A Guide to Amazon Product Categories
Even though I would consider ChannelAdvisor somewhat of a webinar expert, I am still surprised at times about how some topics can really strike a cord with online retailers (unfortunately my proposed series on tragic German literature figures of the 12th century has been postponed indefinitely).
Our July Amazon webinar (click here to download a recorded version) is a case in point. At the conclusion of the webinar as well as the next few days following it, Tim Mirick from Amazon, our in-house Amazon expert Jonathon Davis and I fielded many questions from merchants on the overall opportunity, the Amazon Webstore and Fulfillment By Amazon products, and strategies for really hitting it out of the park.
In response to the many inquiries I am going to start an Amazon De-Mystery Machine series of posts reviewing the most common seller questions (aligned somewhat with the sales life cycle). Note that while I will tragically skip my Holiday 2007 Amazon wishlist I will also not review if and when it makes sense to look at Amazon as part of a multi-channel portfolio - there are not many online retailers that can afford NOT to market their products to the 75+ million convenience shoppers that turn to Amazon for their online shopping needs.
Last, but not least, I need audience participation so please send me any and all Amazon-related questions that you have and I will try to reply directly or through a blog post. Without further a due, let’s kick this off:
“We have great products for Amazon — how do we get started?”
Before diving into the details of signing-up with Amazon, let’s review what’s available today and terminology. There are over 40 categories hthat fall into 3 buckets:
- open to any merchant
- gated (requires review)
- closed (not accepting new merchants)
Open categories are the biggest piece of Amazon’s categories pie and include popular destinations such as Books / Music / Video, Home & Garden, Consumer Electronics and Camera & Photo (the chart on the left shows a complete list). If you sell in any or all of these categories you can be up and running with your products on Amazon with relatively little effort.
Gated categories include Apparel, Jewelry, Beauty and Gourmet Food and are essentially closed to any but the most qualified online retailers. What does most qualified mean? Merchants that add significant value to a category by way of their product selection (unique), brand (well-recognized), pricing (more on this value-add concept to come).
Closed categories are Groceries, Cell Phones, Adult Toys, Guns, Gift Cards and Tobacco & Alcohol. These categories are not available to any merchant because of the sensitive or strategic (groceries) nature of the products and generally require approval from the very top at Amazon. Yes, that could mean from the very top of Amazon.
Let’s go, I am ready!
So now that you know which category you want to sell into at Amazon (hopefully it is an open category), here are the next steps. Earlier this year Amazon introduced self-service enrollment for open categories via their Amazon Services site (www.amazonservices.com) — that means you can sign-up and be on your merry way in a few steps. Better yet, as a ChannelAdvisor customer you can sign up for a 3-months-free Pro Merchant subscription via our Strategy & Support Center.
What? You want to get into a gated or closed category? Well, we’re out of time for today and I will focus my next post on a best practice for getting Amazon’s attention (and significantly improving your odds for acceptance).