People keep asking me the same question every Thursday live. "Chris, how much money do I actually need to start Amazon FBA?" And every week I give them the same answer that nobody wants to hear: three to five hundred quid. That's it.

You don't need a limited company. You don't need a business bank account. You don't need a warehouse, a VA, a course, or a £5,000 "starter kit" from some guru. The cost of entry to one of the biggest retail platforms on the planet is about the same as a decent pair of trainers. And I'm going to walk you through exactly how to spend it.

Amazon offers something called an Individual Selling Account. It's free to open. You don't need a company registered at Companies House — you can sign up as a sole trader with a personal bank account and a utility bill.

The catch? Amazon charges you an extra £1 on top of every unit you sell, up to 40 units a month. Sell more than that, you'll want to switch to the Professional Plan at £25/month. But for your first month or two, the Individual account is the best first test on earth. Zero downside.

This is how I started in March 2020. Books are the cheapest, lowest-risk entry point into FBA. You can buy them at car boots, charity shops, library sales, and Facebook Marketplace for 20p to £1 each and sell them on Amazon for £5–£15. The margins are ridiculous.

Grab a sourcing app — there are free trials for most of them, including my own at scoremyasin.com — and scan barcodes. If the numbers work, buy the book. If not, move on. That's the job.

Why books first? Because you're learning three things at once: how Amazon's fees work, how the buy box works, and how to stomach the fact that some stuff won't sell for a month or two. Lose £20 on a bad book and you've paid for the lesson cheaply. Lose £2,000 on a bad pallet of wholesale and you've paid for it expensively.

Here's a number nobody mentions: sending stock into Amazon costs almost nothing. Amazon has something called the Partner Carrier Program with UPS. You can send a 63x63x63cm box filled with 23kg of product into an Amazon warehouse for about £4.50. That's not a typo.

So your shipping budget? Covered. Boxes? Free from Facebook Marketplace, local garden centres, and supermarkets. Labels? Sub-a-penny each on a thermal printer. None of this is the bottleneck.

Once you've done 50 or 100 book sales and you've got the rhythm, start dipping a toe into wholesale. Now you're buying direct from brands and distributors — bigger margins, bigger order sizes, bigger cash-flow considerations. I transitioned into wholesale about six months in. I taught myself. No course. Just obsessive Googling and TikTok videos.

Eventually you'll move past wholesale into brand-direct relationships (buying straight from the brand owner, cutting out the middleman) and private label (your own brand). That's where the real money lives — but you don't start there. You earn your way there.

Amazon FBA is "quite easy to get into, but difficult to get good at." That's the line I use every week, and it's still the most honest thing I know about this business. The mechanics are simple. The discipline is brutal.

I was working a nine-to-five managing the biggest Amazon account in Europe (Procter & Gamble Germany, if you're curious — £25–30M/month in revenue, 1,200 SKUs). After the day job, I'd do dinner, bath, bed with my two young kids. Then 7:30pm till 11pm, six nights a week, I was doing my own FBA side hustle. For two and a half years. Before I went full-time.

That's the bit no guru puts on the sales page. The entry cost is £300. The commitment cost is your evenings for two years. Decide now if you're up for it.

Want to see what's actually selling right now? Grab the free trial of my sourcing software at scoremyasin.com — no credit card needed. And come hang out on my live every Thursday at 7:30pm UK time. It's free. Ask anything. That's how every successful student I've got started.