Amazon Pro-Merchant Account?

Eats Away Profits!

[olimits7]

Hello,

I'm thinking about creating an account on Amazon as a Pro-Merchant, and listing my products. However, I took a look at what this would cost me and it's amazing anybody can turn a profit selling on Amazon after they take their cut.

After trying to figure out some pricing, including Amazon taking their 6%-15% commission on the sale price and adding a closing fee there is no way I can make a profit unless my wholesale price is ridiculously lower.

I'm looking to get some feedback from people who have Pro-Merchant accounts on Amazon? Do you think this helps your website with sales? Do you make good profit margins selling on Amazon.

Thank you,

olimits7

[jwolthuis]

Pro Merchant advantages:
- Avoid the $1 fee per sale that Amazon charges non-Pro-Merchant sellers
- Ability to create new ASINs for products not yet in their catalog.
- Import product listing via spreadsheet

Pro Merchant disadvantages:
- Need to sell a lot of widgets just to cover the $40/month nut. For a 20% markup, that's $200+ in revenue just to break the surface.
- Your listings will still appear below Featured Merchants.

In general, Amazon has a strong trust factor with shoppers, and lots of shoppers have payment methods and addresses already set, so shopping is painless. But the organization of their catalog is terrible for anything other than books or electronics.

And if your competitor has already added your product to the catalog, you're stuck with their descriptions, and shipping weights (which are often way off the actual weights). Your pricing formula must take that into account.

[Wlauzon]

We have had a Yahoo store since the late 90's, and recently looked at Amazon because of the hype they sent about their new stores.

After figuring out all their fees and percentages, it would have cost us over 2.5 times as much as what we pay now.

Some of our more expensive items only have a 12-16% margin after you count shipping and overhead, giving Amazon 2/3 of that is a total non-starter for us. On one item I compared, we would have paid Amazon $49 vs the $4.60 we now pay Yahoo.

[Rugles]

And if your competitor has already added your product to the catalog, you're stuck with their descriptions, and shipping weights

This is the Biggest drawback to dealing with Amazon.

I understand why they did it, to reduce duplication in their database, confusion for the shopper and therefore bandwidth ... but as a merchant it is a huge hassle.