As an Amazon seller, I’m sure that you don’t like it too much when you’ve fervantly spent all night listing a few hundred books that you got at that great Friends of the Library sale in your town to find out that whenever you go to submit then, things don’t go well.

There are a number of reasons you may encounter technical problems when interacting with Amazon.com and a resource for you to check to see if, in fact, Amazon is having a problem is the Amazon sellers annoucement forum on the Amazon Seller Community Forums site.  Why waste hours of your time troubleshooting your PC or calling up your ISP when it’s on Amazon’s end?

In this forum, which I subscribe to via RSS, you get all the latest downtime notifications and problems that Amazon may be having.  Hey, no one’s perfect, right?  Even the mighty Amazon has technical problems every now and then.  They will typically post any wide spread problems that the website is encountering and then come back and let you know when the problem is resolved.

If you’re having a problem with the site and there is no sign of your problem in this forum, always contact Amazon Seller Support and they should be able to get you squared away.

If you’re a textbook seller, this is a good blog to subscribe to in your favorite RSS reader. You can’t get any better advice other than straight from Amazon! http://www.amazontextbook.com/

I recently came across a tool that Amazon has for download called ASON (Amazon Services Order Notifier). This handy little tool installs on your computer and runs in the background and periodically pulls down all of your Amazon orders at specified intervals. You can do all sorts of things with this tool instead of going to the Amazon website. Let me give you a rundown on what it looks like when you want to install and use it.

First, you will need to go to the Amazon ASON download page and download the tool or, if you’d like, you can go to the Amazon ASON page to get some more information about it.  Once you download it, double click to install it.  Here are the installation steps.

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6. This step takes you tothe Amazon page to install a “certificate installer”.  Click Register Now and it should let you through.

7. Click Continue to update and it will close down ASON and allow you to log into your account on Amazon.

8. Click Next to begin the certificate installer process.

9. Click Finish and you’re done!

That completes the installation of the Amazon ASON tool.  As you can see, it’s really not that difficult as it goes through the normal Windows wizard approach.  The only thing that is different is the installation of the certificate, which if you follow the screenshots, is not that difficult at all to install either.  What this installation did was install the software onto your computer and verify your Amazon credentials with Amazon’s server to make sure you are who you say you are.

Next is using the Amazon ASON tool.  First, it needs to start downloading your orders.  Whenever I did this, it only took a few seconds to get my few last orders.  I’m on a high speed Internet connection as I hope all of you are too!

Here is the popup that comes up when it’s running in the background to let you know you have new orders.  Anyone familiar with the Microsoft Outlook email notification popup?   It’s very similar to that.  Pretty slick, huh?

Here is the main screen when you open it up.  You have an option to see how many days worth of orders.  As it said in the introductory popup box above, it only downloads the last 5,000 orders, which, if you’re just starting out, probably covers every order you’ve done.  If you want to see more, you’ll just click on the dropdown box that says “Display orders received within”:” and it wil change to whatever you specify.

Here is the order screen whenever you double click on an order.  This is the exact same information as you would get from the Amazon account page but you don’t have to wait for the page to load because you get this information right on your desktop!  It’s much faster than going to the webpage to get this information.  As you can see, you can also print out shipping labels and packing slips right from your desktop as well.  This is a GREAT feature as well!

Finally, this is the packing slip screen you see whenever you click on the button above.  It will tell you all of the relevant buyer information that you need so that you can get the order sent out ASAP.

I hope that this gave you some new information about the Amazon ASON tool.  I actually had not used it at all before since I’m using another online service to manage orders but I thought this would be an EXCELLENT tool for Amazon only sellers.  This will save you a ton of time and frustration and for anyone really wanting to stay on top of the orders coming in, you can constantly be bugged by new orders by the popup box.  Once you start getting dozens of orders a day you’ll eventually probably turn it off because it will bug you too much! 

What is the Amazon Sales Rank and How It Can Benefit You

Amazon Sales Rank

The Amazon Sales Rank is one of the most valuable tools that you will find in the online book selling world.  The Amazon Sales Rank helps you make better buying decisions for new inventory, it tells you approximately how fast a book is likely to sell and gives you an idea on how many more copies are selling than any other book in Amazon’s catalog for comparison purposes.

Some online book sellers focus heavily on this number yet others don’t spend as much time with it.  Everyone has their strategy, but I, personally, focus heavily on the Amazon Sales Rank.

The Amazon Sales Rank is a number that Amazon assigns to all books in it’s huge catalog of millions.  It is a number set to give you an understanding of the volume of sales a particular book is getting.

Amazon has being tight lipped about exactly how this number is calculated but there is a basic understanding that the higher the number, the more recently the book has sold.  The number is NOT about how often it is expected to sell or how many copies it is selling.  It is simply an indicator of the last time a copy has sold.

In my opinion, the Amazon Sales Rank only gives you the answer to 1 question.

• When was the last copy of this book sold?

There is no other voodoo about it.  It’s also a good indicator of future sales, but that is not it’s explicit purpose.  There have been a few studies that try to understand it such as this study on understanding Amazon’s Sales Rank.  Also, as you can see from the comments on this blog post about how Amazon’s Sales Rank is hotly contested because no one really understands it fully besides Amazon itself.

Don’t forget about the recent Amazon Sales Rank fiasco.  People were in an uproar about gay and lesbian books myseteriously losing their sales ranks.

It helps many people including online booksellers, authors, publishers and the like but to give it some perspective to us, online booksellers, take away these points.

• Don’t necessarily think that a book’s sales rank will automatically classify it as a quick seller or not
• If you come across a book that has no sales rank at all, this means it has never sold on Amazon before.  However, do not let that sway you from buying it if you get a great deal.  That customer just might come along and be looking for it.
• Don’t use the Amazon Sales Rank as your sole indicator of which books to put in your inventory.  Factor in the lowest 3 used prices as well as the sales rank to make an accurate balance between the time you expect the book to sit on the shelf, your overall storage space and the amount you are paying for it.
• No matter how much research people do, no one will ever know for sure how this number works.  Do some testing of your own.  Pay close attention to a particular book’s sales rank when you buy it, monitor other sellers’ listings on that book to see if you can estimate other sales of the same book and finally notice it when your copy sells.
• Use TitleZ.com to track the trending sales rank of a book.  As I mentioned in my previous post, TitleZ will give you a timeline of what a books general popularity is to give you an idea of future sales.

If you previously haven’t paid attention to Amazon’s Sales Rank in the past, now is your chance to.  It is yet another powerful tool in your knowledge arsenal to make more money selling books online!