How to start Amazon FBA in the UK. The complete beginner's guide.
Everything from what it costs to opening your seller account and booking your first shipment, written by a UK seller who still sources every week. Eight steps, no fluff.
What is Amazon FBA and how does it work?
Amazon FBA (Fulfilment by Amazon) lets you store your products in Amazon's fulfilment centres. When a customer orders, Amazon handles the whole process: picking, packing, shipping and customer service.
That means you can use Amazon's logistics network to build a business without running a warehouse, hiring pickers or managing couriers yourself.
In practice, being an Amazon FBA seller comes down to a repeatable loop: find a product selling for more than you can buy it for, send it to Amazon, and let them do the rest. The skill is not in the logistics. It is in knowing which products are worth buying.
Amazon FBA for beginners works precisely because it removes the two things that usually stop people starting: storage and shipping. Whether you want a full time Amazon business or a second income alongside a job, understanding how FBA works is the first step.
How much does it cost to start Amazon FBA?
The honest answer is that the fees are small and the stock is not. Most people worry about the wrong number.
What Amazon charges you
- Individual plan: no monthly fee, 75p per item sold
- Professional plan: £25 a month excluding VAT, no per item fee
- Referral fee: a percentage of each sale, typically 8% to 15% depending on category
- FBA fulfilment fee: charged per unit, based on size and weight
- Storage fee: charged monthly on the space your stock occupies
The two plans cross over at about 34 units a month. Below that the Individual plan is cheaper, above it the Professional plan is. There is no reason to pay £25 a month before you are selling.
What you actually need to start
Stock is the real cost, and it is the one nobody budgets properly. You can test the process with £50 and an afternoon. To run it as a business, £500 is a realistic minimum and £1,000 moves considerably faster, because your fixed monthly costs need enough stock turning to absorb them.
Software is the other line. A deal analysis app is not optional once you are sourcing seriously, and most sellers run one subscription rather than several.
Rather than guess, put your own numbers in. Our startup cost calculator shows what a given starting budget turns into over your first few cycles, and our FBA profit calculator works out the fees on any individual deal before you buy it.
Creating your Amazon seller account
Starting Amazon FBA begins with a seller account. Amazon offers two account types for different scales of business:
Individual plan
For beginners testing the water with fewer than about 35 sales a month. You pay 75p per sale rather than a monthly fee, so there is nothing to lose while you find your feet.
Professional plan
For sellers ready to scale. The £25 a month subscription unlocks bulk listing tools, advanced reporting and advertising, and removes the per item fee.
What you will need
- A valid bank account for receiving payments
- An active debit card for fees and the subscription
- Government issued identification for verification
- Business registration documents, if applicable
- Tax information for your region
Your first 90 days matter more than most people realise. This is when your seller metrics get established, so take the time to read the policies properly rather than learning them through a suspension.
Our step by step guide to setting up a new Amazon seller account walks through the whole registration, including the parts people usually get stuck on. When you are ready, start at Amazon's seller registration.
Need a hand getting set up?
Our getting started module walks you through registration end to end, including the verification call.
From £39.99 a month. Cancel any time.
The terminology you actually need
Learning the language speeds everything up. These are the terms that come up every day:
Best seller rank
How well a product sells within its category. Lower is better. Every category has its own benchmarks, so a rank of 20,000 means very different things in Beauty and in Garden.
Amazon standard identification number
The unique 10 character code Amazon uses to identify every item in its catalogue.
European article number
The 13 digit barcode number that identifies a product. In practice, the number you scan when you are sourcing in store.
Buy box
The featured seller position that wins the large majority of sales. Price, fulfilment method and seller metrics all feed into who gets it.
Sales velocity
How quickly a product sells, worked out from BSR movement and category dynamics. This is what tells you whether to buy 10 units or 200.
Seller count
How many sellers are already on a listing. More sellers means the buy box is shared more ways, and usually means tighter margins.
FBA fees
What Amazon takes from each sale. Split into the fulfilment fee, based on size and weight, and the referral fee, a percentage of the sale price.
Amazon buy box share
How much of the buy box Amazon itself holds on a listing. One of the first things to check before committing cash to a deal.
Review count and rating
Social proof that drives conversion. Products above four stars with a decent review count convert noticeably better.
Average buy box price
What the buy box has actually sold at historically, rather than what it shows today. The number your margin should be built on.
Want the full picture?
Fifteen structured modules take you from your first listing to a repeatable sourcing routine.
From £39.99 a month. Cancel any time.
Learn your foundations
When I coach someone new, the first thing I say is learn the fundamentals. It is the least exciting advice and the only one that reliably works. Three areas carry most of the weight.
Deal analysis
The single most important skill an Amazon seller can build. It takes hours to get right, so we teach it in detail rather than in a checklist.
Keepa
The most important piece of software you will use. Hours of video on reading the whole chart, not just the green line.
Sourcing
The difference between a great month and an average one. We cover every method and add new masterclasses each month.
Sessions like this run every week, covering a different topic each time. It works the way a good Amazon FBA course should, except the material keeps being added to and you can ask questions about your own deals rather than watching someone else's.
Want the full video library?
Over 35 hours of content, with new material added every week.
From £39.99 a month. Cancel any time.
Sourcing your first product
Everything else rests on your ability to find stock consistently. There are five main routes, and most sellers end up using two or three of them.
Retail arbitrage
Scanning clearance and reduced to clear in Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury's and the rest, looking for items still selling at full price on Amazon. Margins are the highest of any method, with some items returning over 100% ROI. Our retail arbitrage guide covers it in full.
Online arbitrage
Sourcing from online retailers such as B&Q, Superdrug and Screwfix using newsletters, manual scanning and Keepa. Discount codes and cashback come straight off your cost of goods. Our complete online arbitrage guide walks through the whole method.
Amazon to Amazon
Buying price drops on Amazon and reselling them on the same platform, UK or EU. We run UK and EU price drop monitors built in house, and our Amazon to Amazon guide explains how to spot a genuine drop.
Wholesale
Buying in quantity from wholesalers, distributors or the brand directly. Needs a larger starting budget and some experience, but stock is far easier to forecast.
Private label
Building your own brand and manufacturing your own product. The longest route to a first sale, and the one most dependent on getting PPC right.
Not sure which method suits you?
Bring your budget and the hours you have available to a 1-1 session and we will map it out.
From £39.99 a month. Cancel any time.
Sending your first shipment to Amazon
The first shipment is the part that puts people off. It is five stages, and it gets quicker every time.
Load the items into Amazon
List everything you are sending. Go to Add Product, enter the ASIN, then fill in your SKU, sell price and country of origin. Give it five to ten minutes to appear in your inventory.
Select your items
Once they are in inventory, select everything going in this shipment, then Actions, then Send or Replenish Inventory.
Complete the shipment plan
Enter total units and the prep category for each product. Getting prep categories right here saves you a chargeable prep fee later.
Complete the box information
Weights and dimensions for every box in the shipment. Amazon reweighs on arrival, so estimate honestly.
Confirm and book collection
Review the plan, confirm the shipment and book your collection date.
Rather not pack it yourself?
Our prep centre receives, checks, labels and ships your stock from 35p a unit.
24 to 48 hour turnaround.
Common Amazon FBA mistakes to avoid
Almost every new seller makes the same handful of errors. None of them are fatal on their own. Together they are why most people quit in the first six months.
Buying on today's price
The price showing right now is not the price you will sell at. Build your margin on the average buy box price over the last few months instead. This single habit prevents more bad buys than anything else.
Ignoring who else is on the listing
Fifteen sellers sharing a buy box is a different proposition to three. And if Amazon itself is on the listing holding most of the buy box share, you are buying a very small slice of the sales.
Buying before checking you can list it
Plenty of brands and categories are gated. Check you are approved to sell before the money leaves your account, not when the stock is already in your hallway. Our guide to getting ungated on Amazon UK covers how to open the ones worth opening.
Forgetting compliance requirements
Some categories carry obligations well beyond a normal listing. Toys are the clearest current example, where Amazon now requires third-party lab validation that most resellers cannot obtain. Our guide to Amazon's toy compliance rules explains how that one works.
Going too deep on one product
A great deal is still a bad idea if it swallows your entire budget. Early on, spread across more products in smaller quantities. You learn faster and one mistake cannot take you out.
Not accounting for fees properly
Referral fee, fulfilment fee, storage, VAT, returns. A deal that looks like £6 profit can be £2 once everything lands. Run it through the profit calculator before you buy, not after.
Confusing revenue with profit
£10,000 of sales sounds excellent right up until you work out that £7,500 of it was stock cost. Track return on investment per product, not turnover.
Quitting during a slow month
Arbitrage is seasonal and lumpy. A bad February says almost nothing about your business. The sellers who last are the ones who keep sourcing consistently through the quiet stretches.
Where to go next
Account open, basics learned, first product sourced, first shipment sent. That is the hard part done.
What follows is refining the process: turning cash into more cash, and staying consistent when a month goes badly. That is the part almost nobody manages alone, and it is what the community exists for.
What membership includes
Amazon FBA questions beginners ask
Is Amazon FBA good for beginners?
Yes, with one caveat. FBA removes the hardest practical barriers for a beginner: you do not need a warehouse, a courier account or a customer service process, because Amazon handles all three. You can start with a few hundred pounds and scale from there.
The caveat is that FBA makes the logistics easy, not the business. Your results depend entirely on whether you buy the right products at the right price, and that is a skill you have to learn. Beginners who treat it as a side hustle that runs itself tend to lose money. Beginners who treat deal analysis as the actual job tend not to.
Can I make £1,000 a month selling on Amazon?
It is a realistic target, and it is worth understanding what it actually requires rather than treating it as a promise.
Profit comes from return on what you spend on stock. At a 30% return on cost, which is a reasonable working assumption for arbitrage, £1,000 of monthly profit means selling roughly £3,300 of stock every month. Allowing for the time between buying stock and getting paid, that usually means having somewhere in the region of £3,000 to £4,000 in rotation.
You do not need that on day one. Profit reinvested compounds quickly, which is exactly what our startup calculator is built to show. But anyone telling you that £500 becomes £1,000 a month by next month is selling you something. Your results depend on your sourcing, your category and how consistently you actually do the work.
How much does it cost to start Amazon FBA?
Amazon's own fees are modest: nothing monthly on the Individual plan and 75p per item, or £25 a month excluding VAT on the Professional plan, plus a referral fee and a fulfilment fee on each sale. The real cost is stock. £500 is a realistic minimum to run it properly and £1,000 gets you moving faster. Step one above breaks it down in full.
What are the most common Amazon FBA mistakes?
Buying on today's price instead of the average buy box price, ignoring how many sellers are already on a listing, and buying stock before checking you are approved to sell the brand. Add to those going too deep on a single product and confusing revenue with profit. Step seven covers all eight in detail.
How does Amazon FBA work in the UK?
The same way it does everywhere else, with UK specifics attached. You send stock to a UK fulfilment centre, Amazon stores it, and when it sells they pick, pack, ship and handle returns and customer service. You pay a referral fee and a fulfilment fee per sale, plus monthly storage. UK sellers also need to think about VAT registration once turnover crosses the threshold, and about UK product safety rules in certain categories.
How long before I make my first sale?
Account verification typically takes a few days, and shipments take roughly a week to be received and made available once they arrive at Amazon. Most people who move steadily are selling within three to four weeks of starting. The delay is rarely Amazon. It is usually how long it takes someone to feel confident enough to make their first buy.
Do I need a limited company to sell on Amazon?
No. You can register as a sole trader and many UK sellers start that way. A limited company brings advantages as you grow, particularly around liability and tax efficiency, but it is not a prerequisite and it is not worth delaying your start over. Speak to an accountant once you have revenue to plan around.
Is an Amazon FBA course worth paying for?
It depends entirely on what you are buying. A one-off video course that was recorded two years ago and never updated is poor value, because Amazon's fees, policies and tooling change constantly. What has more value is ongoing access to material that gets updated, and to people who can look at your specific deal and tell you why it will not work.
That is the reason our membership is monthly rather than a lump sum course fee. Be wary of anyone charging four figures up front for videos.
Can I do Amazon FBA part time?
Yes, and most people start that way. Online arbitrage in particular suits evenings, because you are sourcing from a laptop rather than driving to shops. Retail arbitrage fits weekends. The thing that does not work part time is inconsistency: a few hours every week beats an intense fortnight followed by a month of nothing.
Ready to start your Amazon FBA journey?
Join the 300+ UK sellers already using fulfilledby for mentoring, deal monitors and straight answers. Start today and see where you are in a month.
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