Mistake #1 – Violating the Rules
When joining Amazon, sellers agree to the guidelines and regulations set out by Amazon. Therefore, a failure to abide by their policies will ultimately result in the potential for your account to be suspended.
Some of the main violations are surrounding:
Product quality issues - Selling counterfeit, prohibited, or cheap items, can all violate Amazon’s policies. Amazon places major importance on consumer confidence, and therefore not giving customers high-quality products is a big concern – which Amazon will not tolerate.
Shipping Issues - Amazon prides themselves on ensuring products are delivered to customers in a timely fashion – arriving when they say they would arrive by. Therefore, late shipments or cancelled orders are not favourable.
Poor customer reviews – Do not get caught buying reviews – just don’t. Amazon will most likely terminate your account if they see this type of behaviour. In addition to this, if a seller receives multiple bad reviews, Amazon will typically suspend the product.
Violating listing guidelines – if a seller does not list their products in line with Amazon’s rules, I think you can guess what they will do.
Mistake #2 – Directing Shoppers to Your Own Website
Unsurprisingly, Amazon doesn’t like competition! If you try and leverage the site for your own, personal promotional purposes (e.g. including the website URL on your Amazon detail page), Amazon might decrease your opportunities to market your brand.
Mistake #3 – Not using Amazon PPC
Amazon allows sellers to access their built-in pay-per-click (PPC) advertisement software
PPC can also help with:
· Driving traffic to main sale events (e.g., Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Prime Day, etc)
· Launching new products
· Increasing brand awareness
Mistake #4 – Forgetting to Add Sales Tax to the Product Price
When uploading your listings, don’t forget to include sales tax in the price of your products. Otherwise, you’ll end up paying for it.
To easily avoid this issue arising, go to ‘Tax Settings’ in Seller Central once you have successfully set up your account, and follow the guidelines.
Mistake #5 – Unsuitable Product Listings
Optimizing product listings aids in maximising conversion rates, increase profitability, and refining search results.
Amazon’s search algorithm’s (A9) focus is to connect buyers and sellers and is much simpler than web-based SEO algorithms.
To fulfil A9, sellers must focus on two main ideas: Relevance and Sales Velocity.
Relevance – keywords are needed for ranking. You need to include them on the page, but also:
· Within the product listing title
· In backend keywords
· Within the product description
Performance – within a product page, you must focus on including:
· Product pricing
· Images of the product
· Video of the product
· Customer reviews
Mistake #6 – Poor Customer Service
Coming under the important performance metric of ‘buyer-seller contract response time’ (CRT), it is important that sellers respond to customer inquiries promptly – ideally within 24-hours of the query being made.
It is also important for sellers to read and react to customer feedback. This displays not only good customer service, but also allows them to improve upon their goods and services.
Mistake #7 – Over-ordering Stock
Preparing in case of a demand surge is a smart idea, however, having too much and not selling it can cause problems – a lot of them.
Cash flow issues could arise due to money being ‘tied-up’ in stock. If a seller’s products are Fulfilled by Amazon, there may be additional fees if stock is resident in their warehouse for a year or more.
Avoid these mistakes to ensure your hard work pays off!
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