This article is written by our friend Dan, who runs an awesome website about his Amazon journey at garlicpressseller.com
Table of Contents
Amazon FBA seems to be a dream come true for millions of people who want to start their own e-commerce business. While joining this e-commerce empire as a seller is a magnificent idea, you must consider the fact you may fail. The truth is that not everyone who starts selling on Amazon succeeds. I know this is not something you’d like to hear, but it’s something you need to know.
Why do people fail at Amazon FBA?
There are many reasons for that. In this article, we look at the top 3 of them to help you avoid making the same mistakes sellers who fail make.
Why Do You Need to Be Prepared for Failure?
Starting a business is an investment, not only in terms of finances but also in time. When you become an Amazon FBA seller, you don’t only invest in purchasing products but also in product research tools like Jungle Scout and Helium 10 as well as in your time to set up and launch your store. And, not being prepared for whatever outcome your business may have is a big mistake. Actually, dreaming only of success and not being prepared for failure is one of the main reasons why a lot of people don’t succeed on Amazon.
Before we head to explaining the top 3 reasons Amazon FBA sellers fail, let me tell you a bit about the most common types of sellers. Why is this important? Because if you’re aware of the categories of sellers, you may identify yourself in one of them in time and carefully plan your next steps.
3 Categories of Amazon Sellers
- Those who fail right at the start and their business never actually takes off.
- Those who have some success, but don’t invest in learning how to grow their business and earn a full-time income.
- Those who succeed in their Amazon business and scale it up to a level that brings them large income, even 6 or 7-figure income.
You can be in any of these categories, and while luck has something to do with your business’s success, it mostly depends on you. Whether you fail or succeed, and to which extent you succeed, depends on how much time you invest in preparing and learning about running an Amazon FBA business.
Starting an Amazon store and selling products isn’t something that happens overnight. It’s a long process that requires a lot of learning and patience. If you’re not ready to commit to it, be ready to fail.
The Top 3 Reasons People Fail at Amazon FBA
1. Considering Amazon FBA Is Easy
Amazon may be a huge marketplace with immense potential for sellers, but that doesn’t guarantee your success. Selling on the #1 e-commerce marketplace in the world doesn’t mean you’ll succeed and make 6-figures per month or even a year.
Actually, taking into account Amazon’s popularity and evergrowing expansion, it’s expected to have millions of active sellers. That means millions of competitors, which makes succeeding a lot harder. With enormous competition, you need to think and plan your business ahead.
Invest Time and Money
If you really want to succeed on Amazon, you need to invest time and money in learning about Amazon FBA, running a business on the platform, purchasing helpful Amazon FBA tools, and learning about how to scale up your business and turn it into a stable full-time income.
Don’t Leave Your Full-Time Job Just Yet
An important aspect to consider is financing. Whether you run a classic e-commerce business or dropship your products, you need to be ready to invest a certain amount of money. You need money to launch your products on the market, and since finding winning products is essential for a successful launch, you need to invest in the best Amazon FBA tools like Jungle Scout, Helium 10, and Viral Launch. That’s why it’s important to have a regular job that will bring you recurring income part of which you’ll invest in your Amazon business.
Although starting an Amazon FBA business doesn’t require a Ph.D. degree, it requires a lot of work and learning. So, don’t take it as an easy, get-rich-quick business.
2. Doing Everything Yourself
Starting a business is hard at the beginning. Your store is new on the market, most people don’t know it yet, and you don’t make a profit right from the start. The lack of these things prevents most sellers from making additional investments, especially when it comes to employees. But, there’s no business without employees.
Doing everything yourself won’t save you money. In fact, it may be the reason you lose your money and fail. Why? Because you’re not good at everything and you can’t work 24/7 to do all tasks related to your business.
Outsource Some of Your Tasks
If you want to succeed, find people to help you. You don’t need to employ them and pay a fixed wage + benefits. You can simply outsource some of the tasks you either can’t do that well, don’t have time for, or aren’t worth your time. The best and budget-friendliest way to do that is by hiring reliable freelancers.
You can hire people to help you with part of your tasks, especially the ones that take your time but aren’t worth it. For instance, packing and shipping inventory is a time-consuming minimum-wage job. As such, it’s not worth doing it yourself, but hire someone to do it for you.
Other tasks you can and should outsource are customer support, copywriting, and social media marketing. If you’re good in one or some of these, it’s fine, but it’s still better to outsource them to freelancers because they are experts in their field. Plus, these three tasks don’t cost too much, yet hiring professionals to do them will bring you a high ROI.
Outsourcing tasks will give you more time to focus on more important high-dollar tasks like product research or marketing your business.
3. Choosing the Wrong Products
Finding the right products to sell in your Amazon store is an essential factor that determines whether your store succeeds or not. Considering there are millions of sellers on Amazon, selling high-demand unique products is impossible. However, you can find high-demand low-competition products to list on your store. These are what we call “winning” products.
Being in high demand, there’s a great interest in them all the time, and having low competition gives you a greater chance of being noticed by the consumers looking for them.
In order to find winning products, it’s best to use an accurate product research tool like Jungle Scout, or any other of your preference. Additionally, you can do manual research using Excell sheets for analyzing and comparing multiple products at once.
And, while using product research software is the most reliable and fastest option for finding winning products, it doesn’t guarantee you success. Why? Because, if you don’t know which factors to look at and how to determine which products will perform well based on the given data, you won’t be able to choose the right winning products for your store.
Key Factors to Consider When Choosing Winning Products
Product’s Historical Performance
Buy products based on historical sales data, historical rank data, and historical pricing. You shouldn’t choose products based on their current sale, rank, and price. Maybe they are currently performing great but underperforming the rest of the year.
Product’s Amazon Data
Don’t choose products based on your hunch. You don’t need a product research tool to tell you crucial product data because Amazon has it all. From Best Seller’s Rank (BSR) to the number of sales, to product specifications and customer satisfaction, you can find all these data by looking at the product’s page.
Is it selling? How many people have bought it? What’s the price? How does it rank? Are customers satisfied with their purchase? Consider these questions, not your gut, when deciding upon which product is worth investing in and selling.
Product’s Quality
The product’s quality should be above all. It is the factor that can ruin your Amazon seller reputation and bring the number of sales to zero. Why?
If you sell profitable products just because they are winning ones, but neglect the product’s quality, you won’t sell anything. A few, 10, even 50 people may buy your product, but if it’s of low quality, they’ll leave a 1-star review which will destroy your business. And, oh, yes, they will ask for a refund and return your product, which will make you lose money.
So, make sure you take into account the product’s quality, not just order it because it is a “winning” one.
Final Words
Selling on a worldwide recognizable marketplace like Amazon doesn’t guarantee you success. In fact, due to the millions of sellers and even more buyers, it takes e-commerce to the next level by “asking” sellers to have good knowledge of how Amazon FBA works as a requirement for success.
Only those who spend time learning about Amazon FBA, invest in their business, and continue to invest time and money in learning and expanding their knowledge will succeed. If you’re not prepared for that, you’ll fail.
Don’t fall for the lies that becoming a successful seller on Amazon is easy. It’s not! There are a lot of things to learn about it and a lot of work to put into it, so don’t think you can do it all yourself. And, remember that products can either lift or drown your business, so make sure you choose the right ones.
And, these mistakes?
Don’t get discouraged by them, but take them as advice on what you shouldn’t do when starting your Amazon FBA business.
Already been there???
Let us know which mistakes you’ve done and how you’ve overcome them. Share your experience and thoughts in the comments below to help each other become better!
More posts
About the author
Dan Saunders
Dan is a well established Amazon seller for over 5 years now.
He is a product research specialist and is always sharing he work on his blog: Garlicpressseller.com. Here he shares case studies on how to launch products on Amazon, but also methods on how to find unique keywords or how to master product research.
