Selling on Amazon can be a tricky affair. After all, it’s the biggest online marketplace in the world. Overly complex processes and stiff competition can make it challenging to understand and optimize your Amazon business for maximum returns.
To start and run a successful business on Amazon, there are a few things you need to get right from the get-go. For starters, you need a great product catalog with attractive images and product descriptions. You also need to have competitive pricing, which entails a considerable amount of research — not to mention a solid understanding of Amazon’s platform. Finally, and probably the most important, is that you need an amazing customer experience.
To help in accomplishing these things, Amazon provides you with the Seller Central platform, Amazon Seller University, and a variety of other resources and tools such as Easy Ship, Fulfillment by Amazon, and the Seller App. And these are wonderful resources with vast amounts of information, but they can take an equally vast amount of time and effort to fully understand and use effectively. Amazon’s answer to this is the Service Provider Network (SPN).
What The Amazon Service Provider Network Offers
Amazon’s Service Provider Network was created in 2014 with the goal of helping brands and sellers launch, manage and grow their businesses on Amazon. Today, the network consists of over 300 agencies that are trained and certified by Amazon to help sellers benefit from the platform’s services.
Agencies within the Service Provider Network again have access to a robust arsenal of tools and resources for helping brands grow their businesses across a variety of processes.
Account Management
Account Management services provide sellers with support for day-to-day Seller Central operations and insights that can help you grow your business on Amazon.
Assistance with account management can help sellers overcome a variety of hurdles that they can encounter when selling on Amazon. For example, setting up products or coupons can be a headache for many sellers, especially if they haven’t been selling on Amazon for a long time.
Advertising Optimization
For brands and businesses that utilize Amazon’s advertising platform, the Service Provider Network can provide them with expert guidance in setting it up and optimizing it. Optimizing your advertising campaigns can help you manage and grow your Amazon business tremendously.
Cataloging
Another area that can help your product’s buying appeal is in the cataloging department. Cataloging services help sellers list new products and optimize existing listing following Amazon guidelines. A service provider can help you create compelling product descriptions that further increase your product’s discoverability.
Enhanced Brand Content
Enhanced Brand Content (EBC) / A+ Content development lets you add rich product descriptions and features that can lead to better conversions. Used to boost customer confidence, EBC, and A+ pages can increase conversion rates by including more content, imagery, and comparisons to further describe products below the fold on product listing in Amazon.
FBA Preparation
For those utilizing Fulfillment by Amazon, a service provider can help you prepare your products for Amazon fulfillment centers without any headaches. FBA Preparation services include labeling, poly bagging, quality checks, storage, and bundling.
Imaging
Service providers can help enhance the presentation of your products on Amazon. They provide you with a variety of imaging services, including professional product photos, model shoots, and image editing.
Great imaging can serve to make your products much more appealing to buyers, as well as increase your brand’s and product’s discoverability.
Additional SPN Offerings
Agencies within Amazon’s Service Provider Network offer tremendous benefits to brands and businesses looking to start selling on Amazon. In addition to the aforementioned, they can also help with:
- Accounting
- Compliance
- Excess Inventory
- International shipping and returns
- IP Accelerator
- Storage
- Taxes
- Training
- Translation services
The Benefits of Utilizing Service Provider Network Agencies
The e-commerce industry is growing at a fast clip, and to keep pace, sellers need to be able to learn to ins and outs of selling on Amazon and ramp their business up quickly to compete. By leveraging an agency within the SPN, businesses can accomplish these things much more efficiently than if they went at it on their own. Let’s look at the reasons why.
Costs
Once you’ve identified the necessary skills across the variety of business processes that selling on Amazon requires, you’ll quickly realize that doing it on your own isn’t feasible. Selling on Amazon is a complicated business. To truly be effective, you’ll likely end up needing at a minimum one full-time employee to help create and maintain your business.
By outsourcing these responsibilities to an experienced agency within the Amazon Service Provider Network, you save money. Dedicated to maximizing these processes, an agency is much better equipped to handle the complexities of selling on Amazon.
Managing and Maintaining a Team
In addition to hiring your own employees and paying their wages, you’ll also need to worry about management. Managing and directing even two employees is a lot of work—and that’s if you want to pay for some really great employees. Overseeing the day-to-day of two employees can easily turn into a full-time job of its own, which you may need to hire another employee to do.
Additionally, you’ll have to consider maintaining your team. Turnover is a fact in any business, and so when one of your employees decides to part your business for greener pastures, you’ll need to start the whole process over again.
With an agency, you worry about none of this. Employee productivity, retention, recruiting and all the rest are offloaded onto the agency. Instead, you can put your energy into the core aspects of your business, such as its trajectory and your products, which are the things that you—the business owner—should be focusing on.
Your Relationship With Amazon
As Amazon grows, they look for more and more opportunities to automate their processes. Brands that once had dedicated support personnel at Amazon have found that access to them has decreased or disappeared altogether. Instead, Amazon has introduced paid programs that offer direct support.
One of the biggest benefits of utilizing an agency within Amazon’s Service Provider Network is that they have a direct relationship with Amazon. An agency can oftentimes be in direct contact with Amazon personnel that helps them with troubleshooting and forecasting and gives them information and access to beta programs within Amazon’s platform.
Knowledge and Expertise
A successful agency has the benefit of working with several different brands in multiple categories across various channels. Moreover, all of these situations require unique objectives working with multiple budgets. The accumulation of knowledge and insights in working with multiple brands and businesses can be invaluable to a vendor. It’s the kind of expertise that can guide a business away from ruin.
An agency that’s dedicated to the Amazon platform will have access to shared information regarding new beta programs. They can react to these changes and have the knowledge necessary on how to approach them or implement them long before it’s pushed out to clients. The same applies to changes in process, changes in service terms, and even bugs in the system.
All in all, agencies within the Amazon Service Provider Network are privileged to be there. The opportunity to leverage the platform to connect with innovative brands and businesses looking to make their mark on Amazon is invaluable. It’s a win-win for everyone, giving these brands access to expert knowledge and experienced professionals which can help them grow and maintain their businesses serves everyone in the process.
If you’ve decided to take up the challenge and opportunity of selling your products on Amazon, hiring a solid agency within the Service Provider Network would undoubtedly be a smart choice. Working with a knowledgeable agency will help you reach your sales goals, grow your business and truly help you take full advantage of what Amazon has to offer.
Final Thoughts
If you’re looking to get started with an agency in the Service Provider Network, you’ll want to choose an agency based on the unique needs of your business. The location of your business and the marketplaces you’ll want to sell on are going to be a factor. And of course, you’ll want to do your due diligence in choosing an agency with the requisite experience and knowledge to help you grow your business effectively.
That said, Amazon has created an incredible way to connect brands and businesses with service providers that are intent on understanding Amazon’s intricacies and processes to help these brands maximize their business opportunities, avoid unnecessary mistakes, discover opportunities and do what these businesses do best: Make great products. If you’re serious about being successful on Amazon, you’ll want to give the agencies within Service Provider Network a very close look.
OperationROI Is An Approved Amazon Service Provider
OperationROI has been approved by the Amazon Service Provider Network. Being accepted means OperationROI has been vetted by the Amazon SPN team and has been certified in Account Management, Advertising Optimization, Cataloging, Imaging, and Enhanced Brand Content.
Selecting the right service provider will really depend on your unique needs and budget. At OperationROI, we are happy to help you assess all of your selling needs and figure out the best way to drive more traffic and increase sales. Get in touch with us now to learn we help our clients sell more on Amazon.
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