Should You Take An Amazon Course?
If you have been interested in selling on Amazon for a while or have already started, you probably are following some type of Amazon content creator that inspired you to start selling. This content creator may be a blogger or YouTuber and oftentimes they have some sort of course offering that teaches you what they know.
The real question is should you pull the trigger and purchase one of their courses to get started on Amazon? The honest answer is it depends. In this blog post, I’m going to answer the common questions that come when a seller is interested in buying a course to get started on Amazon. By the end, you should have a solid understanding of whether or not you should buy a course.
Do you need a course?
No. That’s the answer, end of story. You don’t need anything other than the right mindset, a good work ethic and a willingness to learn to succeed on Amazon. If a content creator makes it seem like you will fail without their course, you should be very skeptical. To be honest, all of the information about selling on Amazon is already out there in the form of blogs, YouTube videos and more. A course does not guarantee success or prevent failure, it is ultimately up to you to make your business succeed.
When people purchase courses, they get that dopamine hit that makes them feel like now they got everything they need to succeed. What happens when you run into a problem with Amazon down the line? Of course a course may give you some guidance, but it is ultimately up to the seller to contact Amazon and resolve all the issues. How fast your business will succeed or fail falls entirely on your shoulders. If you keep learning as much as you can each day and take massive action, you will likely succeed with or without course.
A person who has access to a quality course may have some advantages over a person who chooses not to take a course. The person who didn’t take the course can close the knowledge gap by immersing themselves into learning about Amazon as much as they can. Over time, the person that took the course and the person that didn’t take the course will both have relative success if they put in the work. The course just helps accelerate the learning curve.
Is there value in buying a course?
Yes. There is a ton of value in buying a course. Now that you know you don’t need a course to succeed, it’s important to lay out the advantages of a course. A person who has access to a quality course has many advantages over the person who’s learning it on their own. The key differentiator here is the quality of the course. To figure this out, read as many reviews as possible before purchasing. The real value in buying a course is that all of the information is packaged for you so you know exactly what to do step by step.
If a new seller is starting out doing retail arbitrage, it may take them a few weeks to get learn, set up their business and get going. If they take a short course, they’ll be able to get a good idea of what they should be doing every day to hit the ground running, get ungated from several categories and start making their first sales. Can a person without a course do this too? Yes, but they’ll have to find out the information on their own.
In addition to having all the important information packaged for you, the biggest benefit a course can have is a community of sellers. If you are able to get access to a community of successful sellers that are willing to help you, the course will be invaluable. Many courses have private Facebook groups or private memberships in which anyone within the group can ask the community for help with specific topics about their business.
Since many of the sellers have already experienced what you are dealing with, you can get easy access to the answer for your issues. A community of successful sellers is the most impactful benefit a course can ever have. All of the information is available online, but you don’t run into a community of six and seven figure sellers everyday.
When is a course appropriate?
If you get anything from this blog, it should be this portion here. Knowing when to or when not to take a course is the most important factor in your success. If you’re starting out as a brand new seller and you have a very tight budget, do not take a course unless it’s free. What you need to be spending your time on is learning how selling on Amazon works and shipping your first products into an Amazon warehouse.
Learn by doing, that’s the only way you’ll learn on Amazon. Once you have established your business and start making real sales (>$1,000 per month), you can decide to take a cheaper course (less than $100) to help you scale your business. A course won’t give you a magic pill or thousands of dollars overnight. You must take responsibility and put what you learn into practice.
If you are looking to do private label, you should almost always take a course. For new sellers who are doing retail arbitrage, it’s pretty straightforward: you go to a retail store, you scan items for potential profitable products, you ship to Amazon and you make a sale. There’s not many areas in which you can mess up your business in that business model.
Private label involves doing product research, branding a product, finding a manufacturer overseas, getting a sample, ordering hundreds of products, marketing and more. It also costs thousands of dollars just to get starting with just one product. In that instance, a course is literally a fraction of what it would take to get your first private label product. It’s better to invest in a quality course to make sure you’re doing all these steps correctly to increase the chance of success. Losing money on a private label product will likely cost you thousands of dollars, so taking a course is a no-brainer.
Final thoughts and recommendations:
A course is just another potential resource you can use when you sell on Amazon. Just like any other business, you need to invest in yourself to succeed. Whether you take a course or not will not intrinsically determine your success or your failure. It’s not the flashy answer, but it all depends on you. If taking a course does not make logical sense to you, then you should not take it. This is business 101, if there’s not a positive return on your investment, do not do it.
Factors that you should take into account when choosing a course include the success of the content creator, potential communities within the course and the price of the course. If all three of those factors meet your budget, you should take the course. A $99 in-depth course that brings thousands of dollars of dollars in revenue to your business is a no-brainer. If you have $1,000 to start and you spend $500 on a course, the return on your investment will likely be low even if the course was great because the price is way out of your budget.
In conclusion, be very rational about taking courses. If it doesn’t make financial sense to take it, then you should not take it. Go and learn from all of the free resources first and once you’ve done that, you can start exploring paid courses. Below are some free courses on getting started on Amazon. Check them out and leave a comment below to let me know how effective they were.
