Tips To Sell Well on Amazon by 4 Successful Amazon Sellers
When it comes to selling your products on Amazon, there’s clearly a lot of money to be made. But prospective sellers face stiff competition. There are over 9.7 million Amazon market sellers worldwide. So, how can you stand out amongst the crowd—and most importantly, how can you be successful?
We gathered together an esteemed panel of successful Amazon sellers to get to the heart of the matter:
- Hai Mag, CEO and co-founder of Eva Guru.
- Muhammad Siddique, an Amazon influencer, best-selling author, and host of Growth Hacking Secrets.
- Zain Shah, an Amazon YouTube influencer.
- Ryan Williams, a Fulfilment By Amazon (FBA) influencer.
Our panellists discussed everything—from the art of finding hot-selling products and how to optimise your ads, to the importance of influencer marketing, saving money, and scaling your business. If you’re an Amazon seller in the UK, you’ll surely want to listen to this. Scroll to the bottom of the article to watch the video.
By the way, if you’re fast-tracking business growth, there’s a thousand things you have to do daily. Focus on your growth and leave the routine work of accounting to our experienced accountants in the UK.
How Do You Find Hot-selling Products?
Don’t find the customers for your products—find the products for your customers. Very few people understand this, yet it’s a crucial concept.
Zain gave the example of an iPhone charging cable. The out-of-the-box charging cable is 1 metre in length. By analysing consumer demands, he spotted a gap in the market.
Now, his top selling product on Amazon is a 3-metre-long charging cable.
“It’s not like I’m Isaac Newton,” he said. “I haven’t invented a new product. I’ve just taken an existing product and been creative with it.”
It’s only by rigorously analysing the latest trends that you can find the right products to sell. Hai pointed out that lockdown restrictions are slowly ending, and that this is itself an important trend for an Amazon marketer to consider.
People are thinking about going on vacation—they want to get out of the house, even if that means just going to their favourite local restaurant. After a year of lockdown restrictions forcing them to sit at home in their sweatpants and dirty t-shirts, they’re ready to look their best.
“Look at the data,” said Hai, “you can see that the stores are selling beauty products—there’s been a huge increase in people buying hair dryers and face masks. That’s a gap in the market to plug.”
4 Ways To Optimise Your Ads
The best way to grow is to take calculated risks—not blind risks—and diversify your calculated risk-taking.
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a standard tool used by virtually all Amazon sellers. With this in mind, our panellists shared some top tips to optimising your ads going forward.
- Know your audience. What are people searching for?
- Study the keywords. Download a report from your PPC campaign.
- Trial and error. Experiment: take out words and target new areas.
- Consider using streaming ads. These are cost-effective and target your audience.
As Ryan said, “It’s important to keep things simple. Know where your money is going and whether it’s paying dividends.”
Why Influencer Marketing Is Essential To Boosting Your Product Sales
Build relationships with everybody you need to know in your industry. Establishing good working relationships is the key to making money and keeping your brand on top.”- Muhammad Siddique
“Build relationships with everybody you need to know in your industry. Establishing good working relationships is the key to making money and keeping your brand on top.”- Muhammad Siddique, Amazon influencer, best-selling author, and host of Growth Hacking Secrets.
While PPC ads are great, they’re not the be-all and end-all of online advertising—so we soon moved on to discussing the importance of influencer marketing. Hai pointed out that marketing through online influencers is actually more cost-effective than traditional modes of advertising.
“It’s much cheaper pouring a couple thousand dollars into the influencer network than spending thirty thousand dollars on PPC—with PPC you need the right photo, the right price, the right video, the right content, and the right feedback.”
Muhammad—a well-known influencer marketing guru—said that establishing relationships with the right people is key to building sales velocity.
Discussing the role of influencers, he spoke of capturing the ‘experience economy’. Influencers don’t just share a product; they share a lifestyle experience. He said, “Their followers will likely buy a product even though they don’t need it! Why? Because they love the influencer who’s just reviewed the product.”
He recommended building relationships with micro-influencers, people with over 1,000 followers. “Influencers provide the brand, not you.” In Muhammad’s experience, you’ll get more sales while spending less money than with traditional marketing channels.
Now, Amazon is catching up. Zain pointed out that the company is building a streaming system—a platform where influencers can review and recommend products on a livestream. “This is the future,” he said. “The connection between the influencer and the consumer is a lot stronger than any kind of advertising.”
4 Must-Have Tools For Amazon Sellers
You don’t need a degree to be an Amazon seller. You don’t need to be intelligent. You just need to treat it like a business, and learn how to make the system work for you.
The panellists were in firm agreement about the best software to use:
- Helium 10 (product research, inventory management, fraud protection)
- Jungle Scout (product research, market intelligence)
- Eva Guru (product reimbursements, reimbursements, price management)
- A specialist eCommerce accounting software (like East river)
How To Save Money While Boosting Productivity
“If there’s a tool out there that can save you time, and only costs a fraction of labour costs per month, then use that tool,” says Zain Shah.
Automating your manual processes is not only a way of saving money—it’s a way of maximising profits. Hai, who developed the Eva Platform alongside fellow Amazon seller Barry Guze, is a passionate believer in the power of automation.
He gave the example of automating processes like stock replenishment.
Stock replenishment can be done on our platform in 30 seconds, but if it’s done manually, it could take 4 or 5 days of work.
Zain went one step further, claiming that you don’t make money by merely selling a product—you make money by saving money on repetitive manual tasks that could be easily automated. “Then you can spend time on the truly important stuff.”
Osome is another example. By automating your tax returns, you can save yourself mind-numbing hours of needless work. On average, East river frees up 40 hours of admin work every month for their clients.
Yes, you read that right—you needn’t get your eyes tested.
How To Grow And Scale Your Business
“You don’t need a degree to be an Amazon seller. You don’t need to be intelligent. You just need to treat it like a business, and learn how to make the system work for you.” Ryan Williams
Naturally, the conversation turned to Brexit. Selling to countries in the EU used to be as simple as clicking a button—now it has become a far more complicated process. There are different steps to getting registered in different European countries and directly shipping to them.
However, Ryan wasn’t too disheartened. “If you’re based in the UK, I’d still recommend expanding into Europe first—it’s easier than trying to sell in the US.” In the end, he said, it all depends on the product that you’re trying to sell.
Zane agreed. “It’s subjective, and depends on the product—but if you’re in the UK, sell to a European country.”
He described the importance of capturing growing markets. Examples include the Netherlands and Saudi Arabia. In these countries, there is little competition. Zane added, “I look into the market first and see whether it’s growing or not.”
Hai agreed. But he rightly pointed out that the United States is the largest Amazon market in the world—if you’re based in the UK, he would recommend trying to expand there.
To round it off, Muhammad had this to say: “If you want to dominate, know the local laws, study the data, and find a local influencer in that country. By combining this with streaming ads, you will do very well.”
What Are You Waiting For?
Thanks to our incredible panellists for joining us. It was an incredibly informative, engaging, and fascinating discussion.
If you’re a prospective Amazon seller, remember that East river can help you throughout every stage of building your dream business. We will register your e-commerce business, automate tax returns, and be on hand at all times to answer any of your accounting questions on e-commerce businesses. Most importantly, we’ll give you more time to do what you do best: sell like a pro.
Plus, if you’re an East river client, you’ll receive $3,000 of Amazon Web Service (AWS) credits. You can use these for FBA or any Amazon Web Services (AWS) program.
It’s time to get started.
