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A Guide to Creating Your Account and Selling on Amazon

A Guide to Creating Your Account and Selling on Amazon

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Marketplaces are occupying an increasing share of the e-commerce market. In 2018, Amazon made up 49% of online sales in the USA. Interestingly, Ukraine ranks among the top 9 countries with more than 10 thousand sellers on this platform. Nevertheless, creating an Amazon account is considered to be a hard thing. 

To make the process simpler, we’re offering you to follow our step-by-step guide to creating your Amazon seller account.

Creating Your Account Is the Key Yet Hard Step to Sales

Ukrainian producers should grow their sales by expanding to foreign markets. Developed countries offer much larger markets to make sure everyone has enough space for sales. Moreover, they recover faster from economic crises. 

Another advantage is that marketplaces give quick access to large sales markets and end consumers, while the threshold for entering the market is relatively low and easy.

Creating an account is the major problem many potential sellers face at the beginning. On Amazon, this process is fraught with many pitfalls: the paperwork, transfers, proof of residence, etc. Although we recommend consulting professionals right away, let’s take a look at how it works.

Step 1: The Paperwork

Creating an Amazon account for an individual requires you to check whether all of the documents are at hand:
  • A copy of your passport or a certified translation of your internal passport
  • Contact details, such as your name and surname according to your passport, email, and phone number
  • Credit card details
  • A USA bank account for receipts you earn on Amazon

Step 2: Setting up a Connection to a Proxy Server

Your next step is to buy IP addresses and connect to a proxy server. 

If Amazon catches you logging in to several accounts with the same IP address, it’ll immediately block you. Here’s a case: when several neighbors logged in to different accounts with the same IP address in their apartment block, Amazon blocked them. For that reason, you’d better always log in with a secure IP address.

Step 3: Creating an Account

Let’s now create a seller account. The first thing to do is set up a connection to a proxy server. After that, you need to log in to an existing buyer account and click the “Register now” button on sellercentral.amazon.com.
Here’s a step-by-step process:
  1. Click the “Start selling” button.
  1. Next, enter your email and password and click “Create your Amazon account”.
  2. Enter your details in Latin characters.
4. Confirm your email address.
5. Choose your business location, i.e., a country where a legal entity or an individual is registered.
6. Fill in the following fields: a company name (or an individual name), address, phone number and seller name on the website.
7. Specify your bank card details—it can be issued in any country and for any currency. Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, Diners Club or JCB will do.
8. Enter your bank account details to receive transfers from Amazon. You can sign up for a Payoneer card to get a USA bank account.
  1. Add your tax details. You need to answer whether you register as a legal entity or an individual as well as a resident or a non-resident of the USA, complete the “W9-BEN” form (basic details, such as your address, country of registration, etc.) and finally sign the form. 
  2. Add your listing and product categories. The system will ask for general data on your products: origin (hand-made or factory-made products), identifier type, batch volume, your website that features your products, etc.
  3. Check the details you’ve entered and upload your passport and bank statement.

Done!

Step 4: Verification

Sometimes Amazon may ask you to provide additional documents once you’ve created your account. At this step, Amazon almost always blocks accounts until sellers prove their identity. 

Next, Amazon emails you a request to provide additional documents to the address you’ve specified when creating your account and to Seller Performance Notifications.

Once you’ve logged in, you’ll see your notification highlighted in orange. 

  1. You’ll have messages from Amazon in the Performance Notifications section. Read all of them carefully to understand what information they want to receive from the seller.
  2. After that, you need to send the pre-arranged documents: your utility bill, including gas, water, electricity or the Internet.

If you’ve skipped some of the blocks when creating your account, Amazon will ask to provide additional information once the account has been verified. You’ll see red windows on the home page. You need to click on them one after another and add the information required by Amazon.

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It’s a sure thing that you can create an Amazon account on your own. But the reality is more and more beginners are automatically blocked by the platform. 

Disqover Agency’s team helps you get the best experience on Amazon at all steps: creating an account, verification and turnkey account kick-off. We create Amazon accounts for the USA, Europe, UAE and Australia.

If you have any questions about creating Amazon accounts, our specialists will be happy to advise you on this matter for FREE. Please follow the link to leave your contact details, and we’ll get in touch with you as soon as possible!

Alina Smolenska
Alina Smolenska
Chief Product Officer
Alina Smolenska
Alina Smolenska
Chief Product Officer
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No Niche Research as a Biggest Mistake to Avoid When Selling on Amazon

No Niche Research as a Biggest Mistake to Avoid When Selling on Amazon

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Amazon is the largest e-commerce marketplace where anyone from over a hundred countries can sell products. And you’ll only need to have Internet access to create an account and make sales. 

According to Amazon, more than six million people in the USA shop on Amazon daily, while the marketplace makes up about 48% of America’s e-commerce market. Other surveys show that the platform offers about 350 million different products. Nevertheless, not all of them are in demand and help their sellers make money.

You’ll find it extremely hard to predict whether a given product will be hot to sell on Amazon.

According to our in-house statistics, seven out of ten surveys prove that a product shouldn’t roll out in its original form.

To cut back on your expenses and mitigate your risks, you must first analyze the niche. Read on to learn the details.

What Is Niche Research?

Niche research is all about analyzing commodity groups on Amazon to understand whether it’s worth entering the marketplace with an existing product. We carry out researches for both the USA and European markets, depending on the client’s needs. Our research helps answer the important questions about product launches, such as “Do I need to adapt my product or packaging?” and “Which product ranges do I need to roll out to make a profit?” 

Moreover, we assess the buyer interest, potential income, sales, profitability and competition on Amazon. Potential sellers can be sure that buyers on the platform need their products. Niche research is an investment in your future sales. At Disqover Agency, we carry out niche research for Amazon by taking a stepwise approach.

Steps to Carry Out Niche Research for Amazon

Step 1: Demand Analysis

In e-commerce, strong demand means a slew of relevant search queries, i.e., people really want to buy certain products. At Disqover Agency, we measure product demand using special programs. Over the years, we’ve developed some niche size metrics. Please take a look at our example: 

  • Large: 800+ thousand queries
  • Medium: 350–800 thousand queries
  • Small: less than 350 thousand queries

It’s not that simple, though. You must take into account your competitors who run ad campaigns for specific queries and use the right keywords in their listing texts.

After measuring the niche size and the competitor count, we analyze branded traffic, i.e., search queries related to specific brand names. For instance, the shampoo niche generates more than five million queries per month, but 25% of them are branded queries (“head and shoulders”, “biolage” and “kerastase”), while this makes the real niche size much smaller. The niche is large in terms of the query count, but at the same time, branded traffic makes up a quarter of its size.

The number of users who don’t care about brands is far less than initially estimated. Nevertheless, it’s important to take a holistic approach to analyzing each product and consider all factors. Even if branded traffic is enormous, you can always build your reputation and compete with existing brands over time.

Step 2: Competitor Analysis

Analyzing competitors on Amazon consists of several steps: 

Step 1: we collect and analyze competitor data from Amazon. This includes average monthly sales, price, price history, seasonality, fulfillment, BSR, product rating and review count.

Step 2: we outline the key parameters of each competitor product. For example, we outline such parameters as “application” and “volume” when analyzing the shampoo niche.

Step 3: we process the retrieved data. This is the key and most time-consuming part.

Pushing the analogy with the shampoo niche, we can give answers to the following questions:

  • Which price segment is the most popular and helps make more money?
  • Which hair types bring more shampoo sales and which ones bring less?
  • What volumes are in demand (sometimes these data are different from assumptions)?
  • What is the most popular shipping option among end consumers?
  • Is there an A brand (a key player who takes most of the sales in the niche)?
  • What is a threshold for entering a niche based on reviews, etc.?

Step 3: Calculating Unit Economics

This process comprises two key steps: measuring margins and choosing competitive prices. Over the years, we’ve managed to find the minimum margin level you must have to enter Amazon. Otherwise, you’ll spend all of your income on advertising. Besides, the lower the margin, the more sales you’ll need to make a profit. Consequently, you’ll have to be making investments for a long time if you have to make more sales.

Step 4: Preparing a P&L Forecast

Our team has drawn up a P&L statement template that covers all of the features for your business on Amazon: 

  • Product size tiers according to Amazon
  • ACoS (Ad Cost Over Sales), i.e., a metric that helps assess how efficiently and profitably you run ad campaigns on Amazon
  • Portions of organic and PPC sales

This step helps you figure out the investment period, break-even point and total investment with specific expense items, such as manufacturing, shipping to Amazon warehouses, marketing costs and Amazon commissions.

Keep in mind that Amazon is an extremely dynamic marketplace where forecasting sales is a hard thing. The marketplace regularly introduces new rules and commissions. Therefore, this forecast is rather approximate. It’ll help answer the question about whether sellers make sales with certain products on Amazon.

All in all, niche research consists of four steps that hide many subtleties and vital nuances. Disqover Agency’s team helps you get the best experience on Amazon at all steps, including researches on product niches before you enter the marketplace.

Should you have any questions about niche researches for Amazon, our experts will be happy to advise you on this matter for FREE. Please follow the link to leave your contact details, and we’ll contact you as soon as possible!

Alina Smolenska
Alina Smolenska
Chief Product Officer
Alina Smolenska
Alina Smolenska
Chief Product Officer

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