By Erin Wawok

Feb

26

FBA The Wrong Way: Common Mistakes When Using Fulfilled by Amazon

If you are in the e-Commerce industry, the odds are good that you are at least interested in using fulfillment by Amazon. Just in case you’re not up to speed: fulfil by Amazon, or FBA, is a business-friendly way of taking advantage of Amazon’s impressive warehouse management system and infrastructure.

To us Fulfilled by Amazon, simply ship your inventory to one of Amazon’s many warehouses and let the e-Com giant take care of the rest. While this service has many benefits, using it correctly requires a bit of learning. Let’s take a quick look at some of the information you should consider before using this tool:

Don’t Forget to Do Your Homework

One of the most talked-about benefits of using Fulfilled by Amazon is the boost in visibility that companies receive upon joining the program. To promote cooperation with its most popular policies and increase efficiency, Amazon rewards businesses that use FBA by making it easier for them to earn organic traffic. This can be just as valuable as free two day shipping and easy fulfillment.

However, it is a mistake to assume that using fulfillment by Amazon is sufficient to optimize your organic Amazon traffic. Every Amazon seller should do some research in order to understand the basics of Buybox, Amazon’s algorithm that decides which company’s inventory is selected at the time a customer makes a purchase of a specific brand. Assuming you have any level of competition, this is a life or death matter for your online sales.

Avoid Silly Errors and Unprofessional Listings

Fulfil by Amazon isn’t just for Amazon! Because FBA so conveniently fulfills the orders for websites other than Amazon, it is in your best interest to invest in a multi channel listing software like Listing Mirror. This will allow you to take advantage of the powerful multi-channel functionality offered by Fulfilled by Amazon without worrying about the typical difficulties associated with managing a business across multiple platforms.

The benefit of using Listing Mirror is that you only have to create each inventory listing one time. After that, Listing mirror will make sure that same product listing is transferred across multiple online marketplaces. With that being said, make sure that the original listing doesn’t have any spelling, grammatical, or formatting errors. When a consumer sees a product listing that contains errors, they are much more likely to shop elsewhere. These errors scream “unprofessional” or even “untrustworthy.” Customers want to see that you care enough about your product to ensure that it is presented in the best possible light. If you decide to use the FBA service, make sure that you double, and even triple check your listing before sending it off.

Understand Where Your Data Goes

When signing up for FBA, many Amazon sellers fail to thoroughly read the service terms and conditions. Most people are guilty of skipping over that bit of information — but you should know that the way Amazon uses your data essentially gives them a tremendous business advantage over your smaller organization. By signing up for FBA, sellers are giving Amazon the right to collect pretty much any and all sales data that they can find. By doing so, Amazon is able to pick out sales trends, and take over the sales of that product.

Of course, this information isn’t shared with the third party sellers — and it’s not as if you are compromising sensitive customer data by using fulfillment by Amazon. But this is how Amazon stays one step ahead of their competition. It turns out that collecting data from your competitors gives you an upper hand!

Sell More. Work Less.

Here at Listing Mirror, we are committed to bringing you the most up to date information for popular online marketplaces. To learn more about the services we offer, simply request a free demo.

Erin Wawok

Erin is the Co-Founder of Listing Mirror.