Starting an Amazon Fashion Jewelry brand doesn’t have to be difficult!
There’s no getting around it, e-commerce is Amazon. Because of Amazon, a significant amount of retail consumers expect 2-day shipping and free returns. Some customers won’t even purchase anything online without 2-day shipping. If you are an Amazon Prime member, this situation has probably happened to you! Many times, when you are purchasing something off of Amazon, you are actually purchasing from a third-party Amazon Marketplace seller. In this guide, we will go through the high-level steps on getting started with selling on the Amazon marketplace. Then, click through the detail links to get the illustrated how-to for each step.
Key terms in this section:
- Amazon Prime: The Amazon service where customers can receive, among other things, free 2-day shipping.
- Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA): The shipping plan where you send your products to Amazon and they send it to the end customer. This is the most common way to receive Prime shipping
- Merchant Fulfillment/ Fulfillment by Merchant: The shipping plan where the seller sends the product to the customer themselves without using Amazon’s fulfillment infrastructure.
- Seller Fulfillment Prime: The option to fulfill 2-day shipping as the merchant and bypass Amazon’s fulfillment service
- Buy Box: The box on the screen on the product page that has the buy button. Only one merchant can have the Buy Box at one time. Beating out other sellers to get the Buy Box is often called “winning the Buy Box”.
- Purchase an Amazon Professional Selling Plan
There are two types of Amazon selling accounts, an Individual account, and a Professional account. The individual account is free but has an additional cost per unit when selling and has a monthly sales volume limit. The professional account has no limit but costs $39.99 a month. The idea is that individual accounts are targeted for regular people just selling things they have lying around the house, a few times a month. The professional account is geared toward business owners that want to establish a sales channel on Amazon. While it would be great to start with an individual account and then work up to a professional account, unbranded or self-branded jewelry is one of the restricted categories of products that requires a professional account. So in the journey of starting a jewelry brand on Amazon, a professional selling account is required.
2. List your product
While listing on other e-commerce platforms like eBay or Shopify is as straightforward as just adding pictures and descriptions to a page, Amazon has a few more steps. More specifically, Amazon is only expecting only one product page for every unique product. For example, say you’re listing a brand new iPhone X on eBay. You would simply create your own listing with your own descriptions and your own pictures and set your price. In search results, your listing would show up alongside thousands of other similar listings written by thousands of other people. Amazon does not allow these repeat listings. Instead, if you want to sell your iPhone X on the Amazon marketplace, you will find the existing master listing and simply list yourself as an available seller of that item. You will not be able to edit the listing unless you have “page control” and for a popular product like the iPhone X, it will likely be impossible for an individual seller to get that control. In our case, since we are establishing our own brand, we will not be looking to list as an available seller on an existing item but rather we will create a completely new listing with our own branding.
Find out Amazon product listing guide here.
3. Ship your product
There are two main ways products are fulfilled to end consumers: merchant fulfillment or fulfillment by Amazon. Merchant fulfilled is probably what you are used to. In this plan, you physically box up your own item, buy shipping, add labels and send the package via UPS or another shipping company. Fulfillment by Amazon, more commonly referred to as FBA, is a little different. If your product is registered to be fulfilled using FBA, you will first send your product to Amazon and they store it in their warehouse. When the item is purchased, they will package it and send it to the customer without you having to do anything. The catch, of course, is that they will charge you an additional fee for the service. Also, note that FBA is the most common way for the customer to receive Amazon Prime shipping, Amazon’s free 2-day shipping plan. Yes, there are options for Seller Fulfilled Prime but that is a more advanced topic for another date.
While it may seem easier to first dip your toe into the Amazon Marketplace by using merchant fulfillment, there are many considerations that new sellers will have to contemplate when choosing these shipping options. Because you will have no reviews, it will be difficult to get visibility in the search rankings. Even worse, even when your product page shows up, you will not show up in the “Buy Box” on the right-hand side of the main product page. You will instead only be listed as an additional seller, even if you are the only seller! Using FBA can mitigate these problems to a certain extent. We will do a deep dive into this topic in our Amazon fulfillment section.
While this can be a lot of information to absorb, this is just a brief overview of the Amazon selling process. The process can be difficult but you will find it rewarding once you make that first sale and well on your way to building a sustainable fashion brand. If you have any questions, be sure to leave us a comment below and we will try to answer as soon as possible!