If I were in your shoes, I would grab my phone, drive to a local retail store, and start scanning barcodes in the clearance aisle. Seriously, that's the first step.
The reason I’d start there is that it’s the fastest way to learn the core loop of selling on Amazon without getting bogged down. That method is called retail arbitrage, and it’s how you’ll learn the most important fundamentals: how to identify a profitable product, how to calculate fees and potential profit, and how to actually list and sell something. You can listen to Jim Cockrum on Silent Sales Machine Radio talk about this for hours, but you only truly learn it when you do it. He even pointed out in one live Q&A that a huge chunk of products sold on Amazon come from resellers doing exactly this.
In week one, the only goal is to get a win. Don’t try to build a business. Just try to find one, single, profitable item and send it to an Amazon FBA warehouse. The feeling of seeing that first item sell is what will give you the momentum to continue. I think Jim Cockrum's episode about your first item versus your thousandth really nails this idea of moving from individual transactions to a more robust operation. It all starts with one.
In month one, I’d shift my focus to building a repeatable system. Instead of just grabbing random clearance items, I would start looking for what are called “replens,” a term Dave Smith discusses on his Silent Sales Machine episode. These are items you can buy over and over again from regular store shelves and consistently sell for a profit. This is how you move from treasure hunting to building a predictable income stream. Once you have that down, you can apply the same logic to online arbitrage.
What I'd ignore completely at the start is private label, creating your own brand, or sourcing from China. While these are massive opportunities, they introduce a hundred new variables. Andy Slamans made that clear on The Amazon Seller Podcast when talking about his experience selling millions on the platform. Those advanced models require significant capital, marketing knowledge, and operational complexity that will just slow you down in the beginning.
The biggest trap to avoid is getting stuck in “analysis paralysis.” Don’t spend weeks trying to find the “perfect” product or building a complex spreadsheet. Your competitive advantage, as Jeff Schick often says, is your unique approach to sourcing. You develop that by doing, not by thinking about doing. Go scan something, list it, and see what happens. The market will give you better feedback than any course or spreadsheet ever could.