One of the biggest problems that you might face as a new seller is overstocking. When you are just starting, it can be quite difficult to estimate how many stocks of items you should put in your inventory. And as you know, if you don’t sell out your stocks within 360 days of placing them on your FBA warehouse, you’ll be charged with a long-term storage penalty fee. The Amazon Outlet can help you unload all of these items by giving you an avenue to sell all of your overstocked and unsold items.
If you are not familiar with the Amazon Outlet program yet, this article is what you need. In this article, we will talk about what it is, what are the requirements to sell on it, what are its benefits, and how it can help your online store. Hopefully, at the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of how to use this feature to your advantage.
Ready to learn more about the Amazon Outlet Program? Let’s jump right in!
Table of Contents
What is Amazon Outlet?
Amazon Outlet is one of the go-to-place offered by AMZ to customers who want to shop for products at huge discount prices. Shoppers can find highly-discounted items, markdowns, overstocks, and clearance products all in one place.
Just like the normal Amazon website, the Outlet also has its categories like Home Improvement, Video Games, Electronics, Toys, etc. The only difference is that the items sold on this part of the website are all discounted by as little as 20% and can go up to as much as 70% on some deals.
Shopper’s Point of View
As a shopper, there is no question that the outlet is a great place to purchase products from. Not only are you confident that the products you buy aren’t bootlegs. More importantly, you can trust and rely on the amazing customer service experience provided by one of the biggest shopping websites in the world.
If you are looking for the best discount deals online, this is one of the greatest, most trustworthy platforms that you can use. Amazon Outlet further empowers that by allowing only legitimate brands, not bootlegs and fake sellers, to sell on the platform. However, do not expect the outlet to feature the newest, high-end, popular, and expensive items from brands such as Sony, Apple, Google, etc. Most of the items sold here are utility items that are from not-so-popular brands. However, you can be sure that all of the items sold here are brand new.
If you don’t really care about the brand and just want to buy something that works and gets the job done, this is the best place to find these types of products.
Seller’s Point of View
If you are a seller, on the other hand, Amazon Outlet also offers a lot of great benefits for you and your store. It is not only a place for shoppers to enjoy but for sellers to take advantage of as well.
Below are some of the benefits of using the Program:
You can get lots of sales and reviews – when you are just starting, getting lots of sales and reviews is gonna help you create a “buzz” around your product. As you know, when you are just a new Amazon seller, it can be hard to grow your business from the ground up.
The best way to do that is to create a buzz and attract attention to your products. And what better way to do that than to offer products at huge discounts, right? When you get lots of sales from discounted products, customers are much more inclined to give out positive reviews too because they feel like they got their money’s worth and value. And that could be one of the best things that you need to start ranking your store in Amazon’s organic results.
You can sell your overstocked products – as I have previously mentioned, one of the worst problems that a seller can have is overstocking the inventory. When you are selling on Amazon FBA, and you don’t sell your inventory within 365 days, you will be charged a “long-term storage fee” by AMZ. And this is not something that you want to happen because this penalty is added on top of your monthly inventory fee, doubling your fees.
With the outlet program, you get access to a targeted set of customers who are already looking for discount deals. Because of this, you can easily sell most of your overstocked items before they even reach the penalty duration. If you are running a discount deal and you want more attention to your products, selling on this platform is a great decision that you should make.
You can get rid of items near expiration or effectivity date – sometimes, you want to sell items that are nearing their expiration or effectivity date. As a seller, you don’t want these to go to waste, which is why the program is the best place to do this.
By offering your products at hugely discounted prices, you can attract more buyers into your listings and get rid of the items before they practically become unusable and unsellable. And that is a win-win situation for any third-party store owner. As a seller, selling in this platform can give you more cash flow, reduce your overstocked inventory levels, reduce overall storage fees and sell more products that net more reviews.
How Does Amazon Outlet work?
When you are selling on Amazon FBA (fulfillment by Amazon), you need to sell your items fast. If you have overstocked items that you cannot sell, and they are nearing their “365-day long term penalty” timeline, you need to get rid of them quickly. Not being able to sell your items stored in AMZ’s fulfillment centers will cause you a lot of penalty fees that you don’t want.
With this outlet feature, sellers can now unload and sell products that are not bought out quickly in the main AMZ store. But can anyone sell their products in the outlet store?
Below are some of the requirements needed to be eligible to sell on this platform:
- Sellers must have their inventory in fulfillment centers for 90 days or more
- Sellers must have 10 or more units of product inventory on-hand in fulfillment centers
- Sellers must have a valid sales history
- All the products that are sold in the Outlet must be in new condition
- No refurbished or repackaged as new products will be allowed
- Sellers must possess a product rating of at least 3.5 stars or more
- Sellers must show a reference price of the products sold on the deal to show how much discount is applied
- Sellers must not be currently enrolled in Subscribe & Save program
- Sellers must not be currently enrolled in other Deal promotion programs such as Lightning Deals
- Products sold must not have appeared in another Outlet deal within the past 60 days
- Customer product reviews policies and price policies must be followed and complied with.
While these are just the basic requirements to be allowed to sell on Outlet, not all products that fall under these requirements will get an outlet recommendation from AMZ. There are still many other variables involved in the selection and approval process such as the evaluation of ASIN among others. A product that is recommended by AMZ today might not exactly be recommended again by AMZ tomorrow. Customer demand, age of inventory, etc, might also play an important role in the selection process.
To see which ones of your products are recommended for the outlet platform, you can check eligible product recommendations via the Manage Inventory Health page. This can be accessed through your Seller Account.
Creating an Outlet Deal
In this section, we’ll briefly tackle how to create your first Outlet deal. The steps are straightforward to follow:
- Go to your Amazon Seller Central account
- On the drop-down menu located at the top of the page, look for Inventory. Then select Inventory Planning.
- Click on the tab called Manage Inventory Health
- Time to check eligible items to sell. Filter the eligible products by clicking on Create Outlet Deal. This can be found in the Show Recommendations By setting. You can also click on the links in your Manage Inventory Health page and clicking the card named Improve Your Cash flow (which can be found on the Seller Central account’s home page)
- All the eligible items should now show.
- The next step would be to click on the drop-down menu located on the right of your eligible product. Select the Create Outlet Deal option.
- There should be a pop-up window that will appear. This is where you need to enter your discounted price. The discounted outlet deal price should always be less than your default maximum price.
- Enter the date range for your outlet deals. Fill up the start and end dates.
- Finally, click Submit.
Once your outlet submission is finished, you will get a message prompting “deal submission is successful” to let you know that you have submitted correctly. Sometimes, you might get the message “Maximum deal price should be XXX”. When this message appears, all you have to do is change your price so your deal would be less than or equal to the allowed maximum.
After the submission, your deal will be placed in a pending status. This pending status will usually be processed within the week, after which it will be scheduled. Keep in mind that not all successful submissions will be accepted as guaranteed deals though. Several factors such as demand and age of the product’s inventory can affect whether they would get approved or not.
When the deal is finally approved, you will see the product’s discounted price automatically apply. As soon as the deal ends, the products’ price will also automatically go back to normal. There are certain things that you cannot do while your product is on a deal. For example, you can’t raise your prices while the product is in the outlet promotion. Doing so will automatically cancel your current deal. You might also have a harder time getting accepted for another outlet deal in the future because of this.
Best Practices When Selling On Amazon Outlet
Following these best practices when it comes to selling on Outlet deals can help you get accepted in more deals in the future. Be sure to try and follow these examples if you want to have a good standing in AMZ’s eyes:
Make sure you have enough stocks to cover all the sales that your deals can generate
If you don’t have enough stocks to keep running the deal inside the two-week minimum date range limit, do not run the deal.
Make sure to use high-quality images on your listings to help generate more interest and sales towards your deals.
Get rid of pricing rules for your products’ ASINs before submitting them to a deal. Pricing rules might be preventing the price of the products to drop down automatically.
Try to combine several of your deals with coupons to improve and increase your conversion rates.
You can also consider giving higher discounts than what is recommended to improve conversion rates.
Make sure to comply with all the rules and regulations of the program to avoid having problems with your deal submissions. Continuous violations of the terms might make it harder for you to be accepted again to run deals in the future. This is something you never want to happen.
Conclusion
Running Outlet deals is a great way to get your overstocked products sold. They can also help you get more reviews for better organic rankings in the future. But more importantly, it adds to your current cash flow so you can sell more products in your store.
If you need a seller software solution to help you find winning products on Amazon, Zonbase is the answer to your problem. With tools to help in tasks such as keyword research, product research, and listing optimization, finding winning products to sell online has never been easier.
