How to Make Money on Amazon

These days, selling on Amazon is big business; in fact, the company now makes more money from the commissions it charges to third party sellers than it does from selling things itself! 

While Amazon was originally created to sell books, they now handle a huge variety of merchandise, from toys to clothing to tools and much more.  While certain categories have restrictions on who can sell in them, in general you can sell anything that's legal and has a bar code.

On most items, Amazon charges 15% of the sale price + shipping; they also charge a flat $0.99 per item sold. However, signing up as a pro seller (for $40/month) removes the flat fee. While 15% is pretty expensive, they more than make up for it by taking the problem of getting customers off your hands; Amazon naturally attracts people looking for just about anything, which means that all you have to do is supply the product.

Of course, shipping is expensive these days, and Amazon's shipping charges don't always cover your actual shipping costs. To get around that, you need to keep shipping costs down and look for items that have a high profit margin so that you avoid losing money. 

Really the only limits to how much you can make are your available time and investment capital. When I started my own Amazon-based business, I invested a few hundred dollars to start; that quickly turned into some thousands of dollars of merchandise charged to my credit cards. When the holiday season was over, three months after I started, I'd cleared an $8,600 profit on $96,000 in sales..and that's while working part-time and being a full-time grad student.

If you do your research,you should generally be able to sell almost everything you buy at a profit, but it can take a while; I've had some items sit for almost two years before being sold. Accordingly, this business does tie up a fair amount of money, which is why available capital is often the limiting factor in how much you can earn. 

There's a lot more to selling on Amazon than can be squeezed into a hub of reasonable size; my Amazon book, which I tried to make a short, easy to read guide to selling on Amazon, runs to 16 pages (although one of those is the cover). If you don't want to read a book, though, the interface is fairly user-friendly and you can quite easily learn through trial and error.

A special coupon code, just for readers of this page: if you buy the Amazon report, use code HUB to take $10 off the price.