• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Mallee Blue Media - Web Design - Marketing - Site Management Services

Web Site Design, Marketing and Site Management Services

  • HOME
  • WEB DESIGN
  • SITE SERVICES
  • AGENCY SERVICES
  • BLOG
  • ABOUT US
  • CONTACT US
Why Selling On Amazon Is A Model That Really Works For Solopreneurs

Why Selling On Amazon Is A Model That Really Works For Solopreneurs

Updated - November 12, 2019 By Kayleigh Alexandra Leave a Comment

When it comes to the hyper-lucrative world of selling online, it’s difficult to avoid talking about Amazon. It doesn’t even seem reasonable to describe it as the gorilla in the room.

It’s more of a blob that has long since engulfed the room, leaving only small gaps through which smaller businesses may grow to reach the wider world.

For some, quite understandably, this is a reason to panic. Near-monopolies are dangerous things, and it’s certainly a massive challenge to compete with everything Jeff Bezos brings to the table.

But who says you need to compete with Amazon? It isn’t just a seller, after all — it’s also a marketplace with incredible reach and an appealing fulfilment model.

Companies with major ambitions can find it restrictive, but solopreneurs tend to benefit significantly from the presence of the Amazon ecosystem. And if you’re interested in building a career as a solopreneur, then selling through Amazon might be ideal for you. Here’s why.

The FBA network can do a lot of the work

Being an online merchant is far more complicated than it sounds to beginners because the online portion doesn’t go that far. Once you have an order, it’s back to the classic warehousing system: ordering, storing, handling, packaging and shipping the products.

That system is complicated and expensive (particularly if you’re working alone). Are you going to make enough money to cover the cost of storage alone? What happens if you want to scale?

Fulfilment by Amazon (also known as FBA) is a convenient cheat that lets you avoid most of the inconvenience.

The premise is simple: you pay Amazon to store your stock and process the orders to completion, and the only work you have to do is source the products, get them to the warehouse, and manage your Amazon listings. If you just want to dabble in e-commerce, why put in more work than you need to?

Amazon can handle some digital products

There’s no fixed limit on what you can sell online, and you might not want to sell phone cases or fidget spinners. Perhaps you want to sell music, or ebooks, or something else in a digital format. If so, you can use Amazon to good effect.

Web CEO SEO Tools

It doesn’t support all digital products (for instance, you can’t sell a multimedia training course with no physical presence), but it does support the ones that are typically most useful to solopreneurs.

The biggest one is ebooks because solopreneurs often put a lot of time and effort into establishing their expertise and building up groups of followers so they can market various written works to them.

The Kindle store presents a massive opportunity for anyone in that position, making it relatively simple to do everything from getting a book published (as this Jericho Writers piece outlines, it’s easy to DIY) to distributing training ebooks (like through Lynda, a highly accessible platform to use).

There’s less of a need to market products heavily

Marketing is a significant part of the average merchant’s workload because online stores don’t inevitably get traffic.

Unless you can pick up high rankings for relevant terms and/or drive traffic using promotional activity, you won’t get anywhere. But what if you sell through Amazon?

If you take that route, you don’t need to do any advertising: Amazon is the default e-commerce destination, so your products will get exposure to relevant people.

If you choose products in categories that get a lot of interest, follow the best practices for Amazon listings (because that part is vital for getting solid positions in Amazon searches). And have products that are worth buying (absolutely critical), then you should be able to make sales without putting in much effort.

It lets sellers piggyback off the trust in Amazon

Getting products listed on Amazon doesn’t just help them get found: it also helps them get sold. One of the underlying problems with new e-commerce stores is that people find it hard to trust them.

When you make a payment online, you take a small leap of faith in assuming that the process is secure and won’t unduly risk your important financial details.

If the store you’re on seems even remotely suspicious (for instance, through not clearly providing PCI DSS compliance), you might back out before placing an order.

But even if your operation is 100% new, you can sell through Amazon and get the complete trust of the shoppers. After all, your products are implicitly being vouched for by this massive organization with a generous return policy: what’s there to be worried about?

This avoids the need to focus on trust badges and other assurances, which frees you up to get more creative with your product copy.

For these reasons and various others, selling through the Amazon marketplace is a very attractive option for merchants who choose to work solo.

It saves them a significant amount of time, effort and money, all while getting them excellent exposure. So if you’re interested in the solopreneurial lifestyle, it’s definitely something worth considering.

  • Author Details
  • More from this Author
Kayleigh Alexandra
Startup Specialist – Micro Startups
Kayleigh is a Content Marketer and Startup Specialist who writes about startups and entrepreneurship at MicroStartups.org. Microstartups is a site where all website profits go to charities that help people reach their full potential.
https://microstartups.org/
  • Open Source vs. SaaS Which Platform Is Right
    Open Source vs. SaaS: Which Platform Is Right For Your Ecommerce Store?
    April 28, 2022
    Kayleigh Alexandra
  • Amazon Is A Model That Really Works For Solopreneurs
    Why Selling On Amazon Is A Model That Really Works For Solopreneurs
    November 12, 2019
    Kayleigh Alexandra
  • Mission Led Marketing
    Mission-led Content Marketing: What it is, Why You Need it.
    November 1, 2018
    Kayleigh Alexandra
  • Boost Your Brand with Good Reviews
    Use Reviews to Boost Your Brand in Micro-eCommerce
    July 13, 2018
    Kayleigh Alexandra

Share our Stuff

Shares

Filed Under: Business Trends

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Web CEO SEO Tools

Sign up for Exclusive Traffic, Link Building and Marketing Tips


Browse Topics

  • Business Trends
  • Digital Marketing
  • Web Design
  • Customer Focus
  • Social Media
  • Writing Tips and Tricks
wordpress site migration service

Latest from our Authors

Top 10 Strategies for Marketing your Vacation Rental Property Online

February 23, 2023David Trounce
Best Strategies for Marketing your Vacation Rental Property

10 eCommerce Trends For Small Businesses To Look Out For in 2023

February 9, 2023David Trounce
Stay Ahead of the Curve in 2023 with these Top 10 eCommerce Trends For Small Business

5 Business Trends That Will Alter How You Conduct Business

February 2, 2023Gaurav Sharma
5 Business Trends That Will Alter How You Conduct Business

Google’s Local 3-Pack and How Can You Rank For It

February 1, 2023Mallee Blue Media
Google’s Local 3-Pack How Can You Rank For It
  • Site Services
  • Agency Services
  • Schedule a Consultation
Australian Office: (+61) 414 3555 22
  • Web Design Service
  • Blog
  • Privacy, Terms and Conditions
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube
DMCA.com Protection Status
  • Contact Us
  • About Mallee Blue Media
  • Digital Marketing Tools for Business
US Office: (+1) 914 522 6411

· Mallee Blue Media. Web Design and Site Management ·

· Copyright © 2023 · Australia · +61 414 3555 22 · United States · +1 914-522-6411 · ABN: 363 34370 438 ·

Share

Blogger
Delicious
Digg
Email
Facebook
Facebook messenger
Google
Hacker News
Line
LinkedIn
Mix
Odnoklassniki
PDF
Pinterest
Pocket
Print
Reddit
Renren
Short link
SMS
Skype
Telegram
Tumblr
Twitter
VKontakte
wechat
Weibo
WhatsApp
Xing
Yahoo! Mail

Copy short link

Copy link