Amazon can be a great place to build your business, whether you want to sell a few products as a side hustle or are thinking about adding an online sales channel to your existing business. From choosing a product to building your own brand, explore some of the different ways you can make money with Amazon.
7 ways to make money on Amazon
1. Choose a product type or specialize in a niche
Choosing a product to sell can be a challenge. Start by thinking about your interests and hobbies, allowing you to draw on your strengths and capitalize on knowledge you might have about a particular industry. Other times, inspiration can strike when you least expect it.
You might try selling a single product, or source a variety of items from different product categories. You might find yourself gravitating toward one category, like clothing or toys. You may want to expand your catalog, or narrow it down to a handful of products—maybe even just one top seller.
- Check out this guide to find product ideas, and get inspired by this list of successful online businesses.
- Use Product Opportunity Explorer in Seller Central to identify popular product categories and niches.
- Keep an eye on purchases, and let sales analytics guide your decisions.
2. Sell handcrafted items
If you’re a pro at sewing, woodworking, or another skill, turn your expertise into an ecommerce business. Amazon Handmade is an online community of artisans selling unique goods to a global audience. This program comes along with a fee waiver for a Professional selling plan, plus other perks for artists and creatives who want to share their work with the world.
- Learn how other artisans turned their handmade passions into a business in the Amazon store.
- See how you can easily list your first handmade product.
- Explore how Amazon Lending can help you fund your business.
3. Create and distribute merch
Maybe you have a great idea for a funny T-shirt or coffee mug. Bring your ideas to life with Amazon Merch on Demand. This program allows you to design custom apparel and accessories on a print-on-demand basis. Products print after each sale (so you don’t have to worry about unsold stock) and ship through Prime so customers can receive orders quickly).
- Have an idea but need someone to bring it to life? Amazon’s Merch Collab is a licensing program where brands collaborate with qualified designers and manufacturers to create branded merchandise.
- Keep in mind considerations for selling clothes online and running an online clothing business.
- Learn more about requirements for brand names and logos in the Amazon store.
4. Sell to businesses
Amazon Business provides a suite of features and tools that can help you connect with business-to-business (B2B) customers. Business customers often buy in larger quantities and return items less—which means you can sell more with less time and effort. Reach business customers with customized prices, bulk selection, certifications, and other B2B features.
- Use certifications and a business profile to help your products stand out to procurement professionals and other B2B customers shopping on Amazon Business.
- Understand and manage your B2B sales in this B2B Central overview.
- Get B2B product and pricing recommendations using Business Discount Insights.
5. Earn passive income by recommending products
You don’t need to sell products to make money with Amazon. Amazon’s affiliate marketing program, Amazon Associates, lets you monetize traffic through social media and other channels by recommending products for sale in the Amazon store. This affiliate marketing model allows you to earn up to 10% in commissions. Interested in earning passive income?
- Associates Central has resources for reporting, payments, account information, and more.
- Associates use easy link-building tools to direct audience to recommendations.
- If you have a following on social media platforms, you can also join Amazon’s Influencer Program. You can monetize your social media content by recommending Amazon products and earning commissions on qualifying purchases.
6. Sell books online
Selling books online can be a great way to generate some extra income. Whether you want to resell children’s or comic books, list rare collectibles, or self-publish a book you wrote, selling books online can help you reach readers around the globe.
- Secondhand books are generally easier to find, cheaper to acquire, and can be more profitable if you find good deals locally or online. Learn about Amazon’s condition guidelines for books.
- Have you written the next great novel or play? Self-publish through Kindle Direct Publishing, which allows you to maintain control of your rights, set your prices, make changes anytime, and earn royalty on sales.
- Book prices depend on variables like type and condition. It can be a good idea to monitor the prices of other booksellers and adjust your prices accordingly to make sure they’re competitive. Amazon’s Automate Pricing tool lets you automatically adjust prices based on pricing rules and preferences.
7. Resell, wholesale, or dropship products
Rather than creating your own product or establishing a brand, other ways to make money with Amazon are by reselling, sourcing wholesale, or dropshipping products.
- Resell products: Amazon can be a great channel to resell for a profit. Just be sure to follow Amazon’s selling policies and code of conduct for sellers.
- Source wholesale: If you’re planning to move lots of inventory, work with a wholesaler or a manufacturer to set up a supply chain and get products into the hands of as many customers as possible.
- Dropship or print on demand: Don’t want to invest in procuring and storing inventory until the product sells? You can work with a dropshipper to send orders directly to customers after they place purchases. You might also use a print-on=demand solution like Amazon Merch.
You can start out with just one of these strategies, or try a combination. Get inspired and learn more with this guide to inventory management.
Explore ways to sell with Amazon
Strategies to drive ecommerce sales
Once you’ve decided how you want to make money in the Amazon store, there’s a range of ecommerce strategies you can use to grow your business.
Build your own brand
Building your own brand takes effort and investment, but it can pay off in customer loyalty. Plus, Amazon offers a suite of brand-building tools and protection benefits through Amazon Brand Registry. From enhancing your product detail pages and increasing customer engagement, to generating customer reviews and protecting against counterfeits, the program takes the guesswork out of brand management.
- Build your brand with tools that help grow awareness for your brand, improve customer consideration, increase conversion, and build brand loyalty.
- Protect your brand with programs and tools like Transparency and Report a violation to give you peace of mind.
- Make strategic decisions to grow your business based on aggregated customer data with Amazon Brand Analytics.
Set competitive prices
Do you have a pricing strategy? If not, researching the competition for products you’d like to sell can be helpful. This is especially important when you first list products, but sales can benefit in the long run if you set up a system to conduct pricing research on a regular basis.
Dedicate some time to analyzing prices for similar products in Amazon search, or use our Automate Pricing tool to automatically set prices across your portfolio based on current demand.
Optimize listings to connect with more shoppers
To connect your offerings with more potential customers, use SEO best practices to help product listings rank in search results. Basic search engine optimization involves targeting specific keywords in product titles, bullet points, and product description.
The Listing Quality Dashboard on Seller Central can help you identify ways to improve the discoverability of your products by recommending product attributes and other details to add to your product listings. This can improve the customer’s experience and fix time-sensitive issues that may result in your listing being hidden from search results.
Cross-sell, advertise, and offer special deals
Depending on the products you’re selling and your ideal audience, trying new sales and marketing tactics can be a great way to boost your bottom line. Here are a few ideas for driving sales on Amazon:
- Cross-sell or up-sell: Cross-selling is where you help the customer find products related to the one they want to buy. For example, someone purchasing a phone might also want a phone case. With Virtual Bundles, you can combine two to five complementary products from your enrolled brand on a single product detail page. Up-selling is where you recommend a premium version of a product or an upgrade, such as an add-on. Use comparison charts in A+ Content to subtly cross-sell or up-sell.
- Advertise: Amazon offers cost-per-click ads to help you reach current and future customers, including Sponsored Products and Sponsored Brands. Reach customers outside of Amazon by using Sponsored Display.
- Offer deals and coupons: You can entice customers with digital coupons and promotions. Two common types are Lightning Deals (random deals that appear throughout the day) and Best Deals (short-term promotions where an item is featured for a limited number of days).
To land on the Amazon Deals Page, try promoting your offers with seasonal sales, or run deals for holidays and shopping events such as Prime Day. Learn more in this guide to ecommerce marketing.
Experiment with A/B Testing
What content works best? With A/B testing, you can find out by comparing different versions of titles, images, and other parts of a product listing.
Experimentation can increase sales by up to 25%. Run A/B tests (also known as split tests) on Amazon product content to optimize for conversions using the Manage Your Experiments tool found in Seller Central. Learn more about how running A/B tests can help your bottom line.
Engage your audience
Engaging with your customers can be a key part of creating customer loyalty. You can do this a few ways.
After a customer purchases a product, you can follow up with them via email and invite them to leave product reviews. Amazon offers email templates to help you shape the customer journey to improve sales.
If your customers spend time on social media, it might be worth investing in social media marketing. You can hold contests, post trivia, and use other interactive ways to show people products and channel traffic to visit your online store. If you want to take it to the next level, social selling through a destination like Amazon Live is a way to do product reveals in real-time, give customers tailored product suggestions, and more.
Tools and program to help you scale
Signing up for Amazon’s Professional selling plan comes with access to a host of programs and tools to benefit your business—whether you’re already established in ecommerce or considering selling in the Amazon store for the first time.
Take advantage of fulfillment solutions
The fulfillment process—picking, packaging, shipping orders, and handling returns—can consume valuable time and resources, especially as you scale. But you have several fulfillment options based on your specific needs: fulfill orders on your own, outsource fulfillment, or do both.
Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) lets you outsource order fulfillment to Amazon. Once you send your inventory to Amazon’s fulfillment network, we store, pick, pack, ship, and provide customer service and returns. The program can help you increase sales and stay focused on growing your business.
You can also use FBA’s Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) program to outsource fulfillment for purchases made on your own website or another sales channels.
Streamline operations with ecommerce automation
Amazon provides sellers with automated technology for inventory management, tracking sales and orders, responding to customers, and other essentials. Simplify and automate daily tasks to keep your business running smoothly, such as marketing workflows and analytics reporting.
Automating your business can save you time, improve customer satisfaction, maintain a consistent brand presence, and help you gain valuable business insights.
Process payments
Payment processing is a key part of providing customers with a seamless shopping experience. Amazon Pay offers shoppers the trust and convenience of Amazon for your online store, while Amazon Currency Converter in Seller Central lets you sell globally and get paid in your local currency.
Want to learn more?
Seller University is home to thousands of courses on topics from improving customer service to understanding intellectual property policies. You can also visit the Selling Partner Blog for stories, tips, and helpful articles about selling in the Amazon store.
Need account support? Strategic Account Services connects you with a designated account manager for tailored advice based on your business needs. Work together with your Amazon advisor to get started with your Amazon account, grow your business, and succeed selling online.
Ready to make money online?
Whether you’re already established online or looking to increase sales by adding an ecommerce channel to complement your brick-and-mortar store, you can sign up for a seller account and start making use of these features and more selling programs.
Start selling today
Reach customers who search Amazon.com every day.
