Do you build your own fence or hire a professional? And when it comes to Amazon FBA training, should you shell out thousands of dollars on a course, or should you just piece your knowledge together from free internet resources (like this blog, which you should bookmark by-the-way)?

There’s a large debate in the Amazon FBA community: is paid training worth it? But we can flip that question on its head, too: 

Is free training good enough? There are strong points on each side. 

Today, I will walk you through a 6-point comparison between free and paid Amazon FBA training so that you can decide which is the right one to fuel your Amazon FBA business and create a life of financial freedom. 

1. Basics

Free Amazon FBA training is FREE. 

This one is fairly obvious—who doesn’t love free swag?

If you use free training, you don’t spend any money on your learning, which leaves you with more money to put into your inventory and get to selling (and making more money) faster. 

Free Amazon FBA training comes in many forms, although YouTube and blogs are probably your best bet when it comes to getting thorough information. 

But it’s up to you to ensure that the free training you solicit is both comprehensive and up to date.  

Paid Amazon training never becomes outdated. 

What could be a potential weakness of free training is an obvious highlight of paid training: any worthwhile company will update their training. However, ensure you check that your Amazon coaching company does this before you decide to invest in their training. Not all companies do this (but our Amazon FBA Mastery membership absolutely does).

If you’ve sold on Amazon before, you know that Amazon is notorious for updating and changing the platform like that’s its job 🙄 

But you are more likely to get training that reflects that constant onslaught of updates from paid training, especially if that training has an entire production team.

Meanwhile, it is literally impossible to update a video on YouTube. You can upload new videos, sure, but if a video is doing well, you as a content creator have little-to-no incentive to take it down.

2. Coaches

Free training allows you to sample from all different kinds of Amazon coaches.

There’s a reason “variety is the spice of life” is such a cliché. 

Exposure to different teaching methods allows you to combine multiple instructors’ training. But it also gives you the opportunity to find instructors who make the most sense to you.

In fact, vetting instructors by their free training, before selecting a paid training makes a lot of sense: you can ensure that you like that instructor and their teaching style before you commit to a hefty financial investment. 

Try before you buy. 

Paid training gives you the combined training and experience of multiple Amazon seller experts. 

At Just One Dime, our training comes from the minds of successful, oftentimes six-figure Amazon sellers—I am assuming if you’re looking at a paid training that’s not ours that it’s as well-developed and thought out as our membership. Afterall, if you’re looking at a course named after someone, then you may be looking at the combined experience of a single person. 

Additionally, different strategies that you receive from your paid training (provided you’re only using one) won’t contradict or work against each other. 

For instance, if you search Amazon FBA PPC optimization strategies, you will find a ton of free content. However, if you’re taking a little bit from one YouTube channel, some from a blog, and more from yet another YouTube channel, you might wind up with three extremely valid PPC strategies…that actually work against each other, blow up your advertising budget, and cause your product to never be found where interested shoppers might find it. 

Instead, most paid training that offer multiple PPC optimization strategies will either guarantee that those strategies can all be used productively together. If not, that training will likely make it extremely explicit which ones should be used independently. It would not be in their best interests to let you assume that two disparate strategies mesh when frankly they just don’t.

3. Strategy

Free training gives you a lot of different Amazon FBA strategies. 

There are seemingly endless hours of Amazon FBA YouTube content. You could be glued to your computer screen for hours every day for years and not run out of new strategies. That’s huge. 

But, it could also be directionless.

Paid training gives you a consistent Amazon FBA strategy to get out of your 9 to 5 rut and start living a life of freedom. 

Free training leaves a lot to guesswork, which makes it hard to truly strategize your FBA store (which is a must).

For example, if you don’t ever watch videos on inventory and cash flow management, you could pour thousands of dollars into a product that does little for you in return 👎

On the other hand, paid training is typically strategized. The course architects know what it takes to succeed on Amazon FBA, what steps are crucial, what order to perform them in, etc. They will also ensure that you don’t miss something critical solely for being unaware. 

You don’t know what you don’t know (or what you need to know), but experts do.

4. Content

Free Amazon FBA training provides an endless ocean of content. 

The internet is nothing if not expansive. And in the same way there are endless tutorials on  “how to change a tire” or “how to bake exquisite cookies”, there is a seemingly endless amount of Amazon FBA content across the world wide web.

But here’s the rub: YouTubers tend to focus on what will rank well in YouTube and Google search results because that gets them more subscribers. This then precludes these content creators from creating the content that Amazon sellers actually need.

For instance, until we watch the top-ranked video for “amazon fba product research”, we may never know if that strategy fits with our own or paints a clear, complete picture. 

Paid Amazon FBA training fills in gaps that free training never could. 

Courses don’t have to be sexy the way YouTube videos do. And while a flashy free video on trademarking your brand is captivating, if you don’t have a paid course, you might never know that you should—or how to—ensure that your brand name is not in use before you start using it 🤦

This could actually delay—or worse, hurt—your business in time.

5. Short-term vs long-term

Free training can get you started quickly. 

One of YouTube’s strongest, most redeeming merits is that it incentivizes creators to provide lots of value. 

In fact, viewers’ actions on a video determine how well that video ranks. So if you don’t get to the point quickly and provide sort of blah content with no real value, the platform will not reward you. On the flip side, it does reward excellent content with strong rankings, making it in the creator’s best interest to get to the (practical) point. 

And since “get started on Amazon FBA” is a buzzword in this industry, you can find a lot of practical, actionable content to get started ASAP.

But much in the same way that you might find holes in your FBA knowledge from free trainings, not get a real strategy, or even get stuck watching videos on the same three buzzworthy topics, you might be left in the dark as to where to go once you have started. 

Paid training helps you develop a brand. 

Free training tends to be shorter sighted whereas paid training is more long-term friendly. 

Consider your product’s brand. If you were to only ever use free training, you might build a product—let’s say a dog pool float—that sells well. Then you might take the proceeds to launch another product—maybe this one’s a shower organizer. 

Sure both products sell well because you use free training to conduct excellent research and know there’s a market for each. But they don’t go together. And when shoppers visit your Amazon store, they’re confused. 

Then, if you want to sell your business, you can’t find a buyer and don’t understand why.

Building a brand however is a long-term strategy that allows you to:

• Capture and captivate one specific, interested audience.
• Create an emotional backstory for your brand and products that helps shoppers connect with you.
• Expand your product line tactfully, with products that complement each other.
• Establish yourself in an industry rather than a single product category.

Free training can’t compete with that or the level of strategy involved. Most would-be Amazon sellers don’t know they should build a brand over a product, which means not as many viewers search “how to build a brand on Amazon FBA”, which means YouTubers are not creating content for that question, even if they should.

This is perhaps the most common theme throughout our comparison: free training is based on what ranks and what content creators assume sellers need. Paid training is specifically designed based on what actual sellers know other sellers need. And you get all your steps in order from start to finish.

By the way, everything I’m showing you today regarding paid training is meant to apply to all legitimate, paid Amazon FBA courses and memberships. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say my standards weren’t based on Just One Dime’s own Amazon FBA Mastery membership. 

Not only does our membership cover everything I’m talking about today, not only is it updated regularly, not only is it based on actual strategies used by myself and our coaches who have real, successful experience selling on Amazon, but we will bring you into our strong community of like-minded sellers who want to share their knowledge with you. In fact when we survey our students, they tell us our community alone is more than worth the price of a membership. See for yourself today.

6. Community

Free training can bring you into ALL SORTS of communities. 

You can and will find camaraderie across YouTube channels (among other venues). Shoot, I’ve even seen communities in the comments section of YouTube videos. Many link an online Facebook, Discord, Reddit, or Twitter thread or group. 

However, those communities are often full of other free viewers who may, but probably may not, have the same type of goals and drive as you. 

Paid training brings you into a FAMILY community.

If you want to find a like-minded community, you’ve got to get paid.

Any Joe Schmo can join Amazon FBA groups on Facebook or wherever you get your news filtered through friends and family. And there is value in belonging to such a community. 

But it truly does help when you’re part of a community that is all part of the same program, that’s all been through (or is currently going through) the same training. 

When you were in grade school, whether you liked your classmates or not, you all experienced together: you learned the same lessons taught by the same teacher. You were presented with the same materials to expand your knowledge. You could ask each other questions if a classmate understood something you didn’t, or you could both ask the teacher. 

That’s exactly what it’s like to be in an Amazon FBA community who goes through the same paid training as you. You’ve all watched the same videos, read the same articles, and learned from the same teachers. You can ask questions and other students will answer; if not, a coach (teacher) will. You’re experiencing together. 

Or at least such is the case with our Amazon FBA Mastery community. 

Learn how to join our incredible community and how we can help you make your dreams a reality at JOD.com/apply. 

Which training will you go with? Free or Paid?

Let me know in the comments.