Amazon FBA Seller Income: The Secrets of Retail Arbitrage and Private Label Sourcing That “They” Don’t Want You to Know

There's this thing called the Amazon Seller program that I've been using for the past 30 days to make a "side income." As an internet marketer, it's super important to have multiple streams of income...

• There are only so many people in your niche to buy your products
• There are only so many people willing to join your monthly program
• There are only so many people who will use your software
• Only so many people are the "right fit" for your coaching program and so on...

Let's go mass-market. Amazon Seller is different from their Kindle program (digital books), CreateSpace (physical books), and WAY different than their affiliate program (promote Amazon products for 5%) so let's not get it confused with that...

This is a lot like eBay minus the "auction" and "bidding" part of it. You say I have THIS for sale at THIS price. You can usually just add yourself as a seller on one of their existing products. For example, you have a copy of the Four Hour Work Week around the house (as I had several copies), you list it in New or Used condition with the price you want to sell it for (shipping is added on).

When it sells, Amazon emails you and says... here is the shipping label to print out, put that item you just sold into a box and mail it.

Heck, the FIRST time we looked into the Amazon Seller program was to sell physical copies of our home study courses. Because technically, you could combine a printed manual and DVD set in a cardboard box, buy your own UPC code for $1.99 and sell a physical product (in a box) of your course as an Amazon product. But let's not get too off-track with the possibilities...

Many people have been able to turn this Amazon Seller method into a full time income (you can scale it to the point where your items sit in Amazon's warehouse and they handle the shipping as things are sold). You can get your own physical products private labeled (outsourced)...

What "They" Tell You

I'm not in the business of trash talking any other internet marketers, but the DANGER is that over the past few months I've seen one marketer tell you to sell supplements using Amazon's program... I wouldn't do this without a quality control process and without a lawyer...

Another marketer claims to make $100,000 per month when I heard around the grapevine he spends $100,000 per month on ads... so he's breaking even in order to get that screenshot to then sell you a course on "how he did it"... not good.

And still another marketer pitched a course showing a so-called "Amazon listing" of a product he had created. A couple problems: one, I searched his company name and product name on Amazon, no results. Another issue is the listing he showed had a 3D DRAWING (computer rendering) of the item that was selling instead of the item that was selling. When was the last time you saw something on Amazon with a cartoon instead of a picture of the real product? You don't. It's against Amazon's rules...

Four Real Ways to Do It

Let's not allow a few dishonest marketers ruin it. There are tons of people making money as Amazon Sellers and you personally deserve to be in that category. The point is there are a couple of marketers who are sharing bad knowledge and let's not let that ruin our day. There are two ways to make money as an Amazon Seller:

• Retail arbitrage: pick up items with a certain criteria from discount stores (scan using a smartphone app) like Walmart, BigLots, Costco, sell them at a profit from Amazon (add yourself as a seller in an existing Amazon listing)
• Product sourcing: get your own wine bottle opener, water bottle, LED flashlight, vegetable peeler, muffin making pan, etc. created for pennies and sell on Amazon (create your own Amazon listing of a brand new product)

Those are the two strategies, and there are also two different ways you can ship items on Amazon:

• Fulfilled by Merchant: you don't send anything directly into Amazon, you just list it as your inventory. When it sells, you print the shipping label yourself and mail out to each customer
• Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA): you send your items in a big box to Amazon, they sit in Amazon's warehouse and you're done. When a sale comes in, Amazon mails it out themselves using prime shipping

You can do both... have some of your inventory on-hand and more in Amazon's warehouse. The point is there are four ways total:

• Retail arbitrage + fulfilled by merchant: Great if you want to try this thing out, find a used book around the house, price it at a penny, make a dollar or two profit from shipping
• Retail arbitrage + fulfilled by Amazon: My preferred way to do it, pick up a ton of SPECIFIC items from discount stores (like 20 water bottles that showed to have a HUGE seller ranking plus a huge profit margin), mail them all to Amazon in a box so I don't have to print 20 different shipping labels when those items sell
• Product sourcing + fulfilled by merchant: you could get, for example, a whistle or jump rope or foam roller made... have them ship samples directly to you, or even get that first shipment of 100 or 500 right to you. When the orders come in, YOU label and package and mail these items out so you don't have to wait 1 week period for Amazon to process your inventory
• Product sourcing + fulfilled by Amazon: this is where the big bucks are made. Have your product sourcer ship your items directly to Amazon's warehouse (this is the method Lance used in our Dropship CEO course while I was playing around with retail arbitrage)

Lance and I have a course where we show us doing this called Dropship CEO, and to my knowledge (I don't look TOO closely at competitors) -- NO ONE combines both. Retrail arbitrage to get started, then product sourcing to ramp it up and scale.

SOLUTION: Start With Retail Arbitrage, Then Add Product Sourcing

What also surprised me is that several of the students inside that course realized they wanted to stop for a while and focus just on retail arbitrage... build that up and then switch over to product sourcing once they became tired of it. I think that's a WAY better way to get started than jumping right into the product sourcing part of it.

And not to toot my own horn, but Dropship CEO course (showing BOTH retail arbitrage and product soucing with Amazon) is available to you instantly, right now. No 8 or 10 weeks of drip fed content, no theory, no padding. I want you to get started on this FAST instead of waiting a couple of months to make your first dollar (which would be the case if it was drip-fed).

Does Amazon take a small fee out of every item you sell? Of course. But so would eBay or PayPal. That's called the cost of doing business.

Paid Amazon Ads: Huge Goldmine

There are also lots of hidden Amazon Seller opportunities "the others" skipped over for some reason. For example, Amazon has a paid advertising network that's better for marketers than Google or Facebook. The very first day we advertised on it, Lance sent me a screenshot that showed 3 dollars profit for every 1 dollar spent.

I've ramped up my retail arbitrage too. I literally do it in 1 hour per week. I rush in while I'm already out and usually on my way home from something else, I load up the cart and usually buy out the store's inventory of that item. I tell the cashier not to bother bagging my items, just scan and go. I load up a shipping box (re-used from previous Amazon purchases) and I even tell UPS to come by and pick up the full boxes from me. No more trips to the post office.

Let's not get bogged down on technical details or get ourselves confused here.

Amazon is a great way for anyone to make money. Whether you're looking for a side income, replacement income, or you want your kid to pay for their own college education (as Lance is doing with his daughter). Someone in your house should be doing this and I want to show you how inside our Dropship CEO Amazon course, so click right now.

CLICK HERE to Claim Your Amazon Seller Training

Filed in: Amazon • Archive 1: 2012-2016 • Product Launches