Research Outline

Amazon- Selling a Boxed Game

Goals

To understand how to offer a boxed game on Amazon, how to promote it, and how ad buys and "promoted" products work.


Early Findings

The Process

Purchase a UPC Code

  • You first must obtain a UPC symbol for your product. You may buy these symbols from a reseller like Nationwide Barcode, or you can buy them directly from a business like GS1.
  • You’ll want to look for anything that says that the codes have not been used before to avoid any chances of confusion between your game and some other random product.
  • Once you have a UPC for your game (it doesn’t have to be on the game itself at all) then you’ve tackled the most confusing and unclear part of selling your game on Amazon.

Register To Sell On Amazon

  • When signing up to sell on Amazon, there are two options. You can sell as an individual or sell as a professional. Amazon provides you with a dashboard to manage your product, sales, and deliveries.
  • Individual selling- This charges you a small $0.99 fee per item sold plus some additional charges based on whether you or Amazon fulfills the item. Or you can
  • Professional Selling- This costs $39.99 a month plus fees but gives you the bonus of a list of perks.

Listing an Item

  • Once you have selected whether to sell as an individual or a professional, you will log into your dash and begin to upload items.
  • You will describe your product and then enter shipping information, like the weight of the product.
  • You will also upload a picture of the product. Amazon has several rules for posting pictures that can be viewed here.

Amazon Prime

  • To be eligible to be considered Amazon Prime, you product will need to be labeled FBA, or “Fulfilled By Amazon”.
  • The fee for FBA purchases are closer to 35% but make your product more available and appear more legitimate to Amazon’s best customers.
  • The main benefit beyond the small perks is that Amazon handles everything about orders for your games, filling the orders and passing the profits on to you as they are sold. If you choose this option, you will have to ship your products to Amazon for fulfillment.
  • All products sent to Amazon for FBA must be labeled with their ASIN, or “Amazon Standard Identification Number”. Amazon can also label your products with their ASIN for you, but at the cost of $0.20 per unit.

Advertising

  • Sponsored Products- Sponsored Products are ads for individual product listings on Amazon, so they help drive product visibility (and product sales). They appear on search results pages and product detail pages. Sponsored Products can help you reach high-intent shoppers who are actively looking for products related to theirs.
  • Sponsored Brands - Sponsored Brands showcase your brand and product portfolio. They’re search-result ads that feature your brand logo, a custom headline, and up to three of your products. Sponsored Brands give you the opportunity to quickly grow consideration for your brand and collection of products from shoppers who have expressed an interest in similar products.
  • Amazon Stores - Stores are custom multi page shopping destinations for individual brands that let you share your brand story and product offerings. (And you don’t need any website experience to use them.) With Stores, you can choose from a rich set of easy to-create content templates and tiles, rearrange them with easy drag-and-drop functionality, and make a professional-looking website without any coding or design skills.
  • Sponsored Display- Sponsored Display is a new self-service advertising solution that helps advertisers reach relevant audiences across the shopper journey, with ad placements that appear on and off Amazon. Sponsored Display helps you reach the right audience for your business—beyond those actively shopping on Amazon—with display advertising that is easy to create and manage.

Promotions & Coupons

  • Customers want to save, and promotions are an incentive to make a purchase now. There are three types of promotions: money off, free shipping, and buy one get one free. You can also offer percentage or money-off discounts with digital coupons.

Results of Initial Research

  • This block of research focused on figuring out the process for selling on Amazon. Research indicates this is a rather straightforward process.
  • Things get more complicated when you start advertising. There are multiple avenues with different benefits. It is unlikely that a Store would be appropriate for one item. We recommend focusing research on sponsored products, brands, and displays, along with promotions and coupons.