December 21st 2009

Shopping Cart Comparisons, Amazon

EBay And Ecommerce

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four shopping cart review process copy
To succeed in ecommerce, you’ve to to do two things, get the supply and the distribution right.

If you’ve got into ecommerce and found Chinavasion, then you’ve got a great drop ship supplier and you just need to work out how to list your items online.

There are about as many ways to sell online as there are things to sell online with eBay, Amazon and many other eBay alternatives offering to host and promote your listings and open source communities like OSCommerce and CRE Loaded offering to help you create your own website to list products on.

As a result, it can be difficult to decide which platform to choose and which software package to use to help you to get the job of listing done.

So Chinavasion will be running a series on the different ecommerce software / platform options available to you, go through how they work and talk about their benefits and problems.



Amazon

Amazon logo


You’d have to have been living under a rock inside a deep dark cave in the middle of a isolated forest not to know what Amazon is. EBay’s main competitor started out selling just books in 1995 before expanding to everything and anything that could be sold online. Both through its retail arm and third party traders via Amazon Marketplace ( amazon.com/marketplace )or Amazon webstore ( webstore.amazon.com/?ld=AZNav ).

Amazon itself has an Alexa rating of 20 (unsurprising since the analyics giant is owned by Amazon), a Google page rank of 9, gets 70,828,252 visitors a month according to compete.com and attracts 50 million U.S. consumers to its website on a monthly basis.

There are as many ways to get your products onto Amazon as there are different marketplaces with single upload system, a free windows-based inventory system and a flat file data upload system which is used by multiple auction providers like Auctiva or Vendio ( doubleplus.com/listing-your-products-amazon.html ).

One thing to note though is that the Amazon Seller Desktop Applications won’t work with existing listings ( realityfunnel.com/4DCGI/DetailNewsDisplay?ID=65&Session=JHVSVLECJBDKDAD ).

And while the customer base and search ranking for Amazon is strong competition for customers is also high, meaning that listings need to be as search and customer-friendly as possible. Especially if you want to do well.

This site is very much US-Seller centered and, if you are an international seller, there may be certain categories you can sell things under. And while there are Amazon stores set up for other locations (Amazon.co.uk for example) the one that gets the most traffic is the US site.

But with more exposure comes more cost. It costs US$59.99 a month to have an Amazon webstore plus 7% comission (or US$99.98 a month plus 7% commission if you are having items listed on the amazon shop and marketplace).

If you are listing items on the Amazon marketplace as a casual seller then they charge 99 cent listing fee and comission fee of between 8% and 20%. If you’re going ‘all out’ then you can get a ‘pro’ account which will give you unlimited uploads for US$39.95 a month and comission fee of between 8% and 20% depending on what you’re selling.

So you can see, while Amazon might be easy to list on it’s not the most n00b-friendly selling option out there. Thankfully with lots of sellers using this service you’ll be able to get advice easily with a number of forums being devoted to tips on how to sell on Amazon.

Let us know what you think of Amazon in the comments below or take part in our polls to let us know which ecommerce platform you run your business with.

Amazon Summary
Amazon logo



  • Name: Amazon
  • Number Visitors: 70,828,252 U.S. visitors per month According to Compete.com
  • Set-Up Cost:$0
  • Monthly Cost:
    • US$59 +7% commission Amazon webstore monthly cost
    • US$99 +7% commission Amazon webstore + Amazon Marketplace monthly cost
    • US$0.99 + commission Casual listing on Amazon Marketplace
    • US$39 +commission pro listings on Amazon Marketplace
  • Transaction Cost:8%-20%
  • Customizationability:Not customizable
  • Help:amazonsellercommunity.com/forums/index.jspa
  • Software Requirements: None
  • Find At:
    • amazonservices.com/content/sell-on-amazon.htm?id=hm1 Amazon Marketplace
    • webstore.amazon.com/WebStore-Pricing/ Amazon WebStore





2 comments...What do you think?

  1. Posted by Pieter 21st December, 2009 at 9:22 pm

    If Chinavasion can provide us with spreadsheet with product code, description, cost, etc …. and a zip file with pictures then it would be easier to populate whatever ecommerce program you use …..

    Manual process takes a long time ….. programs like Easypopulate with OS Commerce works excellent ….. if you had spreadsheet !!

    Thanks

  2. Posted by Gareth 23rd December, 2009 at 11:16 pm

    Hi Pieter,

    Thanks for your feedback. Part of the reason for us to run these blogs is actually to discover what systems people are using so that we can put together the ‘right’ datafeed.

    Information like ‘easypopulate’ is very useful.

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