Founder, Aftermarket Arbitrage · 14 August 2026
The straight answer: £500 minimum, £1,000 comfortable
You need £500 to start Amazon FBA in the UK properly. With £1,000 you’ll be comfortable — you can absorb a mistake, buy in slightly deeper on the good finds, and keep money moving while stock is in transit. Anyone telling you £200 is enough is setting you up to stall, and I’ll show you exactly why below.
That’s the whole answer. The rest of this post is the working: why the number is £500 and not less, where every pound actually goes, and the spending traps that quietly eat beginners’ budgets before a single unit ships.
Why £200 starts fail
I run a sourcing engine that reads 80+ UK retailer sites around the clock, and I work with a membership of UK Amazon sellers at every stage. The pattern with underfunded starts is always the same, and it’s not that £200 can’t buy stock. It can. The problem is what happens next.
- All your capital ends up tied in stock. You spend £180 on inventory, send it in, and then you wait. Amazon receives it, it sells over two to six weeks, and payouts run on a two-week cycle. For a month or more, you have a business with no money in it. You can’t buy the next deal, and the next deal is the entire game.
- There’s nothing to reinvest. Arbitrage compounds. The sellers who grow are the ones who put this fortnight’s payout straight back into next fortnight’s stock. With £200, your first payout is small enough that “reinvesting” means buying three more units. You’re not building momentum; you’re restarting from zero every cycle.
- One bad buy ends you. Everyone has a bad buy early on — a price tanks, a listing gets gated, a product sits. With £1,000 across eight or ten products, one dud is annoying. With £200 in two products, one dud is half your business gone. The maths of a small bankroll doesn’t allow for the mistakes you are guaranteed to make while learning.
The £200 seller doesn’t usually lose their money. They just grind to a halt, get bored waiting, and quit. Undercapitalisation kills by stall, not by blow-up.
Where the £500 actually goes
Here’s how I’d deploy £500 today, starting from nothing.
Stock: £350–£400
The bulk of your money belongs in inventory — profitable, barcode-matched products bought at a genuine discount to their Amazon price. My bar is 20% ROI minimum after all fees; below that, the margin gets eaten by the small stuff and it’s not worth your time. Run every prospective buy through the profit calculator before you spend a penny — buy price, sell price, fees, and what’s actually left. If you haven’t checked the fees line, you haven’t checked the deal; the FBA fee checker exists for exactly that.
And match by barcode, never by title. A product that looks identical to the listing but isn’t the listing is a return, a complaint, and possibly an account health hit. A missed deal costs you nothing; a wrong match costs you money and credibility.
Prep and postage: £30–£50
Poly bags, a label printer or a trip to a print shop, box tape, and the courier cost of getting your first shipments into an Amazon fulfilment centre. It’s unglamorous and it’s not optional. Budget for it upfront so it doesn’t come out of your stock money.
The seller account: £0 to start
This surprises people: you do not need the £25 + VAT Professional account on day one. The Individual account is free and charges £0.75 per item sold. The break-even is roughly 33–34 sales a month — until you’re consistently selling more than that, the Individual plan is the right call. Upgrade when the Pro account earns its place, not because a YouTube video told you it looks more serious. (The Pro account does unlock some tools you’ll eventually want, but “eventually” is the operative word.)
Buffer: £50–£100
Keep something back. A deal appears at 11pm and you want to move on it; a shipment needs an extra label run; a product needs an ungating invoice. The buffer is what stops every small surprise becoming a crisis. This is also the honest difference between the £500 start and the £1,000 start — the extra £500 mostly becomes deeper buys and a fatter buffer, and both make the whole thing calmer.
How fast should you reinvest?
All of it, as fast as you can, for as long as you can stand it. In the early months, treat the business as a closed loop: payouts go back into stock, not into your pocket. Every fortnightly payout you reinvest is compounding; every one you withdraw is a restart. I’d want a new seller reinvesting 100% for at least the first three to six months — take nothing out until the bankroll has grown to the point where a withdrawal doesn’t slow the machine down.
Two admin points while we’re on money. Keep records from day one, because once your rolling 12-month turnover hits £90,000 you must register for VAT — and HMRC gives you 30 days from the end of the month you crossed it to notify them. That threshold arrives faster than people expect, because it’s turnover, not profit. When you want to see what VAT actually does to your margins, the VAT calculator will show you — it changes which deals are worth buying, and it’s better to understand that before the letter arrives rather than after.
What NOT to spend on early
The fastest way to turn £500 into £150 is to spend it on things that aren’t stock. In order of how often I see it:
- Courses. £500 courses teaching what’s freely available. Everything you need to start is in my online arbitrage guide, and it costs nothing. Spend your money on inventory, which can pay you back, not on information, which mostly doesn’t.
- Software stacks. Beginners sign up for four tools at £30–£60 a month each before they’ve bought their first product. You need almost none of it on day one. Add tools when a specific bottleneck demands them, one at a time.
- Wholesale minimums. Wholesale has £500–£2,000 minimum orders on products you can’t yet judge. That’s your entire bankroll in one supplier’s basket. Arbitrage first — retail or online — because it lets you buy in units, test cheaply, and learn what sells before you ever commit to a pallet.
- Branding and admin theatre. Logos, websites, business cards, premium accounting software. None of it sells a unit. A spreadsheet and a sole trader registration are fine for now.
The discipline is simple: in month one, if a pound isn’t going into stock, prep, or the buffer, it needs a very good reason.
Start with the guide, not the wallet
If you’re weighing up whether to start, read my full online arbitrage UK guide first — it’s free and it covers the whole process end to end, from finding deals to your first shipment. And when you’re ready to spend your £500 on actual products rather than hunting for them manually, that’s what the membership is for: my sourcing engine reads UK retailers around the clock and puts vetted, barcode-matched leads in front of you. You can see how it works and what it costs — but the guide first. The money question you came here with is answered; the next question is what to buy with it.
About the author
Jack Bayliss is the founder of Aftermarket Arbitrage, where a team and a purpose-built sourcing engine find and verify Amazon UK deals for members every day. He also runs Vantage Wholesale. Meet the community on the community page or book a free call.
