Hello everyone! My husband and I are going to start selling on Amazon FBA here soon. We've been researching it as much as possible and have gotten most of our supplies and some inventory already. I'm going to talk to my friend that I went to business school with (she's an accountant, I went for marketing) to see if she has any experience with ecommerce businesses.

My question is for anyone who sells on Amazon, or any other ecommerce platform such as ebay, what do you use for your bookkeeping? I've seen Godaddy and Quickbooks mentioned several times by FBA sellers. Is it worth paying for bookkeeping software or do you have your own system? If anyone else here sells Amazon FBA and has some tips for tackling sales tax as well that would be great.

I'll be researching this myself of course, and as I said I will be speaking with an accountant, but I figured it doesn't hurt to ask around!

-Rabbit

Good luck with this, Amazon is a great platform but extremely anal retentive to deal with. Have you purchased UPC codes yet? If not I suggest just buying them off ebay. It's much less of a hassle than trying to go through the registration process, etc. etc.

Yes you will want to get some bookkeeping software. We use Sage, which is quite expensive and probably more than you'll need (though I may be wrong). You can manage things in an excel sheet with proper organization if it's like one item a week but when it comes to tracking all your costs and settling your numbers I would highly recommend just getting software. The type of software is going to highly depend on the type of business you plan on doing. If you have enough of an inventory you're willing to go with FBA then you might want a heavier hitter like Sage, but a small small business could probably get away with quickbooks just fine. If you can do a trial run on any of the softwares definitely do it!

Thank you for taking the time to answer my question. Our goal is to eventually make this my husband's full time job (with me helping, too) so we definitely want this to grow & want to make sure we get off to the right start. I'll have to check into Sage. Have you heard of Inventory Lab? I saw some good reviews of that and considered doing a trial. We have not purchased UPC codes yet, we were going to get blank labels & print them ourselves. Would this not be a good idea then?

Definitely do, there actually looks like it's a sale right now on it.

And no I have not heard of Inventory Lab, I will have to look into it!

The UPC thing, you can print them however you want but you need actual 100% legit UPC codes. It is required by Amazon. There is a whole governing body for it which you can sign up for, pay the fees, etc. It's a long process and can be expensive. But you can also buy them from secondary sellers. My company does some small filling via Amazon and that was the faster, cheaper, and easier method. It's up to you really and how big you think your company will be, etc. We didn't need 'our' UPC code, really. We just needed unused UPC codes. When you do get them, keep an excel to log which items attach to which. You can't use a UPC twice on Amazon.

Thank you for all of the good advice. I've saved what you've said to my notes. I'm worried about not getting everything right from the start since Amazon is so strict, but I think we're getting there! Do you have any other tips or advice that you think I should hear before we get started? I'm sure you're busy & I don't want to pick your brain too much. Thank you!

You'll get there absolutely! Don't worry about it, I don't have much to pick but I don't mind helping with what I do know... Let's see. Well Amazon is really picky with photos. They don't accept line drawings, or photos they don't feel are of the actual product. So make sure your items are fully photographed to the best of your ability. Also keep your invoices on hand for your products. It depends on what you're selling but you may need to prove you actually have a purchase history. If you're a reseller anyways. Amazon required us to show invoices with all the items we were wanting to sell through them, purchased from our suppliers. Save all that stuff anyways, you need it for your financial paperwork. But Amazon might need it too.

Oh, and shipping. If you're stateside shipping tends to be better than Canadian but be prepared to eat some shipping costs. Amazon does not let you 'choose your shipping'. They have a calculator that decides the shipping for you and you don't get to edit that. I'm not sure how that will differ between their FBA and regular system but it can be a pain.

I'm trying to think about what other problems we encountered... if any come to mind I'll let you know. Those are the main things that we came up against when starting to sell via Amazon. We've done great through it. Most of our small item sales come from Amazon now and it's boosted that side of our business. Amazon is definitely frustrating at times, but once you're up and running I'd say it's excellent.

My husband does photography so that shouldn't be too much of a problem if we end up selling products that don't already have a listing and photos. We'll keep all of the invoices/receipts for sure.

We live in Indiana. I saw that one of the warehouses is there, so hopefully most of our shipments will be directed there. We also live down the road from a UPS so that should be very helpful!

Do you mind if I mail you to ask some more questions?

No, not at all, please go ahead! :)