People give me funny looks when I say I sell on Amazon. They kind of look at me like a kid who sells trading cards on eBay.
Buying in China and Selling in USA is the new American dream and I think there's no greater opportunity for the home entrepreneur than selling physical products online from your bedrom than trough Amazon FBA.
I literally started an Amazon business in about 1 month for about $1K
- Step 1 Product Ideas & Selecting This was easily the most overwhelming and difficult step of the process for me. Scouring best seller lists, hot items, analyzing product listings, images, bullets and competition was maddening and time consuming. From my reading and browsing of this subreddit and others, many don't even make it out of this step. I bounced through many different categories, but eventually settled on home & kitchen (like everyone and their brother). Needless to say, I thought I could easily find a product listing that had some problems and enhance it.
- Step 2 Product Sourcing - China Alibaba. Wow this place is remarkable, bringing the factories and trading companies right to us. It's really remarkable actually, but it has earned a reputation for a reason. I browsed more flexible and folding cutting boards than you can ever imagine, but I eventually settled on a supplier and began negotiations. We started emailing on July 28th after reading my carefully designed product/pricing inquiry, I'm sure I can find the template if anyone wants it. An order of 300 sets/units got to the United States by September 8th. Due to my location, I preemptively vetted a warehouse that had Amazon FBA experience. The factory labeled my product, hell, they even fixed my poor quality image that wouldn't have scanned too. I got lucky by finding a factory that actually cared about me, the buyer, without their assistance I could have faced some serious issues, lucky break #1. Ordering a sample was going to be about $250 and my entire inventory for 300 sets ended up costing $480, so I didn't order the sample (please don't skip this step, it was an extreme circumstance due to isolation and the only time my location negatively impacted the process!). I really wanted to get this in before Q4 was over. Shipping ended up costing more than the product itself, coming in at $660 to go via FedEx air express. Shipping by air or sea cargo/freight is a huge headache, I don't recommend it for your first order. Build the costs into your product, if the numbers don't work then find something else. Here's a great tip for beginners, if your first order has inventory valued under $800, you don't have to deal with import duties and taxes
- Step 3 The Pre-Launch Pre-Launch? Could have been done better for sure. I have taken mostly a hands off approach and so far only utilized the Amazon channel itself for sales and marketing save for this post on reddit. Creating the listing was about all I could do at this point, there was no reason to start a social media campaign over some generic flexible cutting boards, let's be real. If this was truly my brand that I was building then certainly this is the way to do things, the Amazon Marketplace let's us take a hands off approach to some of this however. $1140 was a lot for me to drop on this product and it wasn't even the end of the expenses. I still had to pay for warehouse services in the States ($153), shipping to Amazon ($85), product photos ($95), giveaways (RIP) ($220) and my PPC budget ($200). That $153 includes shipping to the photographer from Fiverr as well, but most of this cost could have been avoided if I was shipping to a personal residence in the States.
- Step 4 The Launch I have some alternative strategy. You can read it here: How to Launch and Promote New Products on Amazon in 2017 - Seller at Heart
- Step 5 Promoting - Sales With my automatic PPC campaign running, sales started to tick up. Achieving organic ranking comes through two things from what I can tell, ranking on keywords through sponsored ads and sales.
Frankly this is simplification of something that requires more hard work and dedication than most of us are truly willing to give forth but if you are still interested you should read this post How To Start An Amazon FBA Private Label Business - Seller at Heart
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