Amazon Webstore

[danny156]

Does anyone have one - or had ??

Pros and Cons ??

 

[F1ink]

Used to have one... (not printer ink I should add)

Software was difficult to work with..
Products required barcodes
Expensive on fees.

I don't know if its changed much but all the above cons and the fact we didnt get enough orders to justify the effort and costs were the reasons for discontinuing. The business has gone on quite happily without using Amazon.

 

[danny156]

Used to have one... (not printer ink I should add)

Software was difficult to work with..
Products required barcodes
Expensive on fees.

I don't know if its changed much but all the above cons and the fact we didnt get enough orders to justify the effort and costs were the reasons for discontinuing. The business has gone on quite happily without using Amazon.

Can you port your inventory across from your existing Amazon account ??

What difficulties did you have with the software?

 

[F1ink]

We had to manually enter all the products individually, and the software struggled to handle product variations like sizes and different colours.
Learning curve and the time spent with this software did not justify the costs and orders gained.

From my experience I don't recommend it, if you have an existing e-commerce website then the time/money can be better spent on the marketing for that.

 

[danny156]

We had to manually enter all the products individually, and the software struggled to handle product variations like sizes and different colours.
Learning curve and the time spent with this software did not justify the costs and orders gained.

From my experience I don't recommend it, if you have an existing e-commerce website then the time/money can be better spent on the marketing for that.

Did you have an Amazon.co.uk marketplace account or did you just sign up for webstore ??

 

[F1ink]

Both, still have the marketplace account, but that gets so few orders I forget I have it sometimes

 

[in2play]

Tried it. You can port products across from your existing seller central account and I think you can use the flat file as well.

It all seems reasonably intuitive and gives you a good looking page.

There were several things that put me off. It seems you are limited to the descriptions that you put into your product listings and these are shared into your seller central account. This means that Amazon could use your product descriptions on their own pages at the same time and I don't like the thought of what that could do in terms of SEO.

You are also restricted to selling at the same prices that you list on Amazon. If you currently have two different pricing structures, because you are chasing the buybox on Amazon, but not on your own website, you will have a problem.

It's not so good at accepting products that don't fit the Amazon SKU/EAN model, eg personalised items.

 

[theretaildoctor]

We thought it was a good alternative to whats out there at the moment, a lot of big brands use itfor their platform, its worth looking at

 

[danny156]

You are also restricted to selling at the same prices that you list on Amazon. If you currently have two different pricing structures, because you are chasing the buybox on Amazon, but not on your own website, you will have a problem.

I spoke to someone yesterday and he said I could control my prices differently but selecting which platform I am controlling the price from

 

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Does that not conflict with Amazons policy of you only being allowed to sell for the same or higher price on your own web site

Much abused I know but here we would have Amazon actively saying it is okay which is a different thing altogether