Review of the Proven Amazon System 2012
by Jake Jacob
“Setting up an Amazon business that utilizes the Fulfillment by Amazon System is much like buying a franchise opportunity. With a franchise, you buy a package, get some knowledge and equipment to get started, and then it’s up to you to run with it. One of the big differences is that buying and selling online using FBA really has no ‘buy-in’. There are no major upfront costs to get started. All you really need is a little knowledge, some motivation, and some inexpensive tools and services. You probably already have a computer with an Internet connection at home in order to list products for sale and a smartphone like an iPhone or Android phone that you can use to gather pricing information on products. It is common to underestimate the real, legitimate income that can be generated by this business because it is a business that truly does not have a high cost of entry.” The Authoritative BLUEPRINT for Buying Retail Products to Sell Online for BIG PROFITS by Chris Green.
Growing up in Ghana, W.Africa I was the kid who took the arriving American tourists down to High Street in downtown Accra and negotiated with the traders who sold their curios there and got them the best deals. When I was in my early teens I got to know the Hausa traders that would go to the States and buy up cars and stuff them with stuff bring them back to the Ghana and sell them for a hefty profit and then relax for a few months. Right then and there I decided that that is what I wanted to do when I grew up.
I always had this idea that if someone could buy a warehouse and just start filling it up with ’stuff’ that in time I could sell it for a small fortune. With the Proven Amazon Course I have access to over twenty Amazon warehouses all over the world and I only pay a tiny fee for what I ’store’ there. It comes out to about a penny a month for an average size book. So the game is to get as much stuff that I buy cheap into the warehouse and then out again as fast as possible making the most profit as I can. When the inventory arrives at one of ‘my’ warehouses I’m done. Amazon takes care of the packing, shipping, customer service, tracking, records and returns while I’m out on the internet and offline looking more deals.
Here is a short video of an Amazon warehouse. CLICK HERE
The Proven Amazon Course that Jim Cockburn put together in 2011 with some of the best talent in the Ebay and Amazon world’s is so full of meat that it took a full week to go through the information. I have been reviewing products and courses for years and I rarely actually do anything more than do just vet the author and go through the material looking for holes and giving the system, product or methods a quick kick in the tires.
Not PAC , the original course came out last year and many students of the course that came out last year are doing very well selling on Amazon. I have been making money online for over ten years doing everything from email marketing to designing QR Codes, SMS Messaging Campaigns and E commerce Mobile Web Sites but I’ve never been attracting to selling stuff online. The affiliate marketing model had me building a site creating stunning content and attracting traffic to hopefully click on affiliate links I had placed there for the reader. It made sense but I always wanted to make the bigger bucks so for the last couple years I have been involved in helping local businesses grow and thrive using the internet.
However with the economy in Tucson being so bad I have been looking for a different model that takes advantage of the Long Tail since I know that people in one part of the world may need something here and people here may need something there. Finding out the amount of free traffic you can plug into on Amazon for free has convinced me that this my way forward and I am diligently tying up every loose end to pursue this with about 80% of my work time.
Here’s a short overview of the course that was released last year.
After going through what was released in 2011 I went out that afternoon and took my dog Skipper for a long walk to think about what I’d learned in the last few days. On the way back I stopped by a yard sale to see if there were any books for sale. I found a few that looked good. I didn’t know about the scanner that the course makes available. It allows you to zero in on how many copies of the book are available on Amazon. It also gives you the power to find the right books at the right price. Plus much more which I’ll get to shortly.
I ran home with my ‘finds’ and as I referred to the course I found out I could actually download the scanner the course talks about for FREE. It is connected to Red Laser, the best UPC and QR scanner on the market and Amazon. It showed me within minutes why I should never go anywhere without my phone fully charged and always give myself a few extra minutes on any errand.
Why? Because whether it’s a trip to the grocery store for a gallon of milk or a stop at Kohl’s for some shorts there are deals everywhere. Chris Green’s information will have you literally tripping over deals where you can make 100% profit more on a daily basis. Further, the scanner tells you how many items are in stock at Amazon, how much Amazon is selling them for, how many FBA sellers there are, what the ranking is of a product, the weight, how much net profit you will make. The data is real time and directly connected to Amazon so it’s very accurate. You can also upload the information to a spreadsheet and shipping software (add-on) where you can in minutes produce labels, set up tracking and have a box ready to be picked up by UPS in minutes. Finally, as a FBA seller you are also eligible for the Amazon’s UPS rates which are almost impossible to beat.
Back to the story, after scanning my books that I had invested a whopping $4.25 in I found I’d gotten three good ones and two bad ones. However, my net net profit after shipping was going to be $32 for a five minute stop. Not bad and needless to say I was hooked. The next day I had an appointment at the hospital. They have an area of free books that people have donated. Anyone, patient or otherwise is welcome to help themselves. I had my scanner with me there but I obviously didn’t pull it out as I didn’t want someone asking ‘What are you doing’ and me saying ‘uh, uh, checking prices?’
So I just quietly used the criteria presented in the course to picked up three books up and when I got home I found I’d picked up one that has no other FBA sellers listed and whose lowest price listed by the used book sellers was $37.15. I was thrilled. The other two that I thought would be valuable could be had for a .01. Next time I have an appointment I’ll just drop those off at the hospital.
This brings me to the point that the Proven Amazon Course gives you an edge over anyone else out there that is buying and selling on Amazon and Ebay. Jim Cockburn stated in one of his newsletters that he had visited with one of the leading affiliate marketers in the industry. He told Jim that affiliate marketing was NOT AN ONLINE BUSINESS.
What he meant is that the business owner was using others to promote his business, taking their time and their resources to promote the business. In other words, if you are an affiliate marketer you may make a little money for often a tremendous amount of work but you don’t have your own business.
That said, this course will empower you to build a real business. They cover everything from setting up your business and getting a tax certificate, to on the high end setting up exclusive deals with actual manufacturers and on the low end of cleaning and packing up one book. Over the years I have always posed this question to the vast majority of home business opportunities.
If it’s that good why don’t they set up a regular business keep their ’secrets’ to themselves and hire people and then dominate the market. Remember all the ‘make millions in real estate courses’ that you saw everywhere. It never made sense to me that someone with that knowledge would put it out there for general consumption but maybe that’s because I’m greedy and they wanted to share the wealth. I bought a few of those courses and I never did make any money.
I have made a lot of money both offline and online and being in my fifties and knowing the state of affairs in the country right now I wanted to take a few minutes to share with you what I think is your best shot to having a great home based business that the whole family can get involved with and having a blast and helping out the local economy. The money you spend at yard sales, thrift stores and local vendors stimulates your local community.
Back to the peddlers of opportunities and why the Proven Amazon System 2012 just makes common sense. Chris Green in the advanced retail arbitrage teaching on the 2012 version of the course (which by the way was $1400 originally) states logically why it would be completely impossible for one or even several hundred folks to dominate this business model. He moved from Dallas recently but he dominated one chain in one city and was moving over a million dollars a year. There are simply too many thrift stores, clearance racks, and Craig list classified that are local to your area that only YOU can exploit.
For instance, last week I flew to Dallas where my son picked me up and on the way back to his place I was sharing what I’d learned on the Proven Amazon Course. We had to stop at Walmart to pick up a pillow and when I walked in I was shocked and pleased to see 20 full racks at the front of the store with mostly toys that were on clearance after Easter. I remembered that toys were huge sellers on Amazon so I pulled out my smart phone and started scanning and ended up leaving with some toys. Again, if I’d already made some money and had a little more confidence I would have cleared the place out. Almost everything there would have netted me at least 200% -1000% profit and I could have just sat on them until Christmas.
But what I saw there gave me the confidence to do what the course recommends and that is to start small so I have a small pile of books, the toys my son bought at Walmart to get in on the deal, and some stuff I gathered up around the house that I want to get rid of and would rather do it on Amazon than stand in the blazing heat of Arizona in a yard sale.
This course has brought up memories of my brother years ago who carved bears with a chain saw in the mountains of North Carolina and shipped them all over the country using eBay. I know numerous folks that have sold stuff on eBay for years. Why do I bring that up? Because Amazon is light years ahead of eBay in every way. And most importantly is my fresh understanding of the FBA customer.
By stepping into the FBA world you enter the world of discriminating online shoppers. Many people are price conscious when they go to but there is a whole population that is not. They want what they want when they want it and don’t really care about the price. There is another huge group that doesn’t have access to the Walmart’s, Kohl’s and Targets of the world. And then there are items whose price is controlled by supply and demand. If you are in one of the hundreds of American populations overseas you are heading to Amazon to do much of your shopping and knowing you can have what you want safely and quickly wipes out looking down the right hand column. Those online shoppers are not trying to save a couple bucks. FBA shoppers trust Amazon and know that Amazon is obsessive about customer service. This is the world this course gives you instant access to for about a dollar a day and a free trial period.
Understanding this groups wants and needs and providing them with items online is what this course is all about. The PAC 2012 brings up things that you may never have thought of before. For instance here in Tucson every space heater and winter item is sitting on the clearance rack in March while in places further north like Alaska have online customers getting on Amazon and finding great prices on gloves, scarfs, and other winter ware. This simple fact and just thinking about things like this will give you sales. In addition to this the FBA customer is going to buy to get the free shipping and that gets you a bigger sale.
And then there is whole other group of Amazon shoppers that the course targets called ‘Prime’ who never pay for shipping on Amazon. They pay a small fee once a year and only FBA sellers have access to these high value shoppers. There are some other things about prime shoppers but I’ll let you find out about those after you get inside the course or you can just do a search and get the details.
The material in the 2012 version of the Proven Amazon Course covers everything in the area of arbitrage which is just a fancy way of saying ‘buy low and sell high’. Here is a short video that will give you an inside peek of what you get.
I have found that the single most frustrating aspect of working online is support. When you buy
PAC 2012 it is not a one time info dump. You also become part of a vibrant community that is actually doing this and making money. Everyone is positive and the experts that put the course together often answer questions directly. I love that. Without support and new information in a rapidly changing environment any course becomes obsolete in months.
So you ask, now what? Here’s my plan. I am going downtown and getting my business license which will give me tax free status for all out of state orders. That gives me a 8.5% increase in all of my profit margins. I am going to be on the look out for rebates, coupons and discounts and closeouts to maximize my margins. I have made a list of the thrift stores and will be making the rounds and befriending the managers.
In between the thrift stores I’ll be stopping anywhere I see stores that may have light items on their clearance racks. When I get back I’ll go to my study materials and pack up a few boxes with the items I find,label them and call UPS.
To be a FBA seller you have a $39.95/mo. fee but the first month is free. My goal is to cover the cost of the course, shipping, and making a $100 profit before I pay off my credit card. This is by far one of the lowest risk businesses I’ve ever set up and the course even outlines a less expensive zero risk option. You go out and find a deal and buy ten items. You list them on FBA and see if they sell quickly. If they do you send some more in if not you pay the dollar or two to have the items returned to you take the rest of the items back to the store, get your refund and quit.
On the other hand, if you have ambitions like I do going all the way back to my childhood dreams of being a trader I hope to be sending truckloads to Amazon and making profit from around the world. Amazon is expanding worldwide quickly and the thought of my goods showing up at people’s doorsteps in exotic places around the world is exciting. Amazon takes care of all the paperwork, the customer service, and all the accounting. I am freed up 100% to go find better and better deals and keep rolling my profit back into the business until I reach my goals. In the meantime I won’t be losing money hoping to do well. The Proven Amazon Course is the most exciting business model for a home business that I’ve ever found. You can literally operate an empire with your cell phone once you get into the higher levels of retail arbitrage. And the fact that you can start by going out and picking up aluminum cans for a week, buying a bus pass and finding two or three bags of bargains on clearance racks and thrift stores and graduating to controlling truckloads of merchandise rings of the American dream that most of the nation has lost.
I sincerely hope you take this journey with me and I’ll making regular posts right here to keep you up to date with my progress. Things change fast and as always you have an unconditional, no questions, no hassle money back guarantee if you are for any reason not as dazzled with this course as I have been. Get started now.
