Want to know how to make money on Amazon FBA? Keep reading!
I’ve been selling print-on-demand products in Amazon for over two years. Recently, I tried sending a few of my winning products to the Amazon Warehouse for Mother’s Day, and my sales increased significantly.
In this article, I’m going to show you how to make money selling on Amazon before Mother’s Day by using the “unfair advantage” of Amazon FBA.
What is Amazon FBA?
First of all, let’s understand the basics.
FBA stands for Fulfilled By Amazon. Basically, it’s about selling products on Amazon and letting Amazon fulfil the items for us.
We need to ship bulk products to the Amazon Warehouse, and when there’s an order, Amazon will pick, pack and ship the product to our customer automatically. We need to pay Amazon a fee for doing this.
With FBA, you gain benefits that general sellers don’t have, such as better product rankings, faster shipping, Amazon Prime badges, etc.
Amazon FBM vs FBA
Amazon FBM, or Fulfilled By Merchant, is different from FBA. In this method, sellers need to pack and ship orders to their customers by themselves.
I normally sell print-on-demand products like coffee mugs, shot glasses, and travel mugs on Amazon using the seller- fulfilled method.
But I don’t pack and ship the products by myself.
When there’s an order, Amazon sends the order information to GearBubble, a print-on-demand company I use, and GearBubble will start making the product and ship it to my customer.
The process is done automatically. I don’t need to do anything.
There are many print-on-demand companies – GearBubble, Printful, Teelaunch, Printify, etc. – on the market. I use only GearBubble and Teelaunch.
Why is FBA better than Print-On-Demand?
Print-on-demand is similar to Amazon FBA, in that I don’t need to do anything by myself.
But there is one major difference.
And it’s a drawback that often prevents my customers from purchasing items from my store:
It’s the delivery time.
With FBM, GearBubble takes one or two weeks to make the product and ship it to my customers.
Because it’s a print-on-demand product, the supplier makes the item only when there is an order. It takes time to make and ship the product to the customer.
That’s not what my customers like. People want their item fast.
The delivery time is shown for every product on Amazon. If your product takes longer than two weeks to ship, it’s harder to sell.
With Amazon FBA, the product is shipped within 1-2 days. People will see the text “Get it By Tomorrow” on the product page. This is a major advantage of using Amazon FBA.
People always procrastinate
I sell thousands of products for holidays such as Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, New Year’s, etc.
These are many special days for which people will purchase items as a gift for someone they love.
But the truth is, not many of them place an order far in advance. Most people order items just 2-3 days before the special day.
We can’t deliver an item that quickly using the FBM method.
Many people who purchase products I fulfill with FBM always send me a message like: “When will I get my order?” or “If I don’t get it by tomorrow, please give me a refund” – even though they placed their order only few hours previously!
Before last New Year’s, thousands of my FBA products sold out.
“Get it Today” or “Get it by Tomorrow”
If you notice the options in Amazon’s search results, there is a “Delivery Day” option on the left side. People can select “Get it Today” or “Get it by Tomorrow”, and Amazon will show only items that meet these conditions.
You can see that when I search using the keywords “mother’s day mug” and check the condition “Get it Today”, the search results decrease from over 100,000 product to only 2,000 products.
That’s more than 50 times fewer products.
That’s one huge advantage that FBA products have over FBM products. It’s also the why FBA products sell better and more easily than FBM products during the holiday season.
How to find products to sell on Amazon FBA
Not every product can be sold, even if you harness the power of Amazon FBA.
You need to make sure the products we send to the Amazon warehouse can be sold. Otherwise, you’ll pay a storage fee, shipping fee, and other fees for nothing.
Since I sell print-on-demand products, it’s easy to find the best products to sell with Amazon FBA.
The Benefits of Print-On-Demand
The way I sell products on Amazon is quite different than what others do. I don’t source products from others and resell them at a higher price.
Also, I don’t need to randomly select or research what items I should send to the Amazon warehouse.
I create only new and unique products. It’s easy to create new products, because it’s print-on-demand. I don’t need to stock real physical products.
For print-on-demand products, we don’t need to create a real product first. We just do our research, create designs, and send them to the store. When there is an order, the supplier will make the item and ship it on our behalf.
When I select a product for FBA, I study the selling stats first.
The product I send to the warehouse must be a product that has been sold with FBM before.
That’s how I find proven products to sell with Amazon FBA.
How I make $12,230++ per month on Amazon FBA
Okay, now you understand the basic stuff, like what FBA and Amazon FBM are, the benefits of FBA, and how to find products to sell using Amazon FBA.
Next, I’ll show you how I made money selling on Amazon in advance of Mother’s Day.
I started by finding the best products to sell on Amazon FBA.
I have many coffee mugs, shot glasses, and travel mugs with mother-related quotes printed on the products. A few of them have sold since 2017.
Not many sales for each product. Just 3-4 sales, almost every month, for each product.
The previous January, after the high season ended, sales were slow because people had spent their money in the previous December.
So I planned out what niches I would focus on this year and decided to create many products for Mother’s Day (5 months in advance).
List all possible niches where you can create products
I asked my VA to find quotes for mothers. They could be funny quotes, meaningful quotes, quotes from daughters or sons to mothers, quotes from new moms to their mother, quotes from a husband to his wife as a new mom, etc.
Then I found out which ones I could combine with other niches (such as the professions, dog breeds, cat breeds, etc.).
For example, for “You are a Great, Great Mom. Very Special. Very Beautiful. Really Terrific. Everyone Agrees!”, I added more specific niches to the quote. Like this:
You are a Great, Great Engineer Mom. Very Special. Very Beautiful. Really Terrific. Everyone Agrees.
You are a Great, Great Teacher Mom. Very Special. Very Beautiful. Really Terrific. Everyone Agrees.
You are a Great, Great Nurse Mom. Very Special. Very Beautiful. Really Terrific. Everyone Agrees.
You are a Great, Great Dalmatian Mom. Very Special. Very Beautiful. Really Terrific. Everyone Agrees.
etc.
There are around 500 sub-niches in the profession niches, 250 sub-niches for dog breeds, and 250 sub-niches for cat breeds.
After combining these sub-niches with the Mother’s Day quotes, I had around 1,000 extra quotes, all from one original quote.
These kinds of quotes had low competition, because we targeted many small niches. The traffic wasn’t high compared to the main Mother’s Day niche, but the combined traffic from all the sub-niches was big enough to generate many sales.
Next, my VA used these quotes to create coffee mugs, shot glasses, and travel mugs. There were easily more than 10,000 products related to Mother’s Day in my account.
Then I gave these products some time. I just sat back and planned to do something else, like Father’s Day or general small niches.
That’s what I did then, and I’ll do the same every year from now on.
Check the stats and send best products to Amazon Warehouse.
As I said, I just wait for sales to come. When there are some sales from each product, I check the number of sales. If there are around 3-4 sales in a month, I try sending a few boxes of that item to Amazon’s warehouse.
BTW, I asked my VA to list these products in my Shopify store as well (you can read the Automated eCom System to find out more), and there were many sales from one product related to Mother’s Day.
(I had run some Google Shopping Ads campaigns for that store, and maybe Google suggested my product to their people.)
The conversion rate was very high, from very low traffic. I set the budget at just $10 a day for my Google Shopping Ads campaign.
Since it had sold well on Shopify and Amazon, I decided to send 3 boxes (108 units in total) of this product to the Amazon warehouse.
Then I found few more mugs that sold well for Mother’s Day last year, and few more mugs related to mothers that sold this year. I sent two more boxes of these products to Amazon.
Also, there were few more niches that have a special day in May too, such as Lawyer’s Day, Nurse’s Day, National Teacher’s Day, Military Spouses’s Day, Accountant’s Day, etc.
As I said, I have many products in thousands of niches. So I checked the sale stats of the products in those niches, found the ones that had sold in the past, and sent some boxes of those products to the Amazon warehouse.
I sent 12 boxes, or 432 coffee mugs in total, to Amazon FBA. I didn’t send the shot glasses and travel mugs, because there was no clear winner for those kinds of products.
Okay, that’s how to find products to sell on Amazon FBA. I mainly select only products that have already had some sales.
Then, I just wait for the products to be checked in at the Amazon Warehouse.
It took around three weeks to make and ship all of my products to the Amazon warehouse. All of them arrived at the warehouse in the last week of April.
That’s not bad. The Mother’s Day is on May 12. I had enough time to sell the mother-related products.
The results from Amazon FBA and FBM
My products sold from the first day they were checked in the Amazon warehouse, thanks to the power of Amazon FBA.
Even after I raised the price from $19.90 (for Amazon FBM) to $21.95, all of my products were sold out by May 9.
That was cool because all 432 mugs sold out within just 2 weeks. The total revenue from my Amazon FBA products was around $9,482.4. The rest (around $2,500++) was from Amazon FBM.
I didn’t spend money on ads for these items, because they are seasonal products and can sell with organic traffic alone.
The profit for one mug is around $7, so my total profit from this FBA lot was around $3,024.
Even so, I was a bit disappointed, because most people buy their products on May 10 or 11. Unfortunately, by then I didn’t have any FBA products left. I should order more boxes next year. Maybe 20-30 boxes for Mother’s Day only!
What to do next?
The next big holiday for which we can sell lots of products is Father’s Day. I’ve already asked my VA to list many products in this niche. It’s basically Mother’s Day all over again. Start by finding general quotes, then try to combine them for other sub-niches.
After Father’s Day, I’ll ask my VA to list products in general niches, as usual. There might be some special days for some niches, but sales don’t spike the way they do for the big holidays. So I just keep listing products in many different niches.
If I see product sales that stand out from the others, I’ll send them to the Amazon warehouse. I’ll start with one box, or 36 units of each product.
In this case study, I showed you how I found a winning products related to the Mother’s niche to send to Amazon FBA. I’ll send more every month, because they are evergreen products. People can buy them for their mothers for any occasion, such as their birthday or Family Day.
This is how to find products to sell on Amazon FBA.
Just keep listing, and find the ones that stick (the spaghetti method)!
That’s how I make money on Amazon FBA. You’ve already learn the basics about Amazon FBA, how to find the best products to sell on Amazon FBA, and read my real-life case study on selling products for Mother’s Day.
Now it’s time to do it yourself! 🙂
—Bank K.
