How To Sell On Amazon FBA: I Sold $5,263 My First Month

You are about to learn how I sold over $5,000 on Amazon FBA in my first month of selling, and over $23,000 in my first 5 months…

In mid 2017, I set out to create a passive income source for myself. I thought about starting a Shopify store or an affiliate website but finally settled on becoming an FBA seller. What is Amazon FBA? FBA stands for “Fulfillment by Amazon” which is where you send bulk products to Amazon and they ship and fulfill the orders for you on your behalf, and take a cut. After doing a lot of research, I found out that FBA is a viable way to create fairly passive income.

In my first month of selling, I sold over $5,000 worth of product that resulted in a profit of over $2,200. Over the next 5 months, I sold over $23,000 that totaled over $10,000 in profit. I went from having no e-commerce selling experience to becoming, in my opinion, a fairly successful seller. Creating an extra 2,000 plus dollars a month in profit was pretty substantial, plus Amazon FBA is scalable! I want to teach YOU how to sell on Amazon successfully.

Learn how this seller sold his Amazon FBA Business for $54,000 working just 40 hours per year.

How To Start Selling On Amazon FBA With This Amazon FBA Guide

How To Find Products To Sell On Amazon FBA

One of the biggest factors to my quick success was Jungle Scout. Jungle Scout offers a suite of products for Amazon sellers that makes the selling process much easier! Read a full in-depth review I wrote on Jungle Scout.

The Jungle Scout tools include

1. A Chrome Extension
2. A Web App 

These tools allow you to get a “birds-eye view” of a product niche before you make a product order. Jungle Scout allows you to see average sales and average demand of your competitors’ products, and figures out how many units they are selling every day/month. This information helped me, and will help you, figure out if a niche is too saturated or if there is potential to come in and make a profit.

I found 3 potential products using Jungle Scout and then narrowed it down to one. Once I had my product, I knew that my competitors were selling 300 units per month on average of this product, and I figured that in my 1st month I could sell 150 units, and then probably 150 units the next month. I ordered 300 units which I planned to last about 2 months.

I used Alibaba and found a manufacturer overseas that was able to manufacture the product. Like mentioned previously, I needed 300 units so we negotiated a price of $6.80 per unit that did not include shipping.There are 2 options with regards to shipping, air or sea.

1. Shipping by air is much quicker but more expensive
2. Shipping by sea is slower but less expensive

I opted to ship by air since I wanted to get to market quickly and prove to myself that Amazon was a viable way to create passive income.

My unit cost was $6.80 plus shipping at $3.10 per unit. The total cost delivered to my door was $9.90 per unit, so total cost shipped to my door was $2,970.

Side note, I suggest paying with a credit card through Alibaba even though there is a credit card fee. Long story short, I found out that the “Buyer Protection” programs do actually protect you in the event that something does happen, and it’s worth paying for it.

It took about one month to have the products manufactured and arrive at my house in California. You can have the products sent directly from the manufacturer, using a freight forwarder, to the Amazon warehouses. You can even have the ASIN stickers applied for you and everything. However, I like to do quality control since I want to ensure that each unit is quality.

Once the 300 units arrived at my house, I found out that the products met my standards and it was time to package them for Amazon. I print my own ASIN barcodes through the Seller Central portal onto stickers that I apply to the plastic bags. I also purchase “Made in China” stickers and suffocation warning stickers that I apply to the plastic bags as well. Once I had all stickers applied to the products it was time to ship them in bulk to the Amazon warehouses. I go to Home Depot and purchase the large boxes. Since this unit weighed 14.4 ounces, and I did not want overweight penalties,  each box had to be under 50lbs. I calculated the weight and figured out how many units I could get in each box using the large Home Depot boxes.

Cost wise, the stickers per unit cost $0.02 a unit for all 3 stickers. The tape and box to per unit was $0.46, so total cost of shipping the products to Amazon cost $0.48 a unit. Make sure to keep all of these costs in mind! It was $9.90 shipped to my door plus $0.48 a unit to get it to Amazon. I had about 12 boxes that I took to the UPS store. You buy your UPS labels through the Amazon seller portal and tape them onto the boxes. Once your boxes are sealed, just walk into UPS with all your boxes, set them on the counter and you are done. It’s already prepaid and ready to ship.

Creating A High Quality Listing Is Key

I highly recommend taking quality photos with a DSLR camera, the first photo being on a white background to follow Amazon’s guidelines. I suggest writing very thorough, organized and error free text that explains the product and discussed the materials. Use proper grammar and proper English as these things will help your product sell when it’s being compared to your competitors. It’s the little things that will help drive sales!

It takes about a week for your products to show up on the marketplace since Amazon has to take them into inventory.

Once my product was online I started to see sales! I had a quality listing, a quality product, and sales were starting to come organically with no reviews. I did use pay per click campaigns, and in my first month, I generated over $5,000 in sales … going from having no experience, kind of just winging it, to actually selling. I realized that I need to order more inventory because sales were above my projection.

Keep In Mind…

Your products are coming from overseas so you need to give yourself 45+ days of lead time to get your products so that you don’t run out of inventory on Amazon.

After the first few weeks of selling, I ordered another round of 300 units and I sold out again. I was making a 44% margin which worked out to be $16.29 of profit for every unit that I sold. Use the Amazon FBA calculator to figure out your profit margin before you order any products!

I got organic reviews naturally, I didn’t ask people for reviews. I didn’t use any programs to get reviews. This product only had about 10 or 12 reviews, which for having that amount of limited reviews was really encouraging since you hear stories that you need to have a lot of reviews in order to be successful.

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The Key Takeaway For You, An Aspiring Amazon FBA Seller

I wrote this article and made these videos to encourage you if you’re on the fence about selling on Amazon. I went from having absolutely no selling experience to selling over $23,000 in 5 months which is over $10,000 dollars in profit. That was an extra $2,000 a month in profit from a job that only took a couple hours each week to do. You can start a successful FBA business with about $2,500 to $3,500, so go ahead and take the plunge!

Want To Know What To Sell On Amazon FBA? The Best Products To Sell On Amazon FBA Are…

I would not recommend selling a product that:

1. Is Battery Operated
2. Needs To Be Plugged In
3. Are Made of Glass
4. Are Filled With Liquid

I would look for a product that sells in the $25 to $40 price range. This gives you room for a healthy margin allows you to drop your price if the niche starts becoming oversaturated with competitors. Also, look for products with 60 or less average reviews. You do not want to compete with products that have hundreds or thousands of reviews.

Amazon is growing every single day. We read about it in the news often, so there’s no better time to get in. I highly recommend exploring FBA selling more, look at Jungle Scout and see if you can find a product that might be a good option to sell. It will take you about 5 hours to find a product, but designate an afternoon or an evening to doing this and it’ll be well worth your while.

If you have any questions, feel free to email me at zach@moneynomad.com. I’d be happy to answer any questions or concerns that you might have. There will be some ups and downs with Amazon selling, as with anything in life. Stay focused and stay dedicated, and you will see success selling through Amazon FBA. I hope that now you know how to sell on Amazon successfully. If you enjoy online courses, then I encourage you to check out the best Amazon FBA courses and Amazing Selling Machine review.