Building your business — how Amazon gives you the tools to help your business thrive

As any successful business owner will tell you, behind a great customer experience is a lot of hard work. Whether online, offline, or multiple channels, small and medium business owners need to think about a range of different things including inventory management, shipping, customer experience, marketing, and so much more.

This is where selling on Amazon’s stores can help. Globally, almost 60 per cent of the sales of physical products sold in the Amazon store (by value) are now made by third party sellers, and Amazon Australia invests in a vast array of tools and services to ease the load for businesses selling on its store – opening up the possibility to reach millions of customers across the country and globally.

Since January 2019, Amazon Australia has launched more than 100 new features, tools and services to help sellers in Australia succeed. No matter what aspect of your online business you need help with, there’s a tool or program to help you figure it out.

"We aim to take the heavy lifting off the table for our sellers so that they can focus on their brand and customers,” explains Amazon Australia’s Head of Fulfilment By Amazon and Marketplace Recruitment and Development, Luke Latham. “By providing tools to manage the major pillars of your online business, coupled with a great on-site user experience, it’s possible for sellers to achieve great success with little investment.”

Seller Central — the hub of tools and education — is Amazon’s one stop shop for managing everything you need to help your business succeed on the store. Everything from how to register your store on Amazon, to listing your products, and shipping orders, can be facilitated through the portal. This means that reports, insights s, daily sales, product listings and more, are all just a click away.

“There is an enormous amount of guidance, information, seller-specific insights and data, and step-by-step instructions in Seller Central that ensures sellers can learn how to best build their business and utilise the broad range of tools and features we provide,” Luke says. “We have dedicated teams whose jobs it is to help businesses make the best of their selling experience and succeed on Amazon’s stores.”

Put your product in front of millions of customers

Thanks to Amazon’s product listing tools, it’s never been easier to create and manage listings. Sellers can create and access their listing information any time - including product details, images, videos and other unique attributes, to assist customers in making an informed purchasing decision - and track their sales analytics to determine how their inventory is performing.

Not only do these product listing tools help sellers in terms of getting their product online, they also provide invaluable inventory insights, so sellers can spend less time trying to figure out the nitty gritty of their brand’s performance. “Sellers who are going online for the first time want to understand what their customers are buying,” Luke shares. “We have a number of tools that help them understand how productive their inventory is and how best to reach and build engagement with customers over time.”

What’s even better is that Amazon offers API tools to help sellers expand beyond the Amazon Australia store and sell through multiple different channels. “Our sellers are not selling through Amazon exclusively,” Luke explains. “Through our Selling Partner API, sellers can leverage a number of integration services from third-parties that allow them to replicate and manage their catalogue across multiple stores.”

Logistics sorted for you 

Perhaps a favourite program of sellers, Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA), is an optional Amazon service for a fee that allows sellers to step back from the complicated fulfilment process. Sellers who sign up to the FBA service simply ship inventory to Amazon's fulfilment centre, and Amazon takes care of the rest. Amazon will store, pick, pack, and ship the products and manage customer service for you.

Rather than sourcing storage, hiring inventory management team, and negotiating shipping rates yourself, you can access Amazon’s advanced logistics network and reputation to ensure you get the best fulfilment services possible. You also have full control of your inventory and can gain insight into the sell-through rate of your individual products through your Inventory Age report in Seller Central.

“Far more than just a shipping service, it’s an end-to-end inventory management, operations, supply chain and last-mile fulfilment service which is pretty unique – and your FBA products are automatically eligible for the Prime badge, which enables free and fast shipping on eligible items for Prime members,” says Luke. “Under the FBA program, Amazon manages customer service and returns, ensuring sellers can focus on their core business while providing customers with reliable, convenient and fast deliveries”.

With FBA, sellers can save time and scale their business to help reach more customers. “It really saved my life by helping to dramatically reduce costs on postage, storage, inventory management, and much more,” says Amazon Australia seller — and owner of Sydney-based business, Bella Luna — Jo Yating.

Amazon also offers Multi-Channel Fulfillment for a fee, which allows sellers to use Amazon’s logistic expertise to fulfil orders made on any of the sellers’ ecommerce channels. “Splitting inventory can be painful for sellers – with Multi-Channel Fulfillment, sellers can pool all of their inventory into Amazon fulfilment centres and leverage the Amazon network to deliver orders from any of their sales channels – including their own website,” says Luke.

Build your brand

To help brand owner sellers manage their branding, Amazon has several brand services to assist in protecting and growing the reputation of your business. For example, by enrolling in the Brand Registry, brand owner sellers can get access to tools designed to protect their brand while improving the customer experience. In addition, Amazon Brand Analytics allows eligible brand owner sellers to track key performance statistics such as customer engagement, search frequency rank, top clicked product listings, and the conversion rates of products. Based on this information, brand owner sellers can make informed selection decisions based on demand from existing customers.

Helping to boost sales and visibility, Amazon has major sales events on Prime Day and Black Friday/Cyber Monday, regular sales events throughout the year, as well as a number of marketing initiatives to ensure sellers’ products get in front of the right customers. Sellers with products that are enrolled in the FBA program are able to participate in these events

As a seller, Jo explains that big sales events like Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Prime Day have helped boost her sales while requiring very little additional effort from her: “It’s amazing that all the marketing is done for me — all I do is sit back and watch the sales roll in!”

Learn more and get involved

Want to take your business to the next level? Reserve your spot now for Amazon Australia’s Virtual Seller Summit 2021, taking place October 12th-14th.

The free annual event is designed to teach you how to establish, grow and expand your business on Amazon Australia and beyond. Featuring over 35 video presentations from over 25 Amazonians, and some of our great partners, you’ll leave feeling confident and motivated to take your next big step.

To learn more about selling with Amazon and to understand all of the details involved in the tools described please visit https://sell.amazon.com.au/sell.