Hey, everybody. If you have heard about the news
that Amazon has this opportunity to sell on their platform
and you can make money doing it?
This video is all about how to do that, if you are brand new to this.
Today, I'm going to walk you through the four most important steps
you need to effectively begin selling on Amazon to make money.
Hey, guys, this is Seth Kniep, Kniep’n it real.
So excited to be here today and explain this to you.
I'm a seller on Amazon for several years now.
We did over 3 million a year in revenue, 40 to 60% profit.
We started off at zero.
We went up to my first check, which is like around $15.
Then we got to $10,000 a month,
then 20,000 a month and just kept growing it from there.
Today, I want to show you step by step, the main keys.
Now, this is not everything you need to know to succeed,
and anyone who tells you that is lying to your face,
I'm going to give you the basic steps to get started.
There's a ton more you’ll need to learn as you go,
but at least this should give you a huge advantage over
just running into this blindfolded.
I've made a ton of mistakes.
I'm one of the worst examples to follow
when it comes to how to start selling on Amazon, at least in the early days.
I lost over $20,000 doing bad deals with people and I didn't realize
they were going to take advantage of me
or not doing a good job in differentiating my product.
So you can learn from my mistakes, and that's why I started this whole
training in the beginning was to teach others what I've learned,
so they don't have to make the same mistakes that I did.
Number one, you need to understand the process.
The way Amazon works is you become a third-party seller.
There's another option to become get what's called a vendor central account,
but I don't recommend it at the beginning because it's more advanced.
It also limits you as well. I preferred the third party-seller account.
So you go to Amazon.com and you sign up and become a seller.
You're going to go to services.Amazon.com/selling/benefits.
You can see the URL right here on my screen.
You're going to click the start selling button and sign up for an account.
Now, the way the process works is you are going to send products
into Amazon's warehouse after you've done your product research and made sure
that the product you're selling has high demand but low competition.
Then when someone comes along and finds that product on Amazon.com
and as you know, there are billions of transactions
happening every year now on Amazon, it's massive.
I mean, the money you can make on this is so extreme, it's not even funny.
They're going to find your product, and when they buy it,
you get paid a percentage of that and Amazon ships the product out for you.
Now, at first, this is kind of scary to people.
Why wouldn't you want to ship it?
Well, when you're doing 1000 orders, 2000 orders a day, I promise
you do not want to be doing that yourself,
and you will end up spending more money paying someone to do that
than simply having Amazon take care of the whole thing for you,
as well as the customer service.
This is why people use the term FBA.
It stands for fulfilled by Amazon, where Amazon fulfills the orders for you.
This is why I believe in passive income through Amazon,
because when we have all these products that are selling every day going up,
being shipped out by Amazon, it allows me to have freedom
to do other things. Focus on building my store,
taking out my wife on a date, hanging out with my kids,
working on the accordion, all these different things I want to do.
It gives me time and freedom to do that.
I don't have to worry about
calling in sick or talking to my boss or being somewhere at a certain time
because we've built a system that makes money for us.
Even while you're sleeping, you're making money.
So the first thing is you need to understand the process,
and the first step to that process is sign up for an account.
Now, when you first sign up, there are two kinds of accounts.
There's an individual account,
and as a professional sellers account.
An individual account is free.
However, every time you sell something, not only will you pay the fulfillment fees
for Amazon fulfilling it for you and the storage fees and the referral fee.
And I can explain those later.
And that ends up being around 33% of the price that you
are selling your product for.
So just keep that in mind when you sell… If you sell your product
for $100, about $33 of that goes to Amazon.
That might seem unfair.
At first it did to me when I first started,
but the more I understood how these work, I don't have to spend money on marketing
to get people to buy my products
because they're already on Amazon, people are already finding them.
It's way less money to pay Amazon to do that for me than for me
to do that for myself through our own e-commerce online websites.
So when you get an individual seller's account, it's free.
However, every time you sell something, not only will you pay approximately
a total of 33% in fees, but you also pay an additional $0.99.
This is a per item fee, and it's for the privilege of selling on their platform,
you're paying them a fee for that.
When you get what's called
a professional seller's account, which costs $39.99 a month,
you don't have to pay the per item fee.
So naturally, once you're selling
40 or more products a month, you're breaking even.
But the advantage of having
the professional seller's account is you get access to run ads on Amazon.
Have you ever been to Amazon
and you're looking up organic makeup and so you search for it
and you see these little boxes that say sponsored?
Those are ads.
A lot of people don't even know their ads.
Well, those come up first because someone's paying to have them get there
so that they make money.
When you have a professional seller's account, you have the option for ads.
You can also have what's called business reports.
These are reports you can download and look at.
Understand how your business is doing and what you need to do to tweak it
so that you can optimize your success and make more money and keep expanding your store.
Here's what I love about selling on Amazon, you guys, there's no limit.
When I worked for Apple, there was always a cap to how much I could make.
Oh, a 2% raise. Oh, a 3% raise.
I'd worked my butt off all year trying so hard
to make more money for my family, and they gave me this little piddling
of a 3% or 4% raise. On Amazon, there's no cap.
I can make more money and more and more.
I just keep growing it and growing it and growing it.
It's almost unbelievable.
Step number two,
you need to find products that have high demand and low competition.
This is very important, and there are several tools you can use to do this.
One of the easiest ways to start is you just go to Amazon's best seller list.
If I Google Amazon best sellers and go right here,
I can see products that have a huge sales rate.
Now some of these,
obviously I cannot sell because they're what's called gated like clothing.
At the beginning, we couldn't sell clothing.
Now we can. Until you have a good reputation.
But for most of these categories over here on the left side,
you can sell these right away.
So, for example, sports and outdoors, this is a very open category.
You go through here and let's say you go, Hey, look at this.
They have a foam roller.
I'm going to click on it and I want to see what they're selling it for.
So they selling it for around $8.75.
Can I source this and make money, especially
if I'm in the $14 range or the $17 range?
Now, obviously, the demand is a huge impact on this.
How do I know what the demand is?
Well, that's based on what's called the best sellers ranking.
Let me show you. If you scroll down on the listing
or you can just hit Command F
or you can do Control F if you're one of those people who sadly use a PC.
No, just kidding.
But if you just do command F and you can see it come up here
and type in sellers and hit enter.
There it is. I can quickly find in this page what is the ranking?
Now this foam roller is number two in sports and outdoors.
That means it's selling like crazy.
But how do I know it's selling like crazy? Because of the BSR.
Anything that is 5000 BSR or lower is selling a ton, usually 15 times a day or more.
Now, that's going to vary
based on the product category, but that's a general rule of thumb.
Now I know it is selling fast and it’s selling strong.
That means there's potential to sell this product.
But the next question is, Well,
how do I know that there's not too much competition?
If there's 50 other sellers who are crushing it out there,
my chances of showing up on the first page of search results are very slim.
Let me show you how to do that.
You come over here to Amazon.com and you're going to type
in what's called the main keyword or the seed keyword.
How do you know what the main keyword is?
If you were to remove all other keywords and it still made sense,
that's how you know.
So for example, if we were to remove this first phrase AmazonBasics High-density
Round Foam Roller and we just called it black and speckled colors.
Well, no one's selling black and speckled colors on Amazon.
Hopefully not. That would be kind of weird. If we just called it high density.
That would also be kind of weird.
So in this situation, we're just going to focus on the main keyword.
And in other words, the keyword that without which
this would not make any sense. So we wouldn't sell round foam or just foam.
It's a foam roller.
That's the main keyword. So I'm going to copy that.
I'm going to come up here and I'm going to search.
By searching the main keyword.
It's going to quickly tell me, who are the top sellers?
Now, when I scroll down, you're going to see these are the top sellers.
That's why they're showing up on the first page of search results.
Now here's the little parameter
I'm going to use to determine if there's too much competition for this.
Your goal is to show up on the first page of search results
when someone types in this main keyword foam roller.
But the only way you can do that is
if none of these sellers are selling too strong.
Now the reason I'm using foam rollers because I know it's
a very popular product and it gives a lot of data,
but I can tell you the competition here is extreme.
Just for example, I'm going to scroll down
and I'm going to go to the last one on here.
So in other words, the lowest ranking on this page
and it's not this one, this is sponsored that's run by an ad,
this one is as well, I'm going to scroll up, it's this one right here.
I'm going to command F or Control F sellers again
until I find the BSR quickly.
Here it is, and I see the BSR is 10,000.
Anything that is higher than 5000
would not be considered a strong top seller.
10,000 is not that amazing.
It's strong, but it's not nearly as strong as what I'm looking for.
Because the last listing on that first page of search
results, the BSR is higher than 5000.
Remember, number one is the best selling
you want to be number one in the race, not number 100.
So anything 5000 and below as a general rule means it's a strong seller.
Because this one is 10,000,
that means there's a chance I might be able to compete.
Because this person's not selling that great for their foam roller.
I can get on that first page of search results much more easily.
They're not selling enough to make it as a problem for me to compete with them.
So what I'll do is I will do it, and I don't just do this one day.
You need to do this every day for a couple of weeks.
Find out everyone on that first page of search results and see if
anyone is showing up consistently
higher than 5000 BSR, which means it's not selling as well.
If you consistently do, then you have a chance to compete.
This is the first indicator, their strength.
Now there's a lot more I could show you
and teach you different things you want to look at.
But this is the first step.
The most basic way to teach
how to understand if there's potential and I just use BSR.
I figured out the competition by using BSR.
I figured out the demand by using BSR, and I used the 5000 parameter
as a general rule of thumb to de-risk myself as much as possible.
Once you are determined and very assured that your product is high demand
and not too strong a competition, in other words,
you can show up on that first page of search results
because other sellers are not doing as well as you are.
The next step is to find a supplier who can build your product,
and the easiest way to do this is to go to Alibaba.
Now, Alibaba is not a supplier itself.
They don't even technically partner with suppliers.
It's more like a business networking platform where there are a ton
of opportunities to talk to, connect with, meet, negotiate with suppliers.
Now, there's a few pieces of criteria I'm going to give you
to make sure you work with a supplier who is trustworthy.
So let's say I want to search
for my foam rollers and I want to see if I can source here.
So go to Alibaba.com, come here up to the top and type in foam roller.
Now it's going to pull up a whole bunch
of different suppliers who can build these out for you.
The next thing you want to do
is make sure you click on trade assurance and gold supplier.
And if you really want to be extra safe, you can click on Assessed Supplier.
Now this filters out anyone who I wouldn't trust.
Now, I know I'm dealing with gold suppliers. This means they've been prequalified.
They had to pay a minimum of $2000 to $2,500 just to get on this platform.
Usually, scammers aren't willing to pay that much money.
They want everything cheap and free.
Second, assessed means someone actually, a third-party company visited
that supplier and assured that they have a warehouse facilities that are legit.
They're actually building a product as a factory should.
And trade assurance means you can get your money back in case you get screwed over.
So I come down here and I begin to search and I say, Well, let's see this one.
If I order 100 pieces, it only costs me $2.50.
Now I have to make sure that if I am going to sell this product, I need to be 100% sure
that I can beat the competition and still be profitable with my price.
So if they're selling it at $47.95 and I can see it's very bundled,
I need to make sure that at least 67% of that profit
either goes to the supplier or to me, and the remaining 33% goes to Amazon.
So I'm going to come through here
and let's just say, well, I'm looking at this one.
This looks really interesting.
I like the design and I begin to look at this one.
I can contact a supplier right now. I click on here.
It's going open up a box,
and here's where I can type in the information that I'm looking for
and request them to tell me how much does it cost if I order 100 of these?
Now, a key part in this is you want to differentiate your product.
The bundle I just showed you
where they're selling dual foam rollers and a whole bunch of other stuff,
the seller did that so that you get a whole lot for your money.
And that causes them to rank better and to more people to buy it
because there's increased value. And I can guarantee
you most of those other items they included are really, really cheap.
But because it looks good, it’s perception value is huge,
they were able to buy it.
And I don't mean cheap in quality, I mean cheap in price.
Make sure you study your competitors critical reviews
to find out what their customers don't like about the product,
that you build your product to fix those problems.
And you do that when you talk to the supplier on Alibaba, you say:
“Look, I love this foam roller, but I need a smaller one or a thicker one
or more firm one
because the competitors reviews keep complaining that they're too squishy.”
You see? That's how you differentiate.
When you differentiate people have
a reason to buy from you instead of the competition.
Let me go back.
Number one, understand the process.
You're going to buy products you’re going to send them to the warehouse.
Amazon ships it out for you.
Number two, find products with high demand, low competition.
How do you do that? Know the BSR.
Use 5000 BSR as a general rule of thumb.
Number three, find a supplier who can build the product for you
and also differentiate that product.
Now, number four, send the product in to Amazon,
start making money.
So once you talk to your supplier and you come up with an agreement,
they're going to give you a little form to fill out. Include everything you need.
Don't just say: “Oh, I want one that looks like this one in the picture.”
You need to say: “I want one that's six inches diameter.
I want one that includes this kind of foam.
I want one with C-140 Pantone color.”
Be specific.
And when you purchase it, use the trade assurance option.
That means if they try to screw you over, you can go back to Alibaba
and put in a claim and say: “Look, this is not what I was looking for.
This is not the right product.”
And that way, the supplier can't hurt you and take your money.
But if you use the filtering options I showed you to filter out the scammers
and the wannabes, but not the real suppliers,
it's very unlikely you're going to be scammed or screwed over
because these are legitimate suppliers. They’re for a reason.
They have gold supplier status and assessed supplier
and all these things. And use trade assurance
because they're not going to try to scam you.
It's very rare that a scamming supplier would allow trade assurance
as a payment option when they realize they can't cheat you because Alibaba uses
a third-party escrow service to hold that money
before it ever goes into their account.
You have to click a button that says, I approve of the product.
It completely protects you, which is really nice.
These four steps can get you started.
One more thought.
When you send your product into Amazon's warehouse to start making money,
I recommend that you have the supplier print the FNSKU
label on the retail packaging of your product.
So, for example, if you were selling a lint roller
and this was in a package, the package, the retail packaging, kind of like this,
this is retail packaging, you want there to be the FNSKU
code on here.
So when it goes from the supplier, it can go directly to Amazon's warehouse,
not to your house.
You don't want to deal with that inventory.
And they will stock it up for you.
And when sellers begin to find your product, they start buying it
every two weeks, you get a payment from Amazon.
And you can set it up so it’s direct deposit
into your account, which is how we started and we've done it ever since then.
The FNSKU label will come up when you're in Seller Central.
You go to send your product into Amazon's warehouse.
They will show you the FNSKU label and I have a bunch of other videos
on how to do that.
There's a 10,000 more things that are important to understand the process.
But I want you to know of these four steps,
in a nutshell, this is how
you get started on Amazon.
When I began, I hadn't watched any video.
I hadn't read any book about Amazon.
I just started and I learned as I went.
And it was hard and I made a lot of mistakes.
Our team can help you do this faster and safer.
We have a team of nine coaches who are advanced Amazon sellers,
own multiple online businesses.
They're making hundreds of thousands of dollars.
They can help you scale that process and teach you step by step how to do it.
You can also become part of a community
who will constantly reach out to you and help you and answer your questions.
And the coaches as well, there's a ton there.
But either way, I hope this is helpful to you guys
who are considering starting on Amazon.
Guys, I started doing this just a few years ago.
I'm so happy I did.
I will never forget the day we got to 20,000 a month, I was blown away.
I had never seen that much money in my life ever before.
Amazon has made me more money than all of the money I ever made combined.
I am telling you it is worth it. It is hard.
There's competition out there.
But if you study
and you do a good job, you can do this and then you can go fire your boss
and have margin to do the things you love with the people you love.
You guys have an awesome day.
If you have any questions, let me know. Take care.
I had to lint roll my shirt
before this video because I don't know, I just like, I collect lint like crazy.
It's insane. I'm like all these white speckles.