UTeM A6 3B

To get started with Amazon Marketplace Pro Merchant, visit the Amazon.com home page and look for the little Make Money box on the left side; click the Marketplace link and look for the Pro Merchant information. Follow the instructions to set up a Pro Merchant account. When Amazon sells one of your Marketplace listings, it processes the order and transfers the money to your bank account (every 14 days) minus certain charges.

■ A 99-cent flat fee per transaction
■ For computer equipment, a 6% fee
■ For photographic equipment, cell phones, and electronics, an 8% fee
■ For musical instruments, a 12% fee
■ For everything else, 15%

However, note that Amazon provides a shipping credit; they charge the buyer a shipping charge, and also pay you for shipping. For instance, if you are shipping a book within the U.S. using standard, media mail, they’ll pay you $2.26. If shipping a computer they’ll pay you $4.04 plus 45 cents per pound (you have to define the shipping weight when entering the product).

Is your pricing competitive? You don’t always have to have the rock-bottom lowest price. But if you’re not close to the bottom, you probably won’t do well selling through Amazon Marketplace. Note that Amazon has some pricing rules, which can be summarized as follows:
■ You must sell your products at or below the Amazon price.
■ You cannot sell your products anywhere else on the Internet at a lower price.

However, if you have a Pro Merchant account, you don’t have to pay the 99-cent fixed fee—but you will pay a $39.95/mo. membership fee. Sell 40 products a month, and you’ve saved the fee. But there are other advantages to the Pro Merchant account:
■ You can use the Inventory Loader to upload data about thousands of products at a time. Without a Pro Merchant account you’d have to enter each product into a form, one by one. The Inventory Loader is essentially a system similar to the Upload function in Yahoo! Merchant Solutions’ Category Manager (see Chapter 13), in which you upload a spreadsheet or other data file into Amazon Marketplace.
■ You can create and customize a zShops storefront. Some merchants don’t maintain any other store on the Web; they simply work from zShops.
■ You can upload any number of products; there’s no limit to your Amazon listings.

By the way, although Amazon.com makes it easy to join and get started, they are actually more selective than one might imagine, based on size of your listing. If you upload five or ten products, fine . . . but if you upload 50,000 products, you’re going to get a call from them, and be vetted. In some cases, very large merchants are denied access—they have their Merchant Pro accounts shut down.