Amazon Hates New Products

What I learned (and lost) from doing my first FBA and e-commerce business.

Fedor Buturlin
Nov 1 · 8 min read
Photo by Bryan Angelo on Unsplash

Pre-story.

The internet is overflowing with stories of Amazon FBA (Fulfillment By Amazon) millionaires of passive income. There are people, influencers and even companies that sell courses for money, others do it for free. But all of them are getting a lot of attention as perhaps its the ultimate money-making dream of all those who pursue FIRE movement.

I am one of them I guess.

Since I was 14, I was into making money on the internet thing, at some point, my monthly income was more than my Mother's salary at the factory she worked at back then. I was making websites, selling links and running Ads, it was true passive income back then (mid-2000's). It was relatively easy.

Now it's a different story.

I started this business because I wanted to quit my day job. I work as a software engineer, and kinda, jack of all trades. Self-taught, always.

I had a good bonus payout at the time and decided to invest it all in this business. Roughly 5000 Euro.

Product choice is the key.

When choosing a product to make I used JungleScout app and their chrome extension. It's a database of all product on Amazon with their respective data, like reviews, price, etc. Where you can find opportunities to fit in with your baby that would make you a six-figure income.

I made a list of 10 products a could potentially pursue. There are some criteria as to which you should adhere in order to maximize your chances of success. I wanted to make something nice, something I could then sell on my own Shopify store.

After vetting more, I had two products that were appealing as good opportunities. One with a very high price and high margins and one with low price and low margins. The initial investment was the same on both of the products, but the quantity was 100 vs 1000.

I’ve chosen the more expensive product because I though a hundred would be easier to sell than a thousand, and those margins were promising.

When we get caught in a pursue of money, solely, its time to reevaluate our true motives, perhaps.

This was the first mistake I made because I saw super high volumes of sales for one of the competing products. Which was relatively easy to implement. Rather than focusing on launching a smaller and cheaper product to start with.

Start small.

I studied that one competitor. Every single thing that he did to get into top sales in less than a few months! It really seemed like a golden opportunity. But there were some things to consider that I was too blind to.

  1. Other competitors were out of stock.
  2. It was the Christmas holiday season.

If I wasn’t rushing for big revenues, instead of just learning the process with a smaller and cheaper product, things could have worked out differently.

Sourcing, manufacturing, and shipping to Amazon is easy.

But time-consuming.

Anyone can do it, really. It's just a matter of pure work.

You find the product on wholesale websites like Alibaba. Get a sample. Work out your modifications. Get the design done. Get sample with your design and labels. Workout your product thank you card. Make shipping labels to Amazon warehouses. Find out it's actually 3 different warehouses across the US. Rework your shipping deal with a supplier. Finally, produce product batch. Ship it. Wait for 1–2 months to arrive in the first warehouse, then another month to the rest.

It’s easy.

Marketing is not easy.

It's not. You should have an email list of potential customers before you launch your product. Or some other type of customer outreach to generate that initial sales volume.

There are so many different methods on the internet, that describe how to get that initial traction on Amazon. You should be ready to dig into Amazon CPC and facebook messenger bot giveaways.

I decided to copy that exact competitor’s strategy. The strategy was to run a giveaway in facebook messenger to potential customer prospects. In order for them to enter the competition, they had to subscribe to my messenger funnel, where they would receive a notification about the winners, and get a big discount when they find out that (most of them) did not win. The final discount was 70%.

That’s huge. I thought.

No launch strategy is good enough.

So that was my launch strategy, I was expecting a good number of sales after the giveaway, to get my traction. In fact, I was ready to just break even on every item, but it did not happen.

Instead, I realized that all my potential customers were looking for a free product, and could barely afford it even at such a discount. My funnel looked like this.

Announce the winners. Offer a 50% discount to those who did not win. Wait 2 days. Offer 70%. Wait another day. Offer 90%.

I sold maybe 10–15 products using this method.

When a customer received the product he/she was tempted for a free gift. They had to text to a specific number to get the link or visit a website and enroll in another messenger funnel. That's how I was able to “talk” to my real customers and ask them for review.

Product reviews are really, really hard to get.

If you can contact your real customers and ask them for a review, its easy in fact. But what happened to me sent me 10 steps back. So I was able to ask for a review from a real customer that bought a product on Amazon, no matter the discount. But the feedback I was getting from them amazed me.

Amazon let through 2 or 3 reviews and then stopped accepting any more reviews for my product. Some customers were trying to leave feedback with their “spouse” accounts and etc. Maybe this is the thing that messed it up for me. I don’t know.

Customers were reporting an inability to leave a review. They were so kind, sending me screenshots of the exact error messages they got from Amazon. It was something like: “Unable to leave a review for this product at this time, we temporarily blocked reviews due to suspicious activity”

Those were real reviews attempts, of real customers.

Contacting Amazon support did not resolve this issue for me. They replied to me saying that it's actually a client's inability to leave feedback, and it does not have to do anything with my product!

Pivoting may be good.

I got a little emotional and though I need to launch my own eCommerce store because of numerous Amazon limitations. I could still connect my Shopify store to the Fulfillment by Amazon services, so I decided to do just that. It took me another good 2 weeks hustling on launching my Shopify store. I wanted to get the design right, make a good copy and optimize it for conversions. But it was not converting as well. At that time I started to realize that perhaps something was wrong with either the product or its pricing.

At lease, i could put a pixel and retarget my prospects, and get some analytics as well.

Influencer marketing works.

At some point in this e-commerce journey, I was really heavy on influencers, but as my budget was really limited, I could afford free product for post exchange. I have given away around 10 products to influencers, keep in mind that I had 100 in total. I had generated zero sales with influencers that I have not paid for post, as far as I am aware. I could only track influencer based sales from the use of coupon codes specifically generated for the particular influencer.

My average influencer profile would look like this:

  • Up to 10k follower
  • Lifestyle, health or fitness niche
  • Female/ USA

Most of the influencers did not even respond back after getting a free sample, some would in a month's time.

The only success I had was with a paid product placement post I did with one influencer who had around 30k followers. I paid her around $200 for this post and I got around the same revenue, not profit. Considering her following and post price, she was the cheapest I could find, but still not enough to break-even.

Pivot again.

At that point, I had outlets, Amazon store, and Shopify store. I still around 70 products to sell. I thought maybe it would be good to focus on making a break-even point and evaluate what's next afterward when I sell all stock.

I started to make Bing Ads and Google AdSense. Some of them were targeting my Shopify store, some were directed towards Amazon.

Shopify targeted Ads were not generating anything close to being able to break even. Oh, I forget to mention that my break-even point is a little different. I just wanted to return the money spent on Ads, let alone investment made to buy stock.

Ads targetting Amazon were way cheaper. I could use “Amazon” in Ad title that gave me like 50% CTR and around 0.5$ CPC. But I still had to put my price way down in order to generate any sales. At some point, I was able to get my money spent on ads back. Some days were very hopeful, like 3 sales per-day. And then no sales at all for a week. The market was so unpredictable, after running this cycle for another month or so, I had 30 products in inventory still and my Amazon storage fees were about to come into place.

I had nothing else to do. I had to destroy my inventory as its costs were way cheaper than trying to sell any.

Summary.

I don’t think I am in any place to give advice in the summary, but I can think of would could be done differently that perhaps would yield better results.

  • I would start with a cheaper and smaller product.
  • I would focus on one sales channel, depending on the product itself.
  • Start with a bigger investment, would have set aside 100% of initial investment just for marketing.
  • Have 3 times more for future restocking and marketing.
  • Have a plan for getting reviews, and a backup plan for getting some more reviews.
  • I would focus on creating one sales funnel that works.

There are many many more things I think I could do differently if I had another go. But the biggest takeaway for me here is, don’t chase the money.

I was a little blind because I thought I can replicate someone else’s successful product and make big buck quick (like in 6 months' time).

And finally, I lost somewhere around 6000 euros :)

I write to share what I learned on the journey and the journey itself. Learning to craft stories, create success and live a fulfilled life.

Thanks to Glen Binger

Fedor Buturlin

Written by

On a never-ending journey to you know what…

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