Hi all, I hope you’re having a brilliant week so far!
The reason I’m writing this article is because looking at the data, it’s clear that allot of people are searching for this online. And it’s always a good idea to give people what they want!
Amazon is a massive, multinational company, in the past 10 years it’s growth has been incredible. Back in 2010 it’s net income was $1.2 billion, fast forward to 2019 and last years income was $11.59 billion. That’s very impressive and has turned Jeff Bezos into the world wealthiest man with a net worth of $181.4 billion at the time of writing this article.
With so much money passing through the platform, it makes sense that a lot of people have became very rich through Amazon. But how you may be asking yourself. When you buy products from Amazon, often the product is not actually owned by Amazon the company, instead they are owned by a third party reseller. They use FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon) which means Amazon take care of storing and shipping the product to customers. So let’s say you want to sell 500 wireless keyboard, you would basically send them to Amazon, then list them on the website for sale and Amazon take care of the rest.
For the customer there is no difference, they get the same delivery options and return options as they would if they were purchasing directly from Amazon themselves. To a person looking to set up a business this can be an excellent option.
Where most people find themselves stuck is when deciding which products they should sell. If you search on Amazon, almost everything you can think of is available, so how do you find something no one else is selling? Well, you don’t. Instead you focus on what people are buying, in the same way I am writing this article based on what people are searching for. There are multiple tools available for searching popular products. One of the most popular being Jungle Scout. But you can also look at this data on Amazon itself.
There are multiple methods of sourcing your products, for example if you were looking to sell designer shoes, you could directly approach manufactures and ask if you can buy their product at a reduced price to sell on Amazon, and this is true for any product, including insect repellent, hair wax, and anything else you can think off. Unfortunately with the additional costs of setting up FBA you will have to get the product at a good discount to make a profit, and this is an issue many sellers find.
A popular alternative is to buy products from abroad, from websites such as Alibaba, shipping the products from China at a lower cost and then reselling them on Amazon. With this option you can also create your own brand. So for example if you decided to import watches from China, you could have your brand name on them.
If you decide to go down this route, there is one other challenge which should be considered. That is getting stock from your Alibaba supplier to the Amazon warehouse. The most popular method of doing this is by using a freight forward company. They deal with getting the stock into your destination country and they deal with taxes and paperwork. They then pass everything over to the Amazon partner couriers who book the stock into the Amazon warehouse.
There are some things you have to consider before reaching out to a seller on Alibaba. Firstly, I always recommend you pay for a stock sample before ordering bulk, there is nothing worse than spending thousands on stock to realise it’s of substandard quality and you cannot sell it. The other thing to consider is ensuring the supplier is efficient in organising and preparing stock, if you have issues with just a small order that may make you reconsider using them again in the future.
There are thousands of people sucessfully running Amazon businesses, and there is no reason why you cant do the same. Just remember to take your time and do your vigilante checks.
Best of luck, and remember to let us know how it goes! And join our mailing list for more tips.