Karin Weizel worked at a dealership when one day while out on a test drive with a customer, they got into an accident with a semi-truck. She knew this was no longer the life she wanted to live and began to search for ways to make money without having to work the typical 9-5.

She sold things on eBay here and there previously but she started to feel that life was too short to be stuck at her job.

Amazon FBA and Selling On eBay

Suddenly Karin was flooded with all kinds of information and content, but she found inspiration to sell on Amazon through Tik Tok. This brought her into the world of Book Flipping.

When she first looked into Tik Tok, Karin’s son let her know that it was mostly young people dancing on there, but a quick search showed her that wasn’t entirely true.

“I wasn't seeing the 12 year olds dancing and that kind of stuff. I wasn't seeing that, what I was getting out of Tik Tok was immediately people that were sharing their life story and talking about selling on Amazon and eBay.”

Karin is a big proponent of taking in as much information and content about Amazon FBA and selling on eBay before jumping into doing it yourself. When you go into a venture with the power of knowledge then it’s hard to stumble.

Amazon FBA Community

Karin found the community to be kind and helpful, but of course there are some things that members of the Amazon FBA community are not going to tell you right off the bat.

Everyone has their sources and to scale your own business you have to put in the work and do your homework for example: you probably won’t have anyone telling you where you can buy Gaylords.

But as far the community goes people are just mostly wanting to see others succeed in this business as well. As Karin states “There’s enough books in the world for everybody.” While some may hold onto information and have their well kept secrets, it’s mostly about a sense of community and to help one another.

Karin’s main goal is to be able to sell enough where she can end up traveling all while doing Amazon FBA. It’s her dream to use her book selling income to fuel her travels across the country in an RV.

She feels she can do online sales from anywhere, and being able to travel from place to place and picking up things here and there from thrift stores would be a perfect situation for her.

You can listen to Karin as a guest on The Sellers Corner here: https://podcast.accelerlist.com

Do you have a dream you’re trying to achieve while selling online?

Often, we’ll get excited Amazon sellers who sign up for AccelerList to start listing their products with us and we unfortunately have to cancel their subscription before their trial is even up.

This is because they were not an Amazon professional seller. Being an Amazon professional seller costs $40/month but as you will see in this article, it’s well worth it.

Amazon professional sellers are also commonly known as a “FBA Sellers” as well.

When you are first starting out selling on Amazon it may feel like you are getting pinched for money in every direction, we totally get it.

But if you breakdown the costs and then the efficiencies you gain from your subscriptions, you should quickly see that their is more than enough value to warrant the spend.

Amazon Professional Seller. Should I pay for the plan?

Let’s first start with the Amazon Professional Selling Plan.

It costs $40 a month or $480 a year but if you head over to read some of our Amazon success stories, you’ll see that you can make up the $480 in your first month of selling on Amazon.

Here are some of the perks you get for being an Amazon professional seller versus an individual seller.

But even this chart can be a little daunting if you are new to selling on Amazon.

The best way to some up this chart and selling on Amazon as an FBA seller with a paid Amazon professional seller plan is…… SCALE.

You can certainly make lots of money selling on the individual plan but it’s not optimized for a business that wants to scale.

You can make a lot more money selling on FBA…like millions of dollars if you choose to give your all.

4 ways to scale your Amazon business

Fulfillment by Amazon

As an individual seller, you handle the shipping, the customer service and the storage. Pretty hard to scale up and out of your apartment or house if your holding on to books or toys all year round, waiting for them to sell.

Buy Box

Over 80% of all sales happen right in the buy box. As an individual seller you are not eligible for the Buy Box so you will be missing out on lots of potential sales. To make matters worse, you’ll most likely need to drop your pricing to a level low enough to attract a buyer off of the Buy Box offer in order to nab the sale which only eats into your profit.

MWS API connection

Unless you are a software engineer you most likely won’t be messing around with Amazon’s MWS API, but that is what AccelerList is for.

Listing products on Amazon’s Seller Central is painfully slow. If you are a private label seller and only have a few skus (barcodes) it might be doable, but even those sellers leverage software to scale their business.

If you’re doing medium-to-high volume retail arbitrage then you are listing lots of products all the time and you’ll need and want a listing application.

As an individual seller, you won’t have access at all to the API which means AccelerList won’t be able to connect to your account and you won’t be able to list with us.

Promotion and Gift Services

Want to run a special promotion on your products? Want to offer gift services to entice customers? You won’t be able to do that on the individual seller plan and that means missing out on Prime Day and the 4th quarter.