10 Things You Should Know Prior To Selling on Amazon

The opportunity to sell on Amazon

Selling on Amazon is one of the best opportunities for people who are looking to start a business or side hustle. Amazon sellers make up more than half of the sales on Amazon’s marketplace. New Amazon sellers (1-2 years experience) may be taking home up to $42,000/year in profit. More than half of Amazon sellers have reached $100,000 in lifetime sales and 22% of them have reached $1,000,000 in sales.

Although these numbers can be promising, there are several things new sellers should know about Amazon prior to starting selling. Although I can keep giving out statistics on how great Amazon is for sellers, I’m going to cover the aspects of Amazon that are directly correlated to your success. These 10 things will help you avoid common pitfalls and maximize the chances of success on Amazon.

1. Thoroughly Complete Your Seller Application

There’s no point of getting excited about selling on Amazon if you cannot get approved to sell. Amazon has a lot more stringent process for new sellers in comparison to other marketplaces. Amazon requires a lot of personal and business information prior to any new account getting approved.

It’s important to provide the right information in the format that Amazon requested to avoid a rejected application. Some of the information Amazon may request includes phone number, address, banking information and tax information. You must do this correctly or Amazon will reject your application. If Amazon rejects your application, it makes it a lot more difficult to get approved. Do the seller application thoroughly and correctly to avoid a rejected application. To learn more about how to complete your seller application, check out this blog.

2. Follow Amazon’s guidelines

Amazon has many guidelines for sellers to follow in applications, shipping, communicating with customers and more. There are so many ways that an Amazon seller account can get shut down. It’s important to follow all of Amazon’s guidelines to avoid getting your account suspended.

The customers on Amazon are Amazon’s customers not yours. Amazon will let you know that quickly with suspending your account if you violate any of their guidelines. This is one of the cons of selling on Amazon. There’s a lot of things you need to avoid to keep your Amazon account. Make sure you follow all the guidelines that Amazon lays out in order to keep your selling privileges on Amazon.

3. Focus on key actions that grow your business

Everyone knows the feeling you get when you set out a big goal and start working on it. There are so many ways sellers waste their time on things that don’t make money for their Amazon business. The single most important factor for success when selling on Amazon is focus. You need to be laser focused on what exactly makes you money. For most sellers it’s finding good selling products and shipping products to Amazon. If you spend an hour that is not related to finding good products or shipping products to Amazon, your business is not growing.

I know that there are many distractions, but you can literally learn everything you need to know as you go. The most important thing is that you start and keep repeatedly doing actions that make sales. Anything outside of that is wasting your time.

4. You need to invest time and money

This is not a popular opinion, but yes you need to invest time and money to make your Amazon business grow. You may hear about gurus on beaches doing Amazon from their laptops, but that definitely will not work for you as an Amazon seller. No one starts off on Amazon as an expert, it takes time and money to learn what works. The more time and money you have at your disposal, the higher your chance will be to succeed on Amazon.

You can always start small, but as your business grows you will need more time and money to reach the scale you want. For business strategies like private label, you will need a lot of money and time before your product succeeds. To learn more about private label on Amazon, check out this blog here.

5. Separate personal and business activities

This isn’t necessarily a must, but it will make your life much easier. The last thing you want is your Amazon sales eaten up by some subscription you forgot to cancel or an automatic payment. When you’re first adding your banking info on your Amazon account, you need to choose the right one. This is because it will be very hard to change later on. Getting a separate account for your personal spending is crucial to see how your business is actually doing. Keeping personal and business checking accounts is almost a necessity once your Amazon business reaches a certain scale.