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The Ultimate Glossary of Terms About Amazon Business

Updated: Nov 16, 2020


Welcome to SEOzon Prime’s Amazon Seller Glossary! This page contains an alphabetical list of common terminology and acronyms frequently used by all who want to know how to sell products on Amazon (Amazon sellers) - the biggest online marketplaces (with an estimated $2.03 trillion in net sales in 2019 alone, and over 4000 items sold every minute in the US). When looking for a specific word or acronym, we highly recommend using the “Find” function. You can also hold the CTRL or command key and press “F” on your keyboard, then type the term you’re searching for.


A+ Content


Amazon A+ Content is the premium enhanced branded content feature available to first-party (1P) sellers who have access to Vendor Central. It’s the additional information you can add to a Product listing in the “From the manufacturer” section above the Product description (only available to Amazon vendors), rich in images and text. With A+ Content you can attract online buyers and enhance their shopping experience with more detailed item descriptions, attractive comparison charts, enriched multimedia content, high-resolution imagery, videos, brand story, and more media that's going to help you sell your products better and faster.

A+ Content Example for a Surfboard
Advanced Product Description: How A+ Content looks like

Advertising Cost of Sale (ACoS)


This metric is used to measure the performance of Amazon Sponsored Products campaigns by showing the percentage of ad spend versus revenue from advertising. In general, a good Amazon ACoS is around 15-20 %, with the average ACoS is at 30 %. As a general rule of thumb, to maximize the profit of your online store, you should be targeting as high a sales revenue figure as possible, based on as low an ACoS as possible.

The formula is ACoS = Ad Spend ÷ Ad Revenue.


Amazon Business Account


An Amazon Business Account is the alternative offered by Amazon to verified businesses that wish to have cheaper, efficient, and seamless access to supplies via Amazon. It’s free to create and it comes with a myriad of benefits including fast delivery options, price discounts, and analytics reports. It’s ideal for buying corporate items.


Amazon Marketing Services (AMS)


Launched in 2012, Amazon Marketing Services was rebranded into the Advertising Console as a feature of Amazon Advertising. You can see it as Amazon’s PPC advertising platform for Vendors that enables access to different advertising formats, such as Sponsored Products Ads, Product Display Ads, Headline Search Ads, Lock Screen Ads (for the US only). These tools help vendors differentiate their products from the competition as well as drive more traffic to their product pages.


Amazon Seller Central (ASC)


Amazon Seller Central is the friendly web interface available to merchants and brands to market and start selling their merchandise straight to Amazon’s virtual shoppers through the Amazon marketplace. Those who have a Seller account are known as “third-party sellers.” Seller Central gives users much more control over the whole process by allowing them to stock and price their own products.


Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN)


ASINs are unique blocks of 10 alphanumeric characters assigned by Amazon to identify products in the online catalog. They’re available on the product detail page and for books, ASINs are the same as the ISBN. You can use ASINs to find product pages.


Amazon Vendor Central (AVC)


Vendor Central is the web interface offered by Amazon to first-party sellers, distributors, and manufacturers who sell in bulk to Amazon. This type of account is available by invitation only. Instead of selling products directly to Amazon shoppers, the owner of a Vendor Central account is a supplier who sells to Amazon, and then Amazon resells these products to its customers.


Average Selling Price (ASP)


The ASP (average selling price) is the average amount of money an Amazon professional seller makes in sales per product sold, calculated by dividing the dollar amount of sales by the number of items sold for a particular period of time.


Best Seller Rank (BSR)


The Amazon BSR is a sales indicator of the rank given to Amazon products compared to other products in the same product category. It’s located under the product description section and shows how well a product is selling on Amazon compared to others. Updates hourly, the Best Sellers Rank is calculated by using both recent sales volumes AND historical sales data for a given product. For instance, in the image below, the Product is ranked #3022 in the Sports & Outdoors product category, while it's #1 selling product in the "Beach and Sun Shelters" category.



Brand Registry (BR)


The Brand Registry is a program dedicated to brand owners. It’s basically where you register a private label brand (approved and registered trademark) if you wish to protect your content or intellectual property against fraud and counterfeiters. Content-wise, this is your chance to amaze your customers with a unique shopping experience as it gives you access to advanced marketing features like A+ content (aka Enhanced Branded Content) or Amazon Storefront.


Buy Box


The Amazon Buy Box is a section on the right-hand side of an Amazon product detail page that includes the large “Buy Now” and “Add to Cart” buttons and allows online shoppers to make an instant purchase OR add a product to their virtual cart. The buy box brings the majority of sales, especially when you sell the same product as other Amazon sellers.


Drop Shipping (DS)


Drop-shipping is the process of shipping a product straight from the manufacturer, distributor, or supplier to the end customer. In this case, individual sellers don't have to carry the inventory or ship the goods – this falls under the manufacturer’s responsibility. Basically, in this eCommerce method, independent sellers take the purchasing orders, while the manufacturer produces the goods, maintains the inventory, and ships them to Amazon buyers.


Fulfilled By Amazon (FBA)

Fulfillment by Amazon is Amazon’s promise of fast delivery from an Amazon Fulfilment Centre when products are sold by 3rd party sellers. Sellers bulk-ship their products to an Amazon warehouse and logistics center. When an order comes through from an online shopper, Amazon packs & dispatches it to the ordering customer as it would do with an Amazon product.


Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM)


Also known as Merchant fulfilled (MF), FBM refers to the process of shipping products straight to the end customer by sellers themselves. Therefore, sellers don’t rely on Amazon to fulfill their orders and carry the full product-shipping responsibility.


Fulfillment Centre (FC)


Amazon’s fulfillment centers are big warehouses equipped with robots, machinery, scanning devices, and computer systems that store and track the shipment of millions of products each day. There are more than 175 fulfillment centers located around the world (mostly in Europe and North America), occupying over 150 million square feet of space. Each of them takes care of the distribution side of the Amazon purchasing process, by having the function to pick, pack, and ship orders to the ordering customers.


Lightning Deals


Lightning Deals are promotions in which Vendors/Sellers offer Amazon shoppers large discounts for a specific amount of time (usually a few hours). They're very profitable for bargain-hunters.


Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)


Amazon PPC (also known as Sponsored Products) is a popular advertising method that helps Amazon sellers amplify sales by paying only when potential buyers click and view their product page (for the item they’re advertising).


Marketing Quote by Joe Chernov
Good Marketing vs. Great Marketing

Private Label


Amazon Private Label is the term used when you sell items manufactured by someone else under your own brand (with their consent). In other words, sellers buy generic merchandise and they personalize it with their own brand name, logo, and packaging.


Problem Receive (ProbRec)


Percentage of inventory units received in an Amazon warehouse with an issue that has to be solved asap (wrong warehouse, missing bar-code, etc.)


Search Volume


The estimated number of times a certain keyword is searched by Amazon website visitors in one month, very useful for finding or marketing products. Amazon receives over 2.5 billion visits/month but never discloses search volume information, therefore with no direct access to this data, amazon sellers must turn to third-party services like Merchant Words, Sonar from Sellics, or Helium 10 that make estimations based on their own research and tools.


Standard Product ID


It’s the barcode number displayed on the product you are selling online through Amazon - usually a 13-digit EAN number, a 12-digit UPC number, or a GCID made of 16 alphanumeric characters. For books, it’s the ISBN. You can request the product ID from the manufacturer OR, if you’re the manufacturer, go to the GS1 standards website to learn more.


Stock Keeping Unit (SKU)

SKU stands for Stock Keeping Unit which is a unique alphanumeric product identifier used as a method to help sellers easily organize, classify, and locate their products. An example is S2 B4 which could stand for “shelf two, box four.” Once created, SKUs cannot be modified. If sellers don’t allocate one to each item in their inventory, Amazon will just automatically generate them.


Storefront


Amazon and sellers alike use the term Amazon Storefront as well as Amazon Webstore for the public-facing part of an Amazon store which usually includes content about the company and the products they're selling. Feature-wise, Storefronts is a feature for Brand Registry owners, essential for brand protection, brand building, and for providing an immersive online shopping experience.


Upper-funnel Keywords


Known also as top-of-the-funnel keywords, these terms (keywords) are broad searches used by customers who have just started to gather information, educate themselves about the product they need and have not made up their mind. These short key phrases get large search volume estimates but they’re extremely competitive as they pull in many products.


Vendor Lead Time (VLT)


Also known as Supplier Lead Time, VLT is the average amount of time between a purchase order placement and receive date in the Amazon warehouse.


Wholesale


Amazon wholesaling is a selling model that involves purchasing large quantities of a product (from established brands) at a low price (directly from the manufacturer) and then reselling to end-costumers on the Amazon marketplace, at a higher price, as a reseller.


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