How to Start an Amazon FBA Business With Little Money
It’s a very well known statistic that the majority of American cannot cover a $500 emergency. With many individuals interested in starting an Amazon FBA business, it’s safe to assume that most people don’t have a ton of money laying around to get their business started.
Although it’s harder to start selling on Amazon with little money, it’s definitely doable and hundreds of thousands of sellers have started an Amazon FBA business with little money. With so much demand on Amazon from consumers, if you find a few products in your home to sell, you can realistically turn that to a few hundred dollars.
The more creative you can get, the better your results can be. In this blog post, we will cover how you can honestly get started with little or no money and how you can get some quick sales to establish your business.
What do you need to start an Amazon FBA business with little money?
Although you may be starting with low funds, you’ll need to make up for this with added effort in other areas. These areas include:
Knowledge:
If you are completely new to selling on Amazon, you have to fill in the knowledge gaps to save as much money as possible. Taking some time to watch a few YouTube videos or read a few blogs can save you both time and money.
If you have the right knowledge on how Amazon works, you’ll avoid the pitfalls that many sellers fall victim to. This may sound like generic advice, but you need to spend time every day learning on how to improve your business. Don’t waste time learning about random things, focus on exactly what drives your business.
In this case, you’ll need to learn how to ship your first product into Amazon with as little money as possible. Once that is done, you can worry about sending in the next product and so on. The basic knowledge you’ll need to know for sending in your first product is how to find a product, making sure it’s listed and sells on Amazon and shipping it to an Amazon warehouse. Your focus should be on learning these things, nothing else matters when you’re starting out.
Time:
If you expect to succeed on Amazon with no money and no time, you’re lying to yourself. If you have money to start off with, you don’t need to find creative ways to find products. You can just go to Walmart or another retailer near you and start scanning for profitable items.
Assuming you have little to no money right now, you’ll need to spend a few hours each day trying to gather as much free products as possible to send in to Amazon. If you do this correctly, you can get a few hundred dollars in sales and use that to start sourcing other products. You don’t need a ton of time, but dedicating at least a few hours per day is needed to start getting sales.
Understanding costs:
First, it’s important to understand how a product sells on Amazon. By doing this, you’ll be able to get an understanding of what’s the cost of doing business on Amazon. Let’s cover all the aspects of selling a single product on Amazon and how we can minimize the costs as much as possible.
Selling plan:
The first cost you’ll come across while selling on Amazon is the cost of your selling plan; a selling plan is required to have an Amazon seller account. There are two plans: the individual seller account and the professional seller account. As a new seller with little money, you’ll want to select the individual plan. The individual plan is free, while the professional seller account costs $39.99 per month.
By selecting the individual plan, you don’t have to pay to sell on Amazon. The only fees associated with this is a $0.99 fee and the referral fee by Amazon once an item is sold. This is not a big deal because Amazon takes that cut after you make a sale. So far, you don’t have to pay anything yet to sell on Amazon and you’re an Amazon FBA seller.
Finding a product:
To start your Amazon business, you’ll need to find a product to sell. In this case, you’ll want to find free products around your house or in your area that sell on Amazon. By eliminating the cost of goods for products, you’ll have much higher profits and you can reuse that to find more products to sell.
The majority of products you’ll find for free are used items or items laying around your house. A good place to start is to check the books in your house. All of the books you may have from recreational reading or from school can be worth hundreds of dollars. You can start by downloading the Amazon seller app and scanning the books with the app.
Once you scan a book, Amazon will tell you if they sell it and how much it’s selling for. Most households have tens of valuable books just laying around. You can scan those books and ship them to Amazon. So far, we’re still at $0 for the cost of selling on Amazon.
Listing items:
Many ecommerce platforms like eBay have fees associated with listing a product. In contrast, Amazon doesn’t have any listing fees for any products. All you have to do is search for the product on the Amazon seller app or on Amazon Seller Central and click sell when the listing appears.
Amazon will ask you to put in the price you’d like to sell the product for and your item can be listed. So far, we’re still at $0 for having a seller account, finding a product and listing the product.
Shipping:
Now that you have a selling plan and some products to ship, it’s time to ship these products in and make some money. Shipping is extremely expensive, especially if you’re shipping large items like furniture. You’ll need specialized hauling providers like Valley Haul Away if you’re moving large items, but Amazon can handle most smaller items.
This basically means you ship the product into an Amazon warehouse and Amazon will handle the rest. You can choose either FBA or FBM to sell your products, but FBA is the preferred option. You can check out how to ship to FBA here.
Obviously shipping isn’t free, so you’ll have to pay your shipping costs to get your products into Amazon. You can easily ship $100 worth of goods for less than $10 depending on how you package your products and how many boxes you use. There’s an Amazon FBA calculator that helps you set your sales price and get an accurate estimation of your profit.
The only costs associated with this step is the shipping fees (Amazon sellers get discounted rates at most shipping providers) and buying boxes. Most households have some boxes laying around, so you can use that instead of going out to buy some. So far, the cost of selling on Amazon is less than $10 before making any sales.