What It ACTUALLY Costs To Sell On Amazon FBA In 2022

hey everyone i'm tatiana and today's video is an updated 2021 version of how much does it cost to start an amazon fba business so i've been doing these videos for the last few years did one in 2018 2019 2020 and here we are today 2021 and my purpose here is not to try and convince you to start an amazon fba business i'm not going to be biased with what i share with you today so there's not going to be any any manipulation of numbers uh trying to make it seem like it costs less than it actually does um the fact is that i want you guys to understand what the reality of starting this business looks like and the more details you have the better you're able to determine whether or not it's the right fit for you and this is just this is a wonderful business selling on amazon is extremely lucrative there are many different methods to selling on amazon many different models fba is one of those private labeling is one of those but this one although there is no ceiling and that's the beauty of it you can really earn as much like there's no limits with what you can earn when you build your own brand however the barrier of entry is that there is a minimum cost and not everyone can afford to start this business so by the end of this video you're going to get clarity on how much it's going to cost to start this business just to get the ball rolling and then you can start reinvesting those profits into the business and start growing the business um so i'm going to give you the facts here and let's get started because it's going to be a bit of a long video all right so i have two categories over here i have the mandatory and the optional category i'm going to be starting over here with the mandatory category these are just fees these are costs that i believe are going to be pretty much a must for everyone starting this business so in order to sell on amazon you do have to be a member of their seller platform and it costs it costs you money you have two options you have the option of becoming a professional seller or an individual seller now the professional seller pays a monthly fee which is 39.99 and the individual seller still pays a fee they just don't pay monthly fee so they pay the fee per item that they sell so usually you know if you're selling us a good amount of uh products per month it makes more sense to pay the 39.99 membership fee rather than paying per item because that actually adds up if you're not really selling much like a couple units a month then yeah you don't need to get the professional so i'm going to put down here 39.99 as the membership fee now in the past i used to recommend starting with an individual seller account set up your seller central account and then later once you're ready to ship your inventory to amazon then upgrade it to the professional selling account so that you can save 39.99 per month i don't recommend doing that anymore and the reason being is because i found that it's actually become quite difficult to upgrade your account in the past it was simple they would just easily upgrade your account but now when you request to upgrade from individual to professional sometimes they'll do a bit of an account audit and it can actually take weeks or months for this upgrade and this is you know time is money especially if you have inventory ready to be shipped to the amazon warehouse with fba you're going to want to get that upgrade soon so i recommend just starting off with the professional account it's just going to be much less hassle for you and the last thing you want is issues with your seller central account because you're really dependent on amazon okay now the second thing that i'm going to recommend is a product research tool so in the past before everyone knew about selling on amazon the way that us old people would do product research is we would go to amazon and we'd browse through amazon catalog page by page by page and trying to do some manual math to figure out which products are selling well but over the last six years there have been a multitude of amazing tools that service amazon sellers that just make your life so much easier and help you find incredible products now you've probably already heard of two of the most popular tools one is jungle scout and the other is helium 10. these are two of the most popular product research tools but they do far more than just product research so i do highly recommend them now i'm actually going to be putting this in the mandatory category and although it's technically optional believe me guys whatever you're paying for these tools is going to be worth it because they're going to help you find products better quality products they're going to help you find products that you probably wouldn't be able to find doing some manual research and uh also it's gonna save you so much time and you know what if you are working full-time right now and you're doing this on the side if you can only commit an hour two hours per day or per night then you wanna make the most of your time and these tools will certainly help you so i have put two product research tools here jungle scout uh you can get it for a hundred and forty nine dollars for three months and that's what the 25 discount code if you use the link in the description box of this video that's what's going to get you that 25 discount code otherwise you're going to be paying full price with helium 10 you can get it for 48.50 per month and that's what the 50 discount code so again these are my affiliate links they're going to be linked in the description box below um you'll be able to get these discounts uh if you use those links um so i'm going to use jungle scout just for the sake of this example uh jungle scout for three months all right so the next thing that you're going to have to pay for invest in are samples so once you've used your product research tools you found the product that you want to sell on amazon you've contacted suppliers now you're going to need to get samples from the suppliers i recommend contacting as many suppliers as possible because obviously you know the more suppliers you contact the higher your chances of success with any one of those suppliers but once you've narrowed down that list to your top three suppliers i recommend getting at least three samples so one three different samples from different suppliers and the reason being is because your goal on amazon is you want to make sure that you're selling the highest quality product it's you know selling on amazon is not like how it was you know a number of years ago where you can get away with selling a low quality product nowadays everyone's got a high quality product on there and if your product is not meeting the standards the quality standards you're just not going to have success so get samples from three different suppliers you're going to notice immediately the differences when you receive those samples which one's higher quality which one's less poor quality i also recommend that you buy your competitors products so go to amazon find out who the best sellers are of that particular product that you're going to be selling buy their products so that you have something to compare it to you can compare the manufacturer's products with your top competitor product and then you can tell okay if this is the best seller obviously this is a product that people like to buy obviously it's high quality let me compare it to the samples from the manufacturer so how much your sample is going to cost you it depends each supplier has their own policies some suppliers will send them to you for free you just have to pay for shipping some suppliers will make you pay for the samples um and so i'm going to put on average about fifty dollars per sample so if you get three samples that's about a hundred and fifty dollars and usually the fifty dollars is including the shipping and what you can also do to kind of save money on the shipping so if you're if you're ordering these samples internationally say from china and you ship a sample from china to the us by air um you know that can add up so you can actually reconcile you can hire a company to store all of your samples in one shipment so that all of your samples can arrive at a facility and then they all get shipped to you in one shipment so that you save on shipping costs so that's an option but i'm not going to write that down so here we go samples so about a hundred and fifty dollars for all three samples all right so now we are on to inventory this is going to be by far where most of your money is going to be spent it's going to be on your inventory but it's really hard to give you just an estimate on how much your inventory will cost because it completely depends on the product that you choose to sell on amazon when i first started selling on amazon i was broke i really did not have much money and so i looked to sell one of the cheapest products i could possibly find that still had demand and i was able to source that from my manufacturer for 20 cents per unit and it was also super lightweight so the shipping was extremely inexpensive so you know you have the option of buying a product that's 20 cents a unit but there's also products that you can pay for fifteen dollars a unit or twenty dollars a unit so it really does depend on what you choose and this is where you have to you can be smart about this it depends on what your budget is if you've got lots of money to invest in this business that's great i mean the more the merrier and you know you can choose products that are more expensive and it might be advantageous for you to do that because a lot of people maybe can't afford to source product that's ten dollars a unit twelve dollars a unit and if you can that just means that there may be less competition for those products and also you're probably going to be making a higher profit margin but if you have a tight budget and you still want to get started you want to get your foot in the door you want to start learning this business you still can you're just going to have to look for products that are a little bit less expensive that you can manufacture at a cheaper price like i did so the option is yours the choice is yours you just have to be intelligent about when you're sourcing products or what you're looking for so i'm gonna say like on average i would say most people buy get products that are about five dollars per unit so that's what i'm going to use for this example here with an estimate about five dollars per unit and it depends also on how much inventory you're going to order so oftentimes when you reach out to a manufacturer they're going to tell you their moq which stands for minimum order quantity and that minimum order quantity is the minimum order that you have to place so for some it's 100 units for others it's 500 units for others it may be a thousand units now you can negotiate a little bit with this um but you know not too much uh you can try and negotiate and be like hey you know this is the first time i sell this product on amazon and especially if you're not making like modifications to the product then you are able to negotiate a little bit more and lower that moq if it's high but at the same time you don't just want to order the bare minimum amount of inventory you do have to forecast and try and um forecast how many units you're going to be selling and because you really don't want to go out of stock that's probably one of the biggest struggles when people first start selling on amazon and they're having initial success and then they're out of stock and it can backfire on you you know it's not the end of the world it's a good problem to have it's better than not making any sales at all but at the same time if you're getting gaining momentum and all of a sudden you have to halt that stops that can be detrimental because also amazon doesn't like that amazon wants their customers to have the best experience possible and if they see that customers are clicking on your listing but then they're not able to buy your product that can actually hurt your rank so you have to be intelligent about how many units you order but you also have to consider what your budget is so for this example i'm going to say five dollars a unit 500 units i think that's very realistic you could do less you could do more but i think this is a very realistic estimation for inventory cost all right so the inventory is going to cost about 2500 again it can be more it can be less i'm just trying to kind of play on average here okay the next cost your artwork so i'm going to start with your packaging your packaging design for your product now when you are sourcing with a manufacturer for the first time they're going to show you some basic packaging that's included with your product it's a very basic packaging that comes free at no additional cost for you and i would encourage you to go ahead and use that packaging at this point in time i don't think it's necessary to go and buy premium packaging and explore like a bunch of different packaging options unless you have the money to do that otherwise it's not the best use of your money right now because you have yet to prove your concept let's like make some sales first but what you can do as you can customize the packaging for your brand that is an option so the way that you would do that is oftentimes the supplier will provide you with like the dimensions of the packaging and then you can send those dimensions off to a graphics designer and give them some ideas of what you want your packaging to look like your color theme your font your logo what you want on the packaging the graphics designer will do the work for you now i recommend using a platform called fiverr.com i'll link it in the description box below i also made a video detailing how i use fiber and i show you a lot of the logos in the packaging that i've had created for my brand in the past so if you wanna sneak peek to see some of my sketches and some of the things that i've created through fiber you can click the link in the description box for that video but on fiverr the reason i recommend it is because it's extremely affordable you can get packaging logos artwork almost anything on there at a really great price and you just hire these freelancers who are quite talented um you just have to give them some direction so they are all graphics designers they're artists they they have talent they know what to do but if you give them some direction it really can help enhance the quality of the work that you receive sometimes fiverr gets a bad rap about how it's you get low quality work but that's never been my experience my experience has been if you give direction you can have really amazing quality work to date it's really the only place i use for logos design work all of that stuff so on fiverr you can get your packaging done for roughly 25 dollars okay i just realized i was standing right in front of the words that i was writing out for you guys so i hope you can see them okay so packaging is roughly 25 um i also included a logo on here you're going to want to get a logo made for your brand because you're just going to want to have that stuck on your on your branding that's going to be important for you the logo is 15 roughly on fiverr on fiverr you can get a logo for 15 they'll give you three different concepts and you just choose the one that you like best and you can ask them for revisions if you want you can also get a logo done for 500 from 99 designs so again like you can spend as little or as much as you want depending on what your what your budget is but my experience has been 15 will suffice for a great logo all right so the next thing we're going to talk about are your amazon photos so these are the photos that are going to be displayed on your amazon listings so when people search for your product they view your listing they look at your photos now your photos are extremely important probably one of the most important elements of your entire listing because you could have the best products in the world but if you don't know how to market them properly people aren't going to buy them and on amazon most people they don't actually take the time to read your description or your bullet points but they look at your photos and so your photos can make or break a sale and your photos are even more important than your packaging that's why for packaging i don't really recommend that you go all out with your packaging not at this time it's not the best use of your money because you have to think about it in retail if you were selling this product on walmart and someone was looking at the shelf and they were looking and trying to choose between your product versus someone else selling something similar then your packaging matters your packaging is everything your packaging might be the difference between someone grabbing your item or just like glancing over it but when it comes to e-commerce people aren't going to see your packaging but what they will see are the photos that you have displayed on amazon and you don't even have to include a picture of your packaging in those photos if your packaging doesn't look nice later down the road as you start making more money with your business and you have more profits that you can invest into other areas of the business to improve things then you can start working on the packaging and the reason you would do that is because it's going to help with your branding experience it's going to help the customers experience ultimately your goal as a seller is you want to make those customers as happy as possible you want to add so much value to them that they're overjoyed by the fact that they were able to purchase your product and so for example with my brand it took me two years before i stopped using the manufacturer's packaging and i upgraded to my own type of branding type of packaging and so then every product would be coming with this beautiful tissue paper that with gold font all these beautiful affirmations were written on it these cute little cards it even came with a free draw drawstring bag and so i i invested more into the packaging because i wanted my customers to feel a certain way when they open the product when they receive the product they feel like excited that they got the product they get certain vibes from it and in fact it actually helps with marketing because then when your packaging is great they want to share it with others because it elevates their status and whenever something's status elevating people share it with others and so i get tags on instagram and on facebook and people just sharing it with their friends because they enjoy the experience so it's not the priority right now if you're tight on money but down the road you can always improve that what is the priority are your amazon photos those are important and in the past i would recommend you know you can just take your own photos with your phone with your camera and that's good enough because that's what i did and again in the beginning when i started this business i really did not have much money i did everything myself literally i was the graphics designer i was the photoshop person i was the marketer i was the copywriter i was everything however uh nowadays the competition is higher on amazon and people know what they're doing and they've got amazing quality photos so don't skip out skip out on this this is important so if you use fiverr.com which again i'll be linked in the description box below you could pay around a hundred dollars for your amazon photos maybe like a hundred dollars two hundred dollars for your amazon photos or if you want a more premium service you could go to productphotography.com for example they are all about taking professional amazon photos it can get as expensive as 1295 dollars so again it can be as little or as much as you want but honestly i'm i'm good with the fiber photos and really my tip here if you want to save money on this what you can do if you have the latest iphone or just a quality camera you can take the pictures of your product yourself just make sure that they have amazing lighting perfect lighting on a solid background take the pictures of your product take it from different angles then what you can do is you can send it to a freelancer on fiverr for 3d rendering where they will render the product they'll photoshop it to make it look perfect and just perfect the product and enhance the quality remove the background so that it's on a white background and then you can send it to another person on fiverr to create the amazon images because essentially the images on amazon a lot of them it's just a lot of text on the images a lot of photoshop inserting the picture here inserting it into a lifestyle shot and so that way you can really save money if you don't want to send your products to a company like productphotography.com where they have a professional setup and they'll do all of that for you so there are ways that you can save money or if you don't even care to like do that work yourself you can outsource it so a hundred dollars for your amazon photos so the next one on the list are barcodes barcodes so these are the upc barcodes that you will need in order to sell on amazon in order to create your listing on amazon you will need a upc barcode which helps amazon identify your product now a barcode in the past people would buy these things called resale barcodes and they were super inexpensive because they're not technically authentic barcodes but they kind of do the job and amazon would accept them and those barcodes were really cheap like 10 bucks for like 20 barcodes but since a couple of years ago amazon has announced that the only barcodes that they recognize and accept are gs1 barcodes i'll link the website for that in the description box below so if you're going to be buying a barcode for your product to sell on amazon you have to buy it from gs1 otherwise you risk you know not following amazon's terms of service and you risk your listing being suspended or possibly even your account being deactivated so it you know you take if you want to save money you get the speedybarcodes.com or or just resale barcodes you can but do it at your own peril and so the cost of the barcode is 250 and i know it's a lot and that's why a lot of people are very hesitant about it and asking do i have to get that barcode and it's it's really up to you but amazon's terms of service says yes you do um and it's 250 but not for one barcode it's one to ten barcodes so technically you can get 10 barcodes but if you're just selling one product you only need one barcode because you don't need a different barcode for each product if you're selling markers a pack of markers and you have a thousand units it's one barcode for the thousand units not each one of those thousand units needs a different barcodes so you'd pay 250 dollars to get one barcode you'd only need one pro barcode per product sold on amazon per product listing so 250 is what i'm going to put here and i also have to mention that there's a 50 annual fee for gs1 to renew your barcode which is kind of silly but that's just the price of it okay so the next two on the list shipping and bond so how are you going to be shipping your products from your manufacturer to the amazon fba warehouse you have two options you have air shipment or you have c shipment if you're doing it internationally if you're sourcing locally then you'll just ship it via truck it's going to be inexpensive you can even use amazon's discounted carrier rates so if you are sourcing your products in the country in which you wish to sell then your shipping is going to be really inexpensive don't even worry about that if you're shipping internationally it's going to be more expensive so c or air those are your two options air is always going to be more expensive than c it's faster it's easier c can take about two months for your shipment to arrive depending on what country it's shipping from but you save a tremendous amount of money doing it that way so if you can plan ahead with your inventory anticipating your shipments and doing some proper inventory reporting so that you know when to order in advance then you're going to save a lot of money it's going to help with your profit margins if you can continuously ship by sea now for your first shipment i recommend shipping by air simply because it's simpler you want to get started as soon as possible with selling your products on amazon and you don't have to worry about the headaches of a c shipment however you have the option of doing it by sea as well i'm putting an estimate of about four hundred dollars for a shipment this is so so rough this estimate because it depends on your product entirely if you have a very lightweight product your shipping is going to be cheaper if you have a small product your shipping is going to be cheaper if you have a heavy product more expensive the dimensions are big or the dimensions are a wonky it's going to be more expensive so just keep that in mind when you are doing product selection that if you want to save on you know the shipping fees you're gonna also have to take that into account with the product that you pick because you might find a fabulous product but it's five pounds per unit um and that's just gonna eat your profit margins when it comes to the shipping now the next thing i put here is a bond so in order to ship your goods from one country to the next you're going to need a bond and bond costs about 85 per shipment or you can spend 500 for the bond and it works for the whole year so 500 per year i do the 500 per year because i do many many shipments per year if you're only doing a few shipments then the 85 dollars could work but if you're gonna be doing more than you know four shipments five shipments then you're definitely going to want to pay for the yearly bond rate which is 500 okay so the last thing on this list of the mandatory costs i'm putting the amazon ppc this stands for pay-per-click advertising now a lot of people might put that on the optional like you don't really need to advertise your product but honestly guys if you're not doing ppc when you first launch your product you are having a huge disadvantage you really want to turn on your amazon ppc learn how to do ppc not just the automatic campaigns but the manual campaigns so you're going to want to spend at least two hundred dollars just to get the ball rolling because you have to recognize that when you first launch your product on amazon your product's probably going to be on like the 30th page of the amazon search results and i don't know about you but for me as a customer i don't move past page three you know even page one sometimes i just want to make my buying decision as quick as possible i'm not going to go through 30 pages and so the beauty of ppc on amazon is that you pay amazon a certain fee and you can your product for whatever keyword you're paying for can show up on the first page as a sponsored product and the beauty of it is that you don't pay unless someone clicks on your listing so if someone sees your product on the first page even though technically your product should be shown on the 30th page you've but you've paid for a sponsored ad and they click it then you would pay for that click and so it's well worth the money because it's it allows you to get discovered by customers and especially when you're first getting started and you're ranked so poorly you want to get as close as possible to page one and the way that you do that is by getting those sales and getting those reviews so i'm putting that here in the mandatory category but you know you have to understand that ppc you know it's a bit it can be a bit frustrating because it can eat all of your money if you don't know what you're doing and sometimes it takes some money initial investment of money a few hundred dollars to really start to understand what your campaign strategy will be what your ad strategy is to figure out which keywords perform best which ones don't so it takes a little bit of plain around to figure out you know how to do your campaigns and requires a bit of investment so these are all of the things i have in the mandatory category and i'm going to put a total here for you okay so the total here is three thousand eight hundred and twenty eight dollars and eighty nine cents so this is what i calculated from the 39.99 amazon membership fee three months of jungle scout for a hundred 149 fifty dollars for product samples twenty five hundred dollars for inventory 25 for packaging fifteen dollars for your logo a hundred dollars for your amazon photos 250 for your barcode 400 for shipping 85 for the bond and 200 for your amazon ppc so the grand total is 3 828 now again this is more of an average um however i would say you know at minimum you want to have at least twenty five hundred dollars to get started that would be the minimum so you can get by with twenty five hundred dollars you're just gonna have to save a little bit of money with certain things um but i'd say you know to feel comfortable this is probably the the cost that you want to be looking at here so if you don't have this money right now i don't want you to feel discouraged i just want you to understand that this is the reality of the situation and it's better to not get started with this um because then you might get in over your head and things become expensive and you're no longer able to continue with your business and then it's a total loss um so it's better to save up you know maybe get a second job or just save some more money until you have enough to finally get started with this business and as i mentioned at the beginning of this video there are many other ways that you can start making money on amazon or online so that you can save that money to later invest into a private label business and the reason you want to do that is because these other business models yes they're great they can help you get cash faster and you know requires a bit less of an investment but the private label model tends to have one of the greatest opportunities in terms of really building a real brand where the sky is the limit and you can later sell those assets you can later sell the the brand um the company for seven figures even eight figures so the opportunity is huge here let's move on to the optional fees over here okay so the first thing i have here is a third party inspection fee for 300 now what this is when you find a manufacturer you place an order with the manufacturer you pay them your deposit and then when they tell you hey tatiana the goods are ready we're ready to ship the products wherever you want them to go amazon wherever before you ship those products out what you want to do is you want to hire a third-party inspection agency so this is a company that will come to your manufacturer's warehouse and they will inspect the products to make sure that they are up to the quality standard based on what you agreed upon initially with the contract and um the cost for this is roughly 300 it can be more or less depending on how many units you want them to inspect so you can have them inspect for example 10 of your inventory um so if you're selling you know if you order 500 units 50 units like 50 random units and inspect those and if they're great then great that they pass or you can have them inspect the entire inventory all 500 units so depending on how much what percentage of the inventory you want them to inspect it will cost more i would recommend that you know the reason you do this is because this is the first time you order from that supplier you you're yet you're building you're establishing a relationship you're brand new you don't know them they don't know you you haven't established a lot of trust yet you're building rapport so um you don't know if the products that they sent you with that sample are going to represent the products that are you know they manufactured for you and so you want to make sure that before you send those products to amazon that they are up to standard because if they're not and if they're low quality what's going to happen is they're going to arrive at the amazon warehouse customers are going to order them you're going to get negative reviews and that's the last thing you want as a brand new seller to start getting negative reviews because that's really just going to destroy your listing and your conversion rate and even seller performance metrics so um it's really worth getting an inspection at least for the first time that you place an order with this supplier maybe even the second time but beyond that it's not necessary because then you've established a level of trust and you don't necessarily need to do that so i put that there is optional some people choose not to do it they're good with just sending their products to the amazon warehouse or some people what they do is they send the products from the manufacturer to their house and they will personally inspect it themselves and then save the money so they go through the inventory check everything and then they send it to amazon's warehouse you should only do that if you live in the country where you're going to be selling your products so if you're going to be selling in the u.s then go ahead and send it to your house because it's going to be cheap for you to send it from your house to the amazon warehouse using amazon's discounted carrier rates but if you are going to be living in a different country uh than where you're selling then you don't want to do that because then you have to pay to ship it from your supplier to your house from your house to the to the uh warehouse and that's going to be very expensive if it's international shipping so um that's that i just thought about one thing that i mentioned i forgot to mention for you guys i remember in my 2020 video there's a lot of confusion about the barcodes uh and how do you get your your barcodes to your manufacturer how do they stick them on the products and i want to let you know that i filmed a video just for this i will link it in the description box below but in summary what you can do with your barcodes is you can either just send them to your manufacturer and your manufacturer will print them stickers and stick them on your products for you most of the time they won't charge for this or they might charge you per unit just depends on the manufacturer and your relationship with them sometimes they just want to give you something for free or what's better is that you actually send it to your your packaging graphics designer and they they embed the barcode into the packaging design and so that way when the packaging is printed it's already printed with the barcode embedded into the packaging that way there's no additional time used to stick the stickers onto the products or additional expense to have your manufacturer or amazon because amazon offers for 20 cents a unit they're gonna stick the barcodes on your product for you if you forgot to do it but that's quite expensive so that's pretty much how it's done but check out the video in the description box below if you're confused about barcodes especially when you start to understand that there's two different barcodes there's a upc barcode f and sku sticker it can be very confusing so my video will clarify that so the next one on the list is a freight forwarder a freight forwarder is going to help you facilitate your shipment so i strongly recommend that you choose to work with a freight forwarder if you're going to be shipping by sea because it's quite complex there's a lot of paperwork that needs to get done and also when your inventory is in a boat for like a month or two months you can start to get nervous especially if you've never shipped products before but when you work with a freight forwarder you have peace of mind because they're on top of it they're always monitoring they're checking up on things they're making sure that you know the products are going to get delivered and they also know to check for insurance and all of that stuff so i strongly recommend working with a freight forwarder if you're going to be shipping by sea if you ship by air not as many hassles you may not need one but you can still work with a freight forwarder for air shipping so they're gonna facilitate your shipment from a to to z um from from a to z from point a to point b and um the fee is anywhere between you know a hundred dollars to two hundred dollars for the brokers fee i put a hundred and twenty dollars here um just as an average and um you have to understand there's other there's some other costs like messenger fee and the duties oh i forgot to mention the duties those are things that you're going to have to also include from your cost with shipping are the duties because when you import anything into the united states or any country if you're importing from one country to the next there are going to be duties that you have to pay for that shipment how much the duties cost completely depends on what you're selling and the cost of what you're selling how much is it worth that inventory and so what you can do to try and estimate the duties is you can find out what what the hts code is for the product that you're selling and you can try and estimate the duties i'll put some links in the description for you guys if you want to try and estimate your duties so the freight forwarder here is about 120 bucks how do you find a freight forwarder you just do a google search but i will recommend for you my personal freight forwarder whom i've been working with for like the last five years they're an amazing company they're i think a relatively small company which is why i like them such personalized service honest rates and just really really amazing so i will recommend them they're called sea riders and you can email amazon seariders.com to inquire about their freight forwarding services they also have a bunch of other services and they can help you get your bond they can help you with your duties all of that stuff so i definitely recommend them i will put the email in the description box below and if you decide to work with them you can get twenty dollars off of your first freight uh off of the broker fee so that broker fee can be about a hundred dollars so you take twenty dollars off of the broker fee uh with your first shipment if you decide to work with them via my recommendation so um i'll put that here okay so amazon see writers.com 20 off if you mention my name all right so the next optional expense is an amazon fba training program now i put this here as optional because a lot of people do decide to start this business without any formal education or training however i wish i could put this in the mandatory category because it is my most genuine recommendation that you do invest in a training program this business this is a real business guys you're going to be investing nearly four thousand dollars to start this business and you want to make sure that you're starting this business with a solid foundation with a good understanding of what to do and there are so many moving pieces with this business it's there's more than meets the eye and the devil's in the detail and so i find that oftentimes people who they perform best when they can have step-by-step guidance otherwise they start to fall into analysis paralysis because they don't have the confidence and the certainty to know whether or not the decisions that they're making are the right decisions or to know what the next steps are so if you can do your research i'm not going to give you any like i'm not going to tell you what course to get but do your research because people leave reviews people are open and honest if they had a bad experience with a course they will post about it if they had a positive one they will post about it you can try and get referrals from people but do your research to find a comprehensive program something that's step by step that's very detailed and updated it's important because amazon's constantly changing their policies are constantly changing so you need a program that's updated now i put a thousand dollars to five thousand dollars here why because you can get a program for under a thousand dollars but believe me you get what you pay for and like i mentioned you're building a real business here you want the best education you can and i've been through a lot of amazon fba training programs i get free access to a lot of them because i have a lot of people that want me to promote their program on my youtube channel and so i go through their course and often times i'm just disappointed with what i see um but it's it's you know makes sense if you're buying a 300 course you can't expect them to be investing so much time and resources into creating that course so a thousand dollars to five thousand dollars is the price range i do have two recommendations for you after all the courses that i've been to two of them that have been my fav favorite throughout the years and i will link them in the description box below one of them that's at the one thousand dollar price range it's called marketplace superheroes and the one that's at the five thousand dollar price range is called the amazing sewing machine so yes they are they're very different but the amazing selling machine is the best recommendation i have but again you get what you pay for and if you can't afford the five thousand dollars then the marketplace superheroes would be my second recommendation that would be kind of a runner-up program but i do recommend that you invest in a program if you can't invest in a program don't have the funds to invest in one then i would say you know really do your research get my free training which is i have a four-part video series that anyone you guys can all access it go to tatianajames.com fba the link will be in the description box below in the free training that i provide for you guys i cover a lot of details about selling on amazon it's not a course so you're not going to get something comprehensive but it's enough to help you understand what you're going to need to do next and whether or not this is the right business model for you because it's not for everyone as i mentioned before so i do recommend that but it's an optional choice everything will be linked in the description box for you down below okay the next thing here is your product launch so there are many different tactics or techniques uh methods of launching your product on amazon to have initial success and you know one of those things you might do something like a viral launch where you kind of give your product away at a discount and then you get those initial sales and then oftentimes people come and leave you positive reviews so you kind of do some product giveaways you can work with influencers so that they can represent your pro your brand share your product with their following so there are different strategies here so i'm just putting this in here just for you to take into account you're going to need about 200 maybe worth of inventory maybe more depends on how much your product is to give away just throughout the product launch okay and then over here i have the trademark so trademarking your brand name this is not something that you have to do right away because if you think about it the purpose of trademarking your branding is to protect it so that nobody else can use that name but if you are just starting out your brand new seller you know you've made up your brand name chances are you know someone else isn't gonna randomly come up with that brand name at the point where you may want to consider trademarking it is when you start to become more of a popular seller on amazon you have competition people see your brand name and they can see if it's trademarked they might want to try and trademark your name so then it becomes more important to trademark your name once you start having some success with your brand also a reason why you might want to trademark your name is because on amazon there's something called brand registry and brand registry kind of registers registers you as a brand on amazon and you get certain perks from that for example you get enhanced brand content on your listings so if you've ever seen those listings where they have beautiful images and videos on their page they have something called brand registry and in order to apply for brand registry you need an active trademark so that's you may consider getting a trademark at that point keep in mind it does take up to six months to get your trademark approved so you may want to start factoring that in earlier on however it's not like the biggest priority right now now how much does it cost to trademark well in order to file your trademark it's 225 dollars per class a class is like a category so if you're trademarking for like kitchen utens utensils that would be like one class or if it's um you know like it depends on what it is that you're trademarking so about 225 dollars per class now if you live within the us um then you can trademark your your name yourself you have the right to do that and it's very easy to do it seems complicated on the website but honestly it's quite simple they have tutorials on the website i can also link the website down below for you with those tutorials however if you live internationally you are no longer allowed to trademark the name yourself you have to hire an attorney to trademark for you so that's where the attorney fees get come in here and to hire an attorney a regular attorney might be about a thousand dollars however you can use fiber you can use fiber to um to hire an attorney via fiber and if you hire an attorney by a fiver it's about 235 dollars for them to prepare the trademark and then you would go ahead and file it on your own so just take that into account that's how much it costs the last thing i'm going to mention is setting up a legal entity so if you wish to sell on amazon you don't have to set up a legal entity this is a corporation an llc ltd whatever you know entity you want to create it's not mandatory you can sell as a sole proprietor as an individual it's your choice it's recommended to set one up because there are usually tax advantages to setting up a business having write-offs for all of these expenses right otherwise you know you're personally going to be paying for these things so there are advantages to it but there is a cost to setting up an entity it depends on what state you live in and in states like kentucky it's like 40 bucks states like california it's 400 something like that so it depends on where you live and you don't need a lawyer or anything to set that up for you you can easily do it yourself so that's an optional expense you don't need one to sell on amazon but it is something to consider all right everyone so that wraps up this video these are the costs of selling on amazon i may have missed a thing or two here but i think that this is quite accurate here and again like it can be more or less than this but this would probably be about the average and so you know i don't want to discourage you with this video the purpose is just to share with you the reality of the situation um that this is a wonderful opportunity but you do need some cash to get started with this and it's better to have this cash available before you get started because again if you get started and then you don't have enough money to pay for your marketing or pay for you know different services or your shipping you know then you start to get caught and it becomes really challenging so hopefully this was helpful for you guys if you enjoyed it make sure you hit the thumbs up button leave me a comment in the comment section down below i would love to know about where you're at with your amazon fba business have you started it yet are you still doing research are you looking for products are you working with the manufacturer are you already selling how many products are you selling i always love to know more about you guys please share with me some information so i can get to know you better and if you haven't yet started your amazon fba business and you want help then as i mentioned earlier i have a four-part video training series that's absolutely free and you can get it by going to tatianajames.com fba or clicking the link in the description box below in that video series i really try and explain to you the whole process of selling on amazon i show you how to find products using jungle scout how to find the best products on amazon so it's quite uh explanatory and you're gonna get a lot of information through that and it's totally free so thank you so much for watching and i will see you in the next video check out all the links in the description box uh there are lots of resources there for you guys take care

Channel: Tatiana James

Views: 251,063

Keywords: Costs to sell on Amazon, amazon fba 2021, amazon fba for beginners 2021, how much it cost to sell on amazon, how to start selling on amazon, how to sell on amazon, how to sell on amazon 2021, cost of selling on amazon, fba fees explained, amazon fba fees, amazon fba fees 2021, amazon fba for beginners step by step guide, how to sell on amazon for beginners, how to sell on amazon fba for beginners 2021, how to make money online, amazon fba 2021 tips, Tatiana James FBA

Id: S21AhuFRy_U

Length: 48min 24sec (2904 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021