• Bank account and routing number
• Internationally chargeable credit card
• Government-issued ID
• Tax information
• Phone number

For Amazon Seller Central accounts there are 2 available plans:

The Individual selling plan costs $0.99 per sale.
The Professional selling plan costs $39.99 per month, no matter how many items you sell.

In most cases we recommend the professional plan, it has more features and is more cost effective for anyone planning on selling more than 40 items per month.  More info on the different plans can be found here

Aside from the above account fees amazon has a range of other fees that may apply:

FBA fees: these are for sellers using fulfillment by amazon.  Amazon charges an FBA fee for each unit sold dependent on size and weight tiers.  If you plan on using your own fulfillment and not FBA you will not pay this fee, but you will pay a higher referral fee.
Referral fees: these are percentage based tiers based on the price of your product and your product category.  Most products sit in the 10 to 15% tier.  More info
Labelling fees: If you choose to have amazon FBA label your products this is usually around 50c
Inventory placement fee: If you prefer to send inventory to only 1 fulfilment centre Amazon charges an inventory placement fee. Again based in size tier, approximately 40c per unit.

If you are just getting started with a small amount of products we recommend manually adjusting pricing to get a feel for the sales potential of your product and where it sits within the market. 

However, as soon as you can support it, we recommend using a repricing tool.  Repricers allow you to automatically update prices in real time based on the competition and other important metrics.  If you are a reseller, a repricer is even more essential as it allows you to grab more buy box percentage

Repricers allow you to ensure consistent sales volume and that you are maximizing your profit margins.  

We have written in depth about how to best use repricers here

If you’re selling your product on Amazon FBA in the USA, there is now a way to easily expand to selling in Canada, Mexico & Brazil.  The program is called Remote Fulfilment with FBA and is only available to FBA sellers.  It’s as simple as enrolling in Seller Central and then Amazon replicates your listings into those other markets.  More information found here

Note that some listings are not able to be replicated due to cross border issues, so you need to check on a case by case basis.  If this is the case, you can still open seller central accounts in those other countrist and send your products direct to FBA centers within those countries

There are mixed opinions on whether Amazon sellers should try and sell off Amazon to supplement their sales on Amazon.  I’ll give you the main pro’s and con’s:

The 2 key reasons to build your own website and sales channel is to a) own your audience and b) diversify your marketing channels to reduce risk.  While you are selling on Amazon, you are essentially ‘renting’ your audience in the sense that you do not have full control over how and when you can engage with your audience.  Building your own website allows you to build your own customer lists and engage with your customers when, how and where you want.  Having your own customer list is a business asset in and of itself.  It also allows you to diversify against the risk of something happening on Amazon and losing all of your traffic and sales.  There are other good reasons as well such as having more control over the creative and branding of your product.  

The big downside to selling off Amazon is the cost.  To generate the same traffic that Amazon does to your products is going to be very challenging, and arguably cost far more than it would to invest in Amazon itself.  Money and time spent on building a site and traffic to your site, might be better suited in investing in Amazon ads, improving product listings or launching new product variations.  

Ultimately the decision is different for every business.  At some point it will probably make sense for a business to diversify into other traffic channels off Amazon.

There are several ways you can utilise Amazon ads to drive business performance:

Amazon Sponsored Ads

Amazon Sponsored Product Ads help you to improve the visibility of your products with keyword-targeted pay-per-click display ads. Sponsored Ads are shown in search results and on product detail pages.

Amazon Headline Search Ads (Sponsored Brand Campaigns)

This type of Amazon ads enables you to promote multiple products alongside, above, and below the results on a search results page. Your ads are displayed when a shopper uses your targeted keywords in their search query.

Amazon Product Display Ads

Amazon Product Display Ads are PPC ads that are shown on customer review pages, below search results, and on product detail pages. This type of Amazon ads is excellent for cross-selling and up-selling opportunities and can also be displayed on cart abandonment emails and follow up emails.

Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS) is the percentage of Amazon advertising spend for every dollar you gain in revenue from attributed sales of your marketing campaign. It’s a key Amazon marketing metric.

To calculate your ACoS, you need to use the following formula:

Total Ad Spend/Attributed Sales = ACoS

For example, if you spend a total of $100 on advertising for every $400 you make in advertising attributed sales, you’re ACoS would be 25% for the marketing campaign.

$100 Ad Spend/$400 Total Sales = 0.25 ACoS

Blended ACoS is the percentage of ad spend to total sales – not just advertising attributed sales.

It’s vital that you look at the relationship between attributed sales and organic sales to determine the efficiency of your Amazon Advertising and to inform future marketing campaign decision making.

For example, if your ad attributed sales and organic sales are increasing at a similar rate, it proves the effectiveness of your advertising and that there is room to grow your ad budget and expand your reach. However, if your attributed sales are growing, but your organic sales are decreasing, it highlights that your Amazon Advertising may be cannibalising your organic sales.

While some marketing agencies will make the mistake of focusing on regular ACoS alone, our experience and expertise can help you to utilise blended ACoS to gain a better understanding of the impact of your Amazon pay-per-click marketing to ensure that your strategy is delivering growth of both your attributed Amazon marketing and organic sales.

Pricing is a vital factor in product search ranking and conversion rate optimisation. Products with a successful sales history rank higher in search results pages. Testing and optimising your price points can help your products to achieve a higher ranking in the Amazon product search algorithm.

Just like Google, Amazon uses a ranking algorithm to provide shoppers with the most relevant products and best value deals in search results. Amazon only utilises data from the Amazon platform to inform its ranking algorithm.

Along with targeted keywords, pricing is the ranking factor that you have the most control over. We provide advanced Amazon marketing techniques that go beyond what most marketing agencies provide. We help our clients optimise their price points to get a competitive edge in search results and boost their visibility and sales.

Yes, very interestingly, it does.  This is an interesting nuance of Amazon.  The more you invest in Ads, the more traffic is driven to your listing.  Sales velocity increases which drives organic rankings.

This is interesting because other platforms like Google have the exact opposite policy.  They claim that investment in advertising has no effect on organic results. 

Read more about this in an article we wrote on Search Engine Land