Creating an Amazon Store

Setting up your own Amazon store and selling products is extremely satisfying and a good source of supplementary income for any teenager. Here, I wanted to tell you about my journey, and give you guys an overview of what it involves and some tips around the pitfalls.

Setting up your Amazon Store

Creating my amazon store was A LOT more complicated than I thought it would be. First of all, you need to be at least 18 years old to start one. Since I was only 15, I had to do it through my parents, using their ID.

I found it fairly complex to set the store. But, I battled through it step by step, celebrating each small win. You do not need your parent’s help, pretty much all the information you need is online. I found this Youtube video pretty helpful. You probably want to start selling in the US first, so the Professional seller option is not a necessity. The professional seller account charges you a monthly fee and doesn't take commission but initially it is probably not worth it at all. Once you start digital advertising you will need this option though, which I will talk about later.

Deciding on what products to sell

Obviously, if you want to sell a product on Amazon you first have to figure out what you are going to sell. The first thing you want to do is think about your target demographic and what products they would find useful, as well as trends in the world. In my case, I was in 10th grade when I started my Amazon store and Covid-19 has recently began spreading. So, I considered the impact the pandemic would have on what people would want to buy.

My first idea was to sell face masks, of course! However, they were nowhere to be found, even for importing, so I scratched that idea fast. Then, I noticed the working from home trend and started thinking about what I can sell to people who are working from home. After some research online, analyzing what other people search Google Trends (useful!), looking at the rankings and sales of various Amazon products, I decided to sell desk humidifiers.

How to source your products

I learned from various sources and Youtube videos that Alibaba.com is where most entrepreneurs buy their products from. I spent a few days searching on Alibaba for various desktop humidifiers. I was looking for functionality, aesthetic appeal, and, of course, a good price. Other important factors to consider were the minimum quantity that they sell, whether or not they send a sample prior, and their shipping price.

I then found the perfect one that was sleek, included a light and fan, and was cheaper than the other options. Before buying a product, you must buy one sample to make sure that it is quality and not “clickbait”. I did this, and I was very pleased with the product and decided it was the one. But this was only the beginning.

Negotiations

I started my negotiations via sending a message to the seller on Alibaba.com. I did this at a fairly late hour since there is a time difference between US and Asia and I wanted to message them at a reasonable hour on their end. The responded right away and sent me their number to start text messaging on WhatsApp. If you want to buy products from Alibaba.com, I strongly suggest getting the WhatsApp app because that is the main form of communication used by people outside of the United States.

When negotiations started, the seller was trying to offer me outrageous prices, particularly on shipping, claiming that it was necessary to get it shipped by plane. I knew this wasn’t the case and asked to get it shipped by boat, a much cheaper but slower option. After some more back and forward texting we agreed on the quantity and price.

Receiving products and sending them to Amazon for listing (frustrating!)

After receiving the products, I hand checked each box to make sure none of them were damaged and no pieces were missing. Each product also required some assembly as some pieces (mostly attachments) came outside the box.

To list the product, I had to measure and weigh them all and enter all that information to the product page. I also took some pictures. There are some apps you can use to remove/blur the background, but for the humidifier I used regular photos I took with my iPhone.

I wanted to sell my products via Amazon prime, it is called FBA, Fulfillment by Amazon. I thought 2 day shipping and ease of returns would give my store an edge over the competition. For this, you need to ship all your products to Amazon first with individual barcodes. I labeled all of them, got the shipment label from Amazon and shipped.

It took 1-2 weeks for products to arrive to Amazon. However, when the listing became online I was surprised. The product was combined with another similar product, but a different color etc, and I could not modify any of the description and photos of my own listing. This was pretty frustrating. After many online searches and Youtube videos I could not find out how to fix this. Also, the Amazon help pages were not very helpful....

After some digging, I was able to reach out to customer support via email. Initially, they did not understand my problem, it took many emails to explain. The process was slow, it took 1-3 days to get a response each time. After understanding that they wrongly combined my product with another similar product, I tried to find a way to resolve that. But it turns out that it was not possible. So, they had to mail back my entire order and I had to relabel and send them. This back and forth took many weeks, and definitely taught me a lesson around perseverance.

After I reshipped the products back to Amazon, it took about 2 weeks for them to re-list it and show it as Prime in stock. When it start selling and getting the first few positive reviews, it was super satisfying.

Maintaining the store

I have to say, listing products was very challenging but after that it is relatively easy. Sometimes you get customer questions, and answer them. Occasionally you get returned products. But other than that, it provides a nice steady side income. I also designed my own product to sell on my Amazon store and applied for a trademark, which is a prerequisite for advertising self designed products. I will tell you about all this in other articles!