[rperissi]

Hi all... Does anyone also sell on Amazon? Not their ecommerce (prostores) solution, but rather the ability to be a seller that customers can purchase through amazon. I think the fee is 39.99 monthly and around 15% per sale etc. Amazon handles the cc transaction, and "deposits" the funds in your account after your ship.

We have some adwords ads that show up on those pages, but wondering if there is an "amazon market" that we can't otherwise tap without selling directly on amazon?

Several competitors are over there apparently selling the same products we sell - b/c there are plenty of recent product reviews, etc. I'm thinking we should be in that market as well.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Rob

www.MEDNETdirect.com
Quality Medical Supplies

[babybeauandbelle]

we sell some items on Amazon, but sales through there are sloooow. Nothing compared to our retail sites...

[PeteA]

We sell relatively low priced items (exercise DVDs) and do very well on Amazon. Some titles never move because the retail divisions of certain wholesalers on on there selling at 60% off, but on titles where we are one of the few retailers, we move plenty.

It's worth trying out with the free version, at the very least.

[rperissi]

Yeah, we're thinking of maybe giving it a try with a few of the "hot" items - we know our product is the same quality or better, and sells for a couple of bucks less than what is moving on Amazon. We can also see that the item is selling in general b/c of the current amazon reviews...

When you say free version, could you elaborate? Is that only for certain types of merchandise? We only looked briefly, but it seems we would need to sign up and pay 39.99 a month, plus the 15% per sale fee.

Thanks,
Rob

www.MEDNETdirect.com
Quality Medical Supplies

[PeteA]

In our case, we started selling DVDs that were already in Amazon's catalog. We simply added on to their listing with no monthly fees. But, we later upgraded - since sales were strong - to the monthly plan so that we could list a few items not in their catalog. If you need to create your own product pages, then you do need to sign up for the monthly plan. You can cancel anytime, so it might be worth it to try for a month or two.

There is no way to integrate inventory, etc. with the Volusion account, so we set up a dummy customer called Amazon and place an order every couple of days so that we keep inventory correct.

[Frihet87]

We originally passed on the Amazon % based program, but toward the end of 2007 Amazon began to offer a pay-per-click variation called product ads.
( http://www.amazonservices.com/produc...=AZAdvertLearn )

Cost wise Product Ads, is very much like a shopping engine (shopzilla, shopping.com etc).

We find that many of our high volume, low price point products (Spider traps and moth traps) move very well because of the Amazon exposure.
But our roof and mold cleaner product lines that require more education / investigation don't get listed on Amazon because they have a lower conversion rate.

[jwalker500]

The only thing I don't like about product ads, is that when uploading a product file, you may in effect, create a new product on the Amazon website if it was not in their catalog. This is all fine and good and you'll get the traffic. But, once the product is on Amazon, anyone can come behind you and sell it (on the same page) through Amazon Marketplace. In effect, leveraging your product description and photo, which is no longer your intellectual propertly.

[wpmccabe]

You will be surprised at what sells on Amazon vs your regular store! The top sellers there are rarely the top sellers on your Volusion Site. It's expensive, it takes a while (14-18 days to get paid), most customers will not convert to your Volusion store, but lots of them will continue to buy on Amazon!

[RoseyToys]

We are an Amazon.com featured merchant. It is a bit pricey, 39.99 per month and then 15% of the sale. Yes you only get paid 2x per month, but we see a lot of sales from Amazon. The biggest issue is that we have to take the order info from Amazon and input it into our volusion store. We do this for a number of reasons:

Branding - the customer gets invoices, packing slip, etc from us.
Marketing - the customer will get future newsletters from us (and hopefully purchase more from us directly)
Inventory - we keep track of our inventory in once place.

We also offer a 10% coupon on each of our packing slips.

We do see some of our Amazon customers buying from us directly - we also see Amazon customers buying from us again on Amazon. In the end, we feel it is worth it - especially during the holiday season (we are a toy store).