Amazon opened up their online infrastructure doing business in South Africa around 2 weeks ago and is ahead of schedule from what we were originally told being June/July. On my personal business sellers account we are nearly there to go live with our products after experiencing a small delay or two with our factory partner.
We currently have a list of around 450 items which is fantastic considering nearly 300 are brand new items Amazon has never listed before and no one else has. This is good news because Amazon cannot steal this business away once sales have been proven because that is their modus operandi. We the seller are in fact the factory and cannot be bypassed dealing direct. This was important and why we have selected this route by partnering with the manufacturers. The cost price and selling price which Amazon request has both partners built into both. You have to think ahead because Amazon has no morals when it comes to shafting their seller accounts.
The sellers portal is quite simple, but at the same time is time consuming because of the information required loading every single item. The basics are straight forward but there are parts that require serious thought and are too important to spend no time on.
The key words or SEO words when searching for a product is what basically gets your product in front of the buyer is what we are currently working through. The majority of products we have overlap certain areas of other product categories and there is nothing we can use as a guide for these.
Once we have a template it will be plain sailing and we have given ourselves another week to get this completed. Next week the product loading will commence on the portal because there are roughly 20 steps for each product and we are missing vital information on certain steps.
This morning I spent a few hours at the factory checking on the packaging making certain everything meets Amazon's standards. They have a set criteria and we have to follow every step. Thankfully they will come and collect and be buying the product from us directly once they see the orders flowing and we do not have to provide stock in their fulfilment centers. This is how they operate for international orders once they know their number of sales forecasted.
They have some strict rules if you deliver directly and anything that is 1 pallet or more has to be delivered in a 8 ton truck or larger with a back door and no side curtain. The problem lies in the cost if you are only delivering 1 pallet because they will not accept a van or a pick up. Thankfully only our sports client has to worry about this because the costs rise rapidly and need at least 8-10 pallets to justify the use of the truck.
Once we are completed the loading process and have done it correctly we should start to see the orders start to flow and I don't mean locally, but more internationally. Like I said previously there is no competitor in this section because there is nothing that even comes close and with the weak Rand I do expect sales from week one. When it is all loaded I will take some screenshots so everyone can get an idea of what is required.