How to sell on Amazon food and beverages

Selling food and beverages on Amazon

It’s an exciting time for any brand wanting to sell on Amazon. However, unless you already have experience selling online, it can be overwhelming to wade through all the approval processes when selling on Amazon- marketplace regulations, and all the packaging, labelling, and shipping requirements when selling on Amazon. We will explain to you the key things, how to sell on Amazon when it comes to food and beverages.  

Over the last few years, Amazon has taken big steps to promote and refine its grocery offerings.

In 2014, Amazon began requiring sellers to obtain approval before selling food on its site. Before that, sellers didn't need approval as long as their selling metrics in that category were good.

Requirements how to sell on Amazon food & beverages

Once you’ve decided to sell food and/or beverages on Amazon, the first thing you should do is open a professional Amazon Seller Central account.

This requires information about your business (legal business name, contact, address, tax ID in your country & credit card details). Now that you have your own seller account, you need to provide your product invoices and other information on the products you’re about to sell.

Providing an invoice to be approved for selling on Amazon

Product invoices are one of the main criteria for being approved to sell food and beverages. Sellers must submit an invoice which:

• Must be dated within the last 90 days
• Must have the seller’s name or issuing business name
• Should have information for your business (e.g. address, phone number, email or website)
• Must have the names of the purchased products from a manufacturer
• Must have the document issuer's name, address, phone number, email or website
• Could also include pricing information (this is suggested but is optional)

As well as this, if you are the manufacturer and brand owner you'll need to provide:

• US Food & Drug Administration (FDA)- Certificate of Registration, or US Food & Drug Administration (FDA) New Dietary Ingredient (NDI) Notification
• The business address of your store/office
• The business address of your manufacturing plant
• Business certification showing that your business is registered (e.g. business licence or sales/use tax licence)
• Home occupation permit (if you work from your home)

Once you’ve sent through the above-mentioned documentation, it will take some time for Amazon to process it all. But after Amazon granted you the approval, you can make your first sales.

Before 2014 all food and beverages on Amazon were sold under a category called Grocery & Gourmet. However, nowadays it is split into 3 categories, which are:

• Food & Beverages
• Organic Products
• Chilled & Frozen Foods

When selling in any of these categories, sellers still need to show great performance. Which is evaluated on the following criteria:

• Order defect rate: < 1%
• Pre-fulfilment cancel rate: < 2.5%
• Late shipment rate: < 4%

Packaging and labelling of food and beverage products

As a seller of food you need to be aware that products with expiration dates can be sold via FBA. As long as the units arrive at warehouses with a shelf life greater than 105 days from time of arrival. Amazon will remove units that are within 50 days of their expiration date.

All packaging must include:

• Product name
• Name and address of packaging company
• Expiration date
• Net content quantity and weight (the weight of the contents, not including any packaging)
• Any dietary or allergen-free claims (such as organic, kosher, gluten-free, dairy-free)

In short, product packaging must protect the quality and safety of the food.

Additional requirements for organic products

At some point in 2017, most likely following the acquisition of Whole Foods. Brands selling organic products started receiving emails from Amazon to produce certificates proving they were complying with USDA Organic regulations.

In order to sell organic products on Amazon, a brand must prove that the products:

• Have been produced to the USDA Organic requirements or an international standard that has been named by the USDA
• Comply with the USDA Organic labelling standards
• Are certified with the relevant authority

If you’d like to find out more about complying with the USDA Organic labelling standards, you can read the requirements for organic products on the Amazon webpage.

Additional requirements for chilled and frozen products

Chilled and frozen products can't be FBA. They can only be fulfilled via Merchant. As you can’t guarantee that products will be in the same condition while being delivered to Amazon FBA warehouses.

This category is basically just as it sounds: products that require refrigeration in order to maintain their quality. Therefore Amazon needs to ensure that the product has maintained its chilled or frozen state throughout the shipping process.

Amazon also sets temperature ranges for different categories of products. And will request verification that these products have been kept at these temperatures. For example, meat and poultry should be in the range of -2.2°C – 5°C.

Amazon also will request validation and verification of the chill chain. To ensure that products have been kept at these temperatures throughout their journey.

Product page listings and requirements

When selling on Amazon, you have to consider specific requirements. They are for the format and information included on the product detail page (product listings) in the food category. Here’s a quick checklist for when you build your product listing:

• All food and beverage product pages must include an image of the nutritional and ingredients information for each product
• Images should include only the products included for sale through the listing. You should not feature accessory products in the images.
• As is suggested for all types of products on Amazon, images should have a 1000-dpi minimum. Which allows customers to zoom in on the listings

For a higher conversion rate, it is a good idea to post an image of the packaging too. You could also use bullet points to describe the flavour and texture of the product. And add details of the kind of experience it can bring to the customer.

To sell more effectively, you need to come up with some good story telling for your brand and product. Which you can detail briefly with bullet points.

Marketing strategies for food and beverages on Amazon

This category is one of the most competitive on Amazon, and we recommend registering for Brand Registry on Amazon. So that you can take full advantage of its advertising for your products and brand.

However, if you don’t have a trademark, you can still achieve a great sales volume by focusing on things like:

• Adding additional value to the products and/or creating a bundle. For example, if you sell dried fruits, try adding nuts or chocolate to it. Bundling the products together usually increases conversions by up to 8 times on Amazon.
• Offer shoppers multi-buy discounts, or upsell with discounts on certain combinations of products.
• If you have multiple flavours of a product you can expand your sales by having variants of the product in one listing, rather than creating a new listing for each flavour. This will increase your ranking for the specific product listings.
• Use lifestyle images to enhance your product listings and demonstrate your products in use.
• Show the size of the packaging, by comparing it with a human body in the image.

In terms of Amazon SEO for food and beverages, there are a few aspects to consider:

• If Amazon approved you to sell organic products, still include the term “organic” in your product listings. So that shoppers searching in the main categories can be directed to your listing.
• Leading with the brand name in a product listing title can harm your search ranking. Because it pushes the relevant terms further down the title. So, instead of naming a product “Brand XYZ Milk Chocolate Bar”, try naming it “Milk Chocolate Bar by Brand XYZ”. If you have strong brand name recognition (that shoppers might be searching for) then consider placing the brand name first.
• Run PPC campaigns, and update your keyword line-up about once a week. Using the information from the PPC customer search terms report to guide you. This will also allow you to change your keywords to keep up with holiday or seasonal trends.

How ''Subscribe & Save'' can help you sell more and retain customers

In 2019, Amazon launched a new programme – Subscribe & Save. Where customers can schedule repeat deliveries of the same products and experience 10% or 15% discounts.

Subscribe & Save is more appropriate for sealed items with a longer shelf life, like dry or canned goods, shelf-stable beverages, coffee and tea, etc. This is a great opportunity for brands that sell these types of products to make re-stocking easy for shoppers. Therefore encouraging repeat purchases and increasing “Customer Lifetime Value”.

For example, Amazon Fresh competing with other grocery delivery services. Brands selling products that shoppers consume on a regular basis – perishables. As well as chilled and frozen foods – could benefit from the loyalty that this programme encourages.

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At INNELS, we help companies to start selling food and beverages on Amazon. If you need any advice, don’t hesitate to contact us.