Making Amazon & FBA Work With Amzshark
It's no secret that Amazon is taking over the world. In 2013, the last complete year for which we have statistics, Amazon led the pack of the world's e-retailers by such a wide margin it's stunning. Amazon.com Inc's market share of the online retail market was more than the next nine e-retailers combined*.
For online entrepreneurs with an eye towards e-commerce, it's almost professional suicide not to dabble in Amazon, and if you already have a product range you're selling online, you'd better get it listed on Amazon fast. Otherwise, you risk becoming obsolete (read “out of business”) very fast.
Getting Started With Amazon: Amzshark
To be successful on Amazon, one thing you're definitely going to need is a robust analytics package. You'll also need a lot of savvy about how products sell over time…and not just your products but any product you're thinking of selling in the future.
Another thing you'll need to know is how your own Amazon listings do each day. When you tweak the way you list your items, you're going to want to know how those tweaks affected your rankings in the Amazon product listings.
Surprisingly, Amazon doesn't really give access to this info for the retailer. If you know PHP or MySQL you can perhaps derive a program to retrieve data from Amazon.
For the rest of us, there's Amzshark.
There are very few products out there which offer Amazon analytics, but one that we tried was Amzshark.
Amzshark provides vital information for anyone who wants to make money on Amazon, especially those wishing to make use of Amazon's wonderful FBA program. FBA allows retailers to use Amazon's warehousing service, which stores, picks and ships products for you. All you do is ship your stuff to them, then start listing.
Knowing what products to purchase is the key to making this work, and you simply can't do this without the information provided by Amzshark. Here's what they do for their clients:
- track small listing changes in your products
- help you find niches where there's opportunity
Amzshark Offers Two Types of Data
The two features of Amzshark are:
- Product Spy. Tells you how many sales per day for any product on Amazon.
- RankTracker. Shows daily rankings for your products for any keywords you choose.
Using this vital information, you'll be able to make informed decisions about what to sell on Amazon and how to list it so it ranks and sells. Without Amzshark, you'll flail in a sea of sharks and get eaten alive. In other words, data is key in this business, and since Amzshark is the only product who offers Product Spy, it's a pretty valuable tool to have.
Product Spy
Since the developers of Amzshark are the only people who make this, it's hard to compare to other services. With a 5% margin of error, you'll know how many products are selling per day for any product you choose. Use it to find a new niche product to sell by seeing which products are big sellers but have very few retailers selling them.
Product Spy lets you track by country, for data in any marketplace.
RankTracker
Ranktracker lets you see the results of tweaking your listings, so you can see what works and what doesn't. When there's competition, this is invaluable information for succeeding.
Our Verdict
We tested both features and found them to return relevant, robust and useful data for analyzing our FBA store. Cons? At $25 per month for the basic package, you only get 20 ProductSpy jobs, rendering this package pretty useless for a business.
Since volume is the key to making real money on Amazon, the largest “Enterprise” package is necessary, but be ready to shell out a whopping $200 monthly. Their mid-range package is $50 but only allows 50 ProductSpy jobs. Again, not enough for any volume.
*Source: Statista, “Leading e-retailers in the United States in 2013, ranked by e-commerce sales (in billion U.S. dollars)“. Retrieved 12/9/14.
