Amazon FBA: How To Sell On Amazon As A Complete Newbie (Using This 4-Step System)

If someone came up to you and said: 

“Hey, want me to run your business? I’ve got millions of customers, and they’re all yours for free. Whaddya say?”

What would you reply?

I’d laugh right in their face.

“No way. Not buying it this time, dude.” Do you really think I was born yesterday? 

In what world does someone offer you a million customers and ask to run your business… FOR FREE?

If your answer to this is ‘no world at all’, I’m about to introduce you to a whole new one.

Do you know there’s somewhere normal people like you and me are cashing out big pay-outs every week, letting someone else handle all the “heavy lifting” that comes with running a business?

And no, this is NOT going to be about:

• Creating Digital Products
• Affiliate Marketing 
• Online Coaching
• Dropshipping

Neither does it cover things like SEO or Facebook ads, sales pages or having an email list.

Boy, do I love this place. And so do 2+ million other people.

Can you guess what it is?

Funnily enough, it’s not some secret club that’s nowhere to be found.

Here’s a hint: We’ve actually all been here. In fact, it could be in your browser history right now.

If you hadn’t guessed it yet, it’s Amazon. 

And they need people just like you to sell on their platform and grab a FAT slice of their billion-dollar eCommerce empire.

How? That’s exactly what today’s article is about. I’m going to show you how you can make money selling physical products on Amazon - without EVER having to touch or see them.

The Power Of Automation: The business that does business for you

When I heard someone talk about “physical products”, my skin used to crawl.

Just thinking of all the moving parts: 

• The buying and storing inventory. “Where the hell am I fitting all this stock? The back boot?” 
• Handling orders. “How am I supposed to pack and ship 100 orders in one night? Kill me now.”
• Handling refunds. “Ugh. If someone returns a damaged item, where do I put it? I don’t want it.”
• Customer service. “What do I say when an unhappy customer messages saying their item ripped on the first day?”

Selling physical products sounded like living hell. It was never the ideal online business I’d see myself in. 

But when I heard Amazon did all of this for you – It blew me away.

Knowing you could run a business where someone else did all the “heavy lifting”: the shipping, packaging, logistics, refunds and customer service - became a life-changing moment for me.

Not only because half of my business took care of itself, this type of business stuck out to me something I always craved for in an online business - AUTOMATION.

I thought YES – for the first time, I could create an eCommerce business without all the burdens a normal everyday store has to deal with.

Selling on Amazon is as simple as it gets: 

• you buy 
• you list 
• you sell 
• then you repeat 

(We’ll go into more detail with this in just a moment).

But here’s one of the best parts: You get instant access to Amazon’s truckload of traffic, for FREE. To break this down into real numbers, look at how much traffic Amazon’s received in the past six months:

Think about how many people search for stuff on Amazon every day. Imagine placing your product right in front of thousands of customers each day?

And it doesn’t involve anything you’ve heard before like Facebook ads, having an email list or website, or even creating a new product.

Nor do you have to wait months on end to start making money. You can make your first sale in less than 30 days from now.

If you’re like me, that absolutely loves systems with just a few moving parts, you should be salivating at what I’m sharing with you right now (at least I am).

And if you’ve been a loyal subscriber to Affilorama, you know I don’t have to tell you about the amazing power of automation - doing less, to make more.

Whether you’d like to “go all in” and turn this into a full-time job, or just part-time, YOU get to choose how big or small as you want your business to be. There’s no ceiling. 

Whether if it’s an extra $500 or $1,000, or to make $10,000 a month, all of these numbers are totally doable. You just need to learn and follow a proven system that can generate this for you.

And that’s what we’ll be looking at for the next part.

How it works: The 4-Step System to Selling on Amazon

Selling on Amazon very simple. All you need to do is follow these four steps, then rinse and repeat the process:

Step #1: Find a product

The first step starts with finding a product to sell. And before you say “But Eric, I have no clue what to sell”, “I don’t know the latest trend”, look at how much these five random products make every month on Amazon:

Random product #1: Rubik’s Cube

Revenue per month: $83,342

$83/k to make people’s lives even more confusing than it already it is? Where do I sign up? 

Random product #2: Washer Fluid Additive 

Revenue per month: $58,437

Turns out loads of people want their car extra squeaky clean.

Random product #3: Aluminium Drip Pans

Revenue per month: $45,153

LOL. Seriously, it doesn’t get as boring as this. But who’d think this could make you over $45k?

Random product #4: Lemon squeezer 

Revenue per month: $10,991

$10k for squeezing juice out a lemon? 

Random product #5: Bamboo Travel Utensils

Revenue per month: $10,153

Oh, and another $10k per month for making wooden cutlery look fancy.

As you can see, you don’t need the sexiest or latest product to make money on Amazon. It can be almost ANYTHING.

It’s funny. When I ask someone who’s just starting out on Amazon “How well do you think you’re product would sell?”, they say something like, “Uhh… I dunno. But it looks really nice, so I’m confident people will buy it.”

WRONG. If you take this approach, you’re doomed before you even start. 

Instead of finding products you think will make sales, you do the total opposite. You find products that already sell. It’s not rocket science, and with a simple product research tool like the one we use at E-com Space, products like these aren’t hard to find.

Step #2: Create a listing on Amazon

After you’ve found your product, you need to list it on Amazon. Simply put, a ‘listing’ is the page you click on to see a product.

This way customers can find your product on the search results. Making one is incredibly simple, but I won’t get into all the details here.

Step #3: Ship to the Amazon warehouse

Once you know what product to sell, you have to ship it to Amazon’s warehouse. They have hundreds of warehouses placed around different states, where they hold all of your inventory. Then when a customer buys your product, they’ll pack and ship it straight to your customer, from their very own warehouse.

This is all through their FBA program (Fulfilment by Amazon). From here onwards, everything in your business starts to become automated.

Step #4: Make money!

Once you have everything set up: your product, listing and inventory in the warehouse, you’re now ready to make sales. 

This is where fun begins. Literally, I spend most part of the day refreshing my seller app a dozen times to check how many sales I’ve made. Care free.

Knowing that product will sell month after month, without you having to be there, even while you sleep at night – is a seriously awesome feeling.

The great thing is that once you’ve done all the main work upfront, there not much left to do, apart from sending more inventory in when you’re close to running out.

You can see how streamlined the process is to get started selling on Amazon. But what’s even more fascinating to see is how much money a single product can make you in a single month.

Imagine selling 5 more products? 10 products? 20? 100?

Each one bringing you in a monthly income – automatically. Giving you the freedom to go about your day as normal and focus on doing the things that you love. Like spending time with family, eating out, learning a new sport etc.

Like I said before, it’s not magic, it’s math. All you need to find out is how much products you need to sell in order to make you how much you want in a month.

If it’s $3,000 a month, it may be three products making $1,000 a month.

Or if it’s $10,000, it may be five products making $2,000 a month.

Obviously, there’s way more products that go above and beyond $3,000 or $10,000, single-handedly. The examples above are just to dumb it down to simple numbers, so you have a clearer idea of how possible it is to create the lifestyle YOU want when focusing on the numbers. NOT the product.

4 eCommerce models you can use to sell on Amazon

Before you start, you have to decide on what kind of selling method you want.

There are four major types of models you can use to sell on Amazon. Some have low profit margins, some high. Others require more money, or more time than others.

Whichever model you choose depends on your own circumstances. I’ve tried them all, so let’s take a look at each one quick.

Low cost, low profit margins:

• Retail arbitrage
• Online arbitrage

Medium/high cost, high profit margins:

• Wholesale
• Private label

Amazon Model #1 – Retail Arbitrage

This is what I like to call “entry level” type of selling. 

Here’s how it works: You drive to your local retail store, go to the clearance section, then find items that sell for a higher price on Amazon. You buy the item(s), put them in a box and send them over to Amazon’s warehouse so they can be sold.

This is how I started off, and it helped me get my hands dirty and see how the whole process worked out.

And for a while it worked… until I started getting 20+ orders a day. As my business grew, more and more time was spent roaming down the clearance aisle, trying to find items to sell.

On top of that, an even bigger chunk of time was spent packing these items into boxes, printing shipping labels, and driving down the post office to get them shipped on time for the next week. Yeah, fun.

At that point, I knew doing “logistics” for half the day wasn’t what I wanted to spend the rest of my life doing.

However, if you’re just looking to test the waters and see how things work, it’s a great way to start.

But at the same time, it’s super hard to scale your business without having to sacrifice your time. I wasn’t a big fan of that, so after trying this out for a little while, this model got a loud “NEXXTT” from me.

Amazon Model #2 – Online arbitrage

This is basically the exact same model as retail arbitrage. Only difference here is, you’re finding items on online stores instead (Like eBay and Toys R Us). 

So you don’t need to cut hours out your day to drive to retail stores, because you can order them home instead.

But again, there’s still ‘logistics’ involved. You still have to pack all your items bought in a box and ship them over to Amazon.

The end result is pretty much like the first: you hit a scaling cap, where your business reaches a plateau. Unless you find someone else to do all the packing and shipping for you, your business will only grow as fast as my 24-year-old brother’s facial hair (which is painfully slow).

Amazon Model #3 – Amazon Wholesale

This is one of quickest and easiest ways to making money on Amazon. 

All it involves is buying branded items in bulk from wholesale suppliers, then selling them on Amazon.

Here’s an example: Look at these Spider Man walkie talkies. Imagine they’re selling like hot cakes on Amazon.

All you’d have to do is find a supplier that sells this, order a bunch, then have THEM ship these to the Amazon warehouse for you. Making the frontload work completely hands-off on your side.

And you can do this over and over again, with hundreds of other products. Without worrying about not having enough time, space or if there’s enough stock left in the clearance section.

Plus, if you think it’s hard to find 100 different products, THINK AGAIN. You’ll be surprised to know there’s literally tens of thousands of products from one supplier that already are being sold on Amazon. 

In fact, it’s actually harder to find branded items that aren’t being sold on Amazon than to find ones that are.

According to Scrapehero, Amazon have a total of 562.4 million products being sold – and that’s JUST in the USA… they also sell in 13 other countries.

But what I like about the wholesale model is that it’s an actual business. At this stage, it’s not about finding items available at clearance and hoping to make a profit. Instead, you’re building a system that doesn’t frees you from much of the dirty work.

Amazon Model #4 – Private Label

Now for my favorite, selling privately labelled items.

In the past three models, the focus has been on selling branded items. This model takes a different angle. Instead, the focus is on finding niche products that make a lot of sales. Then having the product manufactured in China and shipped to the Amazon warehouse.

Another example: Let’s say yoga mats are making huge sales on Amazon. I want in on this big opportunity, so I find a manufacturer on Alibaba who’ll create my own yoga mat and add my logo to it (so it’s privately labelled. Get it?). Then from here, I have them shipped over to the warehouse and sell them on Amazon.

What I love about this model is, it’s your product. Nobody else gets to sell it. With branded items, you aren’t the only person selling the item, you share what’s called the ‘Buy Box’ with other sellers.

And unlike the other models, you don’t need 4 or 5 products to make $1,000. You only need one. Because these types of products can make you thousands of dollars - ALONE.

Plus, the rewards of selling products like these can be HUGE. Take a look at this product here:

Every month, this mouse trap set pulls in a revenue of $100,504 a month.

But could you guess how much it costs to buy the exact same product from China?

A DOLLAR AND FORTY CENTS! How dirt cheap is that?

This small, stupidly simple $1.40 mouse trap making $100,000 per month is just one of a million other unsexy products making a ridiculous amount of revenue on Amazon.

Private label is the model I use and is the best way to sell on Amazon for me.

Bottom Line: Anyone can do this. Why not you?

You don’t need to have a ton of time or experience to start a successful business on Amazon. All you need is a laptop, Wi-Fi and the right mindset. Just think, if other people can do it, why not me?

Selling on Amazon is a huge online business that almost ANYONE can get started with. It’s a simple step-by-step process, with few moving parts.

If you’re the type that doesn’t want to have to learn 101 things at once to have a successful business, and would rather follow a step-by-step system, selling on Amazon may just be the “perfect” type of business to start.

I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek into how you to sell products on Amazon. Hopefully you’ve had your ‘a-ha’ moment during this post and can see how lucrative creating an online business on Amazon can be.

Thanks for reading! Let us know your thoughts in comment section below.

~~~

Bonus: I've set up a link where all Affilorama visitors can get free access to my eBook called "How to Private Label and Sell Profitably" (value: $147), for a limited time.

Simply head over to: https://www.affilorama.com/redirect/amazon4step to grab your copy now.

~~~

This is a guest post from Eric Cole, Founder of E-com Space, which teaches people how to start their own online business, with a focus on eCommerce based models.