How To Sell Jewelry on Amazon
Sell Jewelry on Amazon
Jewelry is one of the most lucrative niches for retailers. With luxury profit margins, retailers do not need to sell a high quantity of items to have a healthy bottom line. Amazon entered the jewelry market many years ago and has established itself as one of the ecommerce leaders in jewelry.
With millions of customers buying jewelry products from Amazon, sellers have a huge opportunity to build great jewelry businesses. Although the opportunity is lucrative, sellers on Amazon have to overcome several hurdles to start selling jewelry on Amazon. Below are some of the requirements needed to start selling jewelry on Amazon.
Requirements to sell jewelry on Amazon:
Similar to ungating, Amazon has requirements to sell in the jewelry category. The jewelry category is one of the hardest categories to be eligible to sell in. Some of the requirements to sell jewelry on Amazon include:
Professional selling account: This is pretty straightforward, you’ll need a professional selling account to sell in jewelry. This is a baseline requirement to be eligible to sell in most categories that need ungating on Amazon.
Good account health: Amazon requires all sellers who want to sell jewelry on Amazon to have good account health. This is also a baseline requirement because if your account is not in good health, you’ll likely get your Amazon seller account suspended. The metrics you need to meet include:
- Late shipment rate of 4% or less
- Cancel rate of 2.5% or less
- order-defect rate of 1% or less
Working knowledge of jewelry: When Amazon sellers choose to pursue jewelry products, they need to make sure they have some working knowledge of jewelry. If you were selling in any other category on Amazon, you’d have some sort of understanding whether a product would sell well or not.
Besides traditional jewelry products like gold and silver rings, necklaces, etc., a lot of jewelry is trend-based. You will likely need to freshen up on your jewelry knowledge to succeed in the jewelry category. Reading some popular jewelry blogs or watching videos on sellers in the jewelry category can be a great way to teach you how to sell jewelry on Amazon.
Product quality requirements:
Authentic products: This is self-explanatory, but you will need to have authentic products to sell jewelry on Amazon. This means you’ll need to have invoices of your products to show you’re getting products from a trusted supplier. Selling inauthentic jewelry products will lead to getting your account banned and possibly additional legal issues.
No used/pre-owned/vintage products: Amazon takes the quality of their jewelry products extremely seriously. Since there’s so many issues that can arise from selling used jewelry products, Amazon forbids sellers from listing them in the first place. Amazon strictly prohibits sellers from selling any used, vintage or pre-owned jewelry products.
Inspection/quality control measures: Amazon requires sellers to have quality control measures to ensure products are of good quality before customers receive it. Sellers should inspect all of their products for validity and legitimacy. This policy by Amazon is to protect sellers.
If sellers send it in a faulty product, Amazon won’t accept excuses and they will likely shut down your seller account. Having some sort of way to double-check the quality of products is important to protect your Amazon seller account.
Quality Assurance Standards:
Amazon has extremely strict quality assurance standards for jewelry products. Failure to meet these quality standards may result in sellers losing their privileges to sell in the jewelry category. Amazon has been known to make product purchases themselves to ensure quality from sellers. Some of the quality assurance standard set by Amazon include:
Applicable metal quality marks: The U.S. and Canada have requirements for jewelry retailers to disclose the metal quality of certain metals like gold, silver, platinum, etc. Metals have to fall within a certain tolerance mark for them to be considering legitimate. For example, the tolerance is +/- 0.003 of the stamped fineness for gold metals. You need to double-check which metals you are selling and if they meet the quality marks.
Measurements: The measurements listed on the product detail page may be 1/4 size over or 1/8 size under. There’s difference tolerances for different kinds of products (ex. bracelets, rings, etc.). You need to make sure your products are within the right measurements of the sizes you listed. If the product measurements vary greatly, you’ll end up with a lot of returns.
You can check out the full list of quality assurance standards from Amazon here.
Listing differences unique to the jewelry category:
Selling jewelry products on Amazon is different from selling in other categories. Amazon has several requirements from jewelry sellers that are listing-specific. Some of the requirements include:
Jewelry style format: All jewelry products on Amazon have to follow the jewelry style guide. This is the basic template that all products must follow or Amazon will take down the listing. The jewelry style guide follows many of the same format as normal Amazon listings. Some of the jewelry style format requirements include:
- Title Style
- Product specifications
- Displaying variations
- Exhibiting the brand of the product
Provide all attributes:
It’s important to provide all the attributes necessary to your jewelry product in the listing. Without these attributes the customer won’t have a clear description of the product. It also opens up liability in case of a dispute between a customer and you in the future. The attributes you need to include in your listing include:
- Metal weight: The weight of the product must be clearly listed. The weight is generally in grams and you need to make sure it’s accurate prior to putting it on your listing
- Metal type: The metal type refers to the actual metal you are selling. This would be gold, silver, etc. The metal type is crucial to mention because it greatly affects the cost of a product
- Metal stamp: Most jewelry items are stamped with information that reflects the purity level of the metal. Stamps are often on the inside band of a jewelry product. Any stamps on your product must be labeled on the listing.
Measurements: For any jewelry product, you must specify all measurements. Customers buying jewelry on Amazon don’t have the luxury of seeing and feeling a product in real-life. They rely on product photos and descriptions to get the most accurate assessment of the product. Measurements on the listing must be precise. If you are adding photos, it’s a good idea to show scale. This will give the customer a good idea how big the product is in real life.
Final thoughts:
This is a very brief overview of what it will take a new seller to enter the jewelry category. You will likely need to spend some time learning about more specifics about the jewelry category prior to selling your first product. I’d recommend trying to sell a few low-priced jewelry items to get a sense of how it works.
By selling your first jewelry product, you will learn all the listing requirements, shipping requirements and any additional work you’ll need to do for Amazon. Here’s a link to a helpful video about an experienced jewelry seller on Amazon. It covers a lot of aspects of the day to day aspects of selling jewelry on Amazon and more.
