How does Amazon marketplace actually work for a small seller?
Selling handmade candles through our own site. People keep telling me to list on Amazon too. I don't get how the fees, FBA and ranking fit together, or whether my own brand just gets buried.
Check category restrictions before you buy any stock. Some categories and a lot of big brands are gated, so a new account can't list them until it's approved, sometimes only with invoices from an authorised distributor. People tend to find this out after the pallet has arrived.
If it's your own product, get a trademark application in and apply for Brand Registry. It gives you more control over the listing when other sellers try to edit it, and unlocks A+ content and the better ad formats.
Short version: you open a Seller Central account, list products (either on an existing listing someone else created, or a new one if it's your own product), and Amazon takes a cut of every sale.
The parts that decide whether it's worth it:
- Plan. There's an individual plan that charges per item sold and a professional plan with a monthly fee. Once you're selling more than a few dozen units a month the professional one is cheaper, and it's needed for most of the useful tools.
- Referral fee. A percentage of each sale, depends on category. For a lot of categories it's around 15%.
- Fulfilment. FBA means you ship stock to Amazon's warehouses and they handle shipping and returns for a fee, and your items get Prime. FBM means you ship it yourself. FBA is easier but storage fees punish slow-moving stock.
Do the maths per product before listing: price minus referral fee minus fulfilment fee minus your cost minus ads. A lot of small sellers find out later that they need to run Amazon ads to get seen at all, and that's what eats the margin. What are you planning to sell?
