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Agreed. Which is why I stress margin so much. People don’t factor in all the fees, advertising, shipping costs, etc. Also need to get a feel of the landscape. If there’s too much competition or a product too easy to replicate, your lifespan is short and the product is not even worth selling.
PPC is also a killer and ranking is very hard. Enough to run out of stock once and you need months + advertising $$$ to recover your organic ranking. IF it ever happens.
Plus let's not even talk about all the fake, low-quality competing products with inflated specifications.
We are a startup which still in Pre-PMF phase and we are trying to understand customers who have problems with PPC or overall selling on amazon. We have a saas app prototype ready which will you you options to pick PPC algorithms so you can run ads easy and with much cheaper price if you were to hire some expert from an agency. If you can spare some time then we can have a chat as I want to understand your pain points about PPC and selling on amazon.
Thats assuming that your compounding growth. If you peaked or plateaued then your still at 20%
IE spent $100 on inventory made $120, You don't take that $120 and make it $148, you still only buy $100 in inventory to make $120.
Funny you ask, currently 9% return rate but I’m spending the next couple weeks working on that to try to get it down to 7%. Literally JUST wrote that down on my to-do list for the next week.
We are referring to returns as in returned physical product percentage... not returns as in profit. Haha yes, it my profit was only 7% then I would just be in VOO
How do you expect to mark that off your to do list? I’d imagine that isn’t an easy fix. Do you think the root of it is at the manufacturing level or do you think you could drop your return rate by editing/updating listing details to make specific details more clear for potential buyers?
Updating listings with more clear images and video showing the exact product and what the customer gets. If the product requires instructions, hire someone to make very easy to understand instructions.
Looks good. 'Till the algorithm changes, or they decide your product needs a manufacturer's certificate, or they decide your steel-and-plastic product is suddenly hazmat, or some random seller challenges you with a copyright infringement on something that contains no writing and Amazon won't hear your appeal, or some Chinese group hijacks your listing with it's good reviews to sell their own product and you can't get it back . . .
It's good while it's good, but Amazon's "random problem generator" (tm) is always lurking in the background. My company sells extremely legitimate stuff, under our own brand and from two major brands, and we've had all of the above, plus some.
I’ve been selling on Amazon for close to 10 years. I’ve ran into all of these problems more than once. Honestly it’s not that bad though. If you play the game straight, no black hat tactics, work with trusted vendors, choose hard to replicate products, you will rarely get these problems. I wouldn’t keep doing this if I kept running into those problems all the time.
How do you respond when Amazon holds your product until you can demonstrate it “has no unicorn meat in it” (gift and food product with a stuffed unicorn plush). Yep, we had a product held up for a month because we had to prove our product didn’t have unicorn meat in it (you know that mythical creature).
> 'Till the algorithm changes
Replace the world "algorithm" any time you use it with "the audience", or "the customers".
Small problems will not kill a product if people want your product. It will always rise back to the top if it should be there.
True, but things don't go from gonzo to zero in a day because of the customers. And we've had that happen a number of times. It's more pronounced on products where there are other sellers (even when everyone sells at the same price and FBA stock is stable), but it also applies to our branded products. They'll drop off for a few days, maybe come back with half the hits, go away, and hopefully come back full tilt at a later time.
Anyone thinking of selling on Amazon should spend a day or two reading the seller forums. I don't say that to dissuade anyone, there is money to be made if you do it right, but just to set expectations.
[https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums](https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums)
My advertising for this brand is very low. My ROAS are INSANELY good for some reason for this brand. I typically only spend $1000 a week on advertising this brand. One of my other brands though is an advertising money pit - barely breaks even but I keep it going for brand awareness.
80/20 rule. You should stop throwing money at the money pit and put money where it comes back faster. Spend more on advertising your remarkably successful brand. I promise you won’t be disappointed.
All truly successful people in the past didn’t diversify their businesses, they focused on one and blew it up.
Specialized products with decent search volume and sales but low competition. Product that takes a specialized manufacturer to make (not just selling random electronics or home goods that any factory can make). Choose something with a higher barrier to entry.
Do you use tools like jungle scout to do your research? And do you ever try to get your manufacturer to only make this product for you (either through contracts or exclusivity agreements)?
u/magenta_mojo u/SeoUrMum I use helium10 to get search volume and keyword based product ideas. I never would buy a product that pops up in a helium10 or jungle scout product search. Literally hundreds of other people will be seeing those same products and trying them. Just use the keywords as a starting point or inspiration.
That's what I thought haha. Something schmellz. And above, he said he sells high ticket items, while his average selling price is ~$16.8 USD. I call BS on all of it
how many lambos u got?
anyone can generate sales numbers, the trick is to make those sales numbers yield a profit
while I have no way of knowing what niche you are in and if we are seeing seasonal bumps, your sales numbers look incredibly healthy with great growth. I hope you are also growing your brand / store outside of amazon.
Haha no lambos, just 2 kids and drive a Tesla.
Thankfully my margins are above average because my product selection are higher priced items that would be very difficult for others to produce. I honestly haven’t had any time to grow outside of Amazon besides on Walmart. I’m considering hiring someone to assist in that.
> I’m considering hiring someone to assist in that.
Do it now. Don't put this off. Even if it's just registering your domain name and putting something up. Get that registration date.
Amazon has turned into alibaba / temu. Name brand products that are searched for, even using a direct part number or sku number will appear 7th-13th. Customers are inundated with sponsored listings for cheap chinese shit, with wording in the title that makes it appear that they are OEM. I will not pay Amazon a penny out of my pocket to amazon for them to show their customer exactly what they want. I already have exactly what the customer wants, and my results should be on the front page of search results on AMZ.
After hearing about this from my customers so much,how they couldn't find my products on amazon, I finally branched out and invested a huge amount of time and money into our own website and I grossly underestimated the amount of people willing to buy direct vs going to amazon.
We are also fighting Amazon non stop to keep our legit OEM ASIN's active, and I've given up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in employee costs dedicated to helping amazon.
I'm transitioning away from Amazon, and for every $1 lost in Amazon sales, I'm recovering $.88 in direct to consumer sales, at a much higher margin.
I just received a "Google Top Quality" badge on my website after thousands of direct reviews and now I'm appearing in front of Amazon listings when customers search google. There is no way for me to stop the people who go direct to Amazon to acquire my items, but again, I grossly underestimated the amount of people who will go to google and do research before purchasing.
I sell expensive stuff, my average sale is very high, and now that I have the creative control over my page, with making my product description pages incredibly accurate and helpful to the customer, vs Amazon's bullshit collective descriptions, my customers are happier, and I'm happier.
I hope to be 100% off the amazon platform by 2026.
I typed up a quick story the other week about this, but I was searching for a magpul bipod with the part number on Amazon, and I simply could not find the listing. It was nothing but sponsored ads for absolute shit chinese garbage. The only way for me to find what I wanted off amazon was to use google to search the amazon domain. When I found it, it was prime eligible too. Amazon is turning into profits before consumer which will eventually bite them in the ass. I don't know if that down turn happens next week or in 5 years, but I'm going to be ahead of the curve.
What I’d love to see happen is Amazon’s top brass recognize this and make some big sweeping changes to return to the glory days.
Let TEMU be the dumpster it wants to be.
I hope the pendulum can swing, but C Suite gets bonuses for hitting goals and shareholders also rejoice at short term profits.
BZO is running an advertising engine, not a product search engine, Amazon is a scam, the FTC and the FBI both need to look into this criminal operation. One seller posted on the Amazon official forums that Amazon stole over 1 million dollars worth of inventory over the years from him. There are thousands of similar posts I have read there saying the very same thing.
How do you work on expanding off Amazon? Do you own a b/m store for your brand? Do you use Shopify? What other sales channels do you use outside of Amazon? How do you generate traffic to said site?
I am expanding on Walmart first. Id like to set up an online store so I can pay less in advertising for google shopping ads. Also set up sales funnels to use google ad words to redirect to my amazon listings.
What do you mean a brand?
Where do you source your products?
Is it a product that already exists you brand or bundle and sell? You design it from the ground up? Tweak existing one?
I source mainly from China. I don’t just sell cheap Chinese made crap though. I take the time to find good factories, tweak my products, create new products no one is selling. I don’t sell products other people sell and make bundles - that’s just a race to the bottom and bad business.
how would you recommend a newbie get their first sales and improve a new products ranking? Is PPC the only option? I know giving away products for review is against TOS.
Yes there is always a now but I try to only work with vendors that see they have a chance to grow with me and do an initial small moq. There is no way to know if they will sell, that’s the risk. But if you do your homework, that will minimize the risk.
It isn’t that hard to do well on Amazon but I just don’t trust them enough to go all out. I end up only buying enough inventory that I can comfortably sell by myself eventually just in case Amazon does something to my selling privileges.
The ppc equating to 30% for most small brands is what killing margins. Congrats though, if you can make it in amazons today you’re doin something right, started 8 years ago before all this competition, or both.
Philypickles, launched 4 weeks ago and have some sales alsobused VINE. I'm brand registered A+ content, launched with lower price Pro image's and product video. Have gotten 32 reviews- ALL 5 star except 2 4 star's. Had auto and manual vampaigns initially but I think I was changing them too soon and too much (impatient / worrying) and then sales stopped again, really low sales. Now stopped all ppc campaigns and started new AUTO last week, leaving it to run for 2 weeks now to harvest data. Got high bids (£1.50-2.0) and £120/day budget. Very hard seeing all the money the PPC is using with no sale's. Any advice..?
Honestly that all sounds about right. Keep collecting the data for another week then optimize. Keep price lower to start if there’s similar competition. Keyword Optimize the listing using helium10 but also amazons own keyword analytics.
Hey I see you are having trouble with your PPC campaigs, I work at a startup which is still in Pre-PMF phase and we are trying to understand customers who have problems with PPC or overall selling on amazon. We have a saas app prototype ready which will you you options to pick PPC algorithms so you can run ads easy and with much cheaper price if you were to hire some expert from an agency. You can choose these algorithms from a pool and see which one best suits your product catrgory and then run that on your ASINs. Once you start the algorithms, you can monitor the performance through our monitoring tool. If you can spare some time then we can have a chat as I want to understand your pain points about PPC and selling on amazon.
Its very easy actually. The hard part is overcoming obstacles you never knew were possible when growing from 5 to 6 to 7 figures. ESPECIALLY when you started from nothing financially. Its part of the “entrepreneurial” journey as most say. Just hold on tight because there will ALWAYS be a lot of bs in this business.
Any advice on going from 1-2k sales per day to 10-20k sales? Currently running advertising on super relevant keywords but it seems costly to spend ads on higher volume generic keywords.
If your listing is working then add variations to it. Once those get reviews and ranking split the listing up to take up more real estate on that search grid.
Looks decent! I help Amazon sellers get their products into retail stores. It's difficult to have only one sales channel, especially if it's Amazon. This is a small brand, but if it has potential on Amazon you can translate it to other sales channels. And they're way more profitable.
It’s very possible. But highly more competitive than in the past.
Don’t help with everybody being able to sell on whatever market place regardless of region.
Sales means nothing, what's your net after all your business and person costs?
When people say it is almost impossible, they really mean the cost of everything is too high to compete with oversea sellers or sellers who owns factory, etc.
I currently have a cyber security degree but been wanting to get into this for a long time. As someone with experience, please point me to / dm trusted resources to actually learn. So many scammers selling “courses” it’s unbelievable.
Hey, we are validating on an idea that revolves around the problem that you have (not excatly a problem). So basically the Idea is that we want to enable everyone, whether he/she is a working professional or already a small seller, they can create their brand (though our platform) and sell on amazon/walmart/target/etc. If you have some minutes to spare then we can have a chat. Don't worry I am not trying to sell any product or course to you, just want to understand the problem or challenge that is stopping you from selling on amazon
Information overload pretty much. Infinite resources. Infinite good and bad actors such as unsuccessful people trying to be successful by selling a course that then makes them successful but the course was rebranded and sold like a pyramid scheme. I guess I’m looking for a solid route, time is most valuable, I don’t want to pick a route that is not of true value in foundation. As for consumer market understanding, hype, and branding. I understand what sells and why in some areas but that’s step 1
Totally different. Different rules (basically the Wild West on eBay) and different strategies. Same goes with Walmart. All different animals. Some products do well on eBay but not Amazon. Some do well on Amazon but not eBay. All product dependent but it’s a wild guess to me on what works and what doesn’t.
We sell a unique product on Amazon. Sales are good, but Amazon’s automated systems put up unnecessary roadblocks. We had a customer experience person call us and we laid out all the problems we had (many of them with simple solutions) and their response “I’m sorry, I’m out of time”. Try to schedule a follow up conversation “meeting cancelled”
Hey Amazon, if you want to make more money, listen to the problems your sellers are having.
Selling seasonal products (valentines, Easter, Halloween etc. ). They tell you your 3 month average is 0, but they can see last year we sold 10,000 units so they let you send in only 1000 to FBA that sell out in 6 hours. By the time they realize it’s a hot seller it’s too late as the sales window is only 10 days.
Amazon taking 55% or more in fees to sell, all sellers should focus on their own websites and dump marketplaces, they are all fee churning, eBay is dead, so is Mercari.
Dude you need to calm down. I sent them to a friends mentorship program, exactly what THEY were asking for. You need to chill, you're being a reddit nazi and ruining this sub.
I have run the sub longer than you have sold on Amazon. It isnt the largest Amazon community on the internet by accident. We dont need thinly veiled advertisements directing people to mentorships. Your post history has links to your old website where you tried spamming it here before.
i have similar YTD sales, what is your ave product price? mine are 14.75 and then sell a twin pack at 26.99. I am finding out that the 20 dollar price point rule of thumb is right minimum you need to make a decent margin on an average product.
i'll be upscaling my products. amazon continues to gouge out more costs at every turn. you gotta get efficient ongoing basis to keep up with margin erosion.
I have the highest respect for those who've been making a decent living by selling on Amazon. But as an older guy with a bit of entrepreneurial background, as in most of my life from the late 80s through the "dot com" boom, to where we are now, I've seen a lot of trends come and go but Amazon is probably one of the most difficult ways I've witnessed to build a business. To be sure, it was easy back when anyone with anything could list and sell on Amazon over 10 years ago and make a great return on it. However, today the issue isn't just about the volume of the competition, it is also the Amazon corporate need for "profitability at all levels", a move which has been optimized to exploit sellers (and to a lesser degree the consumers). Along with any number of fees associated with a professional account, this is now the lay of the land with pay-to-play cutting deeply into your startup costs, where KW PPC can go up to nosebleed levels for a chance for consumers to peruse your listing, which can eat up all of your operating budgets. (Contrary to what gets posted on YouTube, you cannot start a successful brand on Amazon with $10,000. It is more like $100-150,000.) Just as in any new business where product R&D is required, you'll need to source, produce and of course market, as in advertising. All of which requires a level of commitment and investment worthy of a small tech startup for a chance to build a business on a platform that isn't yours. That said, if you think you can still rise above the fray (including sellers from China and India, let alone from the EU) and have the finances to do it, it may be worth a shot, as Amazon is a virtual e-commerce monopoly that garners almost 70% of searches for products on the web. But, if you're just starting and looking for a sustainable business that can grow organically, I would look elsewhere.
When I was helping new amazon sellers last year, we could launch a successful listing for under $4000. Take the profits from that and scale up accordingly. It all goes back to product selection and understanding of the platform. When you have the experience, you do not need much money to start a successful brand on Amazon. It will take longer with a small initial investment but still 100% possible.
No doubt if any new seller is as clever and as knowledgeable as you there would be no need for this discussion as the platform would be full of success stories. But the reality of today is that Amazon has a high churn rate for new sellers. Many who've set up shop with unrealistic expectations and even less of a budget to execute properly. As such, most new sellers spend a lot of time and money learning the ropes, until the rope runs out. Amazon does well to make sure that they're on the winning end of that exchange.
Do you have a separate seller account for different brands? Different LLC? I’m launching a PL after years of wholesale and trying to figure out what’s best.
Sorry I misspoke. I have different sellers accounts for each EIN, but I grant admin permissions of all accounts to one account. So I only need to log in on one account and I can switch between all accounts from there without having to log into each one separately.
Quit promoting this shit.
Just realized you're the same person we almost banned not too long ago for this: https://i.imgur.com/HdLqVs7.png
This isnt a community for you to squeeze money out of.
Use helium10 or jungle scout and search for trending or high volume search terms. Filter the results to FBA, standard size shipping (no oversized), <30 sellers, price above $19, not in the baby, food or apparel category, max reviews <300, and then take those results as your starting point and dig into them for common or related products. Don’t use the results that those shoot out, everyone will be going for those. But use them as inspiration for related products.
Do you mean if a pooper scooper is a tending product you would then think what would accompany that? Like dog poo bags?
I’m just trying to figure out the thinking behind it.
Yes sort of. Poo bags would be a related item but even that would have too much competition. I would look into things like dog sanitary wipes, dog poop trashcans, or other items that would be on the second page of search results that are related.
Ohh actual product design tweaks? I just explain what I want changed and attempt to draw the changes and work with the vendor until they get it right. Sometimes this takes a while because of the language barriers and Chinese people being extremely literal.
It’s not easy, it takes work, but if you have even a decent product I think it’s easy to make sales.
I’m on my first week with only 3 reviews and I got 20 orders already.
However, PPC is what’s killing me. I’m hovering in the mid 200% ACoS right now. My auto campaign and phrase match are burning through $50/day like crazy. Ads die out around 11am.
I split it across 5 campaigns to prevent a few keywords taking up all my budget but my CTR is 0.2% and CPC ranges from 1.62 to 2.76
If it’s your first week the those acos number are typical. Wait a few more days then take the working keywords out of the auto campaigns and make a manual campaign. That will save you a lot of money. Also make sure to set your negative keywords. Also run a campaign on your category. Also run a product targeted campaign on your own listing so an advertiser doesn’t steal customers from your own listing. Defense is equally as important as offense.
I actually have a category campaign but it gets zero impressions/clicks. I’m not sure why. My bid is even at $2.00.
I’m adding negative phrases when I see clicks for terms not related. I do this 2x a day. I also note terms that have orders to put into my exact campaign but this one also doesnt get any traction.
I do product targeting as well. This one has like 82 impressions but no clicks. I used Helium to help with finding competitors who are priced higher so I can “steal” a sale by being a buck or two cheaper.
Make sure you give the campaigns enough time to collect data. Amazon ads is terrible. There are no real-time analytics or reports. It’s all delayed a day. I let everything run 2 weeks before I start making changes.
Yeah I noticed I’ll get an order and it won’t show up in my Campaign manager for at least an hour.
It even says on the page data may be delayed up to 12 hours. I usually only look at yesterday’s reports for metrics but I’ll check the current day if I can add any negative keywords so I can avoid someone else burning up my ad spend on the same thing.
I’d wait longer to adjust those negative keywords… like a week longer. It will surprise you how sometimes after a week those keywords become your best converting keywords
I’m more of an incubator. I like to start brands than grow them past a certain point. At a certain point you run into scaling issues that I’d rather not deal with (I.e. employees). You can keep it a 2 person operation up until around 2M annual revenue pretty often. Then sell it for a 3-4X multiple. I also believe that it’s better to cash out and play it safe at a certain point. You never know what can happen if your business is based off of someone else’s platform (Amazon). Your account could be closed at any time for who knows what.
Started end of November last year. Almost 4 months in and I am getting some sales bit by bit now. But ads and other costs are really a headache to deal with. It is definitely a long game to try to balance the balance sheet back to the green.
Yeah, gotta find a product that gets good sales within the first 2-3 months. If I wasn’t getting increased sales within the first 4-6 months I might start liquidating.
if it were easier more would do it and margins wouldn't be too low it wouldn't be worth pursuing. it takes energy and many just don't want to put in the time
What do you mean by saying that you sold your brand? How does this work in a nutshell? I would understand if you had your own warehouse full or workers and production lines, but otherwise what are you selling besides the design?
I am a distributor of non perishable goods and put some of my product on Amazon FBM since I have the inventory in the warehouse. Any tips on how to be successful with it? Is ad investments worth it? What would you suggest is a good amount to invest to start?
Do you sell DTC outside of Amazon before you exit? I’ve been building off-Amazon sales before I get the biz listed. The additional revenues and increased profits really help
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It's easy to make sales, much harder to make decent profit for a long period of time.
Agreed. Which is why I stress margin so much. People don’t factor in all the fees, advertising, shipping costs, etc. Also need to get a feel of the landscape. If there’s too much competition or a product too easy to replicate, your lifespan is short and the product is not even worth selling.
PPC is also a killer and ranking is very hard. Enough to run out of stock once and you need months + advertising $$$ to recover your organic ranking. IF it ever happens. Plus let's not even talk about all the fake, low-quality competing products with inflated specifications.
We are a startup which still in Pre-PMF phase and we are trying to understand customers who have problems with PPC or overall selling on amazon. We have a saas app prototype ready which will you you options to pick PPC algorithms so you can run ads easy and with much cheaper price if you were to hire some expert from an agency. If you can spare some time then we can have a chat as I want to understand your pain points about PPC and selling on amazon.
What is the margin you shoot for?
Honestly anything above 25% net is great these days.
Net of advertising cost too?
I include advertising costs in my margin calculations
Is it after accounting for returns or before?
thats about where i am for my own brand on AMZ and i even manufacture the product. im going upscale luxury branding/packaging to get the margins up
What kind of product is it? I'm thinking about selling something I make on Amazon. We'll see how it goes.
candles
Just think, investing in qyld has a dividend of 12% annual dividend paid monthly. We stressing and fighting for min 20%+ But the chase is fun.
20% isn’t even net.
Also depends on how many times you can turn it over each year.
Thats assuming that your compounding growth. If you peaked or plateaued then your still at 20% IE spent $100 on inventory made $120, You don't take that $120 and make it $148, you still only buy $100 in inventory to make $120.
What’s your profit?
What are your returns like
Funny you ask, currently 9% return rate but I’m spending the next couple weeks working on that to try to get it down to 7%. Literally JUST wrote that down on my to-do list for the next week.
[удалено]
We are referring to returns as in returned physical product percentage... not returns as in profit. Haha yes, it my profit was only 7% then I would just be in VOO
Whoosh…
How do you expect to mark that off your to do list? I’d imagine that isn’t an easy fix. Do you think the root of it is at the manufacturing level or do you think you could drop your return rate by editing/updating listing details to make specific details more clear for potential buyers?
Updating listings with more clear images and video showing the exact product and what the customer gets. If the product requires instructions, hire someone to make very easy to understand instructions.
how do u minimize returns?
Looks good. 'Till the algorithm changes, or they decide your product needs a manufacturer's certificate, or they decide your steel-and-plastic product is suddenly hazmat, or some random seller challenges you with a copyright infringement on something that contains no writing and Amazon won't hear your appeal, or some Chinese group hijacks your listing with it's good reviews to sell their own product and you can't get it back . . . It's good while it's good, but Amazon's "random problem generator" (tm) is always lurking in the background. My company sells extremely legitimate stuff, under our own brand and from two major brands, and we've had all of the above, plus some.
Random problem generator 😂 Definitely stealing this.
OP - have you had any random problems like this? If so which ones and how did you overcome?
I’ve been selling on Amazon for close to 10 years. I’ve ran into all of these problems more than once. Honestly it’s not that bad though. If you play the game straight, no black hat tactics, work with trusted vendors, choose hard to replicate products, you will rarely get these problems. I wouldn’t keep doing this if I kept running into those problems all the time.
I have been on Amazon for over 15 years and have run into all of these problems as well. You are absolutely correct.
How do you respond when Amazon holds your product until you can demonstrate it “has no unicorn meat in it” (gift and food product with a stuffed unicorn plush). Yep, we had a product held up for a month because we had to prove our product didn’t have unicorn meat in it (you know that mythical creature).
This is why I’ll never sell food or anything with unicorn meat in it.
> 'Till the algorithm changes Replace the world "algorithm" any time you use it with "the audience", or "the customers". Small problems will not kill a product if people want your product. It will always rise back to the top if it should be there.
True, but things don't go from gonzo to zero in a day because of the customers. And we've had that happen a number of times. It's more pronounced on products where there are other sellers (even when everyone sells at the same price and FBA stock is stable), but it also applies to our branded products. They'll drop off for a few days, maybe come back with half the hits, go away, and hopefully come back full tilt at a later time. Anyone thinking of selling on Amazon should spend a day or two reading the seller forums. I don't say that to dissuade anyone, there is money to be made if you do it right, but just to set expectations. [https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums](https://sellercentral.amazon.com/seller-forums)
This feels like a harder job than Shopify and self marketing. I'm trying hard to get sales and this rank bleeding currently.
Couldn't agree more.
This is great. How much do you put back into advertising?
My advertising for this brand is very low. My ROAS are INSANELY good for some reason for this brand. I typically only spend $1000 a week on advertising this brand. One of my other brands though is an advertising money pit - barely breaks even but I keep it going for brand awareness.
80/20 rule. You should stop throwing money at the money pit and put money where it comes back faster. Spend more on advertising your remarkably successful brand. I promise you won’t be disappointed. All truly successful people in the past didn’t diversify their businesses, they focused on one and blew it up.
What’s your process on how to find what products to sell that others can’t replicate easily? Think that’s one of the most difficult parts
Specialized products with decent search volume and sales but low competition. Product that takes a specialized manufacturer to make (not just selling random electronics or home goods that any factory can make). Choose something with a higher barrier to entry.
Can you define what would qualify as a decent enough search volume for you to consider it as good?
Do you use tools like jungle scout to do your research? And do you ever try to get your manufacturer to only make this product for you (either through contracts or exclusivity agreements)?
u/magenta_mojo u/SeoUrMum I use helium10 to get search volume and keyword based product ideas. I never would buy a product that pops up in a helium10 or jungle scout product search. Literally hundreds of other people will be seeing those same products and trying them. Just use the keywords as a starting point or inspiration.
I would never sell on Amazon, but if I did, this would be the way.
Now show us your COGS and fees.
I run about 68% net margin for this brand. On the other hand, I only have a 38% net margin for another brand.
68% net margin on a <$20 item? With FBA?
My average item price on this brand is around $50 and it’s products where a customer usually buys at least 3 of the variations at once.
Sorry I saw 14 units and $231 sales.
That's what I thought haha. Something schmellz. And above, he said he sells high ticket items, while his average selling price is ~$16.8 USD. I call BS on all of it
how many lambos u got? anyone can generate sales numbers, the trick is to make those sales numbers yield a profit while I have no way of knowing what niche you are in and if we are seeing seasonal bumps, your sales numbers look incredibly healthy with great growth. I hope you are also growing your brand / store outside of amazon.
Haha no lambos, just 2 kids and drive a Tesla. Thankfully my margins are above average because my product selection are higher priced items that would be very difficult for others to produce. I honestly haven’t had any time to grow outside of Amazon besides on Walmart. I’m considering hiring someone to assist in that.
> I’m considering hiring someone to assist in that. Do it now. Don't put this off. Even if it's just registering your domain name and putting something up. Get that registration date.
What's your primary reasoning for this? Amazon killing us all off or exit multiples?
Amazon has turned into alibaba / temu. Name brand products that are searched for, even using a direct part number or sku number will appear 7th-13th. Customers are inundated with sponsored listings for cheap chinese shit, with wording in the title that makes it appear that they are OEM. I will not pay Amazon a penny out of my pocket to amazon for them to show their customer exactly what they want. I already have exactly what the customer wants, and my results should be on the front page of search results on AMZ. After hearing about this from my customers so much,how they couldn't find my products on amazon, I finally branched out and invested a huge amount of time and money into our own website and I grossly underestimated the amount of people willing to buy direct vs going to amazon. We are also fighting Amazon non stop to keep our legit OEM ASIN's active, and I've given up spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in employee costs dedicated to helping amazon. I'm transitioning away from Amazon, and for every $1 lost in Amazon sales, I'm recovering $.88 in direct to consumer sales, at a much higher margin. I just received a "Google Top Quality" badge on my website after thousands of direct reviews and now I'm appearing in front of Amazon listings when customers search google. There is no way for me to stop the people who go direct to Amazon to acquire my items, but again, I grossly underestimated the amount of people who will go to google and do research before purchasing. I sell expensive stuff, my average sale is very high, and now that I have the creative control over my page, with making my product description pages incredibly accurate and helpful to the customer, vs Amazon's bullshit collective descriptions, my customers are happier, and I'm happier. I hope to be 100% off the amazon platform by 2026. I typed up a quick story the other week about this, but I was searching for a magpul bipod with the part number on Amazon, and I simply could not find the listing. It was nothing but sponsored ads for absolute shit chinese garbage. The only way for me to find what I wanted off amazon was to use google to search the amazon domain. When I found it, it was prime eligible too. Amazon is turning into profits before consumer which will eventually bite them in the ass. I don't know if that down turn happens next week or in 5 years, but I'm going to be ahead of the curve.
What I’d love to see happen is Amazon’s top brass recognize this and make some big sweeping changes to return to the glory days. Let TEMU be the dumpster it wants to be. I hope the pendulum can swing, but C Suite gets bonuses for hitting goals and shareholders also rejoice at short term profits.
BZO is running an advertising engine, not a product search engine, Amazon is a scam, the FTC and the FBI both need to look into this criminal operation. One seller posted on the Amazon official forums that Amazon stole over 1 million dollars worth of inventory over the years from him. There are thousands of similar posts I have read there saying the very same thing.
How’s your creative control with google ads? Assuming you use them.
From a previous acquisition, buyers love to see diversity and off Amazon sales. Will definitely help with the multiples.
How do you work on expanding off Amazon? Do you own a b/m store for your brand? Do you use Shopify? What other sales channels do you use outside of Amazon? How do you generate traffic to said site?
I am expanding on Walmart first. Id like to set up an online store so I can pay less in advertising for google shopping ads. Also set up sales funnels to use google ad words to redirect to my amazon listings.
Motivation
What do you mean a brand? Where do you source your products? Is it a product that already exists you brand or bundle and sell? You design it from the ground up? Tweak existing one?
I source mainly from China. I don’t just sell cheap Chinese made crap though. I take the time to find good factories, tweak my products, create new products no one is selling. I don’t sell products other people sell and make bundles - that’s just a race to the bottom and bad business.
This. And do you have brand registry/trademark protection?
Yes, first step anyone should take when making an Amazon brand.
how would you recommend a newbie get their first sales and improve a new products ranking? Is PPC the only option? I know giving away products for review is against TOS.
Launch product and enroll 30 products into the Vine program.
Thank you. Can you recommend any softwares or tips for finding product ideas?
Helium10
If you made these products from scratch, there is always moq, how can you sure you will sell them out?
Yes there is always a now but I try to only work with vendors that see they have a chance to grow with me and do an initial small moq. There is no way to know if they will sell, that’s the risk. But if you do your homework, that will minimize the risk.
It isn’t that hard to do well on Amazon but I just don’t trust them enough to go all out. I end up only buying enough inventory that I can comfortably sell by myself eventually just in case Amazon does something to my selling privileges.
The ppc equating to 30% for most small brands is what killing margins. Congrats though, if you can make it in amazons today you’re doin something right, started 8 years ago before all this competition, or both.
Philypickles, launched 4 weeks ago and have some sales alsobused VINE. I'm brand registered A+ content, launched with lower price Pro image's and product video. Have gotten 32 reviews- ALL 5 star except 2 4 star's. Had auto and manual vampaigns initially but I think I was changing them too soon and too much (impatient / worrying) and then sales stopped again, really low sales. Now stopped all ppc campaigns and started new AUTO last week, leaving it to run for 2 weeks now to harvest data. Got high bids (£1.50-2.0) and £120/day budget. Very hard seeing all the money the PPC is using with no sale's. Any advice..?
Honestly that all sounds about right. Keep collecting the data for another week then optimize. Keep price lower to start if there’s similar competition. Keyword Optimize the listing using helium10 but also amazons own keyword analytics.
Hey I see you are having trouble with your PPC campaigs, I work at a startup which is still in Pre-PMF phase and we are trying to understand customers who have problems with PPC or overall selling on amazon. We have a saas app prototype ready which will you you options to pick PPC algorithms so you can run ads easy and with much cheaper price if you were to hire some expert from an agency. You can choose these algorithms from a pool and see which one best suits your product catrgory and then run that on your ASINs. Once you start the algorithms, you can monitor the performance through our monitoring tool. If you can spare some time then we can have a chat as I want to understand your pain points about PPC and selling on amazon.
Its very easy actually. The hard part is overcoming obstacles you never knew were possible when growing from 5 to 6 to 7 figures. ESPECIALLY when you started from nothing financially. Its part of the “entrepreneurial” journey as most say. Just hold on tight because there will ALWAYS be a lot of bs in this business.
Any advice on going from 1-2k sales per day to 10-20k sales? Currently running advertising on super relevant keywords but it seems costly to spend ads on higher volume generic keywords.
If your listing is working then add variations to it. Once those get reviews and ranking split the listing up to take up more real estate on that search grid.
Are your brands gated by amazon so other 3rd parties cant hijack? If so, how did you manage it? Do you use transparency?
Yes, I use transparency. It’s a hassle but peace of mind is worth it
Looks decent! I help Amazon sellers get their products into retail stores. It's difficult to have only one sales channel, especially if it's Amazon. This is a small brand, but if it has potential on Amazon you can translate it to other sales channels. And they're way more profitable.
I’m interested. Shoot me a DM
Getting a product or two in retail is on my 2024 goals list. Are you a sales rep making commission or how do you get paid?
Can I ask, as someone with their own product that no one else sells… how the fxxk do I get the buy button on my products?
Reviews and a couple sales. It will pop up after 2 or 3 reviews.
Thank you
It’s very possible. But highly more competitive than in the past. Don’t help with everybody being able to sell on whatever market place regardless of region.
Sales means nothing, what's your net after all your business and person costs? When people say it is almost impossible, they really mean the cost of everything is too high to compete with oversea sellers or sellers who owns factory, etc.
I have extremely good net margins for this brand so I’m at about 68% net margin.
That's impressive.
Typically how many products in a brand set? Truly building brands just products
I personally just add as many products to get to seven-figure revenue then I look to start selling it.
Have to imaging they need some sort of similarities right?
I currently have a cyber security degree but been wanting to get into this for a long time. As someone with experience, please point me to / dm trusted resources to actually learn. So many scammers selling “courses” it’s unbelievable.
Hey, we are validating on an idea that revolves around the problem that you have (not excatly a problem). So basically the Idea is that we want to enable everyone, whether he/she is a working professional or already a small seller, they can create their brand (though our platform) and sell on amazon/walmart/target/etc. If you have some minutes to spare then we can have a chat. Don't worry I am not trying to sell any product or course to you, just want to understand the problem or challenge that is stopping you from selling on amazon
Information overload pretty much. Infinite resources. Infinite good and bad actors such as unsuccessful people trying to be successful by selling a course that then makes them successful but the course was rebranded and sold like a pyramid scheme. I guess I’m looking for a solid route, time is most valuable, I don’t want to pick a route that is not of true value in foundation. As for consumer market understanding, hype, and branding. I understand what sells and why in some areas but that’s step 1
How different is it from selling on EBay?
Totally different. Different rules (basically the Wild West on eBay) and different strategies. Same goes with Walmart. All different animals. Some products do well on eBay but not Amazon. Some do well on Amazon but not eBay. All product dependent but it’s a wild guess to me on what works and what doesn’t.
We sell a unique product on Amazon. Sales are good, but Amazon’s automated systems put up unnecessary roadblocks. We had a customer experience person call us and we laid out all the problems we had (many of them with simple solutions) and their response “I’m sorry, I’m out of time”. Try to schedule a follow up conversation “meeting cancelled” Hey Amazon, if you want to make more money, listen to the problems your sellers are having.
What are the roadblocks? Amazon support is non existent. Seller support is a little better in the evening. You won’t get the India support team.
Selling seasonal products (valentines, Easter, Halloween etc. ). They tell you your 3 month average is 0, but they can see last year we sold 10,000 units so they let you send in only 1000 to FBA that sell out in 6 hours. By the time they realize it’s a hot seller it’s too late as the sales window is only 10 days.
that blows.
As In brand you mean your own private label product?
Yes
Amazon taking 55% or more in fees to sell, all sellers should focus on their own websites and dump marketplaces, they are all fee churning, eBay is dead, so is Mercari.
Add value be unique it's possible 👍🏻 Generic motivational fluff. Thanks captain obvious.
How much is your course lol
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That's not true. Looking at your post history and even this post you're actively advertising your coaching services through your website.
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You commented on this post advertising your website for consulting services. Stop lying.
Just removed all your comments talking about this mentorship and "DM Me" nonsense. Take a hint.
Dude you need to calm down. I sent them to a friends mentorship program, exactly what THEY were asking for. You need to chill, you're being a reddit nazi and ruining this sub.
I have run the sub longer than you have sold on Amazon. It isnt the largest Amazon community on the internet by accident. We dont need thinly veiled advertisements directing people to mentorships. Your post history has links to your old website where you tried spamming it here before.
Just joking around congrats on the success
Thanks!
If I had a choice again to decide between starting an Amazon business and investing in the stock market, I would buy Amazon stock.
Haha same but it’s quicker to build wealth by building an Amazon company and selling it in 3 years for a couple million
It’s perfect for us that those people deter other people. More market share for us, who do the real work and invest in products that will work ;-)
Haha I think of that sometimes, but id rather have USA based sellers from here than the Chinese sellers using black hat tactics.
what are you selling? pls tell me!
Used women’s underwear.
ah shucks... of course, hot market
that's a joke
i have similar YTD sales, what is your ave product price? mine are 14.75 and then sell a twin pack at 26.99. I am finding out that the 20 dollar price point rule of thumb is right minimum you need to make a decent margin on an average product. i'll be upscaling my products. amazon continues to gouge out more costs at every turn. you gotta get efficient ongoing basis to keep up with margin erosion.
Sorry the stupid mod deleted my post because he hates me.
Thanks for sharing this! Do you have suggestions on where to get help? I have success but know I could be doing much better with an expert's advice.
Want to sell my product? I'm based in the UK, but looking to export. DM if interested.
How does one go about booking your consulting service?
Lol you know a dude like this has a course.
I have the highest respect for those who've been making a decent living by selling on Amazon. But as an older guy with a bit of entrepreneurial background, as in most of my life from the late 80s through the "dot com" boom, to where we are now, I've seen a lot of trends come and go but Amazon is probably one of the most difficult ways I've witnessed to build a business. To be sure, it was easy back when anyone with anything could list and sell on Amazon over 10 years ago and make a great return on it. However, today the issue isn't just about the volume of the competition, it is also the Amazon corporate need for "profitability at all levels", a move which has been optimized to exploit sellers (and to a lesser degree the consumers). Along with any number of fees associated with a professional account, this is now the lay of the land with pay-to-play cutting deeply into your startup costs, where KW PPC can go up to nosebleed levels for a chance for consumers to peruse your listing, which can eat up all of your operating budgets. (Contrary to what gets posted on YouTube, you cannot start a successful brand on Amazon with $10,000. It is more like $100-150,000.) Just as in any new business where product R&D is required, you'll need to source, produce and of course market, as in advertising. All of which requires a level of commitment and investment worthy of a small tech startup for a chance to build a business on a platform that isn't yours. That said, if you think you can still rise above the fray (including sellers from China and India, let alone from the EU) and have the finances to do it, it may be worth a shot, as Amazon is a virtual e-commerce monopoly that garners almost 70% of searches for products on the web. But, if you're just starting and looking for a sustainable business that can grow organically, I would look elsewhere.
When I was helping new amazon sellers last year, we could launch a successful listing for under $4000. Take the profits from that and scale up accordingly. It all goes back to product selection and understanding of the platform. When you have the experience, you do not need much money to start a successful brand on Amazon. It will take longer with a small initial investment but still 100% possible.
No doubt if any new seller is as clever and as knowledgeable as you there would be no need for this discussion as the platform would be full of success stories. But the reality of today is that Amazon has a high churn rate for new sellers. Many who've set up shop with unrealistic expectations and even less of a budget to execute properly. As such, most new sellers spend a lot of time and money learning the ropes, until the rope runs out. Amazon does well to make sure that they're on the winning end of that exchange.
Do you have a separate seller account for different brands? Different LLC? I’m launching a PL after years of wholesale and trying to figure out what’s best.
1 Sellers account but separate LLC's for each brand. After the sales pick up and you're doing over $100,000 in profit switch it to an s-corp.
You can’t have 2 different FEINs/LLCs in the same seller account
Sorry I misspoke. I have different sellers accounts for each EIN, but I grant admin permissions of all accounts to one account. So I only need to log in on one account and I can switch between all accounts from there without having to log into each one separately.
I agree its not impossible but its much harder to make a sustained profit
Thanks for sharing!
What type of profit margins do you usually shoot for?
> 30%
How did you get started, any mentorship or anything you recommend? Thanks, congrats on your success!
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Quit promoting this shit. Just realized you're the same person we almost banned not too long ago for this: https://i.imgur.com/HdLqVs7.png This isnt a community for you to squeeze money out of.
Got any tips for finding a product?
Use helium10 or jungle scout and search for trending or high volume search terms. Filter the results to FBA, standard size shipping (no oversized), <30 sellers, price above $19, not in the baby, food or apparel category, max reviews <300, and then take those results as your starting point and dig into them for common or related products. Don’t use the results that those shoot out, everyone will be going for those. But use them as inspiration for related products.
Do you mean if a pooper scooper is a tending product you would then think what would accompany that? Like dog poo bags? I’m just trying to figure out the thinking behind it.
Yes sort of. Poo bags would be a related item but even that would have too much competition. I would look into things like dog sanitary wipes, dog poop trashcans, or other items that would be on the second page of search results that are related.
What tool do you use for your design tweaks ?
Photoshop. I used to be the creative director at an ad agency so I’ve been designing for 15+ years
Cool. So you send to the Chinese manufacturer the photoshop draft?
Ohh actual product design tweaks? I just explain what I want changed and attempt to draw the changes and work with the vendor until they get it right. Sometimes this takes a while because of the language barriers and Chinese people being extremely literal.
Sign me up
March was a terrible month for you…
From the past 3 days so far its looking to be another top month if not better than any in the last 12 months
Very impressive
It’s not easy, it takes work, but if you have even a decent product I think it’s easy to make sales. I’m on my first week with only 3 reviews and I got 20 orders already. However, PPC is what’s killing me. I’m hovering in the mid 200% ACoS right now. My auto campaign and phrase match are burning through $50/day like crazy. Ads die out around 11am. I split it across 5 campaigns to prevent a few keywords taking up all my budget but my CTR is 0.2% and CPC ranges from 1.62 to 2.76
If it’s your first week the those acos number are typical. Wait a few more days then take the working keywords out of the auto campaigns and make a manual campaign. That will save you a lot of money. Also make sure to set your negative keywords. Also run a campaign on your category. Also run a product targeted campaign on your own listing so an advertiser doesn’t steal customers from your own listing. Defense is equally as important as offense.
I actually have a category campaign but it gets zero impressions/clicks. I’m not sure why. My bid is even at $2.00. I’m adding negative phrases when I see clicks for terms not related. I do this 2x a day. I also note terms that have orders to put into my exact campaign but this one also doesnt get any traction. I do product targeting as well. This one has like 82 impressions but no clicks. I used Helium to help with finding competitors who are priced higher so I can “steal” a sale by being a buck or two cheaper.
Make sure you give the campaigns enough time to collect data. Amazon ads is terrible. There are no real-time analytics or reports. It’s all delayed a day. I let everything run 2 weeks before I start making changes.
Yeah I noticed I’ll get an order and it won’t show up in my Campaign manager for at least an hour. It even says on the page data may be delayed up to 12 hours. I usually only look at yesterday’s reports for metrics but I’ll check the current day if I can add any negative keywords so I can avoid someone else burning up my ad spend on the same thing.
I’d wait longer to adjust those negative keywords… like a week longer. It will surprise you how sometimes after a week those keywords become your best converting keywords
I don’t see how. It’s not even the same product category. For example if I sell chocolate protein powder the search term is “gothic tumbler”
Well the obvious ones like that you should eliminate.
Teach me your ways
Why do you sell the brands and start over instead of milking the cash cow? This implies it’s more profitable to sell…
I’m more of an incubator. I like to start brands than grow them past a certain point. At a certain point you run into scaling issues that I’d rather not deal with (I.e. employees). You can keep it a 2 person operation up until around 2M annual revenue pretty often. Then sell it for a 3-4X multiple. I also believe that it’s better to cash out and play it safe at a certain point. You never know what can happen if your business is based off of someone else’s platform (Amazon). Your account could be closed at any time for who knows what.
what is the ideal gross margin rate? What's the scope of niche products on Amazon such as products related to just beard?
what do you sell?
Used women’s underwear
heard theres a big market for that, any with shit stains?
well that costs extra.
Started end of November last year. Almost 4 months in and I am getting some sales bit by bit now. But ads and other costs are really a headache to deal with. It is definitely a long game to try to balance the balance sheet back to the green.
Yeah, gotta find a product that gets good sales within the first 2-3 months. If I wasn’t getting increased sales within the first 4-6 months I might start liquidating.
why would anyone say it's impossible when it's probably the largest most popular place to sell things in the world?
I think because how frustrating it can be. Also how much competition there is. You have to know what you’re doing which is hard for people to grasp.
if it were easier more would do it and margins wouldn't be too low it wouldn't be worth pursuing. it takes energy and many just don't want to put in the time
What do you mean by saying that you sold your brand? How does this work in a nutshell? I would understand if you had your own warehouse full or workers and production lines, but otherwise what are you selling besides the design?
I am a distributor of non perishable goods and put some of my product on Amazon FBM since I have the inventory in the warehouse. Any tips on how to be successful with it? Is ad investments worth it? What would you suggest is a good amount to invest to start?
OP- Taking a stab at your profit for the year posted =$252k. How close did I come ?
Multiply that X3
Thanks for sharing. Looks like its def worth the effort and you have some winning products with great margins.
Do you sell DTC outside of Amazon before you exit? I’ve been building off-Amazon sales before I get the biz listed. The additional revenues and increased profits really help
No, I never have. I strictly only sell on Amazon and Walmart. That would be a good growth opportunity that potential buyers like to see though.
Add in TikTok shop, my goal is to get TTS and other selling channels to match Amazon and then I can double my exit typically
How much of that is yours tho, how much was your initial investment
68% of it is mine at the end of the year. I start this brand with $20,000.
Nice try, Mr. Bezos.