(note: I’m going to start by posting about something that’s not strictly programming related. This will be a multi-part series, and by the end you’ll have a solid framework to get started with FBA. Hopefully you’ll do it better than I did; stay tuned for more details on that.)

Discovery

It was circa October of 2015, and I was looking for an interesting side project. Ideally I’d find one that would teach me something new, and hopefully make a little money in the process. In the course of looking around for ideas, I came across the /r/Entrepreneur subreddit which had a post about Fulfillment by Amazon.

For those who are unaware, Fulfillment by Amazon is a program for 3rd-party Amazon sellers where Amazon will warehouse, pack, and ship items for you, taking all of the headache out of storing your items and fulfilling orders. Of course, they take a fee for this service.

I can’t recall the exact post I was reading on that subreddit, but I remember it being a fairly short post that mentioned FBA and a podcast called The Amazing Seller. The podcast was less than a year old at that point. I started listening with episode 1 and was hooked. [1] Within a couple of weeks of commutes back and forth to work, I was completely caught up and ready to launch my FBA empire.

My enterprise was a modest success, doing somewhere north of $70k in revenue over 18 months. This is small potatoes to many FBA sellers, but I was thrilled. Unfortunately, eventually everything came crashing down due to problems that were entirely foreseeable and preventable, which I’ll describe in this series. I’m taking a break from FBA now due to lack of time, but I will definitely pick up the pieces and start again in the future. Marketing FBA products has changed significantly due to Amazon making changes to their rules for sellers, so I imagine there will be lots to learn when I do pick it back up.

What I learned

Here’s a selection of skills I taught myself along the way:

• Selecting candidates for private label products
• Alibaba: contacting sellers and placing orders for sample products
• Receiving samples and selecting a supplier
• Shipping (sometimes large quantities of) product here from overseas, by air and by sea
• Dealing with import tariffs & customs
• Taking product photographs that don’t look awful and meet Amazon’s specifications
• Becoming proficient enough at Adobe Illustrator to create a passable product label for my custom brand
• Creating the Amazon listing and working in Amazon’s Seller Central UI
• Building and optimizing Amazon product advertisements (“sponsored listings”). Yes, Amazon has an ad system just like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Each of the above could probably have a lengthy blog post written about them, but I’ll try to combine them where it makes sense in this series. I do want to provide enough detail that someone else could get started with FBA using these blog posts as a guide.

Stay tuned to learn more about my FBA adventure!

Notes