How much does it cost to start up on Amazon? All

up, I would say at least 10 Australians

sell on Amazon. The answer is yes. If you're based in

Australia, you can sell on Amazon USA, you can sell on Amazon UK,

Canada, Japan, and parts of Europe. What should I do

if my product doesn't sell on Amazon? This is a big

problem. It's really only a couple of things you can do. You've got a product

that is not being seen on Amazon. Amazon is in the business

of making sales so they can make money too. They're going to put the best products

that sell the most on page one. So you have to make sure that you provide a

product that is awesome and people want to buy. I'm

Matthew Fraser and this is Amazon Ecom

Secrets. I'll be sharing with you the secrets that helped me go from

millions in debt to an eight-figure entrepreneur. If

you're ready to escape the nine-to-five and live life on your terms,

let me show you the way. Welcome to Amazon Ecom Secrets. My name

is Matthew Fraser. And in today's episode, we're going to

dig deep into the most asked beginner questions on

Google for Amazon. So let's get cracking. So

the first question comes up, how much does it cost to start up

on Amazon. It depends on the type of product that

you're going to sell. But let's just say you're going to

start with an Amazon training course. That could cost anywhere from maybe

$1,000 to $3,000. Then you're going to set up your legal entity. That could cost somewhere around $1,000 to $2,000. Then you're going

to have to set up You

want to probably eventually do trademarks. You may want to

do patents on your product at some point. However, I would say that is something that

you would do probably further down the track rather than just in the very,

very beginning, like certainly not on your first product. So all up,

I would say if you're going to go into this thinking you're going to start an Amazon business, at

least $10,000 would be a great, great

start. Second question. How much does it cost to sell

on Amazon Australia? Now, when they say sell on Amazon

Australia, I assume they mean compared to say Amazon USA,

and there is a difference. The difference is simply the location. And

for those people who are based in Australia, it does seem a little bit easier. I do get

people that come to me and say, oh, I wouldn't set up on Amazon USA. It's

too hard. I say to my clients, let's set up on Amazon

USA for starters, right? Let's climb that mountain

first because Amazon Australia is essentially easier in

your mind because there's just less barriers. Barriers

meaning, for example, what legal entity do I set up? If I

go to America, do I have to set up a LLC, which

is like a USA company, or can I just use my Australian-based

company? Do I even set up a company or do I set up a trust

or do I go in as a sole trader? I tell my clients,

aim big, which means set up the company from get go.

Set up a company or trust. I would never suggest setting

up as a sole trader because that means you're setting yourself

up to be small. the

cost to sell on Amazon Australia, very similar to Amazon USA,

I would budget $10,000 at the very, very beginning. And

that would include a test product as well to get it over to, probably

from China into Amazon Australia or

USA. All right, the third question, can Australians

sell on Amazon? Now I assume that means, can they sell on Amazon USA?

Now the answer is yes. If you're based in Australia, you

can sell on Amazon USA, you can sell on Amazon UK, Canada,

Japan, Japan is a tricky one though but you can be done, and

parts of Europe. What are the things that you need to consider though

when you're selling on these foreign platforms? The first

thing is legal entity. The second thing is going to

be localized taxes. Every territory has

their own individualized tax system. So for example, in

Canada, they have a VAT, what we would call in Australia a

GST. So you'll need to factor in that. You need to

account for that and claim that. So you would then need to get Canadian-based

accountants. But you don't have to have a

Canadian legal entity. You can actually have an Australian legal

entity operating in Canada, for example. Now,

my company is set up a little bit differently. I have an Australian-based company,

a USA company, and a UK company. All

of them are treated individually and the UK company actually

accounts for the things that happen also in Europe. But

it's a bit, it's an absolute minefield. I definitely suggest you get some professional advice

on this on how especially to set up your legal entities. Japan,

let me touch on that one for a second. Japan is a really interesting territory.

I actually outsource the sales and the operation of

my Amazon selling to a third party. Now,

why do I do that? It's because Amazon in Japan actually requires someone

to be based in Japan. Now, I'm obviously

not based in Japan, so I need to outsource that to

a third party that's based in Japan. So I sell the goods into

Japan, They then handle all the operations within

Japan, and then they send me back the profit. And they account for all

the taxes that need to be accounted for within Japan as well. The

other thing to note about going into Japan, because it is very nuanced, is

unlike in Australia, when you sell something, in

Australia, you sell it, you then pay GST. If you don't sell it,

you don't have to claim the GST and make

a payment to the government. In Japan, when you send the

goods into Japan, they ask you to pay the GST on

the entire amount as it goes into the country, right,

before you even sell it, which is another huge

cost to get into the country. So if you put something into Japan

and you don't sell it, Too bad. You've already

paid the full amount of GST in Japan. And

you can't get away with trying to discount the product on paper going in

because they have a specialized reporting system

that will know if you claim that

you were going to sell the product for $100, but you ended up selling it

for $1,000 so you could pay less GST, they'll crack down

on you and then ban you from their country. So don't get caught out on that one. Now question

four, is it profitable to sell on Amazon? And

the answer is absolutely. It's a simple case,

just like any business, you need to understand what is your retail

price and what is your cost price. And in the middle there, there's going

to be some profit. Is it easy to not make profit? Absolutely.

You can easily burn through all your profit and make a loss, especially

when it comes to advertising. So make sure your numbers all line

up and monitor them closely. I have P&Ls done

on my business every single fortnight. So I give all

my information to my bookkeeper, she tallies up the P&L, and

that's how I know on a fortnightly basis exactly how my business is

tracking. And I certainly recommend that you do something similar, maybe

even at least do monthly P&Ls. All right, let's move to

question five. Is Amazon FBA worth

it in Australia? Now, Amazon FBA is

compared to Amazon FBM. What is the difference?

FBA is fulfilled by Amazon. FBM is

fulfilled by merchant, merchant being you. So

here's how it works. Amazon has their own warehouse and fulfillment

centers scattered all across the world. massive in

the United States. And in Australia, we have about three fulfillment

centers. You can actually ship your goods that

you want to sell into the Amazon warehouse. And let's say

it's down in Sydney, right? You ship it down to Sydney. Now, when you

make a sale on the Amazon platform, you don't have

to touch the goods. Amazon will pick pack

and ship your goods on your behalf. And that's what

makes Amazon so successful because it takes away a lot of the pain points

for you. Now, if you were to start your own business, of course,

out of your garage, you would have to handle all those things yourself, but Amazon's

going to handle them for you and make your life simple. All

right, question seven. Why am I not getting any

sales on Amazon? Well, this is so nuanced and

there's a range of reasons perhaps why you're not getting sales on

Amazon. But let me try and tackle a couple of reasons

why you probably aren't getting sales on Amazon. One, you've

put in a product that no one wants to buy. That would be the first thing.

Second thing, you've got a product that is not being seen on

Amazon. So let's just say you've sent in your specialized yoga

mats. Now when you first set up on Amazon, Amazon doesn't

put you on page one when the customer types

in yoga mat. You might be actually on page 50 of

yoga mats. Now, as you can appreciate, no one

is searching the buttons, pressing the buttons to go through 50 pages of

yoga mats. So they're never, ever going to get to your product to be seen,

even if you've got the most amazing yoga mat in the

world. So how do you overcome that? Two things, one

is you have to do paid advertising, which is called

PPC, pay per click. You give money to Amazon and

then they will move your listing all the way to

the front page so you can be seen. And

when everyone comes to the front page, eyeballs are on your listing and

then you've got more chance of making a sale. The

second way to be seen on page one is through organic

sales. So eventually over time, once you've built up your sales volume,

Amazon is going to push you to the front page. Picture this.

If you're a product that doesn't sell, why on earth

would Amazon put you on the front page? They wouldn't. They Amazon

is in the business of making sales so they can make money too. They're

going to put the best products that sell the most on page one.

So you have to make sure that you, first of all, provide a product that

is awesome and people want to buy. Let's move to question eight.

Why is it so hard to sell on Amazon? In

my training that I provide to my mentees, there's

two reasons, and I've seen this over the years, two

reasons why people can't make it onto Amazon.

The first reason is when they're doing their Amazon training. Now,

whether that's training you're doing by yourself or whether

you've partnered with another training program, you get to

a point in the setup phase that it becomes

overwhelming. So you're bringing in all this knowledge and information and

for whatever reason it's just too hard. Especially if you're someone

who's going from the nine to five day job and

now you're becoming an online entrepreneur. That

transition is super difficult. So you're going to get this complete

information overwhelm, just like a fire hydrant down

your throat. And it's going to be really, really tough

for you. So you have to break through that barrier first,

which means setting up your Amazon account, setting up your legal entity, finding

a product, and then getting it shipped into an Amazon fulfillment

center. So that's the first reason why people quit is because it's too hard

in the beginning. And the second reason why people quit and they say it's too

hard is they get a product, they ship

it into Amazon, and then they find they can't sell

it. So now they're stuck with probably a product where they've,

I know people who have invested up to $30,000 or

more on a range of products, shipped it into Amazon, and

it's not selling. What do they do? They freak out,

right? They're going to quit now because now their money is tied up and they can't even,

it would cost them more money to ship it out of Amazon, right?

So no one wants to buy it and that's a big problem. So what's

my suggestion to you? Clearly get training, proper

training, proper coaching, proper mentoring from someone who

knows what they're doing. That will certainly eliminate those

first two hurdles. All right, question nine. What should I do if

my product doesn't sell on Amazon? Well, first

of all, this is a big problem. And there's really only a

couple of things you can do. One is ask Amazon

to dispose of your product, which means you're gonna have a

huge loss. Hopefully, you've taken on a

mentor and they've told you, don't put in a lot of

money of stock into your first product and into Amazon. So

let's just say you were talking to me, you were testing out this Amazon thing,

and you said, Matt, I'm gonna spend $20,000 on my first product. I

would say absolutely not. Let's just start a little

bit smaller. Let's test the market with maybe $1,000 or

$2,000 because at the beginning, we don't really know

if it's going to sell. So I'd rather we, I'd

rather it doesn't sell on $1,000 rather than it

doesn't sell at $20,000. Okay. We can recover from $1,000 loss.

It might be difficult for you though, to recover from a $20,000 loss. So

the first thing is dispose of your goods. Amazon will

still charge you a fee to do that. You can take advantage of one

of Amazon's other programs, which is like a liquidation program where

they, I think they might pay you like chump change, maybe a

dollar per unit, but you'll get like some money back. The

other way you could possibly do to get rid of your product

if it doesn't sell on Amazon is to set

up a Shopify store and advertise your

product through there. But I would really strongly suggest

you analyze that first because if it's not selling on Amazon, then

it's probably not going to sell on your own Shopify store too. All

right, question 10. Why would an Amazon account be

blocked? Well, this is like a myriad of

answers for this one. It could be you haven't set up

your initial ID properly, so

they'll block your account and you can't sell. So you have to go into your backend,

go into account info, drop down box on the top right, down to account info.

and then figure out what's wrong. Generally, it'll be in

red, so it'll be highlighted straight away so you can see exactly

what the issue is that you can tackle. The other

thing you should do is contact Amazon customer support and

find out why your account is blocked. There

could be another reason too, maybe you've set up a second account and they've blocked your first

account. So it's a really tough one to answer because

there's so many reasons, but certainly contact Amazon customer support and

get the full details. All right, question 11. How

long will my Amazon account be blocked? Well,

I can tell you from my experience, I haven't had an account be

blocked. Actually, no, I lie. I have. I'm

just thinking through my referedex. It was actually in the

UK my account was blocked. What was happening over the past few

years, you would have heard of Brexit. And there was all these changes going

on with Amazon UK to do with shipping goods

out of the UK into Europe and all the tax

implications. And it was just an absolute nightmare. At one point,

Amazon said you could ship products to Europe. And then a few months later,

no, you can't. And then you could. And no one really knew what was

going on. And because of the taxes that

no one really knew much about because it was just so complicated, no

taxes were being paid. So Amazon went ahead and blocked my

account amongst thousands of other accounts where

the sellers were shipping goods from the UK to

Europe. And so what ended up happening was it was literally blocked for

something like three months from memory. And ultimately, Amazon

sorted whatever they needed to do to sort it out, and the account

got unblocked. But it was a bit of a pain in the bum at the time, because not only did

they just block the account, they also tied up my

inventory. I couldn't ship it anywhere. And it also tied

up all my money that was sitting in Amazon. So I was just sitting there,

and it was like $80,000 or something at the time, just

sitting there waiting to be had. But it's all come good now. One

of the things that I do when mentoring is I try to give people an

overview in the beginning of this is kind of where we're heading and these are

the possibilities down here. But on a weekly and

daily call, we only go

into the granular of where we're up to today. What problem

are we solving today? We don't keep talking about the bigger picture

because if we do that, it does actually get overwhelming. We just want

to get past the issue at hand and

that's it. All right, question 13. Why would I

pay for Amazon mentoring when I can just watch

YouTube? What a great question. And

here's the answer, is that you can watch all the YouTube

that you want, but they're not going to know about you and

your exact position, your tolerance

to risk, your cash flow situation, your

capital situation, and also your mindset. And

what I can tell you, Out of all the mentoring that I

do, the biggest thing that comes up is about mindset. And

it's just something that you just can't get out of a YouTube

video. Not only that, it's all

the hurdles that you're going to face. And what

I'm able to do is prevent people from making big financial

mistakes. Okay, question 14. Why

choose Amazon over Shopify? Which one's the best?

Now I can tell you, I've done both and

each have their place in the market. Amazon is

great and so is Shopify, but here's the difference. Amazon

already has a captive audience. When you have your

product on Amazon, they've already got millions of eyeballs

going to Amazon and all they have to do is find your product on

the platform. Then, if you've got FBA, which

is fulfilled by Amazon, which is your products in their warehouse, Amazon

is gonna pick, pack, and ship your product on your behalf and take all

the hard work out of it. Compare that to Shopify, that's

your own website. That means you've got to

get your own customers to your website. They're not just

going to stumble across it, right? They've got to find an ad

or a link somewhere that someone else is promoting to get to your

website. You can also use things like SEO within Google. Now,

here's the difference. Shopify, unlike Amazon,

you now have to Potentially pick, pack and

ship your own product. Now you don't have to do that yourself out of your own garage. Although

I actually started doing that myself in the very beginning, but once

it got to a big enough point, I had all my products

shipped into a fulfillment center, third party

fulfillment center. So although the customer was driving traffic

from a Facebook ad to my Shopify store that they're making

a purchase. and another company was pickpacking and

shipping my product to the customer. But the thing is, you

will also have to look after your own customer service on Shopify,

but Amazon will handle the customer service returns and refunds for

you. All right, question 15. Do my Amazon products

have to come from China? Well, of course they

don't, but a lot of people think they do because you've got places like Alibaba. Now,

Alibaba is a platform that puts all the

factories and manufacturers kind of in one place. 95% of

those on Alibaba are China. And as we all know, China's like

the main wheelhouse of manufacturing in the

world. They're pumping out a lot of product, including things like

your everyday iPhone. But

you don't have to, when you're selling on Amazon, find a product in China.

I actually have a product that I'm selling that's manufactured right here

in Australia. You could find the same thing, whether it's

manufactured in Australia, China, India, America,

it doesn't matter. They can all be sold on Amazon. All

right, guys, thank you so much for joining me on this episode where I answered all

of the most pertinent questions that you wanted answered, especially if

you're new to Amazon. It would be a really big help if

you could leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcast. Thank

you so much for joining me and I'll see you in the next episode. Take care. Hey,

guess what? You've made it to the end of this video. Congratulations. For doing

so, I want to invite you to my free exclusive community where

you can learn more about Amazon and e-commerce. And

I might even be able to answer your questions. So make sure you come on board, jump

in, and I look forward to seeing you there. Find the link below.

Thanks for tuning into Amazon Ecom Secrets. If

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