What is Amazon FBA?

Are you familiar with Amazon FBA (Fulfilled By Amazon)? You may or may not be, but recently I have started selling items on Amazon via Amazon FBA. The main question is how does selling on Amazon work? And the answer is, it is pretty simple, however there are a number of different rules and regulations as well as restricted items.

How Does Amazon FBA work?

Basically Amazon sells a shit load of items everyday and they need people to provide them with those items to sell. They have multiple huge warehouses around the world where there inventory is located. People send in items to these locations and Amazon handles the shipping and everything else. Sit back and relax, kinda.

You will first need to signup for a Amazon Seller account. This is free and will allow you to sell products on Amazon, however you will have to fulfill and send out the products yourself. In order to do FBA you will have to get the upgraded account, which is $40 a month. This allows your products to be purchased with Amazon Prime, this is a big selling point.

What type of products to send to Amazon FBA?

Usually the products sent into Amazon are in new to very good condition. Amazon has a number of guidelines to abide by and the rules must be followed or your account could get banned. Some products are restricted on your account and not on other sellers accounts, they maybe grandfathered in to certain categories.

Restricted Amazon FBA Products

Once you make your Amazon seller account, download the Amazon Seller App on your phone, it’s free. This will allow you to scan items and barcodes. When it is linked with your account it will let you know if an item is restricted or not. If you are restricted you will have to get ungated to sell a product in that category. Some categories will be easier than others to get ungated for, other categories or products will be virtually impossible to get ungated.

Even though there are some restrictions, there is still a ton of opportunity and products to sell. If you are restricted for a product on Amazon don’t give up, go over to eBay. Now remember that Amazon has fees and costs. It is important to buy your products at the lowest possible price point. That is the real key to Amazon FBA, sourcing. I would go over sourcing here, which basically means going out and buying stuff low, but I feel that it would be longer than what this post is about so look that in an upcoming post.

Shipping Products to Amazon FBA

Once you have some products to send into Amazon you will need to list and label them. You can create a listing from the seller app, make sure that you detail the condition of your item, this is very important, you do not want returns. Once that is done you will need to print out labels and put them on each product that you are sending into Amazon.

After labeling all products you will need to pack them into a box or boxes and take them to a UPS store. When you have a pro seller account you get Amazon’s shipping discount with UPS, this really comes in handy. It will take a few days for your shipment to get to Amazon and become live. The Amazon seller app lets you know how many units and dollars sold you have on a daily basis.

In order to grow on Amazon you will need to do a lot of sourcing. You could also do a private label product, but your own product will be a lot harder to get off the ground.