has, the better your chances of being listed higher up in the searchresults.
Back to eBay: ProStores
Since the title of this book is Selling Beyond eBay, it might seem like a violation ofmy entire premise to discuss creating a website called a ProStore with eBay as yourWeb host. But my point is to demonstrate options for selling beyond eBay auctions,fixed-price sales, and eBay Stores. The option of eBay’s ProStores (http://www.prostores.com) gives you a way to sell through a website that is just as valid as thehosting solutions provided by Yahoo! or Microsoft. And eBay is certainly a well-known name.
One advantage of choosing ProStores, if you already sell through an eBay Store,is that you get a 30 percent discount on the usual hosting fees. Those fees are shownin Table 11-3.
That’s right: If you are already used to having eBay charge you a Final Value Feeon each auction or fixed-price sale, you won’t be surprised to find that, even thoughyou’re being charged a monthly fee to have a store, you have to pay a successfultransaction fee of 0.5 or 1.5 percent of each sale that is completed. You are alsocharged a Bandwidth Quota coverage of 4 cents for every megabyte of bandwidth.(Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that moves along a network connection. Inthis case, you pay for the amount of data your visitors view.)
It’s not uncommon for Web-hosting services to charge you for bandwidth. But
Table 11-3. Hosting fees for eBay ProStores.
Store Level
Express Store
Business Store
Advanced Store
Enterprise Store
Monthly Fee
Successful Transaction Fee
$6.95
$29.95
$74.95
$249.95
1.5 percent
0.5 percent
0.5 percent
0.5 percent
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they don’t always charge you a monthly fee for each transaction you conduct. Person-ally, I think you pay enough to eBay already, and you can find less expensive hostingoptions elsewhere. See Chapter 15 for suggestions of affordable Web hosts; Chapters12 to 14 examine some well-known e-commerce operations that will provide you withstorefronts, new auction systems, and other ways to get your products and servicesbefore the public.
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C H A P T E R (cid:3)12
Leveraging Amazon.com’sCustomer Base
When you move beyond eBay to explore new sales opportunities, the key is to avoidreinventing the wheel. Rather than starting a new storefront or e-commerce websitefrom scratch, build on what you have already done or take advantage of what othershave accomplished in advance. In the case of a storefront, you will be better off ifyou choose a host or an online mall that already is well-known and has a lot of traffic.If you join a marketplace that already attracts millions of customers, you can skimoff only a small percentage of them, and you are still likely to generate substantialincome.
When it comes to well-known and highly trusted websites, you can’t do muchbetter than Amazon.com. According to an article in the journal The Economist(http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?Story_id(cid:4)2646123), Amazon took inmore than 2 million orders in a single day during the holiday season of 2004. Thesame article cited a study by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ASCI),which reported that Amazon lead all competitors with a customer satisfaction ratingof 88 out of a possible 100.
You can’t just sell anything on Amazon, however. You have to pick your merchan-dise carefully. If you want to sell in the popular Marketplace area of the voluminousAmazon.com site, you can’t sell jewelry or clothing unless you have been invited todo so and been approved to sell beforehand. You’re best off if you sell merchandisethat Amazon already sells, such as books, CDs, DVDs, electronic games, householdgoods, and any kind of high-tech gadget you can lay your hands on. Although Ama-zon allows individuals to conduct person-to-person auctions, this part of its site ishardly the most popular. Where Amazon excels is in letting individuals like you andme piggyback on to things that they are already selling. It is like a college bookstore:the store will sell new textbooks at full price, but invite students to sell back theirused textbooks alongside the new ones at a reduced price. Both the students and the
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bookstore benefit. If you do the same on Amazon, you can sell with less effort thanon eBay or other sites. The key is to match what you have to sell with Amazon’soptions for putting your ‘‘stuff ’’ online, as you’ll learn in this chapter.
Exploring Amazon.com’s Marketplace Sales Options
Amazon.com provides individuals and businesses with many different options forpiggybacking their own merchandise onto Amazon’s seemingly limitless inventory.The first problem, when you connect to the site’s well-traveled home page (http://www.amazon.com, shown in Figure 12-1) is to decide which option to go with. Whenyou scan the home page, it can leave you scratching your head. When you look underthe heading ‘‘$ Make Money,’’ you see the following options:
• Marketplace. This is the option that lets you sell your own books, CDs, and
other items alongside products that Amazon.com is already listing.
•
Associates. This is Amazon’s term for its well-known affiliates program. Youplace a link or ad on your Web page, and if someone clicks on your link and makesa purchase as a result, you make a percentage of the purchase price.
•
Advantage. This is for publishers, labels, studios, or those few artists who ownthe rights to distribute their own creative works. If you have a band and create CDsthat you sell on your own, theoretically this would be the category for you. However,for the most part, Amazon works with well-known music, book, and other publishers.• Web Services. If you develop software, you can create tools to help otherpeople find what they want on Amazon—or to help sellers sell more effectively on thesite. Some of the products, such as SellerEngine and ScoutPal, are described later inthis chapter.
•
Paid Placements. If you produce books or music, you can have your products
offered along with complementary titles already listed on Amazon.
So far, for individual sellers like you and me, the Associates program and theMarketplace are the most practical options. However, if you dig a little further youcan find some different ways to set up shop on Amazon’s turf. If you click on thelink SEE ALL SERVICES under the heading ‘‘$ Make Money,’’ for instance, you go to ahelp page that lists other options for publishers, such as Amazon’s well-known SearchInside the Book feature. That’s not for you. However, if you go back to the home pageand look under the heading Bargains, you find two links that are worth investigating:
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Figure 12-1. Amazon.com carries a wide variety of options for individual sellers as well as buyers.
(cid:2) Amazon.com, Inc.
•
Auctions. Although Amazon.com has its own auction area, it is not nearly aswide-ranging and offbeat as eBay’s. Unlike the Marketplace, sellers are allowed to listin any of the categories. Once again, the best things to sell are books, CDs, andelectronics, because those are the items that most people want to buy on the siteanyway.•
zShops. Amazon lets you set up your own storefront with items for sale, in afashion similar to eBay Stores. The executive I spoke to at Amazon frankly admittedthat this part of the site doesn’t get much traffic, however, and suggested that individ-ual sellers are better off listing in the Marketplace.
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Auctions and zShops have been part of Amazon’s website for several years. Theydon’t get as much traffic as the Amazon.com Marketplace, and certainly not as muchas eBay. In my opinion—and the opinion of the Amazon.com executive I inter-viewed—the Marketplace is the best option for individual sellers and small sellers tomake money when they move beyond eBay.
If you’re not a small seller but have a large-scale business on eBay or on your ownwebsite, you may be able to gain entry to a more exclusive program on Amazoncalled the Amazon Merchant program. ‘‘It was our success on eBay that allowed usto sell on Amazon,’’ says David Yaskulka of Blueberry Boutique, a prominent andsuccessful business on eBay, Overstock.com, and Amazon.com. ‘‘But it’s challengingto get into the Amazon Merchant program. We’re the largest shirt and tie sellers oneBay, and one of the smallest on Amazon. Amazon vets its sellers in much the sameway that a highly successful shopping mall does. But it’s worth the effort—most buy-ers assume (correctly) that if you’re selling on Amazon, you’re a professional andthey have little risk.’’
Jumping on the Amazon Marketplace Bandwagon
You can participate in the Amazon Marketplace in two different ways: as an individ-ual seller or a business. The difference is in how much you are charged when yousuccessfully complete a transaction. In either case, you are essentially adding one ormore of your own items to existing Product Detail pages on Amazon. One of thosedetail pages is shown in Figure 12-2. As you can see, the book being advertised sellsnew for an already deeply discounted price of $16.47. However, if you don’t mindreading a used book, you can choose from fifty copies of the same book that variousindividuals are offering for as little as $12.99. You’ll learn how to add your own booksto Amazon’s product pages in the sections that follow.
Selling Individual ItemsYou’ve probably got lots of books lying around the house that you no longer need.You have lots of options for getting rid of them. You can donate them to your localresale shop; hold a garage sale (don’t expect to get more than a dollar for each; you’llprobably get less that that); or sell them on eBay.
Think about the steps involved in selling a book on eBay. If the book you wantto sell is recent, you can enter its ISBN (International Standard Book Number) inthe Product Detail form. If you’re lucky, eBay will be able to use that number to pullup a stock photo of the book that you can use in your description, along with basic
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Figure 12-2. You can add your own copies of books or other products to listing product detail pagesin the Amazon.com Marketplace.
(cid:2) Amazon.com, Inc.
information about the book such as its size, publication date, and number of pages.If not, you’ll have to take your own photo and note all that information yourself. Youalso have to choose the category in which to sell your item. And it’s up to you towork out payment and shipping arrangements.
If you sell your book on Amazon.com, several of those steps—the photos anddetails, and the payment and shipping options—are streamlined for you. You don’thave to make those choices because Amazon.com gives you the stock photo andbasic product information on its Product Detail page. It also handles the paymentquestion by requiring you to use its Amazon Payments system. As far as shipping,Amazon doesn’t give you an option, either: it determines how much shipping willcost and requires you to ship your book out within two days of purchase; later, itreimburses you.
Although selling on Amazon.com gives you less control than selling on eBay, italso saves you some time and trouble. Think about all the questions you receive fromprospective buyers:
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‘‘Why is your shipping so expensive? Can you ship another way?’’‘‘Can you pack in an envelope instead of a box to save on shipping?’’‘‘Do you accept money orders or checks instead of PayPal? Do you acceptcash or Western Union wire transfers?’’
When you’re selling on eBay, you have to answer each of those questions yourself.On Amazon, the questions never arise. You have to do things Amazon’s way or notat all. Sam Wheeler, Amazon’s Director of Strategic Partnerships for Amazon.comServices, sees this as an advantage for sellers. Wheeler states:
Time is money, and you save time on Amazon because you don’t have to have somany discussions with your buyers. They buy something; you ship it out, andthat’s it. As far as using our payment system, we believe that if every transactionflows through our transaction pipeline, there is more trust between buyers andsellers. Fraud is a problem for everyone on the Internet. As far as shipping, webelieve that you’re not here to make money on the shipping, you’re here to makemoney on the product. Buyers don’t have to play the game of wondering howmuch it is going to cost to ship your product.
It’s easy enough to try out the system for yourself, especially if you have everpurchased anything on Amazon.com in the past and already have an account withthe site. You only need to look around for a textbook or other item to sell, and thenfollow these steps:
1. Go to the Amazon.com home page and click SELL YOUR STUFF if you haven’t
done so already.
2. Once the Sell Your Stuff page appears, choose the category in which your itemshould appear from the drop-down list labeled Select category. The options inthis list (shown in Figure 12-3) give you a good idea of the kinds of merchan-dise for which Amazon.com is ideally suited.
3. Search for the book you want to sell on Amazon.com. You can enter either allor part of the title in the Search by Title or Keyword box, or enter the ISBNnumber (for a book) or UPC or ASIN number (for another product). Thenclick START SELLING. For this example, I’ll use one of my own books, which isshown in Figure 12-4.
4. Fill out the Select Condition page and click CONTINUE.5. When the Enter Price page appears, enter the price at which you want to sellthe item. Since I have a new book and I am willing to sign it for the purchaser,
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Figure 12-3. It’s a good idea to sell merchandise that Amazon.com already has listed for sale.
(cid:2) Amazon.com, Inc.
I presumably have an advantage over the other sellers. But should I advertisethe book as new or collectible? My feeling is that people shop on Amazon.comfor convenience and value; they’re looking for bargains. If the book is signed,so much the better. I decided to offer the book for $9.99 and inscribe it person-ally to the buyer. I enter the quantity, my location, and my shipping methods,and click CONTINUE.
Note: Shipping methods are described next, but keep in mind that Ama-zon.com is reimbursing you for the least expensive Media Mail shippingoption. For a book, your standard shipping method is U.S. Postal Service
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Media Mail. The seller also has the option to choose expedited shipping(not overnight, and not Media Mail), or the international shipping option(delivery in three to six weeks).
Figure 12-4. Accurately describe the condition or special features of the item you want to sell.
(cid:2) Amazon.com, Inc.
6. Click CONTINUE. On the Confirm Listing page, review the terms of the salecarefully. You don’t want to get surprised when the sale is made. Amazondoesn’t charge for listing merchandise, but it takes a commission when thesale is made. (See Table 12-1, Amazon Marketplace Commissions, for details.)In this case, Amazon will take 15 percent of the sale, or about $1.25 on a saleof $9.99. I will make $7.74 on my sale.
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Table 12-1. Amazon Marketplace commissions.
Type of Item
Computers
Camera and photo equipment,cell phones, cell phoneservice, and electronics
Everything else
Musical instruments
Books, CDs, DVDs, otherproducts
Commission
Example
$0.99 plus 6 percent
$1000 sale; $60 commission
$0.99 plus 8 percent
$150 sale, $12.50 commission
$0.99 plus 10 percent
$250 sale, $25 commission
$0.99 plus 12 percent
$300 sale, $36 commission
$0.99 plus 15 percent
$50 sale, $7.50 commission
7. If the terms are acceptable, click SUBMIT your listing to list your book for sale.
That’s all there is to it.
Once an item goes up for sale on Amazon.com, it stays online for sixty days. Ifthe item doesn’t sell, you will receive a message from Amazon with instructions onhow to relist it.
Note: In order to use Amazon Payments (and thus make purchases fromyou in the Marketplace), you must live in a country where Amazon.comPayments is allowed. Residents of many Eastern European and Asiancountries, including China, India, Russia, and the Philippines, are notallowed to use Amazon.com Payments at this writing. If you are sellingmerchandise that might appeal to residents of these countries, you mightwant to use eBay or another auction site instead. To access a completelist, click HELP, ORDERING FROM AMAZON MERCHANTS, AMAZON MARKET-PLACE, AND MARKETPLACE SHIPPING TIMES & RATEs.
Shipping Do’s and Don’tsIf someone does buy your item, it’s up to them to pay you using Amazon Payments.Amazon requires all buyers to pay immediately using the credit card associated withtheir Amazon.com account. Once the buyer’s credit card has been charged, you re-ceive a message from Amazon.com entitled ‘‘Sold—Ship Now!’’ Be sure to verify theorder in your Payments Account to make sure the transaction is marked ‘‘Com-pleted.’’ If it is, you need to be on your toes (or more accurately, in town and near
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your merchandise). The reason is that you are required by Amazon.com to ship youritem out within two days of the e-mail message. If your package doesn’t arrive in thetime that Amazon.com allows, it’s up to the buyer to ask you about the status of theshipment. Time estimates are as follows:
•
Standard delivery within the United State: four to fourteen business days aftershipping
• Expedited shipping in the United States: two to six business days after ship-
•
pingInternational Standard: three to six weeks (though buyers are made awarethat delivery may take as much as eight to twelve weeks due to customs re-strictions).
Of course, you can add two business days to each of those estimates, since youhave two days to pack and ship—a generous amount of time, considering that manyeBay buyers expect the package to fly out the door within a day after an instantPayPal payment is received.
Which option should you choose? It’s up to you whether to pay for DomesticStandard, Domestic Expedited, or International Standard shipping. It’s still up to youto pick the shipper: the United States Postal Service (USPS), United Parcel Service(UPS), Federal Express (FedEx), or DHL International. No matter which shipperyou choose, you get the same shipping allowance from Amazon.com. The exactamount of the allowance depends on what you’re shipping and what service is cho-sen. Some examples are shown in Table 12-2, Amazon.com Shipping Allowances.
There are at least two obvious flaws with this system. First, suppose you sell abook and it’s really heavy? I mentioned to Sam Wheeler that I once sold a Bible thatweighed 9 pounds and cost $7.70 to ship in a USPS flat-rate box. If I get an allowanceof $5.39 for that book, I’m losing $1.31 on the deal. ‘‘Clearly the allowances don’tcover everything, but you would have to add the extra cost to your purchase price,’’he acknowledged.
Second, what if you sell something to someone overseas and that person wantsto receive the item faster than three to six weeks? Typically, Air Parcel Post andGlobal Priority, the USPS’s two expedited overseas shipping methods, cost morethan $20 for a package of 3 pounds or more. How could you add more than $10 tothe purchase price to cover international buyers when there’s an even better possibil-ity that a domestic buyer will make the purchase? In that case, it’s a good idea torestrict your item to domestic buyers only, which you can do when you list it in theMarketplace.
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Table 12-2. Amazon.com shipping allowances.
Type of Item
Domestic Standard
Domestic Expedited
InternationalStandard
Books
CDs, Cassettes,Vinyl Records
DVDs
Video Games
Camera &Photo
Electronics
MusicalInstruments
EverythingElse
$3.49
$2.49
$2.49
$5.39
$4.99
$4.99
$3.49$4.49 (cid:6) $0.50/lb
$4.99$6.49 (cid:6) $0.50/lb
$4.49 (cid:6) $0.50/lb$4.49 (cid:6) $0.50/lb
$6.49 (cid:6) $0.50/lb$6.49 (cid:6) $0.50/lb
$4.49 (cid:6) $0.50/lb
$6.49 (cid:6) $0.50/lb
$9.79
$5.49
$9.79
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
Note: You can view the entire table of shipping allowances by going toAmazon.com and clicking HELP, ORDERING FROM AMAZON MERCHANTS,AMAZON MARKETPLACE, MARKETPLACE SHIPPING TIMES & RATES.
(cid:3)
Which Amazon.com Categories Are Best for You?
You probably know the site is good for books, CDs, DVDs, computer games, and videogames. It’s not as well known that the following additional types of items are alreadycontained in the site’s product catalog:
• Camera and photo equipment• Electronics, including radios, portable CDs, iPods, and so forth• Cell phones• Ofﬁce products, including printers, toner, paper, pens, and much more• Musical instruments• Kitchenware• Tools and other hardware• Outdoor living items, such as gas grills, mowers, bird feeders, and outdoor
furniture
• Sports equipment
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If you click the tab labeled SEE ALL 32 PRODUCT CATEGORIES at the top of the Sell YourStuff page, you’ll notice that there are many more sales categories on the site. Theones that aren’t in the Select category drop-down list are the ones for which youhave to be approved by Amazon. These include jewelry, clothing, pet supplies, healthand beauty care, baby items, and many more. In these additional categories, theitems don’t include used merchandise offered by individuals.
‘‘There are categories where we require approval before you sell,’’ says Wheeler.‘‘Amazon has a $2,500 guarantee for every item we sell. We want to make suresellers in selected categories are reputable and offer merchandise that’s in goodcondition.’’
Becoming a Book Seller with the Book LoaderThe easiest and most practical way to supplement your eBay sales with Amazon.comsales, in my opinion, is to gather all the books in your house in one big pile and listthem in the Amazon.com marketplace. Everyone has books lying around the housethat they don’t read any more. Even if your books qualify as antique and don’t havean ISBN number, you can list them easily using the Book Loader. (Amazon listsmillions of pre-ISBN titles in its catalog and you may already find your older bookdescribed there.)
Unlike eBay’s Turbo Lister, the Book Loader isn’t software you download andinstall on your computer. It isn’t a tool you access online with your Web browser. It’sthe Microsoft Excel spreadsheet shown in Figure 12-5, which you download and
Figure 12-5. To upload books in bulk, you need to fill out and upload a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
(cid:2) Amazon.com, Inc.
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copy to your computer. (It assumes, of course, that you have Excel installed on yoursystem.)
Note: A variety of developers have created software tools that help sellersfind items to sell that will be profitable on Amazon.com, and to helpcreate sales listings on the site. See Chapter 14 for more on Monsoon,SellerEngine, and ScoutPal.
Once you have filled out the file, you save it in Excel’s default .xls format, tab-delimited. Go to your Seller Account page, click LIST SINGLE ITEMS OR UPLOAD MULTI-PLE ITEMS, and follow the instructions for using the Book Loader.
Tip: To download the Book Loader ﬁle or to ﬁnd out more aboutusing it, perform the following steps:
1. Click HELP2. Click SELLING AT AMAZON.COM3. Click EXPERIENCED AND VOLUME SELLING4. Click VOLUME LISTING TOOLS5. Click BOOK LOADER
Selling Merchandise as a Pro MerchantThe goal of any successful auction or fixed-price seller is to build volume. When youbuild volume, you build revenue. Anyone who sells at volume on eBay—either as aPowerSeller or an ambitious and hardworking amateur seller—will want to know howto sell at volume on Amazon. The Marketplace is still a great place to sell at volume;those who sell at bulk are in the Pro Merchant program. As Amazon boasts, it has‘‘no such thing as a nonpaying bidder’’ because it passes through only valid paymentsthat are charged to the credit card that is already on file for a buyer.
Becoming a Pro Merchant is easy: you only have to commit to paying a monthlyfee of $39.99 to sell in the Marketplace. If you are an individual seller you pay nolisting fees; if an item sells you are charged $1 plus Amazon’s commission. In con-trast, Pro Merchants are charged only the commission. If you are a Pro Merchant,your item stays listed until it sells; if you are an individual seller, your item is taken
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down if it does not sell after sixty days. Some examples of Pro Merchant profit-and-loss margins appear in Table 12-3. As you can see, Pro Merchant status puts youahead if you make numerous sales and have a steady revenue stream. For occasionalsellers who complete only a handful of transactions per month, Pro Merchantmonthly fees don’t make sense.
Many Pro Merchants on Amazon list thousands of items at a time, so the monthly
fee is justified for them.
Table 12-3. Pro Merchant profit margins.
Type of Item
Computer-relatedequipment
Computer-relatedequipment
Books, CDs, DVDs
Books, CDs, DVDs
Number ofSales/Month
TotalGrossRevenue
Profit if youProfit ifyou payare a Procommissions Merchant
Commissions
6
20
5
25
$325.00
$28.44
$296.56
$285.01
$550.00
$92.00
$310.00
$52.80
$18.75
$71.25
$497.20
$73.25
$238.75
$510.01
$52.01
$270.01
Using Volume Listing in the Marketplace with InventoryLoader
There is a volume listing tool for Pro Merchants and other Marketplace sellers whoneed to upload many items at once. If you read about the Book Loader in the previ-ous section, you’re already familiar with Inventory Loader and how it works. It is nota Web-based tool or a piece of software, but an Excel spreadsheet you download andfill in with your product information. You’ll need to enter the identification numberfor each product you want to sell, such as:
International Standard Book Number (ISBN)
•• Universal Product Code (UPC)• Amazon Standard