Questions and Answers that people who are exploring, but have NOT started selling on Amazon might ask
Hi, my name is XYZ and I'm from Malaysia. I'm not sure if I am allowed to ask questions via the messenger, however I appreciate if I could ask a few questions:
1. I'm new to e-commerce, and am interested in trying FBA, what I want to know is is it possible to sign up if I don't have a SSM registration, or if I require one will a limited liability partnership be allowed?
2. How does taxes work? Will I need to do anything in regards to taxes such as sales tax, or be involved with any tax outside of malaysia, ie us taxes. I assume I will have to declare all my income and pay Malaysian tax.
3. If I sign up for FBA, will I have to send stock to the Amazon warehouse before making my listing on Amazon, or am I allowed to make my listing, be happy with it, and go live later and then only send stock to the warehouse?
4. When I do private label, will it be mentioned or showed or will I be placed as a specialised private label store? How does private label differentiate from dropshipper for example? Is a private label something like Prada selling their own brand over Amazon?
5. Will the buyers know that I am a Malaysian selling on Amazon us? I also understand somewhere on the packaging I will need to label "made in China" if I'm sourcing from China?
6. I read that Amazon will reject if the packaging is not as to their standard or charge to repackage, where can I see what the standard for packages is as I was not able to find this info
7. What is the buy box, I read quite a bit about it but can't seem to understand what that is.
8. What are the methods to make the item reach the top of the search, are there free tools? Will fb advertising be enough?
9. How does listing in amazon work? Is it just the keywords in the ad we make? Or is there paid keywords, ie paying for certain keywords so that when those are searched for my listing goes to the top?
10. How are Amazon listing listed on Google? Do we need to to some kind of seo optimisation? Really appreciate if you could help me with these.
Thank you alot.
1. I'm new to e-commerce, and am interested in trying FBA, what I want to know is is it possible to sign up if I don't have a SSM registration, or if I require one will a limited liability partnership be allowed?
2. How does taxes work? Will I need to do anything in regards to taxes such as sales tax, or be involved with any tax outside of malaysia, ie us taxes. I assume I will have to declare all my income and pay Malaysian tax.
3. If I sign up for FBA, will I have to send stock to the Amazon warehouse before making my listing on Amazon, or am I allowed to make my listing, be happy with it, and go live later and then only send stock to the warehouse?
4. When I do private label, will it be mentioned or showed or will I be placed as a specialised private label store? How does private label differentiate from dropshipper for example? Is a private label something like Prada selling their own brand over Amazon?
5. Will the buyers know that I am a Malaysian selling on Amazon us? I also understand somewhere on the packaging I will need to label "made in China" if I'm sourcing from China?
6. I read that Amazon will reject if the packaging is not as to their standard or charge to repackage, where can I see what the standard for packages is as I was not able to find this info
7. What is the buy box, I read quite a bit about it but can't seem to understand what that is.
8. What are the methods to make the item reach the top of the search, are there free tools? Will fb advertising be enough?
9. How does listing in amazon work? Is it just the keywords in the ad we make? Or is there paid keywords, ie paying for certain keywords so that when those are searched for my listing goes to the top?
10. How are Amazon listing listed on Google? Do we need to to some kind of seo optimisation? Really appreciate if you could help me with these.
Thank you alot.
My Reply:
Hi XYZ, sorry was in a meeting the whole of yesterday.
I often tell people that 90% of any questions they have, have already been answered before by me either on my website or in my facebook group.
https://www.jasontayonline.com
https://www.facebook.com/groups/MySilentTeamSG
You can use the search functions to search for keywords related to your questions/topics you want to find out about.
As I get up to 21 private messages per minute from people asking me questions, I would deeply appreciate it if you search those 2 resources for answers first. Then if you cannot find existing answers, post your questions in the Facebook group as the group can potentially provide more and faster answers, and it also helps others who might have similar questions. If the questions are personal/private/confidential, then sure, send them privately to me.
This will help tremendously as I am currently replying to 8 people concurrently and also have my own business to run.
1. I do not know what an SSM stands for, but assume it's a Malaysian business entity. However, you don't need to register a company or business to register a seller account on Amazon. You can register using your own personal identity as the business entity. If budget is an issue, then you can start selling as an individual, however I would recommend operating as a company in the mid to long-term.
2. I shared my opinion about taxes on my website on this page: https://www.jasontayonline.com/amazon-tax
3. You don't sign up for FBA. You sign up for a seller account. To make use of FBA, you first have to register for a seller account (and be approved), then create listings (as part of the listing creation process, you select if this listing will be using FBA or if it's merchant fulfilled), then create a shipping plan based on the listings. Only then would you have a shipping address so you can ship inventory to Amazon, and be able to download the Amazon shipping labels to print and paste on the cartons.
4. Private label is simply creating and selling your own brand(s). When you create any listing on Amazon, one of the fields is the brand name. So if you enter DurianBoy as the brand name when creating the listing, that would be the brand name shown on the listing page. Branding is nothing to do with dropshipping. Dropshipping is a logistics model. If you use FBA, it would not be dropshipping since FBA is where Amazon is storing and shipping the inventory. In dropshipping, the inventory is shipped by the supplier, no stock is held by the seller (you), and no stock is sent to and stored at Amazon, therefore the listing will not be prime eligible.
5. Not really. It's not that you have to label "Made in China". It's that the legal requirement in many countries is that the country of origin must be labeled on the product. For example if your product is made in Malaysia, it should be labeled "Made in Malaysia".
6. I Googled "FBA packaging requirements" and found this page. You might need to have and be logged in to your Amazon seller account to view it. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/help.html?itemID=200141500&language=en-US&ref=mpbc_200243250_cont_200141500
Sounds very complicated, but it is no big deal, and pretty common sense once you do it. More important is to make sure your products and shipments are properly labeled as that is the only way Amazon can identify whatever you send to them for FBA. I wrote about it here: https://www.jasontayonline.com/code-confusion-understanding-amazon-gtin-upc-barcodes.html
7. If you go to most product pages on Amazon, you will see a box with a light grey outline on the right which contains the Buy Now/Add to Cart buttons. That is what is referred to as the buy box.
8. I would need about 6-10 hours to explain this. But the essentials have been shared multiple times on my website (https://www.jasontayonline.com/how-to-increase-amazon-sales.html) and in the Facebook group. Just search for ranking, organic rank, seo, rank, etc. in the MySilentTeamSG facebook group.
9. You are referring to 2 different and separate things. To sell anything on Amazon (or any ecommerce site), you typcially have to create a page for the product with the title, price, product info. This is a listing. To increase traffic (get more people to see the listing and therefore potentially buy), you can run ads. Ads can be run on and off Amazon (eg. Facebook, Instagram, Google). Ads can also be targeted using keywords, demographics, other similar products, etc., depending on the features of the platform you are running the ads on.
10. Google trawls and indexes all public pages on the world wide web, including Amazon pages such as listings. Your listings should already be search engined optimised because Amazon is a search engine (that's how customers find things to buy - by searching on Amazon). If your listings have good Amazon SEO, then they would also be well optimised for Google.
One huge key to selling on Amazon is to realise that Amazon is a search engine. To do well as a seller on Amazon, it is therefore not so much about products as about researching and optimising for the right keywords so you can be found by Amazon customers.
Hope that helps.
Jason
Hi XYZ, sorry was in a meeting the whole of yesterday.
I often tell people that 90% of any questions they have, have already been answered before by me either on my website or in my facebook group.
https://www.jasontayonline.com
https://www.facebook.com/groups/MySilentTeamSG
You can use the search functions to search for keywords related to your questions/topics you want to find out about.
As I get up to 21 private messages per minute from people asking me questions, I would deeply appreciate it if you search those 2 resources for answers first. Then if you cannot find existing answers, post your questions in the Facebook group as the group can potentially provide more and faster answers, and it also helps others who might have similar questions. If the questions are personal/private/confidential, then sure, send them privately to me.
This will help tremendously as I am currently replying to 8 people concurrently and also have my own business to run.
1. I do not know what an SSM stands for, but assume it's a Malaysian business entity. However, you don't need to register a company or business to register a seller account on Amazon. You can register using your own personal identity as the business entity. If budget is an issue, then you can start selling as an individual, however I would recommend operating as a company in the mid to long-term.
2. I shared my opinion about taxes on my website on this page: https://www.jasontayonline.com/amazon-tax
3. You don't sign up for FBA. You sign up for a seller account. To make use of FBA, you first have to register for a seller account (and be approved), then create listings (as part of the listing creation process, you select if this listing will be using FBA or if it's merchant fulfilled), then create a shipping plan based on the listings. Only then would you have a shipping address so you can ship inventory to Amazon, and be able to download the Amazon shipping labels to print and paste on the cartons.
4. Private label is simply creating and selling your own brand(s). When you create any listing on Amazon, one of the fields is the brand name. So if you enter DurianBoy as the brand name when creating the listing, that would be the brand name shown on the listing page. Branding is nothing to do with dropshipping. Dropshipping is a logistics model. If you use FBA, it would not be dropshipping since FBA is where Amazon is storing and shipping the inventory. In dropshipping, the inventory is shipped by the supplier, no stock is held by the seller (you), and no stock is sent to and stored at Amazon, therefore the listing will not be prime eligible.
5. Not really. It's not that you have to label "Made in China". It's that the legal requirement in many countries is that the country of origin must be labeled on the product. For example if your product is made in Malaysia, it should be labeled "Made in Malaysia".
6. I Googled "FBA packaging requirements" and found this page. You might need to have and be logged in to your Amazon seller account to view it. https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/help.html?itemID=200141500&language=en-US&ref=mpbc_200243250_cont_200141500
Sounds very complicated, but it is no big deal, and pretty common sense once you do it. More important is to make sure your products and shipments are properly labeled as that is the only way Amazon can identify whatever you send to them for FBA. I wrote about it here: https://www.jasontayonline.com/code-confusion-understanding-amazon-gtin-upc-barcodes.html
7. If you go to most product pages on Amazon, you will see a box with a light grey outline on the right which contains the Buy Now/Add to Cart buttons. That is what is referred to as the buy box.
8. I would need about 6-10 hours to explain this. But the essentials have been shared multiple times on my website (https://www.jasontayonline.com/how-to-increase-amazon-sales.html) and in the Facebook group. Just search for ranking, organic rank, seo, rank, etc. in the MySilentTeamSG facebook group.
9. You are referring to 2 different and separate things. To sell anything on Amazon (or any ecommerce site), you typcially have to create a page for the product with the title, price, product info. This is a listing. To increase traffic (get more people to see the listing and therefore potentially buy), you can run ads. Ads can be run on and off Amazon (eg. Facebook, Instagram, Google). Ads can also be targeted using keywords, demographics, other similar products, etc., depending on the features of the platform you are running the ads on.
10. Google trawls and indexes all public pages on the world wide web, including Amazon pages such as listings. Your listings should already be search engined optimised because Amazon is a search engine (that's how customers find things to buy - by searching on Amazon). If your listings have good Amazon SEO, then they would also be well optimised for Google.
One huge key to selling on Amazon is to realise that Amazon is a search engine. To do well as a seller on Amazon, it is therefore not so much about products as about researching and optimising for the right keywords so you can be found by Amazon customers.
Hope that helps.
Jason
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