Amazon

If you live on Earth, odds are you have heard of a small company called Amazon. If you don't live on Earth, well.... I'm jealous, but that's a topic for a different day. Amazon is the largest online retailer on the planet (I think), and you probably order something from there at least once a week.

Hell, some people order something from Amazon every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. With how large it is, there is even 2 hour or less delivery on a lot of items in certain areas. In my area, I can place an order for an item in the morning and usually have that item in hand by afternoon. This is without even having drones yet!

With almost any product imaginable at our fingertips, and the ability to access this from our smartphones... The world is becoming more and more dependent on giants like Amazon. Realistically, I think the only reason big box retailers like Walmart are even still standing is that they are directly competing with their own delivery services.

In 10 years, do you think there will still be physical big box retail stores? Maybe there will be but they'll probably be tiny and only visited by a handful of people. The people that don't like technology, and want to pay with cash... If cash is even a thing at that point. Who knows. For now, we have both, and it's the perfect time to get into ecommerce.

I feel like I rambled a little bit there. This post is primarily about my journey of becoming an Amazon seller. I'll dive into why I decided to do this, how I started, and how it's going. I asked for some questions on Threads yesterday and people dropped in some things that they were curious about.

How did I start?

I'll first start by saying - I am physically sourcing and shipping my own products. I am using a service called FBA, which stands for Fulfillment By Amazon. This is a service that Amazon offers to anyone with a seller account that takes away a lot of the headache of running an ecommerce business. I chose to use Amazon FBA because I don't have a lot of room for inventory, and I don't want to deal with the headache of shipping items every day.

A close friend of mine used to sell items on Amazon a few years ago, and told me a little bit about it. I immediately knew I was interested, when he explained the inner workings. Shortly there after, he and I decided to go into business together to try and build an Amazon ecommerce empire of our own. There's really only one thing you need in order to get started - capital for inventory.

Starting a seller account is relatively easy, even if you don't have a registered business. You can start with your SSN as the tax ID and then migrate to a business tax ID later. Once you have your account, it's time to get rolling. There's a ton of different ways you can approach this, but we decided to find one "flagship" product to keep a large stock of. I won't share specifically what this one product is, but we were able to source from a manufacturer in China, relatively cheap.

One thing to keep in mind when sourcing from China, or really any other over-seas country, is that it's going to take a long time to get your product. From order to my doorstep took a few days shy of 2 months. This is air, land, and sea travel. With 2 stops in customs. Customs can take weeks to process things, especially coming from China just because of the terms with the US.

Once you receive your product, you'll need to go through the process of creating packs if you're selling packs, labeling, and prepping to ship to Amazon. It's going to take a few more weeks from here for Amazon to receive and process all of your product into inventory, but from there all you have to do is make sure it sells.

In the mean time of all of this, we decided to start sourcing products locally to get sales going. This is pretty simple, really. You can take any time, scan it with the Amazon seller app, and see if it's listed. If it is, you don't even have to create a listing. You can literally just add your product under the existing listing, and just price it slightly lower.

How is it going?

Well, I'd say it's going well. Our first month with any kind of product in stock, we had about $250 in revenue. Obviously, all of this revenue went to advertising and sourcing more products. We decided to run daily ad campaigns for our flagship product to build up its sales rank. This also means more opportunity to get reviews. Reviews and sales rank are the absolute most important things to manage.

If you shop Amazon, you probably are more likely to buy from a seller with more ratings or a better rating. That's just human nature. We want that sense of trust in knowing that someone else purchased and had a good experience. It's all an investment. After getting our flagship product moving, we started sourcing local product.

Sourcing local products is a hardcore hustle, and it takes a lot of time. This involves looking at every sale, every clearance aisle, and never passing on a potential profit. We started looking at thrift stores for used books, and really any other kind of sale item that we thought might be popular for Summer. Outdoor, home improvement, and gardening are incredibly popular in the summer.

One thing you will run into while sourcing products is that a lot of product categories or brands require approval to sell. For example, you're not just gunna go slinging Pearson books all willy-nilly. The Amazon seller app will let you know that you require approval for brands or categories. What helps with getting ungated is good seller history. Most will approve instantly if you have 3 months of sale history.

You'll come across certain brands or categories that require one of 2 things for approval. Either a letter from the brand authorizing you to sell (no one is going to have this), or an invoice showing that you purchased 10 items from them directly. We have pretty much avoided these particular brands and categories for now. Once we have more revenue, we will start placing orders from specific brands to get ungated.

What's next?

I think our focus now is used books. We're pretty happy with our inventory levels right now. We have 5 pending shipments to the warehouse that should be processed soon. This will put us having just under $8k worth of inventory at sale prices. That seems like a lot, but it really isn't. It's just an arbitrary number that gives us an idea of the value of our inventory.

Used books is a topic for a whole other post, because it's a pretty interesting adventure. Going in, I didn't think used books would ever sell, After doing research, the used book market is actually huge on Amazon. Sourcing used books is pretty fun, almost like a treasure hunt. You definitely don't wanna try to fulfill these yourself, because you will almost guarantee a loss. I'll cover this is another post.

So next, we're just constantly on the hunt for huge discounts on products to resell. Thrift stores, discount stores, liquidation sales, and more are where we are looking. Remember to manage expenses strategically.

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