FBA - Quick Guide for Total Noobs, with Sourcing tips

Hi guys, I wanted to post a step-by-step guide to get started with FBA for those of you who want to try it out for the least possible investment. I will be using selling books as an example, and will tell you the EXACT steps I took to begin my own personal journey. If you follow this you WILL make money.

I will be recommending one paid product, (and one book that really motivated me), but you can get a free trial of the software. I won't be posting any affiliate links or anything like that, I'm purely sharing this info just for the sake of sharing it. I believe there is plenty of room for all of us to make a good side income with very minimal effort on FBA, so I'm not worried about giving away this info.

First off, the book "Amazon Autopilot" by Peter Valley is what got me really excited about FBA. The book isn't cheap (maybe $39) but it's loaded with great info, and I found it to be excellent. It's geared to books, but much of the info is scalable to other products. I'm not selling this book, and I'm not Peter Valley. I get nothing for plugging it, I just thought t was a great read, and it's totally optional.

Step 1:

Create your seller account on Seller Central, but don't sign up for the "Pro" account just yet. You'll definitely want a Pro account once things get rolling to save the $1 fee Amazon charges on each order tho. The "Pro" account is $39 a month, and only makes sense to pay for if you have at least 39+ orders a month. (make sense?).

*NOTE: I would highly recommend that you create your seller account with a different e-mail than your personal Amazon account. I did not do this, and it's too late for me to switch it now. (I'll explain more later)

When you are creating your account I HIGHLY suggest you disable the "Stickerless / Co-mingled" option. It will ask you if you want to, and at the time I signed up I had no idea what it meant. My advice is to STICKER everything you send to Amazon. (Also more on this later)

*Also, don't worry about any of the Tax stuff just yet.

Step 2:

Ok, your account is set up, now you need some shit to sell. We are going to focus on books for this tutorial. (Side note, TEXTBOOKS are HUGE money on Amazon. They are risky too. I've heard many stories of people selling a used textbook only to have the buyer return it after 30 days, in essence treating it like a rental book. Sure you can hopefully sell it again, but the return will hurt your seller metrics and it's annoying to deal with returns. So just be aware. I'm not saying to not sell some textbooks, just throwing it out there.)

You'll need a paid app to source out in the field, at thrift stores, garage sales etc. The cheapest one I've found to accomplish this is ProfitBandit @ $9.99 a month (and you also need an Amazon Pro account to use it, $39.99/mo). I'm going to show you an easier and cheaper way to source books though. EBAY!

Yes, Ebay. When sourcing books, a good rule of thumb is to stay AWAY from sourcing mass market fiction paperbacks. Also I'd stay away from buying Fiction books in general. Also stay away from any of the "Chicken Soup for the Soul..." books, NEVER ty to resell those, they don't sell and there are TONS of them out there. What books are great? Yoga books, Job hunting books, niche cooking books, Parenting books, etc. Also avoid any "For Dummies" type books.

Also, only source books on Ebay being sold as "brand new" unless they are really in demand (based on sales rank).

*Set your search parameters on Ebay for books that are non-fiction..then sort them by price...then you should have pages and pages of books you can buy/ bid on brand new for $.99 (with free shipping). When you see books that you know will sell, you'll bid $1 on them knowing you can triple your profit (or more) even after FBA fee's. If you don't end up winning all the good $1 books you've bid on, that's okay. You're doing this to make a profit, don't be tempted to bid more. Shoot for at least 3 to 4 times profit on each book.

*How do I know if a book is "good"? Sales rank..

PROTIP: Go to Amazon.com, select the "Books" category, in the search field just type this "[]" (without the quotes) and click search... This will show you the total number of listings on Amazon for books. I just did it and got 48,913,877!!! Wow, that's a shitload of books, huh?

Now, we from that huge number, let's figure out what 1% of it is... 489,000 roughly... So now we know that any book with a sales rank of 489,000 or lower is in the top 1% of books..Many people shoot for books in the top 1%-5%...In this example I probably wouldn't consider it a good buy unless the sales rank was around 100k, but that's just me. Find what works for you.

Step 3:

Before I spend any more time typing all this up, I'm going to wait for feedback.. Was this info so far helpful? Do you guys want me to keep going? - Please let me know, and be sure to click "Thanks" if you liked this info. 