Course Map

Part of the AMZ Operator Series (companion to IDS) | Built July 2026 | Distilling 50 named operators, 40 books, and Amazon's own fee/policy documentation — see the Reference module for the full provenance library.

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#WHAT IS AMZ?

AMZ is the Amazon-FBA-specific companion to IDS, this platform's older, now-archived course. Where IDS taught the general "implement, deploy, scale" shape of an e-commerce business, AMZ is built entirely inside one platform's mechanics: the fee stack Amazon actually charges, the ranking systems (A10, COSMO, Rufus) that decide who gets found, the honeymoon-period window that never comes back, and the account-health thresholds that can end the business overnight regardless of how good the product is.

This is not a "find a winning product, run some ads" course. It's an operator's manual: exact 2026 fee tables, exact tool workflows, decision formulas you run before every PO and every bid, and — just as important — the failure modes that kill accounts, told by the people who've watched them happen. Every module distills named practitioners (Kevin King, Bradley Sutton, Steven Pope, Kian Golzari, Chris McCabe, Joe Valley, and more) rather than generic "Amazon selling tips." The Reference module at the end of this course lists all 50 experts, 40 books, and roughly 200 articles the series draws on, with a source tier attached to each.

The one number every module reduces to:

Contribution Margin = Price − Landed COGS (incl. duty) − Referral Fee
                     − FBA/FBM Fulfillment − Storage − Returns − Ad Spend

If it's positive after all of that — not just after COGS — you have a business. Most of this course exists to keep that number honest at every stage: sourcing, listing, launch, advertising, fulfillment, and the day someone tries to take the account away from you.

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#COURSE ARCHITECTURE

The eleven modules run in one sequence — each assumes the ones before it — grouped into five parts plus a reference library:

Every module contains: exact 2026 fee/rate tables, decision formulas with worked numbers, a failure-modes section ("how operators die here"), and a closing Ten Commandments summary. Numbers are dated to July 2026 and flagged where they're policy-fragile — Amazon re-rates fees every January, and several 2026 tariff and de-minimis rules carry expiry dates that can move.

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#HOW TO USE THIS COURSE, BY STARTING POINT

Deciding whether to do this at all, and how: 02 (Business Model Selection) → 01 (Fee Economics) → the two together tell you whether your capital fits private label, wholesale, arbitrage, or none of the above yet.

Have capital, no product: 03 (Product Research) → 04 (Sourcing) → 01 (re-check your fee math against a real landed cost before you commit to a PO).

Have a product, about to launch: 05 (Listing SEO) → 06 (Launch & Rank) → 07 (PPC) — read these three back to back; the honeymoon window in Module 06 is unforgiving of a half-finished listing from Module 05.

Have traction, no profit: 09 (Inventory, Cash Flow & Finance) → 07 (PPC, re-read the TACoS section) → 01 (re-audit your fee stack) — margin usually leaks in one of these three places, not in the product.

Worried about the account, or already flagged: 10 (Account Health & Risk) first, independent of where else you are in the sequence — nothing else in this course matters if the account is gone.

Choosing FBA vs FBM, or building a second channel: 08 (FBM, SFP & 3PL Operations) — run the per-SKU decision table before assuming FBA is always the answer.

Building for exit, or already past $500k/year: 11 (Scaling, International & Exit) — read it even if an exit is years away; the habits it asks for (accrual books, documented SOPs, diversified traffic) are cheapest to build early and expensive to retrofit right before a sale.

Want the sourcing map behind every claim: the Reference module — its 30-day learning paths (private label, wholesale, FBM-first) point at the specific books, podcasts, and free video libraries (My Amazon Guy's 1,500+ SOPs, Helium 10's Project X) that go deeper than any single lesson here can.

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#WHAT'S DIFFERENT ABOUT 2026

A few structural facts this course assumes you know, because they invalidate a lot of older FBA advice still circulating: de minimis (the $800 duty-free import threshold) is dead — every China-sourced unit pays real duty now, whether it arrives as a container or a dropshipped parcel; Amazon's ranking stack has three layers (A10 behavioral, COSMO semantic, Rufus conversational) instead of one keyword-matching algorithm; Amazon exited its own US prep/labeling service on January 1, 2026, so shelf-ready prep is the seller's problem now; and the FBA aggregator era that paid 6-7x SDE is over — 2026 buyers are individuals, search funds, and strategics paying rational multiples for real, documented businesses. Each module's own numbers carry the specific dates and sunset clauses that matter for that topic.

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#GLOSSARY

ACoS/TACoS cost of ads ÷ ad-attributed sales / ÷ total sales — the campaign dial vs the business-health verdict (Module 07) · AHR/AHA Account Health Rating (0–1,000 score) / Account Health Assurance, Amazon's pre-deactivation-warning program (Module 10) · AQL Acceptable Quality Limit — the inspection sampling standard for pre-shipment QC (Module 04) · ASIN Amazon Standard Identification Number, the product ID · AWD Amazon Warehousing & Distribution — upstream bulk storage that feeds FBA without Q4 storage spikes (Module 01) · BSR Best Sellers Rank — a relative ranking, not a unit count (Module 03) · CCC cash conversion cycle = days inventory + days sales − days payable (Module 09) · COGS cost of goods sold · COSMO Amazon's semantic ranking layer — maps intent to products, not just keywords to listings (Module 05) · CPR Cerebro Product Rank — the units-to-page-1 math behind a launch budget (Module 06) · CVR conversion rate · DD+7 Amazon's delivery-date-based reserve — funds release 7 days after confirmed delivery (Module 09) · FBA/FBM Fulfilled by Amazon / Fulfilled by Merchant · FNSKU the barcode Amazon requires on every unit it fulfills · IPI Inventory Performance Index — the score that sets your FBA storage ceiling (Module 09) · IP intellectual property — trademark/patent risk and defense (Modules 03, 10) · LIL low-inventory-level fee — charged for running too lean, not too deep (Module 01) · MOQ minimum order quantity · NARF North America Remote Fulfillment — ships US FBA stock into Canada/Mexico without separate inventory (Module 11) · ODR/LSR/VTR/OTDR Order Defect Rate / Late Shipment Rate / Valid Tracking Rate / On-Time Delivery Rate — the seller-metric thresholds that trigger suppression or deactivation (Modules 08, 10) · PPC pay-per-click advertising (Sponsored Products/Brands/Display) · POA Plan of Action — the document that gets a suspended listing or account reinstated (Module 10) · Rufus Amazon's AI shopping assistant (folding into "Alexa for Shopping") — reads and quotes your listing copy directly to shoppers (Module 05) · SDE seller's discretionary earnings — the profit measure a buyer actually prices at exit (Module 11) · SFP Seller Fulfilled Prime — earning the Prime badge while shipping the order yourself (Module 08) · SIPP Ships in Product Packaging — certifying a box to ship without an Amazon overbox (Module 01) · SKU stock keeping unit · SQP Search Query Performance — Amazon's own funnel-by-keyword data (Module 05) · TACoS see ACoS above · 3PL third-party logistics warehouse.

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#PROVENANCE & MAINTENANCE

• Compiled from the eleven-module AMZ Operator Series (built July 2026) plus its companion Source Library — the source files carry their own provenance blockquote (which practitioners a module distills) and are preserved in the body of each lesson, not stripped out.
• Fee figures are verified against Amazon's official October 15, 2025 fee announcement ("2026 Updates to U.S. Referral and FBA Fees," effective January 15, 2026) plus Seller Central rate cards as of July 2026. Always confirm your own exact number in the FBA Revenue Calculator before a launch or a price change — rate cards are the map, not the territory.
• Volatile facts to re-verify before relying on them: the Section 122 tariff surcharge sunset (July 24, 2026) and the Section 301/reciprocal-tariff track (November 10, 2026); Amazon's annual January fee re-rate; ad benchmarks (CPC/ACoS drift year over year); TikTok Shop and Walmart Marketplace fee/policy changes; any dollar figure in the New Seller Incentives table (Module 01), which Amazon revises quarterly.
• This is the standard-tier import of the AMZ corpus: a faithful, well-structured port of source material that already carries real provenance-tier tagging (see the Reference module). A deeper verification and quality pass — recomputing figures independently, adversarial review against primary sources — is planned separately and has not yet run against this course.