The Simplest Way To Start an Amazon FBA Business in 2026! (Complete Guide)

if you're thinking about starting an Amazon FBA business but you don't know where to start and the whole process just seems pretty overwhelming and in this video I'm going to walk you through the five basic steps you need to get an Amazon business up and running in the quickest and simplest way possible if you don't know who I am my name is Paul and I've been doing e-commerce for over six years now I've started many successful online businesses that have allowed me to quit my job and travel full-time while still making money now I make these videos to explain how I did it and help you on your own Ecommerce Journey so let's get into this first I

really want you to make sure that Amazon FBA is actually what you want to do and that it's a good fit for you see when you're doing Amazon FBA you need to have all of your inventory up front before you list it for sale on Amazon that means you need the money to purchase those items up front this is very different from something like Drop Shipping where you only buy the items once someone has already purchased them from you that way you don't have to spend a lot of money on inventory at the beginning with the FBA you need that initial investment now that is a hurdle but if you have the capital to invest in an FBA business then you're gonna see that these hurdles actually keep out competition so it can be seen as a good thing now another risk with Amazon FBA is that all the items that you purchased up front they may not sell there's no guarantee of that now we do have ways to greatly mitigate that risk by doing research and finding which items are popular and how much competition there is but it's very different from something like again Drop Shipping where if your items that your Drop Shipping don't sell it doesn't matter because you didn't purchase them up front and again this is just another hurdle that keeps out competitors and if you know how to deal with it it's perfectly okay because some items in truth will not sell but that's just kind of part of the system and you learn to kind of absorb those costs and we can find ways to liquidate products to still be able to recoup some of those costs and overall if you do product research correctly for Amazon FBA you'll end up way ahead the last thing I want to mention about Amazon that you have to be aware of and thinking about is whether you

have to be thinking about is whether you want to sell with FBA or fbm because

there's two different ways to sell on Amazon with the FBA model which is the model that most people are familiar with you are going to take all the items that you purchase to sell on Amazon and you're going to send all of them into Amazon at once in like one shipment Amazon will then take all the items out of the boxes put them on their shelves and when a customer then purchases one of those items Amazon will remove that single item from the shelf and ship it directly to the customer the same way you get items to your own house through Amazon Prime the other model called fbm stands for fulfilled by Merchant and when you sell that way you have to have your items in your house or in a warehouse or in a storage locker and then when they sell you are responsible for taking each item and shipping them one by one directly to the customer for Amazon I really recommend that you stick with the FBA model because once you send all that inventory into Amazon handles all the rest the Fulfillment the customer service the returns it really makes your life a lot easier and in addition to that it's what Amazon wants you to do so they give priority to sellers that are using FBA step number

two is you need to decide where it is

that you're going to buy the products send into Amazon and there's a few different ways to do this so I want to break down for you the pros and cons of each of them now one of the methods that probably gets the most attention is where you buy products from websites like AliExpress or alibaba. com bring them into your house Rebrand them as your own and then send them into Amazon FBA this is called private label FBA if you ever hear a big Guru Amazon Guru talking about Amazon FBA this is probably what they're talking about so what this involves is coming over here to AliExpress and doing some research to figure out what a good product is so for instance right here we have this vintage looking hair cutter beer trimmer type device it's selling for a dollar 58 here on AliExpress and you can see that there are a lot of sellers here on Amazon selling it for 25 to 30 dollars now the pro about this one the pros about this is that if you manage to get this right there's a lot of money that can be made here you are building up a brand that you're selling on Amazon and you can even sell this brand down the line the drawback of this is that very often that once you hit on a winning product you will have people come in and copy you very quickly and you can already see here so many people selling pretty much the exact same product and then it just becomes a race to the bottom where people are just trying to sell it for as cheap as possible while still making somewhat of a profit so there are pros and cons to this and the other big con about this is that it's really hard for beginners to master this you're basically buying thousands of dollars worth of these in this case these beer trimmers and if you get it wrong or the competition comes in then you're out all that money and all you can hope to do is hopefully liquidate and make back some of your initial investment but there's a lot of risk to be had here another method that a lot of people love to do is kind of on the opposite end of that one is that they just go around to thrift stores garage sales or they go into local stores like Walmarts Home Depots look for things that are on sale and buy them and then send those items into Amazon themselves my buddy Steve used to do a lot of that he has a lot of videos on his YouTube channel about going to thrift stores and things like that and there's a lot of potential there because the items that you're buying especially at the thrift stores will be cheap in price and you can usually sell them for a lot more on Amazon the drawback here is that it's quite a hustle you have to be driving around finding these products every single day as soon as you stop doing that whether you're because you're tired or you're sick or someone in your family's tired and sick and need to take care of them the money stops coming in because you're not sending in any more products to Amazon so it does work people make a lot of money with it but it is such a hustle and actually my friend Steve isn't doing it as much because of that and for another reason that I'm going to tell you about in a minute so you can kind of do this whole process of going to stores and finding products but do it online instead and

when you do it online it's called online Arbitrage so a lot of people do this where they will wait for deals and websites like nike. com And buy a bunch to inventory have it shipped to their house and then send it into Amazon we call this online Arbitrage so the cool thing about this is that you can do this from home and you don't have to drive around and you can kind of just be comfortable but the drawback here is because it is so easy a lot of other people can do it as well so I actually tried this myself I was doing it for a few months and yes I was making money with it but what I discovered was that I would buy like 50 sweatshirts from nike. com when they're on sale everything looks good where it looks like it's going to sell for a great price on Amazon I would send them into Amazon couple of them would sell things are looking great and all of a sudden everyone else who bought the sweatshirts during the sale as well their products hit Amazon as well all of a sudden there's so much more competition and the price just drops and now either I'm not making as much as I thought or possibly I'm not making any money on that sale I'm just holding on hoping the price will go back up so it definitely does work people make a lot of money with it but again there is that risk because this does require you to buy a lot of inventory up front that again the price could go down so to kind of combat this my buddy Steve who I told you about before developed this really unique cool system that takes the benefits of something like thrift store Retail Arbitrage and the benefits of online Arbitrage and brings them together and

he calls this the eBay to Amazon system

and what this basically involves is you're coming over here to eBay and using some product research tools that connect with eBay and Amazon you're able to identify deals these Arbitrage deals where there are some products being sold on eBay at below the value that they're being sold for on Amazon and when you buy stuff here on eBay you're usually buying one-offs what Steve concentrates on actually are DVDs believe it or not still a lot of people buy DVDs and CDs and I was doing this as well I was buying a lot of DVDs here on eBay so I'd buy DVD here on eBay for about let's say 20 and I would go ahead and sell it on Amazon for fifty sixty seventy dollars same exact DVD so when I say this combines the benefits of both that's because with something like thrift stores one of the ways it works so well is because there's such scarcity there it's hard for people to find these items so when you go into a thrift store maybe you find a DVD in a thrift store there's probably only one of them and anyone else who's going to look for that DVD has to now look around at other thrift stores so we're still getting that sort of scarcity where we're only able to find one of the DVD but we still get the benefit of online Arbitrage because the DVD will just be sent by the eBay seller to my house and then I resend it into Amazon who will then sell it for me and because I'm only buying one of each DVD title at a time the risk is much lower if for some reason a lot of competition comes in for that particular movie then okay I'm out one DVD that's it and oftentimes if you wait the price will go back up that's a lot different than when you're buying sweatshirts from Nike where if the competition comes in you might still have 30 sweatshirts that you have to sell so the risk is much lower with this eBay to Amazon system and I think it's a really great one for beginners for that reason step

three is to sign up for an Amazon account and you can do this by heading to cell. amazon. com when you land on here there should be a big button that just says sign up and it says underneath that that's going to cost you as of right now 39. 99 a month plus other selling fees if you sign up with this button you are going to be signing up with the professional plan now if you scroll all the way down to the bottom kind of hidden down here is an option to sign up as an individual seller when you sign up this way it's not going to cost you 39. 99 it's going to cost you zero dollars to sign up but I really recommend and you pretty much have to sign up for the professional account the one that costs forty dollars a month and that's because one the selling fees are going to be lower for you and you get a lot of additional benefits as well so it's really the route that you need to go if you're going to be selling at all on Amazon FBA so don't get the individual plan make sure to sign up directly for the professional plan now

during the sign up process Amazon is going to ask you a lot of information about you and your business and they're going to need information from you like about your bank account they're even going to ask you to verify your identity as well and they do all that to prevent any sort of fraud on their platform they also need your bank info so they can send you payments they may even require you to have an interview with someone over like a video conferencing tool so the person can see your face you can hold up your ID they can verify that you really are who you say you are all of that is necessary there's no way around it but we all had to do it as Amazon Seller so just be ready and prepared for

that step number four is for you to do

some test purchases this is an opportunity for you to buy just a little bit of inventory just a few DVDs in my situation maybe it's a few CDs for you or board games whatever it is that you're buying from eBay just buy a few of them and kind of test this whole system out tiptoe into it make sure that it works for you make sure you're comfortable with the whole process before you kind of go all following with it and just start purchasing a lot of items I know the Temptation is there to do that I know I was tempted to do that myself but kind of tiptoeing into this and testing it out really made me feel a lot more comfortable with the process made me realize what I understood and didn't understand about it so that I could then go all in with it and buy a lot more products so for instance this is one of the first ones that I purchased I believe it's this Hamlet DVD I paid 15. 49 for this and you can see once it's sold on Amazon I sold it for 44. 95 so that's what I'm talking about because the markup here is quite large the Arbitrage opportunity differences in price is quite large there and if I come over to this FBA calculator I can see that for a 44. 95 product that cost me 15. 49 after you take out the Amazon fees and the Fulfillment fees and storage costs and all that I have a profit here of 16. 70 which is about a 37 margin on just this one DVD which is really awesome you're not going to see that with a lot of other businesses even Amazon businesses or other types of online Arbitrage anymore so it's a really great opportunity it also means that you don't need to sell as many products in order to make a good amount of profit that you're going to be happy with for each every month normally if the profit margin is only like five or ten percent you're gonna have to sell a lot more inventory in order to get the same amount of profit that you would make selling these eBay to Amazon things which have higher margins now once you

get your items delivered to your house like I got this big stack of DVDs right here you're gonna go ahead and send these in to Amazon now we're not going to send these in one by one we just get one box put them all into this one box and ship just this to Amazon they're gonna take care of everything after that like the filling the orders returns customer service so it's like really completely hands off after the point of sending it in and actually listing the items up for sale on Amazon and this process seemed very confusing to me at first I was like what do you do how do you print the labels what are the labels supposed to say like the shipping labels or the boxes I'm telling you once you do it once it's very easy to do it just becomes like clockwork doing it over and over again we use a program to help us create the shipment and then we get the labels printed out I have a special printer with sticky labels so I could just peel it off like a sticker slap it on the box send it into Amazon and literally it's like hands off after that so super easy and then again once you do it once it becomes like

clockwork doing it over and over again

if you want to learn more about how to do this eBay to Amazon system then I encourage you to check out my friend Steve's Master Class it's called the eBay to Amazon master class and this is how I learned exactly how to do this so you can click the first link in the description down below for more information to check it out for yourself but like I said I really think that if you're a beginner looking to get into FBA I think this is the simplest way to do it and the way that's the lowest risk because you're not going all in with just a few products like you would with the normal type of online Arbitrage you're really spreading out your risk between so many different products so that even if one's a failure and even if one of them or a couple of them weren't well researched and weren't good items it doesn't matter so much because you have such a wide variety of items so definitely check it out I'll have it in the first link in the description down

below but if you want to watch another video here on YouTube and you want to learn more about who Steve is I encourage you to check out this interview I did with him recently you can click right here and I'll see you there in just one second