Let’s face it, Amazon’s Seller Central platform for sellers does not exactly have a reputation of being user friendly and intuitive. In fact, it has a little bit of a bad rep.
Like it or loathe it, it is the one thing you are going to have to get used to if you’re a serious FBA seller. For all of it’s faults, it is the key to unlocking huge business potential on the world’s largest ecommerce platform. Providing you also find the right products to sell, of course ;).
Nothing worth having comes without any frustrations, right!?
This article is going to give you a tip top list of things you need to know to make the most of Amazon Seller Central. We’re going to run through loads of insightful stuff, including:
Let’s just get to it, shall we?
First things first, you only need one Seller Central account to sell in a single marketplace. Even if you sell numerous products and have a few different brands, you can do all of this within your single account.
The only time you would need to set up numerous Seller Central accounts is if you plan to sell in multiple continents/regions. Amazon has unified accounts for North America (Canada, US and Mexico) and Europe (UK, Germany, Italy, France and Spain). At the time of this writing, it's our understanding you need additional individual accounts for the other marketplaces like India or Japan.
If you plan to sell fewer than 40 items per month then you can pay a small fee per sale. This is not going to be suitable for entrepreneurial ecommerce business owners.
You will need to set up a Professional account, with a subscription fee of $39.99 per month. Here’s a useful Amazon help article about setting up accounts.
Here’s a handy checklist of everything you need to get set up:
Once this is done, you will also need to fill out your seller profile. This is customer facing information:
Have you heard the news yet? Amazon has introduced two-step authentication!
Essentially, this means that rather than just entering your password, you can add an additional layer of security to your account by having to enter a unique security code.
This second step could be one of the following:
Tip: Especially for people who travel a lot, I find Authy is better as it will store all of your apps if your phone is lost, stolen or replaced. Using Google’s app may end up getting you locked out of your accounts, which isn't fun at all!
Security is of utmost importance for any business. We have strict security rules in place at Jungle Scout that the whole team adheres to. It takes a few extra seconds out of your day but prevents severe ramifications if your account got hacked.
It’s not worth thinking about what could happen if someone got into your seller central account with malicious intent could do! 😱
Whilst we are here having “the security talk” it’s worth mentioning that you should also generate secure passwords for everything business related. Make your passwords at least 12 characters long, and ensure they include random numbers, letters and special characters.
Using a password like “Mydogsname1234” won’t cut it.
You could try a free password vault service like LastPass to generate and store your passwords securely.
A little shout out for those sellers who are expanding, outsourcing, and looking at hiring employees or VA’s to help out with tasks.
You can grant access to your account for other people pretty easily without the need to contact Amazon using their invitation model.
You can add, edit, revoke or change user rights at any time. So if you are thinking of spreading some of your workload, this is a simple way to get someone set up!
One of the main reasons to get familiar with Seller Central is that it holds all of your important business metrics. From your sales reports to PPC reports, if you are running any Amazon pay-per-click campaigns to leverage more sales.
What do you think your most important business metrics are? The number of times people view your product? How many times someone purchases your product? Your conversion rate?
I would argue that you need to keep a balanced overview of all of these metrics. It’s crucial to understand how each of them can give you signals about how your products are performing, and how you can improve and scale. However, most of all it’s important to consider all of these metrics against the most important piece of data of all, your profits!
You can go into your reports in Seller Central from the main menu under ‘Reports’.
In here you will find reports for your payments, business reports (sales reports), fulfillment, advertising (PPC) and returns. Getting familiar with the data these reports is very important. You can download any of these reports as a CSV and manipulate your data in any way you want.
In an ideal world, you would be running reports and diving into the data frequently. But doing it this way requires a lot of work, analysis and number crunching.
To save time and headaches, you could try Fetcher, and get your own Profit Analytics dashboard set up in a few minutes. This allows you to access all of your important finance stats at a glance, with guaranteed accuracy.
This could save you hours in excel each month, by giving you a product breakdown, an overview of your revenue, and costs including PPC, promos, fees and more.
Speaking of conversion rate, check out this really useful article on the Splitly blog that explains exactly what Amazon conversion rate is, how it works and it’s limitations. There are some really useful tips in there about how you can take steps to increase your conversion rate by a small percentage point, which could make a huge impact on your bottom line.
Making the most of the product information fields that form your product listings seems obvious. But when was the last time you checked your product listing was up to scratch?
When it comes to our product listings, we are stuck with the fields that Amazon provides us with. It’s really important that we make the most of these, and fill in as much information as possible, in an optimized way.
Here are some tips for things you can check right now that could help boost your listing straight away:
I covered this very topic and how to carry out effective keyword research in session #11 of our Million Dollar Case Study, catch the recap here!
You can hear an audible sigh of frustration the world over when an Amazon seller runs into difficulties with the Seller Central platform. Just as the platform itself gets a bad reputation sometimes, so does Amazon's seller support.
The good news is, there is an infinitely useful wealth of help documents waiting for you. Just click the small help button in the top right-hand corner:
Forums like Reddit often have useful information so a quick Google search is also advisable to resolve a whole host of problems that you might encounter. The likelihood is that someone else has already run into a similar issue.
If the problem you are having is technical or maybe you are seeing some bugs then the best option is to contact seller support. All truth be told, this can be a useful resource if you speak to the right person. If you go to the help desk as explained above, you can access the contact options as well as review any open ‘case logs', which keeps all of your support tickets handy.
In order to get the contact options, you will have to first select your problem and the tool will try to offer you a relevant article. You can usually then click on a link to say your problem is not listed and then you will get some contact options:
For some issues, you may also get a live chat option in addition to phone and email.
Be as patient and descriptive about your problem as possible. If you feel you are not getting anywhere with a support agent, try again later!
Additionally, you can join our popular FBA Competitive Edge Facebook group. There is a huge community of like-minded sellers in there with a sharing is caring mentality! 🦄
You have customers, and sometimes, those customers have issues. As an Amazon FBA seller you could let Amazon handle your returns and customer support. But you will get far better results if you are involved in your own support. In any case, wouldn't you want to know what your customers are saying about your product, or if there are any issues that you could resolve or improve?
Monitoring your returns regularly is very important because it can signal any red flags with a product. You can access returns reports in the reports section:
Also, you can also check any returns on a daily or weekly basis in the ‘Orders' tab, under ‘Manage returns':
Tip: I mentioned Fetcher earlier, which is also a very useful tool to keep track of all of your returns metrics
Other than the obvious steps you can take in providing a high-quality product and ensuring your listing describes the product accurately, the best way to improve Amazon customer support (and reduce returns), is with email campaigns. Jump Send is a fantastic investment to automate your customer support by setting up email campaigns to be sent out to all of your customers.
With these email campaigns you can leverage so much, for example:
There's lots more information about utilizing email campaigns for top-notch Amazon customer success over at the Jump Send blog.
That's my top tips for making the most out of Seller Central and ensuring that you kick your business off to a flying start. Let us know in the comments below if these tips have helped you along the way, or if you have any other useful ideas to share with the community!