How to become an Amazon seller? There are a lot of videos and articles. Amazon even has Seller University that can take you step by step. I’ll give the high level steps on how to start. This is reseller/arbitrage FBA focused, so the process is a little different if you sell FBM or want to launch your own private label.
Open an Amazon seller account
First thing you gotta do is go to sellercentral.amazon.com and open an account. If you already have an Amazon customer account, the process goes a lot smoother, but it’s not mandatory. Click the sign up button, enter your information, and pay the $39.99 fee.
What about the free Individual account? Not worth it. You won’t be able to get the Featured Offer on a listing (AKA Buy Box), which account for 80% of all Amazon sales. This means that your seller account won’t be listed first among all the competitive sellers (and almost every product has more than one seller selling it). Customers pick the first seller they see.
Individual sellers also can’t get permission to sell brands. Also known as ungating, you need Amazon’s permission to sell many brands, as well as some categories.
Once you sign up, Amazon will send you a postcard in the mail to verify your address. Follow the instructions on the postcard, then sign up for the ID verification process. Once you verify your ID and your address, you’re good to go.
Find stuff to sell
This is the hardest step to start. There are 550 million products for sale on Amazon, then there’s gated products, and gated categories. All this makes it really hard to know where to start. The good news: only a handful of categories are gated. Many gated brands give the illusion that there’s nothing to sell. I advise newbies to find everything and anything to sell; scan, scan scan — ungate as you go. Scan at minimum 1,000 products a day, but if you really want to make money, scan 10,000 products per week.
Download Amazon’s seller central app onto your phone, then start scanning barcodes. Start with stuff around the house with barcodes to practice. Once you got the hang of it, go to a store. Use the app to scan a barcode, then enter the price to get a basic idea of what your profit will be like. The seller central app will auto calculate that for you by subtracting its fees.
If online arbitrage, go onto a retailer website. Click every product on every page on every category you see; at least 1,000 a day.
Rinse and repeat, and like I said: scan, scan SCAN or click, click CLICK. It’s a numbers game; simple but not easy.
Ship stuff to sell to Amazon
Okay, you finally found stuff to sell! Now it’s time to get that stuff in boxes and shipped to an Amazon fulfillment center (FC). First, get your shipping supplies. In your Amazon seller account, go to the Add Products page. Use the wizard to add each product to your inventory. Then go to the ship to Amazon page. Use that wizard to select the products you just added to your inventory. Enter the quantities and the other information they require.
Amazon will then organize your stuff into a shipping manifest. Pick a date you want to ship your stuff, and then pick a shipping service option. Amazon Partnered Shipping will almost always be the cheapest. Select the shipping option, then click the button to ship. The payment will be taken out of your reserve, which is a holdback of your sales revenue that Amazon will take any of your expenses from before paying you out. Now take your boxes to the shipping partner’s drop off location.
Wait for your inventory to become active
Up until this point, your inventory has been inactive, which makes sense because you don’t have any physical inventory in the Amazon FC. So now check your Amazon seller account periodically to see when your inventory switches to active. When it does, that means it’s live on Amazon’s website!