Guest post from Nick at eBusinessBoss.com
Today I want to run you through my journey as an amazon seller… It all started for me about four years ago. I have been a full-time amazon FBA seller for around two years now and I haven’t looked back since.
Hopefully hearing my story will give you some insight into online business and the amazon fba business model.
About four years ago I was feeling very unfulfilled in my job, I had gone to university and finished my degree in surveying… I was set for a life in property sales and valuation.
Something just didn’t feel right. I’d always known that I wanted my own business but I didn’t really know what I wanted to do!
I had always had an interest in online business, I could see that the internet was only going to get bigger and better and I wanted to be a part of that!
Two very good friends of mine also felt that same sense of wanting more out of their current situation. It’s fair to say they both had that entrepreneurial spirit burning inside of them.
We arranged to meet at a local bar and began brainstorming.
All of us had busy schedules and full-time jobs, but we were not about to let that stop us.
Our first business venture was a failure. I won’t bore you with all of the details but we basically decided to make a website for a local tradesman.
The tradesman would pay a subscription and be able to advertise their services on the website and social media platforms.
With full-time jobs, we just didn’t have the time to get the business off the ground. We needed a business idea that we could build at night and still make money from whilst we were all working during the day.
This is when we discovered Amazon FBA.
Amazon FBA – How Much Do You Need To Start?
We started our amazon business with around £1500 that’s around $2000 for any of you that deal in American dollars.
We each invested £500, it was all our own money.
We refused to consider taking out a loan or anything like that, this business venture was bootstrapped from the beginning.
The Amazon FBA business model is pretty simple
- Find products that are in demand
- Purchase them at the right price
- Send the items into Amazon FBA
- Find your target keywords and create a well-optimized listing
- Launch Your Product
- Amazon will then pick, pack and send out your products when customers place an order
The first product we decided to sell was a fruit infuser water bottle (You’ll see me holding it in the picture at the start of this article).
I’ve created a video to run through our process in a little more detail, check it out below.
This first product actually got us in a little bit of trouble, but that’s a story for another time.
In my opinion, Amazon FBA is one of the golden opportunities of our time.
Don’t listen to people that tell you it’s now becoming too difficult, it isn’t… You just have to be willing to put in the work.
Selling on Amazon is definitely not a get rich quick scheme, it takes hard work but the long term benefits are incredible.
How Did We Take The Business Full Time?
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, we all had full-time jobs for the first two years of our amazon fba business.
We spent our evenings and weekends optimizing listings, talking to suppliers and trawling amazon looking for hot product opportunities.
At the beginning everything we made would go back into new product ideas, we were always keen to take the business full time but we all knew that this wouldn’t happy overnight.
We were patient, we grew the business slowly and just focused on learning how we could improve ourselves as amazon sellers.
I’ve got some advice for anyone reading this thinking about starting or scaling their own amazon business… You don’t need to invest in expensive amazon courses you can learn everything you need to know for free (if you are patient).
1) Session YouTube – You can learn a lot by watching videos on YouTube. There are A LOT of useful channels out there with the sole purpose of helping you learn more about Amazon FBA (Hint Hint – That’s why we have started our channel 😉 ).
2) Use Reddit – I actually think Reddit is a very underestimated learning resource, it’s like a collection of mini forums, people always seem to be very generous with their information. I have actually written an article running through the best Amazon FBA Reddit communities.
3) Be Patient – Put time aside to learn, the best businesses are grown organically, over time. In my opinion, businesses that are built at speed are much more vulnerable.
When we first started out Amazon business things were actually very different… Products would appear on Amazon and within a few days they’d have 100’s of 5-star reviews, I’m actually very happy this is no longer the case.
Does Amazon’s Change in TOS Mean It’s Now Harder?
When Amazon announced the banning of incentivized reviews a lot of sellers started to panic… I for one welcomed the change with open arms.
It was always going to be a matter of time before Amazon made a change, the reputation of their platform was on the line.
Let’s be honest if your entire shopping experience on Amazon revolved around you buying products that actually weren’t as good as the reviews were stating, would you have returned to buy more? No, me either.
Now, I’m not saying product reviews aren’t important … They definitely are! You just need to obtain them in the right way.
Our private label products have a good, steady stream of positive reviews…. And we don’t cheat the system! We simply ensure that have product has a well thought out automated amazon email campaign.
With our first email, we will always try to include something the customer doesn’t expect, something like a useful eBook to help them get the most out of the product.
Where possible we love to over-deliver… It’s why we’ve never had an issue with our product review levels… Well, that and the fact the products we sell are actually good products.
You don’t need to cheat the system… If you want to improve your product review levels, take the time to structure and implement a value-packed automated email campaign.
Why Have We Started eBusiness Boss?
We have been selling on Amazon for some time now and a little while back we realized that we are in a unique position to help people learn more about Amazon FBA.
We want to build a strong community of Amazon sellers, we are focused on one thing;
Free, Useful Content.
I really hope you have found this article interesting and thanks to Feedback Whiz for the opportunity to contribute to the blog.
We now use FeedbackWhiz for our automated amazon emails and for good reason too.
My favorite thing about the feedbackwhiz software? They give you the ability to automatically exclude any customers that have asked for a refund.
If I customer wasn’t happy with their experience, the last thing we want to do is prompt them to leave a review…
As an Amazon seller, you need to be willing to take every advantage possible.
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