This merely reinforced my feeling that Amazon is getting too powerful and this is not altogether healthy.  As an online retailer that depends on Amazon for a large proportion of his business, this might seem a bit ungrateful but the concentration of power in one retailer I think is bad for everyone in the long run.

Amazon doesn’t care

Our Amazon.fr account accounted for 10% of our sales and it was turned off, just like that.  The fact that we give Amazon as a whole about £50,000 in fees per year has no bearing on our case and I have been unable to contact anyone who might be able to help.  I know that this an individual case, but overall the experience of selling on Amazon is one dealing with a totally faceless organisation.  With Amazon, it is a case of playing by their rather strict rules or not at all.  They are the Apple of the online retailing world.

Amazon makes retailers pay through the nose

At 15%, Amazon is by far the most expensive marketplace.  For comparison eBay and Play.com work out at about 8%.  You could argue that we don’t have to sell on Amazon, but as Amazon grows its market share it is becoming an increasingly important sales channel for small businesses.  Most small online retailers have I talked to report that Amazon is their least favourite channel, but it is where the sales are.

Amazon has all the data

Amazon’s marketplace was a fantastic idea for Amazon and I suspect has been responsible to a large part of its phenomenal performance of late (I’m too busy shifting baby stuff to look at company reports).  Not only do they expand their catalogue making them a one stop shop for just about everything, but they can use other people’s inventory to discover new stock to buy.

For example, I used to sell the  Safety 1st Swivel Bath Seat for 11.99 by the pallet load on Amazon.  The bottom fell out the market one day when Amazon started selling it at £8.99.  I’d found Amazon a great new product to sell.

Amazon controls the customers

Amazon’s marketplace rules forbid sellers from doing the following:

• Emailing the customer directly (all messages go through Amazon)
• Emailing any sort of link to the customer
• Sending any sort of packing slip which identifies the seller’s website etc

The seller is basically not allowed to develop any sort of direct contact with the customer.

One day we may regret what we have lost…

I can’t blame Amazon for what they do.  That is creative capitalism for you and they are very good at it.  As an organisation they have been very proactive as getting businesses to sell on their marketplace and they control it very tightly.  It is convenient for consumers and offers a good level of service.  However, in letting Amazon get too much market share we will lose some things we may come to miss:

• Businesses as curator.  Offline media retailers do provide a selection of products which they think worthy of attention, saving the customer time and effort.  You can argue about the necessity of these service and whether they are being replaced by social media, but there is something nice about being about to go into a shop and talk to experts.  (My hero) Pete Townsend makes a similar point in his Peel Lecture recently when he referred to iTunes as a digital vampire.  iTunes charges a huge commission and provides little support to up and coming musicians.
• Shops a showrooms.  We’ve all looked at products in the shops and then bought them online.  It is a bit of a tragedy of the commons, we are using a resource without paying for it and one day it won’t be there for us.  We might miss it.  Amazon has been hastening the decline of the offline shop by actively encouraging shoppers to use its app in store to comparison shop

* for those people who care, the ODR is the % of customers who have left negative feedback + customers who have started an A-Z claim

Increase sales without reducing prices

Increasing our international exposure has allowed us to sell more of our current inventory without dropping prices.  The set up cost have also been pretty minimal with the only a few template tweaks required.  Our lovely European interns have helped with the translation.

Easy to set up

Using a product like eSellerPro, the setup of additional marketplaces is pretty trivial, if a bit fiddly on eBay.  For example, eBay categories are different on different countries and so we had to build a lookup table.

…But

Delivery causes multiple headaches

The biggest problem we have had with international sales is with delivery.  Firstly, customers either don’t realise that items are being delivered from abroad or have unrealistic expectations about delivery times.  Secondly, international deliveries seem to be delayed and go missing more often.  It does not really help that our eCommerce platform, eSellerpro only supports that standard character set (WHY OH WHY OH WHY?)

Feedback problems

Anecdotally, it would seem that European buyers are generally less likely to leave feedback, and more likely to leave bad feedback if they feel something went wrong.  Most of the feedback was due to perceived late delivery of items.  Things reached a bit of a crunch point the other day and we had to engage in some rather undignified pleeding to get some feedback removed so as to avoid being kicked off Amazon.fr

Translation requirements

As would be expected, we now get many more queries in European languages.  Google translate is surprisingly useful for deciphering these and we also make us of boiler plate customer service replied using Zendesk.  About 50% of our questions are along the lines of ‘where is my item?‘.

Export your store is an interesting new service which allows eBay sellers to quickly load their inventory into the Amazon marketplace.  Being both an eBay and an Amazon seller I know only too well:

• uploading inventory on multiple platforms is a real pain
• selling on Amazon has a massive potential for sales.  At Hello Baby we make over 50% of our sales through Amazon UK, FR and DE

1. Please explain briefly how your product works and how it benefits customers:
Our service lets you export your eBay store to the Amazon Marketplace in a few clicks. The service is easy to use and helps sellers increase sales and benefit from what the Amazon Marketplace has to offer – reaching a wide variety of customers and markets.

A seller can choose which items he wants to export to Amazon. Our service lets you choose the items and then review and edit item descriptions, key features, product codes, condition, price and quantity with minimum effort.
Once finishing the review, the export is completed automatically, notifying the seller via email when the items are on Amazon.

2. What kind of eBay sellers would most benefit from selling on Amazon?
Any seller wishing to increase his or hers sales will truly benefit from our service. Becoming a Multi-Channel seller with a vast selling span has never been easier.

Our customers are very diverse sellers, selling items ranging from electronics, art, fashion apparel and collector items.
Moreover, we think that selling on both platforms is a prospective strategy because of the stats that show that Amazon and eBay are growing rapidly. Amazon is the largest online shopping site on the internet attracting 20 million visitors a month followed by eBay which attracts 15 Million visitors.

3. From my experience of uploading products to Amazon, most categories require a barcode. Does your software support this?
Yes, our service supports defining item parameters such as ISBN, UPC and EAN codes.

The main product code input is as follows:

• ISBN, UPN, EAN parameters that can be added manually by the seller.
• If the codes above are part of the eBay listing, our system will recognize this and import this data automatically.
• Usage of the “Amazon Product Match” system.

4. What happens if a product being listed is already in the Amazon catalogue? How does your software pick this up?
Continuing, what we stated above, the service has a product matching, automatic process which analyzes if the product is already in the Amazon catalogue. The match is based on item title, description and code (ISBN / UPC / EAN).

5. Which countries are supported?
At the current time, we support the Amazon.com domain. In the near future we will support the UK and other domains.
We see expanding to these domains a very important objective.

6. What are your plans for the future?
We’re planning to expand our service so that a seller’s eBay and Amazon stores \ items are fully synchronized, giving him or her full control over inventory, selling information and enabling them to maximize ones selling opportunities.

Market research agencies collate and publish reports on consumer trends. However, the cost of this data is out of the price range of all but the largest retailers. Fortunately, there are some free or keenly priced sources of data which the resourceful seller can use to inform their purchasing decisions.

eBay Marketplace Data

eBay is in many ways a barometer of consumer demand.  Analysing the products being traded on eBay can give a good indication of popular brands, products and consumer trends.   Anyone with an eBay account has free access to the completed item search which, for a given search, shows a list items which have been bought and sold over the last 2 weeks.

The completed items search is only of limited use as the data is unstructured.  However, eBay makes historical data from its marketplace available through third party provides such as Terapeak.  Using a tool like Terapeak to query past eBay sales data gives not only a filterable list of listing but will also provide statistics such as the average selling price and quality of sold and unsold listing.  If a seller wishes to research a particular item, they can enter the product name into Terapeak and learn how many units have been sold, the average selling price and other interesting data such as the time of sale and the sellers.

Unfortunately, there are limits on the usefulness of eBay data.  Whilst overall eBay is a huge marketplace, demand on eBay can be limited for specific products and therefore not representative of market potential.  There is also no way of ensuring that all the products returned in a search are exactly the same, for example many will be second hand.

Prices on eBay can also be misleading as the transparency of the eBay marketplace and its reputation as a place to secure bargains means that prices are lower on eBay than on the web in general.

Google Search Volume Data

The leading search engine Google has recently made its search volume data (i.e. the number of searches for specific phrases) available through its keyword tool.  The Google keyword tool allows users to see the search volume for the specific keyphrases and also generates volume data for similar keywords.

Search volume data is useful in two ways.  Firstly, the absolute volume of searches shows whether there is an interest in the market for a brand or a product.  Sellers should investigate both search volumes for brand names and individual products to gage the popularity of a brand and it products.

Secondly, by comparing the data for different brands can be used to make relative comparisons between the popularity of products.

Amazon Best Sellers

For each of its sales categories Amazon provides a bestsellers list (e.g. http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/baby-products for baby products), listing the products in order of their sales.  It also provides list of movers and shakers (products rising in popularity), most gifted (product orders as gifts) and most wished for (added to Amazon wish lists).

Whilst this data does not provide data on volume or prices, it does provide inspiration for new products to investigate, perhaps using eBay or Google Data.

Hello Baby has been selling on Amazon through seller central for a few months now and I thought I would share some findings.

Postage

The postage functionality on seller central is limited as postage is set by rule and not on a per item basis.  Postage rules can be created in two ways

• By weight.
• By price band

The problem with these is that that the rules are never perfect.  Postage defined by weight is not linear after about 2kg e.g. the rate for 10kg is not five times the rate for 2kg so this does not work if a seller has heavy items to sell.  Defining postage by weight works a bit better, but does not work for expensive by light items. For example I sell some prams which cost about £50 and weigh 7kg and some changing bags which cost about £50 and weigh about 1kg.  Using the banded rule both have to be charged at the same postage.

Another annoying feature is that there is not way of excluding items from international postage.  If any items is offered to a region, then all items must be offered.

Fees

After eBay’s fee structure change, Amazon fees are looking pretty expensive.  In the (very soon to be) past, due to eBay’s listing fees and frequently low sell through rates, for cheaper items amazon fees tended to be lower but overtake eBay as prices increased.  With eBay all but removing the listing fee, amazon fees are looking pretty high by comparison.

Design

It would be nice to bring some more branding into Amazon so that people know that they are buying from a third party seller and not Amazon.  Some sellers seem to have a customised storefront (e.g. Mums the word) but it is not clear to me how this is created.  It is perhaps a legacy of z-shops and not available to new sellers.

Optimising listings

Selling on Amazon is about getting into the blue buy box on the product profile page.  Getting into this box depends on the following

• Price (including both product price and postage)
• Customer service (i.e. feedback, refund rate and a-z claim rate)