How To Sell On Amazon- Everything You Need
To Know!
Jessica Larrew - The Selling Family
How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
Have you heard about people “Selling on Amazon?” And nd yourself wondering,
“What does ‘selling on Amazon’ even mean?” Or, “How does selling on Amazon
work?”
Well, you are in the RIGHT PLACE!
Back in 2008, I found myself out of work and not wanting to go back. So I dove
into selling stuff online with everything I had.
And it panned out! You can see more of my story on my about page. I won’t give
you all of the details here, since you came here for the How To Sell On Amazon
FBA information.
The short story is that a few years after I started my online selling venture, we
turned selling on Amazon into a six- gure business that supported our family of
three.
While working part time!
You can listen to the interview my husband and I did with Pat Flynn of the Smart
Passive Income Podcast (episode #99) a few years ago.
The purpose of this guide is to give you a 1,000-foot view of what it means to sell
on Amazon so you can make an informed decision about whether this is the right
move for you (and your family).
First, What Does Selling On Amazon FBA ActuallyMean?Usually, when I mention to people that I sell on Amazon, one of three things
happens.
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
1. They look at me with a tilted head and glossed-over eyes … Like I just spoke a
different language and they are trying to interpret what I said.
Then the conversation either moves in a different direction or they get really
interested and have a bunch of questions!
2. They say, “Oh, like selling on eBay? I know someone who’s done that before.”
3. They know what I’m talking about and say, “So what do you sell?”
In those rst two scenarios, I try to explain the best I can (you know, the 3-5
minute version) how selling on Amazon actually works and what it means to use
Amazon FBA.
So here it goes (the longer version):Amazon.com is the largest online retailer. In fact, it’s quickly becoming the largest
search engine as well.
People often head to Amazon when they are looking for something — even before
searching Google.
When they do actually search Google for a physical product, Amazon is usually
ranked #1 there! So Amazon is just grabbing up all that traf c from online
shoppers.
I tell you this because it is one of the main reasons we sell on Amazon rather than
trying to build our own e-commerce site.
Imagine trying to compete with Amazon.com for traffic.
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
The good news is this: Amazon allows us to sell on their platform, thus SHARING
that traffic with us.
Yes, this comes at a cost, but that cost doesn’t compare with trying to build a
website and spending money on marketing.
You may not have even realized that Amazon has 3rd-party sellers (people other
than Amazon the company) who sell on the site!
Here is an example of a product page on Amazon; the red arrow shows that if you
click on the “Add to Cart” button, you are buying from Amazon.com.
The blue arrow shows other sellers, people like you and I, who are sharing that
page with Amazon.
Now, why would someone choose to pay MORE from one of those 3rd-party
sellers? Instead of just ordering from Amazon and paying less?
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
That’s a great question, I’m glad you asked
The goal for most sellers on Amazon is not to COMPETE with Amazon for sales,
but to get sales when Amazon runs out of stock on an item or when they are not
even selling the item to begin with!
Let’s look at a different item and see what things looks like when Amazon doesn’t
have the item in stock at all.
In this picture, we can see that “Mikes Super Store” is selling the party set. He is
also using the “Fulfilled by Amazon” program.
That means that as a Prime member, I am able to order from “Mike” and get the
same treatment as I would buying direct from Amazon!
So I don’t look at Mike any differently than I would if Amazon were selling the
item. And the truth is, most people don’t even notice that it doesn’t say “Sold by
Amazon.com.” They just see Ful lled by Amazon and that they can get Two-Day
Shipping on the order.
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
Then they click Buy It Now!
You see, “Selling on Amazon” means that you get to list youryour products for sale on
the Amazon.com website. Then Amazon’s buyers get to purchase from you.
All the while, you haven’t had to create a new website, spend money on ads to get
customers or even ship your items to the customer…
Wait…What?!?
That’s right! Now let’s get to the reason we use and recommend you use the
Fulfillment By Amazon Program.
What Is The Ful llment By Amazon (FBA)Program?Now we are getting into why selling on Amazon using FBA beats out so many
other e-commerce business models!
When we talk to anyone who wants to start selling on Amazon, we always
recommend that they use the FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon) program.
This means that Amazon handles a big portion of the selling process for us
sellers. Actually, they handle the hardest and most time-consuming parts!
Let me list the steps of selling a product on Amazon so you can see what parts the
seller handles and what parts Amazon handles (when we use FBA):
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
1. You find a product to sell on Amazon
2. You list the product on Amazon.com (does not go “live” at this point)
3. You prepare the items to send to Amazon’s warehouses
4. You ship the items to Amazon’s warehouses
5. Amazon unpacks and stores your inventory for you
6. Your product shows up live on Amazon.com (according to where you listed
in step #2)
7. Your product is featured as a Prime Eligible purchase
8. Amazon BUYER places an order from you
9. The Amazon warehouse workers find and ship your product to the customer
10. Your customer receives the product in 2 days (if they are a Prime member)
11. The Customer is happy!
As you can see, we are responsible for nding products we want to sell on
Amazon, listing them and preparing them to sell.
Once the products are listed and are ready for sale, we “hand them off” to
Amazon and they do the rest!
When the product is sold, Amazon handles nding the box, scheduling the
shipment, packing the item and making sure it gets to the buyer on time.
Ful llment By Amazon is the MAIN reason that I stopped selling on eBay and
went all-in with Amazon.
When I was selling on eBay, even though I was clearing almost $2,000 a month in
pro t, I didn’t have much room or ability to scale the business. If I wanted to
make more money, it meant I had to nd more products, create more listings,
store more inventory, ship more items and deal with more customers.
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
I was already spending a lot of time on the business. I couldn’t imaging
DOUBLING IT.
So, when I realized that I could sell more items on Amazon without adding to
my daily workload, I was sold! Can you see the appeal now?
I can now send items into Amazon and then take a week off if I want to. That’s
because all of my sold items will be processed and handled without any input
from me!
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
There is another way to sell on Amazon where you DO NOT ship your items to
Amazon. This is called Merchant Ful lling. I am going to keep this guide all about
selling on Amazon using FBA so I won’t get all into MF other than to say that, with
merchant fulfilling, you handle all of the steps above
The Biggest Benefit Of Selling On Amazon FBAI know I mentioned that with merchant ful lling you have to do all of the work.
But to be totally honest, that isn’t even the biggest bene t of using the FBA
program!
The biggest bene t is that when you use the Ful llment By Amazon program,
your products become Prime Eligible! I touched on this a little when I showed the
picture of “Mikes” party supplies.
Amazon does a ton of marketing to get people to join its Prime Program. People
spend almost $100/year so that they can have unlimited “free” 2-day shipping on
items sold on Amazon.com. There are other bene ts as well, but let’s just focus
on this one. So if someone spends $99 to get free shipping, do you think they are
going to choose to buy from a seller who offers free shipping or from someone
they have to pay an extra shipping cost to?
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
Even if the merchant ful lling seller offers free shipping, buyers still have to wait
longer than the Prime 2 days for the item to arrive! If you are a Prime Member
yourself, I think you know the hassle of having to wait and pay extra for shipping,
right?
As a Prime buyer myself, I ALWAYS choose FBA sellers over merchant ful lled
sellers. EVEN IF the price is higher. I trust that the item will arrive quickly and as
described. Amazon has a trust factor built in that people have come to know and
believe in.
And THIS is where the power of being an Amazon FBA seller comes in!
Amazon has trained us as buyers to look for Prime Sellers!
Take a look below and see which seller you would choose to buy from if you are a
Prime member.
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
If I place an order from the rst seller, I will receive the item on SUNDAY, which
is in 2 days. I am writing this on a Friday and the second seller probably won’t
even ship my order out until MONDAY. And because they are in TN and I am in
CA, we are probably looking at an additional 5 days for me to receive the order.
So, maybe next FRIDAY I will get it. Possibly longer.
The thing is, I honestly would choose seller number one, even if they were like $5-
$7 higher than the merchant ful lled seller. Just for the convenience of fast and
easy shipping.
Thankfully, many people think the same way that I do, so this business model
works REALLY WELL!
Ready To Start Your Own Business Selling onAmazon FBA?Now that you know the bene ts and reasons why the Amazon FBA business
model works, you should have a good idea whether this is something that you
want to try for yourself.
So let’s take a look at how someone gets started in their own Amazon FBA
business.
Finding Products To Resell On AmazonThere are 5 different business models that people use for selling on Amazon.
The way that we teach people to “source” (the term for nding products) in our
Amazon Boot Camp course is “Retail Arbitrage”.
This means buying products from retail stores, either locally or online, and then
reselling the products on Amazon.
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
The goal of Retail Arbitrage is to nd products that are being sold at enough of a
discount in the store that we can “ ip” them on Amazon for a pro t even after
paying for the item and Amazon taking its “cut,” which is about 30% of the total
selling price.
To nd the products, we head to local stores with our smartphones in hand. Then
we use a scanning app on our phone that will tell us what the product is currently
selling for on Amazon. We can then enter our cost of the item and the app will tell
us if we would make any profit.
By scanning, I mean we use the camera on our phone, with the app open, and then
“scan” the item’s UPC barcode.
Testing The Process With Products You HaveAround Your HouseSince you are not yet selling on Amazon you can’t use a scanning app, but I can
show you another way to see what we would see in stores.
There is an online Amazon Pro t Calculator that we can use to see the same
details the scanning apps give us.
Say, for example, that you recently purchased this red can opener. You paid $10
for it on 75% off clearance at Target.
Typing the item name into Amazon, we can see (at the time of this writing) that
this can opener is listed for almost $30.
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
Next we would look the item up on the Amazon FBA Calculator and add in:
#1 the price it is selling for on Amazon and
#2 the inbound shipping cost. I calculate this at roughly $.50 a pound. We get
really good rates as Amazon FBA Sellers through the program. Since this was at
home, I am considering it a zero cost item.
When you click “calculate,” you will get #3 - the pro t on that item if it sells for
the price listed.
Because you actually paid $10 for the can opener, you could then deduct that
from the $19.43 and get a “profit” of $9.43!
See below for the example and how to use this calculator.
Now take a look around your house and do this process with a few items.
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
I don’t want you to nd products that you can actually resell on Amazon, I just
want you to look at the process of how we sell on Amazon. And how we nd
products in stores.
Ready To Start Your Own Amazon FBA Business?Once you have decided that you want to actually start the process of selling stuff
online, you will need to have an Amazon seller account and a few basic supplies
before you can get going.
The seller account is required in order to use the scanning apps I mentioned
previously. I know it may feel like jumping the gun since you haven’t found
anything to sell yet, but it’s a catch-22 in this case.
From this point forward, if you are a person who prefers to see things laid out in a
step-by-step fashion and watch videos to learn, it’s a good time to check out my
Amazon Boot Camp video course, because I leave no stone unturned!
Start Looking For Products To Sell On AmazonOnce you set up your account (whether you do the free one or the paid one), you
can start using the Amazon Seller App to scan items in stores or in your house.
Here is my tutorial on how to use the different Amazon seller scanning apps and
how they work.
You are well on your way to finding profitable products to resell on Amazon!
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
Don’t Forget The Supplies For Your Amazon FBABusinessLike I mentioned previously, you do need some basic supplies before you can
start selling items on Amazon. You can wait until you have found some pro table
products before getting these supplies; you just can’t send those products in to
Amazon without having them.
The basics are: computer, smartphone, printer, labels, boxes, shipping tape and a
scale.
You can see all of our recommended Amazon Seller tools here. This will give you
the exact versions of everything that we use!
Learn From Someone Who’s Been There!
There is no point in going at this alone!
I created the Amazon Boot Camp with you in mind. You see, when I started
selling on Amazon, there were no step-by-step courses available to learn how to
sell on Amazon.
I had to gure it all out on my own — with lots of Google searches and navigating
through forums.
That is why I decided to create the rst complete step-by-step video course for
getting started on Amazon.com using the Fulfillment By Amazon program.
In fact, over 4,000 people have gone through this course and are selling on
Amazon today because of it!
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How To Sell On Amazon - Everything YouNeed To Know!
In our Amazon FBA course you get: Screen Share step-by-step instructions to get your Amazon business up and
running in no time!
Plus, you get access to our members-only private Facebook group where we
have tons of successful Boot Camp students
You can see all of the details of the course right here.
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