Follow Along as I Become an Amazon FBA Seller

Part 1

Three days ago, I knew almost nothing about how to sell on Amazon. It's not that I didn't know about it, or that it was possible. I just had never looked into it, researched it, or seriously considered it as a side-business. Then, earlier this week, I was browsing my Twitter feed and came across a thread on "the best tools for Amazon FBA sellers."

The thread piqued my interest. I recently had some financial setbacks from my investments (look at a chart of the stock market in September, 2022 if you're reading this months from now) and I wanted a way to generate some income within the next couple of months. I've considered a few other options, and even started working on a couple of ideas, but the problem with most side hustles is that they rarely generate income quickly. It takes time to build a following and a market for whatever you're selling, no matter how awesome your product or service is. However, with Amazon, the eyeballs are already there. Over 300 million of them, in fact. And for the most part, those consumers don't care who you are. They just want whatever it is they're looking for on Amazon. As a seller, it means that you can skip right over this huge marketing hurdle and focus on your products.

What is an "FBA"?

There are several ways for you to sell products on Amazon. By far, the most popular for individual sellers (or resellers) is to use the Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) program.

Amazon FBA is a program that allows sellers to list their products on Amazon, send the physical products to an Amazon Fulfillment Center (FC). Then, when someone buys your product from Amazon's web site, Amazon fulfills the order. They pick it (from the shelf), package it, ship it to the customer, and they deal with any returns, refund requests, and so on. In other words, Amazon deals with the logistics of getting your product from their warehouse to the consumer, leaving you more time to focus on your business.

The other primary way to sell on Amazon is Fulfilled by Merchant, or FBM. With FBM, you list your product on Amazon, but you ship it yourself, from your garage, home, your own warehouse, or whatever. You also manage all storage, shipping, customer support and returns which come back to you, not Amazon. Amazon officially calls this their Merchant Fulfilled Network, or MFN.

I want no part of dealing with returns and all that, so FBA is the way to go for me. In fact, over 90% of Amazon's roughly 1.9 million third-party sellers use FBA for at least some of their product, so we're in good company. 

What I'm Doing

Now that you have the basics of Amazon FBA, let's get back to what I'm doing personally. I decided to become an Amazon FBA seller, primarily to see if it's a viable business model for a side-business that could potentially lead to a sole-source-of-income type of business for my family. Rather than toiling away alone and unseen in my home office, I thought I would share this journey with you. Or anyone else who's vaguely interested.

Here's my plan:

• Start with a reasonably-attainable amount of capital. I will limit myself initially to $2,000 worth of sourced product¹. This both limits my exposure, as $2k is the most I can lose if this idea flops, and it also is an amount that many people might be able to start with without breaking their bank account or their family's finances. Now, I realize this might be a lot for many people, and if you decide to follow in my footsteps, then please only risk however much you can afford to lose. There is no guarantee that this idea will make money.
• Publish a blog post every Friday on my weekly progress. This serves two really important purposes: 
  1. It will force me to make at least some progress every week, so I have something to write about, and...
  2. By being public about it, it will keep me honest and motivated. When you tell friends, family, or the entire Internet (!) what you are doing, then you have a lot of motivation to succeed if for no other reason than to avoid being embarrassed when you have to tell everyone that you gave up (or whatever). I know myself very well: external motivation is a powerful tool.
• Create regular Twitter threads to help other people on a similar journey. This will help people to learn from my mistakes and successes, and it will also help me to grow my social media presence.
• Spend no more than two hours/day. I'm putting this rule in place, once again, to prove the viability of the model. With finances tight, I might have to get a real job and I don't want to give this project up. Also, most people who are considering something like this already have real jobs, and I want this model to work for them too. The caveat here is that I will spend time doing research (not product sourcing), studying, and writing blog posts and Twitter threads that's not included in the two hour daily limit.
• Be completely transparent. If I screw up, you'll hear about it. Likewise, if I have a big win, you'll hear about it. If I cheat on the two hour daily limit because I find myself having a lot of fun, I'll divulge that. I will be as detailed and transparent as I possibly can about costs, time, profit, and so on. The only thing I might do is to obscure some of the specific products I choose to source and sell, because that might skew my results. I have to think on that one still, and I'm open to suggestions in the comments section.

What's Next?

So that's the plan and I hope you'll follow along with me on this journey. If there's enough interest, I might create a Discord channel or some other way for folks to commiserate. For now, be sure to follow me on Twitter and sign up for my email list so that you don't miss my subsequent posts. I will also tag all of these articles with Amazon FBA so they're easier to find in a couple years when I have several hundred of them...

My next blog post will be on my experience registering as an Amazon reseller, which I did yesterday. And after that, I will introduce some of the seemingly indispensable initial tools that you will need to successfully turn a profit selling on Amazon. Stay tuned!

¹ If I decide to add more capital because things are going well, or I source a great product that makes me exceed my initial $2,000 capital limit, then I will be clear and transparent about it, while explaining my reasoning.