Let’s face it selling online is not the walk in the park it used to be.
It does have inherent problems.
As more merchants have taken their products online the marketplace has matured and has become more competitive. Under these circumstances its to be expected that eBay and Amazon will periodically raise the bar for seller performance expectations and to meet the ever increasing demands from buyers.
The sellers who perform the best are rewarded with more visible ads and listings. Products listed by lower performing sellers inevitably receive less exposure. Its clear to see capitalism in motion as high converting product listings move up the search results and lower performing listings are nudged down the search results.
When you sell online, regardless if you own a small home business or a larger retail company there’s no discrimination as you’ll find yourself on the same virtual playing field as everyone else.
Here’s the first of three lies that you’ll likely here when you sell on Amazon and eBay.
Lie #1: When You Sell on Amazon and eBay Professionally You’ll Have Lots of Free Time
Some might say that listing and selling your product is the easy part. Although once a sale is made and eBay or Amazon have deducted their hefty commission from your buyer’s payment, this is when your work begins.
Time to pick, pack and ship orders.
If you outsource shipping and fulfillment this won’t apply to you but if you DO ship orders in house then I’m sure you’ll know that it takes time to download orders, print packing slips and shipping labels for eBay and Amazon orders. At the end of the day you’ll then be logging into all your accounts again to add tracking data and mark orders shipped once all your packages are shipped.
If your sales are significant then this task done manually becomes a daily time drain. I remember doing this when I first started my online business and I remember searching for a solution. I eventually found one but it was clunky, clumsy and not ideal to say the least.
Solution: MultiChannelWorks has shipping integration tools with shipping vendors. You could also consider outsourcing packing and shipping completely and use one of the fulfillment centers instead of needing to assemble packages in house.
Knowing your bottom line profitability
You’ve probably heard it being said by a TV personality business guru or you might have read it in a business book, it goes something like this..
“If you want to be successful in business
and stay on top of your game
then you’ve gotta know your numbers
and your bottom line profitability”
I’m sure you must have heard of this predicable business mantra. You may have even chuckled along with the Sharks or Dragons on the TV business shows where famous business gurus mock and giggle at seemingly naive ‘wanna be’ entrepreneurs when they turn up asking for investment for their idea or fledgling business without knowledge of the profitability or ‘numbers’.
Its remarkable how individuals can ask for money without any idea of what return on investment (ROI) they’ll be able to offer. In reality knowing your bottom line profitability and even your actual sales numbers can be a daunting task to keep up with. Especially if you’re just starting out with little help and you’re selling many products in multiple marketplaces with limited time and resources available to you.
Knowing how to calculate profitability is easy enough and going through the task of gathering all the data to make the calculations shouldn’t really be much of a challenge either. Although if you’re needing to commit time to download reports from different websites and marketplaces and merge all that data then it can be time consuming to say the least –this DOES become a challenge on your time and resources. To keep up with merging this data continuously is a time sucking activity.
Solution: Within your MultiChannelWorks account there’s a button that says ‘Run Report’. Click that button to merge your eBay and Amazon sales data from all your sales channels and display the data in crisp and attractive sales and inventory reports. You can see any report at anytime you need to so you’ll be able to see exactly what your ‘numbers’ are and without needing to commit time merging data from all over the place -problem solved.
Click to read part 2 of..
‘The 3 Lies About Selling On Amazon and eBay’
