What goes into setting up your Amazon account (and listings) properly

Welcome to the Bring your product idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.

Hello and welcome to bring your product idea to Life.

If you listened to last week's episode, you will know that I started with a story about how when I started selling my products on Amazon, I procrastinated and procrastinated and took way too long. Well, this week I want to start with a story about complete opposite.

I'm not going to name any names, but I've worked with a brand fairly recently who brought me in to work with them because they weren't making the sales they wanted on Amazon. They've been on there about six months and I think they've made no sales at all.

And once I began working with them, I had a, you know, I had a quick look into their account, was a quick look, quite an in depth look into their account, into their listings, into everything. And it became really clear and they would happily say the same themselves, that they'd kind of rushed through the setup.

So they knew they wanted to be on Amazon. They had a really great range of products. Their products were selling on their own website. They were doing really well.

They were, they were wholesaling into a number of stores, they had great customer feedback. So they were like, yes, let's definitely get these products onto Amazon. So they get on there.

But I think it's fair to say they didn't entirely know how to get off to a great start on Amazon. They got the listings up fairly quickly and it's by the way, it's great that they navigated all of this.

They open the account, they got their listing set up. However, because they weren't done as well as they could have been, they were not making any sales, they weren't getting found.

And even if people were finding them, I'm not sure their listings would have converted that well based on the listings that I could see at the time. So what I then had to do was go and rework absolutely everything for them.

So completely overhaul all of their listings and then what, do some work on their visibility as well.

And this is great and you know, this is sort of does have a happy ending that now they're making great sales on Amazon and things are definitely improving. However, it's a real, real shame that we.

That in a way that I had to do this because one, that was six months where they could have been making sales and they weren't, and two, we've kind of done it all over again because they spent the time doing it in the first place and then they then had to pay me to redo it again. Or if they hadn't worked with me, then they just, six months later came to the conclusion, okay, maybe something's wrong here.

Let's look into it ourselves. If they'd have the bandwidth to, to do that at the time, they would then be, you know, repeating the process and doing again themselves.

Why am I telling you this?

The reason I'm telling you this is because I think it's a real shame that to go through, you know, to decide you want to sell your products on Amazon, to go through the setup process, to get everything, all your listings there, to set up fba, if that's what you're doing, and then to not make any sales, particularly if you then realize that there were things you could have done differently right at the beginning that would have meant that wouldn't have been the case, actually, you'd have got off to much better start. So, in today's episode, I want to talk to you about a proper Amazon setup, how to get set up on Amazon, how to do it really, really well.

And I'm going to walk you through, step by step, the things that you need to do in order to get set up on Amazon. Now, I'm going to tell you right at the outset, I have a free checklist. It's called the Amazon Setup Checklist. It is completely free.

To get it, all you need to do is go to vickyweinberg.com resources or you can get it in the show notes for this episode, if that's easier for you. And I think you can get it from my Instagram bio as well.

But it's a great resource, completely free, and it goes into every single thing you need to do when you're getting set up on Amazon.

So if you are, I don't know, walking the dog like I do when I listen to podcasts, or you're at the gym, or you're just somewhere where you can't make notes, don't worry, you don't need to write a single thing down. You can just listen to this episode and then whenever you're ready, you can go and get that free checklist and it's got all of it for you.

So absolutely no need to make notes. I've already thought of that. It's, it's here for you.

So let's talk through all of the steps you need to go through to get off to a great start on Amazon. First thing you need to do is decide on your seller plan. So whether you're going to have an individual plan or a professional plan differences.

A professional plan you pay for. I've got a whole episode where I go into detail on which I think is best. But to summarize it here, so this episode isn't super long.

I'd say go for the professional plan, you get all of the features I'm going to be talking about in this episode. And if you don't go for that right away, at some point you're going to want to upgrade.

And again, in the spirit of only doing things once, go to the professional plan for the from the outset it will be a lot easier. So then you then need to open your Amazon seller central account.

So what you need to do to do this is a business email address or an Amazon customer account. If you don't have a business email address, I would just say use a separate email address to the one you use when you're shopping on Amazon.

I promise you this makes life a lot easier. You will need a chargeable credit card, so Amazon can charge you every any fees you might incur.

You will need a valid passport or some kind of national id so Amazon can verify you are who you say you are. If you are. If you are a company, a registered company, you'll need to give your company registration details.

If you're VAT registered, you'll need to give your VAT details. By the way, it's also totally fine to be a sole trader. That's one of the options you can set up.

But you know, if any of these apply, you need to have all your details to hand. You need a phone number Amazon can contact you on. You need a bank account detail so you can get paid.

Just a quick heads up that Amazon will want to verify both you and your identity. They might also want to verify some of your company details and they will almost certainly want to verify your charge method.

So all of these are things that can add a little bit of time to the setup process. So just making you aware of these up front, you'll then want to think about your fulfillment method.

So are you going to fulfill your orders yourself and send stock into Amazon to do it for you, which is called filled by Amazon or fba? Or are you going to fill orders yourself or are you going to do a Combination of both. If you have the capacity to do that, I think it's great.

But most people do start out with one or the other and this is a key decision you need to make before you set up your product listings.

So the next thing you would do is set up your listings and I'm just going to talk through briefly the things you need to list your products because I think that's really helpful for you to know as well.

So you need well, optimized product description text and I've spoken about this in lots and lots of other episodes, so I'm not going to repeat absolutely everything here because there's so much you can go back to if you need it. But you basically need a title for your product listing. You need five bullet points and some descriptive text.

And if you decide to apply for Amazon Brand Registry, which if you have a trademark I definitely recommend, you can also create a content and then you'll need a string of Amazon specific search terms or keywords which are used in the back of your listing to help with SEO and being found. So that's, that's the tech side. You'll also need some great product photos.

The key thing to know is that your main product image needs to be your product on a white background with no additional text, no props, no nothing. Literally just your product on a white background, not showing anything that isn't sold of it. You can't have logos or anything else on that image.

And then I also suggest having a variety of lifestyle images and infographics depending on what your product is. And a variety of images really help to sell your product. You need to have a brand name.

And if you are a registered brand, if you have a registered trademark, you need to make sure that the brand name you put on your products is an exact match with your trademark because that will be the name that goes into brand registry. And if these don't match, you are going to have problems further down the line. You're also going to need barcodes.

This is something that often trips people up. They don't always realize that you need this because depending where you're selling your products now, you may or may not have them.

The only place you can buy a barCode from is GS1, so it's gs1.org Note that if you sell the same product but you have different variations. So let's say you sell a product that comes in five colours, that's five barcodes, that's a barcode for each. You can apply for an exemption.

So for example, if you have a handmade product, you won't need to barcode, but you will need to apply this for Amazon and they'll need to preview to list without it. And if you are selling a book, you'll need an ISBN other than a barcode.

And you get that from Nielsen, I believe, but that's something you can look up. So that's what you need to start listing your products. And then once you've got your listing set up, you either need to set up shipping settings.

So if you're going to be dispatching products yourself, you need to tell Amazon if you have a handling time or whether you can dispatch products the same day. You need to let them know what shipping provider you'll be using, so how long delivery will take.

As a little aside, I always suggest offering free shipping if you can, because I think that's quite nice and it kind of matches the prime offer. And if you are using Amazon fba, then you will need to set up a shipping plan to send in your stock.

And to do this, you basically need to let Amazon know what you're sending, where you're sending it from, and the sizes and weights for each item, and any larger boxes you're sending in. You then get labels to print. You can arrange for your stock to be collected or you can drop it off.

And then when I say drop it off, I don't mean an Amazon warehouse else. Amazon's preferred shipping provider is ups. So you'd go to a UPS location, drop off your boxes and they would get sent into Amazon.

And then once you've done all of that, and I'm aware I'm rattling through this, but that said, this podcast is kept at a reasonable, reasonable length. I promise I can go into much more detail on any of this. I've got a lot of episodes covering all aspects of getting set up on Amazon.

If you have a particular question and there's something you need to know, you can always let me know. I'm very happy if you send me a message and say, vicki, I need help with FB and I can direct you to the right podcast episode.

So never be afraid to ask that.

Once your listings are set up and you know you've got and you've got them set up and you've got your stock, whether you're fulfilling yourself or you've got stock in the warehouse, you then need to do something to drive traffic to your listings. I can't say this enough. You won't make sales unless you work at it. You can't sell a product People can't find.

And when you first list your product on Amazon, it is quite unusual that people will find your product straight away themselves. Even if they type in your brand name. You just, you might not show up straight away. And this is a hard one to tell people.

And nobody really likes this. And I can see why Amazon's algorithm works, that it rewards sales. And until you start getting some sales, it's really hard to get visibility.

So you might want to set up Amazon sponsored products campaigns where you are, you know, you're paying for traffic. You might want to do some sort of exile advertising. You might want to use your email list to get people over to your listing.

You might, you know, whatever it is you do, you will, you will unfortunately need to do something to get sales on Amazon. And that's going to be really key. Now I'm going to talk through some of the common mistakes I see when people get set up.

So number one is using placeholder copy.

So setting up a listing and thinking, okay, I'm just going to put in, you know, some placeholder text and I'll write my real product description later and I'm just going to put this text in for now. Sometimes on Amazon, it can be really hard to change things. Once it's in there, you can change everything.

You can change your title, you can change your bullets, you can change your description.

However, information can get locked in Amazon, which means that once that information is locked in, sometimes you have to go through a bit of a process to get it changed. I'm doing this for a client now where we just want to change a product title and there's a lot of back and forth of seller support.

It's a massive hassle. So if you have your final product text and you're able to use it initially when you set up your listings, I promise you, you won't regret it.

It will save you a lot of work in the future. Another common mistake I see is not having a clear usp.

So a listing that's very generic, very similar to other listings in that category, it's going to be really hard, especially as a new listing without reviews, for someone to choose you over another established listing that's got lots of reviews. If they can't see why your product's better, why they should buy yours, not theirs. That has to be really, really clear.

And this is something I often see. Another common mistake I see is not having great images or not having many images.

So you can actually add eight images to an Amazon product listing and you can add A video to each product as well. I fairly often see products where there's only one image. So there's that one main image on the white background. That's really not enough.

I often see listings where it's just all of the images of the product shot from different angles. And that's great. You do need to see for some products, definitely you need to see them from different angles.

But actually, if you don't have lifestyle images, you don't have infographics, you don't have images that really sell your product, I do think you're missing out. And actually, while we speak of images, something else I see quite a lot is where the main image is not on a white background.

And sometimes this gets through. Even though this is Amazon's policy, you might find that you don't put your main image on a white background. But it's fine.

Amazon still approves your listing and up it goes.

However, it's a ticking time bomb because as soon as they realize, and most usually they do realize, that actually your main image isn't compliant, they will take your listing down and then you'll have to go back and rectify it. So getting all these things right from the start is really important and it will save you so much time.

Another common mistake I see is not doing any keyword research, not having any keywords in your listing, not using the search terms field. Keywords are really important because Amazon is basically a big search engine.

So if you are not using the words and phrases people are searching for in your product listing, it's going to be really hard for them to find it. If you're not sure what those words and phrases are, you can do some keyword research.

There are paid for tools out there, so Jungle Scout is one that I use, but there are lots of others.

You can also use the Amazon search bar to get an idea of what people are looking for, but it's really, really important that your listings are optimized. Well, search because. And even though that isn't the only thing, because as I've said before, your listing can be amazingly optimized for search.

But chances are you're going to be using similar keywords to other existing product listings in the same niche. And those listings will come up higher than you because they've already got sales and they've already got reviews.

However, even if at the beginning you're paying for ads to get traffic to your Amazon listings, you don't want to be doing that forever.

And having a listing that's well, optimized for search means that as you start getting those sales, you will then start to move up the organic rankings.

So you will get to the point where when someone types in a keyword relevant to your product, you've got enough, you know, you've got enough sales history and reviews for Amazon to go, oh, this product's really relevant. Let's put it high in the search results. And you can and will get there, but only if you've got those keywords search terms in your listing already.

Another issue I see is not setting clear delivery or handling times.

So if you know, for example, that it's going to take you a couple of days to get your product ready to ship, if you know you can't send things out the same day, don't have zero days as your handling time, add a couple of days to give you leeway. Amazon will start to penalise you for late deliveries. Same with the shipping service.

Don't tell everyone that you're going to be sending things first class. If you're actually going to use second and everything's going to arrive late again, Amazon will penalise you for that.

So make sure you're really upfront about what you can deliver. Most of the time, I think customers won't necessarily mind waiting for a product, but they will mind.

If you tell them it's going to come in two days and it's five days and it hasn't arrived, then they're going to care, then they're going to complain to Amazon and then Amazon's going to complain to you. So be realistic when you set those things, not using Brand Registry and all the available features is something else. I see.

If you have a registered trademark, Brand Registry is free. You get to use a content. You can set up a store, you can use Amazon vine, you can use different types of promotion. It's really worth doing, doing.

So if you have a trademark and you're not registered of Brand Registry, do it now. It's really, it's really worth doing again. It's one of those things you're not going to regret.

It won't cost you anything, it will enhance your listing.

And the final thing I see is people not looking into the fees and the margins and then getting all set up on Amazon and then realizing they're not actually making a profit. And you can avoid this by, well, one, looking at the fees and two, looking at your pricing.

Because I've definitely seen this where someone said to me, oh, Vicky, I'm not actually making any money on Amazon. And then I look and Say, well, actually you're charging a lot less for your product than other similar products in your category.

But actually your product has got these features, which means you could be charging a lot, a lot more. You don't have to charge the same price as you do on your website. I'm going to say that up front.

Not everyone will agree with me here, but actually it's quite common for people to sell on Amazon for slightly more than they do on their website to account for the fees. And that's okay, especially if you're using FBA and people are going to be getting faster, you know, cheaper delivery than they are on your website.

You can charge a little bit more if you need to, because at the end of the day, it's your business and it needs to work for you. You need to be. You need to be making money.

And if Amazon's not going to make you money either, you need to change something so it is, or it's not the right place for you. Because if you're not making money, you know, and you're running a business, that's. That's the whole point, isn't it?

So I hope you found this episode helpful. Just to remind you, you don't have to figure out any of this alone. Download my free checklist. I promise that's a really good place to start.

It will take you through all of this and I have power hours available. So if you've listened and you have any questions, you want me to go through any of this with you, we can spend an hour on Google Meet.

I promise you we can get such a lot done in an hour. I can help with any aspect of the setup process and I also have a launch package if you want me to take this off your hands completely.

You can hire me to do all of your Amazon setup and get you off to the best possible start.

And you can find information about all of this on the in the show notes or you can go to my website, which is vickyweinberg.com so thank you for bearing with me. Thank you for listening all the way to the end of this episode. I really, really appreciate it.

Have a lovely rest of your day whenever you're listening and I will be back soon with another episode.

Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode. Do remember that you can get the full back catalogue and lots of free resources on my website, vickywineberg. Com.

Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.