Where Do I Buy Products To Sell On Amazon

Keeping Track Of Inventory Levels

Tracking all of the inventory levels of all of your products you source wholesale is a very important task. Well walk through two ways you can use tools to help you with this task now.

The first option to setup replenishment alerts directly within Amazon Seller Central. This is a free option and is a good starting point when you dont have a huge number of items to keep track of. Lets walk through a quick example of how to setup a replenishment alert on any item in your inventory:

First, locate the item in your inventory and click on the button just to the right of Edit as shown below:

Then we will want to click on the Set replenishment alerts option that pops up:

You will then be taken to a screen to set the inventory level you want to be notified of when you reach. Lets say you set the replenishment to 10 units, that means that when your inventory level reaches 10 units, Amazon will let you know.

You can set up the replenishment alert quantity in this next screen. Enter the number by the red arrow as shown in this screenshot:

After clicking save, you will receive alerts going forward when your inventory reaches the level you set.

The above method is great when starting out but can be difficult to manage as your business scales. If you reach that point then its worth taking a look at getting a more robust tool involved. We currently use RestockPro to help us manage which products to reorder.

Things To Buy From Alibaba And Sell On Amazon In 2021

Buying products from Alibaba and selling them on Amazon for a profit is an easy thing to do, when you know how.

In this post, Im going to share with you how to buy from Alibabaand what 3 specific things to look for in order to ensure the items youre selling on Amazon have a chance to be profitable.

Im also going to show you my process so you always know what things to buy from Alibaba.

Heres the buying process, in a nutshell:

To buy products in Alibaba you will need to sign up for an account on alibaba.com. You will also need bank or card details in order to make purchases. Accounts are free and give you unlimited access to all the suppliers and manufacturers in the Alibaba marketplace.

Now, theres a little more to it, of course, and thats what Im going to cover next, as well as my process for finding the best products you can sell on Amazon, without using any fancy software and without spending a dime. Thank me later

But first let me add that, as simple as it may sound, buying from Alibaba and selling on Amazon is one of the most valuable skills you can possess.

Heres why:

Its not really about the marketplaces. Buying items from one place and selling them at a profit elsewhere is the backbone of commerce. Its the old buy low, sell high equation. Its what merchants all over the world have been doing for hundreds of years. Its exactly what happens when you go to the supermarket and buy any item.

Thats worth thinking about.

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Handling Returns And Negative Reviews

Its bound to happen: Some customers wont be satisfied with their purchase and will want to return the item or get a refund.

This can be a headache, so some sellers have a strict no-return/refund policy. This will make things easier for you, but it may cause some customers to feel disgruntled and leave negative reviews.

If you do wish to allow returns, make the return period a bit shorter than the AliExpress return period . This gives you some time to process the return.

When a return is requested, request a return yourself on AliExpress. Once you get the return label from the AliExpress seller, forward it to your customer.

If you plan on allowing returns, its a good idea to use the free returns filter when searching for products to sell on AliExpress. Remember that not all products that allow returns and exchanges offer free returns paid for by the seller:

Sometimes, the product will be so cheap that instead of allowing the customer to return it, it may be worth just sending them a new one for free and allowing them to keep the old one. This will save you a lot of headaches and will lead to more positive reviews.

After all, if a product costs $2 on AliExpress and you sold it for $8 on Amazon, you can give them a second one for free and allow them to keep the first one and you would still earn a $4 profit.

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Criteria : Private Label Potential

The last criteria for finding a product to sell on Amazon FBA is the only one thats kind of impossible to filter automatically. This criteria is called private label potential, basically referring to any generic product that you can go out there and launch your own brand with.

Private label potential is important because we DO NOT recommend you sell other peoples brands of products. If you do, your profit margins are going to be way too low.

Also, youre going to be heavily restricted on how you can sell that product, and where you can sell that product. Plus youre going to be competing against tons of other people selling that exact same product. The only thing you can compete on at that point is price, so you want a product without limitations that you can create your own brand out of.

When youre looking for products to private label, you have to avoid products that have a ton of research and patents behind them.

So once youve put together a list of potential products, then its time to head over to a site like alibaba.com. There you can see if you can find a similar product that a manufacturer is making in bulk, which you can then put your own brand on.

Understand Amazons Cost Structure

You can start selling on Amazon with little money. But there are some fees you should be aware of because theyre frequently charged and can impact your Amazon channels ROI. The following fees arent the only fees, just the common ones.

• Referral fees. Amazon charges a commission for selling on the platform. Its different for each category. The average referral fee is 15%, but can range from 8% to 45%.
• Closing fees. This is a $1.80 fee taken from each unit sold for products in media categories .
• FBA fees. If you use Fulfillment by Amazon youll cover the shipping and handling costs for a sale. This fee is charged to fulfill items for Amazon purchases and depends on the items category, size, and weight. A standard package may cost you between $2.41 and $4.71.
• Additional Amazon fees. Amazon will also charge you inventory storage fees for inventory in its fulfillment center. You may pay monthly or long-term storage fees, as well as disposal order fees, return fees, and advertising costs.

For an in-depth look at all possible fees, read the .

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How To Convert Your Items To Fulfillment By Amazon Items

I know what youre thinking, Why do I need to convert my items to FBA items if I just selected them to be fulfilled by Amazon?. This just gives you the option to use Amazon FBA. You dont have to use FBA for every item you sell. There are some items that cant be shipped through Amazon FBA either. Therefore, you need to go into your account and manually select which items you want to fulfill through Amazon FBA.

To do this, go to the Inventory tab in your Seller Central homepage and click Manage Inventory. From here youll want to select the Actions drop down for each produce and select Change to Fulfilled by Amazon.

Please note: Once converted, your listings will be temporarily removed from Amazon.com until the inventory has been received at Amazons fulfillment center. So, you must finish the entire process to list and sell your items through Amazon FBA.

Once you change your inventory to Fulfilled by Amazon, youll be asked about two preferences:

If youre selling new items, you can use stickerless, commingled inventory. This means that Amazon will commingle your inventory with other sellers matching units. If someone orders from you, Amazon might ship a matching unit that is actually from a different seller, but in warehouse closer to the customer. This allows Amazon to ship items faster for better customer service.

In my case, I accepted this because I was not selling anything new.

How To Decide What To Sell On Amazon

Once you know the ways to find products to sell on Amazon you have to decide what youre going to sell via the Amazon marketplace.

Maybe you already have an idea of what you want to sell and you have the data to support selling this type of product. Or, maybe youre still considering your options and need some additional help in this department. If the latter category sounds like you, there are specific ways to decide what to sell.

• Using data: Amazon search volume, Google search volume, competition, SEO difficulty, market trend data.
• Profitability analysis: How do your wholesale prices compare to retail? Do you have at least 40% margin?
• Presence of big brands: Are there established brands already selling products in this niche?

Lets dive into each one in more detail.

Compare Product Ideas Using Data

Before picking a product or products to sell online, you want to compare your product ideas by using concrete data.

Reviewing available data will help you find out information such as search volume, keywords, and more to prepare you prior to selling on Amazon.

Product Search Volume

If youre wondering what site, Amazon or Google, is more popular for product searching, theres conflicting data out there. So, with this in mind, you want to understand the search volume of both.

Comparing the search volume of both Amazon and Google will ensure that you have a clear and true picture of what products people are searching for online and what you should

Google Search Volume

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Should You Be A Reseller Or A Manufacturer

First, lets discuss the tradeoffs of reselling someone elses brands vs. manufacturing your own products: which is better? There are several advantages to selling your own products on Amazon:

Yes, manufacturing your own products has several advantages. But as it turns out, both approaches can work. In fact, we work with resellers who gross over $50 million per year.

Granted, their margins are less than a seller that manufactures its own product, but these resellers have found an incredibly successful, lasting supply and distribution model.

We also work with brands and distributors that sell up to $30 million per year. As you will see, a strong case can be made for either method.

Use A Chrome Extension To Research Products In A Niche Market

There are two popular chrome extensions to help you conduct keyword research on Amazon — , which shows you monthly sales volumes on products, displays products with low competition, and allows you to save products to track them over time. Undoubtedly, Jungle Scout’s analytics can help you quickly and efficiently narrow down on a product or an industry in which you could excel. However, Jungle Scout is relatively pricey, particularly if you’re just starting out.

Unicorn Smasher is Jungle Scout’s free alternative — while the data isn’t as accurate as Jungle Scout, and it lacks some of Jungle Scout’s sophisticated features, it’s nonetheless a helpful free option to gather estimated monthly sales and estimated monthly sales revenue for Amazon products.

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How Do You Sell Successfully On Amazon

First ask, what is success to you?

I wanted and needed income replacement. I needed it to be the major source of my income because my options were limited at the time.

Starting with the right vision, knowing that you want to do well, and provide a good income whether it replaces your old income or supplements your current income with some extra spending money, starting right is important.

I learned the hard way through hours and hours of research and the school of hard knocks. We had a lot of mistakes and setbacks along the way because we didnt have good guidance of how to do it.

Top Selling Categories On Amazon

You can access all of Amazons top categories for free on . Dont let anyone convince you that you need to pay to get access to Amazons best selling categories.

Trending products can be worth a look. Keep in mind that you want something that will still be a valuable long-term investment in your Amazon efforts.

Here are Amazons best selling categories:

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How To Find Products And S Uppliers

Finding potential suppliers is the first and one of the most challenging parts of wholesale sourcing. Finding and securing a relationship with a manufacturer, brand owner or distributor will take the majority of your time .

In general the main key to securing a wholesale relationship is to follow the following format for successful outreach:

Email < Phone < In Person

All 3 of these methods of communication work, and should be used in your outreach. Weve found that in person is the best way to land new accounts early on, with phone being the next best option, followed by email.

The more personal you can make your outreach, the better your chances especially if youre primarily an online-only business that sells on Amazon. You increase your chances of being heard the farther right you move in the above spectrum as it will make it more personal. Basically the farther right you go, the harder it is for a rep to say no!

With that introduction on communication options, lets look at some of your options for finding wholesale suppliers. Here are methods weve used and are still using:

• Trade shows
• Cold call or email representatives of products we have sold previously
• Find products on Amazon that are selling well, and reaching out to the company
• Doing research via Google on products we want to sell and finding their local distributors

The 4 Major Advantages To Sourcing Wholesale

There are four major advantages to wholesale:

The first major advantage is that once you set up a relationship with a supplier, you can keep selling that item as long as there are buyers. When you are running low on inventory, you can simply order more! If you have ever sourced a product via retail arbitrage or online arbitrage, you may be familiar with how frustrating it is when you cant get any more units of a profitable product that sells quickly. With wholesale, you can send your supplier an order and get more product on the way immediately in most cases.

The second advantage is directly related to the first. When you set up a relationship with a supplier, you can get as many units at one time as it makes sense to based on how much money you have and how well the product sells. In some cases, you can buy hundreds or thousands of a single item at one time. This is another big advantage compared to the arbitrage methods because you can make your supply levels match the demand for the product.

The fourth major advantage involves the relationships youll build, which can impact your business positively in many ways:

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Criteria : Number Of Reviews Less Than 1000

So when youre looking for products to create your own brand with, you obviously want to sell products that wont be WAY too difficult when competing against existing products with reviews out there.

Thats why we recommend to use the benchmark of about 1000 reviews or less. The reason for this is simple, if youre going to be starting at zero reviews when you create your own brand, and all your competitors already have thousands of reviews, youre just not going to look as credible having only a couple reviews at first.

Sure its totally possible to compete with products that already have tons of reviews, but it may take much longer than you expect, and cost more money. You may need much more inventory and a way bigger marketing budget to even build up those reviews too.

So one huge thing to keep in mind during this step, is that from the initial search youll see the first several products have thousands of reviews, and its not until the fourth one where we see one less than 1000.

Keep in mind these top selling products you see are the exception, not the rule, most products on Amazon will have FAR LESS reviews and do just fine. We can actually sort by reviews with a product finder tool, and this makes it easy to see all of the products that do not have a thousand reviews on there.

Youll end up finding TONS of products opportunities that have only a handful of reviews and those sellers are making some decent profits.