4 Hours of Work – $17,100 in Sales – $4,000 in Profit

Go to any personal finance blog and you’ll see the normal bashing of Black Friday, rampant consumerism, and the claims of moral superiority from abstaining from these insane shopping holidays.

And they’re all completely right.  Most of the stuff people buy between Black Friday and Christmas Day will be in a landfill by the following year and the whole cycle will be repeated again.

At the start of 2015 I began selling on Amazon.  At first I lost over $1,000 by selecting a very bad product to sell (garlic press).  But I stuck with it and learned my lessons and since then I’ve gone on to sell over $500,000 worth of goods on Amazon after starting with zero e-commerce experience

December is truly a magical time on Amazon.  Short of being a seller on Amazon, there’s really no way to understand how insane the increase in demand is.

In 2016 I went from averaging 15-20k per month in sales to 40k in December.  So far in 2017 I’m seeing the same trend, roughly 2x-3x the sales without me changing anything.

Here’s what November looked like (from my accounting dashboard, Fetcher):

My profit for the month was just under $4,000 after subtracting all of my expenses like the cost of goods, advertising, storage fees, etc.

Just over $1,000 of that came on Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  2 days accounted for 25% of my total profit.  Pretty crazy.

Is It Too Late to Start Selling on Amazon?

I see this question pop up all the time on Reddit and Facebook.  People who want to start selling on Amazon are reluctant to jump in because they think they’re too late to the party and all the easy pickings are gone.

And that’s mostly true.  The easy pickings are gone and the competition is increasing every day.  My main products did not have competitors a few months ago and now I have a couple new sellers who are offering similar products to myself.

However, it’s not too late.  Even now I am continuing to find new products to sell and I am continuing to launch those products.  There’s still a lot of opportunity out there for people who want to sell awesome products that have unique features.  The only people that will fail are the ones who are doing the same thing as what is already out there and not offering anything unique to their customers.

Want More Amazon Selling News?

If you’d like to learn more about selling on Amazon, join the email list and stay tuned.  I’ll be working on some new resources soon to help people start selling on Amazon, even if you have zero experience, just like myself a few years ago.