So, the new year is just about 4% over and what have you done so far?
I’ve spent a good bit of my Sunday afternoon looking into the intricacies and pros and cons of being an Amazon Pro seller. Of course, I have been doing all of my research on the second largest search engine in the world: YouTube.
Oh, so many options!
Now, I am NOT going to make this a post where I try to teach you how to get started in Amazon reselling or how to create a Pro seller account, or anything of the sort. There are plenty of good YouTube videos for that. I’m just letting you in on a little bit of my personal thought process.
So, if I understand correctly, there are
- monthly seller fees (~$40 per month)
- additional per-item selling fees (a few bucks, depending on the item)
- optional third-party app fees (~$40 per month)
- the cost of a hand-held BlueTooth scanner (optional, about $50)
- packaging and shipping costs
- and, of course, the wholesale cost of the product)
Again, the third-party app fees are optional but they apparently can make short work of the otherwise pressing decision as to whether an item is a worthwhile economic investment. It checks Amazon to see how many of that item are for sale and what the prices are and does some additional calculations to consider fees and shipping so it even calculates whether it would be profitable for you to invest in the product.
I just don’t know…
I believe, if I wasn’t already working a full-time job and had time to commit to going out every day and searching for product, well…I’m still not sure it would be sustainable for me even then. LOL I suppose it would depend on the items I found to sell.
Again, I am not experienced in this process and I’m not trying to convince anyone out there into trying it, or into shunning it. I am just not convinced it would be the right solution for me. Apparently, there are people making good money at it, and I commend them for their effort. At the moment, I am going to sustain a wait-and-see attitude towards this.
One more third-party app…
There are even further third-party apps which will re-price all of your existing merchandise several times a day depending on what other sellers are selling and the prices they charge, all in an effort to be constantly competitive. When you consider there are other sellers out there using the same services to automatically re-price their inventory, I imagine it’s kind of like vetting the A.I. against itself in a huge war game for a race to the bottom, price-wise, kept reasonable only by the sellers who refrain from using the third-party apps and manually price their products. If it weren’t for that, pricing may get quite scary for sellers.
Aaaand, we’ll see…
I would love to be competitive on Amazon. With all the stories of under-priced bootleg books from pirate publishing houses and other stories about…well, that’s a whole other blog post…I think I need to really know my stuff before I delve into it. I need to do my research. Does anyone out there have any experience in the realm of Amazon Pro selling? Let me know what you think!
As always…Keep the momentum!
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