Know this Before Starting your Amazon FBA Business
Sharing my experiences with Amazon FBA
I failed my Amazon FBA business.
How much did I lose?
Too much.
I put together a list of 5 things you should know about Amazon FBA before ever spending a dime in the industry.
Let’s get started.
1. The Seller Website is NOT User Friendly
It’s a pain in the a** in fact. Learning a new website is one thing, but learning a new website that is not user friendly is a different ball game.
The learning curve is tough to tackle. There were many times where I needed YouTube or Amazon FAQ pages to figure out how to find basic seller information on my dashboard.
It’s almost like Amazon made the website difficult to use on purpose.
2. Amazon Fees are Outrageous (and will keep getting worse)
To be fair, I didn’t do much research into how much Amazon fees were before I got started. That was my own fault.
But what I can tell you is Amazon charges a fee for just about anything you can think of.
Have you heard of that saying where everyone gets a piece of the pie? Well Amazon wants the whole pie.
And guess what? The Amazon Seller industry is so competitive that Amazon can get away with so many bogus fees.
3. People Return Low Quality Products
If your product sucks, it will get returned by the customer. Not only does the sale get refunded, but also your product is likely not properly packaged anymore. This means it will be much harder to resell without getting returned again.
If I were to start Amazon FBA over again, I would spend 10x more time finding a product that I am passionate about.
My products sucked. They were low quality and added little value. People didn’t want them.
4. Amazon Support is Horrible
I can’t put into words how bad Amazon support is.
Once again, I feel like Amazon intentionally makes their support bad to encourage sellers to figure out problems on their own.
Without a mentor or good Amazon support, I was on my own. YouTube was the best resource I had. Additionally, I kept getting tons of advertisements for Amazon FBA courses that would “teach” me how to do Amazon FBA.
I invested less than $150 in courses and they gave me some value. However, I don’t recommend investing into a course if you don’t know the full story of the course creator.
If you are looking for a mentor to help guide you, I recommend reaching out to people in your contact list to see if they know anyone who has done Amazon FBA before.
If you find someone from your contact list, reach out to them and ask to meet with them for lunch so you can ask questions about their experiences. It’s vital to understand as much first-hand experience as possible about the industry before investing a lot of money.
5. When You Quit, The Game isn’t Over Yet
When you decide to back out of the Amazon FBA industry, there is still an uphill battle of problems to deal with.
First of all, what will you do with your leftover inventory that is sitting in Amazon’s warehouse?
You basically have 2 options:
- Tell them to throw it away
- Have them send your inventory to your address (more fees)
Both options suck.
Additionally, you have to make sure you shut down your listings and shut down all operations with your Amazon FBA account.
If you just quit cold turkey and don’t take these precautions, you will lose more money from fees.
Final Thoughts
You’ll most likely find yourself quitting Amazon FBA if you ever start.
The vast majority of people will not successfully make it in this industry. It’s VERY competitive and without the right people working with you, you stand little chance.
I’m not going to sit here and say “prove me wrong!”
I’m here to tell you that I failed and it was costly. I will say that the lessons learned were valuable. But if you can make up your mind without spending a dime, that’s even better.
If you liked this article, you’ll like this other story from me:
