Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) has made selling on the largest e-commerce platform easier and more efficient.
Sellers who sign up for this program experience hassle-free logistics and shipping, and faster delivery of products to customers. Additionally, they can avail of discounted freight rates.
Moreover, FBA sellers do not have to worry about providing poor customer service and managing returns. This is because the Amazon team will handle these two problems efficiently and promptly. As such, merchants on the program are less likely to get negative reviews and feedback.
Using Technology to Leverage the FBA Program
Although Amazon will take several things off your shoulder when you sign up for FBA, it doesn’t mean you should stop looking for ways to be a more successful seller.
Certain apps will enable you to be a more productive FBA merchant. By downloading and using these mobile tools, you will get help in handling various elements and operations involved in online selling. These include freight booking and shipping, marketing, and pricing.
Below are five types of apps that will help you become a more efficient and successful FBA seller:
1. Product Sourcing
Investing in new products to sell and adding more to your inventory is often a risk, especially if you are not sure there is a market for them. To be sure your investment in new or additional products won’t go to waste, find out if it is worth it (and profitable) to do so first.
Sourcing apps are the best tools to use if you are looking for new products to sell, or you want to be sure replenishing your inventory will be a good move. They will help you choose in-demand items to add to your store. Some apps will even aid you in finding reputable suppliers to partner with.
Two of the widely used product scouting apps are SellerApp and Scoutify.
2. Pricing
Browsing through Amazon is one way of knowing the going rates of the products you are selling. By having an idea of these rates, you can price your items competitively.
However, there are apps you can use to scout for rates faster and more efficiently. Additionally, these tools will help you monitor the prices of products on Amazon. They will allow you to view the price history of items sold by other users as well.
With these applications, you can also set price and product availability alerts. You will also be able to check the current sales rank.
The Amazon Seller and camelcamelcamel are two of the best pricing apps to use.
3. Shipping
Sending your products or inventory to a fulfillment center can be time-consuming and stressful. You will need to prepare your items, schedule a pickup or bring them to your shipping company, and prepare and complete several documents.
An app can help you streamline the whole shipping process. You will be able to skip certain steps yet still ship your inventory efficiently.
Many of these mobile shipping tools will help you find the most cost-effective air or ocean freight forwarding services. Additionally, they will prepare and pick up the items you will ship. They can also provide custom invoices and monthly reports.
ShipWorks and Shipa Freight are two of the most complete and reliable shipping mobile applications today.
4. Payments
As an FBA seller, receiving, tracking, and managing payments are challenging yet rewarding tasks you have to do regularly. However, with just one app, you can stay on top of all these three easily.
Aside from using it for pricing, you can also use Amazon Seller to view and analyze your sales. It will also give you a great idea regarding your account health. Additionally, it will allow you to see the next payment balance.
Other payment apps worth downloading are those that allow you to receive money from international marketplaces without excessive charges or issues with getting it directly. An example of this tool is Currencies Direct.
5. Reviews
Finally, reviews can make or break your career as an Amazon FBA seller. It is, therefore, important that you monitor and manage all feedback that you receive online.
Certain mobile applications will enable you to monitor product reviews. There are a few ones that will help you remove negative ones on Amazon as well.
However, the best apps to have are the ones that will allow you to request for reviews from buyers. They have built-in multi-language message templates and automatic email rules which they will send to your buyers.
AMZ Finder and Bqool are two of the best apps to download for review monitoring and management purposes.
Many of these apps are free to download and use. As such, there is no reason for you to avoid maximizing them for your business to flourish on Amazon.
AUTHOR BIO
As Chief Product Officer for Shipa Freight, Paul Rehmet is responsible for translating the vision of Shipa Freight into an easy-to-use online freight platform for our customers. Formerly Vice President of Digital Marketing for Agility, Paul managed Agility’s website, mobile apps, content marketing and online advertising campaigns. In his 25-year career, Paul has held various technology leadership positions with early-stage startups and Fortune 500 companies including Unisys, Destiny Web Solutions, and US Airways. Paul has a Masters in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a Bachelor of Computer Science from Brown University. Paul is based in Philadelphia.