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Dear Amazon Seller,

This newsletter will cover the following topics:

1. Make sure the students are well equipped for the start of the new school year
2. Already start planning for a successful year end with Fulfilment by Amazon
3. Keep your methods for bulk transactions and automation up-to-date
4. Reach new customers with the Europe Marketplaces Account
5. Checkout by Amazon: Offer the Amazon checkout experience on your website

1) Make sure the students are well equipped for the start of the new school year

Get the right products
This month mums and dads will be busy shopping for the mountain of kit that their children need to start back at school, so make the most of your captive audience and make their shopping task as easy as possible for them. Entice them with keenly priced and well-presented offers in product categories such as desk and chair sets, easels, stationery, calculators, computers and notebooks, satchels and ruck-sacks, trainers and lunch-boxes. And, as an extra hook and to beat the competition, why not present your customers with promotions* on your offers – free shipping and bulk-buy discounts are popular promotional vehicles for shoppers buying lots of different kinds of products in one go.

*Software and Video Games products orders are excluded from free-shipping promotions. BMVD Products are excluded from all promotions

Make your products shine
Optimising your seasonal selection will help maximise sales over the peak season but the data quality of your listings, one of the other essential principles behind successful selling on Amazon, is just as important as it will help customers find your products (via on-Amazon and off-Amazon search results) and then influence their decision to purchase your products.
Would you buy an item that didn’t have an image, a good description, or clearly defined features? Make sure your products have: 

• Attractive images with a clean white background 
• Clear, concise and accurate titles 
• Bullet points which describe the key features in short sentences 
• Descriptions with as much factual and information content as possible 
• Correctly assigned browse-nodes and relevant key search term

More information here.

This tutorial will explain how information is displayed on Amazon product pages (also known as detail pages).

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2) Already start planning for a successful year end with Fulfilment by Amazon

Good timing and planning can make your end-of-year sales, and we want you to have your best festive season ever!  Plan to send some of your best selling items into an Amazon Fulfilment Centre and let Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) take care of delivering them quickly to customers in your home marketplace as well as EU wide accompanied by the Amazon delivery promise. Like many FBA sellers today, you could enjoy increased sales, reduced costs and time savings allowing you to concentrate on growing your business further. 

Consider listing some of your products on Amazon’s other European marketplaces from your Amazon home marketplace account and reach tens of millions of potential new customers throughout the EU. We will ship your Amazon orders using our European Fulfilment Network. With Amazon’s EU Export for Multichannel option, we can even take care of delivering products originating from your own or other third party sites from the same local inventory pool to your customers at home and in all 27 EU countries giving you increased flexibility and reach. All things geared towards helping you maximise your sales and optimise your inventory at the busiest time of the year. Other FBA advantages which help drive up sales are:

• We will ship most items until very shortly before Christmas.
• Many late purchasing customers trust Amazon to deliver by Christmas Eve and will therefore place a last minute order.
• Your customers can request different delivery options such as Free Super Saver Delivery or benefit from Amazon Prime.
• Many online gift shoppers combine purchases in one cost saving order and FBA items can be shipped together with those from Amazon.
• FBA orders are eligible for Amazon gift wrap including personalised gift messages.
  

And on the practical side:

• You don’t need to take on extra staff in the run up to Christmas to cope with a peak in orders.
• You can ensure you don’t run out of stock by using Amazon’s replenishment alerts.
• You can even go on holiday between Christmas and New Year and your items can continue to be sold and delivered via FBA

To get started and see for yourself follow our simple step by step guide to preparing your first shipment. Should you have questions, or require assistance, our Seller Support will be very happy to help. More info on EU Import and Cross-Border Sales here.

This webinar will show you how to get started with Fulfilment by Amazon.

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3) Keep you methods for bulk transactions and automation up-to-date

Sellers that make use of our upload macros in the Excel-based listing templates need to make sure they are using the latest revision and are not dependent on an outdated version of these files. If you downloaded your copy of the template earlier than April this year, you should go to Seller Central Help and get a recent version.
The old version of the template macros were connecting to a backend interface called “AIM” which we will deprecate in October 2012. After that date, the old template’s macros will no longer work. The current versions of the listing templates show a version number of “2012.xxxx” and come with macros that use our “Marketplace Web Services” API. The first time use of these macros requires an activation of this API, but after that you can use it with no difference to the old process.

If you use our “Amazon Merchant Transport Utility” (AMTU) for automating the data exchange between your systems and ours, you need to make sure as well that you are running the latest version of AMTU 2.x. The old AMTU 1 versions are based on our “SOAP” interface, which will be deprecated in October as well. Instructions and installation files for AMTU 2 can be found in Seller Central Help. Migrate to the new version soon, to avoid service interruptions by the upcoming interface deprecations.

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4) Reach new customers with the Europe Marketplaces Account

Amazon has unified its European marketplaces, allowing sellers to create and manage product offers in the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain from a single Seller Central Account. With the Europe Marketplaces Account, sellers can now reach millions of new shoppers and grow their business.

What are the main advantages of the Europe Marketplaces Account?
With the Europe Marketplaces Account, sellers

• Can offer their products on all EU marketplaces without having to open new accounts locally.  
• Pay one pro seller monthly subscription from their home marketplace.  
• Have a single inventory pool and a single interface to manage their orders across all marketplaces.  
• Can modify their account’s details from a single user interface.  
• Can view their Seller Central.de, Seller Central.fr, Seller Central.it and Seller Central.es pages in English.

Furthermore:

• With Amazon’s European Fulfilment Network (EFN), sellers can use Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA) to store their inventory in their home marketplace’s fulfilment centres and fulfil orders coming from other Amazon EU marketplaces.
  

• For Amazon customers, the main advantages are: 
  • Greater selection of products
  • Amazon Prime advantages
  • Returns are easily handled with Amazon Return Centres

• The main advantages for Amazon sellers are:
  • Only one local inventory
  • Reduced inbound costs
  • Access to millions of new shoppers
  • Local customer service by Amazon
   

• Sellers have access to the NEW « Expand Offers Internationally » tool, which enables sellers to list products in their target marketplace against existing products (ASINs) without having to upload the product manually. With the “Expand Offers Internationally” tool, sellers are able to broaden their customer base and increase their sales. Step by step instructions to use the tool here.

This webinar will explain how to expand your offers internationally with the Europe Marketplaces Account.

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5) Checkout by Amazon: Offer the Amazon checkout experience on your website

Amazon has always looked to ensure that our customers have the best possible experience when buying from our website, and this is why we are pleased to let you know about Checkout by Amazon, the payment solution offered by Amazon Payments Europe.  This solution allows us to extend our trusted and convenient way to pay to our Sellers own websites.

Checkout by Amazon is a complete checkout and payments service that makes it easy and secure for the millions of active Amazon account holders to buy on your website.  Customers can make a purchase using the payment and delivery information held within their Amazon account without leaving your website.

• Fast & convenient: With Checkout by Amazon, customers can complete purchases without having to re-enter their delivery or payment information.  With Checkout by Amazon, your customers stay on your website throughout the purchase. 
• Trusted & secure:  With Checkout by Amazon, your customers can pay on your website without sharing their financial information, keeping their details safe.  In addition, they can feel more confident buying from your website knowing that they have the same protection under Amazon’s A-to-z Guarantee as when they shop on Amazon.co.uk. 
• Familiar: You can now offer your customers a checkout experience they are familiar with from shopping at Amazon.co.uk. With simple integration and a growing number of plugins available, implementing Checkout by Amazon with your Shopping cart is easy.

Register with Amazon Payments for Checkout by Amazon to help your business grow.

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Sign up for the upcoming free Amazon webinars.

Click here for more information as well as downloads of previous webinar presentations.

 

	Checkout by Amazon
		Checkout by Amazon is a complete checkout service for e-commerce sellers. More info here.

 

	Amazon Webstore
		Create and run your own eCommerce website using Webstore, Amazon's all-in-one transactional eCommerce platform, built on proven technology which powersover a billion secure transactions around the world each year. More info here.

 

With kind regards, 

Amazon Services Team

 

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