Many people think the only way to turn a profit on Amazon is to go the traditional route—acquire inventory, list products on Amazon, and hope to sell, sell, sell. That’s one way to make money on Amazon, but there are many others—and some of them are underutilized. We asked five e-commerce professionals to share their ideas for additional ways to make money on Amazon. You might be surprised at all of the possibilities.
Lou Haverty is the founder of Financial Analyst Insider, a resource for accounting and finance professionals. Lou has over 16 years of experience in commercial banking in various roles including middle market capital markets and portfolio management.
Most people don’t realize that third-party sellers make up a significant percentage of Amazon’s annual sales revenue. If you want to make money from Amazon as a third-party seller, it can be as simple as buying a clearance product from your local warehouse store and reselling it on Amazon for a small profit. If you want to take that a step further, you could try and directly negotiate with a retailer in your local area and see if they would let you buy some of their overstock inventory before they sell it to an inventory liquidator.
Other options would be to source a product from Alibaba and sell it directly on Amazon. You could also create your own product-based review website and partner with Amazon as an affiliate by referring your website traffic directly to Amazon.
Designer, Developer & Digital Marketer
David is a digital marketer and “web guy” with over a decade under his belt helping subject matter experts and individuals to use technology not only to survive but to thrive in the new digital ecosystem. He also documents his experiments, failures, and interesting tools at Mazepress.
There are a lot of ways you can make money on Amazon, and it seems the number of opportunities is always growing.
Most people are already aware that you can sell your own products on Amazon and ship them to customers, but many people aren’t aware of the other ways you can make money on Amazon.
- Becoming an Amazon affiliate and building your own website or blog.
- Dropship products direct to Amazon and sell using Amazon FBA (Fulfillment).
- Creating Amazon Alexa apps to sell to businesses, the demand for this skill is growing.
- Selling and setting up Amazon AWS and S3 services like web and video hosting.
- Learn how to create Amazon Sumerian spaces, this could be a big service in the future as VR and AR grow in popularity.
- Amazon Merch – Sell Amazon print-on-demand merchandise on the Amazon Marketplace.
Expect Amazon to create even more opportunities to make money on their website in the coming years.
Rachel Richards is the best-selling author of Money Honey. She is a former financial advisor, real estate investor, professional speaker, and business owner.
Most people don’t know that Amazon has a Print-On-Demand (POD) platform called Amazon Merch. POD means that you can set up products for sale but that you don’t have to carry an inventory. Instead, products are generated or printed after the sale is made. This reduces inventory and financial risk to you, the store owner, which is brilliant!
You create designs to go on products that Amazon already offers (like T-shirts, hoodies, Popsockets) and wait for a sale to be made. Then you sit back and collect royalties without ever directly handling the product. In the past, there has sometimes been a waiting list to sign up for Merch, but anyone can sign up for an account for free. This is a valuable and mostly unknown way to make money on Amazon.
Marc Andre
Marc has been working online full-time since 2008. In addition to an Amazon-based private label business, he’s also built online businesses in the web design, photography, and finance industries. He’s the founder of the personal finance blog VitalDollar.com.
One of the best ways to make money with Amazon is by starting a private label brand. With private labeling you will hire a manufacturer to create a product with your logo or branding on it. You don’t have to create the product yourself or have any experience with manufacturing.
It’s easy to find manufacturers for just about any type of product on Alibaba.com. You then create a seller account on Amazon, create a listing for your product, and send the inventory to Amazon, and they will handle all of the order fulfillment and shipping through their FBA program.
You’re outsourcing all of the manufacturing and fulfillment, so there’s potential for somewhat passive income. My wife and I created a private label brand in 2015 and made $100,000+ profit in our first 12 months. We sold the business in 2017 for a six-figure amount.
Shilpi Singh
Shilpi Singh works at CedCommerce as a content writer. She holds a graduate degree in journalism and mass communication and aims to provide precise, well-researched content to readers.
Amazon has established itself as a robust e-commerce platform globally. What makes it different from the rest of the marketplaces is its capability to absorb everyone associated on its platform by offering various services for mutual financial benefits.
Here are some ways to supplement your income with Amazon:
Enroll in FBA – Fulfillment by Amazon grants Prime eligibility to your products and increases your chance of winning the Buy Box. Sellers and vendors can also enroll in the Amazon Advertising console, a great in-house marketing tool.
Amazon Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing is a great way to make a commission-based income. Market and advertise products on Amazon from your website or video channel and get a commission on every product sold through your website.
Amazon Services – This allows you to offer services, such as grocery delivery, to people in your local area.
Amazon Handmade – You can earn a good amount by selling unique handmade products. Your creativity can reach many customers and generate a good income at the same time.
Dropshipping – Buy low and sell high. You can leverage from sites that ship products in bulk at the lowest price and then sell them on Amazon.
Private Labeling – Private labeling helps you stand out from the rest of the pack. By using Amazon Brand Registry, you have full control over your products and listings. Trademarked products also protects you from counterfeiting or other tricks by dishonest sellers.
Amazon Vine – Even if you are not a seller or vendor on Amazon, you can still make money in an indirect way. Under this program, Amazon invites some of its influential reviewers to participate. The winning reviewer is given free merchandise from Amazon.
Work From Home – If ease and comfort is your priority, you can start working for Amazon, either on a part-time or full-time basis and earning a reasonable supplementary income.
This is a crowdsourced article. Contributors are not necessarily affiliated with this website and their statements do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this website, other people, businesses, or other contributors.
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