Avoid these Amazon FBA mistakes! Ariana and I share her top 10 lessons learned from her first year selling on Amazon FBA!
In this video, Ariana and I will share with you the 10 crucial things that we’ve learned about selling on Amazon. We want to share them with you so you will not make the same mistakes.
It’s Expensive to Start
It could be expensive to start on Amazon especially if you do it wrong. Depending on your product, it could cost up to $10,000 to start a product. One of the ways you can medicate this is to start a Kickstarter.
Different Business Models
There are multiple ways to sell on Amazon. There are four main business models and each one has a different start-up process. There is Retail Arbitrage, Wholesale, Private Label, and Creating your Own Product. The good thing with Creating your Own Product is you can do a Kickstarter. It helps you raise a lot of money especially if you do it right and it does not cost any money.
Don’t Go Out of Stock!
It’s so important to keep track of how much you’re selling per day on Amazon. Be mindful that if you’re going to be running out of inventory.in a month, you can start sending in some inventory and get that number up. You need to do inventory planning and figure out exactly how much you have in your warehouse or storage. Make sure you order ahead of time.
Amazon Fees
Amazon takes a huge chunk of your sales. They take about 33% of your sales. One of them is a 15% Flat Rate whether you’re using FBA or FBM. There is also another fee if you do Amazon FBA, depending on the weight of your product.
Mastermind
There are going to be complications in selling on Amazon that’s why it’s important to have a group of people who are selling on Amazon as well. Ariana put together a group of women who are selling on Amazon for the first time this year and they’re going through the obstacles together. That is so important to share and to feel comfortable with the fact that they are not alone in this.
Amazon is Hard
There is a lot of hard work that you have to put in before you can have it go live on Amazon. After that, you’re not going to see any profit until for a little while because you have to reinvest it to the business.
Sea Shipping vs, Air Shipping
If you have a lot of time, sea shipping is great because it can take at least a month or two before the product could arrive. Air shipping is far more expensive although you get it within the week most of the time. There are also some other factors to keep in mind. With sea shipping, there is a chance that it’s going to get caught up in the port. If you also have a very fragile product, we don’t recommend air shipping unless it’s the only thing you can do. Air shipping can cause more damages to your product like what happened to Ariana’s Vino Cards.
Cash Flow/Profit
The amount of sales someone has is not their profit. You can have $30,000 in revenue in a month but only have $10,000 in profit. Even that money does not go to your pocket as you need to reinvest for more inventory.
Seller Support is Terrible
If you have a major issue, don’t expect to get a result in a timely manner. You have to constantly call and make sure they understand the issue and the best solution for it. It requires a lot of calls and emails back and forth. If you don’t get a result on your first call and call again, you get a different person and have to re-explain the issue. It becomes a long and tiring process.
Get a Mentor
When I quit my job, it was a terrible experience because there is no one telling me which way to go. A mentor basically says swim that way. It is still hard work, you’re still going to do the effort but it’s minimized. You’re going to learn from them and they’re going to help tell you how you can grow from this.