A better question to ask is how quickly you can establish your seller account as a seller and demonstrate to Amazon that you will provide the “Best Customer Experience” Amazon expects to deliver all shoppers. I have covered this subject in my previous blog but suffice it to say that it has many components. The following includes some of the activities Amazon carefully monitors for every seller:

• How efficient and fast you can fulfill the orders you receive?
• How timely are the deliveries of your shipments?
• What percentage of your orders are being returned to you?
• How satisfied are the customers, who buy the items you sell?
• What percentage of the items you sell are receiving complaints due to defect, damage or anything other than fulfillment related?
• How efficiently and satisfactorily are you handling refunds?
• How efficiently are you managing your inventory?
• Are you using systems and procedures with proper checks and balances or are you exchanging data manually thru SellerCentral?

Amazon has several performance metrics that assign a score to every one of these questions and many others. Based on the overall performance score you achieve over a period of time, you would become a seller to be taken seriously.

As you can imagine, it will take a while before you can establish a track record that demonstrates steady operation of your Seller Account. Therefore, I would like to say that new sellers should spend their first year focusing on building their infrastructure while they are growing their revenue base monthly basis. It is best to expect to achieve a revenue base of $750,000 to $1 million in the first year while building the infrastructure and establish your metrics.

Once you accomplish this goal, you will be able to start scaling your revenues and achieve that hockey stick growth. It doesn’t matter how hard you push in your first year, Amazon will modulate your order flow since you are an unknown entity to them. However, if you manage to somehow receive many orders in a short period of time before your account is established, Amazon will shut you down and perhaps remove your selling privileges permanently.

So, slow and steady is the formula and then good things will come to those, who take their time building their account…