Podcast Episode 018 : How to Earn More Sourcing Money to Buy Amazon Inventory

Today we are sharing with you six simple ways you can earn some money in order to fund your FBA pursuits! These are multiple ways you can get more cash in hand to build up your Amazon business. Plus, they all fit nicely into the type of schedule you are already trying to create by selling on Amazon.

The ideas shared on this episode are not only legal and ethical, but are also creative and even fun. No need to use debt to build up your business (which is not a safe strategy), but you can use these strategies to safely build up sourcing capital so that you can start buying more inventory to sell on Amazon.

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Key points from episode 18:

• How you can turn some of your useless stuff into cash!
• The app you can use to make money from selling new/used clothing, shoes, home goods, and more.
• How you can easily turn a few clicks into real gift cards.
• Easily get cash back on your online and in store purchases.
• Selling on eBay and using it as a springboard to Amazon sales.
• Finding a fun side-hustle to raise some capital!
• And much more!

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• Full Time FBA Facebook Group
• Freebie: Common Amazon FBA Acronyms
• Poshmark (use coupon code UZGDS to get $5)
• Swagbucks
• Rakuten (<– Signing up via this link will get you $10 in your account when you use Rakuten for the first time)

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One of the ways you can make selling on Amazon FBA easier is to know ahead of time exactly what to expect each and every month of the year.

Imagine what it would feel like knowing you were not missing out on any of the opportunities that will come your way this year. Imagine working on your Amazon business knowing exactly what your priorities are, what you need to avoid, and what you need to accomplish during each month to make progress toward making this year your best sales year ever.

Now you can with the course The Reseller’s Guide to a Year in FBA: A Month by Month Guide to a Profitable Amazon Business. The package includes a 220+ page ebook, live training videos throughout the year, a private Facebook group, and more!

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Episode 18 Transcript:

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:01.8] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Full-Time FBA Show. In each episode, it’s our goal to help you turn part time hours into a full-time income, selling almost anything on Amazon. Now, your hosts of the show, Stephen and Rebecca Smotherman.

[DISCUSSION]

[0:00:19.8] REBECCA: Hello there, welcome back for another episode of the Full-time FBA show, I’m Rebecca, and with me is my co-host Stephen.

[0:00:29.0] STEPHEN: Hey, how’s it going?

[0:00:40.8] REBECCA: Today we are talking today about how to get more money to spend on inventory that you can sell for your FBA business, your Amazon FBA business.

Last time we talked about how to find free inventory that you can sell and we’re going to kind of progress from free inventory to we want to buy some inventory at a low cost but maybe we still don’t’ have a lot of capital to work with, we’re still just getting started on our business so what do we do if we don’t have a lot of money to spend and we need to get a little bit more money to spend on FBA inventory?

[0:01:22.1] STEPHEN: I have six ideas for you to consider to be able to make a little bit of money on the side to be able to use that money to buy Amazon inventory and so we’re going to talk about that today and the very first one is hosting a garage sale. Now, you got stuff in your house that you probably need to get rid of, maybe you’ve got closed it. The kids have outworn and maybe you’ve got toys that the kids don’t need anymore, don’t play with anymore. Maybe you got kitchen appliances you don’t use.

I would suggest going through your house and just be brutal. Think about things that you can get rid of that you don’t need any more and host a garage sale. Another tip would be to ask friends and neighbors saying, “Hey, I’m hosting a garage sale, is there anything you’d like to donate to my garage sale.”

You can get some things to be able to sell and spend either a Friday and a Saturday or if you can’t afford a Friday, spend as long as you can on Saturday, trying to get rid of your stuff via garage sale, place ads on your local paper or your local city website to try to advertise the garage sale. Put up signs, do whatever you can to get the people there so they can give you money.

[0:02:25.2] REBECCA: I remember, when we first started having garage sales together in the first years of our marriage, we had at least two garage sales a year, we had a spring one and a fall one because we had this kind of mindset of we’re still in the newer stages of our business, we don’t have just a lot of capital to work with and we have a lot of stuff, we combined households and so we had extras of things and the kids were outgrowing things at the time that we could sell.

We were regularly having garage sales and I remember one of the most important tips that I learned from Stephen, because I consider him an expert garage seller both from the buying and the selling standpoint, he’s done both, a lot. One of the most important tips that I remember learning from him when it comes to having a garage sale is how you price your inventory and you are going to make more money if you price your items to sell and you are just trying to get rid of stuff, than, if you hold on to things so dearly that this item has either this perceived value that is a lot higher than what other people might be seeing it as.

Or I don’t want to miss out on some profit and so I’m pricing everything too high. If you price your items too high, you’re not going to make as much money as if you price items to sell and you’re willing to bargain with people, if somebody comes up to you and says, “Would you be willing to take $2 instead of $4 for this,” always say yes. Don’t try to hold on to things and say, “I could get more money from it from somebody else,” you know, somebody else is going to come along and just pay the list price on it or whatever. No, take the money when somebody offers it to you because you don’t know if somebody else is going to come along and want that particular item.

[0:04:10.9] STEPHEN: Right, just because you paid $20 for something, doesn’t mean that $10 is a good garage sale price. If you pay $20 for it, I would still say, you want people to pay with $1 bills or coins, that’s how you want people to pay you at a garage sale, so price it accordingly.

[0:04:25.5] REBECCA: Unless we’re talking furniture.

[0:04:26.5] STEPHEN: That’s true.

[0:04:26.9] REBECCA: Something like that, you know? That’s a good rule of thumb for how you price your items, make it easy for people to negotiate with you, make it easy for people to be able to find stuff at a good price and walk away with your stuff and you have their money.

[0:04:42.4] STEPHEN: Yeah, because at the end of the day, you don’t want your garage still full of your stuff, you’d rather have your wallet full of money. I went to a garage sale one time and they had some Southern Living Cookbooks from 1984 priced at $5 each. You can’t give those away and they’re priced way too high, don’t be that kind of garage seller. Price it to sell and when maybe even if you have a two day garage sale, have everything half off on the second day, just get rid of that so you can get those funds.

[0:05:08.6] REBECCA: Depending on how much stuff you’re trying to get rid of, you could easily come out of a one or two day garage sale with several hundred dollars’ worth of money, profits that you can then take to buy inventory for an FBA business.

[0:05:24.1] STEPHEN: Absolutely.

[0:05:25.5] REBECCA: Okay, the number two way that we have to earn a little bit of extra money to buy low cost inventory for your FBA business. Poshmark.

[0:05:35.8] STEPHEN: Poshmark is a website and a smartphone app that provides people with an opportunity to sell their clothing, their shoes, new and used condition and you know, it’s a great way for you to – actually, you know, get a little more for some of your items that you’re not using anymore. If you go through your closet and you find clothing or shoes that still are in pretty good condition, I would totally suggest trying to sell those on Poshmark and it can be an opportunity for you to get some funds, to buy inventory for Amazon.

[0:06:08.9] REBECCA: Stephen, you may not be aware of this because in our business, I’m the one that actually uses Poshmark.

[0:06:13.0] STEPHEN: Right.

[0:06:13.6] REBECCA: Not Stephen. They actually started out with markets for clothing and for shoes but they’ve expanded and now you can also sell home goods, decorations, you can sell beauty items, accessories, makeup, those kind of things. It’s expanded to more than just clothing and shoes but I would say, the majority of people still use Poshmark for those main two markets, the clothing and the shoes.

[0:06:38.9] STEPHEN: That’s good to know, I had no idea and that opens up the opportunity for you to sell even more items to get a good cash back for those, knowing that if you try to sell this at a garage sale, you probably should sell it at a dollar or so. But at Poshmark, you might actually get 20 bucks for those used shoes that are still in good condition.

[0:06:56.7] REBECCA: That’s right. Okay. The third way that you can earn a little bit of extra cash to buy Amazon FBA inventory, we’ve got Swagbucks. Number three, is Swagbucks. What on earth is a Swagbuck?

[0:07:10.3] STEPHEN: Well, this is something I’ve been doing for years and I think you have too. Swagbucks is a website, also, they have an iPhone app that gives you an opportunity to earn Swagbucks and you can earn Swagbucks by purchasing on websites through Swagbucks like you go to Swagbucks and you click on a store name and you purchase the items from the store or maybe there’s certain advertisements that you don’t mind watching and you can earn Swagbucks with that.

You can provide answers to surveys and depending on how well you do on those surveys, you can get Swagbucks with that so there’s endless ways where you can get Swagbucks and then once you accumulate those Swagbucks, then you can turn those into gift cards. You can get what is necessarily free gift cards, you’re not paying any money, you’re just spending that time going to earn Swagbucks and you can take those gift cards and take them to a store to purchase items at the online web store or in retail stores with those gift cards from Swagbucks.

[0:08:05.8] REBECCA: They also have a PayPal option. You can either get gift cards to stores like Target or Home Depot or wherever that you want to buy inventory but you can also use Swagbucks to get PayPal gift cards which you can then just basically turn to cash.

[0:08:23.3] STEPHEN: Absolutely. You can go to fulltimefba.com/swagbucks and again, we’ll have the links on the shownotes, fulltimefba.com/18 to get started with Swagbucks.

[0:08:34.0] REBECCA: Okay, in our number four way that we have on our list here is similar to Swagbucks, but a little bit different. Talk to us about Rakuten.

[0:08:42.3] STEPHEN: Well, Rakuten is a service that is formally called Ebates and you’ve might have heard of Ebates before but Rakuten is a website that you can click through to purchase items online to earn cash back. You can also set up your debit card or credit card to earn cash back in stores through Rakuten and you began to earn cash back. Now sometimes it is 1% cash back or 2%. Every once in a while they have 10% cash back, 15% I have seen as high as 20% cash back.

And so you can get on their email list you will be notified when those big extra cash back opportunities are. But anytime I ever go buy something online, I always check Rakuten first because it doesn’t cost anything to use Rakuten and you can get cash back very simply and it is not on every website but it is on most of them and I get cash back a lot if it adds up over time.

[0:09:35.2] REBECCA: Right and like you said, you are not spending anymore on that purchase. So if an item is going to cost $15 on an online retail store, you are still going to pay $15 whether you go through the Rakuten site to get to that website but it’s just a matter of are you going to get cash back or not.

[0:09:52.1] STEPHEN: Right and they pay out four times a year, once a quarter and they send you what they call the big fat check or you can get a PayPal payment and get that money in your account, so you could spend it on Amazon.

[0:10:03.0] REBECCA: All right, number five, sell on eBay. That is a very popular way for a lot of people who are just getting started with Amazon FBA to earn some money to turnover into their FBA business. Sell on eBay.

[0:10:16.7] STEPHEN: Right, in fact a lot of people who sell on Amazon first sold on eBay and eBay is still a really great opportunity to make some side income because even though Amazon is called the everything store, you can’t sell everything on Amazon. Maybe you might not be approved to sell a particular brand, well I would suggest selling that on eBay. Maybe there is a certain item that you have in used condition that is only allowable to be sold in new condition on Amazon.

Then sell that used condition item on eBay, a lot of opportunities out there to make some money off of eBay and that’s how I got started. I was selling on eBay before I got going to Amazon and I still, every once in a while, sell on eBay on the few items that I can’t sell on Amazon.

[0:10:57.2] REBECCA: All right and then number six, our last way that we have on our list here to earn money to use for Amazon FBA inventory, is get a side job.

[0:11:07.3] STEPHEN: Right and all the things I am talking about here are kind of like little side jobs, little side hustles but you know maybe you actually need to go deliver pizzas for a little while or maybe do some Uber driving or maybe some – you know there is a lot of different opportunities out there.

Find something that you are interested in, something that you are passionate about and kind of Google what that interest is with the words side job and you might be surprised as to what you will find, the opportunities that are out there to earn a little extra money on your own time to be able to have more cash to spend on Amazon inventory.

[0:11:39.5] REBECCA: All right, so that wraps it up for this week. We are giving you several different ideas of places to legally find some money, ethically. But they are smart ways too. Ways that you can take your interest, take the abilities that you already have, the concept of reselling and ways that you already going to be spending money, you know, with Rakuten and Swagbucks, to earn back some money or to earn some side money that you can then use on your Amazon FBA business.

Because all of us getting started need to find ways that we can really maximize the capital that we have to invest. You know very few people are able to come into you an FBA business from the very ground floor with just thousands of dollars that they want to invest in inventory and even if you did, you might not want to do that because you don’t know what you are doing right away.

But as you are getting started, as you are learning the ropes, as you are gaining more experience in your FBA business, there are ways that you can get more money to invest and that you can slowly build up a snowball of profits that you can just keep reinvesting over and over again and earn more profits.

[0:12:49.4] STEPHEN: If you are interested in any of the links that we talked about during this podcast, go to fulltimefba.com/18, you’ll see the list of ideas. You’ll see links and it will give you an opportunity to kind of research things a little bit more and take your next action steps.

[END OF DISCUSSION]

[0:13:09.7] STEPHEN: So next week, we are going to be talking about how to find profitable inventory even if you have little money. You know? Last week, we talked about how to get profitable inventory if you have no money and today we’re talking about how to get some more money. Well, how can we find profitable inventory that’s cheap, affordable, if we have a little bit of money how can we best use that to find inventory to sell on Amazon. So be sure to check that out.

[0:13:31.6] REBECCA: And we also wanted to make sure if you are just getting started in FBA and you are unsure of a lot of acronyms that we might be using, we wanted to let you know that we have a free PDF download on our blog that will explain to you what all of the FBA acronyms are. Hopefully by now, you know what FBA stands for.

[0:13:52.7] STEPHEN: Fulfillment by Amazon.

[0:13:54.4] REBECCA: You would be surprised some of the acronyms that people try to put together for FBA. So we have a free Facebook group, and one of the questions that we ask in order to make sure that people trying to join the group are not robots or spammers or not human is “what does FBA stand for?” and you would be surprise what some people say. Either because they don’t actually know what FBA stands for or because they think it’s funny anyway –

[0:14:27.4] STEPHEN: Like FBA means “Facebook advertising” and other really strange ones but no. The answer is Fulfilled by Amazon.

[0:14:33.4] REBECCA: So anyway that’s one of the acronyms that is on our list but there are a lot of other acronyms that aren’t quite as obvious for beginners. It is a whole another language that you are having to learn as you are getting into this business. So in order to learn this acronyms, we have put together a PDF download that you can get for free at our website. Just go to fulltimefba.com/acronyms and if you need to look that up to spell it, I understand. I think it is acronyms.

[0:15:05.2] STEPHEN: I have to admit, I misspelled it on our show notes.

[0:15:07.7] REBECCA: I know I am looking at this like okay, that is not how you spell acronyms. Anyway, fulltimefba.com/acronyms.

[0:15:14.4] STEPHEN: We’ll have the correct spelling at fulltimefba.com/18 the show notes for this episode.

[0:15:20.0] REBECCA: Right and that is just the number 18 so and if you are wanting to find the Facebook group that we were talking about, be sure to go to fulltimefba.com/Facebook and you can join the group and if you have a funny acronym or a funny explanation of the FBA acronym, please also be sure to put the correct one.

That’s one of my things that I’m like, “Okay, come on. Do you really know what it is or you’re just being silly?” Anyway, we just want to make sure that you have a clue about something to do with Amazon and that you are a human being.

[0:15:51.3] STEPHEN: Yes, we want only humans in our group.

[0:15:53.5] REBECCA: Right. All right on that note let’s wrap this one up.

[0:15:57.0] STEPHEN: Well thanks for joining us today and I look forward to talking to you again next week and again, we are going to be talking about how to find profitable inventory even if you have only a little bit of money, we’ll help you out.

[0:16:08.6] REBECCA: All right, have a good one and we will be in your ears next week.

[0:16:12.6] STEPHEN: See you later.

[OUTRO]

[0:16:16.3] ANNOUNCER: That is all for this episode of The Full-Time FBA Show. So head over to fulltimefba.com/podcast, where you will find the show notes and links from this episode. While you’re there, subscribe to our newsletter where you’ll get several free downloads of our popular and helpful Amazon FBA resources. Now, take action on what you have learned today so you can find success at turning part time hours into a full-time income with Amazon FBA.

[END]