How to set up your first Amazon listing

Vicki Weinberg: 00:00:18

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.

Vicki Weinberg: 00:00:37

Let's get started. Hello and welcome to this episode of.

Vicki Weinberg: 00:00:47

Bring your product idea to life.

Vicki Weinberg: 00:00:49

So in the last few episodes, we've spoken a lot about managing and specifically auditing your Amazon Seller central account. So today I wanted to take it right back to the beginning.

If you are listening to me, because you're brand new to Amazon, or maybe you're just about to create your first Amazon product listing, I know that it can feel really overwhelming, but it absolutely doesn't need to be. So in today's episode, I'm going to take you through step by step how you can get set up on Amazon and importantly, set yourself up for success.

So the first thing I want you to do before you even go start thinking about opening an Amazon seller account or writing your product listing or anything else, is doing free checks for me. So the first check is, can you sell your product on Amazon? So is your product something that can be sold?

I am sure that your answer to that will be yes, there's very little you can't sell on Amazon, but it is worth having a check.

There's also certain products and categories you need to apply for approval for, and there might be additional information you need to give to your product. So, for example, where it's sourced for what the ingredients are, things like that.

The second check I want you to do is check whether there's demand for your products on Amazon. So are people buying products like yours at the moment? If they are, don't be disheartened. This is actually a really good sign.

There's a great tool called the Jungle Scout sales estimator you can use, and you can look at any product on Amazon and you can look at the bestseller ranking and the category and get an idea of how many products they're selling each month. This is absolutely free, and this will give you a really good insight into whether products similar to yours are selling already.

And then the third thing I want you to take a look at is whether you can afford to sell on Amazon.

Now, I have an older episode which is all about the fees to expect when you're selling on Amazon, and I'm going to link to that for you in the show notes because that's a really Useful episode to listen to because there are lots of fees when you sell on Amazon. You might be aware of some of them, you might be aware of none of them, but it's really good to have a good overview.

And there's also another really good free tool you can use to work out how much money you will make selling your product on Amazon. So you can check that the margins are going to work for you.

Because, for example, you don't want to find out that actually by the time you pay for your account fee and you pay the referral fee and you pay for shipping, there's going to be no money left for yourself.

Particularly if you want to spend on ads or maybe give away some products for vine for review to get yourself going, whatever it might be, you need to check that the money stacks up and that Amazon can be profitable for you.

So let's say you've done all of these checks and you've worked out that yes, Amazon is viable for you, is somewhere you want to sell your products, you then need to set up an Amazon Seller Central account. So Seller Central is the platform that you use to sell your products on Amazon.

So to do that you need a business email address or an Amazon customer account.

I would actually suggest having a business email or certainly a different email address to the one that you use as a customer on Amazon, because I think it is good to keep them separate. So if you have any kind of issues, the accounts aren't linked. You also need a chargeable credit card. You need bank details, Amazon and can pay you.

You need a valid passport or national id, so Amazon can verify you are who you say you are. You need your company registration details and VAT details if applicable. It's also okay if you're a sole trader, by the way.

You don't have to have company details, you don't have to be registered as a company. You don't have to be registered for VAT either. But if you, if you are, you need to provide the information.

You need to give a phone number Amazon can contact you on. And that's basically it, this whole thing.

So you fill in quite a lot of forms, takes under half an hour because you will enter other information, you'll tell them where you live and all kinds of other things, but it shouldn't take that long to fill in the form. And then there's a verification process you need to go through and that can take around a week. So just build that into your timelines.

If you're looking to get set up on Amazon, fairly Soon, maybe you're trying to do it by the end of the year, for example. It's definitely possible. But bear in mind that the verification is the bit that can take a little bit longer.

So once your account has been set up and verified, you're all ready to go. So what you need to do then is set up your Amazon product listings.

So I've done lots of episodes about product listings, so we're not going to go into great detail in this episode because I really want this one to be more of a step by step, so you've got something to work through. But let's talk a little bit about how to make product listings great. So the things you need are a product title.

This needs to be clear, it needs to be keyword rich, and it still needs to be readable. There are also character limits for Amazon titles. 200 characters for most categories.

But do check the category you're selling in because it does vary. It could be 180, it could be 150. Do have a look.

They need to be keyword rich, as I've mentioned, however, you can't actually use the same word more than twice in your title. This is a recent change to happen this year. So this is something to bear in mind as well when you're writing it.

Because it might be that Amazon accept your title but your listing just doesn't come up in search. Or it might be that they won't accept your listing until you've made sure that your title meets a new policy. So just something little to be aware of.

You also need some really high quality images. So the main image needs to be your products on a plain white background. And you also want a combination of other images.

So you might want images showing your product from different angles. You might want some lifestyle images, so you're showing your products actually in use.

You might want some infographics or some text maybe to highlight key features, zoom in on certain parts of your products. Maybe you've won awards and you want to have some images show that whatever it is, having a great variety of images is a really good idea.

You also need some bullet points. So you have five bullets that you can use and I recommend using every single one of them. These ideally should be benefits focused.

They're not just talking about the feature of your product, but really selling your product.

Something I talk about quite a lot is that I sometimes look at Amazon product listings and I think they're great in terms of giving information about the product, which is brilliant, by the way, because not all listings even do that. But what they don't really do is sell the product. And sometimes I bought something and I thought to myself, this is amazing.

This, like, there's something about the product. I'm like, this is amazing. And they really undersold that. Never undersell on Amazon. I mean, there's so much competition. It's such a hard marketplace.

Sell, sell, sell is is what I will say to you. Don't be shy.

If there's something that makes your product unique or something that makes your brand unique, tell people, because they're not going there specifically to buy from you. Or maybe they are. Maybe they've gone to the search bar and they're looking for your product in general.

I've certainly know that I do that with brands that I love. However, it might just be that they're looking for a new hair conditioner or a new duvet cover or whatever it is, and they don't know.

They're not looking for certain brands. It's just which product meets their needs best. And that could be your product.

But unless you tell people how it's going to meet their needs and you tell people why your product's so good, they may not buy from you. You also can add some product description text.

Now, you can either add plain text or which is good for SEO, and you can definitely do a couple of lines of that, whatever you decide to do.

However, if you register your brand of Amazon's brand registry and you need a registered or pending trademark to do this, you can add what's called A plus content. This is something that's really hard to show in a podcast, obviously, because it's not visual.

And maybe if you come over to YouTube, you'll be able to see some more examples of this on my channel. But a content is essentially when you scroll down on any product listed on Amazon, you'll see a lot of these now.

You'll see extra images, graphics, text, all about the product, a little bit of information about the brand. Perhaps this is called a or enhanced content. And as long as you have, as I say, a registered or pending trademark, you apply for brand registry.

It's completely free, and you can add this kind of content to your listing. I definitely recommend it for a few reasons.

One, and this isn't the main reason, but it is a reason, is that most brands now are doing this and obviously you want to stand out and you want your listing to be on the same level as everyone else's. But also because why wouldn't you? A doesn't add towards your SEO because often the text is embedded in an image which Amazon can't read.

However, it's such a great opportunity, just more real estate to show, like I say, talk about your product. This could be where you're going to talk more about your brand.

Or maybe there's something that makes you really unique as the founder or perhaps says you want to highlight other products in your range. Where it is a content is a really great way of doing that.

And then something that is often overlooked but absolutely vital for visibility are the backend keywords. And these are keywords that you put in the back of your product listings. They're not seen by customers. They aid with your SEO.

Some of the common mistakes I see when it comes to product listings is versus overstuffing titles of keywords. Although, as I say, the recent title changes I think are really going to put a stop to that because you won't be able to do that anymore.

Are having incomplete images or quite poor images. So maybe the images are low resolutions, they can't be, you can't zoom in. Or maybe there's only one main image and nothing else.

Or maybe all of the images are just of the product on white from different angles, which by the way, is good. But the more variety of images you can have, the better.

Something else I sometimes see is people having, you know, maybe you sell the same product in red, blue and green. That's not very imaginative of me, is it? But you know what I mean?

And having three separate listings, a red listing, a blue listing and a green listing, when you actually could merge these into variations where the customer can choose the color, this is really, really good thing to do.

If you sell us the same products, but it comes in different sizes, different colors, whatever it is, setting them up as one listing of variations is really, really helpful. It's great for SEO because it helps. It aids helps customers find you. Because these free listings, for example, are now all linked.

It's great for conversions because if someone finds your products in red, but actually they wanted blue, they might not be able to find the blue version, especially if that doesn't come up as high in search. But if it's another option on the product page, that's brilliant because they can just go and buy the blue one.

It's great for your reviews because they're all merged. In short, I can't think of any reason not to not to do it. It's really, really helpful. It's really, really helpful.

So definitely, definitely have a look at this.

Other things I see are not using any keywords, having a product listing that isn't optimized for search at all, or perhaps a listing that's the identical listing from your website.

Now your listing on your website might be amazing and I'm sure it's really, really good, but something to know is that SEO on Amazon and SEO on Google is slightly different.

So you might have a product listing that's really real, really well optimized for Google and will come up really highly on a Google search if people are searching products like yours. But it might not translate over to Amazon.

So this is why it's definitely worth doing some Amazon specific keyword research before writing your listing for Amazon.

And I do recommend writing your product listing specifically for Amazon, even if that is taking your existing listing and then editing it to make it a fit of Amazon format.

Please, you know, don't just copy what you've what you've got on your website because while I'm not saying that it won't be great, in fact I'm sure you're I'm sure it is. It's more the search that I'm thinking about here because Amazon, as I said so many times, is nothing but a big search engine.

So unless your listing contains the words and phrases that customers are searching for on Amazon, it's really unlikely that it's going to come up. What else do I need to tell you? I think that is really, that is really it in terms of getting your product listing set up.

If you apply for brand registry, as I mentioned earlier, you can also have a store, so that's really useful as well. So you can have your own shop front on Amazon where customers can see all of your products.

However, I definitely don't want to overwhelm you, which is why I've kept this episode talking about setting up your listings specifically. There were obviously all kinds of things you need to think about when you sell on Amazon.

So you might want to think about advertising, you might want to think about how you get your first sales.

Maybe you do want to set up a store, maybe you want to think about shipping and whether you should use fulfilled by Amazon or whether you should do your own fulfillment. But this episode I tried to keep standalone just on listings so I don't overwhelm you with everything that you need to think about.

If you would like more information on another topic, please do let me know. Vickyweinberg.com it may be the episode already exists.

I've done over 50 of these solo Amazon episodes so far, so the listing may well listing the episode may well be there and I'm really happy to point you in the right direction. Or it might be that I haven't recorded an episode on that topic yet.

And of course I'd be really delighted to to so do just let me know how I can help. You know that creating your Amazon product listing is achievable.

I know that I've rattled through the steps and hopefully I haven't made it sound too complicated. It it isn't. And I'm sure that you will have everything that you need already.

If you need a second pair of eyes or if you need some support of this before you go live, let me know and I will link to how I can help you in the show Notes and best of luck with getting set up. I cannot wait to see your product listings and thank you for being here. Please share this episode of anyone else who might find it useful.

Please rate and review. That helps me out so so much and it also helps other people to find it. And thank you and I will look forward to seeing you again next week.

Vicki Weinberg: 00:13:59

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 vickyweinberg.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.

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