There are many different acronyms and abbreviations used by other sellers when it comes to Amazon FBA. I’ll outline most of them here!
• FBA – Fulfillment by Amazon
With Fulfillment by Amazon, they will store your products in one of their many warehouses. They will pick, pack, ship, and provide customer service for each of your orders. Your customer gains the added benefit of 2-day shipping if they are subscribed to Amazon Prime.
• MF – Merchant Fulfilled
Unlike with FBA, you are responsible for shipping each order to your customer. You also handle all customer service and returns.
• RA – Retail Arbitrage
This is the process of going to an actual store and purchasing items for resell on Amazon / eBay.
• OA – Online Arbitrage
This is the process of purchasing items from an online store for resell on Amazon / eBay.
• Scanning
There are several different “scanner apps” available to use. The easiest one to access is the Amazon Seller App which includes a scanner option. Basically, you can use your smartphone’s camera and scan bar codes while in the store. The scanning app will pull information directly from Amazon about that specific UPC such as rank, pricing, competitors, and potential profit.
• ASIN
This is the identifying number that Amazon adds to each product listing. Every single item has their own ASIN. It’s typically located right in the URL of the product. They will look similar to this: B00OQVZDJM
• CCC – CamelCamelCamel
This is a great website that tracks price and rank history for items on Amazon. You can find it here.
• Keepa
Keepa is another great price tracking website for Amazon. You can read about their awesome extension in our post about the best Chrome extensions here.
• Rank / Sales Rank / BSR
Amazon has millions and millions and millions of items in their catalog. Each item is assigned a rank according to how well it is swelling. An item with a rank of 5 is going to be selling tremendously over an item with the rank of 450,000. Sales rank is only a snapshot in time, though. An item can be ranked 35,000 one day and then shoot right up to 100,000 the next. It’s really good to pay attention to a 90-day average sales rank rather than where it sits at a specific moment in time. Extensions like Keepa or RevSeller can offer this kind of information.
• Sourcing
This is the act of going and looking for products to sell whether that is online or at an actual retail store. For example: You are at Walmart sourcing for some cool new toys you can send in to Amazon.
• Seller Central
This is the page when you log into your Amazon Seller account. You can adjust pricing, inventory management, customer service, etc…
• Repricer
A repricer is a tool that keeps you competitive against other sellers. It is a 3rd party app that will automatically adjust your pricing depending on the parameters you set for it. You set your minimum threshold and your profit goal then let it do the rest.
• MSKU
Unlike the ASIN, the MSKU is a set of letters and numbers for your own identification purposes. It is assigned to each one of your items. You can have a completely random set of characters or create your own to supply more information down the road. For example: I purchased a toy car at Walmart for $5.40 on January 25th, 2016. I could set my MSKU to look like this Walmart-01252016-xyz-5.40. It shoes the source, date, and cost of the said item. It really helps when this information is not readily available to you. Inventory Lab allows you to create a custom MSKU generator where it will automatically fill this information in for you.
• Restrictions
There are many different kinds of restrictions for Amazon. I’ll outline them below:
1. Hazmat Restriction
A Hazmat restriction means Amazon deems the item you are selling to be hazardous to be shipped or stored in their warehouses. Aerosol cans are an easy example to name.
2. Category Restriction
Some categories are locked until you are approved to sell in them. Some are easy to get unlocked (clothing, shoes) and some are much more difficult (grocery, beauty). Each gated category requires a different way to get approved.
3. Brand Restriction
This means you might be able to sell shoes for instance, but you’re not allowed to sell Nike shoes. There are a lot of certain brands that are restricted to some or all sellers unless you are approved specifically by that company. The rules do not apply to everyone though. For example: I was selling Nike shoes before the brand restrictions hit heavily in the Summer of 2016. I am still able to sell Nike while anyone who wasn’t selling them cannot anymore. It’s a type of grandfathering situation.