📈 A Day in the Life of an Amazon Seller: What to Expect
Are you considering becoming an Amazon seller? If so, you may be wondering what a typical day in the life of an Amazon seller looks like. Contrary to popular belief, being an Amazon seller doesn't necessarily mean living a luxurious lifestyle. In fact, less than five percent of Amazon sellers make over $100,000 in net sales. As a professional Amazon seller since 2018, I can attest to this fact. However, selling on Amazon has allowed me to supplement my income, pay off my student loans, and even leave my nine-to-five job. In this article, I'll share with you what a normal day looks like for 95% of Amazon sellers.
🌅 Morning Routine
Most of my mornings start out just like yours, with coffee and breakfast. During this time, I check my Amazon Seller Central app to see how many overnight sales I brought in and I also check my email to see if there's anything from Amazon such as returns. I'll tackle these few items and then I'll take some time to just enjoy my morning.
🏢 Office Work
After about an hour, I'll head up to my office around 8am to get into contact with my overseas suppliers. There's a 12-hour time difference, so this is the only point in time I can really get into contact with them during my day. Yesterday, I requested one supplier to send over an invoice for a repeat order, so I'm hoping that he got that done overnight. Great, it looks like he did, and I'll review the invoice before completing the payment to kick this purchase order off. If I need my supplier to work on anything such as a new quote or design work, I'll make sure I let them know at this point so they can work on it later.
Here's where most of my work will start with my Amazon store, which is from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. During this time, I'll log on to Amazon Seller Central, which is the seller platform that allows me to really manage my store. When I'm logging onto this, I'll be reviewing my overnight orders in detail. I'll resolve any of those issues from earlier emails in the morning, and I'll also spend a good bit of time managing my ad campaigns.
📊 Managing Ad Campaigns
When managing my ad campaigns, I'll pay attention to two important metrics, which are my return on ad spend or ROAS and my advertising cost of sales or ACoS. These two metrics tell me how efficiently I'm spending my advertising budget in order to generate sales. They're extremely important. The higher the ROAS and lower the ACoS is, the better. Think of it as a return on investment. This ad campaign isn't performing extremely well, so I'll substitute keywords that I'm targeting with new ones during this 10 to 30-minute process. While I was doing this, I received an alert on my phone to go ahead and restock one of my products. I tend to do this quite a bit with reminders on my own just to keep me on track during the day.
📦 Restocking Inventory
Now Amazon does a good job of predicting when you need to restock, so I look at this inventory tool each week and set reminders when I need to restock my inventory. This alert said that I needed to restock my head covers that were about to go out of stock. I was storing about a couple hundred of these units at my home, so later this afternoon, I will create my shipment workflow and send these off to Amazon.
I'm sure that you've noticed that I do not own a warehouse where I keep all of my products or even spoken to any of my customers at this point. That's because Amazon takes care of all this for me through their FBA or fulfillment by Amazon program. I pay them a small fee per unit to store my products, fulfill each order, and handle the customer service. It is what allows me to operate my entire business as a one-man team and helps many independent sellers scale their business to that next level.
🏃♂️ Exercise and Unwinding
Before I restock these items that I have at my house, I need to get some exercise. I'm currently training for a marathon, so today I plan to head out to the local trail to run for about an hour or so. By far, my favorite part about being an Amazon seller is the time wealth that it creates. Don't get me wrong, you do have to put in the hours to launch a private label product. However, as soon as I launched that product, there's very little work to do thereafter since again Amazon handles my storage, fulfillment, and customer service. The output is an abundance of time to spend how I want. The ability to go out for a midday run, take the day off to golf, or do whatever I want on my own schedule is what makes it totally worth it. Trust me on that. I guarantee if you took a poll of 100 Amazon sellers and you asked them what is the best part about selling on Amazon, they're not going to say money.
📈 Researching Product Niches
After catching no fish and to finish up my day, I'll head back home to spend about 30 to 60 minutes researching my product niches that I'm currently selling in and to see how the demand is forecasting. By looking at the weekly search volume for specific searches, I can begin to see trends on what I should expect with my demand, whether it's going to rise or decline over the next few weeks to months. It's the best way, other than past sales, to efficiently stock my inventory at Amazon.
🎉 Wrapping Up
That's a typical day in my life when I'm focusing on sustaining my Amazon business. Whether you're someone looking to use your Amazon store to replace your income or just to supplement your income, it can be one of the most powerful tools to accomplish that. It's done this for me and thousands of Amazon sellers all across the world, which is why it's so sought after. Let my lifestyle be a testament to what 95% of sellers do on a daily basis and what you can expect as well.
Pros and Cons
Pros:
- Ability to supplement income
- Time wealth
- Amazon handles storage, fulfillment, and customer service
- Ability to work from home
- Ability to scale business to the next level
Cons:
- Requires putting in hours to launch a private label product
- Less than 5% of Amazon sellers make over $100,000 in net sales
🎉 Highlights
- Being an Amazon seller doesn't necessarily mean living a luxurious lifestyle.
- Less than 5% of Amazon sellers make over $100,000 in net sales.
- Amazon takes care of storage, fulfillment, and customer service through their FBA program.
- The ability to go out for a midday run, take the day off to golf, or do whatever you want on your own schedule is what makes being an Amazon seller worth it.
- Researching product niches is the best way, other than past sales, to efficiently stock inventory at Amazon.
🙋♀️ FAQ
Q: What is Amazon Seller Central?
A: Amazon Seller Central is the seller platform that allows you to manage your Amazon store.
Q: What is FBA?
A: FBA stands for fulfillment by Amazon. It's a program that allows Amazon to handle storage, fulfillment, and customer service for your products.
Q: How much does it cost to ship products to Amazon?
A: Shipping costs on Amazon are actually pretty cheap. For a box that contains a hundred or so head covers at 40 pounds in total, it's only about $13 to ship to the nearest fulfillment center in New Jersey.
Q: How much money can you make as an Amazon seller?
A: Less than 5% of Amazon sellers make over $100,000 in net sales. However, selling on Amazon can be a powerful tool to supplement your income.
