I'm going to show you why Amazon FBA is an untapped goldmine for us handmade
sellers and how you can get started with FBA in just five simple steps.
Let's do this.
My name is Mei and I help makers,
artists and designers create a consistent income selling their handmade products
online.
This is video number five in my mini series on how to be profitable with your
handmade business on Amazon. So if you haven't watched the other videos yet,
there's a link here to a playlist that will bring you back to the first video so
you can get all caught up if you've been around the channel for awhile.
You know that I started selling my own handmade jewelry on my own
website@tinyhandsonline.com but I was also selling my products over on regular
Amazon, not handmade,
and it was actually doing pretty well considering I didn't do anything more than
publish my product listings on Amazon.
But a friend of mine who was running a very successful makeup business told me
that I had to get on Amazon FBA because that was where the money's at.
So I took her advice and almost instantly I saw an immediate increase in sales
to the point where my team and I were getting maxed out and almost couldn't keep
up between Amazon and my own site orders. For those of you who don't know,
FBA is Amazon's fulfillment service and stands for fulfillment by Amazon.
The way it works is you pay Amazon a bit of an extra fee and in exchange they
take care of your storage, packaging, shipping returns and customer service.
All you need to do is ship them your products in bulk and they'll take care of
the rest. Now you might be thinking
all the extra money
to Amazon and take care of my own packing and shipping.
Sure, you could.
At first I was selling on regular Amazon and I was already getting some pretty
consistent sales without doing anything more than just getting my listings up on
there and making sure they were keyword optimized and had decent product photos.
But Amazon FBA is so much more than just a fulfillment service.
When you start selling with FBA,
all your listings will get the trusty little Amazon prime label,
which will let your customers know that they can get free two day shipping when
buying one of your products. Personally,
I rarely buy anything that isn't prime.
The label alone will give you such an increase in sales that will far outweigh
the costs of Amazon FBA. Also,
you'll rank a lot better in search results than your competitors because Amazon
prefers to promote FBA products over non FBA products and the better you rank
the more sales you'll get.
Just head over to Amazon and search for any product and you'll notice that most
of the products on the first page are going to have the prime label.
But my favorite thing about FBA by far is the flexibility and freedom it gives
me.
I love that I only have to ship Amazon one large package with all my inventory
and have to worry about shipping individual orders or dealing with customer
service.
I can literally go on vacation and keep making sales with Amazon FBA.
I also like that I can hand off the logistics part off my business to someone
who's way better at it than me and instead focus on my craft and growing my
business, which is what I do best and what I enjoy doing.
I saw an almost immediate increase in sales once I got set up with FBA without
making any other changes. It does have an extra cost,
but I just really love that I only have to ship Amazon one large package with
all my inventory and not have to worry about the rest. It's so worth it.
So how much of an investment is Amazon FBA going to be for your business? Well,
if you're already a regular seller on Amazon,
then you know about their monthly subscription fee and their referral fee on
every sale you make. Now if you decide to upgrade it to Amazon FBA,
you'll be paying two additional fees, one for storage and one for fulfillment.
The inventory storage fee is a monthly payment to keep your product safely
stored inside Amazon's warehouse,
you'll pay by the cubic foot and it's actually pretty affordable,
especially if you make smaller products like jewelry or wallets or notebooks.
The fulfillment fee is what you pay Amazon on every single order.
It covers everything that goes into fulfilling an order such as picking,
packing, shipping, and even customer service and returns processing.
In most cases, these are calculated per unit, so if you ship three products,
you'll be paying a separate fulfillment fee for each one.
Your fees will depend on how much your products weigh and how big they are,
but to keep things simple,
Amazon has split its product sizes into two main categories.
Standard size and oversize.
Standard size would be any product that weighs less than 20 pounds when packed
and is no larger than 18 by 14 by eight inches.
While anything larger or heavier is considered oversize,
so unless you're selling heavy furniture or something like that,
it's pretty safe to say that most of our products will fall into the standard
science group when it comes to storage.
The latest FBA price for standard size products is 75 cents per cubic foot from
January to September and $2 and 40 cents per cubic foot from October to December
because those are the busiest months in online shopping when they do provide
discounts. If you decide to pay annually or biannually,
to give you an idea for my costs,
I roughly spend about less than $5 per month on storage,
which allows me to keep around 60 units of jewelry in Amazon's warehouses ready
for shipment. It's really not a lot.
Fulfill and fees are also pretty simple to understand.
For our standard sized products,
Amazon charges anywhere from two 50 to about $12 depending on how much it
weighs.
Then the only other cost you'll need to think about is the bulk shipping of your
products over to Amazon.
So if you're shipping a hundred products over to Amazon,
you can justify the cost of your shipment by a hundred and that's how much
you're spending per product. So for every product you're selling,
you need to factor in your initial stocking fee.
Amazon's usual referral fee and an extra fulfillment fee. For Amazon FBA. Now,
I can't say exactly how much that's going to be for you, but in my case,
I'm usually paying Amazon around 30% of my product price in fees.
This may seem like a bit of money at first,
but if you're pricing your products correctly,
you should have no problem making a good amount of profit from Amazon despite
the extra FBA fees. If you don't know how to price your products,
you should definitely check out my pricing handmade products playlist for a few
videos teaching you how to do that. All right,
so if you're just as excited as I am about Amazon FBA and what it can do for
your handmade business,
then stick around because I'm going to show you how to get set up with FBA in
five simple steps. Step one, pick your products.
Before you get started with Amazon FBA,
you'll want to actually pick out which of your products you're going to send
them. Assuming you're already on Amazon as a regular seller,
you can just pick your best selling products to get started or you can even pick
a few sellers from your Shopify or Etsy shop.
The idea is to just start off with a proven set of products.
If you can step to set up Amazon FBA.
Once you've picked your products, getting started with MBA is the easiest thing.
Assuming you're already an Amazon seller,
all you need to do is convert your products to FBA.
You do this by heading over to the manage inventory page,
which is where you'll find all your products. From there,
you want to click on the edit,
drop down menu next to each product and select change to fulfilled by Amazon.
This means you're asking Amazon to take care of fulfillment for this specific
product. From now on, instead of you shipping it yourself,
it's then going to ask you whether you want to convert and send inventory or
convert only. If you have more products you want to sell with FBA,
you'll want to select convert only and repeat this process with all the products
you want to sell using FBA.
These items are now going to be found in your FBA inventory and no longer in
your regular inventory, but don't worry, you can always change them back.
If you decide you no longer want to sell an item using FBA.
Now that you've converted all items you want to sell on FBA, you can select,
convert and send inventory which will prompt you to first Mark whether your
products should be categorized has dangerous goods,
like if it includes batteries or hazardous material.
Click no for both if they don't apply to you. Step three,
create a shipping plan.
Next you'll want to select create a new shipping plan. For this,
you'll need to insert the address you'll be shipping your products from,
which is most likely going to be your home or business address. Next,
do you want to select your packing type? There are two packing types,
individual products in case packed products.
If you're sending different types of products,
you'll want to select individual products only. Select case packed products.
If you're sending one box with all of the exact same type of item in it,
for example, a box of 50 cupcake necklaces.
Once you've set up a shipping plan,
you will be prompted to add your items from your Amazon FBA inventory to it.
Assuming you've already converted all the items you want to sell,
you should see them all listed here.
All you need to do here is enter the units for every product.
Do you want to ship to Amazon? Step four, ship your products.
Now that you've added all your products to your shipping plan,
you can finally ship them to an Amazon warehouse. To do this,
head over to manage FBA shipments and then click continue with shipping plan.
You'll be asked a few questions for how you want to ship as well as give you the
address to ship to. If you're shipping a lot of products,
they may ask you to ship to separate warehouses. Lastly,
you'll need to select whether you or Amazon will label the product.
I usually label my own products using inkjet. Amazon labels I get from,
you guessed it, Amazon,
they're just regular one by two and five eighths inch labels.
Amazon will give you a PDF of the actual labels to print and apply to your
products before shipping it out to them.
This is how Amazon knows what each product is and they're sending the correct
items to their customers. Number five, ship your products.
Once you approve your shipping plan,
you'll have the option to purchase shipping directly from Amazon.
You just need to know how much your package ways.
You can either put it on a bathroom scale if you don't have a shipping scale or
just estimate it based on if you already know the individual weight of each of
your separate products in your package.
Make sure your products are well-packaged and Amazon will then give you a
printable label for you to stick on your shipment box and they're ready to mail.
Just drop them off at your local ups and that's it.
Once your products arrive and get checked in at the fulfillment warehouse,
they'll immediately become available for your customers to purchase with the
prime label on it. This means no more packing, shipping,
and customer service do these for you and a lot more profits for your business.
How awesome is that, right?
All you need to do now is keep track of your inventory and keep on restocking
whenever you start to run out.
I hope you found this video helpful and learn just how powerful Amazon FBA can
be for your handmade business.
Setting up your Amazon seller accounts a little tricky the first time around,
but if you've already gone through the cumbersome process,
then setting up in Amazon FBA is nothing in comparison and definitely worth your
time.