Amazon FBA Business

What Is An Amazon FBA Business?

Let me start off by saying that Amazon FBA is currently my highest source of income. It is definitely more difficult to break into now than it was 10 years ago. I first began my journey with Amazon FBA back in 2015, and I put a lot of effort into researching a good product, high quality sourcing, photography, branding, listing, and the sales just started flowing in organically from basically day one, that’s how easy it was back then.

After a couple years of that, due to some circumstances, I took a few years off Amazon FBA. Only now have I dove head first back into it back in 2023 up until now in 2026. You can still do it, you just have to find something that isn’t already monopolized to the point that you wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at making sales.

What is Amazon FBA? You’re building products around a brand (private label), and shipping them to the Amazon FBA warehouses where they will take care of all of the packing, shipping, fulfillment, and customer service for you, for a portion of your profits. Sometimes, the FBA fees really eat into your profits, but it’s a trade off. You are paying for the exposure and the sales volume that comes from your products being on Amazon through FBA and the fact that they can be shipped using Amazon Prime.

Approximately 75% of shoppers who shop on Amazon use Amazon Prime, so that’s where most of your sales will come from. It can be daunting to get into at first, but there are a couple big misconceptions that people have about Amazon FBA.

First, you do not need to start with $10,000 or more, you don’t even need $5,000 to start. You can begin your FBA journey with $1,000 if that’s all you have available, or if that’s all you feel comfortable losing. Never invest more than you can afford / are comfortable losing, because that’s always a possibility.

And second, you do not need the perfect product, your actual product choices themselves do not even matter that much. What matters the most is simply just starting, don’t put off starting for weeks and months because you can’t find that “perfect” product. No one is going to pick a perfect first product, and if someone’s first product does go crazy, they were probably very lucky.

Most things that you put on Amazon FBA will make sales as long as you have proof that that specific thing has demand. You can simply find that proof on Amazon itself, look for something that is already selling but has a small improvement that you can make. That’s the improvement you make in the factory with your supplier over in China, or whichever country you choose to manufacture your product in.

Why Does Amazon FBA Work?

As I was saying before, I’m currently neck deep in the Amazon FBA waters myself and have been for a few years now. And I’m just me, not some large company or a Chinese factory going directly to Amazon themselves. A regular Joe can still get a piece of the pie on Amazon, provided you take some necessary steps and educate yourself before jumping in.

It works because Amazon is astronomically huge, they receive almost 100 million visits per day and nearly 10 million purchases are made every day on the website. Everyone knows about Amazon, and it is the ideal place to get the largest number of eyeballs on your product as quickly as possible.

It’s never smart to put all of your eggs in one basket, so I do recommend building an ecommerce store to accompany your Amazon FBA business so that you have something that is yours in the future. But for the short term and for the most part, 95% of your sales are going to come from Amazon FBA if you take this route.

It also works well if you have the patience to slowly work your way up, and never using the money you make early on for anything except reinvesting back into the business. That’s one reason why it is not recommended to begin selling on FBA full-time, or counting on being able to use the money that you bring in.

You should not use any of the money that you make within the first six months at least while the pieces fall into place. Basically, I’m saying that one reason you can succeed, and the reason many others do not succeed in Amazon FBA, is that they don’t have the patience to continue reinvesting that money and slowly building it up. Also, don’t give up on products too early, keep tweaking your photos, title, description, ad copy, and sign up for 10 Vine reviews.

If you enroll your product in Amazon’s Vine review program, your product can get a huge jump start by gathering 10, or a little less than 10 reviews (not every single Vine reviewer will leave a review) . Make sure that you send in your first batch of products looking pristine to maximize the ratings that you get in the beginning, as more quality reviews is equal to more sales.

How To Begin Amazon FBA

Now for the important part, how to actually begin this whole Amazon FBA thing.

1. The first thing that you’ll want to do is choose your first product(s) to sell/test on Amazon FBA. Ideally, you want an item that is small and light, falls within the $10 – $40 range, has demand, and avoid big-brand dominated products. Avoid anything that you would sell for less than $10, as the fees and other costs will make your profit margins razor thin.
2. Conduct product research. It helps to use tools such as JungleScout, Helium 10, and the Amazon best sellers page. Though, it is not necessary to spend money on tools to do your research, you can simply do your research on Amazon if you want. Look underneath product titles on Amazon to see how many units sold per month (e.g. 100+ units sold this month), read product reviews to find customer pain points, note review quantities, and look at how many people are selling that product.
3. It’s time to find a supplier. Use the classic Alibaba to get connected with a supplier and look for Verified companies with trade assurance. Be aware that even verified companies can send you products with sub par quality. Always ask for a sample of the product you want to look at before committing to a bulk order. You will have to pay for a sample in most cases but it’s not usually more than a $30 charge and it’s very worth it. Ask for samples from a few different companies and compare quality, and make sure their Alibaba page states that they’re a factory so that you can request the product customizations that you need, and confirm that with them in the Alibaba messaging center.
4. At this point in time you can create a brand. This is optional but highly recommended, as you will already need to put your brand name or logo on your packages anyway to qualify for Amazon’s brand registry. It’s basically a must to enroll your seller account into brand registry so that you can reach more people and get more sales. This will allow you to gain access to many features such as the ability to protect your products from hijackers, A+ listing content, control your listings, a brand store, and analytics. You will need to have a trademark application pending to get into this which I recommend doing yourself (it’s quite straightforward) instead of hiring an attorney and spending $1k+. There are many other advantages to creating products around your own brand. A brand can get you brand recognition which in turn invites repeat customers, word of mouth sales, and an overall increase in trust. You would most likely create a website alongside Amazon, using your brand name as the domain name, which can generate you even more sales in the future.
5. The next step is to create a professional Amazon seller account (~$39 per month, but necessary).
6. Time to create your first product listing. Research your competition, take note of what they’re doing right with their A+ content, product photos, titles, and other data. Don’t straight up copy others, but use this as a guideline to create your own unique product around your new brand. Learn how to make high quality product listing photos by watching tutorials on YouTube. For the most part, you will only need to take a few high quality “base” photos of your product, and then you will remove the picture’s background in Canva create your own backdrops through editing. Make sure that you enter as many non-repeating relevant keywords as you can into the backend product details section, not the product description but the keywords section that customers don’t see.
7. Send your inventory into the Amazon FBA warehouse. You will box or bag up each individual product and slap an FNSKU label onto each one of those. Then put all of those small products into a larger box, print out your UPS label, and drop it off at UPS. This is the way that I do it, it’s no big deal for me to put a little barcode onto each box of mine as I pack them up. Each product should also have your brand name (if you’re brand registered) somewhere on it or built in to the product packaging before leaving to Amazon. What I do is get rolls of stickers made by Sticker Mule of my logo and then slap one onto each box, then put a piece of tape over the sticker so it is fully attached to the box and seems as if it’s almost printed onto the box.
8. Launch your product by enrolling in Amazon Vine, offer discounts, and run small test ads only if you want to. Personally, I started off fully organic because I didn’t want to spend money on ads in the beginning without knowing if it would pay off. That is a risk that some people are willing to take, and many people become very successful from it. I allowed my products to gain traction slowly and organically, in the hopes of future stability and higher profits. Not all products will get organic sales, some will pop off almost immediately, some will get just a few, it just depends on your product and marketing angle.
9. Once you’re done with all of that, you can relax a little bit, and figure out your next steps to scale the business. Purchase more of the winning products, and cut your losses when it makes sense. And always make sure you will have enough inventory to not run out of stock. Count on about 2 months of shipment time of shipments coming from China from the moment you pay for the goods, and about a month for them to become available on Amazon after sending them in from your business, house, wherever you work out of.

Pros

• Amazon handles all of your inventory storage, packing, shipping, and customer service so you don’t have to.
• Very highly scalable business model (more products, grow brand, increasing inventory).
• Access to Amazon’s massive customer base.
• Potential for very high monthly revenue (many sellers reach six figure months or even higher).
• Relatively hands-off after set up (you’re more focused on logistics and growth after a while).
• You built a valuable asset in your Amazon FBA business (many people sell their Amazon FBA businesses).

Downsides

• Requires an up-front investment (somewhere from $500 – $5000 will do).
• High competition (currently many high competition niches and massive sellers on Amazon).
• Amazon fees can cut into your profits.
• You’re dependent on Amazon (unless you branch out like I recommend).
• Risk of losing money on dud products (it can happen).
• Can take a lot of time to research new products (trust me I know).

Resources

JungleScout & Helium10: One of the most popular and useful tools for Amazon product research (they have some free options but very good paid options too)

Amazon Product Photography YouTube Video: Some useful information walking you through your Amazon listing photo editing.

Great article on how to find reliable suppliers on Alibaba.

Brand registry requirements: Check out all of the steps needed to get yourself enrolled in brand registry before selling.

Canva: Your go-to photo editing software to create your brand logo (if doing it yourself) and creating product images for your Amazon FBA listing.

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-Final side hustle nuggets of information-

“I’m not going to lie to anyone and say that it’s easy to begin a profitable business on Amazon FBA, it takes a certain about of knowledge, a little luck, and experience, that last part you usually get after failing once or twice. Other than saying that, I’d like to add that it’s always better to just start instead of sitting there ruminating for weeks or months. Even if your first product is a flop, you will have learned a very large amount of valuable information along the way. And you don’t have to fail huge, fail small, like I mentioned above, you don’t need to start with $10,000, you can put in $500-$1000 in the beginning. -Cross”