To make money on Amazon, you don’t need a lot of money or time. Amazon’s recent press release revealed that by 2021, 50% of the company’s $469.8 billion in net sales will come from independent sellers. Profiting from Amazon’s customer base is easier than ever thanks to Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA), book publishing, private labeling products, and the Amazon Associates program.
In this article, we’ll share with you the best ways to make money on Amazon.
Table of Contents
1. Sell on Amazon
Educate yourself on everything you will need to know to become a seller on Amazon. In our guide about selling on Amazon, you can learn:
- how to list products
- the importance of the product detail page and how to create yours
- product fulfillment (delivery) options
- learning how to monitor and make use of your performance metrics
- growth opportunities
Amazon Accelerator
You could also sell under the Amazon Accelerator program. Basically, the product manufacturer sells their product exclusively on Amazon. When participating in the Amazon Accelerator program, the seller receives onboarding support, marketing tools, and a venue to test new products, and can solicit feedback to improve the product/process.
Amazon Handmade
You can also sell on Amazon Handmade. If you are an artist with handmade crafts to sell, Amazon wants to partner with you. It can be pretty much anything that is handcrafted except for digital products, food, or electronics. The professional selling plan is $39.99 per month. Amazon waives this fee for the Amazon artisan and instead takes a 15% referral fee.
Professional Services
You could sell your professional services on Amazon. Amazon Home Services provides Amazon customers with access to service professionals who can help them with various home needs.
Amazon uses the example of a customer purchasing garbage disposal through Amazon. When the purchase is made, the website will automatically ask the customer if they would like an Amazon Home Service professional to come to install the disposal. Once the request is made, the service request is then routed to a service professional who is registered with Amazon.
To be a home service professional with Amazon, the individual must pass a background check, have proper licensing and authorization depending on the service being offered, and carry the appropriate insurance coverage.
B2B Sales
Business-to-business sales are another of Amazon’s many ventures. One business cannot function without interacting with another. The Amazon Business program allows sellers to sell from one business to another, optimizing such benefits as quantity pricing, business pricing, and other tools to help reach the business your company needs to interact with.
As a business seller, you have the option of selling only to other businesses or to both businesses and consumers. The fee for selling on Amazon as a business is the same as a professional seller – $39.99 a month, along with other referral fees.
Sell Apps on Amazon
This is way out of my league, so I will directly quote exactly what Amazon has to say about how to sell your apps with them.
- For Amazon Alexa: “Build natural voice experiences that offer customers a more intuitive way to interact with technology.”
- Amazon Appstore: “Develop Amazon apps and games for Amazon Fire TV, Fire tablet, and mobile platforms.”
- Amazon Dash Replenishment: “Build Amazon reordering experiences into your devices.”
- AWS Developer Center: “Find tools, documentation, and sample code to build applications in your favorite language.”
Make sure your app meets the specified requirements and guidelines. Pre-test your app. Then, submit your app to the Amazon Appstore.
Sell Your Self-Authored Books
There are some options for self-publishing with Amazon, and Amazon gives you the tools to be able to do so.
- Publish your digital book with Kindle Direct Publishing. You could earn royalties of up to 70%. You can publish in minutes and have the book appear on Amazon sites within two days. It will make your text available on all Kindle devices and reading apps.
- Publish your audiobook with ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange). You could earn high royalties on exclusive or non-exclusive distribution. You can sell on audible.com, amazon.com, and iTunes. You gain easy access to narrators and studio professionals
Sell Your Designs on Merch by Amazon
As an artist, you can sell your designs to Amazon, putting your designs out into the world with no investment or upfront costs, and earn a royalty from every purchase made. The customer goes to the page, designs their T-shirt, uses your design, gets paid, and gets recognition.
Because Amazon has been flooded with content creators sending in their creations, it operates on an invite-only system. You will need to send in a submission of your artwork. Once there is space available, and Amazon has an interest, they will send you an invitation to become an Amazon Merch creator.
This is the simplified process, as Amazon explains, is:
- Upload your custom artwork
- Set the listing price
- Amazon will print what is sold on the T-shirt
- Product gets shipped
- You earn monthly royalties
2. Become an Amazon Affiliate
An affiliate is an individual or business that earns a commission from selling another’s products. This can be done by including links to the products you wish to sell in blog topics, on websites, and on a YouTube channel, however, you are able to reach a buying audience that will click on the link and make a purchase through your affiliate link, thereby earning you a commission from that sale.
Amazon offers these three simple steps for the Amazon affiliate program:
Step 1: Join for free
You can join for free, but in order to be approved to be an authentic Amazon affiliate, you must submit an application to the associates team. On the application, you will need to show that you have a way to sell Amazon products. You will need either a website that you own, your own mobile app, or an acceptable social media group/page.
Step 2: Advertise with Amazon tools
After you choose whatever products you want to market to your audience, Amazon will provide linking tools to help you advertise and monetize your site.
Step 3: Earn money
The percentage you will earn will depend on the product you have chosen to advertise for Amazon. There is also a bounty program where you can refer consumers to an Amazon program and service and earn a flat fee rather than a percentage.
3. Deliver Amazon Packages
You can either do that as an individual delivering packages, or you can start your own delivery business using Amazon’s technology and logistics.
As an individual, first, sign up for Amazon Flex. As an independent contractor, you download the app, pick up the block of time that you would like to work, work the agreed-upon shift, and earn your money. Sometimes there are tips from customers to help supplement your earnings.
Because you are an independent contractor, you are responsible for all mileage, gas, parking, and tolls. On the site, Amazon states that they will always pay you $15-19 per scheduled hour. After gas and other factors, you can still earn a decent wage.
4. Become an Amazon Influencer
The influencer program is similar to the affiliate program in the sense that you are earning a commission for every product that is sold through your link. The difference is that for the influencer program, you must have an established, high-volume social media presence through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Once you have been established as having a qualifying social media presence, then you can begin the process of being an Amazon Influencer.
Here is how it works:
- You create your storefront with a custom URL and use it to recommend products.
- Share the products with your custom URL
- Earn money when a consumer makes a purchase through your URL
5. Create Videos for Prime Video Direct
Prime Video Direct is the delivery platform Amazon uses to push out the films and videos sold by Amazon. According to Amazon, Prime Video Direct helps rights holders, from independent filmmakers to direct studios, reach Amazon global audiences across hundreds of devices with the same distribution options and delivery quality available to major motion picture and television studios.
This is how you are able to earn income with your videos:
- Flexibility in earning options. Royalties can be earned based on the number of hours content is being streamed, revenue share from rentals, purchases, monthly channels, ad impressions, or any combo of those options.
- Massive reach. Your content can be found through Prime Video in the US and other areas via any supported device
- Earning optimization. Performance metrics are tracked and can be utilized to optimize how you offer and promote your content
6. Work for Amazon Mechanical Turk
Amazon Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing website for businesses to hire remotely located “crowdworkers” to perform discrete on-demand tasks that computers are currently unable to do. Similar to Lionbridge or Appen, this micro-worker opportunity is run by Amazon and can be a good way to earn some extra money from home.
Some of the tasks available to do as an M-Turk worker are:
- Image or video processing. This is really hard for machines to do but easy for humans. You may be tagging an image to optimize advertising, or selecting the best picture to represent a product, or moderating content uploaded by users, or using satellite imagery to identify and classify images.
- Data verification and clean up by finding duplicate entries and verify item details
- Information compilation by answering questions about any topic. Filling out surveys.
- Content writing for websites.
- Locating specific fields in large documents.
- Data processing.
- Transcribing and editing audio.
- Translating from one language to another.
- Reviewing the accuracy of search engine results.