As Amazon expands, so are the prospects to start an e-commerce business by selling on the platform.
Consumers migrated from in-store purchasing to online shopping in 2021, resulting in a massive increase in eCommerce. While the year continued, 34% of customers said that their online spending rose even as their total expenditure decreased. By the end of 2020, 74 percent of customers expected the bulk of their shopping to be done online, up from 69 percent only a few months before.
These trends suggest that eCommerce businesses will have a lot of opportunities in 2021. However, if you want to take advantage of Amazon’s massive opportunity, you must first complete the Amazon seller registration process.
We’ll lead you through the new procedure to ensure that your account is validated (and that you have an opportunity to establish a successful Amazon company).
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What is the best way to start an Amazon business?
What’s impressive about Amazon is that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to starting a business there. Instead, there are various ways to prosper on the platform, from the business model you adopt to the things you offer.
Regardless of the business model and product you pick, the procedures to get up and operate on Amazon are the same.
1. Determine which business model you wish to implement first.
• Private Label:
The practice of a store rebranding/renaming a product already manufactured under their brand or label is known as private labeling.
• Wholesale:
Wholesaling is the process of buying low-cost or discounted items in bulk and selling them individually in a retail marketplace.
• Arbitrage (online and retail):
Arbitrage is a way of locating low-cost or discounted items in brick-and-mortar retail establishments (or on e-commerce sites) to resale them online.
• Dropshipping:
Dropshipping is a business concept in which an Amazon seller does not store their product inventory and instead sends their customers’ purchases to the manufacturer or supplier directly.
• Handmade:
Amazon’s handmade sellers are individuals who make their things to sell on the Amazon marketplace (“by hand”). Jewelry, accessories, home décor, and other items are examples.
2. Once you’ve decided on a company plan, you’ll need to choose a fulfillment method.
• Amazon FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon);
• Alternatively, merchant fulfillment (FBM).
Both strategies have advantages and disadvantages, so consider them carefully to see which will work best for your company.
3. Next, think about the product(s) you’ll be selling.
You may be ready to launch if you have a product (say, you make your handcrafted things), but you still need to go through this stage to ensure that your product will have enough demand on Amazon.
Use a service like Jungle Scout to help you locate things to offer that are in great demand yet have little competition.
4. Apply to become an Amazon seller once you’ve discovered a product you like.
In the following part, we’ll go through how to finish the Amazon seller registration procedure.
5. After Amazon has validated your details and accepted your application, begin sourcing your goods (s)
If you want to sell private labels, you may use Jungle Scout’s Supplier Database or Alibaba to find a manufacturer to make your goods.
6. Last but not least, make your product listing.
And after you’ve created your listing, you can start increasing your Amazon sales!
How to Begin Selling on Amazon
You have a couple of different self-service choices for signing up:
To begin selling, go to services.amazon.com and select one of the “Start selling” buttons.
Go to Sellercentral.amazon.com and select “Register today” or “Selling on Amazon” from the drop-down menu (both take you to services.amazon.com).
Click “Sell on Amazon” under the “Make Money with Us” section at the bottom of the Amazon.com home page.
After that, you must determine whether you wish to be a Professional Seller or an Individual Seller. Individual sellers often have a modest quantity of goods that they want to sell and then be done with selling. Still, professional sellers typically aim to list more than a few handfuls of products and hope to be frequent sellers in the future. If you’re a college student looking to sell some used textbooks at the end of the semester, or if you’re cleaning out your cabinets and come across some old presents you don’t want, being an Individual Seller makes more sense than selling them locally.
You’ll Need This Information to Streamline Your Amazon Seller Registration.
While the registration process is simple and can be done in about an hour, you should have a few pieces of information in advance to make the process go more smoothly. While the requirements for joining up on Amazon vary by nation, let’s focus on registering on Amazon.com, the US marketplace. While you may pause the registration process and resume it later, it’s much easier to gather the following five pieces of information before beginning the registration process:
Your legal company name, address, and phone number.
This email address can be used to access the corporate account. You should already have this email address set up since you will begin getting essential emails from Amazon nearly immediately.
A credit card that may be used anywhere in the world and has a legitimate billing address. (Amazon will deactivate your registration if the credit card number is invalid.)
A phone number where you may be reached (so have your phone nearby during registration).
Your tax identification number (either your Social Security number or your firm’s Federal Tax ID number). The registration procedure will take a brief detour to a “1099-K Tax Document Interview,” where your tax information will be submitted and confirmed to submit your tax identity information. The IRS requires Amazon to gather your tax ID information to notify the IRS of any potentially taxable revenues you generate via your Amazon account. Although you are solely responsible for paying your taxes, Amazon is obligated to record that you were a revenue-generating Amazon seller during the previous tax year.
You’re an Amazon seller once you’ve filled out all of this information. Amazon will almost instantly push you to begin selling your items since once you add even a single product, you are no longer a “Registered, Not Launched” vendor but a “Launched” merchant. If you keep your status as a “Registered, Not Launched” merchant, Amazon will send you any emails asking you to add things. While Amazon appreciates the $39.99 monthly charge it receives from you, if you begin selling items, Amazon is likely to collect considerably more money from you through referral payments.
