Private labeling on Amazon from outside of US

1. When you start signing up for Amazon it asks you all of your business information (inside or outside of the U.S.). So yes You can be outside the U.S.

2. It depends on what your selling, some categories require you to upgrade to Pro seller, some don't. If you DO NOT need to upgrade for your category, I wouldn't until you have 40+ Purchases per month.

3.It depends on what your whole seller can do for you, I have the luxury of being in the U.S. so I have my manufacturer send me a hand full of products I look at for QA, and the rest is sent to Amazon.


4. I would et your first batch of your product sent to you with labels to check them out. Believe it or not most of the product images you see on amazon are created in Photoshop by warping the image to a container.

5. I would have them sent you your house, then repackage them yourself to get started, or if you can afford it, send it to a warehouse that has reboxing and reshipping.

4. You have to do it yourself or have you manufacturer do it, or outsource

I suggest you use the contact us link on the amazon website and ask them some questions

I see that jdherko2588 did an excellent job of providing answers to your questions. Personally I have not done any importing in my FBA business but I definately agree with the above answer to question 2. Register as an individual seller first until the volume you are moving shows it makes sense to move to a pro account. However for certain categories you have to be at the pro level and for some you also have to get Amazon's approval to sell in those categories. If you are new to FBA it is best to start out slow at first, get your feet wet and then scale up your business.

Amazon's seller support is excellent and there FBA videos are very good as well. I expect that studying those will help.

Thank you both for great answers, they really helped.
Another question to anyone who's experienced in private labeling - I've had one of the manufacturers come back to me with the MOQ of 100 items without logo, but if I want to use my own logo, the MOQ is suddenly 1000.
Is this a common practice or shall I negotiate? 1000 is just too much for my budget right now.

I see that there were some excellent answers already given. As an extra bit of info for you, I just advised someone else to check with Barrington McIntosh for answers to some of the same questions about importing and private labeling.

Read here: http://www.warriorforum.com/ecommerc...el-course.html

What type of product? Are you sure direct from China is the best route to take?

1. Absolutely not necessary. You can sell as a individual or as a business. Any one in any part of the world can sell on Amazon, they allows international sellers. I have accounts registered as individual and also as business too.

2. If you are confident that you can sell more than 40 items per month, then go for the pro plan. It's free for the first month. IMHO, if you are looking to sell on a serious note, that is you have your product ready and stock ready, then there's isn't any issue why you cannot sell more than 50 units/ month. Unless you are trying to sell as a hobby on a ad-hoc basis, then go for the pro plan.

3. Of course. You just need to get your shipping agent to take care of this. I sent samples to my local country for my quality check, and then ship my actual shipment to FBA when it's ready.

4. Not necessary, it will waste a lot of time getting it to and fro. For me, when my product is ready with the logo on, I just get my supplier to take a image of the product and the packaging. Then, I just get these images rendered on Odesk or fiverr. The estimated cost of a rendered image is around $10-15 on these platform. You can use about 7 images for a product listing on Amazon, so that will cost you around $100 for a project with 7 images.

5. You can send them to a fulfillment center if you are worry about the products quality. This is only necessary if you want to get them inspected first. If not, you can just send them directly to FBA warehouses. For my first shipment, I get them shipped to earthclassmail, and have them inspected. Everything turns out okay. So in my following shipments, I just shipped directly to FBA, save time and money. Important thing, remember to ask your supplier to use good and rigid shipping cartons, because you are shipping overseas. I often heard a lot of sellers having their packages damaged etc, but till this day, I haven't had any damaged packages so far, I use the most rigid carton box for my shipping carton (5-walled).

6. FBA won't do any tasks for you, except only FNSKU labeling if need to (costs $0.20~30 per unit if I remember correctly). You need to either ask your china supplier to do it, or ask your logistics agent in China to do it, or ask your 3rd party warehouse fulfillment service in USA to do it. You need a separate SKU/UPC for any product option you have, like different color, different size, different product option etc. DO NOT use the same UPC for different product option.

You can googled FBA shipping guideline, and read on the guidelines for shipping to FBA. There are a lot of rules you need to follow. Like barcode label size, shipping carton weight and size etc. Go read these before shipping to FBA. Takes only a few minutes at most.

Well, all the above answers are really nice and approachable. And, yes, in the regards to Amazon marketing, you need to register your business in the USA as well as China. Because, it is the rule of Amazon, you have a business in both countries.