Amazon is the world’s largest online eCommerce platform created in 1994. The company was originally a bookseller but throughout its 24-year existence, has expanded to sell a wide variety of consumer goods, even offering its own electronic devices such as the Kindle e-book reader, and Kindle Fire tablet and TV. With approximately 18 international Amazon sites Amazon offers consumers the ability to find millions of products from across the world at their fingertips. As a buyer, when signing up for Amazon, you can choose to sign up for a free account or for a paid Amazon Prime subscription. Amazon Prime is a $99 a year subscription plan that offers buyers with perks such as free two-day shipping, music streaming, photo storage and a video service similar to Netflix. This plan is significantly more common, especially within the Amazon US marketplace, as 63% of US Amazon users subscribe to prime.
Before you register as a seller on any of Amazons marketplaces, you have two subscription plans to choose from, Individual or Professional. The individual seller subscription plan is geared toward sellers who plan to sell a maximum of 40 items per month. With this plan, Amazon charges sellers $0.99 for each item sold in addition to basic referral fees, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) fees as well as variable closing fees. The alternative plan, or the Professional plan, is geared toward sellers who sell more than 40 items per month. Instead of charging $0.99 per item sold, those with the Professional plan pay $39.99 per month. While both plans allow you to let Amazon handle all customer service, shipping and fulfillment processes, offers more benefits. The professional plan allows sellers to customize shipping rates, gives access to different seller tools, allows you to offer special promotions, and most importantly top placement on product detail pages.
Before selling your first product on Amazon, you have to set yourself up for success by utilizing Amazon Marketplace product research tools. At Algopix, our Amazon Global market research tool enables sellers with the ability to analyze products individually or in bulk analysis up to 3000 products, across 9 international Amazon marketplaces. It all starts with a product identifier, such as a UPC or EAN. Simply enter the product identifier into our system, and Algopix will analyze the data for each market selected, using our proprietary algorithms. Our system will provide valuable insights regarding expenses, competition, and demand as well as a recommendation based on all the data collected. When it comes to expenses, Algopix will provide a detailed analysis of the expenses related to selling your products. These expenses include items such as FBA fees, referral fees, variable closing fees, Paypal fees and taxes and makes calculating margins significantly easier. Algopix provides information on the level of competition based on the number of sellers who offer the product for each selected market. Algopix provides the demand level based on the volume of sales of the product from the last month, in each market selected. Amazon marketplace research lets you as a seller know what products to sell, at what price, and in what market, which results in lower risks and higher profits, setting you up to have a successful eBay business.
