How to Make Money on Amazon FBA (Step By Step Tutorial)
Amazon is the largest search engine anywhere for people who are holding a credit card and are ready to buy and in that sense it is actually better than Google. If you want to claim some of this hundred billion dollar market, then you need to claim part of the search results.
You need to put something and sell it on Amazon and you need to find out what product you can sell on Amazon. Find a place where you can find a product cheap and sell it on Amazon for more money.
So how do you actually get started?
First you go to seller.amazon.com and you register an account. This account is for people who are selling and you need to register as an individual. Later on you will need to register as a business of course as your revenue grows. In the beginning though, just to make it simple, let’s just get started as an individual.
Before you continue, it is very you know that you need an American or European bank account to be able to get the money from Amazon. If you don’t have that, then you need to go and join a service like World’s First, or something like that, and then you will be able to still receive money from Amazon.
Where should you be starting on Amazon?
Amazon is in many countries. If you want to just get started, I recommend from day one that you start on Amazon.com which is the American website. Later on, you can upgrade or go somewhere else to a different country’s Amazon like Spain, France, Germany, or Italy as there are many other Amazons in the world. In the beginning, let’s keep it simple and just start on Amazon.com.
What you want to do is you want to use existing information on Amazon to determine what to sell because what you want to sell is actually pretty important on Amazon. With some products, like phones, you are going to have a hard time competing. For example, you can’t really compete with Apple, Samsung, and LG by creating your own brand like, “Aleks Vitkin Phones.” It would be pretty hard to do that.
However, there are smaller niches with smaller, simpler, less-electronic, and less-complicated products that you can compete with on the market. For example, if you go on Google and you type in Amazon bestsellers, you should find the Amazon website and it will list all the Amazon bestsellers by category.
Finding the right category
Now, what you need to go find is a good category to sell in. These categories can be accessories to phones but not phones themselves, baby toys, kitchenware, etc. Do not go into perishables and do not go into super complicated electronics like cameras, but keep it nice and simple and find a product that has not too many reviews.
If you look at your competition, sometimes they have 2000 reviews. It is going to be really tough to compete if half the market has 2000 reviews. If you go in there, and most people do not have too many reviews with their product or are not too sure if they should choose one brand or the other, then that could be the market for you.
How expensive should your product be?
If you enter the market and you see most products are around $50, bingo! That is just about enough because if you go too expensive, you are probably not going to have enough money to buy enough stock to sell. If you go too cheap, your profit margin will be too low so try to stay above $10-$20 and below $70.
You should go in a market and look for products that are on the bestseller list, and look at the top four or five thousand on that list in the main category. You should find something not too technological, or too technical. Pick something that is not ingestible, like pills or anything like that, and make sure that it is something nice and simple.
Also, you want to make sure it is something light. When you are mailing it, initially you will be mailing it yourself just to get started. You do not want it heavy because it is very expensive to mail it and Amazon does not want to reimburse you that much money for the expense. When you are doing Amazon FBA later on, you can play around with the weight a little bit more, but in the beginning let’s just keep it nice, simple, and light.
Finding the supplier
What you are looking to do next is find a supplier. The best place, by far, to find a supplier is Alibaba.com. The reason why the company became so big is because it is the best place to find suppliers in the world. Most of them are going to be from China, but there are suppliers from all over the world there. You need to go ahead and email the suppliers through Alibaba and ask for samples and see how easy it is to work with them. Are these people nice, easy and friendly to work with? Are they reliable and do they send their things on time?
Look at pricing and make sure you are not overpaying and make sure there are discounts once you order bigger, larger amounts. Be sure they will have enough supply. Once you do order larger amounts, they need to be able to deliver.
Creating your brand
What you are looking to do next is create your own brand. What they have is just like a white label product that is just like a blank sheet of paper basically. For example, let’s say you are selling some brand-less USB sticks. If you put your logo on it and you use your own brand name, suddenly people will recognize that and it will be your brand. If you sell enough of that and people are satisfied, they will come back and buy more. So it is actually useful to build your own brand. How do you get a logo and brand? You can go on Fiverr.com and pay someone for a logo.
Product descriptions
Also, you need to write a description on Amazon to describe your product. Make sure you follow basic sales letter strategies – you can find basic sales letter strategies on Google.
Focus on the benefits of the product and the problem that the product will solve for people. Once you have all of that and the supplier is ready to put the logo on the products, then you get them to take pictures of the product and send you the final branded product. Of course you will have to pay them by this point, but here you can also list the product on Amazon.
Testing the product
One very important thing that a lot of people miss is you need to test the market and make sure that it actually sells. How do you actually get people to buy it? You need to keyword target to make sure that the product is found.
Go and look at the best-selling products and check the descriptions in their titles. Use similar wording and keywords because they have done the research. Do not copy their brands of course, but they have done their research and they know people are looking for, “memory sticks that are 64 GB.” They have done the research so you can do the same research by using your competitors as source material and listing your product using similar keywords. That way, Amazon will know what product you are selling. You will find that if you list it with the correct keywords and there is enough traffic, the conversion rate, which means people viewing your page converted to buyers, is very high on Amazon. You will be able to get your first sales.
Getting reviews
You are going to need reviews on Amazon. If you do not have reviews or testimonials, it is quite hard to sell. Give some money to all your friends, get them to buy from you on Amazon, get the money back in real life, and then get them to write you nice reviews. This is going to help you a lot and is going to increase your rankings and conversion rates on your Amazon page. Also get them to give feedback to your company on Amazon, not just your products.
This is how you get started, and later on you can upgrade to Amazon FBA, which means Amazon will ship the product for you and do most of the customer support for you. This means that your supplier can ship directly to Amazon so your job will be to do some customer support and mail, communicate, and negotiate with the supplier to make sure that they send more supply when supply runs low on Amazon. It is really not too complicated. However, it does take a while and potentially can take a lot of capital needed to invest in. After you see that something works you may want to get some more money to invest into getting more supply so you can sell it.
Do not go ahead and spend all your money immediately because you need to reinvest it back into your business and make sure that it grows as soon as possible. Once you have that going, congratulations! You are getting sales online on Amazon and you can consider adding in some new products and get some new keywords.
