Not everyone who starts selling on Amazon builds a successful Amazon business as a result. A lot of people fail. However, there are still a lot who scale their business and get millions of dollars worth of sales.
So, where’s the foundation stone? Why do most people fail — and how do some succeed?
Well, building an Amazon business, as any business on the planet, first of all, needs a serious approach and effort. It’s the first point that may differ you from thousands of other people who try and fail: if you are persistent enough, you’ll have higher chances for success.
But obviously, that’s not all. So, let’s dive deeper into details and discover the main pitfalls and some good advice that may help you build your successful business on Amazon.
Why Amazon?
Firstly, let’s specify the main reasons why Amazon is so good to go. It’s an extremely popular market, but not the only one on the planet. But here are its main pros that are hard to beat:
Low investments to start: you don’t need tens of thousands of dollars to start selling on Amazon. All you need is the capital investment into your first few products and their listing optimization;
A giant amount of potential customers: each month over 197 million people around the world visit Amazon in search of a product. Amazon is the largest platform in terms of audience size and for each product, there is definitely a customer on it;
Amazon-prime loyalty program: Prime members get discounts on various plans as Amazon users don’t have anything other than shop and participate in actions such as playing a game in an app provides them with rewards and discounts such as Netflix plans and more.
Amazon is a great market to work in, but just placing your products is not enough. Many people come and struggle to sell anything for weeks and months — while others jump in and start theit business successfully.
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Why do many people lose on Amazon?
Wrong product
Choosing and investing in the wrong product is the #1 reason for failure. As an Amazon seller, you surely need to provide value to your customers in order to be able to reach your financial goals. Marketing your products is also essential as the more people will know about them, the more possible sales you will eventually make.
Weak business plan
Just like in any industry business, everything starts with a business plan and making sure you follow all Amazon’s TOS. A business plan doesn’t not only start at choosing a product that will sell, but optimizing the listing, choosing marketing channels, PPC optimizations, finding a software that will help you run your business, design and much much more. Thus, a poor business plan without any step by step arrangements leads to a lot of Amazon seller failures.
Wrong expectations
Everyone who sells on Amazon, at some point looked for Amazon advice on the internet and stumbled upon a few famous Amazon sellers that everyone knows who will advise you how to sell right.
Of course that helps but just because they made millions doesn’t mean that you will as well right away. Money makes money and growing takes time but you still need to be realistic and put a lot of effort and time into growing.
A lot of sellers will try to make millions by starting with selling a lot of different products at once, choosing high volume or high margin products but that does not guarantee that they will sell.
Success stories are great but not everyone has a happy story this is why understanding that it’s going to be a long way to reach success and patience as well as effort are the keys will get you much further than being in a rush to see major profit in no time.
Low-Quality Goods
It’s very much advisable that you inspect your order prior to paying over 50% to suppliers. Just like there are many sellers, there are also many suppliers who try to save on manufacturing but still deliver quality products. And you surely wouldn’t want to pay a supplier you have never met a large amount of money in hope that they will manufacture exactly what you asked for with the accurate quality and specifications.
Therefore, in order to avoid disappointment, and a lot of customer returns due to selling products that do not match consumer expectations, in return getting bad reviews and poor future sales, always try to check your goods prior to paying the supplier over 50% of the agreed amount as they could have used cheaper material than what your agreed on, saved on production or made concessions.
Therefore, it is much recommended that you secure yourself as much as possible. In case you don’t, the worst case scenario will lead to an extremely long time taken to sell the units in stock at break-even and in the end killing a product that could have been extremely successful.
Lack of knowledge and skill
Generally, this is considered the most important part of your Amazon seller business together with account setup.
Even if you do PPC marketing, great sales in the beginning and a few good reviews, if you picked the wrong product you will still fail horribly.
This is why successful and experienced sellers tend to do product research and focus on the main factors before choosing a product, such as profit margin, production demand, ease of manufacturing and finding a supplier, competition level and more. Those are the main factors that need attention at the beginning.
As a new seller, you should avoid trying to manufacture difficult products in order to be successful from the first try.
Getting ungated is another point to focus on, on as many categories as possible so that you are able to sell in that product category in the future.
Being accurate and learning about other sellers’ mistakes will massively help you create a successful business. Being passionate and willing to put a lot of effort and work in the process will surely get you there.
What can help you succeed on Amazon?
There are no specific secrets or hidden methods to being successful that no one knows about but following a few right tactics and rules will surely be of great help.
Right products
Choosing the product you want to sell wisely is the main key of all to the Amazon selling door.
Make sure you choose the right product, find the right manufacturer and choose the right packaging for your product.
Make sure you do enough research before going for that one you are sure you want to sell and pack it accordingly in order to avoid making bug losses or stopping sales.
Always make sure that right goods are properly labelled before shipping them out.
Right business plan
Make sure you make good calculations before investing and have a spare amount as back up left. You surely wouldn’t want to spend all your money on manufacturing and not have enough left for the marketing.
PPC ads
Make sure you run PPC ads. You don’t have to do it manually as there are a lot of softwares such as sellerboard that will help you optimize your PPC campaigns. This will help you get more sales and is totally worth investing in as when a customer will search for the product you sell online they pick what comes within the first few results and you definitely want your product to be on the top.
Right Fulfillment option
Having Amazon take care of the fulfillment is a great option to use. Of course, as a seller you can choose to store them in your own warehouse to save a bit on the fees but that might cause a lot of headache for you and wasted time which you can use to invest in your business. Therefore, weighing whether you are sure you will be able to handle fulfillment or going for FBA is something worth considering well.
Right Tools
This is one of the smartest investments. There are generally a lot of solutions but not all tools will have several features that will not only help you manage your business, inventory and ppc but also boost service metrics and improve your seller feedback.
sellerboard is definitely a tool worth using whether you are a beginner or an experienced seller. It is an accurate profit analytics service with additional tools: follow up email campaigns, inventory management, reimbursements for lost & damaged stock and other FBA errors, PPC optimizer, listing change alerts. All this starting at $15 a month with a free trial.
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Conclusion
With time, most of the sellers who survive on Amazon reach 7 figures. Of course, there are a lot of lessons to learn, new tactics to try and a lot of hard work which are the keys to help you break or make your Amazon selling business.
The rule is always simple: The customer is king. Customers are always right and if you focus on that you have all the cards to make it work! Amazon does stick to this rule and if you go ahead with the same mentality then your business will definitely shoot.
The Golden Rule is simple: The customer is king. As much as this sounds cliché, Amazon sticks to this rule, so you’ve got to buy into the same mentality to make it work for your own business.
