No, all our team members are W-2 employees and work with us in our physical office. We don’t even allow employees to work from home (unless they are sick or something one particular day). We don’t use freelance workers offshore, all your work will be done by our internal employees.
Absolutely, we train lots of employees on managing the Amazon and Walmart marketplaces. Anything we know, we can train on, you would just need to pay for whatever time we need to spend on you. If your company has team members with bandwidth to manage Amazon or Walmart.com, we can provide whatever training is useful for your long term success.
We’ve done live trainings as well as recorded custom trainings that you can watch at your convenience.
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.
No, you can use us as much or as little as you need. Many clients have changing needs or don’t know what their needs will be. With us, you would just pay for whatever time you actually use.
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.
Since we have such a large client base (we’ve been recently pacing about 250 new clients a year), many of the software tools or other services that product brands need offer our clients special exclusive discounts. This often means 10-20% off some of the common software tools or services that a product brand might need. You’ll get access to these once you sign on as a client. In most cases it’s not a huge amount of savings but every bit helps!
For new seller accounts, since we’re part of Amazon’s partner program, we can recommend our clients to get an assigned strategic accounts rep from Amazon. These reps won’t actually do the work for you, but they can be useful to helping get through roadblocks and avoid other issues typical for new seller accounts.
It’s probably best to schedule a call and we can chat about your situation to see if it’s potentially a good fit and/or answer any of your other questions. You can also call our main phone line at anytime (+1 801-876-5406) at it will ring through to one of the reps that’s on-call right now.
You’ll typically have the email and cell phone number of your account manager and they will be available during business hours. If you ever need urgent help and your project manager doesn’t pick up, or it’s outside of business hours, we have a phone line that dials into on-call reps 24/7 for clients.
We typically won’t check our emails outside of business hours so you’ll want to text and/or call your project manager. If they don’t pick up, clients have a phone line they can call 24/7. This rings through to a couple of our consultants phones. If they first two don’t pick up, it rings some other team members. We’re always ready to help our clients with emergencies.
When you become a client, you fill out our service agreement with the rates and the terms, we get your payment information on file.
As we work for you, we use a time tracking tool called “Harvest” to track our time and track how much you owe. Our billing periods end at the beginning and the middle of the month. At the end of each billing period we send you an invoice with the time logs and the balance owed, then we charge your billing method two business days later. You only pay for the time that you’ve actually used.
We have some slides that explain this process that we typically send to all potential clients after we do an info call with you. It’s also described again in our Welcome Packet for new clients.
Yes, Five Star Commerce is part of Amazon’s Service Provider Network. We’re also Amazon Advertising Partners and Creative Services Partners. We’ve worked with 750+ product brands over a course of 6 years.
Unless you catch us on a particular busy day or week, we can often get started the same day or the next weekday. Typically we like to talk on the phone a little bit to get to know you and make sure both sides think it’s a good fit. Then we send a form over to fill out to become a new client.
Once that is filled out, we send you a link that you can use to schedule a kickoff call with your new project manager. Depending on the time you sign with us, you can often select a time that same day.
For large projects, it may take a few days to really get the project moving as there can be a lot of specific details that have to be worked out (getting access to the seller accounts etc.).
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