FBA Paused For Some New Amazon Sellers

By Jim Cockrum

The below graphic is far scarier than reality. In the worst case scenario this MIGHT effect 1% of our community- and that 1% has numerous options to plow forward IF this restriction is put on them.

If you’ve sent in an FBA shipment to Amazon in the past, this article DOES NOT apply to you.

This temporary “pause” of FBA services is reported to have been applied only to SOME new sellers & is seemingly only being applied randomly at that. Only SOME new sellers on Amazon attempting to use U.S. based FBA warehouses for the FIRST TIME ever have been effected so far – and there’s even reports that the warning was put up and then pulled back down again for nearly all sellers!

How can you know if you are effected by this temporary limitation or if you soon will be?

When attempting to send in an FBA shipment (if you never have before), you could encounter a block on that option that looks something like the below graphic.

IMPORTANT TO NOTE:

Even if this happens to you, you CAN still sell on Amazon! Anyone can!

What are your options to sell on Amazon if you are brand new and seem to be blocked temporarily (until mid Dec) from shipping to FBA?

You have PLENTY of great options. Here are some things to keep in mind:

1. You can still sell via “merchant fulfill” – this means when something sells you ship it to a customer.
2. You can partner with someone near you or from our community who is FBA approved. Use our “world map” located here: mysilentteam.com/worldmap.html to find someone near you and negotiate a possible temporary arrangement where they sell in their own account, or sell via merchant fulfill in your own account. This is one great option for those who live outside the U.S.!
3. Consider eBay as well as Amazon (we should all be doing that anyway!)
4. Sell your great finds in bulk to someone else and wait for the FBA doors to be open again.
5. Buy a used but inactive Amazon account from someone (I don’t know if this is allowed or not, but some simple research will tell you)
6. Work with a prep center that provides pack-n-ship fulfillment for you. It works basically the same as Amazon FBA. Here’s a list of our prep centers: Fulfillment Companies
7. Spend more time on PPI, PPP or other courses in the ProvenAmazonCourse.comcourse that offer you incredible alternate opportunities and DON’T rely on your FBA eligibility for the next 2 months.
8. We are only a short few weeks from it being virtually too late to ship anything in via FBA anyway for Q4. Many of the best profit opportunities WILL be “merchant fulfill” opportunities. With LONG warehouse delays expected, selling the product via an Amazon listing, and then shipping the product yourself (aka Merchant fulfill) saves you processing time, Amazon fees, and the potential for delayed inventory stranded in the Amazon processing system.
9. Selling via merchant fulfill is less risky than FBA this time of year ESPECIALLY for newbies b/c it allows you to acquire inventory (via retail arbitrage for example), keep the receipts, and if your items don’t sell – you return them after the holidays for a refund and you’ve lost none of our investment. If you send your inventory to FBA however, this is a far more expensive and complex strategy to “get out” of our inventory investment.
10. If you’ve been “kicking around” the idea of starting an online business at some point, this is the time to do it. I suggest you purchase the ProvenAmazonCourse.com course and get in while Amazon is still welcoming new sellers with open arms. This opportunity is in its infancy, and Amazon is growing rapidly. New restrictions on sellers could come in the future, so NOW is the time to act and be “grandfathered in” on any future changes. Having a diversified online strategy that includes Amazon is ideal if you are serious about the future of your online business!

If you see conversations pop up on this topic, please direct folks here for updates and even more options for the 1% of our audience who is effected by this. We are here for you!

Here’s a link to a very active discussion on Facebook on this same topic.http://jimc.biz/2dceoQp

(SOURCE)

- Are you affected by this new Amazon rule? Share your experience on the comments!

Amazon is shutting down RA & OA! Is it panic time?

By Jim Cockrum

Many sellers are nervously reacting (and overreacting) to some recent developments at Amazon that some are claiming could change or end RA and OA (Retail Arbitrage and Online Arbitrage).

There’s simply no need to panic and there’s EVERY reason to be optomistic! We’ll give you the FACTS as to why this is 100% true for ALL online entrepreneurs in our community.

From Amazon’s perspective, these new changes are all about protecting some of the major brands on Amazon from counterfeit duplicates. We applaud this initiative!

Listen to this short recording with my partners Brett Bartlett and Nathan Bailey as we go through this topic from every angle.

Keep in mind that we have tens of thousands of products across multiple platforms including Amazon and we are running a $25million annual business online between the three of us – and we have zero panic about these changes.

EXAMPLE: Brett has an 8 figure business on Amazon himself with multiple thousands of different items – and he’s been entirely unaffected by the latest changes by Amazon.

Listen to the full audio here: http://provenamazoncourse.com/brandrestrictions

(SOURCE)

- What do you guys think?

Success isn’t about SELLING MORE it’s about BETTER BUYING

By Jim Cockrum

Are you new to selling “physical” product on Amazon or eBay?

After having helped thousands of sellers succeed on those two platforms, I have some of the most universally ignored, yet entirely sound advice you’ll ever get about succeeding on those platforms.

Here’s the tip:

You make your money when you buy your inventory – not when you sell it.

If you want to begin successfully selling physical product online, that should be your mantra. That statement doesn’t seem to make sense until you understand that RESEARCH is what makes you a winner in this game. It’s all about being as certain about your results as you possibly can be BEFORE you commit to buying any inventory that you hope to resell.

This simple tidbit of advice has steered many of our students away from disaster. I can’t stress enough (especially for newbies) the importance of learning to do proper research before buying inventory. We get clients all the time who unfortunately poured piles of cash into 1,000 units of a widget before they met us.   They poor souls were SURE they could move their “great deals” later at a high profit margin.

Most often these gullible newbies were told in a course (not our course!) that the secret to riches was in going “all in” in a single product and then marketing like crazy (aka SEO, feedback tricks, ppc ads etc.). That model DOES work…about 10% of the time. If you are really paying at tenting you’ll note that a 10% success rate is just about enough “success” to keep the “big launch” wheels turning – with course after course promising riches following the same mostly broken model.

If you want something more predictable, steady, proven and reliable however, I suggest you heed my advice.

Success selling physical product is NOT about creatively marketing inventory after you’ve poured your money into buying a pile of it. Instead, success awaits those who cautiously purchase ONLY the items that they KNOW will sell – and sell quickly, profitably and predictably.  Slow and steady incremental growth is the battle plan.  Quick hit, overnight riches based on one large inventory buy is a path to nowhere.

To be clear, if you buy the wrong inventory, you can’t rely on being bailed out by:

• creative marketing
• pay per click ads
• keyword and title shenanigans
• seo games
• fake/coerced reviews

…any other “trick” to get you out of the situation.

We tell all newbies to go “a mile wide and an inch deep” when starting out buying inventory – that means don’t buy more than a handful of anything until you are REALLY good at this game. Don’t pour all your cash into a single type of product unless and until you REALLY know what you are doing (that can take years for some people – while others catch on quickly).

To learn how to properly and predictably enter the game in a much lower risk fashion, check out the number one course in the world (yes, I’m biased) on the topic of selling physical products online: ProvenAmazonCourse.com

(SOURCE)

- Wow we never thought of it that way before. Good stuff! Did you find this article helpful?

An entirely different and easier way to sell on Amazon – the millions of “Golden Gaps”

By Jim Cockrum

Instead of always looking for products to sell, what if you could look on Amazon and find "gaps" where no other seller is anywhere to be found, but the customers are eager to buy even name brand products at high margins? Sound ludicrous? I can prove it’s true and I’ll show you how it’s happening right now.

Millions of these "golden gaps" or "empty rooms" exist. I’ll illustrate.

A visual example works well here. Imagine Amazon is a huge shopping mansion – it’s far too big to be a "mall." We need a planet-sized mansion!

Inside our Amazon shopping mansion visualize a sign on the door of each room. The sign on the door is NOT what you’d expect though! The sign is NOT the name of the product contained in the room, but instead the sign on each room in our mansion is an EXACT MATCH of the search phrase used by a shopper.

When a shopper uses a never before used search phrase, a new room is magically and instantly created! In other words, there are billions of rooms! This is a VERY significant distinction that perfectly represents how Amazon search really works for shoppers. Reread this part if necessary before going forward.

Now we can imagine that the list of search results that a customers sees on Amazon is actually a list of the most relevant "rooms" in our mansion that most closely match their search. The most popular rooms of course are filled typically with MANY sellers competing on price alone selling the exact same product. There’s little opportunity there for smart sellers like us. Still with me?

Shocking fact alert: Right now on Amazon (all sites globally) the vast majority of the "rooms" on Amazon are sitting entirely empty but still getting thousands of people daily TRYING to peek into the empty room but Amazon won’t let them in! You see, our mansion host Amazon doesn’t ever like to show empty rooms to the shopping guests, so instead Amazon guesses what the shopper meant and then gives the shoppers a sorted list of rooms containing "most likely what you want" all the way down the list to "possibly what you want" based on a pure computer generated guess.

Another shocking fact: Nearly half of all shoppers (in our estimation) are attempting to look into an empty room before getting shown other rooms.

OPPORTUNITY ALERT: If you can name your rooms properly (your listing title), you can suddenly have a wave of clients over night without competition (think high margin simple bundle). You see, when a perfect match happens, Amazon’s job is easy! Amazon eagerly flings the shopping guest right into the "perfect match" room and shows them NOTHING else in many cases.

For the smartest most experienced readers in my audience, you’ve just had a massive "ah ha" moment and you are seeing dollar bills right now. Pick yourself up off the floor – it gets better.

You see, hidden in that example are millions of "gaps" or "empty rooms" that are all just BEGGING for someone like you or me to come along, put products inside (yes even name brand products) and start showing up on TOP of Amazon pulling down big margins on even the most competitive products – and Amazon will love you for it (you are filling empty rooms for them and helping shoppers find EXACT matches for their search!). Competitors won’t even know you are there! Amazon won’t ever compete with you! No "race to the bottom" with prices! It’s beautiful.

If you are doubting that there are actually millions of these "golden gaps" or "empty rooms" on Amazon you should know that my friend Brett finds dozens of them weekly. He’s found 500 profitable ones in the past couple years and is doing 8 figures on Amazon because he "gets it." He sees Amazon differently than you do.

View the video here

If you are brand new to all of this please know this. No one teaches this strategy except us.

We see online opportunity differently, and we have the massive audience of success stories to prove it. All of our most successful students have one thing in common – they were all newbies at one point. Many of them (including Brett from our story above) started out with the ProvenAmazonCourse.com (PAC) course and $400 in his pocket.

Right now you can get a great deal on the PAC plus the course I built with Brett that shows you how to find "golden gaps" – get the courses here:

http://ProvenPerformanceInventory.com

If you already know how to sell and bundle on Amazon, just grab the PPI course from that same link above- it’s all you’ll need to use this strategy.

To discuss this course with our Facebook community, use this link http://jimc.biz/1lyOwCJ

(SOURCE)

- Now those are some crazy good tips! What did you think of this article?

Learning to sell on Amazon shouldn’t be a huge investment!

Recently there have been a lot of courses launching claiming to teach success selling on Amazon.  Some of these courses are getting the mega-launch treatment attracting multiple “big hitter” affiliates seeking the fat 50% commissions and contest winnings on the very high priced courses.  As you might suspect, these types of “endorsements” aren’t always based on integrity.  It’s important you know the qualifications and intentions of the person doing the endorsing when you encounter a “mega-launch”.

Part of what makes these big hype launches so disappointing to me is that many (most?) of these “experts” who are promoting these courses have barely any (if any at all) qualifications at all to talk about setting up a legitimate business selling physical goods online.  They are just excited to get a big check for helping sell an expensive course that is being hyped with excitement and flare.

If you want to spend thousands lining the pockets of experts who are possibly only excited about their fat affiliate commissions,  while learning the same things that we teach around here in superior, proven, time tested courses that cost 1/10th the price tag –  that’s fine, but after you read this blog post at least you’ll know the full story from my perspective.

In this blog post I’ll make a simple case as to why you should consider an alternative to the “big launches” and stick with the long time proven courses with long term established communities and experts instead.  Save your cash for inventory!

Consider the ProvenAmazonCourse.com (the “PAC”) course in this case if you are ready to learn how to sell on Amazon.

Are you eager to jump into Private Labeling?  Check out ProvenPrivateLabel.com (by the way, you get BOTH courses in one place -> ProvenAmazonCourse.com for under $300)

Or, don’t buy ANY course and just get going with one basic idea that anyone can use (one of the multiple strategies we teach inside our PAC course) – here’s an 8 minute video I made that’s getting great feedback so far. It shows you how to get started selling on Amazon at virtually no expense at all.

Make no mistake, there are some great courses, books and sites out there besides the Proven Amazon Course, and I won’t say anything specifically negative about my competition because I welcome all sources of creative content, but here are some factors that I think really set our Amazon training team apart from all other options out there:

• For over a decade my team and I have been teaching everyone from newbies to our highest end clients how to sell physical products online. The PAC course has generated nearly 1,000 verifiable testimonials in the last 6 years alone. The BEST students are recruited and become our expert trainers and coaches!
• We are always improving our courses. For example, we partnered with a world’s foremost expert on the topic of Private Label rights and he created all original content for our students. He’s easily the most qualified expert in the arena of Private Label that I’ve ever encountered – he’s had huge success for years with it. If you were under the impression that selling private label is some sort of new discovery, it’s not. It’s also not the best place to start out on Amazon for the vast majority of people who are just getting started because it takes a LOT of work and investment before you see results.  We aren’t hyping it the way you’ll see others hyping private label.
• We don’t insult and hound our students with upsells (be ready for this if you buy most online courses in this niche). I don’t do upsells. We sell the ProvenAmazonCourse.com course ONCE and students get all future updates automatically. No surprises.  Ask anyone who purchased the Proven Amazon Course five years ago how much the course has been updated, improved, expanded etc. They’ve not paid an additional dime since then for the new ideas, updates and content.
• We teach multiple product sourcing and selling strategies (most competing courses teach only one). We have a wide variety of successful students –  everyone from those who’ve built a virtually hands free operation & never leave home while selling into numerous countries, to those who love shopping retail for a living and finding great deals in their spare time (while making a great profit). Our success stories are quite diverse.
• We offer hand holding coaching for those who want it. You can work one-on-one with one of our successful students if you want to ramp up quickly. Our coaches are ALL successful students who we pay well to assist newbies.
• Our community is VERY international. This is a global opportunity. One of our most successful students literally lives on a beach on a tiny island!  Where you live has nothing to do with your odds of success. See our community visually on this mapwe just launched in mid April 2015.
• Our support team is the largest, most well trained and most experienced among all other “how to sell on Amazon” courses available. We have nearly 35 people who are in a paid position of support for the PAC as at least part of their responsibility while they build their own successful businesses as well.
• Our community consists of over 18,000 serious online entrepreneurs many of whom are very successfully working any number of strategies in the Amazon niche (with no sign of saturation whatsoever because hundreds of millions of people are shopping right now on Amazon!)
• While our courses are worth thousands, we are charging so much less than our competitors.  Our popular ProvenAmazonCourse.com is the most comprehensive course on the market in the “Sell on Amazon” niche, and it includes a large number of modules that cover virtually every imaginable way to profit on Amazon – and as of this writing it’s only $300 ONE TIME fee – there are no “upsells” or recurring fees.

Once you purchase the PAC and join our active community and you’ll be surrounded by those DOING this business who are proud to be a part of our community. Some of our customers have been around for 12 years or longer doing this stuff – these are the people you want to hang out with if you are serious about selling product on Amazon.

(SOURCE)

- What do you think about that article? Let us know on the comments!