Good morning (almost noon) everyone. I’m going to discuss selling on Amazon using their Fulfilled by Amazon program. With this option, Amazon stores your products in their warehouses and offers all the benefits of buying from Amazon to your products – free shipping for Prime members and free shipping for purchases totaling $35 or more. They can do this because they have what you’re selling sitting along side the products they’re selling (yours have special stickers identifying them as yours), so they also do the packing and shipping. It costs a little more to do this because they also have small storage fees that do add up if something doesn’t sell, but assuming your items sell, it’s not a bad way to go.
The problem we’re having is that we’ve chosen to focus on books (although we started with children’s toys and games – none of which has sold yet) because they are more affordable and offer great markup with the FBA option (there are other factors that play into it, but it was still more affordable). We have sold more books than anything else, but not enough to be in the black. We’re still in the red, although most of our fees and shipping charges have been paid through the sales we have made. It’s just getting more sales that seems to be our biggest issue.
We’ve connected with other successful FBAers who sell books and they are doing really quite well. Even people local to us are making money. But, we don’t seem to be able to do that. We just can’t seem to figure out what we’re doing that would explain why we’re not.
So, I thought I’d bring our story to you all and see if any one of you might happen to be using Amazon’s Fulfillment by Amazon program and see how it’s going for you. I’m not trying to steal your secrets or anything. I just want to understand what we’re doing wrong.
We have found a regular source for books – free!! Many of them are definitely Amazon worthy while others are more appropriate for ebay or Half.com. Some I’m just going to try to sell on CraigsList. But, any sale is a plus when the cost was ZERO.
So, do any of you sell using Amazon? FBA or regular? How’s it going?