It’s understandable to get excited about selling wholesale electronics on Amazon. Before you start listing electronics for sale on Amazon, it’s wise to learn a few tips.
When you’re new at anything, it’s easy to make mistakes. Even experienced Amazon sellers make mistakes from time to time. Fortunately, learning about these mistakes can help you avoid making them.
We spent lots of time researching the most common issues that Amazon sellers encounter. Here’s how to avoid the top 10 mistakes new Amazon sellers make.
1. Choosing the Wrong Type of Amazon Seller Account
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Amazon offers a few ways for sellers to start selling their items. These options are either to become an individual or a professional seller.
As you can imagine, the individual account is best suited for sellers moving lower volumes of electronics. On the other hand, professional accounts are better for those with larger amounts of electronics to sell.
Here’s the major difference between individual and professional accounts. If you sign up for an individual account, you’ll pay no monthly fee. However, you will be charged $0.99 for each item you sell.
With a professional account, you pay a $39.99 fee every month. But you don’t have to spend money on fees every time you sell an item.
If you’re just starting out, it might be best to try an individual account. Choose the professional account if you plan on selling lots of electronics each month.
2. Making Multiple Accounts
Sometimes, trying to manage sales and messages on one account can get a little overwhelming. To solve this problem, business owners sometimes have multiple accounts set up.
Certain platforms like Facebook, Google, and others might allow you to make multiple types of accounts. Amazon does not. Having more than one Amazon Seller account is a violation of their terms and conditions.
If every seller was allowed to make multiple accounts, it could become quite problematic for Amazon to manage all of this data.
We’re sorry if that’s a bummer to hear, but it’s not worth risking your Amazon Seller account to make another one. Considering all of the resources at Amazon’s disposal, you can bet this company can detect fraud real quick.
If you’re looking for a great way to start increasing wholesale profits, make a Trade-In Tech account. After our verification process completes, you’ll have a whole new stream of reliable electronics suppliers to start working with.
3. Missing Out on Amazon’s Seller University
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We have a lot of tips to help you sell electronics. However, when it comes to more specific tips for Amazon sellers, it might also be best to hear tips from Amazon itself.
Otherwise known as Amazon Seller University, this is a collection of videos that help you learn the ins and outs of Amazon’s seller program. Seller University is also a great way to ensure you’re not breaking any of Amazon’s rules.
Watching these videos isn’t just about learning policies and procedures. You’ll also learn about how to advertise on Amazon, take advantage of promotions, and much more. Considering that it costs nothing to gain these tips, it’s a good idea to check Seller University out.
4. Never Researching Your Suppliers
It would be great if every person on the internet was trustworthy. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Dealing with untrustworthy suppliers is often a stressful situation. Fortunately, you can help prevent this from happening by researching your suppliers.
You don’t necessarily have to spend days on end performing this type of research. But, it’s a good idea to look closely at each supplier you’re wanting to work with.
A quick internet search of this supplier’s company should point you to a potential partner’s website, social media pages, and directory listings.
With that said, researching suppliers on your own can become quite time-consuming. If you’d like another way to find electronics suppliers you can trust, check out Trade-In Tech.
Trade-In Tech is one part electronics wholesale platform and one part social network. By partnering up with us, you’ll be joining a network of thousands and thousands of electronics suppliers.
One of the best parts of joining Trade-In Tech is the peace of mind you’ll gain by working with verified electronics suppliers. We perform background checks on anyone that wants to start buying and/or selling on our platform.
After joining Trade-In Tech, you’ll save valuable time not having to comb through company websites, directories, and search engine results trying to find suppliers you can trust.
5. Not Having an Inventory Management System
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Another major concern for any Amazon seller has to do with their inventory. If you have too much inventory, it’s hard to make a profit. The same holds true if you aren’t buying enough product.
So, how do you avoid these extremes and remain a successful Amazon seller? One way to do this is by having inventory management software.
This type of software automatically tracks your inventory and sales, which helps you save more time. Using the data inventory management software generates, you’ll have a much easier time optimizing what you carry.
For more help with managing your inventory, make sure to check out Trade-In Tech. Our platform makes it easy for you to list your inventory and manage your wholesale electronics business.
We help wholesale electronics dealers manage their inventory on Amazon, eBay, and other popular platforms.
6. Forgetting to Calculate an Ideal Shipping Rate
Ah yes, shipping costs. Something both buyers and sellers throughout the world dread. However, you can make this easy for yourself and buyers.
To do this, you’ll want to reduce your shipping costs as low as possible for the buyer. Sure, it’s fun making a few extra dollars with higher shipping rates. But paying too much for shipping will scare off most potential customers, especially if they’ve never worked with you before.
If you’re struggling to come up with a fair price, look at other sellers listings to see what they’re charging for shipping. Chances are, you’ll get lots of relevant information.
Another tip to help you avoid paying a lot on shipping is to buy items in bulk. As someone working in the wholesale industry, you know the value of buying items in large quantities.
Buying items like boxes, tape, and other shipping materials in bulk can mean paying much less on shipping per order.
7. Neglecting the Importance of Reviews
Source: Amazon
By now, we’re all familiar with Amazon’s one-to-five star rating system. With that said, you might not know that your business can also get reviews from Amazon members.
Understandably, most people are so focused on getting their items that they can forget how important reviews are.
If you’re not getting any reviews after selling items, consider politely reaching out to your customers and ask for a quick review. We understand if this seems a little intimidating, but it’s a totally understandable request.
To make this process easier, you might think about contacting repeat customers first. Considering that these people purchased more than one item from you, they might be more inclined to leave a review.
Most sellers think of this as an extra step. But sellers wanting to take this step are often the ones with more reviews than their competitors.
Don’t worry about all of your reviews being perfect, although you should strive for that goal. Recent research found that 41% of consumers trust a business based on the number of reviews, not the quality of them.
8. Keeping the Same Prices
Throughout life, most people naturally avoid making lots of changes. With that said, this concept shouldn’t apply to your Amazon pricing strategy. Many of the top Amazon sellers change their prices daily or weekly.
Don’t worry, this doesn’t require lots of complicated calculations. Instead, just spend 30-60 minutes taking a look at the prices of your products and those of your competitors every day or few days.
Unless something drastic happens in your industry, you’ll mostly be making small price changes. With that said, a big change like a new smartphone or tablet coming out might affect used values of items from previous generations.
Keeping an eye on changes can prevent you from making mistakes that might become costly. After spending a little time learning how to price electronics, it will make all aspects of your work much easier than normal.
Also, update your price lists or spreadsheets after making any adjustments. Even the smallest price adjustments can add up quickly if you’re a wholesaler.
You don’t want to forget about making a small adjustment, only to find that it costs you thousands of dollars more than you thought it would.
Another great reason to change prices is to keep up with competing sellers. You wouldn’t want to set prices three months and leave them, only to find competitors with marked down products outselling you.
9. Having Unoptimized Listings
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To start ramping up your sales, it’s also helpful to have optimized Amazon listings.
Imagine that your Amazon listing is like a physical retail space. If someone walked in and everything was unorganized, they would probably turn around and leave. If your seller page is unoptimized, virtual buyers probably aren’t going to stick around.
How can you optimize your Amazon seller page? Fortunately, it’s pretty simple. Make sure you have quality product images, engaging titles, and descriptive listings.
The first step is to create an optimized title. First, look at what you’re selling. You’ll want to include the full name of the product. If you’re selling an Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max, include every word into your listing.
When it comes to product images, it’s best to have as many high-quality images as possible. Photograph whatever you’re selling from all angles. After doing that, you'll have great images to start using.
Lastly, you’ll want to optimize the description of your listings. You don’t need to go overboard including lots of keywords. Instead, just make sure that you’re including lots of accurate descriptions and don’t leave out any details.
This is another great time to open a new window or tab and see how other sellers are including in their titles and descriptions.
After you begin creating optimized listings, you should start seeing your sales increase rapidly.
10. Ignoring Amazon’s Digital Coupon System
Who doesn’t love getting a deal while shopping online? Amazon is well aware of this, which is why it introduced a digital coupon system for its sellers.
With Amazon’s digital coupons, you can issue these to potential buyers so they get a great deal. Before you start going crazy with coupons, there are a few things you’ll want to know.
For one, Amazon does charge a fee every time one of your customers redeems a coupon. As of right now, this fee is $0.60 per successful coupon redemption.
Let’s say that a customer buys an iPhone 10 from you for $300. They use one of your digital coupons and get $40 off, bringing the total to $260. Because they’ve used a coupon, Amazon will charge your seller account $0.60.
Also, make sure you’re not mentioning coupons or sales in the titles of your listings. In Amazon’s book, this is another no-no that might result in you losing your selling privileges.
It’s not worth risking your business just to get a quick sales boost by breaking Amazon’s rules. You also don’t want to spend your free time worrying whether or not Amazon will catch your listings or not.
In conclusion, selling on Amazon is a great way to earn a living. By following the tips above, you’ll avoid many of the mistakes that new Amazon sellers make. Don’t worry if you’ve made or are making these mistakes right now. What’s more important is that you now know what to do to correct them.