Dear Amazon Seller,
This newsletter will cover the following topics
3) NEW- FBA Worldwide Export for Media Products
4) AMTU for Easy Data Exchange
With the dark winter days drawing to a close, Amazon shoppers are looking forward to the arrival of spring and the Easter holidays. Cast an imaginative eye over your selection to ensure you can offer what your customers are looking for at this optimistic time of year. Think about chocolate* and decorations for the Easter celebrations, domestic products* and equipment for spring-cleaning, sports and cold-weather gear* for last-minute winter getaways and all those garden and outdoor products for family weekends and holidays.
*The following stores require prior approval to start selling in: Clothing, Grocery, Health & Beauty, Health & Personal Care, Jewellery and Watches.
If you are currently not eligible to sell in these stores, please contact seller support who will be able to provide a full list of requirements to gain eligibility.
The Right Product at the Right Time
The business reports section can give you valuable sales and traffic insight to help you fine-tune your range to accommodate the seasonal shoppers.
- Look at what you were selling this time last year – have you got sufficient inventory of the key sellers and could you look at bringing in any similar products to drive additional sales?
- Can you take advantage of the seasonal demand to clear out relevant slow-movers or aged inventory?
- Take a look at the Page Views metrics for your best-selling seasonal lines - perhaps there is more you can do to increase the view-to-order conversion rate for your offers, such as a slight price adjustment or adding more product information to the detail page.
Spring-Clean your Inventory
Sellers who use Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) have an enhanced selection of reports at their finger-tips which offer further visibility into sales trends and help with inventory management. These reports are available to view online or as downloadable files.
- The Inventory Health Report provides detailed data about your sales, sellable and unsellable quantities, inventory age, weeks of cover left, and information which shows how your offers match up
to the competition.
- The Recommended Removal Report identifies which lines (and applicable volumes) are at risk of being charged the Long-Term Storage Fee at the time of the next Inventory Cleanup, and helps create a removal order to have those lines returned or disposed of.
- The Manage FBA Inventory Report provides listing, condition, disposition, and quantity information to help with day-to-day inventory management tasks.
For more information on how your business can benefit from FBA, click here.
Promote your products
Remember how attractive promotions can be for shoppers browsing on Amazon; a promotion could lead to a spontaneous buying decision by highlighting your offer over those of your competitors. There is a variety of promotional options available for you to choose from, take a look in your Seller Central at Inventory / Manage promotions to find the one that best suits your requirements.
Please note: Software and Video Games products orders are excluded from free-shipping promotions. BMVD Products are excluded from all promotions.
You register, sell, but get no money?
All new sellers on Amazon must expect a 14 day lag between registration and receiving payment for those important first orders – this holding period is a vital security requirement and applies to all new seller accounts. Amazon will settle your account and initiate a transfer to your bank after this 14 day period, provided you have entered your valid bank account and credit card information. Then, going forward, funds will automatically be disbursed every 14 days from your last settlement.
How do you get paid?
In order for a settlement to take place, you must:
- Have a positive or zero account balance.
Referral fees and customer refunds, if any, can affect your balance.
- Have entered valid information in Seller Central for your UK, Austrian, French, German or US bank account. For more information, please see Bank Account Information in the help pages.
When the settlement completes, we post a settlement report in the Reports section of Seller Central and then pay the proceeds to your bank account by bank transfer. It usually takes 6-10 business days from the time when we initiate the bank transfer before the funds arrive in your bank account.
Please remember
Transactions are recorded in your Seller Central account only after you confirm dispatch of an order. If you don’t confirm dispatch of an order, you will not be paid for this order. There is plenty of useful information in Seller Central on disbursements and settlement reports, so be sure to take a look if you want to know more.
3) NEW- FBA Worldwide Export for Media Products
Up until now, FBA sellers have only been able to export their full catalogue on Amazon’s European platforms to the 27 EU member states. However, thanks to a new feature upgrade, Amazon is pleased to give sellers the option to export their media products worldwide. There are currently no extra shipment charges for the seller. FBA media sellers can now activate this additional region setting on the FBA Export settings page in their seller account. Once the new region has been activated, Amazon will ask for an image of a signature to be printed on the customs label for all shipments exported to non-EU member states. (see screenshot below).
4) AMTU for Easy Data Exchange
Are you spending a lot of time manually uploading files to Amazon and downloading reports? Why don’t you take a look at AMTU (Amazon Merchant Transport Utility) – it could help streamline your Amazon business, without adding costs, and give you back some of that valuable time.
AMTU is available free of charge to all sellers. It is a flexible, easy to download application designed for automating / semi-automating several interactive business processes with Amazon. In essence, it turns posting files to and pulling reports from Amazon into a simple drag-and-drop task. Using built-in coding, it runs automatically behind the scenes, uploading files from the relevant directory to Amazon and then retrieving the results of those uploads. AMTU can also retrieve feed processing, order and settlement reports from Amazon.
AMTU provides automated data transportation in XML or TXT format, works in Windows, Mac and Linux environments and offers support for multiple seller accounts from a single installation, with the ability to customise settings for each account independently.
If you think your business could benefit, why don’t you find out more about what the latest version of AMTU offers.
The AMTU 2.1 User Guide can be downloaded from Seller Central and there is an
informative webinar recording with a PDF information deck on the Amazon Services webpage.
You can download AMTU here: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact our Seller Service.
Our colleagues will be very pleased to help in any way they can.
With kind regards,
Amazon Services Team
5, Rue Plaetis
2338 Luxembourg
