I wasted $1000 on an Amazon course and here’s what I learned.
You know those YouTube ads you get about people bragging how much they’ve made in sales the past 24hrs doing Amazon FBA and prompt you to sign up for their course?
Well I fell for it.
I paid $1000 (CAD) for an amazon course that I thought was going to change my life.
Well it didn’t and here’s how I learned the hard way.
To give some pretence, there are essentially 4 ways to make money on Amazon.
- Sell arbitrage. This is when you buy something brand new factory sealed that you found on sale at Wal-Mart and resell It on Amazon. It works, but its not consistent nor a good long term strategy.
- Drop Shipping. Find something on Aliexpress, post the ad on Amazon, get an order and fill that order on Aliexpress to the buyers house. Not good long-term, no control over quality, very long shipping times, very susceptible to competition and you probably wont be getting repeat customers when the package arrives and has shipping stickers from China all over it.
- Private label. Find a product selling well on Amazon, for example: Aloe Lube. Find a manufacturer for it using something like Alibaba, design your own label and packaging for it and come up with marketing plan, etc to sell on Amazon. This could be worthwhile but takes plenty upfront cost and you have to know what you’re doing. It’s smarter to have buyers already from another channel (shopify, eBay, instagram) and migrate them to buy and leave reviews on your amazon product listing as the final step.
- Amazon FBA. This is when you ship (either private label or brand name) product to Amazon’s warehouse and they handle all the shipping, invoicing and hard stuff for you. You just sit back and collect the dough. THIS is what I did and here’s my story…
The idea was simple.
People already buy brandname stuff, you don’t need to convince them to buy a brand they already know. Think Bandai, Colgate, Old Spice, etc.
All you had to do was get in touch with DISTRIBUTORS of said product(s) and convince them to let you place an order and have them ship it to Amazon’s warehouse. Easy right?
Not so fast. First we need to find a product, so let’s shell out another
(-$300) on an annual subscription to JungleScout Lite (because PRO costs more).
Cool! Now we can sift through any amazon listing and find the exact number of units sold of a specific item each month, sweet!
You search for hours at a time for different niches, watch batteries, aloe lube, BBQ gloves, hell; even condoms.
After emailing countless distributors you FINALLY get an email from several and they send you a vendor form to fill out and only after they have all your personal information are you allowed to view their pricing catalogues (so dumb). After seeing that you cant afford 80% of the distributors you place an order with Huggies, you still have hope. Luckily, this product also fulfills all the pre-requisites of:
(X) Isn’t owned by Amazon on the BuyBox
(X) Supplier is willing to work with you, a newbie!
(X) Seller competition is LOW!
(X) Product is UNGATED!
(X) Sales are SOLID!
(X) Profit margins after FBA fees would be worthwhile!
(X) Supplier is willing to ship to Amazon’s warehouse (lucky for you Huggies hasn’t realized they could just sell on Amazon and cut you out, teehee!)
That was tough work, now we just ship to Amazon and watch the orders roll in right?
WRONG.
After negotiating with the distributor of Huggies, they tell you to put down 25% deposit, upfront and to provide a shipping address to have on profile for when they ship.
No problem. But what’s the shipping address? You can’t put your house – where are you gonna put all those diapers?
So you go to Amazon Seller (the management system for sellers on Amazon) and try to fill out your shipment processing info for Amazon to receive your package.
Upon going through the process you realize that Amazon requires you to know the EXACT dimensions and WEIGHT of the ENTIRE SKID before you can even VIEW the warehouse address at the final step? Oops.
You know those YouTube ads you get about people bragging how much they’ve made in sales the past 24hrs doing Amazon FBA and to sign up for their course?
Well I fell for it.
I paid for a $1000 amazon course that I thought was going to change my life.
Well it did, it made me start writing this post which will be viewed amongst thousands. (Screw you Beau Crabill)
To give some pretence, there are essentially about 4 ways to make money on Amazon.
- Sell arbitrage. This is when you buy something brand new factory sealed that you found on sale at Wal-Mart and resell I t on Amazon. It works, but its not consistent nor a good long term strategy.
- 2. Drop Shipping. Find something on Aliexpress, post the ad on Amazon, get an order and fill that order on Aliexpress to the buyers house. Not good long-term, no control over quality, very long shipping times, very susceptible to competition and you probably wont be getting repeat customers when the package arrives and has shipping stickers from China all over it.
- 3. Private label. Find a product selling well on Amazon, for example: Aloe Lube. Find a manufacturer for it using something like Alibaba, design your own label and packaging for it and come up with marketing plan, etc to sell on Amazon. This could be worthwhile but takes plenty upfront cost and you have to know what you’re doing. It’s smarter to have buyers already from another channel (shopify, eBay, instagram) and migrate them to buy and leave reviews on your amazon product listing as the final step.
- 4. Amazon FBA. This is when you ship (either private label or brand name) product to Amazon’s warehouse and they handle all the shipping, invoicing and hard stuff for you. You just sit back and collect the dough. THIS is what I did and here’s my story…
The idea was simple.
People already buy brandname stuff, you don’t need to convince them to buy a brand they already know. Think Huggies, Colgate, Old Spice, etc.
All you had to do was get in touch with DISTRIBUTORS of said product(s) and convince them to let you place an order and have them ship it to Amazon’s warehouse. Easy right?
Not so fast. First we need to find a product, so let’s shell out another (-$300) on an annual subscription to JungleScout Lite (because PRO costs more).
Cool! Now we can sift through any amazon listing and find the exact number of units sold of a specific item each month! Sweet!
After searching hours at a time at different niches and contacting distributors only to hit brick walls, FINALLY, you get an email from Huggies and they wanna let you buy some diapers! Luckily, this product also fills all the boxes.
(X) Isn’t owned by Amazon on the BuyBox
(X) Supplier is willing to work with you, a newbie!
(X) Seller competition is LOW!
(X) Product is UNGATED!
(X) Sales are SOLID!
(X) Profit margins after FBA fees would be worthwhile!
(X) Supplier is willing to ship to Amazon’s warehouse (lucky for you Huggies hasn’t realized they could just sell on Amazon and cut you out, teehee!)
That was tough work, now we just ship to Amazon and watch the orders roll in right?
WRONG.
After negotiating with the distributor of Huggies, they tell you to put down 25% deposit. upfront and provide a shipping address to have on profile for when they ship.
No problem. But what’s the shipping address? You can’t put your home – where are you gonna put all those diapers?
So you go to Amazon Seller (the management system for sellers on Amazon) and try to fill out your shipment processing info for Amazon to receive your package.
Upon going through the process you realize that Amazon requires to know the EXACT dimensions and WEIGHT of the ENTIRE SKID before you can even VIEW the warehouse address at the final step? Oops.
So now you’re in a tough pickle. Your supplier needs an address to ship to, and Amazon wont give you the address until you get the Supplier’s final dimensions which they wont do because you haven’t given them an address yet. Sorry not sorry.
By some miracle you finally convince your supplier to package everything up and that you’ll give them the address later. You’re on thin ice now but at least you got the address. That was a close one!
After paying your final fees to the supplier they send out your shipment and all is well.
Or so you thought.
1 week later you get an email from Amazon’s customer service dept and they tell you you do not qualify to sell these because the product category is GATED to you as a noobie seller.
So you spend the next 3 hours on customer service explaining your situation to a woman from the Philippines and she is nice enough to UNGATE you.
Close one again!
You’ve finally found an in demand product that isn’t competitive and you got a nice contact with the supplier…
NOW WE’RE TALKING!!
You wake up three days later to 4 new emails!
Three from Amazon telling you they’ve shipped out 3 new orders! And one is from that annoying newsletter you always forget to unsubscribe from. You finally accomplished it, hooray!
A month passes you only have about 20% stock left of your diapers. You’ve placed another order but then your worst nightmare happens…
AMAZON TOOK THE BUY BOX! And you cant even come CLOSE to the prices they’re selling for. This sucks! Now you have to repeat the process for another product. Good luck….
In Conclusion:
Although you may hear different success stories form others with selling on Amazon, in my opinion I concluded that for the scraps that Amazon let’s you have and the rules you must abide by: your time, effort and money are better spent on something you can sustain long term.
Amazon is a bully and can do whatever they want to you as a seller.
They can own the buy box, they can kick you out their platform for unsatisfactory reviews, they can claim your shipments didn’t arrive, they can change their shipment facility at a moment’s notice making your logistics 10x harder, they can leave you on hold, in short they can squish you like a bug.
Additionally, the Amazon course I paid for was an absolute trash waste of time and didn’t apprehend to me at ALL because 99% of the info applied for US residents and guess what, I’m Canadian.
Also, Amazon has their own Seller Academy … for FREE.
The only thing that I still use today is the cool JungleScout extension which I can use to see product sales for research.
P.S.
Don’t ever buy Beau Crabill’s course, he is a pro scammer, bad customer service and he eats of mustard for breakfast. YUCK
Thanks for reading,
your friend,
- Mr. 7000
