Unlocking Amazon FBA Wholesale Success: A Beginners Guide For 2024 [LNIM251]

Ever wondered if the bustling world of Amazon FBA wholesale could be your next entrepreneurial playground? Buckle up as we guide you through the labyrinth of finding and selling profitable products on the giant e-commerce platform. This episode is a treasure trove of insider knowledge, packed with a checklist of strategies to help you zero in on high-demand, cost-effective items ripe for the Amazon marketplace. As I unveil a critical evolution of my brand and prepare to roll out a professional coaching program, two lucky listeners stand to gain an exclusive mentorship experience with over three decades of my wisdom in internet business growth.

Venturing further into the heart of Amazon FBA wholesale, I break down the nuts and bolts of nurturing relationships with suppliers and leveraging data analysis tools for maximum profit. Learn how your products can win the coveted Amazon buy box, and what it takes to position yourself favorably amidst the competition. Plus, a detailed walkthrough is on the horizon—but why wait? Grab the downloadable checklist and start your journey toward mastering the FBA landscape before the next session. Just imagine your products flying off the virtual shelves, all thanks to the insights shared here.

As we wrap up, I reflect on personal achievements, from marathon show attendances to the joyous pandemonium of a new puppy. It's clear that a robust support system is vital, be it in family life or the cutthroat world of internet marketing. I share the rewarding experience of guiding a colleague towards a successful tutoring venture, highlighting the symbiosis of business and personal life goals. For those yearning for growth, there's a chance to join my new coaching initiative: two spots for dedicated sessions designed to catapult your business forward. Join us as we navigate the ebbs and flows of the digital market, staying calm and hopeful about what the future holds.

Transcript

Mark Mason: 0:00

Episode two five one.

Music: 0:04

Late night. Internet marketing.

Mark Mason: 0:09

This week on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast. I've got two great things for you. First, we're going to talk all about Amazon FBA wholesale in 2024 and whether or not that makes sense for you, and secondly, I've got that big announcement that I promised you. We'll be talking about all that and more on the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Music: 0:37

The Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.

Music: 0:41

You've been working for somebody else, but you want a business to run yourself. You want to know how to start and where to begin. Can you get out your comfort zone, my friend? Yes, you can do it right when it's late at night. At the end of the day, your dreams burn in your sights.

Music: 1:07

Keep it up and you will find that you're building your business one night at a time, and now broadcasting late at night from a little studio in the big state of Texas, your host, mark Mason.

Mark Mason: 1:27

Hey, hey, hey, how is everyone doing? I am your host, mark Mason, coming to you from the frozen tundra that is Dallas, texas. I know people in the Northeast must laugh because I know it's not that cold here, but it's like 10 degrees outside and there are tiny snowflakes floating around in the air. So when you're from Texas, that's like legitimately cold and you have to wear extra clothes and stuff. Normally here in Texas I wear short pants and a t-shirt about 11 months of the year. So when it gets to be 10 degrees outside and I have to go get the mail or something, that is serious news here in Dallas, texas. I hope all of you are safe and warm and happy wherever you are. Hey, look, I have two amazing topics for you and I'm going to cover the personally most important one, the one that's most important to me personally, first, so we can get that out of the way and maybe we'll come back to that at the end of the show. You know I have an after the show part of the show and we can talk about this some more in the after the show part of the show, because I want it to as quickly as possible get to Amazon, fba and things that are going to help the vast majority of listeners, because what I'm about to tell you is only going to matter to two of you out there.

Mark Mason: 2:55

So I've been reinventing the late night internet marketing brand. I've been thinking about where I want to take the business next, and one of the things that I have decided that I absolutely want to formalize and do is coach some people professionally. You see, I've been doing coaching in my professional life and my day job for over 30 years, coaching employees and other managers and peers and mentors and mentees. I've been working in that space for a long time and, of course, I've also been coaching people in the online space for almost a decade and a half now, both through the podcast but also in a one-on-one basis, and I've decided that, going forward, I really want to formalize that, to make that a reality. After talking to several of my online business mentors about the right way to get started, I'm going to open up two and only two, and I really do mean two. This isn't false scarcity or any kind of hocus pocus. I have time for two coaching clients right now. If you've got an internet business and it's at a level where you feel excited about investing in coaching to take that business to the next step. I have room for two people that have that kind of growth winning mindset in my fledgling coaching program that I'm announcing for the first time today. You're the first to learn about this. What I'm offering at this point in 2024, given the fact that I still have a day job is one 90-minute coaching session per month, and that 90-minute coaching session is a six-month commitment. So you're committing to six 90-minute coaching sessions as a coaching client and that's a $6,000 commitment paid up front. I have two of those available and if you're interested in those two, mark at latenightimcom. That's the email address. I don't have a sales page up for this or anything, but that's the direction I'm headed. And if you want to be at the front of the line, email me and we'll talk about it and see if you're a good fit for what I have in mind. Mark at latenightimcom. Okay, now, I'm super excited about that.

Mark Mason: 5:16

But the next thing we need to talk about is Amazon FBA. So fulfilled by Amazon, fba is really the magic behind what makes Amazon go, and you may not be aware of this. If you shop on Amazon and you just buy things, amazon has made it, where you don't even need to realize the fact that there are really three kinds of things that you can buy on Amazon. The kind of thing that most people believe they're buying, and it's not actually the case, is a product that is sold by Amazon and Fulfilled by Amazon. What that means is Amazon has bought the product wholesale and is holding it in their inventory and when you order it, they are the seller and they are also the third-party Logistics platform that fulfills the order. They both sell the merchandise and they deliver it to you, sold by Amazon and Fulfilled by Amazon, and that's what most people think of when they think of Amazon.

Mark Mason: 6:26

But actually, the bigger part of Amazon is the part of Amazon. That is one of the next two things sold by someone else and Fulfilled by Amazon Someone like me or you, but Amazon Fulfills the order from their warehouse and ships it out. Amazon Prime. Or the third case, which is sold by someone else and Fulfilled by someone else within the Amazon infrastructure, just meaning that Amazon listed the item and took the order, but they're not providing the item and they are not shipping the item. So those are the three cases Amazon bought it and ships it, you buy it, or some seller buys it and Amazon ships it, or the seller both buys it and ships it.

Mark Mason: 7:17

Those are the three cases, and what's interesting is you can build an enormous, giant, epic-sized business by buying items wholesale and sending them into Amazon to be sold, and then Amazon takes both a commission for the marketing part of the business and they take a fee For delivering the item to the customer. It's really cool in a lot of ways, because they handle customer returns and a lot of the customer service issues, and so really this is a business about finding great deals on great products in the wholesale space and getting them into Amazon Strategically so that you can make a profit and let Amazon deal with all the hard work of shipping and dealing with customers and Marketing products and all that. It's a great business for people who are Trying to do internet marketing, start an online business, a work from anywhere in the world sort of business but they are not interested in all the human parts of online business. They don't want to have a podcast like this one. They don't want to deal with customers. They don't want to do all the things that you have to do that are involved with marketing. What they want is an operations business where they can do product research, find great products and have a really killer company like Amazon Sell those products.

Mark Mason: 8:52

And what's interesting is we're seeing other companies, notably Walmart, do this same thing, and actually we're also seeing the same thing happen on eBay. I don't know if you've been to eBay lately, but most of the products that are for sale on eBay now are new in the box products that are using the same model, and the reason that it works so well, particularly in the case of Amazon, is because people are already shopping on Amazon. After all, most people, when they need to buy Something, the first place they go is to Amazon and they go search up Whatever it is they want to buy and instead of running down the street to the store, they just click a button. I mean, let's be honest, I've had times when I've remembered that I needed to buy something and I've stopped at a stop light, pulled out my phone, found that thing on Amazon and hit buy now, the buy now button, and Now it's taken care of. I don't need to stop at the store on the way home. It is an amazing platform and when you sell something on Amazon, amazon charges you for that Fantastic capability that they have to drive traffic to your products. Also, one of the neat things about Amazon is they have your credit card, they have one click buy and so it's. It's almost a frictionless Transaction for customers to buy on Amazon, and so that's a great platform to sell on. But in addition to all that, and for those of you that have been in e-commerce before sticking labels on boxes, you know it is amazing to have someone else Ship to your customers, handle customer service and returns and so forth, and so it's a really good deal for e-commerce.

Mark Mason: 10:42

So the reason that I bring all this up and the reason I decided to talk about this today is that my friend Aiden has a new Program coming out in a couple of days. In fact, by the time you hear this, that Program may be out and available. You can find out about this program to learn about Amazon FBA. They're going to teach other platforms as well in that program Walmart and so on. At late night Offer calm again, that's late night offer dot com. If you go to late night offer dot com, it will take you to the most current information About my friend Aiden's program, and this is a soup to nuts program. It runs for eight weeks. It's a high-end program. It's for people that are really serious about doing something amazing in 2024 and building a new income stream online through Amazon and related whole sale purchasing.

Mark Mason: 11:44

But I don't want to make this Episode a big sales pitch for this program for Maiden. What I want to talk about is Amazon FBA and what you need to think about it if you're considering doing it and how you might do it. So here are some key things that you need to think through if you're considering this kind of Amazon FBA whole sale, and the reason we usually say Amazon FBA wholesale is because you can make your own product and have it Designed or built in China and ship a container full of your own product that's under your brand and you can sell that through FBA to. What makes wholesale unique is that you take a product that's already selling on Amazon that you can buy wholesale and you sell it on Amazon as well To make money doing that.

Mark Mason: 12:39

For example, I've talked many, many times about how I sold Antler toilet paper holders on Amazon when I was doing this kind of thing Six years ago. About six years ago, I started an Amazon business just like this and sold things on Amazon, and what I did was I Developed a relationship with a wholesaler. I saw that they sold these antler toilet paper holders and I looked on Amazon, did some product research and I recognized the price that these were selling on Amazon. Compared to the price that I could get the product for Was favorable for me, and so I bought these and I sent them in and I made money selling toilet paper holders on Amazon and that was a cool thing.

Mark Mason: 13:30

So what does that tell you, that experience? So what it tells you is that in order to be successful in In Amazon FBA wholesale, what you need to know first is how to find Great products. So actually, I prepared for you an Amazon Profitable product checklist. It's a free PDF you can download by going to late night. I am comm forward, slash Amazon and that will get you to the checklist and you can see all the things that you need to consider to have a profitable product on Amazon. And on the next episode of the of the podcast next week, we're going to go over that checklist in detail. But if you want to get ahead of it, you can go to late night. I am comm forward, slash Amazon, download that checklist now and see the kind of things that I'm talking about, but basically, what you need to do is you need to find products that are in demand, products that you can source Affordably.

Mark Mason: 14:34

So what all that really translates to is you've got to have a system for Identifying profitable products that, after the marketing fees that Amazon takes, the price that you're likely to get on Amazon, the cost of shipping and so forth, that you make the profit that you're wanting to make. Now, as you can imagine, that's a big part of what Aiden is going to teach in his course, but basically, the easiest way to do this, the most straightforward and most effective way To find these kind of products, is to develop relationships with wholesale suppliers and Get the list of products that they sell from them. If you go to a wholesale supplier and you introduce yourself and say I have an e-commerce business and I'd like to see whether or not you have products that I'd like to sell, once you've had that conversation, they will give you a list of everything they sell and the wholesale price for it. So that's a very normal thing. Business owners like me pick up the phone and they call a wholesaler and say hey, I'm Mark and I've got an online business and I'd like to buy things, lots of things from you wholesale. And so they send you a price list, essentially a list of all the things that they sell and what it costs, and usually there's other information in there, like the, the product number or something that can be used to look the product up on Amazon, and Then you can feed that list to software to do analysis for what products might be profitable given the current sales price on Amazon, and Other key information like volumes and other things that you need to know to make good decisions about pot potentially selling something. And again, these are. This is a very complicated process to explain on a podcast. These are all things that any good course on selling wholesale items on Amazon is going to cover.

Mark Mason: 16:27

And so you do that and you find a product, or more than one product, that you really like and you buy some of it, ship it into Amazon's warehouse. So then the next thing that you need to do is that shipping part. After you bought the product, you need to get it prepared to ship into Amazon, and what's interesting about that is that in this day and age, there are companies that actually do that for people. So instead of buying something and labeling it yourself and shipping it into Amazon, which you can certainly do I have done with a little label maker and labeling the products and put them in a box and Seeing them to an Amazon warehouse. Instead of doing that, you can send your items directly, have them shipped directly To a third-party company who will do that for you for a fee usually something on the order of 10 cents an item, depending on how much work they have to do maybe more, maybe less, depending on exactly what's going on and they will ship them into Amazon for you on your behalf. And so, really, you're really talking about the kind of business where it's a product research business, where you're running it from a spreadsheet at the comfort of your own home, and that's very appealing for a lot of people. So, once you've done this great product research, you've made a relationship with a wholesale supplier, you bought product, you've somehow gotten it shipped into Amazon, it's in an Amazon warehouse and it's ready to be sold.

Mark Mason: 17:59

How does Amazon decide whose widget gets sold? Like, let's say, you're selling something like oh, I don't know antler-shaped toilet paper holders and all of the sudden you find out there are eight people just like you selling antler-shaped toilet paper holders and they're exactly the same. After all, in Amazon FBA, you're always selling on a previously existing listing, and you can see this. If you go to Amazon and pick any common product, you'll see that there are multiple sellers for that product. That is this process. That is how Amazon works. And so how does Amazon decide? Well, they have this idea of the buy box. When you go to buy, you'll notice that in right, close to the buy button, it will say sold by Mark Mason and fulfilled by Amazon, or sold by Joe Smith Enterprises and fulfilled by Amazon. How do they decide that it's Mark Mason's antler-shaped toilet paper holder that's actually being sold?

Mark Mason: 19:05

They have a buy box competition. That happens every time someone goes to buy something on Amazon and it goes something like this they look at your rating as a supplier, as a seller, they look at your price. It's very heavily weighted on price and they offer your listing a certain percentage of the time to buyers based on your reputation and the price that you're asking. So you'll see if you go look in the marketplace. There are softwares out there that monitor the price of things on Amazon and adjust the price that's being offered accordingly. So I might list my toilet paper holder for $12.50, but in the background I've got software that's looking at all of the prices of all of the other sellers of that identical item and if someone goes down to 1249, I may choose to go down to 1248 or 1245.

Mark Mason: 20:08

So it's an auction system, a bidding system to sort of do what we call win the buy box. And so that's a great thing because it allows you to make one of two choices. One you can be very aggressive to turn your inventory over as fast as you like and run as narrow a profit margin as you like, depending on what you paid for the product. Or you can do what I do when I'm just running this business in the background, kind of like I am right now, where you decide on the profit margin you want and you let the item sit there until the price goes up and hits your price. That allows you to win the buy box. It's kind of like setting a limit order on a stock. I will sell my antler toilet paper holder when the price of those gets up to $12.75. If the current price in the marketplace is only 1250, I'm going to let mine sit in inventory and that works great, unless your product sit in Amazon's warehouse too long. If they sit for months and months and months, then Amazon will start charging you inventory fees and that will start eating into your profit, and so that's something that makes you want to be more aggressive about your pricing.

Mark Mason: 21:26

And so it's a balancing act, and again there's software that can automatically handle this, because as you grow this business, you might find that you have 20 or 30 or 50 or 100 or a thousand different items for sale. I'm talking about different items. You might have a hundred of each of those, so you might have 10,000 or a hundred thousand things in the Amazon warehouse. So as this business grows, a software community has grown up around it to help people run these very large businesses, and when I was doing this back six years ago, I was taking my coaching from a guy who had grown his business all the way up to a size where he was running his own warehouse. He had started just like you might be thinking about starting, and he had grown his business up to where he had to hire his sister to help organize things and research products and find great things to buy, to the point where he decided to buy his own warehouse space so he could buy in large bulk, get better prices, do some of his own labeling and really scale the business. And he was up past $100,000 a month in retail sales, headed on towards a million last. I talked to him many years ago and I'm sure he is still killing it in that business today. So All these things are possible with this kind of Amazon business. Because it's scale, this thing can be absolutely massive.

Mark Mason: 23:08

So if you want to learn more about this kind of business, I have two let's call them three really great options. First, you can go get my absolutely free checklist with no obligation LateNightIMcom forward slash Amazon. That will take you to the free PDF that I've provided to give you a sense of the kinds of things that you need to look for when you are trying to build this kind of business. Particularly, it's a profitable product checklist, which is really the key to the whole thing. That will give you a good idea of the kinds of things you need to look for. So that's one thing you can do if you want to learn more. The second thing you can do if you want to learn more is to go to latenightoffercom. That will take you to information from Aiden about the program that they've got going on. Their programs are spectacular. They have these large cohorts that run eight to 12 weeks of training. The communities are very active for almost six months, usually while people are getting their businesses off the ground. I met people in Aiden's programs 10 years ago that I'm still in contact with, so it's a really robust community. When you get hundreds of people all trying to do the same thing and helping each other, it's really kind of cool. So if you go over there to latenightoffercom, you can check that out, and then the third thing that you can do is you can stay tuned, hit subscribe. Come back next week and I'll walk you through this PDF right here on the show where we'll talk about what it really takes to find a profitable product for sale on Amazon Right now.

Mark Mason: 24:59

On Amazon, I only have two products in the store at the moment. It's a diabetic cough medicine. I have some of that in there and then I also have this very unusual two-piece shovel. It's a specialty, a shovel that's used for gardening that I expect I'll be selling a lot more of in the spring. A little bit too cold to garden here in Texas right now. So I do this Amazon business on the side and I've been talking to Aiden a little bit about scaling this up over the summer.

Mark Mason: 25:31

My 17-year-old son is interested in online business and we've been talking about whether or not we want to shift some of our attention to this, so we may also take advantage of Aiden's course over the next few months. So, all that said, if you're interested in learning more, those are the three ways you can do that Until next time. If you're interested in working with me in a coaching capacity, if you're ready to take your business to that next step and you want to make an investment in coaching, I'm going to have these two slots open. It's a six-month commitment and I'd love to hear from you at mark at latenightimcom. Again, that's mark at latenightimcom. Until then, until next week. I hope you have an absolutely fantastic day.

Music: 26:38

Until then, go and make some great progress on your internet business one night at a time.

Mark Mason: 26:54

Hey, hey, hey. It's After Show, part of the show and, as promised, here I am. So it's really great to talk to you people. I am here at Three Shows in a Row in 2024. I'm calling it a streak, you know it's pretty amazing. I'm pretty excited about it. My 17-year-old just walked by my study door windows and gave me a big thumbs up because he knows I'm recording the podcast. My family's been encouraging me because they know how much I enjoy this, to make time for it, and they're super supportive and they're upstairs watching something on television while I'm downstairs recording the show, and so a big shout out to them for helping me out with that. We've got a new puppy in the house and they're also doing a pretty good job of keeping the puppy quiet, although by this time of day I imagine that the puppy is pretty much tuckered out. I have never seen anything in my life with more energy than a puppy. It is truly remarkable. And not my puppy, it's my wife's puppy, but I'm excited and happy to have a puppy around the house. Don't you dare tell her that I said that.

Mark Mason: 28:01

So let's have some real talk about this coaching thing that I announced at the beginning of the episode. I am a person who likes to help people. If you have a flat tire on the side of the road and you call me, I will probably come help you if I absolutely possibly can. Even if it's raining, I'll be there, because that's what I like to do, and when people ask me for help with starting businesses, I'm always there trying to help them. And in fact, just recently at my day job, there was a guy who was retiring and he was talking about what he was going to do in retirement and he was planning on trying to build out this tutoring business. He's a scientist and he can tutor high school science and math topics until the cows come home. The guy's brilliant. So he was talking about making this tutoring business and I was asking him questions and, as is often the case, he came to me for technical advice about how do I set up a website and how do I form an LLC and what do I need to worry about when it comes to filing my taxes and how do I take people's money and all of these technical issues which I helped him with.

Mark Mason: 29:21

But then we had the part of the conversation that I loves. I asked him what he was really trying to do. We spent some time talking about what is it that? Are you really trying to achieve here? What is it that you want? And he started talking about traveling with his wife and doing stuff and connecting with her in ways that he hadn't before. And I asked him well, when you've got a seventh grader who's freaking out because Because they are not going to be able to pass their math test next week, how are you going to leave that seventh grader and go to Paris with your wife? How's that gonna work? And so we worked through this lifestyle part of the business that he was talking about, and he came to realize, hey, there are things about this that I hadn't considered, about building a business that I don't even really want to have and so we had that conversation. So those kinds of things that's a small example those kinds of things are the things that I love to do.

Mark Mason: 30:19

This intersection between Strategic direction, tactical execution and the mindset that it takes to get places. That's what I really like to work with people on. So what these coaching opportunities will look like is a 90 minute session Once per month where we'll sit down and talk about the large and small Problems that you may be having trying to get your business to that next step or to the big goal that you're trying to hit, and we'll unpack what's in the way and come up with solutions to your problems. I will work with you to help you find the solutions to your problems and Offer them to you when I know what they are, and that's something that really gives me a lot of joy. So in that sense it's super selfish, right. I love that feeling that you get when someone sends you an email, says, man, what you did for me really helped me. I love that. I love being that guy that helps people, and that's how I want to invest my time.

Mark Mason: 31:28

So the two coaching spots are open and I'm not going past to because I need to get a sense of how this is going to impact me, because at this moment I have no plans to leave my day job anytime soon and so I need to be very careful that I don't over extend myself. And I'm there for my coaching clients again for that 90 minute session once a month, fully present, leaning in and really delivering over the top for them for that 90 minutes and the time Before that and after that that it takes to prepare for that session and to process the information from that session. And so that's the plan, and the commitment is for six months because, quite frankly, I think that's how long it takes to really get up a good solid head of steam and Make transformational change. It's not that there won't be massive progress after the first meeting, but I think, if you want to really impact things, six months is a nice time horizon in order to get some really Massive change accomplished. So that's the plan, that's what I'm doing and if, if that rings true to you, if you're thinking, man, this is the opportunity that I've been looking for, that that I need to help me, give me a shout out mark at late night.

Mark Mason: 32:51

I am calm Until next week. I hope everything that comes your way is awesome. We'll talk to you then.

Music: 32:58

Ciao late night in the net marketing.