What You’re Responsible For When Selling on Amazon

Making money on Amazon is easy when you take the right steps to learn how. One of the first steps when it comes to learning how to earn with Amazon is to understand what you’re responsible for when selling products on Amazon. With the FBA program, it’s incredibly easy to make money from the comfort of your own home and build a successful business. 

In this article, we’ll discuss what you, as the seller, are responsible for when selling on Amazon. 

What Sellers Are Responsible for When Selling on Amazon FBA

When it comes to the FBA program, Amazon takes care of a lot of the heavy lifting. While there is a premium you’ll have to pay with this, it’s well worth it and frees you up to focus on the tasks that bring in the big bucks. 

Knowing How the Program Works

First and foremost, you’re responsible for knowing how the FBA program works for sellers and their customers. Here’s how Amazon FBA works:

1. You send your products to Amazon

Amazon has warehouses across the United States just waiting for your products. Some of these warehouses are over a million square feet! You’ll let Amazon know which products you’re sending, and they will let you know which warehouses to ship your products to. 

2. Amazon stores your products

Once you ship your products and Amazon receives them, they’ll sort them and put them in their inventory. Your products are stored safely in the warehouses until someone makes a purchase. 

3. A customer purchases your product on Amazon

Amazon will take care of the whole transaction for you. They accept the payment and update your inventory automatically once a customer makes a purchase. 

4. Amazon ships the product to the customer

An Amazon worker or robot will take your product from storage, pack it up, and ship it to the customer for you.

5. Amazon takes care of customer service

Once Amazon ships the product and the customer receives it, Amazon will send them a follow-up email to make sure they are satisfied. If a customer is not satisfied, Amazon will handle returns and even questions from the customer. 

However, when it comes to product feedback, you’ll have to respond and take action for customer complaints. 

6. You make money selling on Amazon

Once every two weeks, Amazon will total up your sales and deduct all of the seller fees. They will then deposit your profits directly into the bank account you give them when signing up. 

Choosing What Products to Sell

As a seller, you can sell just about anything that you want. However, if you want to avoid storage fees, you’ll have to choose products that sell quickly. Amazon will start charging you additional fees if your inventory is sitting in their warehouse. This is because they need to make room for the products that are selling often and well. 

Choosing which products to sell can be difficult, and there are tons of different ways that entrepreneurs are using Amazon to earn money. It’s up to you to determine what works best for your business plan. 

Keeping Inventory in Stock

You will need to regularly check your inventory levels on Amazon. If your products are selling well, it can be detrimental for your business to run out of inventory on a particular product. This gives your customers time to find another company selling a similar product, and you may lose them forever. 

Amazon is not responsible for notifying you of low inventory, so we recommend checking your inventory every day if you know that certain items are high sellers. For those that are low sellers, you may want to consider sending less inventory to avoid any unnecessary storage fees. 

Marketing and Advertising

Depending on which method you choose when making money with Amazon FBA, you’re responsible for marketing and advertising your products. If you’re selling highly ranked products, you won’t have to do this. In fact, if you’re taking Beau’s online Amazon FBA course, you’ll learn how to make money on Amazon for free without spending time on marketing and advertising. 

However, if you choose to sell your own custom products, you’ll need to make sure that someone can find them when they’re shopping on Amazon. You’re up against tons of competition on the marketplace with over 350 million products listed, so it’s crucial for your products to be found with the right marketing and advertising strategies. 

Paying Fees

Unfortunately, not everything with Amazon FBA comes free. Because Amazon does so much for you, including the packaging, shipping, and customer service, you will have to pay fees. However, when this is compared to renting your own warehouse and hiring your own employees, it’s typically cheaper to use the Amazon FBA program than anything else. 

The FBA program costs money, and Amazon charges storage fees and fulfillment fees. In order to understand how much this will cost you, you will have to understand just how quickly your inventory moves. You should also make sure that your business can still be profitable after paying the fulfillment fees. 

As we have mentioned, you’ll also have to consider long term storage fees as well. If your items sit for over six months, you will be subject to these fees. Amazon wants to sell products, not store them. 

Handling Returns

While Amazon handles all of the customer service tasks, including returns, there are still some actions you can choose to take when it comes to customers returning your products. We recommend learning about why products are being returned. In some cases, customers might say that your products are faulty or no longer in new condition.

You may want to have the items sent back to you for investigation. An Amazon employee may inspect a returned item and believe it to no longer be sellable. But since you know your products best, you can always determine this for yourself and avoid the risk of losing money. 

Are you interested in learning more about what to sell on Amazon to make money? Join Beau’s online course today!