How to Start an Amazon Business?
Many beginners go it alone and find the process can seem daunting. However, when you break it down, it’s not as complicated as it looks. If you follow the proper steps and put some time in, you can start a successful business on Amazon. You may even be able to quit your job and work from home full-time, giving you plenty of flex time.
If you’re wondering about starting an Amazon business, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve created this complete guide to give you the best instructions and help you on your own business journey.
How to Sell on Amazon Without Inventory?
Third-party sellers set up profitable Amazon stores by following a well-known seller blueprint:
Research a product 🡪 Purchase inventory in bulk 🡪 Run product ads 🡪 Make sales and revenue
And while this blueprint continues to work well for a lot of entrepreneurs, not everyone has the inventory management wit—and sometimes budget—needed to purchase, handle, ship, and maintain products.
After identifying this bottleneck, Amazon allowed third-party sellers to create a store and sell products without inventory!
If you want to do the same, you can:
- Enroll in the FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon)
- Try dropshipping products
- Use a combination of FBM and third-party logistics (3PL)service providers
- Sell digital products
How To Earn Money on Amazon?
One of the great things about Amazon is that you have several different options for making money. Pick the one that seems like the best fit for you.
Let’s take a look at the options.
1) Selling Products from Wholesalers:
In this method buy products from wholesale distributors and sell them on Amazon. This approach is somewhat of a cross between private label and retail arbitrage.
Like with the retail arbitrage approach, you won’t be creating your own brand or your own products. Instead, you’ll be selling existing products.
But as with the private label approach, if you find a few successful products, you may be able to sell them over and over again for a long period of time.
The key is to find the products that you can buy at the right price to sell on Amazon for a profit.
2) Become an Affiliate:
A simple way to make money on Amazon is to become an affiliate. If you run a blog, website, or even moderate a community, you already have an audience. By recommending interesting and high-quality products (found on Amazon) to your audience, you can earn a referral fee for your efforts.
Depending on the item, you can get anywhere from 4 to 10 percent of the product’s price when someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link. Amazon lets you become an affiliate for just about anything.
3) Private Label Brand:
This is one of the most profitable opportunities on Amazon.
As a private label seller, you order a particular item from a manufacturer, put your logo and branding on it, and then list it on the Amazon marketplace.
The benefit of selling products under your own brand is that you have complete control over your listings, and you can even apply for Amazon Brand Registry to protect yourself from counterfeiters.
4) Selling Private label Products:
I chose to sell private label products because we liked the idea of having one (or a few) consistent product(s) that we could sell over and over again.
With some of the other options that we’ll look at in a minute, you’ll need to constantly be on the hunt for products to sell.
One of the nice perks of selling private label products is that if you’re successful you won’t need to keep looking for products — you just need to make sure you have inventory of your products that really sell.
Advantage of Private Label:
- High Profit Margin
- No need to constantly look for item to sell
- Passive income
Disadvantage of Private label:
- Higher inventory costs than the other approaches
- Most products have lots of competition.
- Standing out from the competition can be hard when your products are similar.
5) Sell handmade Goods:
There is a high demand for handcrafted goods. If you’re crafty and have a passion for making things at home, you can join Amazon Handmade.
Sellers from more than 80 different countries are selling handcrafted products via Amazon.
Amazon has an artisan-only application and audit process. This ensures that the products are genuinely handcrafted.
The pricing for handmade sellers is very straightforward. There are no hidden fees or listing fees at all. You’ll just pay a 15% referral fee to Amazon for each sale made.
6) Retail Arbitrage:
Retail arbitrage involves buying a product and then reselling it for a profit. With this approach, you won’t be creating a brand or your own products. You’ll be buying and selling products from a variety of different brands.
There are basically two keys to making money with retail arbitrage:
- You need to find great deals on products that people want to buy.
- You need to be able to figure out how much you can sell it for on Amazon (and how much you’ll keep after Amazon’s fees).
The most common way to source products is by finding sales and closeouts in local retail stores and online.
Retail arbitrage can be quite profitable, but you’ll need to be on a constant quest to find the best deals.
7) Sell Via Amazon FBA:
If you want to make money on Amazon without having to worry about customer support, packing, and shipping, then you sign up for Amazon FBA.
With FBA, you can have Amazon care for your stock and deliver it to your customers. All you have to do is send your items to one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers.
The advantage of FBA is that customers can’t tell the difference between shopping directly from Amazon and purchasing from an FBA seller.
8) Sell a Custom product:
With a private label product, manufacturers use one of their own stock products and slap your brand name on. But creating a private label brand isn’t the only option if you want to sell your own product.
Another option is to design and create your own custom product by having a manufacturer produce an item according to your specs. Many of the manufacturers you’ll find on Alibaba (and elsewhere) are ready and able to do this.
Most Amazon sellers choose to go with one of the manufacturer’s stock products and opt for the private label route because it’s fast, easy and inexpensive. However, if you’re using a stock product, it’s usually very easy for other sellers to copy it.
If you need to start your shopify business then visit this link