I dislike selling on Amazon, I really do. Their pricing is filled with little nasty surprises and the platform comes with the Catch-22 of either committing to listing heavily or suffering even higher fees. Currently I only sell used Media product (much of it from my own collections) through Amazon’s FBA program.
I’ve tried building Webstore’s with Amazon’s early incarnation but perhaps purely due to the weight of Amazon itself my excitement was renewed this morning when I spotted Scot Wingo’s post about Vitamin C on his Amazon Strategies blog.
With a 30-day Free Trial all retailers have to lose is time (eh, of course in this game time is often far more valuable than money) so with a light day scheduled ahead of me I figured what the heck, I’d give it a shot.
Basically I spent the better part of the day suffering through the agony and the ecstasy of figuring out their CSV file for bulk item imports. Yes, I ended on a high note (hint to solving the mysterious cipher–You have to list one item in the workflow to open your Webstore. Export a sample CSV file including this product and you’ll be able to figure out which fields are what from the resulting file).
After my Eureka! moment with the CSV my head swum with the realization that this just might work out! I debated much of the day over whether I should choose the Amazon branded checkout or use my own which basically includes all of the elements of Amazon Checkout but with your own branding. I finally chose my own.
After you select which form of Checkout you’re going to use (and you’re warned that this aspect of your Webstore can never be changed) you’re finally able to preview your store. This led to the day’s final point of disillusion.
The preview itself didn’t reveal much. In fact I waited a full minute or more assuming that all of the elements of the page had yet to load. Not so. I went in to the Store Design tab and found the section for putting together the actual pages of your Webstore. A project awaits:
(Clicking this image will enlarge it)
That stopped me in my tracks for the day. I’m really not sure I want to commit the time to all of this. It actually reminds me of the earlier version of Webstore and building that was a royal pain.
So now my head fills with reasons to close my account. First, in order to gain the benefits of Amazon’s built-in legions of shoppers you have to opt for the middle plan which involves my once again paying the monthly ProSeller fee. Paying that fee comes with a commitment to list and turns my trial serious. If I did choose to subscribe to this next level I’d also have to pay higher fees on items that sold on Amazon.com itself versus those same items selling from inside my Amazon Webstore–and all pricing and shipping options must be the same.
Two, I’ve never had any success with my line of vintage collectibles on Amazon in the past. Granted I last tried in late 2008, so that very possibly is calling to be tested again.
Three, if I followed through with this the Amazon Webstore would replace my Highwire (formerly BISI) shop where I offer several choices of payment: PayPal, Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, plus Visa/MasterCard/Discover/Amex through my merchant account. I’d lose the PayPal and Google Checkout options with an Amazon Webstore, and while saying bye to Google Checkout doesn’t bother me losing PayPal as an option does worry me.
So Day #2 of my Amazon Webstore free trial will be free of labor on the site itself and spent running options through my head.
The original Amazon webstore was a chore, but the new one in beta is downright user unfriendly, and a complete nightmare. Try getting help, they admit it doesn't work right and if you cancel it, you will never be allowed to re-open it under your pro merchant account, so what's the point. The original store was a pain in the tail to build, and now it is so slow to add or make changes because it is controlled by their platform and they want users to switch to the new beta, so they have intentionally made the old stores difficult to make changes.
I’ve been shopping for a new shopping cart. I really LIKE that amazon has a proven user experience to increase conversions…. but no Paypal?! That’s a dealbreaker. I ultimately went with another solution that allowed me to accept credit cards via merchant acct AND paypal AND google checkout AND amazon checkout.
@fixed gear – what solution did you wind up going with?