Amazon is one of the main retailers out there, and to say that they changed the landscape would be completely understating it you have to understand that there are over 3000 million active Amazon accounts that are used constantly. Three quarters of people do most of their shopping directly on amazon. There are over 105 million prime customers, and prime customers are spending more than double what the non-prime people spend on amazon.
You need to embrace it, and whether or not you have opinions on Bezos himself, or the amazon system, it’s a focal part of our system these days.
So should you Embrace it
Amazon has disrupted specialty retailers especially, since most people have gone from the brick-and-mortar store to online stores, and it’s definitely caused a lot of ramifications for smaller locales all around the globe.
Most of the revenue that you make on this has now moved away from amazon to the smaller retailers. However, the number of companies that are embracing this strategy is beginning to shrink. Most of the brands that wee sold in specialty stores about half a decade ago can now be found on Amazon, in target, or Walmart. This has now created the problem for specialty retailers, since most of these are dwindling, and becoming a part of the big-box retailers too.
This s a problem that most of the smaller retailers are beginning to face, wondering how they’ll survive the decreased foot traffic and the reduced availability of the merchandise that’s there.
However, for retailers to keep the cash flow up to even compete in this, the best way to do it, is to embrace the juggernaut that you once scolded. Why though? Well, read below to find out.
More cash Flow!
Cash flow stagnation is a big problem that most of the specialty stores are facing. Since more is purchasing online, they don’t’ want to go to a specialty store, especially since there is a risk of it being out of stock, and that’s why many clients are adopting amazon as a key element of the marketing and sales strategies.
Many of these high-end designers and retailers used to have brick and mortar foot traffic around the block, but since the advent of Amazon, it has since stagnated. Sales on Amazon and eBay have changed this though, and you can work with expanding this, and you can sell both online and in-store.
This can change the landscape of your business in a few months, and the Amazon sales will eclipse your old brick-and-mortar or even eBay sales in a few months. Amazon helps with increasing the cash flow, and you can definitely still keep around the employees that would’ve otherwise been let go.
Better Negotiating power
This also has the power to potentially increase the profit margins of the brick-and-mortar sales, and this is a huge benefit fro many retailers.
You can actually negotiate better terms with your suppliers through this too.
You can get volume discounts on the merchandise you would’ve have been unable to support if you only relied on those in-store sales.
You can get volume discounts, specialty items, or even extended terms, and that increases the margins of the items that are sold within the store,e and this in addition to the extra cash flow that’s found form the marketplace online sales, you’ll notice that this will increase everything drastically.
Moving old Inventory
One of the big things that you’ll notice as well, is that old, stale inventory is then out of the way. If you have items that were not selling well or discontinued items that are their,e you can turn these around and resell them directly on to amazon. Amazon is basically a supply and demand maerktplac.e many of the discounted items and some of the variants that are less popular in the store are actually hard to find, and people online can get it from wherever they want, so they’ll eat up these discontinued items.
Simply by putting the items online, you can actually sell these up to 1.5 times the price of what the MSRP had it listed. So your’e getting higher margins on niche items, and products that were less popular for those who were going to foot traffic stores were actually sought out online.
However, due to the limited availability of these items, the prices are actually going to increase.
For example, something that you might’ve sold in your store for le’ts says like 10 bucks may sell for 30 on amazon, and that’s just one of the many examples of the amazon supply and demand, and how it affects everything.
If you use the Amazon FBA program to fulfill these, you can send them all directly to amazon in one singular shipment, and then, amazon has people that handle the shipments form their facility to the customers, and all of the customer service that’s there. Amazon FBA is one of the most popular services that’s changed amazon, and it helps with automating the selling process. When you do this, you allow for amazon to go complete the fulfillment process, and you get sales directly from the prime customers. They handle the work, you handle just getting the products there.e
They also store your products for you as well, letting your offload a ton of your items to storage, and save you lots of money on a storage unit. They take care of payment processing, updating the inventory, shipping out your product, handling any customer service inquiries, questions, don’t the product returns.
You can get an additional up to 20K in revenue selling off the old inventory, and you can from there, use the extra revenue in order to bring in the new inventory that you feel will help you with traffic.
As you expand your business and use the labor hours too, you can ship items to the amazon store whenever its store was slow. You can sell on amazon, increase your labor and revenue per staff in each hour of your business.
The profitability does increase once you start to focus on that, and it can empower pretty much everyone. However, you’ll need to review the s3ller agreements to make sure that you haven’t agreed to not sell those items on amazon.
So should you Embrace it?
The short answer is yes, ut you will probably have about 30% of the fees taken out on a standard items and that doesn’t include the picking, shipping, or packing to the customer. You may want to talk directly to the CPA about the sales tax implications as well. You should figure out if this is right for you simply by making sure that you have no agreements that forbid you from selling on amazon, use a calculator to figure out how much you’ll net, and then look at the seller university in order to familiarize yourself on this platform. Try it, and from there, see if it’ll work for you, and if it’s a better option for you than other types of selling, and if you’ll net a profit as well.
