Services and Pricing
Professional Seller Services For Amazon and Walmart.com
Pricing
Our hourly pricing ensures that our clients get the most out of their money. We’ll have you work with the consultant on our team that is right for you. We can also create a custom pricing for more complex projects. Most clients use a combination of a project manager and specialists.
Senior Project Managers
- Large Projects For Established Brands
- High Level Consulting
- High Level Strategy
Typical Monthly Costs
Choose how much you’d like to spend and change your budget month to month. We’re experts at working within budgets large and small. Most brands start in the higher tier fir the first few months and then naturally drop down to lower tiers as the workload drops (which is a good thing).
Basic Account Maintenance Or Consulting
4-8 Hours/Month- Great for small brands who are already up on Amazon and just need some extra assistance managing the account
- This is also a good fit for brands that just need some consulting for specific problems or issues they are dealing with
- This typically will not be enough time for larger brands or when launching new account or products.
- This typically won’t be enough time to provide graphic design, photography, or video editing services.
Intermediate Account Management
13-20 Hours/Month- Great for medium sized brands that need a moderate amount of work managing the account or launching new products.
- This is typically enough time to manage PPC and other aspects of medium sized accounts.
- You may need more time in months when you need content creation, listing optimization, graphic design, video editing, and more.
Full Account Management & Design
20-80 Hours/Month- Management of all advertising and all other aspects of the Amazon account
- Includes other aspects of improving the advertising such as listing optimization, graphic design, split testing, and more.
- Fixing listing issues, brand registry issues, account suspensions, and more.
- For most brands, this would only be needed for the first few months after a launch, or when launching several new products at once.
When is the best part of the process to contact Five Star Commerce?
If you work for a product brand and you’re interested in selling your brands products on Amazon, or you’re already selling on Amazon and want some expert help, we’d love to talk with you.
Ideally you can start working with us 3+ months before you hope to be live. That will usually give you enough time to get through all the approvals that you’ll need to sell. In some cases, there may be issues with your product packaging or barcodes that have to be changed so the process can move smoothly. It’s ok to if you contact us later, we’ll get you up as soon as we can, but in some cases approvals (category approval, brand name authorization, GTIN exemptions, etc.) are taking a month or two.
How long does it take to start selling on Amazon if our brand isn't selling on Amazon yet?
Assuming you’re already an existing product brand, it’s usually going to be a 2-3 month process. The part that typically takes time is not us getting things done, but rather the approvals and logistical things that have to be put in place before you’re ready.
Here’s some things that usually have to be done in most projects that can cause the project to take longer than one might think.
– Account Signup & Verification
This alone takes at least two weeks. Amazon will have you provide all their documents. then they will have you schedule a video call with them to verify your identity (they usually make you schedule it 5-9 days out) and they will mail you a verification code on a postcard which takes about a week to arrive.
– UPC code approval
Your UPC codes ideally are registered under the exact same name that will be in your “brand field.” This will usually prevent Amazon from flagging the UPC code, but if the name doesn’t match, almost always will we have to send pictures of the product and a GS1 certificate to get them to alllow us to use your UPC codes. This can take a week but in some cases longer.
GTIN Exemptions
For some brands, it makes more sense not to use UPC codes for each of your listings. This is usually the case for things such as clothing, where you have a high number of SKUs. If the brand names are on the product, this approval will usually take a week or less. For brands that don’t have their logo on their products, this may necessitate actually having your logo printed on one of the products in order to get the approval. That process could take several weeks for some brands.
– Category Approval
Sone products don’t require category approval. Others do. If you have the documentation Amazon requires, this will usually take a week or two. In some cases Amazon might reject your documentation, you might not have the documents they want, or the documentation they ask for might be impossible to get because it has no releveance for your product. We might have to appeal those things which can take several weeks.
– Technical Glitches
It’s very common for some features to not work correctly on seller central. For example, connecting variations is very buggy. Often after getting brand registered, some of the features don’t work correctly. In those cases we have to petition seller support to get them to fix these issues. These can take several weeks, and for some problems, months. In some cases, there might be technical glitches that can’t be fixed and we’ll have to find a workaround.
Note that once your products are live and available for sale, that’s still the beginning of the process. There’s a lot to do in order to earn reviews, getting visibility, and growing the sales. For brands that are new to Amazon, the first 3-4 months selling are still a testing to phase that will help determine how much potential your brand has with selling on Amazon.
I don't have a product line yet. But I'd like to look into starting a product business and using Amazon as a sales channel.
Our services are intended for existing businesses. While we work with many small businesses, we’re not in the business of helping individuals start new businesses from scratch. We do not think it’s a good idea to start a business just with the intent to sell on Amazon.
Here’s the situations where selling on Amazon would be a good idea.
1. You’re an existing product brand and you’ve either already been selling on Amazon or you’re selling in other channels and you want to start on Amazon. In some cases others might already be selling your products on Amazon and you want to take control of the channel yourself.
2. You’re an approved distributor or seller of an existing product brand so you can sell their products on Amazon. Ideally you have exclusive rights to sell their products on Amazon and the brand is willing to give you the brand registry benefits.
3. You’ve designed or invented a new innovative product that fixes a specific problem and/or a specific customer segment loves.
4. You’re a well known/famous individual, influencer, or brand that can leverage an audience to sell products to.
Although people on the internet, usually people selling courses, may disagree, if you’re an individual without a background in selling physical products and you’re looking to generate “passive income” and you don’t have a competitive advantage you can leverage, we do not suggest selling on Amazon or using our services.
Do you help new sellers select products to sell?
Our services are intended for existing businesses and we work with many small businesses that are new or relatively new to Amazon. However, we don’t provide ideas for products to sell. For an existing brand that has a product line we can give suggestions on which products might have the most potential on Amazon and which ones to focus on.
We don’t provide “product ideas” as that would be a conflict of interest with the hundreds of brands we work with. We don’t want to give away an idea that another brand is using, or offer a service where we can’t actually provide good recommendations.
Are there certain types of products that you don't work with?
We work with almost all physical product categories. Books on Amazon are sold through another system and we typically will not work with independant authors to promote their books. It’s really the publishers who will typically manage the Amazon accounts and it’s a different product to promote books than physical products. We do have book publishers who, in the right situation, we’ve worked with, but a typical author trying to promote their book is not going to be a good fit.
Clothing is another category that sometimes isn’t a good fit for us to work with. This is true particularly for new clothing brands since it takes a large amount of time to list the large number of SKUs that clothing tends to have.
Not sure if selling on Amazon or Walmart Marketplace make sense for your brand?
We can talk with you on a phone call and get a feel for your situation and provide some advice. When actual research is needed, you can always hire us to spend a few hours doing preliminary market research and talking with you about what to expect, in order to help you decide whether it makes sense for your brand to devote the time and resources to selling on Amazon.
Our Services for Amazon and Walmart Marketplace
Did you know Five Star Commerce is an Amazon Ads Partner?
PPC Advertising on Amazon & Walmart
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The Amazon & Walmart advertising platforms are powerful tools for growing sales. Our team can manage your brand’s advertising campaigns to grow your online sales on both platforms. We’ll optimize bidding and targeting to maximize your ROI on ad spend and continue to manage them in order improve results more and more over time. We’ll typically manage advertising in conjunction with split testing of listings and general listing optimization.
Listing Optimization & A/B Split Testing
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It’s really important that product listings look fantastic. For this we’ll perform keyword research to understand what customers are searching, how they describe the products, and what’s important to them. We then write the listing text in order to be SEO friendly for Amazon and Walmart’s search algorithms and appeal to customers. We’ve done hundreds of split tests on listings so we understand how to design listings to convert. A big part of this is producing high quality graphics that display all the products selling points, benefits, how it compares to competitors, and anything else that a customer might want to know. We have in-house designers who understand photoshop and image editing, as well as the Amazon and Walmart marketplaces.
Google Ads To Amazon
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Amazon is rewarding brands that send external traffic to their site. For many brands, it makes sense to run ads on Google that direct customers to your Amazon listings. We do this along with the Attribution Program so you get a 10% rebate on all sales from your Google Ads.
Consulting and Advisement
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Research To Determine If Your Brand Should Sell on Amazon or Walmart
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Many brands are not aware of the competitive landscape that they are entering into when starting to sell on Amazon or Walmart Marketplace. You can hire us to do research to help you understand what you’re brand would be getting into and the likelihoods of success. We can also teach you about the logistical difficulties and other adjustments your company would need to make so your whole team and be aware of what it will take to help the brand be successful. We often recommend this as the initial service before necessarily committing to everything else.
Account Management
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With an experienced project manager, we can manage your whole Amazon/Walmart account and be proactive in initiatives to increase sales of your products. This is typically complete with weekly calls, problem solving, and continual optimization of the product listings, pricing, ad campaigns and more.
Switch From Vendor Central To Seller Central
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Many brands are preferring to sell via seller central, or being forced to switch to seller central by Amazon. We’ve helped dozens of brands make the switch to seller central. We can help make that transition smooth. This often involves training employees on the new processes, setting up and fixing listing issues, and more.
Graphic Design
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Our graphic designers understand Amazon and the technical aspects of the platform. Unlike most designers who need to be told what they need to create, our designers can help make the call on what should be created, how the images should look, and more.
Enhanced Brand Content & Storefront Design
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For brand registered sellers, we design enhanced brand content on their Amazon listings to increase conversion rates, truly represent the brand, and highlight multiple products to customers. We can also create brand storefronts to highlight multiple products and act as your brands mini-website within Amazon.
Fullfillment By Amazon (FBA) and Walmart Fulfillment Services (WFS)
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Terms of Service Compliance
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Amazon has a lot of rules and terms that brands must follow in order to sell on the platform. Noncompliance can result in getting their whole Amazon account shut down, whether or not you knew you were breaking any rules. Our team understands Amazon terms and can help you navigate their rules to decrease your chances of getting in trouble with Amazon.