How to sell a product on Amazon

How to sell a product on Amazon

Naming

The most important thing about your product is the brand name. The name engenders trust that you know what you are doing. So, appeal to the latent primate in your customers by coming up with a random combination of vocalizations, mostly vowel sounds, like aioweeo, ololalo, or atura; or a combination of real words that aren't related, like Breadmaximum, ConeSecure, or Snapazoo (oops, you stumbled on an existing product!); or a knock-off of some WASPy name, like Shawo, Krispoffer, or Reaeves.

Product

Look through AliBaba for knockoff products at cut rates, that can be customized to include your new name. It's ok if there are five other companies named Walaho, Walahee, Walmartoo, Walfordee, and Waljennif selling it via Amazon. You can undercut them by five cents or create more reviews (see below). Send an email to the factory rep with your carefully chosen name (see above) and the amount of boxes of the product you want them to send to Amazon's Fulfillment Center.

Photography

1. Have the factory take a photo of the product in a light box, so it's just the product well lit in a white background.
2. Have the factory take a photo of the product in one of the factory managers' homes, in the place where you expect the product to be used, but without any people in the photo. The furniture should be international style, like IKEA—That's not a problem because that's all there was when the entire factory town was built and furnished in six weeks.
3. Combine the first photo with what you might call a white foreground: A bunch of really WASPy Americans in sweaters enjoying your product having a picnic outside, or laughing towards the TV in the living room, or moving a toothbrush over their teeth in the bathroom. It's best if your product is an accessory for a flashy product like an iPhone, where you can strut your Photoshop skills by having the iPhone screen in "camera mode" by copying the same WASPy stock photo onto the screen. You used to have to write "camera not included," but there are no rules anymore!
4. Also overlay a measurement on the original photo—Just a line with something like 12" written next to it. If you must include more words, like "maximum," be sure to use a more international style by avoiding any particular country's preferred grammar. Thus, "maximum opening" becomes "maximum open."

Pricing

Just see what others are charging and decide if you want to charge the same, so that people know your product is the same quality; more, so that people think your product must be better; or less, so that people think they're getting a steal. It doesn't really matter. You're going to spend days and days on this but you're only going to sell a few hundred units, and net a hundred dollars total.

Warranty

Offer a lifetime warranty. Your product is so cheap, nobody will bother to deal with it, or if they do, bend over backwards to get them to write a review that gives you props for honoring the warranty. But most of the buyers will be like your parents, or maybe even will be your parents, and they won't want to ruffle feathers and they know you worked really hard on the Photoshop that one week.

Reviews

You know what you have to do. It's for the greater good. This is how we paid for your college, so stop asking questions, Waljennifer!

Affiliate links

You are playing with fire, messing with the mob, taunting the Fancy Bear, but you can try getting links to your products on web pages. The main way is to write journalistic pieces like "The 12 best nose trimmers for Valentine's Day" or "You won't believe what this influencer did to her car!" Then hire a writer to send an email to all the nonprofits in the world begging them include your article in their news pages normally reserved for preventing starvation or educating about nuclear power or whatever nerds read these days. Be sure they send follow-up emails so the website owners know you are real, in case signing it "Rachel Waters" wasn't obviously real enough. Keep trying different such ghost names. Random selections from a phone directory for Whitbread Village, Kansas, might help.

Finality

Once you and your colleagues spooeeu and eradonutcell sell enough units, Amazon notices and decides to release the product under their amazonbasics brand. It's game over, but you made a cool Benjamin. Retire the name—There are too many new combinations of vowels to bother building a brand over multiple products.