Expanding your Business from eBay to Amazon
After all the hard work you’ve put into your eBay store, you finally start seeing some results and you have gained enough knowledge to feel confident about expanding your business on to a new platform. You’ve probably thought about building your own website and setting up your own sales system from scratch – but you’ve also thought about selling on Amazon.
Selling on eBay showed you the potential of your business, but deciding to expand on to a new platform is a bold move – and there’s no better place to expand than Amazon.
With over two billion pounds worth of sales per year in the UK alone, Amazon is the most popular marketplace out there – and it’s hard to imagine that it started off as an online book store. The sales platform accounts for nearly half of online retail sales – according to eMarketer, making it the best pick when it comes to expanding your brand.
Let’s start off by comparing the two platforms
Exactly like on eBay, the first thing a listing needs on Amazon is a title, eBay has an 80 character limit, while Amazon offers you the opportunity to use up to 200 characters!
This is followed by a difference in the Item Specifics. On eBay you fill out IS one way, preferably including a product identifier – an EAN number or MPN, but if an item has none of those, you can use “Does not Apply”.
On Amazon, each product must have a unique product identifier. Amazon also requires you to add a Brand name and an MPN – this allows the creation of an ASIN number within Amazon’s catalog.
What else does a product need?… Pictures! The higher the quality, the better!
Product images are crucial on both eBay and Amazon, eBay recommends square photos with white a white background, Amazon requires pictures to be at least 1000dpi on a white background, with the product filling at least 80% of the image area.
If your current listings don’t meet Amazon’s standards, you can quickly update them using Ad-Lister and this way you’ll make your eBay listings more effective as well.
The biggest difference between eBay and Amazon listings is how the description is formatted. On eBay, sellers have the freedom to write pretty much everything they would like and use as many colors/images as they desire. This can make the listings look unprofessional and this in term can make it harder for the buyers to understand what the merchant is selling.
Amazon is more strict when it comes to the description of your listings, they have a quick start guide where they tell you about the Do’s and Don’ts – here is a quick rundown:
What not to do:
- Don’t add HTML in the descriptions, except for the line-break tag
- Don’t add any details about the availability, price or condition of the product
- Don’t add any reviews, quotes or testimonials to the listing description
- Don’t ask for reviews/feedback from the customers
- Don’t add any contact information in the descriptions – phone numbers, email address or URLs
- Don’t add any links to other websites
- Don’t add any information about your company, shipping or promotional offers
What to do:
- Highlight your product’s top 5 features using bullet points, these features can be size, style, model number, color, what the product does or how can it be used.
- Write the rest of the description in complete sentences with correct spelling and grammar
- Spell out units of measurement – such as inches, meters
- Use numbers for all numerals
So, what is the easiest way to expand your business from eBay to Amazon?
The best solution is to use a third-party tool that was designed to help sellers list on multiple sales channels – here is where Ad-Lister comes in handy. Ad-Lister allows you to push the inventory that you have on eBay to Amazon.
How does Ad-Lister do that? – some might call it witchcraft, we call it the Amazon extension.
This extension allows you to simply list your current inventory on Amazon – using the existing description, images, item specifics, and variations. Once the items have been listed on Amazon, it will be linked to the product in Ad-Lister – meaning that you can update the Amazon listing anytime you want.
There is also a manual way to move your inventory from eBay to Amazon using CSV files – but that can take ages and lots of hours staring at spreadsheets.
Before you start your endeavor, be sure to arm yourself with knowledge – you need to be an expert in the niche -become a master of spotting undervalued items in a marketplace of your choice. And learn the techniques of online marketing, rebranding, reselling, and so on.
