5 Ways to Make Amazon Your Channel

Cin7 Founder and Chief Architect Danny Ing led discussion on making Amazon your channel at two events coinciding with Inside Retail Live in Sydney last week.

Amazon Marketplaces will reportedly launch in September. The news has alarmed some retail chains who fear their business will be impacted the way US businesses have. Ing, however, has been emphasizing the opportunity Amazon presents for companies that want to expand their customer base through a sales channel with the potential to reach 300 million or more customers.

“You don’t have to put everything on Amazon,” Ing said during a March 30 Breakfast Event that coincided with Inside Retail Live. “You can put your fast-moving range on Amazon and anything that is more of a specialized item on your website. We have a customer that sells one-third of his products on Amazon, and keeps two-thirds of his products he sells through his other channels.”

The Breakfast Event followed on a Round Table discussion Cin7 hosted in conjunction with Inside Retail Live. The Round Table saw a capacity attendance, and participation in both events was lively and engaged.

Diligence in Making Amazon Your Channel

Discussion centered on key elements for making Amazon work as a sales channel. Here are five points the discussion touched on.

1. Decide what to sell on your Amazon channel.  Your Amazon channel will be good for your fastest moving products. Slower-moving products may incur storage fees if they sit in an Amazon warehouse shelf for longer than six months. Your Amazon channel will be one more way to attract customers to your entire brand offering. Amazon customers that like your product tend to google your business, which makes your eCommerce channel so important for brand engagement and repeat sales.
2. Beware of fees. Amazon charges fees for many things. You can avoid a lot of them with proper inventory management and demand planning. Sellers can limit exposure to the aforementioned six-month storage fee FBA charges by optimizing stock levels to meet anticipated demand, or demand based on historic sales.
3. Tend to your Amazon ranking. Reviews and good stewardship of your Amazon channel improve your chances of reaching customers when they search for a product. Reviews and reliability of stock will be the most important factors. Brands can encourage loyal customers to rave about them, while good inventory management will ensure you never stock out. If your product remains unavailable for a week while you replenish stock, your ranking will suffer.
4. Package and label everything correctly.  Sellers using FBA must label packages properly to ensure consistent inventory tracking and sales reporting. If you bundle 100 items together in five subunits of 20 items each, you don’t want FBA warehouse staff scanning the wrong bar code label. The bundle and each subunit must be labeled properly. Be sure to follow Amazon’s packaging and labeling guidelines.
5. Manage Amazon as part of your omnichannel strategy. Building a sales channels does not necessarily require more inventory. With real-time visibility and comprehensive reporting, you’ll be in a better position to optimize stock levels in your warehouse and 3PL partners, and through your POS, website, and marketplace channels, including Amazon.