we should strive to not work as hard. Few people are working as hard as they possibly can in the first place, and to limit their output even more by trying to “work smarter, not harder,” will only decrease productivity and negatively impact their lives. It has the opposite effect of what it is intended to have. Even if you did manage to get the same work done in less time, if that work makes you miserable then you have only delayed the suffering slightly.

I do not believe that most people even object to hard work like they think they do. They object to an erroneous concept of hard work that is not really hard work. The reality is that most of what gets classified as “hard work” is inefficient and unproductive work. So we see people digging a trench all day with shovels and that looks like hard work, but the real problem is that we innately know that what they are doing is woefully inefficient. A simple rental of a back hoe could get the job done in minutes, while it takes them a whole day of “hard work.”

Our God-given reason causes us to have a natural objection to such inefficient work. It is not that most people truly do not want to work hard, rather they do not want to work inefficiently. They want to do work that they know is achieving the maximum productivity. To do work, day in and day out, that you know is inefficient or unproductive is not enjoyable and can be taxing on the soul. People then mistakenly see being lazy as enjoyable over hard work, but this is only because the work they are doing is so unpleasant, boring, and unproductive, or there is some other defect in the work.

Hard work does not have to be inefficient, nor does it have to be unenjoyable. Most people are at their best and happiest in work when they feel like they are getting things done each day. They will find that they have more stamina for their work when they are seeing fruit from their labor. This state of being productive is where people can thrive, and this comes easily when you work smarter AND harder. We should not be trying to find ways to get out of hard work, rather we should be finding ways to increase productivity, improve efficiency, and get more done in the same time each day.