Starting an ecommerce business on Amazon comes down to a clear sequence: choose a selling plan, register your seller account, find a product worth selling, list it, and decide how to get it to customers. The barrier to entry is low, but the details matter. Here’s how to move from idea to live listings.
Choose Your Selling Plan
Amazon offers two selling plans, and the right one depends on your expected volume. The Individual plan charges $0.99 per item sold, with no monthly subscription. The Professional plan costs $39.99 per month regardless of how many items you sell. If you plan to sell more than 40 items a month, the Professional plan is cheaper. It also unlocks tools you’ll eventually need: bulk listing, advertising, eligibility for the Buy Box, and access to restricted product categories.
Most serious sellers start with the Professional plan. If you’re still testing the waters with a handful of products, the Individual plan lets you avoid a fixed monthly cost while you validate demand. You can switch between plans at any time.
Register Your Seller Account
You’ll create your account through Amazon Seller Central. Have these ready before you begin:
- Government-issued ID: A passport or driver’s license that matches the name you’ll register under.
- Bank account and routing number: Amazon deposits your payouts here, typically every two weeks.
- Credit card: A valid, chargeable card for your selling plan fees.
- Tax information: Your Social Security number or Employer Identification Number (EIN) for the tax interview Amazon conducts during setup.
- Business address: If you list a U.S. business address, Amazon may ask you to prove you actually operate from it with utility bills or a lease. A virtual mailbox alone won’t satisfy this requirement.
Amazon’s verification system cross-references everything you enter: your entity name, address, EIN, and bank details all need to tell the same story. Mismatches between these fields are the most common reason accounts get flagged during review. Submit full-page, current documents. Screenshots, partial scans, expired IDs, and files where the name or address doesn’t match your Seller Central entries will be rejected.
Find a Product to Sell
Product selection is the single decision that most determines whether your Amazon business succeeds or stalls. You’re looking for items with strong, steady demand, manageable competition, and enough margin to cover Amazon’s fees and still leave profit.
Start with Amazon’s own Best Sellers, New Releases, and Movers & Shakers pages to spot categories where products consistently sell well. Tools like Jungle Scout, Helium 10, or Amazon’s free Product Opportunity Explorer (available in Seller Central) let you estimate monthly sales volume, review counts, and competitive density for specific product niches.
A few practical filters help narrow your search. Products priced between $15 and $50 tend to hit a sweet spot: high enough to support healthy margins after fees, low enough that customers buy without agonizing. Lightweight, small items keep fulfillment costs down. Products that aren’t dominated by a single brand with thousands of reviews give you a realistic chance of earning visibility. And simple, durable products reduce the risk of returns and negative reviews eating into your profits.
Understand Restricted Categories
Not every product category is open to new sellers. Amazon “gates” certain categories, meaning you need approval before you can list products in them. Restricted categories include beauty and personal care, dietary supplements, grocery and gourmet food, health and personal care, medical devices, jewelry, electronics accessories, and textiles.
Each category has its own approval requirements. For dietary supplements, you’ll typically need a Certificate of Analysis from an accredited lab dated within six months. Grocery products require FDA registration, compliant nutritional labels, and at least 50 days of remaining shelf life. Electronics accessories may need FCC identification numbers and UL safety listings. If you’re considering a restricted category, check Amazon’s specific requirements before you invest in inventory. Getting approved can take days or weeks, and some categories require professional certifications that take time to obtain.
Source Your Inventory
Most Amazon sellers follow one of three sourcing models. Private label means you find a manufacturer (often overseas through platforms like Alibaba) to produce a product under your own brand. This gives you the most control over pricing and branding but requires the largest upfront investment, typically $1,000 to $5,000 for a first order including samples, production, and shipping.
Wholesale involves buying existing branded products in bulk from authorized distributors and reselling them on Amazon. You skip the product development phase but compete directly with other sellers on the same listings, which compresses margins. Retail arbitrage and online arbitrage mean buying discounted products from retail stores or other websites and reselling them on Amazon at a markup. This requires the least capital but is hard to scale and can run into brand restrictions.
Regardless of your model, order samples before committing to a large purchase. Test the product quality, packaging, and shipping durability yourself.
Create Your Product Listings
Your listing is your storefront. Each product listing needs a title, bullet points, a description, images, and backend search terms. Amazon’s search algorithm weighs your title heavily, so include your main keyword, brand name, key features, and size or quantity naturally within the 200-character limit.
Bullet points should highlight the benefits a shopper cares about, not just technical specs. Lead with what the product does for the customer, then support it with the specific feature. Use all five bullet points Amazon provides.
Images sell products on Amazon more than anything else. You’re allowed up to seven images per listing. The main image must show the product on a white background. Use the remaining slots for lifestyle images showing the product in use, infographics that call out dimensions or key features, and close-up shots of materials or details. If your category allows video, add one. Listings with video tend to convert at higher rates.
Decide How to Fulfill Orders
You have two main options: Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) or Fulfillment by Merchant (FBM).
With FBA, you ship your inventory to Amazon’s warehouses. When a customer orders, Amazon picks, packs, ships, and handles returns and customer service. Your products become eligible for Prime shipping, which significantly boosts visibility and conversion. The trade-off is cost. FBA charges fulfillment fees per unit based on size and weight. For a standard-size item under a pound, expect to pay roughly $3 to $5 per unit in fulfillment fees. Heavier or bulkier items cost more: a small bulky item starts around $6.78, and extra-large items can run $25 or more per unit. On top of fulfillment fees, Amazon charges monthly storage fees for inventory sitting in its warehouses, with rates increasing sharply during the October-through-December peak season. As of April 2026, Amazon also applies a 3.5% fuel and logistics surcharge on FBA fulfillment fees.
With FBM, you store inventory yourself and ship directly to customers. You control your costs and inventory more tightly, but you handle all customer service and returns. Your products won’t carry the Prime badge unless you qualify for Seller Fulfilled Prime, which has strict delivery speed requirements.
Most new sellers choose FBA because Prime eligibility drives sales, and outsourcing logistics lets you focus on product selection and marketing. Run the numbers for your specific product using Amazon’s FBA Revenue Calculator (free in Seller Central) before committing.
Set Your Pricing for Profit
Amazon takes a referral fee on every sale, typically 15% of the selling price for most categories (some categories charge 8% or as much as 45%). Add your fulfillment costs, cost of goods, and any advertising spend, and you need enough margin left over to make the business worthwhile.
A rough formula: your selling price minus the product cost, referral fee, FBA fee, and advertising cost per unit equals your profit. Many successful Amazon sellers target a net profit margin of 15% to 25% after all fees. If your margins are thinner than 10%, a small price war or fee increase can push you into the red.
Launch and Drive Early Sales
New listings start with zero reviews and no sales history, so Amazon’s algorithm has little reason to show them prominently. You need to generate early momentum.
Amazon’s pay-per-click advertising platform, Sponsored Products, is the most direct lever. You bid on keywords relevant to your product, and your listing appears in search results and on competitor product pages. Start with automatic campaigns, where Amazon chooses which searches to show your ad for. After a week or two, review the search term report to see which keywords actually drove clicks and sales, then create manual campaigns targeting those terms specifically. Budget $10 to $30 per day initially, and track your advertising cost of sale (the percentage of revenue spent on ads) to make sure you’re not spending more than your margins allow.
Getting reviews early is critical but tricky. Amazon prohibits paying for reviews or offering free products in exchange for them. You can use the “Request a Review” button in Seller Central to send a compliant review request to each buyer. If you’re enrolled in Brand Registry, Amazon Vine lets you provide free units to a network of trusted reviewers who post honest, unbiased reviews. This is one of the fastest legitimate ways to build early social proof.
Protect Your Brand With Brand Registry
If you’re selling private label products, enrolling in Amazon Brand Registry gives you meaningful advantages. You’ll need an active or pending trademark registered with a government trademark office, a logo with your brand name permanently affixed to your products or packaging, and the trademark registration or application number.
Once enrolled, you unlock A+ Content (enhanced listing pages with rich images, videos, and comparison charts), your own Brand Store (a free multi-page storefront on Amazon), Sponsored Brands ads, and Brand Analytics for tracking customer search behavior and purchase patterns. You also get access to tools like Virtual Bundles, which let you group multiple products into a single listing, and Manage Your Experiments, which lets you A/B test listing content to see what converts better.
Filing a trademark takes time. The USPTO process typically runs 8 to 12 months from application to registration, but Amazon accepts pending applications for Brand Registry enrollment. Start the trademark process early, even before your first product launches, so you’re not locked out of these tools when you need them most.
What a Realistic Startup Budget Looks Like
Your initial investment varies widely depending on your sourcing model and product category. For a private label product launched with FBA, a realistic starting range is $2,000 to $5,000, broken down roughly as follows:
- Product samples: $50 to $200 for samples from multiple suppliers
- First inventory order: $1,000 to $3,000 for 200 to 500 units
- Professional selling plan: $39.99 per month
- Product photography: $100 to $300 if you hire a professional
- Trademark filing: $250 to $350 per class through the USPTO
- Initial advertising budget: $300 to $500 for the first month of Sponsored Products campaigns
- UPC/GTIN barcodes: $30 for 10 barcodes from GS1 US
Wholesale and arbitrage models can start lower, sometimes under $500, because you skip product development and branding costs. But the ceiling for growth and margins is also lower. Whatever your budget, keep enough in reserve to reorder inventory before your first batch sells out. Running out of stock kills your listing’s momentum and search ranking.