How I’d Start Amazon FBA in 2026 (Exact Step-by-Step Strategy)

If I had to start Amazon FBA all over again in 2026 with no product, with no brand, and just $4,000 to invest, this is exactly what I'd do. And I've been selling on Amazon since 2018, and let me tell you, it's been a crazy wild ride. And why do I say that? Well, my very first product, I feel like I just got lucky on, right? Because when I went ahead and first launched my first product, It was good, I was making money, but my next 3 product launches were complete flops. And if I just went all in on my first brand, I would have gone ahead and made a lot more money way sooner. But instead, I lost tens of thousands of dollars because I just didn't understand the entire concept of Amazon. I didn't understand how competitive the market really was in certain categories where I was spending a shit ton of money on Amazon PPC. Because I didn't really understand how Amazon PPC worked. You see, when you're selling in spaces like supplements, they look at lifetime value of a customer. So you might be looking at actual products that are cost $7 or $8 cost per click. I didn't know that, right? Because I had to go through these growing pains. And I also didn't understand search volume and seasonality, which basically kills new sellers the most because you might have the right product, You're just launching in the wrong season. And that might sound complex to a lot of you, but if you have started Amazon FBA, you know exactly what I'm talking about. So fast forward to today, I've launched multiple 7-figure brands. I've acquired multiple Amazon businesses, which again, it hasn't been all flowers and roses, right? Like I lost investors' money, close to $200,000 on some of these actual brands. But I also have winners, right? Like one of my biggest wins was from a brand that just did $4 million in revenue in 2025. And I've helped dozens of new sellers go from $5,000 a month in revenue all the way up to $60,000 in revenue every single month. So in this video, I'm going to promise you some things, right? I'm not going to go ahead and feed you theories from random gurus on Amazon that just Sound great, but in actuality don't go ahead and perform. But I'm going to go ahead and show you what's actually working on Amazon FBA right now, and it's going to be based on real data, real products, and basically what I like to coin the reverse engineering formula. So what if I would do if I start Amazon FBA all over again? Basically, these are the three levers that people fail on the most: they don't understand Amazon PPC, they go into the wrong market, and they don't. Do margin checks. And again, this is probably one of the biggest things when it comes to Amazon FBA, especially now because we are in a pay-to-play society. If you don't run Amazon PPC, the likelihood of you actually being successful in Amazon FBA is zero. So again, I kind of talked about as far as like my flops in 2018, the learning phase that I went ahead and went through, um, the systems that emerged in 2022. The momentum that I had and actually getting to a $4 million brand on Amazon just last year. And I don't sugarcoat anything, right? Like I can go ahead and show you guys exactly the numbers. You can see here from January 1st, 2025 to now, which is today that I'm recording this actual video, uh, 2026, right? And again, in other videos, I go into the actual business report, which I'll go ahead and do, do so here. I'll refresh these actual pages. So you can go ahead and see the actual validation of these products. And I go ahead and show you the brands that I currently run, right? This actual brand is called Maverick. You guys can go ahead and validate me all you want, right? But again, it's not just me. I've talked about other students that have done the same type of results, right? So like before Sherwin started going ahead and joining the school community and working with me, he was stuck at about $15,000 in revenue every single month. And it's just as little as 2 weeks, just understanding frameworks, what actually matter, lowering COGS, finding the right freight forwarder, and actually doubling down on ads. In just 2 weeks, he was on pace to hit $45,000 in revenue. Or Kevin, that basically started like kind of brand new, hesitant, tried Amazon FBA before, didn't find success, and was making over $100,000 every single month. And his is because of seasonality, right? Um, and then countless other people that are in the school community have done one-on-ones with me. So this formula really works, and it's literally just a reverse engineering type of formula that I like to go ahead and coin. But finding new products that actually work is step number one. And again, the most things that people do in this situation is that they go ahead and plug in filters into Helium 10, Jungle Scout, whatever it might be, and they just hope and pray they find the right actual product. Again, I reverse engineer things. Smart Scout is something that I go ahead and teach constantly. So if new sellers are making money, it's not saturated. So the whole concept here is that instead of guessing what product to go ahead and go into, I like to go ahead and see new sellers that are currently making money on a product and then try and analyze to see if I'm going to have success. Why? Because if new sellers are making money, it literally means that there's a chance for you to go in there and make some money as well. But this is just the first step. And I like to go ahead and use this tool. It's called Top New Products here when it comes to Smart Scout. And it is a goldmine of information. If you guys haven't heard of Smart Scout, haven't used Smart Scout, go ahead. I have like a 30% off currently right now when it comes to Smart Scout. I'm probably one of the only people that use this. So take advantage because this is the best pricing you're going to go ahead and have. But let's kind of go over this top new products tool on Smart Scout. So again, when you go on Smart Scout, there is this top new type of product dashboard or kind of information that you can go ahead and get from Smart Scout. And you can see brands like Amazon that just launched back in November, October, December, right? Obviously we can't compete with the likes of Amazon or the likes of, let's go ahead and see Ninja, right? You can see here, this is how much revenue they're going ahead and making on a monthly basis. So you can see this new Echo that Amazon just launched is making $2 million plus in revenue every single month. And if we're a top brand, we don't think that we can go ahead and get to this because we don't have the marketing budget. We don't have the reach as an Amazon, as a ninja, but there are new sellers right in this range that just launched within the last 3 months. They're already making $100,000, $80,000, $70,000. You guys get the point here. Um, and if you guys hear my daughter in the background, it is okay. I do this live. So again, if you guys appreciate anything I say in this actual video, like, subscribe. But what I'd like to go ahead and do is go down here where I don't necessarily resemble the actual brand, right? Like, I don't know any of these brands down here, and they sell unique items that are going ahead and generating them $60,000, $50,000, uh, $40,000 in revenue every single month. And I found one right over here, right? This little gardening thing right here is basically going ahead and making $46,000 every single month in revenue, and they just launched in September time. So you can see here that this actual item right here is brand new, only has around 73 reviews right now, is brand new to the marketplace and is already killing it on Amazon. So what do we basically do next when it comes to this? Right. Well, we want to go ahead and validate that it's actually in the parameters of our actual profit margin. So let's go on here, right? So we found a product on Top New Tools. It literally took me about 1 minute to find this actual product. What comes next? Well, step 2 is validating the market and margins. So first thing I like to always do is validate, does this product have enough profit margin? In the age of Amazon FBA, you have a 15% selling fee to sell on Amazon. You have a fulfillment fee, you have storage, you have all these different types. If you want to run deals, coupons, whatever it might be, right? I want to make sure that I have right around a 50% profit margin before ads. And how do we go ahead and do this? Well, we use Helium 10, and obviously a lot of you guys know what Helium 10 already is. If you guys don't, make sure to go ahead and sign up for that, download the Chrome extension. I do have like a 30 or 40% off code as well. It'll be below this actual video, so make sure to take advantage of that. But once Helium 10 is, is on here itself, We want to do one of two things. First, we want to go ahead and go here to this revenue calculator. And you can see that based on the selling price right now that they're going ahead and selling for is $29. And the fees associated with Amazon before anything, right, is a $4.50 referral fee and a fulfillment fee of $5.42. What I like to go ahead and do here is I like to divide this these pounds in half, right? So if to go ahead and get a conversion rate of kilograms, and I'll tell you guys in a second why. So if you go ahead and divide this by 50%, we get around 65 kilograms, 0.65 kilograms. So if we go ahead and just multiply that by 1, because right now, if you use the freight forwarder in our school community, you get $1 per kilogram. So basically in the sense of doing the numbers, right, because I'm not really good at mathematician, you're probably going to pay around 50 to 65 cents for this item to ship into Amazon from your manufacturer, right? And we really don't know the manufacturing cost, but if you go on Amazon right now and basically take this title, uh, Bosnia Tree Kit, and just put it on to Alibaba right over here, we ain't gonna get a sense of maybe reaching out to, to these suppliers and getting it for $6, maybe going ahead and getting for $5 over here. This one looks exactly the same at $4.64, so we can assume that that getting— going ahead and getting a quote from them and getting it shipped into Amazon were right around the $5 range. So this is good, right? So we can go ahead and type in right over here a $5 manufacturing and shipping cost into Amazon. And you can go ahead and see here that once we hit $5, our net profit is going to be $15, which is literally 50% of our selling price. So before we run ads, storage costs, any deals, we have a 50% profit margin. Obviously we have to go ahead and confirm with our Alibaba manufacturer to make sure everything looks good, but right now it's checking the box. And one other thing we want to go ahead and use Helium 10 for is just validating that there's actually other sellers making the same amount of money, because the last thing we want to do is get into this actual niche and only one person that is brand new is actually making money. So we use the Helium 10 Chrome extension again. We use the X-Ray tool. It's going to go ahead and pull up here, and we want to sort this by new sellers. As you can see, all of these people just launched within the last 6 months, right? 6, 7, 8 months right now. And we want to make sure— we want to go ahead and make sure is that multiple people are making over $10,000 every single month. So if our goal is to make around $10,000 every single month, This can go ahead and help us validate that, right? So we see that people that just launched are making $15,000, $25,000, $32,000, $420, $28, $66, $79, $72, $4,000. So this actually checks off the box because we see multiple new sellers actually making money. It's not this big brand that went into this space and started making money. And last thing we just want to validate is search volume, right? We don't want to make— we don't want to make sure that we don't have consistent search volume. So people typing in Bosnia tree kit, right, over the lifetime of this thing, it looks to see that people are going ahead and shopping for it in December time mostly every single year. You see a spike in this, but even during the off months, it's not that bad, right? Like, we don't want to go ahead and just see a crater, something like a fidget spinner, which came and there was a huge amount of demand. And all of a sudden, when all this competitor got into it, it just took a dip and no longer people are going ahead and searching up finish, uh, fidget spinners. But in this situation, people every year you can see a spike. So obviously selling season is December time for this actual item, but during the off-season it's still not bad. So now we hit all the boxes that we're going ahead and doing, right? New sellers are going ahead and making money, profit margins there before ads, we have 50%. And this next step might be the most important type of step. So we validated the market share. We validated the net margin that we're safe, right? You want to be above 45%. I know I said 50%, but we want to be 45% or higher. So it actually checks the box even further than that. We want to make sure that the average cost per click is within range. So we can go to Smart Scout once again. Once I'll go ahead and pull it up right over here. We go to Smart Scout and we can go to this products tool right over here. Um, on the left-hand side, you can go ahead and see it. And we just type in this ASIN and we can see based on what they're ranked for, our average cost per click for PPC bidding. And I have a good rule of thumb here that if you're selling a product that is under 50 cents, we want— I mean, under $50. I'm sorry, guys. We want to go ahead and have a cost per click of $1.50 and lower. If you're selling a product that is below $100, we want to have a $2 cost per click or lower. And if we're selling a product that's over $200 or less than $200, we want to have an average cost per click of $2.50. This is not set in stone, but this is a good parameter to go ahead and work towards. So again, once we take a look at the average cost per click for this actual niche, where keywords that actually matter here, we're looking to see that we are within that $1 $1.20, $1.32. We are creeping up when it comes to $1.57. So this is actually borderline if we could go ahead and move forward or not. But as, as long as we don't see this cost per click being $2, $3, $4, that means that it's very competitive. If that's the case, we are clear to move forward. So once that is all said and done, we want to go ahead and actually reach out to these people on Alibaba. So step 4 is sourcing the actual product. So we got a sense of what the product might go ahead and be, right? But now it is time to start reaching out to these actual manufacturers on Alibaba and getting the true price. And based on everything we went ahead and saw, we want to make sure that we are within range as far as production costs, maybe $4 or $5. So we want to reach out to as many people as possible. So I would say a good rule of thumb is reaching out to at least 50 different types of manufacturers because we want to make sure that communication is on point, the actual quote is on point, and then finally to make sure that the quality is on point as well. So once we narrow down pricing, communication, we want to actually get some samples, but we want to make sure that we're looking at all the 1-star reviews of all of this entire market and seeing why they are leaving 1-star reviews. If it's an easy fix, that is all you need. Because the thing is, we want to eliminate those 1-star reviews from our actual listing. Again, we're not trying to get a new mold. We're not trying to revolutionize the way that this whole Bosnia tree kit is planned. We just want to get 1% better. And this goes for the product. This goes for the listing. This goes for the PPC. This goes for everything, right? So again, do not stress out about trying to make this actual product revolutionary. We don't want to go ahead and do that. But once we have that quote, then it's time to go ahead and get into production. You already have the validation already. We know that there's new people going ahead and making money. We know that there's multiple people making money. We know that the profit margin is there and we know the cost per click is there. So now you have the ability to move forward based on what the reverse engineering type of formula. So now we go into manufacturing, getting a freight forwarder, and then shipping it into Amazon FBA. And this is handled obviously by a freight forwarder. And again, we mentioned we get right around below a dollar, uh, per kilogram in the school community. So if you want to be a part of the school community where you're going to get your money back regardless, right now we have the cheapest price possible. We have vendors, we have actual people that know what they're doing when it comes to listing optimization, PPC, validating, getting in front of profit margin, strategy calls, just for as little as a monthly payment every single month. And I guarantee you, one month in this actual school community will pay for itself and more. So if you guys haven't checked it out, go into the school community because big things are coming there and you want to take advantage before the price goes up. So after that is listing and optimization as we know it. As far as going ahead and listing, obviously we go over it in the school community as well. But one thing to consider, even if you're not in the school community, is the main image is literally 90% of your listing performance. Why is that? Well, no one is going to see the secondary imaging, the bullet points, the A+ content, the reviews if they don't click on your listing. And I see it all the time as far as people going in there and spending all this time in their actual listing and they don't go ahead and spend money on their main image. Because again, the reality is if people are not going ahead and clicking on your listing, none of it else matters. So focus on the main image being the most important thing. After that, keywords is very simple as far as going ahead and not being spammy. And the day of Rufus, which is a new AI tool on Amazon, is going to be less about trying to have keyword relevance and more about what people are actually searching up. So start shifting the mindset from keyword to title to not, not being actually spammy, just being something that people can actually read. And again, we have so many of these things as far as like Rufus and like what Amazon is going ahead and going forward with when it comes to advertising, when it comes to going ahead and shopper intent, all within the school community. STP and customer avatar. If you guys don't know what this is, it's segmentation, targeting, positioning, knowing exactly who's going ahead and purchasing your product, focusing on their pain points, their insecurities to actually win and be aligned with your listing page. This is what drives conversion rate the most. Nothing else. This is going to be it. But then after that is obviously PPC and impressions. And I can go hours and hours and hours when it comes to PPC, because there are so many moving parts. And a lot of my videos, my top videos, are about Amazon PPC. And I'm going to go ahead and link the video down here as far as my launching strategies and my relaunching strategy when it comes to Amazon FBA. So go ahead and make sure to check that out as well. But it goes over a full breakdown when it comes to Amazon. And if you guys want me to go ahead and make a new updated video about this, just comment down below about— go ahead and use the keyword PPC. And I'll go ahead and make sure to make a more enhanced version of what's going ahead and working Right now, and it comes to Amazon PPC. But go ahead and comment that if you guys want that for me. But then basically, final thoughts here, right? If you're ready to build a brand the right way, you got to do this reverse engineering formula because this is the best chance for you to go ahead and have success on Amazon FBA. Everything else is just luck. What we do in the school community is we literally reverse engineer everything. So even if you're already in the niche that might have high PPC already, right, that might have top sellers being big brands like Amazon, we want to know exactly where we can carve up a piece of the pie by doing a reverse engineering type of formula for your actual product. So if you guys are interested, again, there's so many caveats to this that will literally pay for itself. Currently right now it is $99 per month. If you're the first 10 people to actually join the school community right now, starting today, you will go ahead and lock in that $99 a month. And you will also lock in curriculum that lets you go ahead and build and have a pathway to 7 figures when it comes to Amazon. So if you guys are interested in that, go ahead and check out the link of the school community below. And if you guys will go ahead and like to go ahead and do one-on-one helping, once you're in the actual school community, just message me and I'll go ahead and help you out. But we have so many coaches. We have a listing optimization coach one day. We have myself as a strategy call one day. We have a PPC coach the other day, and we have a validation coach as well. So you will get so much knowledge in this. Just think about this as a gym for current Amazon FBA sellers. So if you guys appreciate anything I said in this actual video, all I ask for in return, like, subscribe, and I'll catch you guys on the next one.