FBA is the biggest upside of selling on Amazon - Amazon does all the work while you sit back and earn the big bucks.
While there is a degree of truth to this statement, one thing people don’t realize is how long it takes for your inventory to become available for sale.
I concluded in last week’s post that on average it takes 3-4 weeks for the whole process to sell an item, from when you buy it to Amazon shipping it to the customer. When you factor in the amount of time it takes for you to get paid out from an order (2 weeks from the shipping date), you’re waiting 6 weeks to get your money back in some cases.
At scale, this doesn’t really matter because you’re always sending in new inventory and in a cycle of constant cash flow. But for the newer sellers out there, it can be difficult to grow when all of your capital is tied up in a single FBA shipment and you’re just waiting to get paid out by Amazon.
In this article I want to explain an underrated aspect of selling on Amazon and why you (yes, you reading this right now) should be doing it. If you’re a beginner and you ignore this strategy, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.
Let’s talk about Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM).
FBM Intro + Why You Should Do It
FBM is pretty straightforward - instead of shipping all of your inventory to Amazon, you keep it at your home and ship individual orders out to customers. If you’ve sold on eBay before, it’s pretty much the same process.