I'm interested in this too, although I'm a bit skeptical. Sounds too good to be true. For those of you who are selling with FBA, how much are you making per hour? I'm considering working part time over the next 10 years instead of full time for 5, and something like this would be perfect. But only if it would be more profitable then a low stress job making $10-12/hour.
RFord617 - how much did you spend getting set up for your operation?
Thanks.
It's definitely not too good to be true. It's a steep learning curve, but it's extremely easy once you have everything set up. I've done seller-fulfilled for 3 years. Just got into FBA a year ago. I've made about $12,000 in the last 3 months working about 10 hours per week. Everything is pretty much automated for me now other than buy items online and repackaging everything to ship them to Amazon. At the rate I'm going it's about 100$/hr. I make all of this from my couch. Honestly my biggest problem is the way I source my product. The place I buy from puts limits on what I can buy with each order. So if I want to buy like 100 of something I have to put in 20-30 orders. My UPS and mailman guy also both hate me. I have a huge staircase up to my house. They probably bring a couple hundred packages up those stairs each month.
I do have some tips that are a little uncommon but can help you make extra profit.
1. Definitely get InventoryLabs for tax purposes. I use to spend the bulk of my time entering stuff into my spreadsheet. I don't have to do that any more. In fact I made about $130,000 in sales in the last 3 months and it would be a MAJOR headache to do this by hand.
2. Use online portals if you plan on buying from well known stores like walmart/target etc. I received an extra $1500 in cashback for this year alone from doing that.
3. Use credit cards to purchase your items. Manufacture spending on those cards for free vacations etc. My chase ink earns me 5x points back. I can use it to buy gift cards from cardcash or paypal digital gifts from ebay to earn that 5x back. I also use 2% credit cards and cards that offers 0% intro APR. In fact I got a Amex Blue Plus Biz card from Amex. They gave me a $21,000 limit for like a year on 0% APR. That's how I was able to grow my business immensely. This is the points and miles I've about gained within the last year or two. 60k ANA 55k Lufthansa 2 Fairmont Free Nights 75k Mariott 45k SPG 7.5k Hyatt + 2 Free Nights 267k MR 201k UR 201k Delta 110k American (In Progress). I can pretty much redeem the American Express MR points and Chase UR points for an extra ~5,000. I churn credit cards for sign-up bonuses, kind of like what some people do with churning bank accounts.
4. Get a CPA. I actually haven't gotten one yet.... Last year I made only like 20k in sales and 7k in profit (without Amazon FBA) and figured I could do my taxes myself. I'm definitely getting one now. Also don't be like me and put spending on random cards, ideally get a business card to track your spending. Because I'm going to have a headache come tax time when the CPA tries to balance my spending. Oh and also maybe get a business checking account to separate business and personal spending. You probably won't really need this if you your business is starting out small.'
5. Go and watch amazon videos on how to start becoming an Amazon FBA seller. All it took was for me to watch an hour long video. The first week was nerve wrecking, but it was easy sailing from there. I don't have the exact link, but just search on youtube.
6. I honestly might start outsourcing the prepping of my inventory. There are actually companies out there that can do it for you for a price. Might be a good idea later on if you get big. One of my biggest problems is space in my house as well as having these mail carriers ship large amount of items to my house. They start to ask questions.
7. Inventory often get misplaced by Amazon. They won't always reimburse you for it. I use a 3rd party program to get them to auto-reconcile for me. I spend $40 a month on this like inventor lab. Again think of it this way. I make about $100 an hour because I automate everything. It costs $80 for me to have programs find my lost items and to record my sales. That's an extra hour I might have to source products or just chillax. It's a worthy investment.
8. Slickdeals is not too bad of a place to look for inventory to sell. They're one off items, but money is money.
Here's my IL. I'm jealous of you though hodedofome I could get the same ROI lol. On the bright side I do earn a lot of points doing this though.