Selling on Amazon for Beginners

Most people have at least heard of someone selling online from their home and people making a good living online. It turns out that this life style is very much attainable. There are many platforms where you can get started selling on, but the easiest for scaling in my opinion is Amazon. I started by selling books I had laying around the house. I had tons of books I had accumulated from college and decided to sell them for what I could get out of them. I soon realized they sold for good prices and pretty quickly.

I took the money that I made and purchased more books from good will. I would pay a dollar for the paperbacks and two dollars for the hard copies. Sometimes these books would sell for as much as $50. I kept cycling that money instead of paying myself and grew the book reselling business larger. I would also buy books online have them shipped to me and then resell them on Amazon.

The best thing about Amazon, besides the exposure, is that you have the option of allowing Amazon to store your inventory and fulfill your orders through FBA. When I realized how easy it was, I started shipping all my books to FBA rather than doing merchant fulfilled. This way, I would ship the items in bulk, to Amazons warehouse and I was done. When an item sold, Amazon would pick, pack, and ship the items for me. This way I could focus on finding new items to sell. I soon got started selling anything and everything I could.

Some tools I use to help me are listed below as well as links on where you can buy yours.

• Scan lister
  • This tool is something I use that helps me list my items to Amazon very quickly and keep track of when and where I bought my items as well as how much I paid for it. I would wait until you can wait until you are bringing in a good amount of inventory to purchase this one. It is like $19 per month

• FBA Scan
  • This is a great tool for selling on Amazon which allows you to calculate whether you will be profitable and relatively understand competition one every item. If you understand the rank, then you can also see if its a fast selling item or not. There are several levels of cost for this, but I go with the highest ($40 per month) It allows you to store a database of info, good for when you have no internet or no wifi as well as a live search which gives you up to date information.

• Opticon 2002 or 2006
  • This works the easiest with the I phone but also works with Android. You can pick it up for just over $150 currently which is a small one time investment if you actually plan to make money. (I made that back in one trip to a good will). You can easily velcro it to the back of your phone, free up your hands, and scan that much quicker.

• • Tao Hand Scanner
    • I use this with scan lister, its very cheap to pick up (like $20) and it allows me to scan all my items into scan lister or any other platform super fast. As long as you have a free usb port to plug it into your computer, you are good to go.

      

  • Professional Seller Account
    • Once I started doing a decent amount of sales, I upgraded to a professional seller account on Amazon. It cost $39.99 per month, but saves you one dollar per transaction. The idea then is to sell at least 40 items per month and it pays for itself. There are other great qualities you get from a pro seller account, but that’s the basic first reason.