Many businesses, whether traditional brick-and-mortar or e-commerce businesses have a footprint of some sort on Amazon. But one overlooked aspect to leveraging Amazon’s platform is their FBA, or Fulfillment By Amazon business.

This stat is true of business to consumer as well business to business models. For example, while the volume of business on Amazon is incredible and only keeps increasing, several companies operate by utilizing Amazon’s platform to create a drop-shipment business. 

To build your drop-shipping business utilizing Amazon’s platform, there are 6 things you can do to position your business for success.

1.) Choose a niche

Don’t focus on being a one-stop-shop for everything. You won’t be able to compete with larger businesses on the platform, or even Amazon, which offers their own brand for many products.

The best strategy is to choose one profitable niche, not too competitive, and you can drill down into being an exclusive dealer in those products.

2.) Do competition research

Examine your potential competitors in the space. As mentioned previously, it will be impossible to topple giants such as Amazon and Walmart, but there are cracks in their business models that you may find opportunities. Additionally, you want to understand possible issues in the product offerings, such as shipping costs or production issues that may slow your business operations.

3.) Secure your supply chain

Too often, many drop-shipment models rely on getting their products through a wholesaler rather than creating a relationship with the producer of the products. By choosing to go directly to the producer of your product, you will be able to control inventory and possibly create a dedicated brand for your product. 

4.) Optimize your e-commerce site

Building a website for your products is the most basic thing you can do. Unfortunately, basic is all you’ll achieve without optimizing your website to direct every transaction and every search query to your targeted keywords. By targeting every page and product description, you’re increasing the likelihood of your product and brand being at the top of search results, which in the game of e-commerce is 100% vital to survival.

5.) Create a customer acquisition strategy

Building a relationship with your providers as well as optimizing your website is only the beginning. This isn’t the “Field of Dreams,” the movie starring Kevin Costner about a character clearing farmland to build a baseball field that ghosts of legends in the game would visit.

The reality is that it takes a lot of hard work, dedicated practice, and focused strategies to attract your potential customers. Using social media and pay-per-click advertising are good ways to get your brand in front of people, but you need to have a clear strategy of your messaging or risk spending a lot of money with little return.

6.) Analyze the data

You need to constantly tweak and refine your messaging to see what is most effective with your optimization and advertising. By looking at what keywords are converting either for traffic or sales, you can further improve your product descriptions and website keywords, increasing their performance over time. 

Once you establish your business, you need to consider how you are going to ship your products. One of the most profitable is to utilize a fulfillment program such as the FBA, or Fulfillment By Amazon, option. 

With an FBA, you’re storing products or licensing rights onto their platform for a small fee. If you strategically conduct research and optimize your messaging, an FBA can be a very profitable endeavor. 

Depending on your outcome objectives for your dropshipping business, you can continue to build it slowly over time or consider selling it to increase your profit. 

There are a variety of ways to sell a fulfillment business. Once you’ve shown positive growth and a reasonable profit margin, you can utilize a service such as a forum specializing in niche FBA business acquisitions. 

You can check a website like Amazon Forum for ways to build, grow, and sell your FBA easily and often quickly. 

As so much of what people have had to do has been remote, the growth of e-commerce has seen a significant growth rate, and entrepreneurs would be wise to consider leveraging Amazon’s FBA program to gain traction in the e-commerce sphere. 

Once you gain some level of sustainability in the FBA market, you can continue to expand your growth or use that positive growth to sell your FBA business to free yourself up to find a new challenge and new opportunities.