Every day, hundreds of thousands of customers visit Amazon and place millions of orders. Some are loyal to specific brands and are looking only for those brands when they open their browsers. Many others, however, know what type of product reviews they want but don’t have a strong preference towards any particular brand.

Thanks to Amazon’s A-to-z Guarantee, customers know that they can safely try out products from brands that they aren’t familiar with because their purchases are protected by Amazon. If anything goes wrong with the shipping process or the product, or even if they simply aren’t satisfied, customers have 30 days to return their item for a full refund. With this in mind, there isn’t much risk for them to try a new brand.

So how do you entice a customer to choose your brand and product over the rest? There are of course plenty of factors that can help to convert a potential customer into a buyer including keyword optimization, a clear title, and a competitive price. But one of the most important factors of all is product reviews.

When presented with a handful of similar options, a product’s rating will often be the deciding factor for many consumers. Product ratings with a higher number of product reviews are considered to be more legitimate and easier to trust than those with just a few. For this reason, Amazon sellers are always looking for new ways to bolster their product reviews.

Many methods used to gain product reviews aren’t legal

Unfortunately, most of the methods that Amazon sellers have come up with in the past are not allowed within Amazon’s Terms of Service. Amazon has strict rules against generating product reviews that are either inauthentic or left in exchange for some kind of compensation.

For example, paying for product reviews or agreeing to exchange positive reviews with other sellers is strictly prohibited. These methods are obvious enough breaches of the rules as they are designed around boosting review counts with fake reviews. But did you know that it is also illegal to offer free products or discounts in exchange for positive reviews?

Anything that is explicitly designed to incentivize positive reviews is against Amazon’s rules. Even when you ask for a review using a legal method like an email campaign, you aren’t allowed to ask for a “positive review”; you can only ask for an honest review. With such serious rules in place, it is best to stick to legal methods of acquiring product reviews to avoid any account penalties or suspensions.

Email Campaigns are legal and effective

The vast majority of customers will not leave a product review; many don’t have the time and many don’t even think to. Unfortunately, there are a lot of consumers that only think to leave a review if they are dissatisfied. If they are happy with their order and it works as expected, they don’t think to say anything about it.

This is what makes email campaigns so effective. A gentle reminder that product reviews help both Amazon sellers and other Amazon customers is often enough to push a buyer in the right direction to leave a review. Sending these emails after every purchase is a great way to generate product reviews, but doing so manually would take up a ton of valuable time.

Fortunately, there is a better way. Services like FeedbackWhiz help Amazon sellers to fully automate the process. Unique email campaigns can be built for each product, and smart tags like [PRODUCT NAME] will populate with order-specific details so that they come out looking customized without having to be built one at a time. Once you have your campaigns set up, they will run like clockwork and work with every sale, leaving your time freed up to use on other matters.

Sending out the first email right away

Instead of jumping right into a call to action, one method to use when creating an automated email campaign is to send out an early email just to establish a rapport with your customer. This email can be scheduled to go out as soon as an order is processed or shipped on Amazon. For example, the first email might look something like this:

Hello,

Thank you for your purchase of [PRODUCT NAME]! We are glad that you decided to give our product a try and we’re sure you are going to love it!

Your order is currently being prepared and should be shipped out in no time. You can use this link to track its progress! [SHIPMENT TRACKING LINK]

In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to reach out and send me a message if you have any questions about this order or anything else in our product line. We here at [COMPANY NAME] are always here to help.

Thanks,

[SELLER NAME]

Asking for a product review when the time is right

Now that you’ve established a relationship in the first email, you can make a call to action in the second. Before sending out the second email, make sure that the customer has had enough time with their product to actually have the chance to formulate an opinion on it.

For example, a new toothbrush will be used daily right away, so a buyer will likely know within a week how they like the feel of it. On the other hand, you might want to wait two or three weeks before asking for a product review on a set of crafting beads as it may take a little while for the buyer to have time to work on a new project.

With FeedbackWhiz, you can schedule emails to go out in specific time intervals such as “two weeks after the item was received”. Each product in your catalog can be customized with unique email templates and automated schedules.

Here’s an example of the second email:

Hello,

It’s [SELLER NAME] again! Hope everything is going well. Our records indicate that you received your [PRODUCT NAME] two weeks ago. We’d love to know what you think of it!

Product reviews are an extremely valuable part of the Amazon experience. Feedback helps customers to make more educated shopping decisions, and it helps sellers know what we are doing right and wrong. If you have the time, please leave a product review here. [PRODUCT REVIEW LINK]

And as we mentioned in our last email, we here at [COMPANY NAME] are always available if you need anything. Let us know!

Thanks,

[SELLER NAME]

Of course, these templates are just examples. Depending on your brand and the products you sell, it might make more sense for your templates to include fun images and GIFs or detailed instructions on how your customers can use their new product. Regardless of how you set up your automated email campaign, consistently asking customers for product reviews will lead to more reviews coming in. And those extra reviews could be what separates you from your competitors.

Overview

As an Amazon Seller, the last thing you want is having your account suspended or even banned. Your valuable business coming to a screeching halt and your income depleting to a stand-still is every Seller’s worst nightmare! Yet we see it happening all too often to the best of us.

A suspension or a ban doesn’t happen out of the blue. There are always underlying and crucial reasons behind it. Some serious mistakes can breakdown a successful business.

So what’s the solution? Prevention is better than cure!

The Requirement

The need for effective functional, growth and development solutions in online business and eCommerce through a refined, revolutionary and winning approach is utmost crucial. Understanding, applying and maintaining this dynamic, whilst obtaining consistent success with valuable resources, tools, knowledge, and a results-driven approach is what is truly necessary.

Here are some fundamentally common reasons why even the best, most profitable and highly reputed of accounts on Amazon can get suspended or banned when one least expects it:

• Poor product quality
• Selling products that are restricted or prohibited by Amazon
• Opening a new account when the old account was suspended
• Shipping related issues
• Creating more than one Seller account to sell the same products
• Poor performance metrics
• Negative customer reviews or soliciting for good reviews
• Illegal or banned substances
• Not meeting the product listing guidelines or uploading inaccurate listing
• Dangerous goods
• Intoxicants or narcotics of any kind
• Copyright infringement
• Poor customer service
• Canceling orders

Now, given the above critical areas that can cause Amazon account banned or suspension, it is important to maintain healthy account metrics. It all boils down to that! How do you accomplish this? We discuss below.

Healthy Account Metrics

So how does one determine a healthy, strong, viable and effective set of metrics that adhere and align with Amazon’s TOS (Terms of Service) policies, without infringing the rules, guidelines, and protocols outlined for Sellers?

Amazon considers the following stipulated metrics and parameters that regulate and robustly determine a Seller’s account legitimacy and its health:

• Order defect rates
• Valid track rates
• Cancellation rates
• Buyer message-response time

According to Amazon, all sellers should be working towards achieving and maintaining a level of customer service that meets the performance targets. Failure to meet these targets does not necessarily put your seller account in negative standing, but failure to improve may negatively affect your account.

• Order defect rate: < 1%
• Pre-fulfilment cancel rate: < 2.5%
• Late shipment rate: < 4%

These are baseline goals. Sellers with exemplary performance have the opportunity to distinguish themselves to buyers through the feedback rating that appears next to each of their listings.

Most sellers are exceeding these targets, so the better your performance, the better your chance of building a stronger, more competitive business. Amazon state you should monitor your customer metrics closely on a regular basis. This is because the report informs you of the following:

• Your Customer Metrics indicate how you are doing with respect to customer satisfaction. Monitor your metrics frequently so you can spot and resolve operational problems promptly. Excessive order defect rates (negative feedback, A-to-Z Guarantee claims, and chargeback) can cause account suspensions and even account closures.
• Check your feedback and A-to-Z Guarantee claim pages daily, and proactively resolve any issues.

Getting Help

In business and eCommerce in general, time is money. What you save on time, you directly save and increase in money. Thus, Urtasker.com has accomplished this by providing businesses with highly trained and skilled E-commerce specialists that handle the daily tasks, processes and crucial functions of various aspects of the business – virtually and in real-time from anywhere in the world!

This has helped business owners gain more time to work on growing their businesses, whilst seeing increased productivity, decreased downtime, lowered costs and unparalleled profit generation.

As a truly unique, professional and globally relevant eCommerce end-to-end business solutions provider, Urtasker.com takes immense pride in our passion for helping its clients reach their goals.

It doesn’t require heavy upfront fees or long-term contracts/commitments. Its rates are very affordable, and its clients are rapidly growing small-medium sized businesses at a dramatic rate.

 Urtasker’s elite team of eCommerce and Amazon Specialist and Experts will help Sellers with:

• Free account audit
• Provide a plan of action
• Trained team is aware of all prohibited activities
• Manage and monitor performance metrics
• Follow-ups and consistent optimization
• Customer service

In Conclusion, one of the biggest trending Amazon seller concerns is Seller Account banned or suspension scenarios. It is no doubt the most dreaded issue for Amazon sellers.

The first approach should take to protect the Amazon seller account from hackers is to prevent suspensions and bans altogether. Most sellers get in trouble because they don’t stay on top of their customer metrics.

The consequence often is that you lose the Buy Box share for some or all products, losing your account altogether to suspension or worse such as a ban! It’s always advisable to save time, money and hassle by enlisting the help of a professional E-commerce specialist agency that knows exactly what areas your business could use help in.

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Overview

Best Amazon conferences 2020 for sellers are one of the best ways to stay aware of what is changing in the market. Whether you are an existing high-volume Amazon seller or a beginning seller just starting. One of the best ways to get a jump start your business is by attending an Amazons seller conference.

With multiple online sources like blogs, podcasts, forums, and webinars to get daily updated information and stay current with the Amazon selling market. The sheer volume of information out there can be overwhelming for Amazon sellers and difficult to keep up with daily.

Moreover, Amazon targeted conferences allow vendors to show you demos of what they offer and also the latest technology and techniques available to help you expand and increase your business margins and marketing strategies.

Besides the fact that these kinds of conferences will throw light on how to be an Amazon Product Listing Specialist but make things clear about growing the Amazon business.

Here is a list of the best Amazon seller conferences to attend in 2020:

Amazon Professional Sellers Meetup and Workshop
ASGT is one of the most prolific Amazon Seller events in the world. It focuses on delivering actionable advice that’s relevant and tactical.
Learn the latest techniques to find profitable products, source effectively, optimize your listings, improve your PPC, do better quality control.

The event promises to provide Sellers the most value-oriented content with actionable steps and laser-focused strategies.

https://www.asgtg.com/

When: March 3, 2020

The Prosper Show

Prosper is an annual conference focused on sharing best practice education and providing significant networking opportunities for established Amazon sellers.

Prosper will be held in Las Vegas at the Westgate Hotel, March 23-25, 2020.

Aimed at online sellers seeking to improve their business on Amazon, this conference features several ex-Amazon leaders and CEOs/General Managers from leading Amazon marketplace solution providers using workshops and seminars to help sellers learn how to build better online businesses.

This one of the best Amazon conferences 2020 leads with education first, while also providing sellers with access to dozens of leading solution/service providers in the Amazon ecosystem. This conference is ideal for the established Amazon online seller seeking to learn how to build its business more profitably while meeting leading solution and service providers that can help sellers scale their businesses more efficiently.

https://www.prospershow.com

When: March 23-25, 2020

Where: Las Vegas, Nevada

SellerCon 2020

SellerCon is The Largest FBA Seller Event. It provides sellers with Up-to-date & Actionable Selling Strategies.

The world of Amazon is always changing. In 2020, Amazon sales are predicted to exceed $400 billion. To stay ahead, you need the latest strategies, tactics, and resources used by top Amazon sellers around the world.

Over the past 6 years, 15,000+ Amazon sellers from around the world joined SellerCon live to learn how to scale their brands.

https://www.sellercon.com/

When: June 21-23, 2020

IRCE @ RetailX

IRCE promises to deliver educational sessions on the subjects that matter to you the most.

What makes these sessions unique is that they’re curated, which implies that IRCE’s speakers are not only well-informed but prepared with actionable, insightful presentations for attendees to learn from.

Past events have included advanced workshops on FBA (fulfillment by Amazon), Amazon listing strategies, and whether to work as a third or first-party seller on the website.
https://www.irce.com/

When: June 9th – 11th

ASD Market Week

This conference is designed to help you find merchandise that will set your Amazon store inventory apart.

From general stores to fashion boutiques, this is the wholesale buying event where any small to large-sized e-commerce retailer can find unique stock for their business.

What’s more, the conference is also the home to the Source Direct exhibition, a B2B show for wholesalers, retailers, and distributors to purchase wholesale products directly from foreign manufacturers.

https://www.asdonline.com/

When: March 22 – March 25th, 2020

Where:  Las Vegas, Nevada

Sellers Summit 2020

Whether you sell on Amazon, Shopify, Walmart or your own online store, you’ll learn a lot of new strategies by attending ecomChicago.

The conference features three jam-packed days of leading e-commerce speakers, vendor presentations, and tactics you can implement to streamline, organize, or grow your web store.

Organizers have even made arrangements with software creators to give demos of their offerings. As a result, you’ll discover new tools that can help you automate some of your tasks or new ways to grow your e-commerce sales.

https://sellerssummit.com/

When: Fri, May 15, 2020 – Sun, May 17, 2020

South Florida FBA Amazon Sellers

This is a free Meetup group designed to hold meetings every month and throughout the year. A powerful conference-style gathering where in addition to basic and advanced Amazon seller tactics, they cover several different forms of lead generation, funnels, and methods to ultimately lead to increased sales on Amazon.

When: Events run all year round at various venues throughout Florida.

Check the link to see upcoming meetups: https://www.meetup.com/South-Florida-FBA/events/

New York Amazon Seller Meetup

This is one of the biggest Meetup events for Advanced Amazon Sellers. Definitely not to be missed!

Amazon & Multichannel experts share on the stage powerful strategies and shed light on new ways to achieve sales success on the largest sales platform in the world.

The largest meetup that occurs every 2nd month.

https://www.meetup.com/New-York-Amazon-Seller-Meetup/

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Paradoxical as it may seem, this is a real example when in 1 day 50 product units on Amazon were sold, but profit is kept negative. The reason is the Amazon Storage fees. They are withdrawn once a month and most sellers neglect them when calculating their profit. Storage fees are a good example of difficult to calculate Amazon fees, let’s examine them closely.

Sellers who work in the FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon) program must pay storage fees for products stored in Amazon’s warehouses. The current prices for US-based warehouses vary by time of the year and product size (standard or oversize products):

• January-September: $0.69 per cubic foot standard size and $0.48 for oversize products.
• October-December: $2.40 per cubic foot standard size and $1.20 for oversize products.

Additionally, there are huge long-term storage fees that are applied to items stored longer than 6 or 12 months as of the Inventory Cleanup date ($11.25 and $22.50 per cubic foot respectively). September 15, 2018, these fees were changed from a semi-annual basis to a monthly basis.

The fees are calculated based on the combined volume of the products and sellers stocks in an Amazon FBA warehouse. This volume, however, changes dynamically since products are shipped out every day. This makes calculating exact storage fees quite hard.

There are services that give users the actual real-time information. For example, SellerBoard takes numbers, which were charged by Amazon, rather than calculating them based on the volume of the products stored. They are automatically included in profit calculation, along with the number of other types of fees charged by Amazon.

Besides Storage fees, Amazon sellers have a difficult time calculating returns correctly, so usually, they are just being ignored. There are two main reasons for that: «they don’t really matter» or «it’s not clear how to count them».

The bad news is that returns do matter. The good news: SellerBoard takes all returns into account automatically, let’s see how in our example below:

It’s important to know that returns contain not only processing costs and non-refundable costs but also adjustment of sales and costs. Let’s say you sold 1 unit in January. If the client returns it in February you should do changes: give back money to the buyer, adjust Amazon fees and more.

So how do you calculate returns correctly? Let’s describe all of the components:

• Product (-1207.99): money refunded to customers for the purchases
• Refund commission (-31.60): Amazon fee for returns handling
• Commission (+157.98): Amazon returned us the referral fee, that they withheld upon sale
• Shipping / Shipping chargeback (+28.29/-33.68): refund for the shipping to the customer and to shipping chargeback refund to the seller.
• Product cost (+316.17): if the returned product is “sellable”, SellerBoard will calculate the COGS with a plus sign. When the product was sold, COGS for the units on Amazon was calculated with a minus.

If the units on Amazon are returned broken, its cost will not be calculated with a plus. In summary, it’s much easier to use special software that visualizes all of your data, takes all amazon fees into account automatically, supports changing buying prices as well as monthly or fixed costs (e.g. virtual assistant, or photoshoot).
All of this and many more features you can discover while using SellerBoard. For all users, we offer 2 months of free sellerboard.com use with this special link: http://bit.ly/2MZXI5F

Overview

E-commerce is one of the best and most effective ways to earn windfall returns on investment. The Amazon online platform offers the perfect tool to attract a great number of qualified leads. The digital arena is full of online marketing tools that can be harnessed to generate many online leads.

Social media advertising, search engine optimization, online forums, press release sites, PPC campaigns, influencer marketing, using the Amazon algorithm in your favor, ranking products high, and business directories are just some of the few online tools that can be used to funnel the maximum number of visitors to your Amazon product listing.

However, when it comes to hitting high profit and revenues, what are some of the core steps an Amazon seller must take in order to make the dream happen?

So, let’s dive in with some strategies on how to become an Amazon Product Listing Specialist, shall we?

• Standing Out
• Knowing Your Competitors
• Staying Informed on the Global Scenario
• Building Amazon Storefront
• Managing Inventory
• Selecting Products with Potential Keywords
• Influencer Marketing Strategy
• More Outsourcing

Out of these critical factors, we will discuss a few of them in detail below.

Know Your Competitors

 Knowledge is power! Being aware of the “market landscape” and knowing who your competitors are and what they are offering, is a powerful weapon!

Knowing your competitors inside out can, in turn, help you create your products, services, and marketing in a way that is stronger and far more powerful than what’s out there currently. Moreover, it will enable you to set your prices competitively and help you to counter rival marketing campaigns with your own unique and effective initiatives.

Constantly keeping an eye on your competition will provide you a wealth of knowledge and an ocean of information that gives you an effective ‘vantage point’ to make your products or services more ‘appealing’ and visible to the same audience that you and your competition are competing for.

Now, let’s come to the tactics. What should you know about your competitors? Here are a few areas you can analyze and stay abreast with:

• The products or services they provide and how they market them to customers
• Their brand and design values
• Whether they innovate – business methods as well as products
• Their staff numbers and the caliber of staff that they attract
• The prices they charge
• How they distribute and deliver
• The devices they employ to enhance customer loyalty and what backup services they offer
• How they use IT – for example if they’re technology-aware and offer a website and email

Global Scenario

This means keeping in constant touch with what’s happening globally in the E-commerce industry in general, and the Amazon platform in particular, on a global scale.

Amazon is an ever-evolving organism; a unique ecosystem and habitat that is constantly changing and developing with the metamorphosis of the global E-commerce trends, economy, supply and demand, and consumer buying patterns.

You need to make sure you are well-informed always of the ongoing and happenings that occur if you want to succeed as an Amazon Listing Expert.

Keep an eye out for the latest trends, news, consumer buying patterns, what’s hot and what’s not, and how various global economies and markets are shaping.

Read magazines, articles online, attend seminars and expos, conferences and summits if you can, and stay abreast by watching the news.

Building Amazon StoreFront

There are many reasons as to why brands should build an Amazon Store.

An Amazon Store enables your brand to create an immersive virtual shopping experience that can be used to exclusively showcase your brand and products.

These stores are also mobile responsive, making it easier for customers to discover and learn about other products in your catalog.

Amazon Stores also lower the barriers to a shopper’s purchase intent & drives incremental sales and lift across your catalog.

• Develop Brand Equity & Promote Shopper Loyalty
• Capitalize on Internal & External Traffic Sources
• Boost Organic Ranking & Increase Sales
• Promote New Products & Educate Prospects

You can create an Amazon StoreFront by following these steps:

• Register Your Brand with Amazon
• Create Your Store Homepage & Select Template
• Build Out Your Amazon Store Pages
• Add Content Tiles to Each Page
• Upload Your ASINs
• Submit for Review & Publish

Outsourcing More

Outsourcing is critical! Whether you’re a business online or offline, you can never overlook the importance of getting an “extra set of hands” to take the burden off you! As an Amazon product listing specialist, there can sometimes be a lack of self-awareness. Entrepreneurs sometimes fall into the habit of micromanaging and not delegating or outsourcing work they can’t handle.

They try to do everything that they possibly can to cut costs, but really, in the long run, they should have outsourced the things that they are not good at and focused on their strengths. If you are aiming for multiple targets at once, you are very unlikely to hit one!

Whilst putting together well-structured and perfect virtual assistants team creates a level of flexibility and efficiency that is unlikely to be achieved any other way, pulling together the right team with the right skills at the right time require detailed planning. Finding the right balance takes time, trust and patience.

Hence, this is why at Urtasker, we believe that your Amazon Product Listing is the bread and butter of your Amazon business. Our skilled Amazon E-commerce experts and Business Process specialist are able to oversee everything from PPC, Keywords Optimization, Ranking, Algorithm, Amazon TOS (Terms of Service), Campaign Management and other vital areas that will enable you to thrive as a successful Amazon Product Listing Specialist, and also benefit your business dramatically!

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Introduction

Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue – over US$500 billion according to the Fortune Global 500 list in 2018 – as well as the largest private employer in the world with 2.3 million employees. It is a publicly-traded family-owned business, as the company is controlled by the Walton family.

As of January 31, 2018, Walmart has 11,718 stores and clubs in 28 countries, operating under 59 different names.

The company operates under the name Walmart in the United States and Canada, as Walmart de México y Centroamérica in Mexico and Central America, as Asda in the United Kingdom, as the Seiyu Group in Japan, and as Best Price in India. It has wholly-owned operations in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Canada.

Walmart was the largest U.S. grocery retailer in 2016, and 62.3 percent of Walmart’s US$478.614 billion sales came from U.S. operations

The company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1972. By 1988, Walmart was the most profitable retailer in the U.S. and by October 1989, it had become the largest in terms of revenue.

E-commerce Business Strategy

Walmart has been offering e-commerce business strategy to its customers for some time now, but it’s only relatively recently they have been taking things seriously and looking at avenues to really innovate the ways in which their products are accessed online.

Recent highly publicized acquisitions of Jet.com, Hayneedle.com, Shoes.com, Moosejaw, and Modcloth.com, have also demonstrated Walmart’s commitment to becoming a key e-commerce player.

However, Walmart has realized it holds a key advantage over Amazon which it can leverage to offer services the online kingpin simply cannot – its nationwide network of physical store locations. Amazon may have its sights set on brick-and-mortar stores, but Walmart is already there, at the top of the game.

Walmart is, therefore, looking for opportunities to bring the in-store and online E-Commerce sellers using the online tactics to optimize their products, to offer customers unique ways to access its products and services.

Strategy – Endless Isles

Being tested in select stores, the endless aisle system is one of the ways in which Walmart is seamlessly integrating its in-store and online shopping experiences.

A kiosk placed at the end of a physical aisle allows customers to access the entire online Walmart inventory. If a customer has come to a location looking for a specific product, only to find the store doesn’t carry it, they need simply access the terminal and place an order.

They can then arrange to either collect the item from the store or have it delivered to their home. The endless aisle concept also reduces the chance of a customer visiting a competitor’s store after an unsuccessful trip – meaning fewer lost business opportunities for Walmart.

Strategy – Walmart Prime

One of Amazon’s most notable products is its Prime membership service. With Prime, Amazon customers pay $99 per year to gain access to streaming services such as Amazon Video and Amazon Music, as well as unlimited next day delivery on items – at no extra cost. With Prime Air, drones are set to take to the skies to offer delivery in thirty minutes or less – also at no extra cost to subscribers – making Amazon’s competitors are understandably nervous.

Walmart already attempted to compete with Amazon Prime with its ShippingPass service. ShippingPass offered unlimited delivery for $49, but a lack of engagement by Walmart customers resulted in the service being pulled, and subscribers refunded.

From April 2017 however, Walmart began offering its online customers discounts on thousands of products if they selected the option to collect their items in-store. The amount of discount varied between products, with low-cost but heavy goods seeing the most significant reductions.

By effectively paying customers to collect their packages in-store, Walmart once again demonstrates it understands the value of omnichannel marketing strategies. Instead of viewing e-commerce business strategy and in-store retail as two competing revenue streams, Walmart views them as complementary.

How to Sell on Walmart

The Walmart Marketplace is a platform that allows third-party sellers to list their items on Walmart.com, just like you would on Amazon or eBay. Selling to Walmart’s online marketplace is an easy way to get your products in front of a massive audience. Marketplace items appear in search results on Walmart.com alongside other items.

Here’s how you can start selling on Walmart Marketplace in a few easy steps:

Graphic Source:  Walmart Official Marketplace Website

Step 1: Apply to be a Marketplace Seller
Step 2: Complete Your Registration
Step 3: Complete Partner Profile
Step 4: Verify Bank Deposit
Step 5: Complete Item Setup
Step 6: Test Items and Orders
Step 7: Launch Your Account

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Overview

Being an online business owner or e-commerce seller means one needs to give more detailed thought into how the business is going to be managed on a day to day basis. This will invariably depend on individual circumstances, resources, time constraints, overall objectives, preferences as well as service and production needs.

Marketing is a powerful business tool. The internet age has provided a whirlwind of opportunities for every hardworking dreamer that wants to fly without wings. The world of eCommerce and internet has proven to be a lucrative arena for those who want to benefit from the promises it beholds.

Regardless of the parameters, one thing is certain: online business owners crucially ‘need’ to plan and manage resources effectively, to ensure continued profits, growth and consistent success. And one of the most vital of these resources is the art of Marketing!

Another important question is do you think that you are doing great as an online marketer?

Here are 5 ways online businesses and e-commerce entrepreneurs can successfully market and grow their businesses while increasing profits:

Social Media Branding

Make sure your company’s vision and products are effectively communicated online via powerful branding.

Make the branding of your company, products, and services on social media visually appealing!

Human beings are creatures of visual stimulation. We thrive on it. And we act on it.

Think about ads on television about fast food; the way they trigger your visual senses with close-ups of juicy burgers on a bun, splash of ketchup and mayo, steamy golden fries and cool soothing soft drink! It’s all visual; making your mouth water!

Thus, make your visual branding inviting to look at – since if the ad didn’t invite and entice the eye, no one would read it!

Post daily across major platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others for maximum audience engagement and brand positioning.

Knowing Your Audience

Knowledge is power! Being aware of the “market landscape” and knowing who your competitors are and what they are offering, is a powerful weapon!

Whether it’s running FB ads, sending Emails to your list, writing Landing or Sales Pages or simply promoting a Blog post, the art of persuasive social media marketing and attention-grabbing content depends on understanding your audience!

Do your research on what are your audience’s pain points, their needs, wants, desires, struggles, preferences.

A successful e-commerce social media marketing strategy should understand people, have a strong insight into their needs and wants and be empathetic towards providing a solution to their problems.

In essence, great social media for e-commerce business and the associated marketing is simply a direct conversation between you and the consumer.

Remember, writing something doesn’t mean that you’ve “communicated” it.

For example: if you’re selling a mattress, then communicate the benefits of the mattress to the audience (relieving back pain, uninterrupted good night’s sleep, etc).

Customers don’t buy products, they buy the experience, the vision and the benefit THEY believe they can get out of them. And it’s your marketing efforts’ job to MAKE them believe of it!

Keep Track of Costs for SMM

SMM (Social Media Marketing) is your backbone for global audience engagement, lead generation, brand recognition, product visibility and other integral factors that determine your success as an eCommerce business.

So, keeping track of your SMM costs is crucial. You don’t want your costs to negatively impact your SMM.

To make your SMM tactics and campaigns more effective, you need to:

• Layout a clear plan for your goals and objectives with all your social media presence
• Dedicate a strong team to manage your social media channels and platforms
• Assign a realistic cost range to each social media outlet for advertising and promotions
• Use measuring tools to keep an eye out on progress and social media effectiveness
• Utilize Google Analytics and other resources to keep you in the right direction

How to Create Catchy Social Media Posts

As human beings, we are creatures of emotion. Love, hate, jealousy, fear, pity – all are forms of emotion that make us beings of empathy and intellect. We use that intellect to make decisions via ‘Free Will’. Human behavior can be controlled if the free will can be controlled.

How do you control free-will? Through the power of sheer persuasion! And words have the ability to fuel persuasion via creating beliefs, images, stories, and narratives that captivate the heart and consume the mind.

So for your social media marketing, if you’re writing to persuade, you have to hit the gut before you get anywhere near the brain. The part that decides “I want that” is emotional and often subconscious. If your premise doesn’t work emotionally, logic will never get a chance to weigh in.

If you flip that emotional switch, the sale (or other action) is yours to lose. Because our logical minds do eventually step in (usually in a way that makes us think we’re driven by logic in the first place). If your premise is not credible (as in it’s too good to be true), you fail.

Create catchy posts by:

• Using powerful and interesting images, captions, headlines
• Use audience psychology and pain points address their concerns and problems
• Offer solutions and features/benefits, by differentiating yourself from competitors
• Use easy to read the language, no technical jargon or complicated words

Use Paid Promotions

Paid promotions are powerful for generating warm traffic that is already looking for what you’re offering online. Platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and AdWords are critical when it comes to harnessing successful results from paid promotions.

Paid promotions give you:

• Large audience outreach, connecting you to millions of people
• Brand positioning by enhancing the visibility of your product to the masses
• Opportunity to build credibility and trust
• Earn higher profits through solid lead generation and sales

If you don’t have paid promotions already in your Social Media Marketing strategy for E-commerce, you need to do so as soon as possible. It will be game-changing and will pay dividends down the road.

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Overview

E-commerce is one of the most lucrative ways to earn big returns on investment.

Whether you’re selling on Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, eBay or elsewhere, the power of E-commerce is a great arena to attract a great number of qualified leads.

There’s no reason why any self-driven, passionate, goal-oriented and disciplined individual cannot become a successful, knowledgeable and inspiring Ecommerce Guru’ in their own right! All it takes is the right mindset, tools, resources, and an insatiable hunger to succeed while harboring a vision that knows no bounds.

The world is rapidly evolving – from technology and gadgets, medicine and travel, to how we do business and consumer goods. Any form of online business, particularly Ecommerce, is no different, and is here to stay!

Any successful online business guru knows one key fundamental recipe. This recipe involves professionalism, skills, reliability, knowledge, strategy, cost and overall ability to harness productivity in an utmost effective way.

Being your own boss or an E-commerce Guru is not just a matter of name but a constant struggle from no one to a BIG ONE!

With a strategic and educated approach, hard work, competitive foresight and a never-say-no attitude, you can become an Ecommerce; helping yourself and your clients, while also enabling others who want to learn from you – the right way! Without the hype.

Here are 6 tried and tested tips, insights, and techniques that can make a legitimate and proven eCommerce Guru (and not a hyped up fake-preneur!)

1. Learn from Mistakes

Failure has a truly ‘negative’ vibe by its very name. We think of it as something that ‘should not’ be a part of our lives.

Also, a big misconception we often harbor about big ‘Gurus’ and ‘Experts’ is that they are invincible superhumans with the strength of roaring lions.

That is incorrect. They are humans just like us. They love cute little cat videos on YouTube, they feel hungry at midnight and they don’t enjoy paying bills. Just like us.

Mistakes or failures are part and parcel of the game. Naturally, embracing the fear of making mistakes or ending in failure certainly isn’t ever an easy situation. With focus, knowledge, and learning, the impending dread of failure can become an enviable asset you can use to your advantage.

How so? Well. Mistakes are a precursor to success. They form the breeding ground for growth. Unless one makes mistakes, one cannot embrace the definition of success. It is a definition that evolves throughout our entrepreneurial lives and is uniquely distinct to everyone.

2. A Strong Backend Support

As an E-commerce Guru, you cannot reach, sustain and compete at the very top of the food chain ladder, if you don’t have ‘strong legs’ to lift you up or support you.

What this means is you need to develop, cement and maintain a strong Backend Support mechanism to your enterprise that can function as the very basis to your entire business.

Backend Support essentially entails various control and regulatory areas such as: Dashboard, Administrator Management, META Data Control, Crawler Control, Sitemap, Tracking, Store Management, Order Management, Customer Service, Shipping and Social Media engagement, to name a few.

With these elements in place, an E-commerce Guru can focus on building and growing not just his or her business, but also helping those who want to learn the tricks of the trade and advance in the world of E-commerce successfully – without dead ends!

3. Using a Funnel Approach

The truth is that even if you devote thousands of dollars in finances to send traffic to your eCommerce website or product listing on Amazon, chances are that the visitors will ‘not’ be ready to buy your product right away.

For anyone to be a successful Ecommerce Guru, it is important to figure out how your marketing and sales efforts can ‘work together’ to grab your audience’s interest and incentivize your prospective customers to buy! Using an effective sales funnel can accomplish just that.

So how does using a funnel work?

The simple purpose of a funnel is to: Attract (Strangers), Convert (Visitors), Close (Leads) and Delight (Customers).

• Attract: Provides marketing or advertising which attracts visitors to your product page or official site.
• Convert: Establishes unique offers which inspire those visitors to ‘willingly’ share their contact information. This willingness is based on genuine interest.
• Close: Culminates into proactive efforts which support those leads to ‘close’ and transition into paying customers.
• Delight: The most important phase. Superb customer service that satisfies your customers, keeps them happy and makes them send you referrals. Word of mouth advertising works its charm here!

4. Be Unique in Selling

Make your E-commerce selling original. It’s OK to be creative. There’s plenty of boring listings on Amazon, don’t let yours be home for content like this.

For example, if you’re selling fingernail clippers, don’t give them the same uninspired content typically associated with products like this. Give it some personality and explain the benefits of using them.

Use Amazon business reports to measure your conversion rates. Once you have your essential content in place, you can look at your statistics in the reports and establish a baseline conversion rate for your product.

Furthermore, showcase to the world your ‘Unique Selling Proposition”. A unique selling proposition (USP) refers to the unique benefit shown by a company, product or brand that enables it to ‘stand out’ from competitors!

5. The Power of Compelling People

Compelling people is your biggest strength. Persuasive business communications and powerful copywriting are forms of art. They are literally art forms that normal human beings simply cannot replicate – unless you’ve had specialized training.

If you can effectively influence your customers, you can have a successful year in business for 2019.

They decorate the canvas of your imagination like the stroke of a paintbrush, and create a picture that incites interest, grabs attention, evokes desire and inspires action!

The art of effective persuasion and compelling people is about ‘consuming’ the audience’s imagination.

The human imagination is one of the most liberating things in the world; it takes us beyond our wildest dreams and traverses all boundaries, transcending limits we never thought were possible.

AIDA – Attention, Interest, Desire, Action >> these are the pillars upon which marketing and advertising are built upon – and copywriting is the crucial glue that binds them together. If you can master these as an Ecommerce Guru, you can easily compel people to listen to you, respect you, buy from you and keep coming back to you for more!

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Overview

Success in online business is just as much skill and consistency as it is anything else. When we speak of skill, it automatically necessitates technique and powerful business tactics. The more effective the technique and tactics, the more pronounced will be the results.

If you want to be a successful seller in the growing E-commerce marketplace and want to make your mark with higher profits, technique, and tactics are your best friend!

Thus, starting a profitable, self-regulating and ever-green online business, requires certain strategic tactics a successful online seller must practice on a consistent basis!

Here are 5 of the most effective ones you can start applying today:

Understand Your Weaknesses and Strengths (Everyone Has Them!)

Running a great business and selling successfully with profit is all about self-awareness. Having the knowledge (and the courage) to successfully evaluate, understand and tactics based on your strengths and weaknesses.

Do a complete SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis of yourself and your business.

It is important that you know, understand and embrace your weaknesses and strengths. If you don’t, then it’s like shooting darts in the dark and hoping you hit the target. Not practical at all!

If you are self-aware of your weaknesses, you will automatically work on them for improvement. Similarly, being aware of your strengths enables you to effectively utilize them to your advantage.

Competitor Knowledge

Knowledge is power! Being aware of the “market landscape” and knowing who your competitors are and what they are offering, is a powerful weapon!

Knowing your competitors inside out can, in turn, help you create your products, services, and marketing in a way that is stronger and far more powerful than what’s out there currently.

Moreover, it will enable you to set your prices competitively and help you to counter rival marketing campaigns with your own unique and effective initiatives.

Constantly keeping an eye on your competition will provide you a wealth of knowledge and an ocean of information that gives you an effective ‘vantage point’ to make your products or services more ‘appealing’ and visible to the same audience that you and your competition are competing for.

Now, let’s come to powerful business tactics. What should you know about your competitors? Here are a few areas you analyze and stay abreast with:

• The products or services they provide and how they market them to customers
• Their brand and design values
• Whether they innovate – business methods as well as products
• Their staff numbers and the caliber of staff that they attract
• The prices they charge
• How they distribute and deliver
• The devices they employ to enhance customer loyalty and what backup services they offer
• How they use IT – for example if they’re technology-aware and offer a website and email

Stay Ahead of the Game!

Yes, game! You heard that right. How? The online selling and E-commerce market is a big, cut-throat and competitive “arena” of several players who are competing against you for the ‘same’ spectators (prospective customers) you are trying to sell your products or services to.

Hence, adopting an innovative approach, a ‘think outside the box’ strategy and visionary foresight will allow you to always keep moving forward in the race. A small step forward in the right direction is a hundred times better than a step forward in the wrong direction.

Some of the ways you can do this are by:

• Keeping in touch with industry news, consumer behavior, and buying trends
• Attending trade shows, conferences, and seminars if you can
• Staying abreast with what’s going on in the online selling marketplace
• Talking to your customers on a daily basis and learning from their mistakes

These are some of the ways you can keep stepping ahead with a foot in the right direction.

Better Research and Efficient Planning

Research and planning are the cousins of decision making. They are connected by blood! They must go hand in hand.

So starting a new or growing an existing business is much like buying a car: You need to conduct informed research before making the decision.

How?

The way you execute effective research and planning is by:

• First, figure out if there’s demand for your product or service
• Second, you go over a competitive analysis, while at the same time looking for a place to set up shop
• Third, you create a proactive and educated plan to differentiate your offering from all the other products or services that are out there

Research is key! The best online sellers with the best business professional powerful business tactics are the most tenacious researchers. Like miners, they dig, drill, dynamite, and chip until they have carloads of valuable ore.

Adaptable and Evolution-Friendly

Be adaptable and welcoming to evolution. A successful business is one that is ever-evolving, living, breathing and open to change. A successful business is an organism that sustains itself by acclimatizing with its surrounding environment.

The fast past and rapidly evolving world of E-commerce and online business is always changing; always on the move; always undergoing a metamorphosis. This is part of the online ecosystem and business habitat.

It is crucial that as an online seller you learn, develop and perfect the ability to adapt to the environment. Entrepreneurs who cannot adapt to change are those who get left behind.

Be consciously ready and accepting when it comes to adaptation, stay open-minded, be flexible in how you view things, be willing to take criticism and undergo overhauls or revamps to your business and processes when/if needed.

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Let’s get something straight. If you’re still using the same, tired, old selling strategies from 2016 or 2017–heck, even 2018!–to sell on Amazon, you’re going to have a pretty rough go of it in 2019. Amazon is constantly changing, and you’re either hip to these changes or you’re dead on arrival. That’s why it is important to think smart not hard.

But enough doom and gloom! Here’s the good news: we’ve got the top five e-commerce seller tactics to ensure that not only will you and your brand succeed on Amazon in 2019, but that you end up finishing the year with plenty of green in your pocket.

1 – Master Amazon First

This might be tough to hear, but it needs to be said: master Amazon before you start moving your products to Shopify, your own blog, or another sales channel. Because if you don’t conquer Amazon first, all you’re doing is putting more work on your plate.

Remember: Amazon has its own fulfillment network. It’s got its own customer service army to take care of the people who are buying your products. It’s got 2.5 billion people spending money on their platform every single month.

If you can’t maximize your sales potential using the world’s biggest platform to help you, then think smart not hard and ask yourself how are you going to do it with Shopify or Instagram?

2 – Build An Audience

Brand, brand, brand! You’ll hear the gurus say it over and over again, “You’ve got to build a brand on Amazon if you want to succeed in 2019!” And that’s 100% true.

So what are the key ingredients to building this mythical brand? There are three: product, sales, and audience.

If you’re an Amazon seller (even an inexperienced one), then you probably have the first two down. Product is the thing that you used Jungle Scout to find. And sales are what you’ll get when your product goes live on Amazon.

But what about the audience?

In a world where everyone is selling the same stainless steel garlic press on Amazon, an audience is insanely important. It’s your audience who is going to know what makes you and your product so much better than your competition, and they’ll be your champions.

And if you think your audience is made up of the people buying your stuff on Amazon, then you’re wrong. Those individuals aren’t your audience. Those buyers are Amazon’s audience, and Amazon isn’t letting go of those 2.5 billion audience members easily.

To build your own audience, you have to look outside of Amazon. Again think smart not hard. You need platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. You need to generate email lists and blogs..once you’ve mastered Amazon, that is.

3 – Know Your Customer

Of course, before you can build an audience and a brand, you need to know who’s buying your product and why. This doesn’t mean general demographics either, so don’t say “45-year-old dads who want to cook more” or “18 to 25-year-old gamers.” You’ve gotta go deeper.

Knowing and influencing your customer isn’t about knowing their age, background, or socioeconomic status. It’s about knowing what’s making their lives problematic.

Consider infomercials. You know those corny ads where the person can’t open a jar, or a couple’s lawn is just dead grass, or someone can’t seem to get the hang of drawers? Those are people with a problem.

Sure, the ads are a little far fetched–I mean, it’s not that hard to open a drawer–but they identify their audience’s problem right from the start. And once the problem is identified, the hosts immediately offer a solution: the product.

That’s why infomercials work.

4 – Think Micro, Not Macro

Those 1,000 monthly sales you dream about? Erase them from your mind right now!

Sure, we all want instant success, but it’s like Fredrich Nietzsche said:

He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying.

In other words, how are you going to get 1,000 sales if you can’t even sell 100?

So don’t be afraid to start small. Begin by pinpointing a core group of 100 people you want to reach; these people should be your biggest fans. First, identify their problem, and then provide them with a solution to that problem in the form of your product.

Eventually, those sales will expand your audience, and your business will grow from there.

5 – Work Smart Not Hard

A number of people will tell you that your only focus should be on Amazon. “Make your PPC better! Invest in better products!” And while these are all fine things to know how to do, it’s only part of the equation.

While you’re focusing on the other elements of your business–such as building an audience–it’s not a bad idea to automate a lot of the functions that you already have in place. Once you’ve mastered Amazon, why not put someone in place? Then you can turn your attention to the other things
that matter.

This is how you’ll succeed as an Amazon seller in 2019.

Conclusion

All Amazon gurus always think smart not hard worth their salt could point you to another app or another solution to cure all your Amazon woes. But the reality is that as long as you follow these five key guidelines that I outlined above, you will find success on Amazon–and beyond!

The path isn’t always easy, but it is fun.

And believe me, it’s worth it.

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