Dynamic Pricing

With price being a significant factor in determining which offer gets placed into the buy box, it is vital to monitor price carefully and adjust pricing to remain competitive. If you are selling many products, it becomes impractical to price manually, and it is best to use one of the many ‘repricers’ available to manage pricing based on rules. Typical these tools work in the following way.

• Select products. Import details of the products whose price you wish to manage.
• Select competition. Set the parameters of the products against which you wish to reprice. For example, you may only want to compare prices against products with the same fulfilment method, of the same delivery timescale, or sellers above a specific feedback score.
• Set pricing. The tool will need a floor price and a ceiling price, i.e., match prices against competitors but do not go lower than X or higher than Y.
• Set pricing rule. For example, match pricing, go lower by a certain amount, go lower by a certain percentage.

Repricing is an effective way to boost sales but will eat into your margins. Example repricing tools include Bqool.

Amazon Sponsored Products

Amazon’s Sponsored Product programme enables traffic to be driven to listing based on specified keywords. Sponsored Products ads are charged on a Pay Per Click (PPC) basis.

As mentioned, Amazon search performance is primarily based on the listing’s sale history. As new products do not have any history, it will often be necessary to buy traffic to build a sales history. Once the listing’s natural sales performance picks up, sponsored products ads can be scaled back.

Amazon sponsored product works similarly to other PPC programmes such as Google Ads, i.e.:

• An account is organised into campaigns and ad groups.
• Advertisers specify specific keywords to drive traffic to listings.
• Negative ad targets can also be added, e.g., keywords not to appear for.
• Bids set at the Ad groups or keyword level.

For example, a merchant of iPhone cases might bid £0.5 to appear for the keyword ‘iPhone 5S case’. They might only have iPhone 5 cases, so use ‘iPhone 6’ and ‘iPhone 7’ as negative keywords.

There are several options within sponsored products:

• Sponsored products. Promote products to consumers actively searching with related keywords or viewing related items on Amazon.
• Sponsored brands. Rich, engaging adverts highlighting your brand.
• Sponsored display. Rich display ads promoting your brand or products.

Amazon for Business

Amazon’s B2B programmed called ‘Amazon for Business’ enables businesses to buy from Amazon and get the following benefits:

• VAT invoicing
• Quantity discounts for bulk purchases as specified by sellers
• Request quote for bulk purchases from sellers

To enrol in Amazon Business, a seller must be a VAT registered business. They can then set quantify discounts based on the following criteria:

• Percentage discount based on order quality.
• Fixed price based on quantity.

Amazon says that selling to businesses through their platform can boost sales by up to 30%.

Sell Globally

Most of Amazon’s international sites are open to international (i.e., non-domestic) sellers. Each Amazon site works the same way. If you are familiar with one site, selling internationally will be straightforward.

As Amazon is a catalogue system, you may find the much of your inventory will already exist on international sites. This means that you will not need to translate your products and can get selling straight away. Products should have the same ASIN in each country, so it is easy to identify the products you want to create.

In the EU, the Pan European FBA programme allows merchants to deliver their inventory to one country but have prime eligible offers throughout the EU.