Nobody sets out to mess up on purpose, but sometimes mistakes happen. If you’ve found yourself guilty of any of these five Amazon seller blunders, FeedbackExpress has the tips for you to fix them — and avoid making them in the future.
1. Keeping Your Prices the Same All the Time
This mistake is most often seen with new sellers when they set fixed prices for their products. It’s not the kind of mistake that will get you into trouble, but it will definitely limit your earning potential — and possibly reduce your visibility as you get lost in the landscape of stronger competitors.
Product prices change all the time to reflect the supply-and-demand nature of retail, so it’s important to be flexible and keep up. Perhaps with automated repricing software like RepricerExpress! If your prices stay the same, you could be:
- Losing out on bigger profit margins because your prices are too low (raise them when demand is higher than supply).
- Losing out on sales because your prices are too high (lower them when supply is higher than demand).
Speaking of underpricing…
2. Engaging in a Race to the Bottom
Lowering your prices for a bit is sometimes a great selling strategy. But lowering them too much means you not only lose out on profit margins, but can damage your reputation as well.
Consumers love getting a good deal. But they’re also wary of extremely inexpensive prices and tend to associate that with cheap quality (think of the difference between Walmart and Nordstrom’s).
And if you underprice too often, customers will begin to think your cheap prices are your normal ones, and the regular price is just a bid to make extra money off their backs.
When it comes to price wars, you’ll never win.
3. Mismatch Between Available and Actual Inventories
You have two inventories when selling on Amazon: the one that’s listed there, and the actual inventory in the fulfillment centre. Having a mismatch between the two (i.e. available on Amazon, but not actually available in the fulfillment centre) opens you up to a warped Order Defect Rate (ODR) when customers’ orders get cancelled.
When the reverse occurs (unavailable on Amazon, actually available in the fulfillment centre), you risk driving away customers because they’re under the impression you have nothing currently for them.
To combat this, you can:
- Regularly check your inventory.
- Compare your listed and actual inventories.
- Use inventory management software to help you keep track.
4. Being in the Dark About Your Competitors
Just like not having a clear idea about what’s in your inventory, being in the dark about what kind of numbers your competitors are putting can also be a detriment to your success.
5. Failing to Use the Tools That Are Out There
When you look at your browser, does it show a variety of extensions like Keepa, camelcamelcamel, Pickasin, FeedbackExpress, and RepricerExpress? Or do you use the app versions of each? If you’re not, you’re not making the most of what’s out there to help you get ahead.
Amazon, and ecommerce in general, is a hugely competitive world. And there are tons of tools available that can help you run things smoothly, efficiently, and competitively.
The downside is that not many of them are available for free, but the upside is investing a little bit of money in them can pay off handsomely in the way of higher sales. It’s like paying taking your car in for regular maintenance checkups. It sucks paying that money just to be told everything’s fine, but doing it regularly and keeping tabs on it means you extend the life of your vehicle.
Final Thoughts
We know you don’t aim to make mistakes, so it sometimes helps to be aware of potential pitfalls. Another thing to think twice about is using FeedbackExpress to help you with getting more, and better, reviews. We’ll help you out with all things feedback for seven Amazon marketplaces, giving you coverage all over the world. The only thing better than that is the 14 day free trial you start off with when you sign up now.
