The Amazon wholesale roadmap: every stage, free

Why the stages come in this order

Most stages either cost money or depend on something from the stage before. Doing them out of order is the easiest way to spend money before you need to.

Understand the model before you set anything up. Wholesale, arbitrage and private label need different suppliers, different paperwork and different amounts of money up front, so decide which one you're doing first. If you're torn, wholesale vs private label and online vs retail arbitrage take the comparisons one at a time, and the challenges of Amazon wholesale lists what makes it hard.

Set up the business before you contact suppliers. Distributors look at who is applying before they open an account. Stef, who teaches Apex University, makes the point in its Checklist lesson: wholesalers and distributors want to do business with companies, not individuals, so a registered business and its tax ID come before the first application (from Stef's lesson The Checklist, 0:43 to 1:20). A resale certificate belongs to the same pile of paperwork, and what it costs to start helps you plan the money side.

Check the fees before you chase approvals. Getting approved in a category takes work, and it's only worth it where the numbers still hold up after Amazon's fees. Check a few products from that category with the FBA calculator or the profit calculator before you start collecting documents.

Approvals and suppliers run side by side. Stages 4 and 5 don't always happen one after the other. You might open a supplier account first and then apply for approval, or apply first and find out what paperwork you need. Both are normal. The ungating guide covers what Amazon asks for, and the suppliers guide covers who to ask and how. Once a supplier says yes, negotiating with distributors is the next conversation.

Research the list before you place the order. A supplier's price list can run to thousands of lines, and you only want the ones that still make money after fees and leave room for one more seller on the listing. That work is stage 6, and so is sizing your first wholesale order.

Know where the boxes go before the supplier ships. Decide who receives your units, labels them and sends them to Amazon before you pay the invoice, not after the pallet is on a truck. That's stage 7. If you're not sure which labels your units need, start with FNSKU labels.

Phase 3 is not a sequence. Once units sell, stages 8, 9 and 10 happen every week, together: checking your price against the other sellers, keeping the records that protect your account, and deciding what to reorder.

What each phase is for, and when it's done

Stef teaches Apex University from his own experience selling wholesale on Amazon. One passage from his lessons sums up each phase below. They describe his experience, not a promise about yours. Each phase ends with a short list you can tick off, copy or print.

Before you buy: learn the whole game first

Stef titled the lesson The Game because once you understand every step a wholesale business involves, you can scale it and automate as much of it as possible. Then he names the pillars to master: how suppliers work and how to approach them, product research, buying the right amount, prepping and shipping, and finally scaling and optimizing (from Stef's lesson The Game, 7:14 to 7:51).

That list is phases 2 and 3 of this roadmap. Phase 1 is everything you need to know before any of it costs you money.

Phase 1 is done when

• You can explain how a wholesale seller makes money, and why you chose wholesale.
• Your business is set up the way suppliers will ask about it.
• Your Amazon seller account is open and verified.
• You can work out what Amazon keeps from a sale before you buy anything.
• You know which of the categories you want need approval, and what each one asks for.

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Your first orders: a no is where the conversation starts

Phase 2 is where money starts to move, and where you hear no for the first time. In the Finding Suppliers lesson, Stef looks at a redistributor with a very high minimum order, the kind that is hard for a new seller to open an account with. His advice is to try anyway, and if they turn you down, ask who you could buy from instead and who they supply. In his words, "that's how we turn negatives into positives in this business" (from Stef's lesson Finding Suppliers, 8:45 to 9:30).

Phase 2 is done when

• At least one supplier has opened an account for you.
• You've checked a full price list and know which lines make money after fees.
• Your first order is placed, and you know roughly how many weeks of sales it covers.
• Your units are labeled, sent and checked in at Amazon, and your offer is live on the listing.

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Run and grow: let the numbers point at the problem

Phase 3 doesn't really end. It's the weekly work of selling, protecting the account and restocking, and it rewards reading your numbers before you react to them.

In the Restocking lesson, Stef sorts a list of products by days of inventory, and some show more than sixty days. That isn't a bad sign by itself, he says. It probably means the price isn't right to win sales in the Buy Box. "So now you have a pricing issue," and the fix starts with the price (from Stef's lesson Restocking, 10:52 to 11:15).

Phase 3 habits

• Check your price against the other sellers on each listing.
• Keep a supplier invoice for every product you sell, somewhere you can find it in minutes.
• Know your profit per product after every fee, each month.
• Reorder before you run out, based on how fast each product sells and how long its supplier takes.

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Which Apex University lesson covers which stage

Apex University is Apex's video course on wholesale. It comes with a free Apex account. Nine lessons, no card.

Here's where each lesson sits on the roadmap, so you know what each one is for before you start.

No lesson is dedicated to fees, approvals, prep or account health. The guides for stages 3, 4, 7 and 9 cover those.

Finishing the course opens one more thing: the Chrome extension. It's free to install, and its numbers open when you finish Apex University. On an Amazon product page, it shows your profit, ROI and margin at your cost, Amazon's fees, the most you can pay for the return you want, and the listing's sales rank. The Chrome extension page has the details.

For calculators and checklists, the tools page puts every tool in one list, with each one's limit beside it.

Signs you have outgrown spreadsheets

Most of this roadmap works with a spreadsheet, the calculators and some patience. Software earns its place when the same job repeats faster than you can do it by hand. In the Restocking lesson, Stef describes that moment: once you're doing the reorder math across every active product, with several suppliers and each product selling at its own pace, "you cannot always be calculating this on pen and paper, on spreadsheets" (from Stef's lesson Restocking, 6:00 to 6:21).

These are the signs to watch for:

• Price lists arrive faster than you can check them. Matching every line to Amazon, then looking up fees, rank and competition for each match, takes longer than the list stays current. In Apex, that's the job of Apex Green, which matches a supplier's list to Amazon by UPC and lets you filter the matches.
• You can't trace a unit back to the order it came from. When you need a supplier invoice for an approval or a complaint, you're digging through email to work out which order a product came from. Apex Blue keeps suppliers, purchase orders and costs in one place, and a submitted order's unit costs become the cost of those products.
• Reorder math covers more products than you can follow. Different suppliers, different lead times, and every product selling at its own speed. Blue's inventory view shows days of stock left for each product. Its restock suggestions come from your stock, your sales speed and the cover you choose, so treat them as math on your own numbers, not a forecast.
• The margin you planned and the margin you made drift apart. The price list said one thing, and after fees, refunds and shipping the month said another. Blue's profit and loss reads your sales, refunds and Amazon fees from your account and shows profit by day, week or month. It's only as complete as the costs you enter, so a product with no cost shows sales but no true profit.

If none of these sounds like you yet, you don't need software. The course, the calculators and a tidy spreadsheet can carry you through your first orders. When one of these starts eating your week, the card for that stage names the plan built for the job, and pricing compares them side by side.