Ask HN: Anyone interested in knowing more about 3rd party selling on Amazon?

7 points·cm2012··5 comments

With all the news on Amazon currently, I was wondering if anyone was interested in knowing about the amazon experience as a 3rd party seller. I work for a 25 year old jewelry manufacturer that's been selling on Amazon, Newegg, eBay, Buy.com and Sears for two years now managing e-commerce and could answer a few questions.

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Do they handle your fulfillment or are they only an outlet to sell products?

If they do handle your fulfillment , are there any specific requirements ?

Do you use Amazon's advertising services?

I'd have 100's of other questions , but these would help fill my knowledge gap on that subject.

Thank you in advance for your insight on the subject!

The handle our fulfillment for a small portion of low cost but best selling items.

Good fulfillment at a good price!

We use amazon product ads within the amazon system, they go directly to other amazon products

You can also email me at kevinlordbarry@gmail.com, I would be happy to share :)

Someone is making really nice handmade jewelry (bracelets/earrings) that sell for $15-$40 a piece. How would you get their sales up to hundreds of pieces a month without spending much money upfront?

The problem here is that it is handmade. In order to scale to hundreds of pieces per month you will have to scale up the labor. One person can only do that for so long before he/she quits out of exhaustion. You will also need to invest in marketing because jewelry is something that is sold on the vanity of the product and not its quality. I'd say it would be better to concentrate of marketing it first, without looking at scaling to hundreds of sales.

You can make an excel file and put it on Amazon or eBay - eBay might be better for limited quantity handmade.

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