How Do I Get Started?

As I've mentioned before, along the way to a thriving home business, if you can keep some consistent "foundational" income coming in, to pay your personal bills along the way without over-stressing, that's a Boho Business.

Some people do this by keeping their regular day job while they work after hours on building their business. Others find a slow but steady way to generate some income early on, then grow that income slowly until they can use some of it to pay the expenses of creating their dream business. This may not sound exciting, but sometimes "boring" is a good thing.

Seasoned money minds like Warren Buffet are often quoted as saying things like "Never lose money." That's an ideal, and also a good stance for protecting your assets.

After having tried almost everything, I believe in the Amazon model for getting started without over-stressing. You may have heard that it's saturated and that profit margins are low. But that depends on how you look at it and who your coaches are. As I'm writing this, it is the year 2025 and they say nearly half of all purchases happening online are on Amazon! That's tremendous when you consider that the majority of products listed on Amazon are actually provided by what they call "third-party-sellers." That's regular people like you and me.

It is true that Amazon's fees are high. I've heard of profit margins (take-home $ after all expenses) of between 15% and 25%. If you were bringing in a wonderful annual revenue of $400,000 it would seem disheartening to be left with only $100,000 or less as your profit. And then you have to pay personal income taxes on top of that! On the other hand, for a lot of us, an income of $100,000 a year, while working from home, would be awesome.

Still, it can be easy to lose money on an Amazon business if you're not careful about product selection and/or you don't have the right coaches. The landscape has changed even more, after the new tarrifs in 2025, so we are looking into some new coaching programs to see what is available now. (Check back soon.)

One interesting thing about Amazon, is that they are so big, they have been deemed a "marketplace facilitator." This means that the government requires them to handle the sales tax on basically everything sold through their platform - so we don't have to! As long as Amazon is your only platform, that's one less report for a lot of us sellers to worry with (Confirm this with your own accountant). Once you move to more platforms, sales tax would need to be addressed. Also, some wholesale suppliers may not work with you without a sales tax permit/reseller certificate, even if you tell them you are selling on Amazon exclusively.

We actually started our Amazon journey by spending thousands on a course with a company who claimed it was as "DFY" (Done-For-You) as it gets. They said they would vet all of the products for you, pack and prep them, send them to Amazon and they even said they wanted all of their students to be bringing in $100,000 by the end of that year - even if they had to "drag" us to the finish line "kicking and screaming." Sounds great - right? The problem is, people lie. Not always overtly. But I think some people lie to themselves about the actual value of their offerings.

In this case, the products were not as available as had been represented. So many people were in the program, that there weren't enough products to go around. When we were finally able to buy one product through this vendor, it ended up with 12 sellers on the Amazon listing (a lot of competition), then 30, and finally 50 sellers on the listing - including Amazon themselves!

Between the slow rotation into Amazon's "buy box", Amazon's fees, and the storage fees for our inventory sitting around in the Amazon warehouse awaiting its turn, we were losing money every month! Out of 5 total orders that we were able to place from this "DFY" vendor over the course of multiple months, 3 of them were canceled by this vendor. The 4th was that negative-profit item with, ultimately, 50 sellers, and the fifth and final one was way too expensive and had a high MOQ (minimum order quantity). We purchased it out of desperation really and, of course, it wasn't profitable. So much for "pre-vetted" products, nevermind "kicking and screaming"!

It was very discouraging (to say the least) and almost turned us off from selling on Amazon completely. However, there was light at the end of the tunnel. We stopped using that unreliable vendor who was so happy to take thousands of dollars of our money but not so concerned with helping us get out of the hole they'd created for us. And then I found some better resources. I'm going to list three of them here. Interestingly, they almost go in reverse order of price.

Here's what I mean. Amazon resource number 1, below, is my favorite so far, and they happen to carry the lowest cost! 

Resource number 2 costs a bit more, but is still on the more affordable side (as in hundreds of dollars, not thousands). And resource number 3 is a premium level course that is run by some very friendly folks.

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AMAZON COURSES WE LIKE:

Resource 1:

Amazon - Silent Sales Machine:

This course teaches how to find products that are currently selling well on Amazon but may not have as much supply available to meet customers' needs/demand. This is the perfect mindset to begin selling - find an unmet need (or a relatively unmet one) and fill it. It can work well for beginners because you buy just small quantities of a product to start, then confirm it is proven to continue selling, before you commit more dollars to inventory. Rinse and repeat. An awesome course - and affordable too!

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Resource 2:

Amazon - Zoof:

These folks have a lot to teach about selling on Amazon and have been doing it a long time. There is also information about other platforms and strategies. It's costs a little more than Silent Sales Machine at around $97/month, depending on what offers they have running at this time. The model did speak a lot about "deal" finding, which we feel is less viable than the model offered by Silent Sales Machine. However a lot of people like this model and, with the vast amount of information that Zoof offers in general, one could glean a lot from them!

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Resource 3:

Amazon - Accelerate:

This is a premium course that usually costs at least a couple thousand dollars, or more. They also offer great planning and sourcing tools which cost extra. The folks running it are super friendly and genuine. They seem to come out with new courses, big and small, frequently. To whittle down any confusion potentially caused by that, we feel like the one called "Accelerator" really covers the gamut of what you'd want to know for ramping up an Amazon business as fast as possible. If we were looking through all of their course offerings to pick just one, we'd definitely go with "Accelerator."

Eventually, you may want to move beyond just selling on Amazon. Those who've experienced its whims or account closures or just the crippling fees, know the pain of dealing with them. But we feel that it can still be a great place to start, if you have the right support system and training on finding viable products.

Obviously all investments carry risk, so never bet the farm (Never invest more than you can afford to lose), and there are no guarantees that any program will work for you to the same degree that it may have worked for someone else. It will still depend on your time investment, personal skills, dedication, market forces, and sometimes luck to boot...

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-DJ

April 10, 2025

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