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.
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.
PriceGrabber.com, mentioned in the previous chapter, is both a shopping directory and a merchant site. Which method of working with PriceGrabber should you choose? Remember, as a shopping directory, they’ll charge you per click. As a merchant site, they’ll charge you per sale (7.5 percent). You may find it more profitable to go one way or another! If your web site’s conversion rate is low, you may find that you spend a lot of money on clicks for every sale—in which case it would be better to use PriceGrabber as a merchant site. The decision depends on your product price, gross profit, and conversion rate.
Half.com was such a popular merchant site that it couldn’t remain independent—it was purchased by eBay in 2000 with the intention of integrating it into eBay and then closing it down. However, it’s still so popular that eBay finally cancelled the October 2004 closing, and announced that it would keep it open indefinitely. eBay stated that Half.com was continuing to grow more than they expected, and that Half.com members provide eBay with almost half of its books, music, video, and games listings.
There’s a certain amount of Half.com/eBay integration. When you search at Half.com, you’ll see an On eBay tab, which shows you matching listings on eBay. Half.com isn’t promoted in the same way on eBay, though. (Perhaps this will change now that eBay has decided not to close Half.com.)
Half.com allows merchants and individuals to sign up and list products very quickly, and unlike eBay, doesn’t charge a listing fee; rather, they charge a fee based on the sales price, declining with sales volume.
However, here’s one real problem with Half.com: there’s no simple way to upload large numbers of products to the Half.com inventory. Once you’re established as a reliable merchant, you can increase the quantity for each product, but what you can’t do is list large numbers of different products quickly; each has to be typed in one by one!
Overstock says it’s “an Internet leader for name-brands at clearance prices.” They offer “top-quality name-brand merchandise at 40–80% off, every day of the week.” The company name and the blurb imply that the products are all, well, overstock or clearance items, but in fact many merchants are simply using Overstock as another low-price sales channel. They sell through Overstock the same products they sell on their stores, except at a lower price. (We discussed the issue of different pricing models in Chapter 1.)
Overtock.com can move a lot of product. But they won’t take just anyone. They want to know you can deliver. This is not an automated signup, like setting up an account with Amazon. You’ll have to contact Overstock (look for the Have Products to Sell? link), and discuss with them the products you want to sell, how many you have available, the different prices at which the products are sold, and so on.
Figure Overstock.com is looking for merchants, not products. They want to build long-term relationships with merchants.uBid.com is an unusual system (see Figure 28-4). It’s a business-to-consumer auction site, selling brand-name products—around a billion dollars’ worth so far—to four-and-a-half million buyers. Every merchant is vetted, transactions are processed by uBid itself, and a 250-person customer- service department aims to ensure that every transaction goes smoothly.
Products sold on uBid.com generally have no reserve and a $1—or very low—minimum bid price. Auctions are generally multiple-item auctions—sometimes hundreds of items. As with eBay, there’s a “buy it now” function that allows people to bypass the auction process and buy a product immediately.
Figure The uBid system, perhaps the only business-to-consumer auction siteSmartBargains is another major system that you won’t get into without personal contact; there’s no automatic merchant signup, and when we requested information about selling through SmartBargains.com, we were given the e-mail address of the Executive Vice President & Chief Merchandising Officer. It’s an important system, though, partly because it feeds data to AOL’s Instore.com shopping site.
You’re not getting into SmartBargains.com if you sell a couple of homemade candles a week. But if you can reliably supply large quantities of products, then you should probably consider talking with them.
