So far here at fbajourney.com, I’ve covered topics about Amazon FBA that are applicable to people, especially beginners, thinking about selling on Amazon. However, I haven’t given a detailed treatment of why you should listen to what I have to say about Amazon FBA. While I’ve briefly described my FBA journey in the My Story area of this blog, I haven’t gone into specifics about the success I’ve had with my FBA business, and the experience it’s provided me. What makes me an Amazon FBA expert, and why should you listen to what I have to say? Those are fair questions, so I’ll answer them now.
I’ve been selling with Amazon FBA since January 2015, and I want to emphasize that I’m a one-person operation, with no help from employees or virtual assistants. My success is my own. I say this because I know my success could be reproduced by a motivated person starting alone and from scratch, just like I did. If you want it badly enough, I firmly believe you could start selling on Amazon today and begin to see results like mine.
Growth
Speaking of success, I’ve grown my business significantly every year. To give you an idea of the growth I’ve experienced since I started selling four and a half years ago, I looked back at my records and found that my sales volume was just over $34,000 for all of 2015. Fast-forward to 2019, and I now do over $34,000 in sales volume every two weeks. By the end of the year, I should do more than 30 times the sales in 2019 as I did in 2015.
I’ve grown the breadth of my product offering as well. In 2015 I had several dozen products available for sale at any one time. Checking today, I currently have over 1,000 active product SKU’s (stock-keeping units) in my inventory available for sale.
Adaptability
Also, as I’ve gained experience with Amazon FBA, I’ve adapted my business over time to what I’ve found to be most profitable. For example, when I started in 2015, I was 100% focused on retail arbitrage product sourcing. Then, in late 2016, I made my first wholesale purchase, and over the course of 2017 and 2018, I migrated my business away from retail arbitrage to wholesale products.
Even though I would consider myself a retail arbitrage success story, today I’m 100% focused on wholesale product sourcing. Managing that transition has taught me a lot about owning and operating a successful Amazon FBA business.
I’ve made smaller changes to my business as well. Whereas I used to drive to the UPS store to drop off packages going to an Amazon warehouse, I now have UPS pick up packages from my home every day. Finding time-saving measures like this has been key component to the success I’ve experienced as I’ve grown over the years.
Freedom
My final qualification, and by far my proudest achievement, (and one I talked about in my post 2 Pros and 2 Cons of Making a Living Through Amazon FBA vs Having a Job), is also what I think makes my advice so applicable (and hopefully appealing) to readers. My success selling with Amazon FBA allowed me to transition from being a full-time employee to being a full-time Amazon FBA business owner.
The freedom I’ve gained by not having to work a job still catches me by surprise some days, and always puts a smile on my face. In fact, if anyone were to ask me the primary benefit of being an Amazon FBA business owner, I would tell them it’s the freedom it offers versus being an employee.
The growth I’ve achieved in sales volume and product breadth, the transitioning of my product sourcing, and my personal journey from employee to business owner, has provided me a hands-on education with Amazon FBA gained through real-world experience. The individual elements of that hands-on experience, such as:
- how to find profitable product to sell,
- how to price products effectively,
- handling competing sellers,
- learning how to create and pack shipments,
- learning how to handle the cash-flow of a growing business,
are the sorts of topics I’m now an expert on, and they are topics I will continue to offer guidance for here at fbajourney.com.
I hope I’ve provided some insight about why you can trust what you read here at fbajourney.com, and how I know I offer sound advice and direction for selling using Amazon FBA.
Thanks for reading!
If you’re interested in the full story of how my Amazon business has evolved since 2015, see this post.