This guest blog is written by Jantzen Russell at Blazon, a Riverbend Consulting partner.
“Well begun is half done” is a phrase that is not true on Amazon. However, setting up your account on Amazon is still vital for success on the platform.
In this article we’ll go over strategies you can implement while configuring your account settings to ensure you’re getting all you can out of selling on Amazon.
Why do account settings matter?
Just like with many other things in life, how you approach a problem determines how you solve it. And the same goes for problem solving on Amazon.
If you configure your account the right way from the start, you run into fewer problems, and the problems you do run into will be easier to solve. So, it’s all about taking some effort now to avoid problems in the future. Here are some of the most important categories of configuration, followed my more details for each.
Notification Preferences. These settings are exactly what they sound like. Your Notification Preferences determine who gets notified about your account, anything from orders to performance notifications. These settings will ensure that you never miss anything important, even if you’re not logged into the account. You can find Notification Preferences under the gear icon drop down at the top right corner in Seller Central.
FBA Settings. The Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) settings determine how you ship products into Amazon, and what happens in case of customer FBA returns. There are some sneaky fees that Amazon hides in these settings, and many sellers lose a lot of money by not being aware of these configurations. You can find FBA Settings in the same drop down as Notification Preferences.
Payment and Billing Settings. There is not a lot to cover here but ensuring that you have your payment and billing settings configured correctly is really important to ensure that you get paid on time, and that the right cards are being billed.
Shipping and Return Settings. Your Shipping and Return Settings are specifically for seller fulfilled orders, but they’re important to consider. This is especially the case if you keep FBM conditions active of all of your SKUs, which is something we recommend for most sellers.
In any case, it’s better to be aware of and configure your shipping and return setting correctly, then to have to deal with poorly configured shipping settings during a critical event (e.g. your FBA inventory being delayed).
There are a few places to configure various aspects of your Shipping and Return Settings, but a good place to start is in the same drop down as the others. However, some of the settings are configured in the backend of the listings, and others can be configured in the Manage Inventory page.
Your Info and Policies. The “Your Info and Policies” section of your account settings is found in the same dropdown as the other settings. It can be customized. This specific category of settings is unique, as it is part branding, part account configuration. And this might be the most underused account setting by sellers.
Best practices for each configuration?
So, how do you ensure every configuration is set up for maximum benefit? Here are some recommendations.
Notification Preferences are exactly what you think they are, and they behave the way you think they do. So then why worry too much about them? These are imperative because whoever receives what information is key to running your business – and alerts you to any actions required by Amazon.
The Basics
Notifications are broken down into multiple categories, and there are far too many categories. But it’s important to understand how Amazon groups notifications together, so here are the categories:
- Account Notifications
- Emergency Notifications
- Order Notifications
- Returns, claims, and recovery notifications
- Listing Notifications
- Reports
- Amazon Selling Coach Notifications
- Amazon Business Notifications
- Messaging
- Marketing notifications
- Amazon Lending Notifications
- Pricing and Offer Notifications
By default, all the notifications are sent to the email address used to set up the account. And this isn’t a bad option considering many sellers have a unique email address they use to create their Seller Central account. However, there are a couple of issues setting it up this way.
First, Amazon sends a lot of notifications, but not all of them are equally important. And eventually, most sellers just start deleting all emails coming from Amazon. This obviously isn’t desirable when something important needs to be addressed in the account.
Second, by having different kinds of notifications go to different members of your team, you can make sure everything gets addressed by the right person. It streamlines processes and ensures nothing falls through the cracks. And it means you don’t need to manually forward emails to the right person.
Like with other notifications and settings, you shouldn’t need to touch this very often. But setting it up is important, so it’s worth going through.
In Case of Emergency
It is important to set up your Emergency Contact. Account issues, listing policy violations, performance notifications–all of these are sent to the emergency contact. Since you want to make sure you deal with these in a timely manner, ensure the emergency contact is someone who has admin-level access to your account and can appropriately address the problems.
Setting Up Aliases
You can have the same notification sent to multiple email addresses. It can be beneficial to set up aliases for the appropriate type of notification. For example, you might have an email address like the following: [email protected].
If all notifications go to this email address, you always have a copy of everything that goes on in your Seller Central account. But then specific categories go to different email addresses or team members.
Frankly, there are a lot of notifications that aren’t important to read or address, but having a log of the activity in the account is always a good idea.
Every now and again, check in on the email address (alias) used to receive all account notifications, and just review the non-essential messages.
FBA settings can make all the difference
Your FBA Settings are where the rubber really meets the road. How you configure these settings can dramatically change your logistics processes, as well as how much you pay in fees. There are four key parts.
1. Unfulfillable Removals and Liquidations
Amazon recently updated their Removal and Liquidation fees. Generally speaking, we recommend having this setting configured to Return unfulfillable inventory.
If you use Disposal as your removal preference, it can lead to Buy Box issues and poorly refurbished products–and as a result, poorly reviewed products. And the fee is the same, so we recommend just having it set to Return.
However, for some products, it’s not financially feasible to remove unfulfillable inventory. And if that’s the case, we recommend this preference set to Liquidation.
We created a calculator, which you can access here, to determine what your removal fee is. Here, you will also find details about Amazon’s 2024 fee changes.
2. Amazon Barcode Preferences
Your barcode preference really depends on if you have resellers or not. If you have resellers, you’ll want to use FBA labels for your FBA inventory. However, if you don’t get other sellers on your listings, then it’s better to use UPC codes.
It used to be that once a product was set to a barcode type, it stayed that way. This is no longer the case. Now, you can switch the barcode preference by duplicating the listing (adding another condition) and using an alternate SKU.
There are fewer issues with UPC codes than FBA labels, making them easier to manage. So where possible, that’s what we would recommend.
3. Export Settings|
Most sellers in the US only sell in the US. Some, but not many, use Amazon’s remote fulfillment program to sell in Mexico and Canada. But very, very few sell in marketplaces outside of those three. Unless you’re one of those very, very few, we’d recommend turning exports on. This allows Amazon to export your product and sell it in other marketplaces where it sees fit.
From our understanding, they compensate you with the price of the product (less the fees you would have paid them), and then they handle the rest.
It doesn’t usually make a noticeable difference, but we’ve seen cases where a seller eventually does want to list in other marketplaces, and when they do, the listings are already set up. It is, generally speaking, an absolute win.
4. Inbound Shipments Settings
This is one of those sneaky settings, where Amazon can really stack fees on sellers. Your inbound settings determine which Amazon Fulfillment Centers you send products to. Fortunately, Amazon has this set to Distributed Inventory Placement by default. But it would be a good idea to go check, just to make sure.
Inventory placement service fees can stack up, and it’s usually better to just send it to the right fulfillment centers yourself. The other settings in this section are fine to leave as default unless you have a reason to change them.
Set up Payments and Billing settings to benefit you, not Amazon
These settings depend a lot on the seller. But checking that the right places are charging and depositing using the right accounts is important. So, every now and again, review your payment settings to ensure everything is still set up the way you want.
Separating Payments and Deposit Methods
By default, most sellers have their charge methods and their deposit methods as the same account. If you’ve got a great accountant, this might be fine. However, there are two main benefits to separating charge and deposit methods.
- By separating deposit and charge accounts, each transaction is counted correctly. Advertising is advertising, fees are fees, and revenue is revenue.
- If you use a credit card for your advertising (and you’re spending an appropriate amount on advertising), then you can collect credit card rewards points while consistently paying your credit card off before accruing any interest.
Ultimately, how you manage your finances is up to you. But don’t assume that Amazon’s got your bottom line as their default priority.
Choosing the best Shipping and Return settings
These settings really only apply to seller-fulfilled products. If 100% of your products are FBA, and you don’t ship any of your own products to customers, then these settings don’t matter at all, and you can ignore them.
That said, we generally recommend…
- Always include FBM. There’s no question that most sellers believe that FBA is the best way to grow their Amazon businesses. However, even the best sellers run into FBA inventory issues, and when that happens, it’s a good idea to have a failsafe. We recommend having an FBM condition for every product you can fulfill yourself. As long as you have FBA units in stock, those will win the Buy Box. And when you run out of stock, the FBM conditions will take over.
- Create templates. You can create different templates for your FBM products. These templates can have different shipping times and rates depending on the region the customer lives in. Ultimately, though, most sellers usually only have one template for shipping, and that’s totally fine.
- Using shipping automation. Alternatively, you can have Amazon estimate shipping costs for you. They will dynamically determine how much it will cost to ship with your preferred carrier and pass that cost on to the customers. We’ve heard this can be inaccurate and may result in overcharging customers. You can test this out by putting dummy addresses in to see how much it would cost to send it to various locations.
- Set handling time at the SKU level. While you can set handling time on the account level, Amazon recently started to ignore that. Instead, the best way to set your handling time is to do so in the backend of each listing. The best way to ensure that you have your handling time set correctly is to set it at the SKU level. You can also set handling time on the SKU level through a flat file, which could save a lot of time for large catalogs.
- Return settings. By default, Amazon requires that sellers honor their return policy, meaning sellers must accept returns for 30 days after a product is purchased. However, if you have additional returns information that customers need to know, you can put that into your returns settings. Frankly, Amazon’s returns policies for FBM products are so messy and difficult, it’s easier to just accept every return than find ways around them.
Your Info and Policies
The Your Info and Policies page allows you to display information to the customer, when they click on your seller name in the “sold by” section of the Buy Box. While not a frequently visited page, it’s a good idea to fill it out, as it can make contacting you easier, and boost the customer’s view of your brand.
- What the customer sees. When a customer clicks on your seller name in the Buy Box, they’re taken to a page that looks like this:This area is customizable, allowing you to add a phone number, info about your product, how to handle returns, and information about your company. Again, especially if your product is FBM, this is one of the areas a customer will come to if they need to contact you. It’s a good idea to put your best foot forward.
- Make it useful. The goal here should be to give the customer as much useful information as you can. You can create subpages that address specific issues–and where you can, you should. Do your best to think about questions and problems customers encounter frequently with your products. This is often your first line of defense when it comes to helping your customer with those problems.Ultimately, just make the area one that is worth coming to. Customers don’t usually visit your website, and your storefront is usually made for promoting products–so treat this the way you would your website.
- Getting business certificates. The info and policies area of your Seller Central account allows you to apply for business certifications. These aren’t needed, but they’re usually free and they allow you to appear when a customer filters their search to include only certain businesses. If you could qualify as a small business, minority owned business, or a brand that sells products that are eco friendly, then it’s a good idea to get a certification.
How your account is set up really does matter
Most agencies and brands are caught up in how to market your products. And that kind of thing’s important. Obviously, your brand is on Amazon to increase sales.
But at BLAZON, like Riverbend, we understand that how your account is set up is just as important. A well-configured account will perform better and have fewer long-term issues than one that was set up with only defaults.
The team at BLAZON specializes in knowing everything there is to know about Seller Central and growing a business on Amazon. Whether you’re a new seller, or you just find yourself stuck, we can help you avoid bottlenecks, fees, and complications that pop up for most sellers. And then if you ever find yourself with a deactivated account, Riverbend Consulting is the team to get you back on your feet.