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We talk about this a lot, but what is the best way to speed up your financial independence journey? Make. More. Money. And that is why we post a lot about side hustles, online businesses, and ways that you can increase your income and get more cash flow into your wallet. More money coming in means that you will have more money to invest, pay off debt, and enjoy.
So, in this article, we will be discussing two of the most popular side hustles out there (that you can even scale into your own business), Amazon FBA and Amazon KDP.
Background
If you have somehow never heard of Amazon (Nasdaq: $AMZN), it is one of, if not the, largest digital retailers in the world. It truly has every item from A to Z in its catalog of both digital and physical goods. As of 2022, Amazon is sending out, on average, more than 1.6 million packages per day and making roughly $385 million in sales each day as well. It is a huge market, and the good news? 3rd party sellers make up about half of Amazon’s sales revenue, meaning that Amazon is a huge market that you can definitely break into.
Amazon FBA
Amazon FBA stands for “Fulfilled by Amazon”. In this business model, you (the seller) are responsible for sending your items to Amazon warehouses and fulfillment centers. From there, each time you make a sale, Amazon handles all of the processing and shipping to get the item to your buyer.
While you can do wholesaling though Amazon Private Label or you can handle your own shipping and processing, but FBA has become a popular option for new and experienced sellers due to how easy it is to get started and use. Also, with FBA, Amazon handles most of your headaches for you.
Costs To Get Started
For someone new, just starting to sell on Amazon, there are no up-front costs through Amazon. At time of writing, Amazon offers 2 accounts, individual and professional.
The individual plan has no monthly fee, but charges $0.99 per item sold plus additional costs including referral fees (8-15%), fulfillment fees (shipping costs) , and other costs such as long term-storage fees. The individual plan is great if you plan to sell less than 40 items per month.
The professional plan is a flat fee of $39.99 per month, regardless of how many products you sell. Of course, the same additional fees are included here too.
All other costs are associated with your product(s) sourcing and the shipping costs to get them to Amazon.
How Do I Get Started?
Amazon has really streamlined the process and it could not be easier. Of course, you have to start with a product. You can either source a product from a store, a retailer, online, etc or you can create your own. From there, make your Amazon seller account and follow Amazon’s instructions. We are not going to spend too much time on this as Amazon has a great beginners guide on their website, check it out here.
Amazon KDP
Next up is Amazon KDP. KDP stands for Kindle Direct Publishing and it allows you to self-publish e-books, paperbacks, and hardcover books directly on Amazon. There really is no limit to what you can and can not publish on Amazon. KDP lets you retain full rights for your work, so no concerns there.
Costs to Get Started
Once again, there are no upfront costs to get started. Amazon does, of course, charge a listing fee/royalty and all shipping and printing fees (if applicable) for each sale. But, KDP gives you the freedom to set your own price and profit margins for each book.
How Do I Get Started
There are really two ways to get started with KDP, so let’s breakdown both:
1.High Content
For the first method, you will be producing high content books to publish on KDP. This includes your own books, your art, and other content that takes significant time to produce. Self-publishing your work in this way traditionally does great on Amazon, depending on the overall quality. The biggest downside of this method is that it is time consuming to produce and create the content that you are publishing here.
2.Low Content
If you look up how to get started with Amazon KDP, this is most likely most of what you will see. Low effort books such as notebooks, diaries, coloring books, etc can be created quickly, easily, and cheaply. This means that one seller can release hundreds of books onto the market and they only need a few to sell regularly to be highly profitable. If you are willing to sink some time into this, it can be a nice source of income for you for years to come. The main downside though is that because KDp is so accessible and low content books are easy to make, the market has been flooded with thousands of sellers and low content books.
Conclusion
There are 1,000,000+ ways to make money online and Amazon is making a couple of them even easier for you. With either of these options, you can get your products directly on Amazon’s site and reach their entire customer base of millions around the world. Whichever you choose to pursue, or you can do both, there is definitely some money to be made there.
If KDP or FBA don’t sound like the right fit for you, then check out our list of the 8 Online Side Hustles That You Can Start Today!