No doubt about it, Amazon.com reaches a lot of online shoppers — some 95 million of them, in fact. Accessing that market might be attractive, but sorting through the options for doing so can be confusing. Go to the Make Money With Amazon section of their site, and you’re presented with 16 separate options.
For companies that are already selling online, there are really only two choices that make sense to consider, for which I’ll provide a very short course.
The first choice is Amazon Product Ads, a pay-per-click program. As with Google AdWords, your pay only when someone clicks on your ad to visit your website. You control the maximum cost per click, and set a maximum daily budget. There are no monthly fees or minimum spend. You can pause or cancel your ads at any time.
When submitting Product Ads, the information you provide includes:
• Product category
• A four- to eight-word title
• A unique SKU for each product
• A link to the product page on your site where the product can be purchased
• A good quality image on a white background
• Product price plus shipping price
• Product description
If the same or a similar product is available on Amazon, your ad will appear on existing product pages targeting customers who are looking for a product like yours. If your product is new to Amazon, Amazon uses product details you provide to create a new product page that will be available when customers search for related products.
Amazon Product Ads are an especially good choice for merchants offering unique products not otherwise available on Amazon. If the same product is available directly from Amazon, it’s overwhelmingly likely that customers will buy from them instead.
More information about Amazon Product Ads is available here.
In our next blog post, we’ll discuss Selling on Amazon.
