Seller Journey Spotlight: Vanessa Burden, Law Student Making Her Way Through School as an Amazon FBA

It’s All About the Hashtags: How Helium 10 Connected with Vanessa: Meet Florida native, Vanessa Burden, who is currently studying law at Syracuse University and living in upstate New York. I first connected with Vanessa while researching on Instagram using #AmazonFBASeller. As I scrolled through thousands of posts promoting everything from products to online courses, Vanessa initially stood out from the crowd as a female entrepreneur. After clicking on her profile and reading her bio; “Creator, Fitness Enthusiast, e-Commerce Marketing, and Syracuse Law,” I knew this woman was one to be admired.

From the Drop Shipping Dream to Living the FBA-ulous Life:

What first intrigued Vanessa about the e-Commerce world? She was sold on a dream of starting her own drop shipping business. If you’re new to e-Commerce, drop shipping is a supply chain management method in which the retailer does not keep goods in stock, but instead transfers customer's orders and shipment details to either the manufacturer, another retailer, or a wholesaler, who then ships the goods directly to the customer. While researching Facebook and YouTube ads online, an advertisement for selling on Amazon popped up and Vanessa couldn’t get it off her mind ever since. “I woke up one day and thought, well, if I don’t start, I really won’t ever find out if Amazon is actually viable or not,” stated Vanessa.

“I woke up one day and thought, well, if I don’t start, I really won’t ever find out if Amazon is actually viable or not.”

As the saying goes, “you won’t know until you try,” and for Vanessa she knew she had to give selling on Amazon a try to truly evaluate its value and ROI. She took to the platform, made an individual seller account and started listing random items she had lying around the house like calculators and used books. To her surprise, she made two sales on her first day, that was the moment she realized there was major potential in Amazon. From there on, Vanessa started to scale her Fulfillment by Merchant business by thrifting for inventory.

Vanessa has since transitioned her business into Fulfillment by Amazon as she pursues her Juris Doctor degree, also known as the Doctor of Jurisprudence degree, a graduate-entry professional degree in law and one of several Doctor of Law degrees. As our founder, Manny Coats would say, “How Cool Is That?!” When launching her first product Vanessa says Helium 10 helped her solidified her decision. Tools like Xray and Cerebro really helped her to confirm she was making the right selection based on research and metrics. “Helium 10 has since helped me in iterating my PPC campaigns and track some of my key metrics.” Vanessa is currently attempting to scale that product and originally had plans to launch two more products, but they were unfortunately postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read the full blog on Helium10.com