Are you a small business owner looking to expand your online presence and sales? Are you looking to broaden your market and find new useful information? If your online store isn’t making the sales that you want it to, you can sell to customers using large platforms like Amazon and eBay.
How Should a Small Business Work With Amazon and eBay?
While these companies will take a portion of what you make, they are a great way to make money and do your best to expand your business. Amazon and eBay offer the ability to sell to people around the country and abroad. Yet, you need to know how to navigate the platforms to get the most out of them. From utilizing sophisticated algorithms to brokering international sales logistics, below are some tips for working with Amazon and eBay as a small business.
Maintain Your Website
While you will utilize the benefits of Amazon and eBay, you should be sure to maintain your website. This is because it should be your long-term goal to increase sales on your own store’s site. Creating a direct-to-consumer business model that keeps your overhead low and your profits higher. You may not be in the position to rely on that just yet, and that’s okay. But while you work with these huge online retail platforms, it’s necessary to maintain your webstore and your presence online.
Expand Online Presence
Even if you have a successful brick-and-mortar business, before you start selling on Amazon and eBay, you should try your best to expand your online presence. There are a variety of ways to do this, and it is essential to try to expand your reach. After you are satisfied with your website and store, you should move on to bolstering your online presence with digital marketing and social media.
Digital marketing provides all kinds of avenues to expand your reach and increase your sales both on your own website and on bigger platforms. First, you should familiarize yourself with search engine optimization, or SEO. This is the concerted effort to make your website and store reach the top of pages on Google and Bing. Using specialized keywords, metadata, hyperlinks, and more, you can make sure that you land higher up on search engines with blogs and other content.
This alone can generate a lot of revenue, but it also gets the word out. Other ways to promote your business online include:
- Starting an email blast campaign
- Pay-per-click ads
- Video production
- Social media engagement
Social media can provide huge benefits to your online business, both on your own webstore and when you sell on these huge commercial platforms. You should post routinely and come up with a cohesive brand strategy and identity. Paying influencers to promote products is a popular method to get the word out about the brand, a specific product, or service. With a concerted social media strategy, you will be able to expand your online presence and increase sales of your website and in online stores like Amazon.
Be Aware of the Drawbacks
It is difficult to know who takes more fees when you sell on their website. Amazon uses the Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) in their calculations, which varies depending on the size of the product. In addition to the FBA, there is a 15 percent commission fee.
On the other hand, eBay has a 35-cent listing fee and a 10 percent fee on the final value. You also must pay a 2.9 percent plus 30-cent processing fee to PayPal. You will also have to pay for the packing and shipping to the customer.
Fees are high for both, but it depends on the size of the product to determine if Amazon or eBay is a better option. In addition to fees, you will have to learn the marketplace and manage your store. When you don’t know how to fix a problem or need to know how to do something in specific, you will have to contact customer support.
International Shipping
Both Amazon and eBay provide the opportunity to sell to customers around the world, but both have their own intricacies. eBay has a larger international market and doesn’t require you to set up multiple accounts. Amazon asks sellers to make separate accounts for the countries they want to sell in, which makes it more work.
Amazon may not help you with the custom issues that arise, prompting your business to seek out the assistance of a private logistics company and importer of record. There are different rules, fees, and regulations for importing different products or selling them to specific countries. If your goal is to ship internationally more effectively, eBay is the better option.
Restrictions
Like international shipping, Amazon has more restrictions and makes you go through more processes than eBay. It should be noted that these stipulations make Amazon a safer marketplace as far as scams go, but if you are already aware that you should receive the money before you send the item you shouldn’t have much to worry about. Still tread lightly and be careful whenever you’re selling on these platforms, especially abroad. Still, eBay is a lot easier to get started on if you are looking to start selling products on these platforms.
It doesn’t matter what business you’re in, if you want to increase online sales using Amazon and eBay can be an effective way to do so. However, you should keep in mind that the goal is always to grow your own marketplace. You don’t want to be bogged down with the fees and regulations forever.
Conclusion
The bigger you get, the more agency you will have to strike deals with packagers and shipping companies. If you have more control, the lower the overhead and the higher the profit. Selling on platforms like Amazon and eBay can be very lucrative, and it can help you get started but it’s always a prudent move to take what you’ve learned and create a bigger business of your own. So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to start making sales online!
