Legitimate Home Based Businesses
Use Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA)

By Joe Waynick

Online Bookstore Warehouse Packer

One of the biggest problems faced by legitimate home based businesses is storage space for the products they sell.

This is especially true if you live in an apartment and don't have a garage where you can put inventory.

Amazon.com has solved this problem with a popular program called "Fulfillment By Amazon," or just FBA for short. The playing field is now level.

What Is Fulfillment By Amazon?

FBA is a sales fulfillment service offered by Amazon.com. If you don't have room to store all the merchandise you want to sell online then you have the option of sending it to Amazon and they'll store it for you.

But it gets even better than that for legitimate home based businesses. Because not only will Amazon store your inventory, they'll pack and ship your merchandise to your customers every time you make a sale.

Just think what that means.

All you do is decide what you want to sell, buy your inventory, send it to Amazon, and then sit back and collect your profits. Amazon FBA does all the rest!

It doesn't matter what you sell, from power tools to selling software online, FBA could be the perfect distribution channel for your small business.

Too Good To Be True?

Many owners of legitimate home based businesses think FBA is too good to be true. Hardly. Amazon is very shrewd and they make a nice commission off your sales. In fact, on lower priced items you can lose your shirt.

You'll need to familiarize yourself with the FBA program fees to ensure you price your wares profitably.

Amazon has opened up a whole new business model for small entrepreneurs.

Still, FBA is a fantastic program. Merchandise sent to an Amazon warehouse selling for $8.00 or more will give you a minimum net profit of 50% clear and free. Those are great margins your CPA will love.

The greater the selling price, the greater percentage of the profits Amazon sellers keep. The lower your selling price, profit margins diminish exponentially.

What About Marketing and Advertising?

Since you're selling your goods on Amazon's platform, you don't have to worry about marketing an online business.

Amazon is the larges online retailer in the world. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and marketing every year.

All you have to do to start selling used books on Amazonis upload a description of your products to Amazon's website, set your price, and allow Amazon's marketing machine market legitimate home based businesses for you.

Fulfillment by Amazon really is that easy!

Who Can Use FBA?

Both large and small companies can use fulfillment by Amazon to sell their products. But FBA is ideally suited for small legitimate home based businesses that can't afford a fully equipped warehouse and mailing facility.

All that overhead is covered by the world-class fulfillment by Amazon shipping rates and services available to FBA sellers.

You'll need an Amazon ProMerchant account to begin selling through the FBA program, and that's about all.

Oh, you'll also need really great merchandise to sell. That goes without saying.

Finally, you don't want to send too much inventory to Amazon's fulfillment center or you'll end up paying excessive storage fees. In addition, periodically Amazon increases FBA fees so that's another good reason why you don't want a lot of inventory sitting around unsold. Ideally, you only want to send enough inventory into Amazon's distribution centers that will sell within six months.

Realistically, that's not entirely possible. You're always going to end up with stale inventory no matter how hard you try to avoid acquiring slow sellers. But, what you can control is never sending in more than one ASIN of any particular item. That will avoid long-term storage fees and other penalties — at least until Amazon changes its policies yet again.

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