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How To Make Money With Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) Seller Apps

 

People have been making money via Amazon affiliate links for many years but a fairly recent initiative, Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) - has launched a whole new money-making arena for entrepreneurial-minded folks. The basic idea is using third-party seller apps to essentially sell merchandise while bootstrapping Amazon’s prodigious warehousing capabilities. 

 

Through the FBA program, Amazon fulfills your merchandising inventory and agrees to pack and ship your orders in exchange for a fee. Buyers who are purchasing your merchandise will think they are buying directly from Amazon (and for all intents and purposes, they are), replete with all the advantages of the world’s largest tech-eCommerce corporation. This means your merchandise will be sold with Amazon’s delivery options, Amazon’s return and refund policy, and Amazon’s service quality.

 

Sounds like a great way to make money, right? But first, you have to get your ducks in a row...

 

Find a Profitable Niche

Your first task is to find a successful niche that suits your capabilities and interests. The most popular categories right now are:

 

  • Books - Yes, old school books, the kind we used to read before Kindle. Books have huge profit margins, sometimes as high as 1000% of their original price. 
  • Baby items - Pretty much a recession-proof market with light-weight merchandise.
  • Jewelry items - Gems, baubles, precious metals, and like require precise search engine optimization but the profit margin can be 50%+.
  • Exercise clothing - One of the most consistent sellers on Amazon, as people are perpetually renewing their vows to get in shape.
  • Electronics & electronic accessories - Electronics on Amazon offer a lower commission fee (8% instead of 15%), there is a perpetual stream of new devices/models every year, and you can take advantage of “retail arbitrage.”

 

Pick a reliable platform & tool 

Amazon’s FBA service can be lucrative but you’ve got to use the right tools so that you can understand your own metrics and leverage Amazon’s enormous marketplace. The best way to track sales and analytics, for example, is with a reliable Amazon seller app like the Helium 10 mobile dashboard. 

 

The additional benefits of this mobile app include clear snapshots of changing sales data and trends; keeping you apprised of when your inventory is in stock and when it needs replenishment; as well as a clean organized interface of your metrics.

 

While Amazon takes care of the warehousing (storing the merchandise), packing, shipping, and customer emails, you still have the responsibility of choosing your products, ensuring inventory is up-to-date, and creating product listings and marketing the products. These last two can be tricky, which is why you want to be working with the most updated, accurate inventory information. 

 

Speaking of Metrics

If you’re an entrepreneur or a small business owner, you probably already know a thing or two about sales analysis, but if you’re using a seller app, the following metrics are the key ones to closely follow:

~Daily and monthly sales figures

~Aggregated business data regarding daily values

~Microtrends on increasing or declining sales

~Graphs showing units sold, gross sales, and refunds

 

The Advantages Are Numerous

By using Amazon’s FBA program, you can seize the following advantages: using Amazon’s reputation to bolster your brand; capability of offering extremely fast, free service; better ranking and visibility on Amazon; you reduce your overhead; run your business from anywhere in the world

Now that Amazon has overtaken Walmart as the king of commerce (and in terms of company valuation), it continues to come up with innovative ideas for integrating third-party sellers into their brand. The Amazon FBA program is a straightforward way for market-savvy entrepreneurs and small business owners to earn income by leveraging the biggest e-commerce marketplace in the world. 


If you want more information on how to most effectively use the FBA program, read here about the benefits and challenges associated with third-party Amazon selling.

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