Recently, it hasn’t been uncommon to hear about the success stories of those who have made tons of money by selling products on Amazon. Now that you’re here reading this, it’s obvious that you want to get in on the action as well. Wondering how to sell on Amazon can seem complex at first, but surprisingly, getting started doesn’t have to be that hard of a process.
With Amazons FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon) service, you and other merchants have the ability to get your products on the market without having to do much of the hustling and bustling involved in the typical process. This sounds very appealing to most, because being able to cut out a lot of the time you would normally spend on your product preparation and distribution would leave you more time to spend on other business and personal ventures.
There are other ways to sell on Amazon as well, such as by Amazon Vendor Central, or Amazon Seller Central . Selling products by these different ways calls for differing means of operations. Each is dependent on what type of seller you aspire to be, and can also come down to what items you would like to be selling. For beginners, selling products through Amazon's FBA service is known to be a great way to get started.
By selling through FBA, the process is fairly simple; you prepare your products, you send them to an Amazon FBA center for storage, then they take care of the rest after one of your products makes a sale. Having this service is very convenient, but this is not to say that you don’t need to be on top of your product research, profit calculations, advertising, product listing, etc. Of course, Amazon takes their share of money when they help you through this service; it isn’t free for them to operate, and it helps you boost your sales volume and become a more reputable merchant.
Knowing what you want to sell and how you can sell it is a very important aspect of creating a successful Amazon business. With the right tools, and the right know-how, you’ll be well on your way to becoming a successful Amazon merchant.
What Is Amazon FBM?
Contrary to selling products by FBA, Amazon FBM (Fulfillment by Merchant) gives you the ability to take care of most aspects of the product preparation, sale, and delivery. This is desirable by many, since those who do FBM will not have to pay for handling and storage fees that come along with using FBA.
Amazon Seller Central and Vendor Central are two other ways you can sign up to sell products through Amazon, in addition to FBA. With these two, you are operating through Fulfillment By Merchant, because you will either be selling your products mostly on your own, or selling them in wholesale to Amazon for them to resell themselves.
Selling by FBM is not ideal for everyone, and suits certain types of merchants better than others. Some advantages to utilizing FBM include;
- Freedom Of Package Choice and Sizing
- Manage The Preparation and Delivery Yourself
- Quality Assurance per Your Own Standards
- Easy To Control Moderate Amount Of Inventory
What Is Amazon FBA?
Selling privately through Amazon, you will have to deal with aspects such as product preparation, packaging design with proper parameters, where to keep your stock, and much more. Having to make decisions and deal with all of these factors on a consistent basis can eventually impede upon the growth of your business if it becomes too much, as it has in the past for many.
When selling products through FBA, merchants are granted much more freedom and ease of product delivery than many private merchants would have to deal with. Selling products through Amazon’s FBA service essentially means that you can pay to store your products with them, and have them prepare and deliver your products after your item sells online.
Using FBA, you can keep your products in storage at Amazon’s FBA warehouse centers, where they will be carefully stored for smooth stock movement in the future when they begin to sell. Having somewhere to keep their products is a big challenge for many merchants, but this service is a solution for many, seeing that you have the advantage of utilizing the space they have.
After you have your products prepared, as well as their listings, you can upload them to the Amazon catalog and then create the shipping plans for them to be sent to an Amazon FBA center.
How To Get Started / How To Sell On Amazon For Beginners
Selling products through FBA has been enjoyed by many merchants for its convenience for some time now. With lots of preparation and storage space needed taken off of your busy plate, you’ll have more time to spend on other important activities that improve the overall well-roundedness of your Amazon FBA business. But, some new merchants may find themselves wanting to sell products by the FBM route, and take care of most aspects themselves.
Selling through Amazon Seller Central will give you more freedom over the whole process, such as margins and price changes, and you’ll be taking care of the sales yourself. Whereas for Vendor Central, you would sell a wholesale shipment of products to Amazon for a negotiated price. With Amazon FBA, you can ship your inventory to Amazon as you please and they will ship the product for you after a sale is made.
The ability to sell products through Amazon’s FBA has left many online merchants satisfied, and this shouldn’t come as a surprise. They are selling their products on a site that has millions of visitors every day, and are able to store their products with them without having to worry about much preparation and delivery issues. As great as it sounds, FBA still isn’t an all-in-one service, and there’s still much you need to do in order to be a successful online merchant.
It’s still imperative that you stay on top of many business aspects; Amazon’s FBA service doesn’t do everything for you, they just make the product preparation, storage and delivery a whole lot easier. Business aspects such as correct product listings, proper product research, niche opportunities and more are still left up for you to spend time on.
Regardless, to get up and running with FBA is a pretty simple setup, and the whole process can be broadly described as follows;
Set Up Your FBA Account - Head to amazon.com/fba to sign up for your Amazon FBA account. If you happen to have an account from prior use, you can add FBA to your account in the settings section.
Get Products / Create Product Listings - When you’re finished signing up, it’s time to stock up on items you wish to sell, or begin to prepare the products you already have, and create product listings for them. You can add them one by one, or by bulk, into Amazon’s catalog. Many merchants capitalize on integrating their management software with Amazon’s API to easily be able to transition their product / sales data
Product Preparation - Take time to make sure that your products are ready to be in the hands of your customer, taking into account any safety / hazardous concerns that could arise. If you need help getting started with the right materials to properly ship to Amazon, you can get their preferred prep and packaging supplies delivered to you when you get started.
Ship Product(s) To Amazon - After your shipping plans are created, ship the products to an FBA fulfillment center. You will receive a tracking number in order to see where your product is. The customer will receive their own tracking number when the product reaches an FBA center, if the purchase was made prior to it arriving at one.
Customer Orders, Amazon Ships! - After the fulfillment and preparation process is said and done, all that’s left for you to do is wait for your item to sell. Prime members will get their items faster than others. Other customers, on eligible orders, may receive a free shipping option.
As you can see, it’s a rather simple process to sign up with and begin selling products through Amazon’s FBA service. Selling on Amazon FBA requires a multifaceted approach. Taking the time to do correct product research and preparation will better equip you for a future in this business.
How To Sell On Amazon / How To Find Products To Sell
In order to be a successful merchant and keep your sales volume up, you’ll need a steady flow of stock, as well as retailers to get the products from. Having the knowledge of any products worth investing in will increase your chances of enhancing your sales volume to its fullest potential.
Product research is the most important aspect of becoming an online merchant. Knowing your products, how well they can perform on the market, and how well other products can perform is crucial in forming a profitable sales plan. Time spent on product research can lead you to surging opportunities that you can take advantage of, as well as helping you find and settle into niches within the market.
Many companies offer resources and tools through their platforms that will help you with many of the questions and concerns you may come across. These companies offer both free and paid tools + resources that will help you become better equipped to comfortably take on the market, stay organized, and seize opportunities that present themselves.
Seller Labs
With tons of positive reviews online, this platform has been renowned as an accurate place to refer to when looking for product and market information. They offer extensive tools that have proven to be accurate and consistent. Through their resources and tools, they work hard to provide you with everything that you will need to successfully sell your products.
As an all-in-one platform, not only does Seller Labs have tools and resources, they have services that can help you out as well, including their Amazon Product Listing Optimization service, their Amazon Advertising PPC Management service, and their Amazon Buyer - Seller Messaging Optimization service.
The listing optimization service will help you to create the best format for your product listing page. This includes keywords, product features, the best product caption possible, and more. The PPC Management Service helps you to optimize the text and presentation of your ads. The Buyer - Seller Messaging Optimization Service will create the most friendly and customer-oriented messaging response system available to you.
When your product is ready to go online for sale, it’s imperative that you have a well-constructed product listing that suits your product very well. This can be a little tricky, and there are better ways to do it than others. Sure enough, you can do this by yourself, but if you are new, you run the risk of making some mistakes, and potentially miss out on some sales because of it.
The utilization of these services for your product listing will save you much time and effort that can be spent on other business ventures and activities. As someone who is just getting started with Amazon FBA, or just selling products on Amazon by any other means, these resources will prove valuable in helping you to stay organized and efficient.
Jungle Scout
JungleScout has been the one of the top platforms that merchants have looked to for help and advice on what to do in this business, and how to grow the success of their product sales.
JungleScout has consistently been referred to for insightful resources such as webinars, e-books, blogs, free estimator tools and more. They offer many tools, some free and some paid by subscription, that help merchants conduct many aspects of product research and sales plan development.
One of their best tools offered is their Opportunity Finder. With this tool, you’ll be able to gain insight on up-and-coming opportunities, and be given information on niches that you can try and hone in on! This is a unique tool, not offered by many platforms, and can be a key that helps you find the right products to sell, and which niches to invest in. Having the Opportunity Finder in your back-pocket, you’ll know how and when to sell books, clothes, toys, and so many other products available to you for resale!
The Opportunity Finder will analyze keywords that are trending, with high demand and low competition, so that you can explore these keyword products and dive into a niche that doesn’t have many sellers in the first place. You are able to view niche sales and price movements over time, giving you a good idea as to what to expect in this niche.
Having this tool is particularly beneficial for a newcomer, and can really help them to get their feet wet in the growing Amazon business. The ability to track niche opportunities and movements is an excellent advantage to have, and one that can save you time and money in the long run.
IO Scout
IO Scout is both a place for long-time merchants in the business, and a place that helps out and supports the growth of young merchants. They offer an abundance of tools and resources that can give you accurate product and market information.
Throughout their list of tools, many help you to perform different functions, and to receive different kinds of data, depending on the tool you are using. To help you find new products to sell on the market, you can take advantage of IO Scout’s Product Database, which has information on over 120 million products listed on Amazon.
IO Scout’s Product Database is a great place to seek information on any product. Included with every product is data on aspects such as the products sales volume, revenue, historical price, current price changes, reviews + rankings, stock status and more. With all of this information, the decision of whether to invest in a product or not becomes much more clear!
When searching through their product database, you can apply the use of filters to better optimize your searching experience. Searching by category, price parameters, sellers rank and more can help to keep the quantity of information more compact into a precise and easy read display.
With IO Scout, you can start out with a free trial and see if you enjoy their services or not. If not, there’s no strings attached. In addition to their comprehensive paid-for tools, they also offer free tools such as their own Amazon FBA calculator, and a sales estimator, which can give you a general idea of how well a product on the market is performing.
Things To Know Before Utilizing Amazon FBA
The services offered by FBA are great and convenient, but you should be a bit aware of what you may be getting into down the road.
Pricing Fees w/ Amazon FBA
The biggest issue concerning FBA is how much it actually costs you at the end of the day to use, and how much you’re actually taking home after fees. Included in FBA’s fees are the following costs;
Fulfillment / Stock Removal Fees - Storing your products at an Amazon FBA center will cost you about $2.41 per unit, all the way up to $137 for oversized packages / products. The fees include their cost to locate, prepare and ship the item
Long Term Storage Fees - If you happen to hit an unlucky stretch, and you’re products sit on their shelves for over a year, you’ll be charged a rate of $6.90 per cubic foot or $0.15 per unit, whichever number is greater than the other
Monthly Fee - When signing up for an FBA account, you will be charged $40 per month, but won’t be charged anything per customer purchase. If you don’t have the professional plan, you’ll pay a base fee of $0.99 per item, plus an additional $0.45 - $1.50
Your Product Preparation
When you sell items through FBA, you have to properly prepare the products before sending them to an FBA center for storage. Amazon has strict guidelines on how to properly do this, and they often send packages back to merchants / notify them of their mistakes due to merchants' failure to comply with instructions.
Getting used to the details from the start is very important. When you begin the process of sending the product(s) to an FBA center, you must enter it correctly into Amazon’s database, label it properly then send it to the right warehouse, while following rules and guidelines pertaining to the product's packaging.
More Potential Returns To Deal With
Since Amazon makes it very easy for customers to send returns, they end up experiencing them often because of the convenience. If an original customer is unhappy with their product purchase, they will likely have no problem sending the item back, asking for either a refund or a new product.
Selling through FBA, where returns are made easy, it may become common that you deal with them from time to time. This doesn’t mean you end up losing money every time, but having it happen often can begin to fill your page with bad reviews from unhappy customers. Doing everything you can to prepare correctly will help to avoid this.
Some Benefits That Come With FBA
Selling through FBA and selling privately both have their well-justified pros and cons, but selling through FBA offers much more freedom from time spent on product preparation, delivery and anything after.
- Having a place to store your products and stock, where they will also prepare and deliver your sold products for you, is an excellent resource to have as a merchant.
- Amazon FBA’s customer support is known to be punctual and reliable. If you have any questions or concerns, they are likely to get back to you in a timely fashion.
- Amazon will take care of customer returns and inquiries for you. They have a fee for handling returns, but this could be well worth the time it ends up saving you
- Customers will often get a quick delivery when they purchase a product through your FBA business. For your products, free shipping may be offered, and your customers will receive their products very quick, likely to leave you a positive review after it’s said and done
- Amazon taking care of the product packaging can provide you with peace of mind in knowing that your products are being delivered to your customers in a presentable fashion
Using FBA to sell your products is almost never a bad idea; Amazon has millions of users visiting its website every day, with millions of dollars in revenue being sent across the world continuously. It is more or less the most popular online marketplace in existence.
With your products on a popular site, coupled with good product research and a well-constructed product listing, your growth as an online merchant can potentially be never ending.
Give It A Try!
Getting started with selling products on Amazon can seem like a daunting task at first, but with the right tools, resources, and knowledge of the market, you’ll be boosting your sales volume before you know it. Whether through FBA , Seller Central, or Vendor Central, there are plenty of opportunities to exploit and take advantage of the Amazon marketplace. It’s a great place for merchants to sell their products, and will likely be for a while to come.
