- Hi, and welcome back to another Amazon selling video.
If you're new to my channel,
my name is Nikki Kirk and I am here,
in quite possibly the loudest RV park in Casper, Wyoming.
So, this is attempt two at this video.
The first time, literally every Class A around me
decided to leave.
So it's been about an hour of me sitting here,
but regardless, we're just gonna go it,
and hopefully the sound is okay.
There's like an alarm over there at the machine factory,
but I'm just gonna go with it.
So today I am answering one of the most popular questions,
which is, when do you know, or how do you know
when to start taking out a profit
for your Amazon selling business?
So today I'm gonna walk you through how I did it
and what that profit snowball looks like
as you start selling.
Now, I have been selling out of my RV,
literally that RV right there, for four years.
I started my business from an RV
and I still run it from an RV, so it can be done anywhere.
But the key to understanding Amazon selling
is that it is a business and it takes time to grow.
So, if you're sitting here thinking
that this business is gonna be an overnight success,
and you're gonna be having profits, thousands of dollars
next month, well, that is not gonna happen.
One of the most important things about selling on Amazon
is understanding that it is not a get rich quick scheme.
It's not even really a get rich scheme,
but it is a way to start a business fairly easy,
and to make some freedoms for yourself,
to be able to run your own business,
work when you want to,
not work when you want to, all of that kind of stuff.
It's a lot of freedom that comes with it.
But at the end of the day,
it is a business and it takes some time to get going.
In reality, you could start selling today
and you won't see a penny back from Amazon,
no payouts, nothing, for four to six weeks.
So it does take some time.
So if anyone's telling you, like, this is so easy
and you gotta do it, and you're gonna make all this money,
well, they're lying.
It is easy in the sense that you don't have to build up
a business like you would if you were starting from scratch,
because if you do Amazon FBA,
you actually buy all the product
and you send it in to Amazon.
Amazon warehouses, it,
they already have the customers,
the millions of people who shop on Amazon every day,
they're your customers now.
And they will fulfill all the orders
and handle the customer service.
So that part of it is really easy,
but it's the finding the product, waiting for Amazon,
all the different aspects that come up
while selling on Amazon,
just figuring all that out is a lot of work.
So it's not necessarily hard work.
You do have to work hard at it, but it's, it's work.
So one of the great things
is that you don't actually need a lot of money
to get started selling on Amazon.
You can start with literally 500 to $1000
and that is a great amount to start with.
And as you get going, if you wanna put more capital in,
you can, but you don't need a whole lot of money to start.
When you start out,
you've probably watched a lot of YouTube videos
and you're kind of on the fence about it.
It's important to know that you are going to be basically
learning a new language.
It's like learning a new language,
because there's so much to figure out.
It's frustrating. It's intense.
But, if you keep going, you'll learn.
You actually learn by doing on this business,
so that's why I'm always telling people to just go ahead
and start and you'll figure it out along the way.
If you want my help, I have the beginner FBA,
Amazon selling course,
which will walk you through all of it
and come with a great community to help you out.
But you definitely do learn by doing.
So going into this business with the mindset
that one, you're starting a business,
and two, it's gonna take some time
before you're ever able to pull out a profit
is really key to being successful on Amazon.
So literally if you spend $500 on your inventory,
whatever profit you make,
you roll that over into more inventory.
So now say you have $750,
you're gonna turn around and buy more inventory on,
and you just wanna keep that going.
And with that six-month mindset,
like don't pull out any profit for six months,
you're gonna set yourself up for success
and limit your frustration.
The profit potential and how much you can make
selling on Amazon varies by person and by seller,
just like everything in life varies by person, right?
So, for me, I do this part-time.
I've always put in part-time, like effort on it,
and by part-time I mean hours.
So I'm working.
When I'm working on it,
I'm sourcing literally all day from like 7:00 to 7:00,
all day outsourcing.
And then the next day or two, I'm packing it up.
And so those, but hour wise,
that's only three days a week, right?
So it's part-time, even though I'm fully committed
those days that I'm doing it.
There are some sellers out there who do it full-time.
They might do this four or five days a week, seven days.
I don't really know.
I don't do it, but I know that they're out there
and they do it.
So the key is when you see people showing their numbers
and their sales, you have no idea what goes into that.
You don't know how much of that is profit.
You don't know how hard they're working.
You don't know how much they're working,
how much capital they're investing in it.
Honestly, they could be spending $100,000
and showing $100,000 in sales,
and none of that's profit.
You just don't know.
So that's why I always recommend not comparing yourself
to any other seller,
because everyone's effort, capital, time.
Like everything is different by person.
So you have to decide for yourself,
what is it that you want out of it
and look at those sellers' success as like, inspiration,
knowing your goals and what you want.
And then you're just gonna really,
that's another thing that will limit the frustrations.
As I said, I've always done this part-time.
There are literally members of the community,
my community, who are doing this full-time,
who are making so much more than me,
and that's fine because that's what they wanna do.
So everything is all relative to you and your goals.
So for me and my goals,
I make anywhere profit-wise from selling on Amazon,
two to $5,000 a month.
And it varies by month,
by time of the year, by people shopping on Amazon,
by what my product is.
So in March of 2020,
I actually made $5,000 profit in a week,
because I had a hot product that I was FBMing.
March of this year?
I made $1,500 profit because I wasn't really sourcing.
I was finishing up on my RV renovation.
And so, it all just varies
by what's going on in your life
and what products you're finding,
how much time you can give to it.
Everything ebbs and flows and it's your business,
and you can do what you want with it.
I personally make enough money for what I need,
and that was able to work part-time;
travel the country in an RV; staying in RV parks,
which some of them are expensive, some of them are free.
It all just varies.
But I like to do the touristy things
and explore the area I'm in.
So I didn't necessarily travel cheap,
but I made enough money on Amazon to fulfill my part.
Again, my part is that I have a roommate,
so I'm only paying for half
of all the shared expenses, right?
So that's something to consider
of what you and your goals are for your family,
yourself, whatever it happens to be.
Now, I'm gonna walk you through
what a example profit snowball looks like.
So, from initial investment to,
you know, cutting even,
to finally making a profit on Amazon.
So, I used to have a spreadsheet on my old computer,
which was a Windows, and now I have a Mac,
but I was tracking my profit, like my investment,
how much I spent and how much I was getting back
profit from Amazon and rolling it over.
So, I recreated it based off my actual Amazon payouts.
And I'm gonna walk you through what it looks like,
potentially as an example,
and these are my real payout numbers,
so you can get an idea of how it grows.
Before I started selling on Amazon and took off in an RV,
I had quit my Los Angeles desk job in 2017,
and I started selling in August of 2017.
I spent $300 on a training back then,
I had $200 for supplies
and about $500 from my opening inventory.
I then put in more money in September
for more inventory,
'cause I wanted to keep this thing going,
but it was all money that I had in my savings.
So here's what a potential profit snowball could look like
based off of my numbers.
So you have here, I've got my course, supplies,
opening inventory, initial investment of $1,000,
the additional investment in September of 750.
So, a total of $1,750 I have poured into my business.
Now I'm using a blanket 35% profit here
because in general, that's what seller board was saying,
like every payout.
So I got certain amount that Amazon was paying me out,
but that wasn't all profit, right?
Some of that's cost of goods.
So, based on my seller board information,
it's about 35% and the margins really change.
So like in Q4, you'll probably have 50% profit margins.
Whereas, like typically it's like 25 to 30%.
So 35's just a blanket example
that I'm showing you based off a little bit of information,
but it's just a blanket just to help show the snowball.
So you can see my very first payout was actually four weeks
after my first shipment, on 9/16, I got $561 from Amazon.
And now you can see I'm in debt into my business
of only about 1500.
And then it continues on as I get these payouts
and they're starting to go up a little bit,
and my debt into the business is going down.
You can see here that in November
is actually when I made enough profit
to basically cut even, right?
Like, no more money was of mine in the business.
It was like free money, right?
Like, I've paid off all my debts,
and now I've got this thing kind of going
to where I'm making a profit and I'm on the plus side
of selling on Amazon.
So, you can see here by November 30th,
I had profited overall getting all my costs of goods back
and my initial investment of the course and all of that.
I made it back by the end of November.
And then the profits just kept going.
You can see the payouts starting to get bigger and bigger.
This one, I must've done a payout only a week later,
'cause you can request a payout anytime, but here we go.
So, by the fourth month, after my first shipment,
you can see here is when I started to take out my profits
and pay myself.
I actually started in,
it was like the very last payout of December.
So, technically I think it was January,
is when I started to pull out profits
and start paying myself, and I did ever since then,
and it really kind of depends on you and your business,
and how much do you need that money.
Do you need to start taking it out
or do you wanna just kind of roll it in?
Now I needed the money
because I was having no job, right?
I was living on the road doing this,
so I needed to just start.
Stop using all my savings and start using my profits.
So, that's what I did.
And then you can see,
they continue to go into February.
Six months after my first shipment,
my business at this point had profited $7,000.
So again, these are rough estimates.
This is isn't exact what my numbers were.
I just wanna make that clear.
This is just an example of how that can keep snowballing
over the more you pull it into it.
So if you need to pull out money, pull out money,
but if you don't need to, and you can keep investing,
your payouts will get larger.
Your profits will get bigger,
because you have more inventory and more stuff selling.
Now I did start at a good time.
I started at the end of August,
which meant that Q4 was like, literally right there, right?
So everyone's shopping more
and you can see that my sales really did start to pick up
and I was making more profit back.
My payouts from Amazon got bigger,
but it's important to know that your payouts
from Amazon will take some time when you first start.
And that's why if you can really give yourself
that six month buffer of you don't expect a payout
from them, it really helps.
Having more capital will help,
but you don't necessarily need it.
You just need more patience if you don't have the capital,
'cause it's gonna take a little bit of time.
So, as of you know, four years ago, almost.
When was this?
As of November of 2017,
my business has been free and clear.
Like, I have no more of my personal money invested into it.
And with this business,
I've been able to travel to 44 states, as of right now.
I have done it for four years and it's been awesome.
I've been able to travel.
So, it's like what can you do?
If you're starting this as a hobby,
do it as a hobby and just see what's possible.
Maybe you can quit your desk job,
or maybe you don't want to.
Everything is just totally up to what you wanna do
and the effort you wanna put into it.
The one mistake I did make was waiting so long
to get ungated.
You've probably heard me say this.
That's why I created the ungating guides to begin with.
So, if you want to help ungating your account
so you can buy more of those high profit items,
I have guides below which will help you.
And they come with a really awesome community.
One of the best comments was like my friend said,
oh, well I know it's all out there for free,
and he told her, I know,
but this community that it's with is worth it.
So, if you want the community and you want my help,
definitely you are welcome to join.
All the links are below.
Thank you guys so much for watching.
I hope it wasn't too loud.
Anyways, thank you guys so much for watching.
Don't forget to like and subscribe,
and I'll see you back here for another Amazon selling video.
(upbeat music)