Are you here because you want to learn how to sell on Amazon? And you are looking for a proven methodology to help you build a profitable business selling physical products?
You are at the right place…
In this post, I’m going to show you how to leverage the process started and improved by the Amazing Selling Machine course and use it to build your brand on Amazon.
How To Sell On Amazon in a 4-Step Process
Here’s a summary of the entire Amazon business process:
- Step 1: Find a hot product opportunity
- Step 2: Find a supplier either domestically or overseas
- Step 3: Create your Amazon product listing & launch your product
- Step 4: Drive traffic to your Amazon listing and Scale your business
This entire process was first introduced to the market in the Amazing Selling Machine (ASM) by Matt Clark and Jason Katzenback in 2013. Since then they have tens of thousands of students (now they are releasing the 12th ASM version) with thousands of success stories. You can see tens of these success stories here.
Now let’s take every step of the process and explain it a little more…
Step 1: Find a hot product opportunity (What to sell on Amazon)
Thousands of people are asking this question every single month: what product should I sell on Amazon? And the sad truth is that many of them start selling products that soon appear to be a waste of time and money. This happens because they don’t have specific criteria to follow when choosing what products to sell (most importantly their first product.)
This is the most important step of your entire Amazon business. Do it right and everything that comes next can be corrected whatever happens. But if you do it wrong, you will fail whatever you do in the next steps.
And since this is the most important step, it takes the most time and attention of your brand building process. Don’t be surprised if it takes you two weeks of research and selection. This is quietly normal (I’ll tell you about a free tool that can automate this entire step in a moment.)
Criteria of Amazon product selection
1. Must have a private label potential
Private label means that anyone can manufacture it and put their logo and brand name on that product. For example, the iPhone doesn’t have any private label potential because it is exclusive and trademarked to Apple. On the other hand, iPhone cases can be privately labeled because anyone can manufacture iPhone cases and put their names on them.
So as a general rule of thumb, if the product you consider selling has recognizable brands selling it, then stay away from it and vice versa.
2. Sell what is already selling
You don’t want to reinvent the wheel here. First, you imitate then later you can innovate.
This means that the kind of product you choose must have a decent sales volume on Amazon. How do you know that? Amazon tells us 😉
On every product listing page, Amazon shows something called Best Seller Rank (BSR) near the bottom of the page. This is the rank of this product compared to other products in this specific category. For example, the BSR in the image below shows that his product is ranked 808 in Kitchen & Dining category (please note that Amazon ranks products in descending order, so BSR 1 means this product is the best seller in its category.)
So which BSR range you should look for? This free video will answer this question.
3. Should have low competition
This is not a must, but an advantage. Some recommend that you must sell products with low competition while others say that slightly high competition means there are big sales volumes in this market segment.
But if you can find a product with high sales volume and low competition then you should go for it.
4. Price
This depends mainly on your budget. If you have an open budget, then the price won’t be a factor here. In fact, it could be advised to go after high-priced products because most people choose medium-priced products which means you’ll have very low competition in the high-priced items. But if you are on a budget, you need to search in a certain price range. Amazing Selling Machine 12 criteria recommend a price range from $15 to $70.
5. Weight
This is another factor to put into consideration. Heavy products will cost you more in shipping which will lower your profit margin. But again, if you have an open budget and you will ship by sea, this is not a problem at all. If you want to ship by air and you are in a hurry to start selling, you must choose light-weight products. ASM12 recommends below 5 pounds. Please note that shipping by the sea may take about 30 days for your product to ship from China to Amazon.
These are the main criteria you need to consider when choosing a product to sell on Amazon. The next step is to find a supplier to manufacture these products.
Click here to watch a free video that walks you through the research process and get free software that automates this process (available for a limited time)
Amazing Selling Machine course dedicates the entire first module of the 8-week web class to product research and finding the best product opportunity.
Step 2: Find a supplier either domestically or overseas
After you find a potential product, you’ll need to find a supplier to manufacture this product for you. Of course, this supplier will add your brand name and logo on the product for you.
The main question that most people ask here is: Should I search for a supplier in the USA or China?
The simple answer is that if the product goes “in” or “on” your body, you need to find a domestic supplier in the US, but other products can be sourced from China. For example, dietary supplements and skin creams need to be manufactured in the USA while Kitchen products can be sourced from China. This is because products that go on or in the body need higher quality control which is not that good overseas.
To find suppliers in the US, you’ll need to use Google search where you type in the search box something like “your product type + private label”, so if you are looking to sell vitamin D supplements, as an example, you’ll search for “vitamin D private label” then you’ll go through the results and negotiate with them (try to look at 3 or 4 pages of search results.)
If you want to find suppliers from China, then the best place to go to is Alibaba.com. This is the place where to find most of the Chinese suppliers.
You’ll need to contact at least 20 suppliers and settle on 3 of them. Then you’ll order samples from all three. When samples arrive, you’ll examine them and choose which one to start with your first inventory order.
Amazing Selling Machine course dedicates the entire second module of the 8-week web class to finding suppliers, negotiating with them, and ordering samples.
Step 3: Create your Amazon product listing & launch your product
In this step, you’ll first need to create your brand assets. Like brand name, logo, website, and social media accounts.
After that, you’ll want to register a seller account with Amazon Seller Central at https://sellercentral.amazon.com/
There are 2 options; the free one where you pay Amazon fees only when you make sales, while the other option is the professional account where you pay $39.95 per month. The professional option gives you many advantages and this is why you need a professional account if you plan to sell 40 units of your product or more. And don’t worry, when you sell well, they will deduct the monthly subscription fees from your sales revenue, so you won’t need to pay anything out of your pocket.
Once you are ready, you’ll need to create your Amazon product listing. This requires you to choose the keywords to use carefully (because most of your traffic should come from ranking keywords on Amazon, so when people search Amazon for those keywords, they’ll find your listing.)
Many tools help you find the best keywords to use in your listing, but the best one is Helium10 (based on suggestions from top Amazon sellers.)
The listing itself needs some copywriting skills. If you can’t write persuasive copy you can hire a copywriter from freelance sites like Upwork.com or you can follow the guidelines in the Amazing Selling Machine course and write the listing yourself.
The most important parts of the listing page are -in order- images, headline, bullet points, description, and backend search terms (the place where you enter your remaining keywords, but the major keywords must be added in the headline then the bullet points then the description respectively.)
You can use the images from your suppliers when you are starting, but as sales start to happen, you must do some professional photos. You can hire a service to do that for you (you’ll need to send one unit of your product to them.) Many services do that such as https://www.productphotography.com/.
Your images should be 1000 x 1000 pixels or more (which makes them zoomable) and all need to have a white background.
If your budget allows, I highly recommend you create those professional images from the get-go.
Now with everything ready, you need to create your listing inside your Amazon Seller Central account. Then you need to create your shipment info.
We’ll be selling using FBA or Fulfillment by Amazon…This is a service from Amazon that allows you to automate your entire business…
All you need to do is to send them the product, create your product listing (a.k.a. sales page) then send traffic to this page (or you can even depend on Amazon traffic.)
Amazon FBA will take care of the rest of the process; store your products, ship them to buyers, handle customer service, and even refund requests (if any.)
So you can set your marketing campaigns, and go enjoy your life while Amazon FBA is taking care of your business.
Here’s a 31 min video that shows you how to do an Amazon FBA shipment step-by-step:
The interface has slightly changed, but the process is almost the same.
Now, you are ready to launch your product once it arrives at Amazon FBA stores.
Amazing Selling Machine course dedicates modules 3 & 4 to building your brand and brand assets like the website and social media accounts. Then it dedicates module 5 of the web class to product listing optimization while module 6 is dedicated to doing the perfect product launch.
Step 4: Drive traffic to your Amazon listing and Scale your business
Once you follow the instructions, you’ll have a viable product on Amazon and you should have seen some sales and increase in the rankings. Now you’ll want to drive more traffic and try to optimize your listing to see if you can increase conversions…
You should test 2 things in your listing before anything else; the main image and price.
And to drive more traffic, you’ll need to go to the paid route. My first recommendation is to use Amazon Sponsored Ads which is the equivalent of Google Ads but inside Amazon itself. If you have a successful ads campaign, Amazon will cut the cost of your ads from your earnings. This means you can run your business without spending any dollar from your pocket!
Of course, there are more traffic sources that you can imagine like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Pinterest Ads, YouTube Ads and more. But this is outside the scope of this post!
After your first product becomes a success and you make a good volume of sales, you can now think of scaling your business. You can now add another product and another and so on as you want.
You may even decide to sell your brand and start another one. This is why you need to build a brand which means you build an asset that you can either sell later or keep it and enjoy the profits.
The Amazing Selling Machine course dedicates module 7 to the advanced marketing and traffic tactics while it dedicates module 8 of the web class to the process of taking your business to the next level.
By now you know that the ASM course covers all the above steps in much greater detail and video tutorials, but what exactly do you get inside the ASM training?
Amazing Selling Machine Course Contents
9-Module Web Class
○ Over 120 lessons
○ Walks you through building your business from scratch
○ You get FREE upgrades to every new version of the core ASM web class
○ Modules released one week at a time
○ Watch anytime from your computer or mobile device as long as you have an internet connection
○ Downloadable strategy guide with each lesson
Automation Tool Suite
○ Part 1 *SURPRISE*
■ 12 months of FREE access
■ Includes a variety of tools such as:
● Email automation for sending customized emails to all of your Amazon customers to increase product reviews and provide stellar customer service
● Detailed traffic and conversion stats for all of your products
● Sales and profit tracking for your entire business
● Keyword tracking to see where you rank among your competition
● Inventory tracking and alerts that help ensure you take timely action on keeping your products in stock.
○ Part 2 The Brand Launchpad and Continual Sales System
■ ASM team have a list of 10,000+ buyers looking for high quality, new products from their members
■ You get FREE access to this for 12 months as a member of ASM
○ Part 3 ASM Business Dashboard
■ Along with the *surprise* tool, ASM founders have built an integrated dashboard right into your ASM membership so that you can get all of your vital business stats in one place (you get lifetime access to this one)
○ Part 4 The Ultimate Product & Keyword Research Toolset
■ 90-day free access to THE best product and keyword toolset available to help you grow your business faster, easier, and more reliably than ever.
Bonuses
After performing data analysis of asm audience and what kept them from being successful it came down to one major hurdle: sourcing a product. There is a fear that they’ll get scammed out of their money picking the wrong supplier. That issue has been solved…
Introducing The Private Sourcing Agent Bonus (the Amazing.com team will find 3 suppliers + negotiate MOQ & price) This is a savings of OVER $1,500, Plus HOURS of time.
Plus more surprise bonuses you can find here
Guarantees
○ 30 Day Guarantee
This is the normal guarantee where you have 30 days after you buy ASM, if for any reason you don't like what you get, you can ask for your money back. More details about this guarantee here. (Look for the guarantee page link on the upper right hand menu when on you click on the previous link!)
But it doesn't stop here...
○ ASM Success Promise
Follow the course and meet criteria laid out, if not happy with the success they will reimburse you for ASM & unsold inventory up to $7500!
Contact the ASM support within 6 months of your purchase of ASM12 to let them know you’d like to take them up on the ASM12 Success Promise. Then, they will verify that you have met all of the necessary steps and request any additional information from you. Once verification is complete, you can expect to receive your refund of all ASM12 payments made to-date plus inventory reward within 45 days. More details about this guarantee here. (This promise is not available all the time, check for its availability now!)
Private Resource Vault
○ This is ASM exclusive private collection of resources you can use to build your business that they’ve pre-vetted and, in most cases, use in their eCommerce businesses.
○ These resources include:
■ accounting tools, autoresponders, banking services for international sellers, design creation tools, email services for automating your Amazon emails, freight forwarders and warehousing providers, inspection and forwarding services, keyword research tools, landing page and funnel services, tools for organization and task management, photography and video creation services, pay per click optimization tools, stock image services, virtual office providers, website development and hosting services and more!
Mentor Program
○ To help ensure your success they created the ASM mentor program which is a group of incredibly successful ASM members who love to give back by helping all the members. These incredible Mentors have averaged over $1.8M in sales on Amazon in their businesses. Anytime you have a question or need help with the ASM Training Program or any aspect of your Amazon business, the Mentors are there to provide hands-on help. They’re active in the amazing alliance community every single day, which you get lifetime access to, that are waiting to give you all the support you need.
Online group coaching calls
○ The first kick-off call will be on Saturday, October 26th and then the first group coaching call will be held on Thursday, October 31st. There will be one coaching call per week during the 8 modules of the Web Class
○ One per month after the initial 8 weeks
○ Live Q&A going through real member questions about this business
Now you know exactly what you get inside the Amazing Selling Machine Course. You have a great curriculum, bonuses, tools, guarantees and more. You have all it takes to build a successful business selling on Amazon, so what are you waiting for?
Click Here To Invest In This Amazing Training Today
But if I were you, I wouldn't buy it before getting my Amazing Selling Machine bonus here.
Say my product is a good product to sale. How long will it take to pick up some traction? Also at what amount do I need to start restocking?When I have 50 of the product left? 100?
Hi Tierra,
For the first question, it depends on your category. If there are huge traffic volumes of Amazon buyers in your category, you can see sales from day 1. Otherwise, you need to run Amazon sponsored ads immediately to gain some traction. Also, your launch promos are important in this matter. You may give some units in huge discounts, and run some ads to it.
About restocking, it depends on your sales velocity and the time between making inventory order with your supplier until it arrives at Amazon FBA. There’s no specific number here. For example, if your inventory needs 20 days to arrive at Amazon, and you are selling 50 units per day, you’ll need to restock before you are down to 1000 units left.
I hope this helps.
Thank you much!
Also what do you recommend to be a good starting budget for first time sellers? Thanks again in advance!
I recommend around $1000 – $2000 as a starting budget. Don’t go big from the beginning, start small, test your product, improve it based on the reviews, then scale your business.