Selling your spirits brand on Amazon is a great opportunity to reach a vast audience of potential customers. Launching your spirits brand on Amazon can take as little as 6 weeks from the stock arriving in the destination country…if you’ve done the prep work to enable this quick a launch beforehand. When there’s a delay in launching your product on Amazon, it’s usually down to 4 common but easily avoidable pitfalls. Keep reading to understand what they are and what proactive steps you can take to avoid them.
1. Ignoring the Amazon Brand Registry
The Amazon Brand Registry is a program that allows you to protect your brand’s intellectual property and enhance your brand’s presence on the platform. By registering your brand, you gain access to various benefits, including:
- Enhanced brand protection: Prevent unauthorized sellers from selling counterfeit or unauthorized products under your brand name.
- Increased control over your listings: Maintain control over your product information, images, and pricing.
- Access to additional tools and features: Utilize Amazon’s brand analytics and advertising tools to track your performance and promote your products effectively.
Why is the Amazon Brand registry so important?
When buying online, customers want to be sure that what they’re buying is the real deal. When you’ve gone through the Amazon Brand Registry process for your brand, it makes it obvious to Amazon shoppers that your product is the real product and not a counterfeit. It creates credibility and trust for them. It’s also sending a strong signal to them your commitment to protecting your brand and ensuring a positive customer experience. And does more trust and credibility mean? More conversions and sales!
Setting your brand’s Amazon page for the first time? The absence of Amazon Brand Registry also means there’s a greater chance of Amazon rejecting your brand from the marketplace. So it’s important to have the Amazon Brand Registry ready for a smooth and timely launch of your spirits brand on Amazon.
The Amazon Brand Registry process can be a bit of a maze. The good news? We can help you with it every step of the way with our Amazon spirits distribution service.
Curious?
2. Neglecting stock availability
Why is stock availability crucial?
Having sufficient stock available in Amazon’s fulfillment centers is essential for timely order fulfillment and customer satisfaction. Out-of-stock products can lead to lost sales, negative customer reviews, and damage to your brand reputation.
Pro tip: In search results, Amazon often favors listings that can fulfill orders quickly and efficiently, which is a core benefit of FBA.
How to ensure stock availability?
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- Coordinate with Amazon to ensure your stock is properly received and stored in their warehouses.
- Use Amazon’s inventory management tools to track stock levels and avoid stockouts.
- Consider using Amazon’s replenishment tools to automatically reorder stock when levels fall below a certain threshold.
3. Using incorrect barcodes
Why are barcodes important?
To put it simply: the entire supply chain relies on barcodes to track and identify products throughout the supply chain. Efficient inventory management and order fullfilment all run on the availability of accurate barcodes. In their absence, product mix-ups happen which cause a ripple effect throughout the supply chain:
- Goods can become out of stock out of nowhere as the inventory accounted for the wrong product
- There can be delay in delivery to the end consumer, including missed deliveries.
- Inaccurate barcodes can lead to product recalls and returns and therefore additional costs.
The barcode you want to use belongs to another brand? Or you’ve used it already for something else? This is what Amazon will do: it will try and link the new product to what they already have in the database. This then leads to a matching error. Amazon will ask you to provide new barcodes to solve this error. And all this causes delays to your launch.
How to get accurate barcodes
The good news? Getting accurate barcodes is easier than you think. In fact, Amazon has a preferred partner for the creation of unique barcodes: GS1. Retailers, including Amazon, widely recognize GS1 standardised barcode system.
Thinking about purchasing ‘second hand’ barcodes or using counterfeit barcodes (yes, they exist!) to save money? We’ll stop you right there: there are better ideas. On top of delaying your launch, it can also lead to account suspensions and fines. And who wants to face an account suspension even before they’ve started selling on the market place…
Ready to explore distributing your spirits on Amazon?