Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Chapter 2: Mastering the Amazon

In This Chapter

• Listing items for sale in the Amazon.com Marketplace
• Going pro with a Pro Merchant sellers account
• Getting on board other Amazon.com opportunities

It may be a jungle out there, but Amazon.com has strategically cleared a path for the willing netrepreneur. That wasn't always the case. You might recall the days when Amazon.com was launched and the idea of putting an entire bookstore online to make a (substantial) profit garnered its fair share of skepticism. The only thing about the site that got any attention back then was the big, wooden door that the company's founder, Jeff Bezos, used as a desk! Well, a few things have changed.

Consider that Amazon earned around $34.20 billion in sales in 2010. That's not too shabby for a guy who didn't have a “real” desk. What's more exciting is that the site has continued to create business opportunities for people like you by selling products on Amazon.com. Having a slice of that billion-dollar pie probably sounds good!

Amazon has established multiple selling strategies for you to use: Marketplace, Pro Merchant, WebStore, and aStore, to name a few. In this chapter, we show you how to choose a sales model and follow the instructions that Amazon.com has carefully laid out for you.