UTeM A6 3B

Amazon.com actually has a number of different ways for merchants to sell through their store.
■ Amazon Marketplace This is really intended for the sale of used and collectible items, although you can sell new products. In fact, it’s designed to be possible for individuals to sell their own “stuff.” On virtually every page you’ll see a Sell yours here button. Your listings will appear in the used & new page linked from the main product page.
■ Marketplace Pro Merchant With this program you can upload data into Amazon Marketplace en masse, and Pro Merchants are more likely to be selling new items.
■ zShops This system (www.zshops.com) is an online discount store comprised of products entered into the Amazon Marketplace; if you are a Pro Merchant you’ll get your own mini store within zShops (see Figure 28-2). Some product pages within the main Amazon site do have a little zShops link, but probably few people notice this.

■ Amazon Auctions Amazon has its own auction site (auctions.amazon.com), although it’s not terribly well known.
■ Amazon Advantage If you publish books, music, videos, and DVDs, Amazon has another program for you, Amazon.com Advantage. This program puts your products into Amazon’s inventory, allowing them to sell and ship directly.

Amazon has not done a great job at clarifying all this. It’s very easy to get confused when you dig through the jumble of diverse and contradictory information related to all the different ways to sell through the company. (Perhaps this is Amazon’s way of ensuring the survival of the fittest; if you can figure it all out, they’ll let you sell.)

Forget for now about zShops. It’s essentially a compilation of Amazon Marketplace product listings. So the primary way to sell through Amazon is with a Marketplace account, and if you want to be a regular merchant selling a lot of product through this system, you’ll probably need a Merchant Pro account.