How You Start an Amazon FBA Business
Episode #2 of the course Amazon FBA fundamentals: From no-experience to selling your product by Erik Rogne
Today I’m going to give you an overview of the six main steps in starting your Amazon FBA business.
Researching a Product
This is by far the most important part of creating your Amazon FBA business. Why? Well, let’s think about it. You can find any old product—say an iPhone case—and list it on Amazon. Sounds like a pretty dang good product, don’t ya think? You can do everything right, but you neglected to do any research.
Without doing research, you could end up getting stuck with hundreds or even thousands of items of unsold inventory. I’ve helped thousands of people avoid this issue, because I’ve dealt with it first-hand. That feeling is awful.
When you don’t properly research a product, you’re building your business on a shaky foundation. It is just like building a house. You can build a house that looks great on the outside, but what happens if there’s an earthquake? It’s not going to hold up if it has a shaky foundation.
The research process will take you a long time, but it is well worth it. Rather than investing hundreds of dollars in a product that you think MIGHT sell well, you should save yourself the time, effort, and money to research a product properly that you KNOW will sell well.
Importing and Sourcing
After you’ve done all the hard work by researching what product you want to get into, your next task would be to import the product.
Importing a product from China is better than buying from a US manufacturer. By doing so, you have way more choices, get lower prices, and have the power, since they are competing with each other for your business.
To get started importing and sourcing, I recommend using Alibaba.
Listing on Amazon
This sounds pretty simple. Just post your product, right? Eh, it is a little more complicated than that. To rank on Amazon (think: Google SEO) you must know what your target customer is looking for. To do this, you need to go back to the research phase and figure out what keywords your audience wants.
You will also want to make the design beautiful. Use high-quality pictures and make a listing that someone would actually want to read, rather than a big block of text.
Selling on Amazon
Sweet! You listed your product on Amazon, but it is not yet active. The reason for this is because you have no inventory. Once you have your listing up, you can send your inventory to Amazon or have your supplier send it directly to them. This is a pretty simple task but does take one or more weeks.
Marketing
Yes! You now have a product on Amazon. Hopefully you are getting some sales, but if not, don’t fret. That’s normal. Amazon is incredibly competitive, and sometimes you need to market your product.
The simplest way to do this is by doing an Amazon PPC (pay per click) campaign. This is basically where they advertise your listing on the first page and every time someone clicks on it, they charge you.
You can also advertise on other channels such as Facebook, Google, Instagram, etc.
Optimization
Once your product is live, you will want to check your analytics. Amazon makes this easy for you. By seeing these analytics in a visual form, you can figure out what is working and what is not working.
After you determine what is and isn’t working, it is time to optimize! For example, maybe more women are buying this product than men, but you’re targeting men. You can use that information to change your target audience.
That’s it! It might seem like a lot at first, but don’t worry—it will become much easier with time, and eventually you will find this to be the easiest business you ever create!
Two out of 10 days done. Great job! Tomorrow, we will go deeper into how to research a product.
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