we're going to share with you what Taylor sells on Amazon how he did it in every single cost he had to start his business including his design cost his startup cost and everything else but make sure you stay till the end of the video because at the end of this video we're going to share with you the three biggest mistakes that Taylor Made when starting his Amazon business including one big mistake that cost him over $122,000 and I was so sad when I heard about this and make sure you pay attention so you don't make this same mistake Taylor tell us what do you sell and how do did you start your Amazon business I was a full-time nurse during the pandemic I was facing some pretty serious burnout and I realized that my entire income was riant on my employer uh I wanted to learn how to build my own passive income stream and nurse part-time so I joined Travis's program and learned about a tool called helium 10 which helps you find profitable products to sell on Amazon and the first product I found was a cat tracking collar that uses either an air tag or a tile sticker tracking device and from there I went through Travis's Amazon FBA program and learned how to launch this product on Amazon and we're going to show you in less than a minute how Taylor was able to start his Amazon business but if you're new to the channel my name is Travis I've done over $7 million in online sales on Amazon and make sure to smash the like button because right now we're going to show you step bystep how you can launch your own Amazon business and the first step for you to sell a product on Amazon is to find a product to sell on Amazon how did you find your product we talked about it a little bit earlier but let's go into a little bit more detail yeah so I use the program called helium 10 uh it's an online software that gives you the details behind all of Amazon's listing very powerful and by searching keywords on helium 10 I was able to find my product and go from there and the key thing to remember is that Amazon is just a search engine people go to Amazon to search for things they want to buy and helium 10 will tell you exactly what people are searching how much did this cost you helium 10 is normally $97 a month but I use Travis's coupon code to get a discount and there's a link down below I've got the hookup if you want to use that coupon code or sign up for the free plan you can click on the link Down Below in the description but the next step after you found the product you want to sell was you had to get molds made to actually create the product how much did that cost you yeah the molds actually cost me $0 because I have a 3D printing machine and I was able to mock up the mold files on my CAD software at home and then 3D print my own uh demo products um from my 3D printer so it cost me zero the next step after you had the mold was to pay $50 to get the logo in the packaging that's pretty cheap to be able to spend $50 and get the logo in the packaging how' you find your uh designers yeah it is pretty cheap and it's easy to do I just went on Fiverr and upwork a couple gig sites and found Freelancers who could design it for me was 50 bucks I sent them a simple mockup of what I had in mind they came back with a lot of different examples to choose from and I picked my favorite the next step is Taylor spent $100 getting a DBA and DBA stands for doing business as and it allows you to open up a business bank account and legally create a business why did you choose a DBA versus an LLC good question the LLC is just a little bit more involved uh the DBA was faster for me to get up and selling and cheaper so that's the route I went and an LLC stands for limited liability company and I'd recommend an LLC if you're selling something where you might get sued a consumable product or something like that because it provides legal protection but a DBA is fine to get started how did you start your DBA I actually just went on Legal Zoom another easy online service and they took care of it for me the next step to selling on Amazon is to get your product manufactured and you spent over $112,000 manufacturing your product that's a lot more than most people let's start off first off how did you find a manufacturer for this product because it's kind of a unique product right so I went on alibaba.com again browse through that website and I actually reached out to several manufacturers got quotes um submitted them some ideas of what I had in mind and I went with who I thought was the best option usually an initial production run will cost a couple thousand yours was $112,000 why why was it so much more than maybe other products essentially I wanted to produce color variations and so when I wanted to make the color variations it increased the minimum order quantity or theq that I had to produce and every manufacturer when you're working with them they're going to have a minimum order quantity you can't just say hey can you make three of this product so because I had this custom order request they require that I make 2,000 units wow and so how many different colors did you have three I had three different colors so instead if you would have just had one color it would have been 2,000 units but instead it was 6,000 units total exactly yeah so you could have cut down your cost by a third your startup cost if you would have only had one color why did you want to start with three colors versus just starting with one color well I was pretty ambitious off the gates and uh I think that was one of the mistakes I made but essentially it seemed like a lot of the volume that was selling on Amazon were these top three color variations and so I wanted to get out there right out of the gate with these three most popular colors and we'll talk about why I think that's actually a mistake later in this video but the next cost you had once your product was done being manufactured over in China was to get it shipped into the United States how much did you spend on shipping I did C shipping so I think my shipping was only around $500 and part of the reason for this was I actually worked with the manufacturer to have it shipped and this is a term called DDP or deliver Duty is paid uh which means that the manufacturer was responsible for shipping the product to me and so there's two options when you're shipping from overseas you can either do air shipping which is going to be faster but it's going to be a lot more expensive or you could do C- shipping which is going to be slower but it's also going to be cheaper so at this point you actually have the physical products but you still need to add it to Amazon you need to create a listing and one of the first parts of creating a listing is getting photos made how much did you spend on your photos no I spent about $200 on my photos I wanted really high quality work done I actually sent product to a professional photographer for him to make those photos and once you have your photos another expense you're going to have is buying UPC codes and UPC stands for Universal product code this is the barcode that they scan at Walmart or at any store and every product in the world has these barcodes and you have to buy them how much did you spend on your barcodes I think I spent about $250 on my first set of UPC codes and $250 will get you a pack of 10 barcodes which means that you had a bar bar code for all three of your different colors of products plus seven extra ones that you could use for future products and once you have your barcode and your main images you can click on your Amazon seller account click add listing and you're going to create a title for your product you're going to create all the bullet points add your main images and all your side images and at this point you have an Amazon listing there's a couple other fees though before you start selling on Amazon another one is the Amazon seller account fee how much did you spend on that that's I think less than $40 a month just to have that account up and running and another thing that a lot of people don't think about is getting a trademark for your logo and if you get a trademark this will give you brand registry on Amazon which will give you some protection so that people won't copy your product and it gives you enhanced features how much did you spend on your trademark I spent $250 on the trademark which is money well spent because like Travis said you get that updated content and your listings really stand out and how did you go about getting a trademark is that complicated to do so I opted to do it myself through the the trademark and patent office I just went on their website filled out the form Travis has a very good write up on how to do that yourself if you want to but another option is you can hire a legal professional to file that for you and if any of these steps throughout this whole process seems too intense at the end of this video I'm going to be giving you a free eight hour course that'll show you step by step how to start your own Amazon business but at this point Taylor's ready to launch on Amazon and in just a minute we're going to share with you exactly how much money he made in his first month selling on Amazon but let's quickly recap at this point you spent over $14,000 just to get your Amazon business up and running how are you feeling are you scared nervous I was a little nervous not going to lie it was a chunk of change for me to invest but I was also really excited to have that product on the way uh and when it showed up I was even more excited cuz it looked great and now it's finally time for Taylor to launch his product on Amazon and in his first month ever selling I think anything online right right first time first time ever made $2,400 in sales on Amazon but revenue is not profit there was a lot of different expenses the first expense that you had when selling on Amazon is the cost of the products you actually sold how much money did you spend on those products so the actual product cost of those units that I sold was around $430 the next fee when selling on Amazon that a lot of people don't consider is the Amazon selling fee and when you're selling a product on amazon.com you have to pay 15% of whatever your price is to the Amazon platform just for selling a product through their website now that sounds like a lot of money but keep in mind Amazon has over 300 million Prime customers worldwide they last year spent billions of dollars in marketing and every single month they're getting over 2.4 billion people coming to their website so how much money did you spend in that Amazon selling fee in this first month that first month the fee was around $360 another fee that a lot of people don't consider is the Amazon FBA Pick and Pack fee and the way that Amazon FBA which stands for fulfilled by Amazon works is you send the products that you want to sell on Amazon into the Amazon warehouse and when you get an order on Amazon's website Amazon will pick pack and ship your product out to the customer but you do have to spend some money on the Amazon FBA Pick and Pack fee how much money did you spend on that fee that fee was a little over $11,000 which sounds like a lot but back in the old days when I was first selling online you'd actually have to go to the Post Office yourself you'd have to pay for the shipping yourself and it ends up being around the same price as if you were to ship actually sometimes it's cheaper than if you were to ship it yourself on top of that when when selling on Amazon there's just other Amazon fees things like receiving fees storage fees how much money did you spend in those other fees about $140 on those other miscellaneous fees and the last thing that a lot of people don't talk about and this is an optional cost is paying for PPC and PPC stands for payperclick advertising on Amazon and this is a way for you to advertise your product so that it shows up at the top of the search results and you pay every time someone clicks on your ad and how much money did you spend in your first month on PPC my first month I spent almost $11,200 on PPC and in total in your first month ever selling on Amazon how much money did you make I lost $987 my first month what happened why did you lose money in this first month primarily it was that PPC cost so you'll hear this from other people but there's a learning curve when it comes to learning how to advertise on Amazon and I definitely learned that first month that sometimes your PPC cost can get a little out of hand now things are going to get better so keep paying attention but something to keep in mind is usually you are going to lose money at first with PPC but you're paying for knowledge you're paying for information what's going to happen is you're going to spend $1,200 on ads and some of them are going to work but most of them aren't so then the next month you're going to turn off all the ones that don't work and you're going to double down on the ones that do work which brings us to month two where Taylor did over $8500 in sales that's over four times more than you did in your first month but that doesn't necessarily mean that he's profitable yet so let's break down all the numbers and see did if you actually made a profit in your second month so we had the product cost how much did you spend in product cost about $950 the Amazon selling fee was around $1,200 Pick and Pack fee was just under $2,300 and then we have all the other Amazon fees receiving you know all that kind of storage 130 bucks and then the dreaded PPC how much money did you spend in PPC $2,000 so you actually spent more money in PPC this time but in total when we subtract tracked out all the cost how much money if any did you make in profit I was profitable with $1,300 that second month how did you feel about that so I was really excited yeah yeah and this actually took care of the first month so now your net profit for your first two months because the first month you lost 1,000 this month you made $1,300 so what changed in this second month it was really that advertising spend I got a lot smarter with how I spent that money and it paid off yeah be very careful a lot of people just turn on the auto campaigns they just turn everything off and they forget to check it and they end up spending too much money so even though you spent $2,000 you ended up being profitable and in month three Revenue stayed around the same at around $8,100 and let's break down what was the product cost for this month product cost here was around $960 and then we had the Amazon selling fee $1,200 Amazon FBA Pick and Pack fee $2,300 the uh all the other Amazon fees just over $100 and then PBC this time how much was that $1,350 so it was a little bit lower this time and in total how much profit did you make in your third month ever in this third month ever selling on Amazon I made $1,500 in profit so now you're 3 months in you're averaging about $1,500 a month in profit how are you feeling are you feeling like this is a viable way to make money online and seeing the ball get rolling like this it's just hard to compare the first time ever selling on Amazon and already I was seeing some results and during this time how much work are you doing good question uh I was still spending a lot of time checking those PPC ad campaigns making sure I wasn't overspending and dialing those in as I go and do you know how much money was actually being generated from the PPC campaigns like if you were to turn those off would you still be making profit I believe with the keyword that I had yes I still was getting organic sales and that's something to keep in mind is that a lot of times you spend a little bit of money on PPC in the beginning to get your listing going but you'll still be making money even if you turn off all your PPC and you weren't really doing any other work other than PPC so if you stopped doing PPC this would B basically be passive income at this point right absolutely absolutely and just like Travis said once you get that organic ranking the product's selling without you needing to spend money now we're going to share with you the three biggest mistakes that Taylor Made and pay attention because he made one mistake that's so easy to make and I don't want you to make this same mistake but before we do that to quickly recap how much in total in your first three months have you made in revenue and then how much in profit about yeah so Topline Revenue we did $119,000 in sales and the profit from that was just under $2,000 and it seems like profits going to be doubling moving forward every single month right yeah that's how it's looking and that's how it's played out in the months since then and that leads us to the three biggest mistakes that Taylor Made and if you're thinking about selling on Amazon pay attention these are very common mistakes that new sellers make and I don't want you to make the same ones and the first mistake that Taylor Made was starting out with too many skews and SKS for those at home that don't know it stands for stock keeping units basically just means variation was that a mistake in your mind or what do you think absolutely abely absolutely mistake because having all those SKS meant I had to order a lot of product off the bat we talked about theq and my minimum order quantities were so high that I ended up having so much inventory that I was paying to have Amazon store that inventory for me I always recommend just starting out with one skew so in this case Taylor could have started with just one color see if that sold see if you could actually make money with it and then if it works then go to a second color in a third color but Taylor took a really big gamble and I see a lot of new sellers saying well I need to start out with three different flavors or three different things and you don't you only need to start out with one this is called an MVP or minimal viable product you just want to start out with something simple and test the market and as Taylor also said when you have three different SKS you have to pay for storage in all three of them and basically having three different SKS is like having three different businesses because one of those is going to run out of inventory before the others will and then you're going to have to go order more of that and you're going to have to keep track and inventory of everything and that can get complicated but that brings us to the second mistake that you made and that was that you didn't start sooner want to talk about that right yeah and this kind of piggybacks off that same initial mistake really because I had such a large number of units being produced that production lead time the time it took the manufacturer to make those products was a lot longer so it just took longer to make all the products it was longer to ship all the products and then it was longer to get all those listings up all in all this delay cost me about $1,500 just because I wasn't selling every single month you're waiting to start your Amazon business you're losing out on money for instance I had the idea for my first Passion product a year before I actually launched it and then once I launched it I was making $10,000 in profit every single month which means if I would have launched my business a year earlier I would have made an extra $120,000 if Taylor would have launched his business a month earlier he'd have an extra 1,500 bucks profit sitting in his bank account so keep in mind that as you're waiting as you're struggling with analysis paralysis you're actually losing money most people think the only way to lose money in business is to spend money it's not true you're losing out on money just by sitting around and that brings us to the third mistake and this is one of the the biggest mistakes that you made and that was that you made a mistake with the listing what was the mistake you made with the listing right and this again goes back to my initial mistake of launching so many SKS my UPC codes didn't get fact in correctly into each of my listings and so what happened was my product was actually listed as a generic product I wasn't able to get it in brand registry which I spent all that money establishing to begin with which dampens your sales and then trying to fix the the problem with the listings I actually had my listing deleted and so I wasn't making any sales and this is a nightmare to have to deal with but it's something easy to avoid if you just keep it simple and you follow all the steps and it sounds like these are a lot of M mistakes and that maybe Taylor hasn't made as much money as he initially would have wanted to but how are you feeling at this point so yeah even though it sounds like this has been a train wreck it's actually been fantastic I'm really excited I'm really optimistic and I've learned so much from these mistakes that I've actually been able to go on use that knowledge and I've since launched five more products all of which have been profitable and we'll be talking about those in a future video but if you want help starting your own Amazon business I do have an Amazon FBA program I ALS o have a free 8 Hour Amazon FBA video that you can watch right here it's a free course where I share a little bit of the information that's in my paid program you can click on that video I'll see you in the next video and thanks for watching
