With its international reach and ease of use, Amazon has become one of the biggest marketplaces on the planet. While a number of different companies seek to take advantage of that marketplace, the reality is that Amazon has its own rules and requirements that make it difficult for someone to properly exploit the system. As such, someone needs some help, preferably someone who already has experience in dealing with the rules; with such an entity helping them, a business has a better chance of navigating the Amazon marketplace and using it to make a profit.

Who Is An Amazon Consultant?

An Amazon consultant is someone who works at an Amazon agency or an agency created to help someone take full advantage of all that Amazon has to offer. This means that the consultant will help advise in the creation of all of the text and images required by Amazon and its customers, as well as other details in order to simplify the work of the business when it comes to using Amazon. As the agency does most of the heavy lifting, this allows the business free to deal with ensuring that there is a product to be sold on Amazon and deal with its other issues.

What Questions Should You Ask A Consultant?

There are two sets of questions you should ask an agency during the interview process. The first set is just to establish the credentials of the agency you are planning to work with and cover its history with Amazon. Specifically, the agency should be able to show you its previous clients and allow you to look at its previous campaigns; by looking at these previous campaigns, you should be able to get a feel for how the agency does what it does and whether or not it should be representing you on Amazon.

What you are looking for are listings that are reasonably complete: Are there enough pictures to answer a variety of questions about the product? Does the listing have all of the right details? How does the agency handle products with a couple of different variations? You should also be looking to ensure that the products have a number of reviews and that there are at least a couple of good questions about the products with answers. These may sound obvious, but a lot of people tend to forget them and so accept any agency that they find.

The More Interesting Questions

Once you have established that the agency does at least the basics, you should then ask the really hard questions. There are three questions that will separate the good agencies from the bad ones: Fulfillment, shipping, and customer service. Shipping is more about how the agency answers the question; they should have an idea of which shipping company is used to deliver the products; of the three, it is the one you should ask just for the sake of completeness. It is the other two, however, that you need to really listen to the answers.

Customer service is an extremely important one, and you need to know how the agency deals with problems that customers have, such as damaged products or when mistakes are made. Most of an Amazon shipper’s business is made by how well the customer is treated and how well issues are dealt with. Fulfillment is just as important, and how they are organized to get the product to the customer needs to be considered; even if it is just sending the product to an Amazon fulfillment center, you need to know that they know how their service chain works. Of course, you also need to know how much product they need on hand to ensure that chain does not break down.

As you can tell, using Amazon to make a profit can be rather difficult for the uninitiated. While companies could hire their own Amazon specialist to deal with the situation, that person would not have all of the experience or network set up to deal with the specific problems that come up; an agency would be better able to handle the situation and would have a greater aggregation of skills to deal with any problems that come up. An agency may just be the best possible solution for those looking to enter the Amazon marketplace and fully exploit it for the benefit of their own company.