Should You Be Selling With Fullfillment By Amazon Too?I was reading Jim Cockrum's newsletter and saw mention of Fulfillment by Amazon. Basically Fullfillment By Amazon (FBA) means you ship items to Amazon and then list them in Amazon's Marketplace. When an item sells, Amazon ships it to the buyer. I've talked to a few other people who use Amazon's FBA service and they all speak highly of it. Until I read Jim's email, I thought this was just a way to save time on shipping and handling, but it's actually more than that. You see, the way Amazon's marketplace works items shipped by Amazon qualify for free shipping. This means buyers will select the FBA products even if they are priced a bit higher. Another misconception about Amazon was the prices were lower than on eBay. It turns out many buyers would rather buy on Amazon - even used items - than on eBay. There are actually people buying things on eBay, and then selling them on Amazon. This means Fullfillment By Amazon is worth looking into if you sell newer items or books. By newer items I mean things produced in the past 20 years or so. Let me shift gears here. . . I've been selling on eBay since 1997. In many respects selling has gotten easier. I only sell used collectibles, and that's what I watch. Lately - in the past 18 months or so - eBay's changes have cluttered all the search results with garbage. For example I have a search for specific items I collect that I run every 3 or 4 days. When I started this search 4 years ago I got less than 100 results. Today I get 5-600 results. The majority of the results are overpriced items or parts. These items are automatically relisted when the listing ends without a buyer so the number just keeps growing. I know a lot of people who no longer look at eBay regularly because they are so tired of sorting through the clutter. This clutter is happening in all eBay categories, and is a direct result of eBay trying to compete with Amazon. This clutter will only get worse. The advantage here goes to Amazon because the way people search the two sites is different. On eBay people search generally. On Amazon people search for more specific items. Rather than showing every listing that matches the search like eBay does, Amazon shows items that match the search. Then when a searcher selects a specific item, Amazon shows how many are available new and used and the prices. This search difference is a big deal. It's a large part of the reason eBay cannot catch up to Amazon. I said earlier that the clutter on eBay will only get worse. With eBay's new "stores get preferential fees" deal or the "Just sign up for $15.95 a month, and you might save money." store promotion, there will surely be lots of new eBay store sellers. How long do you think it will take for a new eBay store account to realize he should be listing more items to cover his store fee? How long do you think it will take for competitive items to start selling for amounts that leave no profits for the seller? How long after that point will it take for sellers to realize eBay and the Post Office are the only ones making money? Finally, how long will it take those sellers to realize they'll never make good margins on eBay and start looking for other sites? For all these reason I bet that over the next year sellers of newer items - things with UPC codes - will start abandoning eBay for Amazon. If you can sell on Amazon, go for it. Go NOW because in a short while there will be tens of thousands of unhappy eBay sellers moving to Amazon. They'll be using Fullfillment By Amazon to sell their products. Moving your eBay listings to FBA now will put you way out in front of the eBay escapees. Jim Cockrum has a course on using Fulfillment By Amazon. He sent me a copy so I could review it. The course is a few PDF reports and a bunch of videos. The videos go through the whole FBA process and assume you are like me an know nothing about selling on Amazon. I watched a few of the videos, and if I sold items that fit into the Amazon marketplace, I'd surely start sending the stuff to Amazon. If you sell items that fit into the Amazon Marketplace or have access to them - there's a report in Jim's package that lists items you can find locally that will bring premiums on Amazon - you should look into this package. Here's a link to Jim's course.
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