Amazon is a massive platform that reaches literally billions of users. It can be one of the best ways to expand your reach to acquire more customers and more importantly to improve your brand recognition.
Unfortunately, there are costs associated with selling on Amazon, and depending on who you are, what you’re selling, in what volume, and most importantly, how much you’re making on that sale, will determine whether you can afford to sell on Amazon.
Amazon works for both large and small businesses, but the costs associated may be more than the smaller sellers can afford depending on profit margin. Before you decide whether it is worth it to sell on Amazon, we’ll break down how the whole process works and what you can expect to pay so that you have a better idea of what you’re getting into.
We’ll also outline some of the benefits of using Amazon paid ads, besides the massive marketplace. One thing to note is that Amazon offers a number of services beyond just a platform for selling. Most sellers don’t realize at first, that Amazon offers resources for order fulfillment, advertising, affiliate sales linking, and other options. All of these features do increase the overall cost though, so we’ll dive into the benefits of each so that you understand what all you do and don’t need from Amazon before you ever start selling.
The actual setup process for becoming a seller on Amazon is fairly easy. Amazon will actually walk you through the process by making a few decisions and then setting up your seller account.
Before you begin that process though, the key thing is to understand your finances, what you’re looking to do and the scale you’re trying to sell at. Amazon actually offers a marketing agency program to help sellers get to market and offer their goods, but this means additional fees and charges and more work when trying to get ready to sell.
If you’re not going this route and have your own marketing agency, or are doing your marketing yourself, then you would just sign up for a seller account. There are two business models that most sellers use.
Third-Party Seller: This is a person who sells goods that another person makes. This means you rely on the supply you are given by the third party and sell the goods accordingly.
Brand Owner: You make and sell your own goods. This puts you in charge of the supply and sale process. You sell exactly what you are able to produce.
When setting up an account, you should consider whether you want to do one or the other, though some businesses do handle both ends of the process, selling their own goods as well as those provided by third-party suppliers.
Once you know what you want to do in terms of the types of selling you want to handle. Go to seller.amazon.com to register your account. Note that you should already have a standard Amazon account before you begin the process. You’ll also need several pieces of information to complete the actual sign-up process.
We’ll go ahead and bullet point the information you should have for clarity.
All of the information you have to provide is fairly standard for setting up any business type of account, so you shouldn’t have any issues with actually opening your seller account.
When you complete the process, you are given access to a platform called Amazon Seller Central. For informational purposes, we’ll break down Amazon Seller Central into its core components and explain what it does for sellers.
Amazon Seller Central is essentially your eCommerce hub for selling on Amazon. It allows you to manage all aspects of the selling process. They even have tutorials on how to sell on Amazon and a fees calculator to help you see what you’ll be paying for selling your products.
The main benefit of the platform is that you can set up your sales pages, adjust product listings, descriptions, rules, prices, and anything else related to the actual products you sell. It also assists with order processing. From here you can add and edit products as you like, adjust, improve, or remove listings and keep track of all your orders.
Additionally, there are brand services. To access these services, you have to be a registered brand on Amazon. To do this, you must apply to the Amazon Brand Registry, which requires more paperwork.
What you’ll need:
This can be a time-consuming process, even if you have all your paperwork together. Amazon has a brand approval process that can take between 1 and 30 days to complete.
Why is this important? Recognized brands get a number of advantages. They get customized product pages with their brand logos attached, higher brand recognition through the seller platform, and a branded storefront. This level of recognition is invaluable to growing both your sales and your web presence. It guarantees that your brand name and logo will be seen by more people as they browse and buy products on Amazon.
Setting up your Amazon Seller Central can be done manually or you can pay for a service through Amazon to have it done for you.
The last official step before you begin selling is the creation of your actual store on Amazon. This is fairly straightforward and is done through templates. Once you select your brand name and click create store, you’ll be directed to add your brand name and logo and select a pre-built template for your store.
There are a few different options, but select the one that presents your products in the way you want them seen and displays your brand in a way that is visible and identifiable. This comes down to personal taste but is an important part of the store setup process.
From there you move on to the inventory setup process where you can add products to your store. This can be done one at a time or all at once by uploading the products to your store. You can follow the instructions through Amazon’s helpful product upload guide to get the gist of how to do it.
After you have all your product pages set up and you’re happy with everything, the last step before you launch the store so that it goes live is to submit it to Amazon for approval, which takes 72 hours. As you can see, beyond the cost, which we’ll discuss further in a moment, there is a significant type lapse between account creation and beginning the selling process.
Selling on Amazon is not nearly as simple as it may seem at first glance. To sum up the entire process, you need to think about the type of seller you want to be, gather all the important documents, create your seller account, get your brand name approved (if applicable), set up your store, and get it approved.
Now that we’ve broken down the process of selling on Amazon, we’ll do a deep dive into the actual cost of selling on Amazon. This can get fairly complicated so we’ll try to break the fees down in a way that lets you figure out what you have to pay, what you may want to pay for, and what you have no use for.
Beyond just the storefront, there is a whole plethora of options and services that Amazon provides to sellers. The trouble is that each of these services has additional fees associated with them. These costs can really add up, especially if you go in for more than what you need.
Before we begin, one quick thing to note is that the costs we are quoting are at the time of publishing and are subject to change. Use these costs as a guideline for what you can expect to pay.
There are two seller subscription plans and each has its own costs and features.
The individual plan is free to set up and the fee is a flat $.99 per item, at the point the item sells. You can create new product pages with an individual account, but you won’t have access to many of the customized reporting options and inventory management features.
The shipping fees are standardized and set by Amazon instead of the seller. You will also not have access to gift cards and promotional sales options. The individual account is also a single account that belongs only to the account holder, permissions to alter the product pages and other services cannot be given to other users.
We can’t say whether this type of account will be right for you, but for individuals that do limited numbers of sales and just want a marketplace to host their products, this is a good option to start with. If sales volume increases or you need access to other features, you can upgrade. Amazon also offers temporary suspension of sales for any reason to either plan holder. This is useful if you run out of stock or suffer a sudden emergency.
The professional plan comes with a flat fee of $39.99 per month. There is no per-product fee directly associated with the plan (though other fees may apply depending on services). You are also given access to all of the product management and reporting features that are offered through a seller account, unlike with an individual account.
One major difference is that with a professional plan, the seller is able to set the shipping rates instead of Amazon. Sellers are also given access to promotional offers, gift cards, and featured listings on products. You are also able to calculate U.S. sales and use taxes on your products through an available feature. Lastly, professional plan owners have the ability to grant access and use rights to other owners/users.
The professional plan is ideally suited for larger sellers that want more control over their products and reports and who do such a sales volume that the per-item fee would be an unnecessary expense. Starting sellers may choose to go with this plan straight away or may choose to wait and upgrade to it.
These are fees assessed to the seller at the point of sale. For individual plan owners, the fee ranges from $.45 to $1.35 per sale, on top of the standard $.99 fee. This means sellers can expect to pay between $1.44 and $2.34 per item sold. These fees are non-negotiable and are applied by Amazon.
Professional plan fees are percentage-based and can vary greatly. There are two types of fees assessed, closing fees, and referral fees which are paid on a percentage of sale basis and range between 6% and 25%, though the average is 13%. Professional plan holders can track fees with a fee calculator to determine the cost of fees associated with the sale of products.
Depending on the place of origin, taxes can vary wildly so we can’t give you an accurate estimate of what taxes, if any, are applicable. Amazon does provide professional plan members a tax calculator for U.S.-based sales. For multinational sales, the taxes can be quite high, so it is best to do some research into these costs to determine what your product is going to cost you so that you can set your shipping costs accurately.
This is what marketers refer to as the “landed cost” of an item, you take the base price of making the item and include the cost to get it to the customer to determine how much it will cost you in total. If you’re planning on selling on Amazon, it’s important to understand the role taxes play in the sale of products.
The cost of a GTIN may vary depending on the size and scope of your product sales. A standard GTIN for just a few products is a one-time fee of $30. For large companies with many products and expectations to add more, there is an annual fee associated with your GTIN and multiple GTINs may be necessary.
You can get an exemption to this, but to be a legitimate brand you must have a GTIN on every product. This is mandatory and facilitates shipping around the world. You should figure out the monthly cost of your GTINs and factor that into the cost of products just like taxes.
The first thing we’ll talk about, and this is one that big business may want to invest in to protect their property, is a registered trademark. You should already have this if you are a branded company, but we’ll assume you’re just starting and need to know the cost. Depending on the level of protection you want, the cost ranges from $225 to $400. This is not mandatory but should be considered essential if you’re using Amazon to build your brand.
Second, and this is one that has to do with getting your products sold, is Amazon PPC Ads. Advertising is an important part of getting your products sold and investing in advertising through Amazon’s PPC ads can help you drive sales to your store. There are a number of ad types, some are directed at new customers and some are directed at marketing towards existing customers through remarketing ads.
Lastly, there are additional marketing costs for influencer marketing and marketing agency representation. These are associated with the marketing methods you choose and whether or not you employ help from Amazon or an outside marketing agency
The last thing we’ll talk about in regards to fees and Amazon are the fees you pay as part of building your brand and marketing your products on Amazon. There are a number of things you can do from using Amazon’s marketing services to maximizing the SEO on your product pages to improve Google rank or running ads through the Google Ads program on outside sites or through SERP.
Using Google Ads and Ad Extensions can help you develop customer data, but these costs are based on each individual situation, like the optional fees above, these services aren’t necessary, but they may benefit your brand.
Marketing and SEO can get expensive but is one of the main ways to drive your sales up. If you’re looking to build brand exposure and sell more products quickly, then these are important steps to take.
These are the basics of many of the different fees associated with being a seller on Amazon. The exact amounts and total costs will vary, but as we’ve discussed, the total cost versus profit on Amazon is calculated by adding in all of the associated fees, the cost of the product, and subtracting that from the sale price.
By knowing this, you can determine whether Amazon is the right platform for you. You may decide the benefits are worth the increased costs or you may decide that you don’t have the right procedures in place to make it worthwhile. The last tip we will give is to get help from a marketing agency or advertising firm to help you set up and run your online shop so that you can maximize the potential for profits.
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When you want to use paid search marketing platforms, Google Ads often leads the list. Because of its versatility, simplicity, and popularity, it’s obvious why it’s a popular choice. But when you drop all of your PPC advertising money into one marketing strategy, you could lose some leads.
That’s why some businesses explore paid advertising marketing outside of Google, with many turning to Linkedin Ads.
Google Ads and Linkedin Ads are highly efficient ways to market your products and services to businesses and consumers. But each marketing channel has its advantages and disadvantages. Whatever you choose, make sure you discuss the matter with your web development company.
Below is a closer look at each option.
We think it’s reasonable to conclude that Google reaches a vast audience worldwide – its ad reach is a stunning 4 billion people. Google search handles about 70% of desktop searches, and many companies report that they get about 90% of their organic traffic from the search engines. Also, up to 95% of the mobile search market comes from Google.
People use Google’s search a lot, and having the ability to target search terms with specific search ads is a massive benefit of Adwords. People tend to search for very specific things in Google, so if you can customize your Google advertising for your targeted audience, you’ll receive plenty of leads.
So, we can assume that most people’s targeted audience uses Google to some degree. That’s a massive advantage for companies when they want to target an audience.
However, businesses that want to narrow down their search may have issues getting their Google ads settings right with both Google Ads. And if you blunder when segmenting your audiences, your digital ad campaign could suffer.
LinkedIn features a narrower audience – 500 million users – namely businesses and business professionals. But this more limited audience makes it the perfect place for effective B2B marketing. LinkedIn lets marketers serve online ads to decision-makers and vital audience members in several ways.
Summary: For B2B firms that want to reach decision-makers, Linkedin is a terrific advertising platforms. If your B2C company intends to increase its reach, Google Ads could be the best fit.
When you target your audience with Google Ads, you have a few options: location, affinity, technology, buyer behavior, demographics, and interactions with your app or website.
No matter how much you know about your buyer, you may struggle to avoid clicks from worthless leads that cost too much.
In some cases on Google, people may not even know what they’re looking for. You can try to advertise to your desired targeted audience on Google Ads, but it can be challenging to get to the precise people who will most likely buy what you sell.
When people sign up for LinkedIn, they usually provide many details, such as their occupation, title/job title, experience, industry, education, interests, and more. All of this information can be leveraged for great advantage when you start your marketing campaigns.
Also, LinkedIn users can join many groups, start conversations, and obtain followers. The data is priceless when you want to target a specific audience and market to them. LinkedIn also has a Matched Audience that helps advertisers match their email marketing lists and website visitors with users on LinkedIn.
Many marketing experts think that LinkedIn Ads offer more value. LinkedIn has refined targeting, and you can make your product known to them so that you can tell them about something they didn’t know existed.
Summary: For B2B and B2C companies looking for a broad audience, Google Ads has enough targeting features. But for B2B firms that want to target specific groups, LinkedIn Ads has about 100 segmentation methods for micro targeting.
When you want lead generation, Google Ads has a broader reach and is the most effective. First, you can bring in a lot of prospects to your site without breaking the bank. The audience you’re after on Google visits the search giant with the idea to find the best product or service. This makes generating leads easier.
Getting leads from LinkedIn can be more challenging. Users of the platform may sign in to read industry news or talk to group members. No matter how perfect your ad is, viewers may not be in the mood to buy anything.
That said, Linkedin has a way to target ad leads through in-site messaging, which can generate plenty of leads.
When it comes down to dollars and cents, LinkedIn Ads usually are more pricey than Google Ads. As in Google, you can select cost-per-click or cost-per-impression.
LinkedIn also features a cost-per-send for InMail advertising. Typically, you’ll pay about $5 for each click, $6 for 1,000 impressions, and .80 for each send.
With Google Ads, the average CPC is $1. But to leverage that low cost, you need to work on your audience segmentation. If you don’t your ROI may be below what you want.
Summary: Advertising budgets for each platform depends on several factors. On average, Google Ads cost less than LinkedIn Ads. If your B2B company has a tight budget, you may want to focus on a limited variety of LinkedIn ads instead of a broad range of Google Ads.
So should you advertise with Google Ads vs LinkedIn Ads? Yes!
What we mean is, it depends. The correct choice depends on your budget, product or service offered, marketing goals, and target audience. You should not assume that when you need a digital marketing campaign, Google Analytics Adwords is the only choice.
It’s critical to evaluate the market, understand who your buyer is, and make a data-driven decision about the best marketing platform to reach your well-defined goals. One type of company might do better with Google Ads, and another may find LinkedIn Ads preferable.
The great news is you don’t need to choose between the two platforms. Many businesses use both, as well as Facebook, Instagram, and others. If you have the budget, it may pay off to diversify your paid search advertising to get the best ROI.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Digital marketing is a classic marketing strategy that’s commonly used to supplement organic web traffic, but it’s hardly the most straightforward way to increase your site’s audience. In fact, from a technological perspective, it’s a rather fussy practice. That’s why brands that want to include a PPC marketing strategy in their overall strategic decisions need to work with an experienced agency. Agencies facilitate ad distribution, track clicks, and calculate fees – and the best ones can help their clients thrive. Unfortunately, there are a lot of subpar agencies and bad actors out there, and you need to know how to spot them.
So, how do you know if it’s time to fire your PPC agencies? Keep an eye out for these 9 red flags. They could indicate you’re working with the wrong agency and that it’s time to make a move.
Companies leave their PPC agencies behind for all sorts of reasons, but according to a 2015 report by the Society for Digital Agencies (SoDA), the most common reasons include outgrowing the agency’s capabilities, cost overruns, and dissatisfaction with their strategy. These are all valid reasons, and ultimately many of them can be reduced to an agency’s failure to generate any or enough growth. After all, disliking the agency’s strategy isn’t likely to be much of a problem if that strategy is generating major growth. Similarly, a brand is unlikely to view itself as having outgrown the agency is their accounts continue to grow.
Ultimately, what these different reasons for firing PPC agencies demonstrate is that, any way you slice it, no one wants to work with an agency that isn’t making them money. So, while it might take a little while for your PPC ads to gain traction, if you’re not seeing growth based on the launch of or changes to your PPC campaign, it’s time to move on to a different agency.
While most brands work with a PPC advertising agency to run their campaigns, it’s not only possible but advisable for you to set up your own accounts with the major PPC advertising platforms, which include sites like Google AdWords, Yahoo, and Facebook. Still, if you’re not the most technologically savvy, it can be tempting to let your agency do it for you. Don’t give in to the impulse. Instead, ask them to guide you through it so that you can ensure that you’re the one with owner access rights.
Unless you have the owner access rights to your company’s PPC accounts, you can’t be sure you have unmediated access to your campaign metrics or feel good/ confident that you’ll be able to transfer your accounts to another agency or bring them in-house if needed. In other words, your agency could be misrepresenting best results to you or could refuse to relinquish control if you end your contract. You need to retain those rights and then give your PPC agent the appropriate permissions to manage your campaigns. If they balk at this arrangement, show them the door.
Typically, when you look at your company’s profile on a site like Google AdWords, you’ll see that your PPC agency has set up specific goals to help your business grow. These commonly include such metrics as Cost Per Acquisition, Return On Advertising Spend, and Cost Per Lead, though there are plenty of other valuable metrics that are worth tracking. Such measurements assure you that you’re spending your Digital marketing money in the right place, help you budget for ad spending, and offer insights into what’s working and what isn’t.
Unfortunately, you’ll occasionally encounter PPC advertising agencies that fail to set up these metric reports, and they’re not to be trusted. Even if they claim to be using an in-house system, it’s your right to demand they use the standard reporting system for each PPC platform and to fire them if they refuse to. Dashboard-based metrics exist to provide consistent measurements regarding the success of PPC campaigns ad those are the numbers you want to reference.
In a similar vein, some PPC advertising agencies skip the core metrics noted above in favor of less valuable but more appealing “vanity metrics.” Vanity metrics don’t help your business make money and they offer limited insight into your operations. Examples of vanity metrics include any campaign value based on impressions, engagement metrics that don’t drive conversions, and even many of the behavior-based metrics that used to be considered the gold standard in website evaluation, such as bounce rate or time on site.
Ultimately, vanity metrics don’t serve your company because they can be created artificially. An untrustworthy PPC agency might drive up engagement numbers by sharing a great meme on your brand’s landing pages, which will drive likes and other reactions, but won’t actually funnel clients to your site or create sales. Similarly, you can get a huge number of impressions by getting your PPC new ads onto a very popular site, but if no one is clicking on it, all you’ve got is a tally of how many people visited/ web traffic to someone else’s website.
Having the right metrics is important, but if you’re going to meet your goals then your Good PPC agency needs to be adjusting your account settings regularly to refine your campaigns. At a minimum, that means accessing your account to regularly monitoring and fine-tune the settings at least once a week. Such regular check-ins allow your agency to quickly adjust your social media campaigns based on updates to the search engines algorithm, catch any conversion mistakes that could cost your company money, and even react to competitors campaigns.
Be sure that you not only ask your PPC agency how often they access and update your accounts, but that you’re also checking your accounts regularly for updates. The reality is that, although many companies run PPC campaigns, only 10% of AdWords accounts are updated weekly. If your PPC agency can’t meet that standard, ditch them for one that will stay on top of your campaigns.
Just as your PPC agency needs to be fine tuning your accounts regularly, they should also be reporting back on your campaigns at least monthly. While seeing week-to-week progress would be great, as with many kinds of growth, this can be hard to evaluate. Comprehensive, monthly reports, on the other hand, can help you see what your agency has been doing on your behalf, how your accounts are growing, and allow you to be an active participant in your Digital marketing strategy.
Never settle for a company that doesn’t offer substantive reporting. While great reports may offer added insights from your account manager or more labor intensive explanatory work, the majority of PPC reporting is automated – any company that doesn’t provide it is just lazy.
It’s unrealistic to expect that you’ll speak to the same person every time you contact your PPC agency; that doesn’t even happen at your bank or your doctor’s office. That being said, there should be one person who acts as the lead on your account because that allows them to master your brand’s voice, develop a big picture strategy, and generally build up a knowledge base around your brand’s needs and preferences. They might be busy or out of the office occasionally, but anyone whose experienced both approaches – a core account manager and a rotating cast of agents – can tell you that having a point person makes a difference.
If your PPC agency doesn’t have you working with a single, core agent, you may want to ask a few questions to get a better sense of what’s happening. Do they have an unusual in-house strategy, or are they having trouble with employee retention? Do they think it doesn’t make a difference? You can also request that they place you with a single representative, but if that’s not their standard practice already, you’re probably better off going elsewhere. It just doesn’t bode well.
Google AdWords isn’t a new program and there are plenty of other PPC programs out there, but if an agency is committed to this work, then they should have complete Google’s AdWords certification program. You can check on this by asking them to show you their Premier Partner page – it really is that simple. Not having one isn’t necessarily the worst offense a company can commit, but it’s a good indicator that you can do better and should commit your ads spend elsewhere.
Did you pick your PPC agency based on their portfolio of appealing PPC ads/ads or optimized images? That’s a great starting point – it certainly indicates that they can do high-quality work – but it’s not enough if they’re not actually showing you your brand’s own ads before they launch them. Obvious, right? It should be, but many entrepreneurs have been duped by PPC agencies who tell them that their ad is similar to another ad product, which is called ad copy; the client, not wanting to be pushy, walks away with their own notion of their brand’s ad, and meanwhile the agency may not have done any work at all.
Your PPC agency should be giving you the final say on all your paid ads, so if you’ve supposedly got a campaign running and you haven’t seen your ads, ask to see them right away. Odds are good that if your agency isn’t showing you your PPC ads before launching them that they either don’t exist or they’re extremely low quality for online visibility. Great PPC agencies are proud of their work and they want you to see it. Anything less should raise concerns.
Hiring an agency to manage your PPC campaigns will obviously cost more than just the fees for the campaign itself, but the costs involved in running ads with your agency shouldn’t be confusing. That’s because, ultimately, your money should only be going two different places – to the agency and to the ad platform – and everyone at the company should be clear on the split. So, when we say you should be wary about confusing fees, we’re not talking about total cost (that’s a matter for you and your budget), but rather about how the money is split up. For any payment there should be the fee to the agency and the ads spend and it should always be obvious what the division is there.
As popular as PPC marketing is with businesses today, many of the agencies that execute these campaigns don’t do a very good job. They’re wasting your ad spend and your time, and you deserve better. That’s why you should switch to PPC.co’s PPC Management Service.
At PPC.co, we’re committed to ensuring that your ads are reaching the right audience and we know that most agencies just don’t deliver that. Starting from our understanding that website conversions often top out at 2%, we emphasize PPC marketing that pairs first contacts with retargeting efforts to ensure that your brand remains a top-of-mind solution for past visitors. A non-converting visitor is often just someone who hasn’t seen the right content yet, and we want to help you make those connections.
What else makes our PPC Management program stand out? With dual Google Ads and Google Analytics certifications, we have a deep understanding of the systems & AdWords account that get your ads seen and can use tracking data to its fullest potential of web traffic. In fact, that’s why we start every client engagement with a full PPC audit, because even when we’re not leading the campaigns, our skilled professionals can quickly see what’s working and what’s falling short in your current campaigns. From the start, we put our expertise to work for you.
If your PPC agency has exhibited any of the above warning signs, you can’t afford to wait around for progress. It’s time for the protection of business and moves on – to PPC.co. Contact us today to learn more about our PPC Management Services and say goodbye to wasted ad spend and rock bottom conversions. Once you’ve seen the difference a top PPC agency can make in your campaigns, you’ll never believe you let anyone else handle your PPC needs.
