16-Year-Old Shares Strategies For Selling On Amazon That Earned Him $2M In Sales
There are thousands, if not millions, of ways to make money selling online. People make money selling shirts, the clothes in their closet, CBD oils, and even their bodies – legally, of course.
Max Hayden, a 16-year-old from Hopewell, New Jersey, started a side hustle of selling on Amazon. What was he selling? He actually buys products from other websites – like Walmart – and resells the items on Amazon and other online marketplaces like Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist.
When the pandemic hit and certain products became scarce, Hayden ramped up his business by targeting products he knew would be in high demand and short supply at different points of the pandemic.
For example, Hayden realized early that above-ground swimming pools would be huge sellers leading into the summer since people weren’t going on vacation. Hayden also accounted for more people being home but being outside, so forecasted that patio heaters would be in high demand once fall came around.
Hayden’s reselling business actually started back in 2019. Using $300 of his own money, he started reselling sneakers on eBay. His entrepreneurial spirit goes all the way back to fifth grade when he sold toys on eBay and made money selling candy and popular fidget toys to his classmates in middle school.
As for his new online business, Hayden officially registered his business as an LLC last fall. He is now a 16-year-old CEO.
“In the past year, though, Hayden’s business became supercharged. Many items he sells online go for double their retail price, Hayden says, but sometimes they can even fetch a markup of up to 400% if the product is in especially high demand, like when retailers sell out of an item completely.
On that front, Hayden gets help from the multiple groups he’s joined on the messaging platform Discord, where resellers share tips on what products to target and which retailers might still have a hot item in stock.
The Discord group members pay monthly membership fees, and Hayden says the cost typically ranges from $20 to $100 per month for each group, but it’s worth it to get a leg up on other resellers.
Hayden says he often spends hours per day researching which products are reselling for significantly more than their retail prices, whether it’s on Discord or studying the data Amazon Marketplace provides to its sellers.”
After tallying the shipping costs and the original retail prices of the products, Max told CNBC that he turned a total profit of “roughly $110,000 for myself” last year.
Watch more of Max Hyden’s amazing story in this YouTube video from CNBC.