Amazon Advantage

Advantage for Music

Why use Advantage to sell your CDs on Amazon.com?
In the music industry, CDs usually have to reach a critical mass before making it into major wholesale channels. The Advantage program was designed to change the rules and level the playing field by providing the tools and framework to ensure that all titles appear frequently and prominently throughout Amazon.com. It allows almost anyone to open a direct account with Amazon.com and put their products on our virtual shelves. As an independent musician or small studio, the Advantage program allows you to have a direct and profitable relationship with Amazon, putting your CDs in front of millions of qualified customers. If Amazon already buys your top-selling CDs, the Advantage program is a great way to list everything else in your catalog.

It's Powerful
Customers don't like to wait--it's that simple. When you participate in Amazon.com Advantage, your CDs are in stock and ready to go. Since we tend to show “In Stock” CDs first and more frequently, Advantage CDs are more likely to be discovered and purchased by browsing customers.
It's Simple
Manage all your business with Amazon.com from the Advantage web site 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Open an online account and enroll your titles. We stock a small quantity (usually fewer than five) of each product in our distribution center. Your CDs are listed with immediate availability on Amazon.com. When your inventory starts to sell, we'll send you an e-mail letting you know that you need to send more. Amazon.com Advantage pays you automatically at the end of every month following the month of sale. Through your online Advantage account, you can access sales and inventory reports updated daily, add new titles, contact the Vendor Services team and control most of the information customers see on the detail page for your title. All that and no hassle, invoice-free payments.
It's Easy to Join
All you need to enroll in Advantage is North American distribution rights for your CDs, scannable barcodes with the UPC on the back cover, and online access to manage your account. Advantage is nonexclusive and only $29.95 per year plus a 55% standard commission on the sale of your CDs.

The power of Amazon.com – one of the world’s leading online retail websites

Amazon.com is one of the largest Internet destinations, with tens of millions of customers world-wide. The name Amazon.com is immediately recognized for excellent customer service, reliability, and security. Amazon has the ability to proactively put titles in front of the most qualified and receptive potential buyers. Whether it’s a top selling CD or the most obscure title, we put the right products in front of the right people.

How do you increase your sales on Amazon.com? Simple: make it faster and easier for customers to find, discover, and buy your titles. Because Amazon isn’t limited by shelf space, we’re able to give just as much visibility to independent musicians and small studios as we do to top-selling CDs from the major studios and distributors, so we can carry a much wider selection than traditional brick & mortar retailers. This is what Advantage is all about: tens of thousands of bands--from large established music labels to first-time independent musicians--selling hundreds of thousands of CDs on Amazon.com using the Advantage program.

Put simply, joining the Advantage program can help you sell more CDs by improving your availability and exposure on Amazon.com.

Personalization and Auto-Merchandising
“We not only help readers find books, we also help books find readers, with personalized recommendations based on the patterns we see.”
-- Jeff Bezos
From WIRED, “The Zen of Jeff Bezos” January 2005

Most people think the days are long gone when you could walk into a music store and have the owner remember your name and recommend new music to you based on your personal tastes. That might be true in the physical world, but not at Amazon.com. Imagine if every time a customer walked into a store, the merchandise, sales items, end caps, and point of sale display all changed to reflect each person's individual taste, demographic, and previous buying history. That's Amazon.com.

Amazon.com has the unique ability to put specialized, niche, or "hard to find" products in front of customers that are most likely to purchase them. Our personalization technology helps customers navigate the site to not only find the products they're looking for, but also to discover products they didn't know existed. Related title recommendations are automated for almost every product on Amazon.com. Product pairings such as Better Together (Buy X, Get Y) and personalized programs such as Your Recommendations and New for You are based on related customer sales.

We merchandise products to customers based on their browsing and buying history. Amazon.com’s first and most recognized personalization feature was "Customers who bought this...also bought this." Other examples of personalization today include individual Customer Accounts, personal Stores, The Page You Made, Friends & Favorites, Wish Lists, Shopping Lists, Address Lists, and more. These personalized 1-to-1 merchandising features are trusted by millions of Amazon.com customers.

Connecting Unique Music with Unique Customers
Amazon is always looking at ways to better serve our customers, and to provide them with new ways to discover products they wouldn’t have necessarily found otherwise. Amazon.com has two basic types of music customers: people who already know what they want, and people who are browsing our site to discover something new and interesting to listen to. The people who know what they want simply type the name of the CD into our search engine to quickly find and buy it. People who are browsing tend to look at our category pages, recommendation features, or top seller lists. Customers know they can buy the latest releases and top-selling CDs on Amazon.com, but Advantage uses our unique ability to proactively put undiscovered CDs in front of the most qualified and receptive potential buyers. Automated Merchandising can't distinguish between a top seller and a CD from the back of the catalog – it works for every one of our millions of items.

At Amazon.com we’ve invested heavily in our proprietary Automation and Personalization Technology. We're proud to say this technology is at work every day, displaying 100% of your titles, in hundreds of thousands of placements, to millions of customers in our premium real estate throughout Amazon.com.