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It will change again, you can rest assured of that. I think you have the right attitude toward it, FWIW. The FBA'ers out there are in a similar position and man

It will change again, you can rest assured of that. I think you have the right attitude toward it, FWIW. The FBA'ers out there are in a similar position and many of them rely way too heavily on Amazon for their income. These guys/gals started with/as affiliates... and have graduated to "branding" cheap chinese stuff. I tried doing some FBA, but it felt super scammy. Research products that people are buying then just work the pay per click, give some products away for review, and try to "out manipulate" your competition. It is going to end badly for a lot of them. China is learning how to beat them at their own game. The guys that run seminars on this stuff... uggh... nuff said.

Peretus 10y ago
I completely agree with your opinion on the FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) crowd being the same boat. It's not a great feeling to have your business built on someone else's platform and I'm doing everything I can at the moment to reduce our reliance on Amazon. I'm surprised that you felt that selling things via FBA is scammy. I have a full-time job but I also own a business that (currently) grosses about $150K on Amazon. I can honestly say that I don't feel like we've out-manipulated anyone or have done anything but create a very competitive product that we're able to sell at a competitive price. I agree that it quickly turns into a very painful race to the bottom when dozens of vendors are selling variations of the thing (e.g. silicone grill gloves or meat claws), but it's completely different when you're able to take the time to create a really great product. It's been a rewarding experience; I highly recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind answering the occasional support email and is completely committed to excellent customer service.
- dboreham 10y ago
  Care to share a little about your products, or at least the product category you inhabit?
  - Peretus 10y ago
    Sure! We operate in the toys and games space, but regardless of the space I'd follow the same process: 1) Locate a mid-popularity product with a ranking of < 4.3 stars and what appears to be profitable margins 2) Look over the neutral and negative reviews looking for improvement suggestions and complaints customers have 3) Figure out an improvement or a way to fix the issues People will tell you what they want in the reviews. The hard part is figuring out a way to fix it for a price they are willing to pay. Price wins on Amazon every time, unfortunately, so you have to be prepared to sell for less or equal to the competition while at the same time having a superior product. We sell a product for around $20 when the competitor is priced around $18. Our product is 4.9 out of 5 stars with ~400 reviews while the competitor has significantly more reviews but only around 4.5 stars. It's obvious to customers that they're paying a slight premium for a better product when they purchase from us, so we're able to compete. That being said, there's one direct competitor that sells a 3.8-star product for $12 that outsells us 4:1, showing once again that price wins on Amazon's platform. If you have a superior product, the rest will take care of itself. The marketplace may change and the market may change, but if you have a great product and you offer amazing customer service you'll be fine. Of course, I'm glossing over tons of details here, but that's the gist of it. You're welcome to ask questions here or follow up with a PM. I'll be glad to help in any way I can.
    - mjevans 10y ago
      I think the case of the 4:1 product at about half the cost but wall less positive reviews also calls in to question how effective Amazon's presentation algorithms are. A logical solution would be to have their ranked search cherry pick the highest (number and score) reviewed results for focus within a given price category. However I normally hate their ranked search since it's results normally don't seem relevant to my needs. Thus I tend to manually do that by sorting by price and then eye-ball filtering for quality/look in picture (yeah, I used that as a quick filter for poor quality). It would be nice if I could instead directly assign weights to different type of metrics and have Amazon present the list according to my score based on perceived importance. They could use the data from that and actual buying outcomes to tune their default filter (that one might better balance high scores on multiple metrics being sorted to the top of the list).
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ckib16 10y ago
  Yeah, there are definitely too many FBA sellers who are 100% reliant on the Amazon audience for sales. No online store (Shopify etc.), no marketing, no email list etc. It's hard hearing those cases where seller accounts get turned off for some reason and the seller has to fight to get them item back online. As for some being "scammy" - yeah sure, there's definitely a bit of people looking to make a quick buck on whatever they can at FBA. Every market has that. But the people I've seen have the most success on FBA do just what you mentioned - listen to the customer via reviews - improve value via product fixes, bundling, packaging, etc. - provide good feedback & service That said - I don't know how anyone selling commodity, off-brand stuff does it. I could see that being a huge race to the bottom as stated. The only people I know doing FBA stuff are going the private label route to avoid competing solely on price. My brother actually makes a full-time living off of FBA now via private label goods. He really enjoys being his own boss and providing a BETTER product than what was available before. I sold my first FBA product, not a huge success, but validated the business model is real if you work at it. FYI - I've started compiling info for small-scale eCommerce sellers at http://www.privatelabelweekly.com http://www.privatelabelweekly.com for any sellers interested.
rebootthesystem 10y ago
The FBA thing and the seminars are a slow motion train-wreck waiting to happen. You are right in highlighting the folks running seminars. They are running such scams. A good friend of mine jumped into the "amazing opportunity" he was presented with. He paid them $5,000 for an FBA course. Long story short, he ends-up importing a bunch of kitchen crap from China, dropping tens of thousands of dollars. As things progressed, many of the people on the same course did exactly the same. Very soon you had page after page on Amazon with poor bastards selling the same products from China under different brand names and packaging. I mean, exactly the same damn product. Here's an example: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=avocado+peeler https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3... Funny as hell if it weren't so tragic because of how these folks are suffering. People are losing their asses on this stuff. They are killing each other paying incredible amounts for Amazon PPC advertising. Amazon is laughing all the way to the bank and these vendors are bleeding right and left selling the same products, from the same suppliers in China at minimal, if any, profit. And then you have the Chinese suppliers who got wind of this and are doing two things: First, they raise their prices. How stupid do you have to be as a supplier not to recognize something is going on when you get call after call from would-be entrepreneurs using exactly the same script to negotiate with you. These suppliers are nailing people for all they are worth. Second, they are listing their own products on Amazon at the best possible prices because, well, they are the manufacturer! And then, to make things even more interesting, people following these amazing formulas start importing stuff that runs right smack into intellectual property issues. So, the patent or trademark owner files with Amazon and the listings are suspended. The inventory now can't be sold and, to make matters worst, the vendor has to pay through their teeth to have it shipped out of Amazon. Ship it where? None of these people are real businesses with real warehouses and employees! So now they have a a few pallets full of crap they can't sell almost anywhere in their garage and living room. In some cases IP owners have gone as far as issuing C&D orders to these vendors. The whole thing is absolutely surreal. Carnage is the first word that comes to mind when I think of the results. Sure, as always there are examples of folks who are just killing it because they got lucky, chose the right product or whatever. I'd say 95% of the folks who enter into these FBA "get rich quick, work from home, travel the world" schemes would have made more money if they took $5,000 and burned it. As for my friend, some $35,000 later he quit and licked his wounds. Not mentioned is the damage to consumers. These desperate, low capital, no-experience vendors are importing absolute crap from China. There are stores of phone chargers that go "poof" and other crap product issues right and left. And, if you dig deep enough, it will almost always land on some poor fucker who thought he or she was starting a business that would set them up for life. Could be the scam of the century. The only people getting rich with consistency are those peddling the courses.
fencepost 10y ago
I was getting confused by the "FBA" term, so for those curious this almost certainly means "Fulfilled By Amazon" which is the program where you ship your product to Amazon, list it there, and they pull it from their warehouse and ship it - basically using Amazon as a drop shipper. That's almost certainly a hard business to make money on - if you're doing common off-the-shelf items of any value, Amazon can simply add those themselves, and they're probably getting a better price on them with bulk purchases than anyone doing FBA can get. If it's direct sales of items you produce yourself then there are drawbacks if your items don't sell (high charges to ship them back to you apparently mean a lot of them end up being destroyed) or if you get targeted by scammers (e.g. NPR's Planet Money #724 "Cat Scam"[1], IIRC the "scam" part comes in with returns). [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/09/14/493810206/episode-724-cat-scam http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/09/14/493810206/episo... and the Entrepreneur article it's based on https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278622 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278622 in which people sell on eBay for 5-15% above the Amazon price, then simply order through Amazon and send as a gift. Returns go to Amazon and cost everyone except the drop shipper money.
- s0rce 10y ago
  I fell victim to this scam once, we lost our dog's favorite ball and looked on Amazon to get another, sadly, it was discontinued. Checking e-bay we saw some listings for the original ball. Ordered one and we eventually received, drop shipped from Amazon the new version of the ball. The seller clearly didn't update the autogenerated listing to the reflect the product Amazon was actually selling. I then returned the ball since I didn't want the new version and if I did I could have got it for Amazon for cheaper and easier in the first place. Other than cases of false advertising (likely unintentional here but still annoying) who goes to ebay before just buying the item from Amazon (maybe foreign buyers?). Nearly 100% of the time the shipping will be more expensive and the return policy worse, never mind the entire experience.
  - fencepost 10y ago
    > who goes to ebay before just buying the item from Amazon[?] It's not so much people going to eBay then Amazon, it's people who go to eBay and never go anywhere else because it's obvious to everyone (in their mind) that eBay is of course going to be cheaper. They're buying through their preferred retailer, and their preferred retailer is eBay.
problems 10y ago
> China is learning how to beat them at their own game. Awesome, I hope that works out. I've been super concerned when I've seen friends buy products off Amazon for 2-4x the cost I find the same product on AliExpress for. It's ridiculously common to find identical hardware with a huge markup and a random logo stamped on it on Amazon. Some of the stuff is total junk, other things are actually quite good - but you may as well just buy it from the source and not pay a middleman several times the cost.
- minxjinx 10y ago
  There's two types of situation on that one, though - one where the unbranded product is being sold through Amazon but still comes as un branded product from China. The other is the product is being sold through Amazon (often shipping from the US) and either unbranded or "re-branded" by a more... reputable entity. In the second scenario, it is absolutely worth it to me to purchase from Amazon. I get my product faster (since it's shipping from the US) and I'm not stuck holding the bag if it turns out to be a dud.
  - problems 10y ago
    Even with Ali you're not stuck holding the bag - they have buyer protection like most other reputable shopping sites. Most of the time they'll just let you keep the product too and issue you a refund.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  I've started ordering two (or more) of everything I buy from Aliexpress, just in case one is damaged in shipping, lost, or whatever. A lot of times both items end up being fine and I give one to a friend. Sometimes I take one apart to see how it works. What is really interesting is that a lot of things that appear identical on AliExpress are actually fairly different when you open them up. It's weird, because there is innovation going on, but they go out of their way to hide it. What really bothers me is that Amazon allows people to sell things that are shipped from China without making it blatantly obvious it is coming from China. I'm not saying it's hidden, but I use Amazon because I want stuff in a few days. If I wanted to wait six weeks I'd order from Aliexpress.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jfoster 10y ago
FBA seems a far worse business than affiliate stuff. Affiliates seem to have a lot more options (various affiliate programmes, ads as a fallback option, etc.), whereas an FBAer who buys bad stock or has their category become more competitive is out of luck.
philmcc 10y ago
Just to throw an alternative view to the "FBA is a Scam" threads. I had a similar thought when I first heard about it, but then decided that I should give it a try as I am always dismissing things out of hands for believing that they are scams. One year later I've quit my job (full stack developer), and sell full-time on Amazon and have never been happier. My current listings generate the majority of my income and require just a few hours a month to maintain. For the rest of my time I do whatever I want. It's not that things are inherently scammy, or unscammy. It's just things are or aren't easy based on your ability/work ethic, and the competition is or isn't steep based on how uninspired you are when competing. The whole "cheap chinese knockoffs" thing is dismissive and frequently inaccurate. The great majority of things that people purchase from Walmart/Amazon/Target are manufactured in China, full stop. Some of it is cheap, yes, but no more or less than the ones by the "name brand" private labelers.
- CodeWriter23 10y ago
  And it's going to be great until you hit the top 100 list in your segment. Then the cockroaches will move in and sell knockoffs of your product and you can spend your days proving to seller central staff that they are in fact knockoffs, with the requisite purchases and returns from your new competitors. And the requisite requests for escalation and emails to jeff@ when the associates refuse to escalate. Enjoy your pink cloud while it lasts. And maybe keep your full stack skills current as a hobby. But be assured, there is a competitor somewhere willing to flip your product for $0.01 profit per unit.
  - philmcc 10y ago
    There is a hint of truth to the concerns you're articulating, but it shouldn't be enough to dissuade you (or anyone else) from doing this. The argument that people will always pay for the cheapest reasonable alternative would suggest that grocery stores would only sell the cheapest, generic brands. People will pay for quality and social proof, perceived or otherwise. Two identical products but one with (say) 500 genuinely earned reviews over time will always feel like a safer bet. My expectation isn't that Amazon FBA will be my career for life. I expect it will be a viable income stream for a few years while I reinvest this time (and some of the earnings) into more stable industries (I have so much time to play with VR now) and develop an SaaS (including one in the Amazon space, go figure).
kriro 10y ago
On top of that the FBA also seems to enable massive tax fraud. There was a report on German TV recently that the vast majority of products for certain categories that are produced in Asia (mostly China) shipped via FBA on amazon.de don't list any sales tax on the recipes and it seems the sales tax is simply never collected (the companies usually don't even have a tax number). Seems like very massive tax fraud, not sure if Amazon could be sued over this for enabling tax fraud at least it seems they are pretty lax about it. Iirc due to English laws, amazon.co.uk requires that every seller has a tax number.

Peretus 10y ago

I completely agree with your opinion on the FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) crowd being the same boat. It's not a great feeling to have your business built on someone else's platform and I'm doing everything I can at the moment to reduce our reliance on Amazon. I'm surprised that you felt that selling things via FBA is scammy. I have a full-time job but I also own a business that (currently) grosses about $150K on Amazon. I can honestly say that I don't feel like we've out-manipulated anyone or have done anything but create a very competitive product that we're able to sell at a competitive price. I agree that it quickly turns into a very painful race to the bottom when dozens of vendors are selling variations of the thing (e.g. silicone grill gloves or meat claws), but it's completely different when you're able to take the time to create a really great product. It's been a rewarding experience; I highly recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind answering the occasional support email and is completely committed to excellent customer service.

dboreham 10y ago
Care to share a little about your products, or at least the product category you inhabit?
- Peretus 10y ago
  Sure! We operate in the toys and games space, but regardless of the space I'd follow the same process: 1) Locate a mid-popularity product with a ranking of < 4.3 stars and what appears to be profitable margins 2) Look over the neutral and negative reviews looking for improvement suggestions and complaints customers have 3) Figure out an improvement or a way to fix the issues People will tell you what they want in the reviews. The hard part is figuring out a way to fix it for a price they are willing to pay. Price wins on Amazon every time, unfortunately, so you have to be prepared to sell for less or equal to the competition while at the same time having a superior product. We sell a product for around $20 when the competitor is priced around $18. Our product is 4.9 out of 5 stars with ~400 reviews while the competitor has significantly more reviews but only around 4.5 stars. It's obvious to customers that they're paying a slight premium for a better product when they purchase from us, so we're able to compete. That being said, there's one direct competitor that sells a 3.8-star product for $12 that outsells us 4:1, showing once again that price wins on Amazon's platform. If you have a superior product, the rest will take care of itself. The marketplace may change and the market may change, but if you have a great product and you offer amazing customer service you'll be fine. Of course, I'm glossing over tons of details here, but that's the gist of it. You're welcome to ask questions here or follow up with a PM. I'll be glad to help in any way I can.
  - mjevans 10y ago
    I think the case of the 4:1 product at about half the cost but wall less positive reviews also calls in to question how effective Amazon's presentation algorithms are. A logical solution would be to have their ranked search cherry pick the highest (number and score) reviewed results for focus within a given price category. However I normally hate their ranked search since it's results normally don't seem relevant to my needs. Thus I tend to manually do that by sorting by price and then eye-ball filtering for quality/look in picture (yeah, I used that as a quick filter for poor quality). It would be nice if I could instead directly assign weights to different type of metrics and have Amazon present the list according to my score based on perceived importance. They could use the data from that and actual buying outcomes to tune their default filter (that one might better balance high scores on multiple metrics being sorted to the top of the list).
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ckib16 10y ago
Yeah, there are definitely too many FBA sellers who are 100% reliant on the Amazon audience for sales. No online store (Shopify etc.), no marketing, no email list etc. It's hard hearing those cases where seller accounts get turned off for some reason and the seller has to fight to get them item back online. As for some being "scammy" - yeah sure, there's definitely a bit of people looking to make a quick buck on whatever they can at FBA. Every market has that. But the people I've seen have the most success on FBA do just what you mentioned - listen to the customer via reviews - improve value via product fixes, bundling, packaging, etc. - provide good feedback & service That said - I don't know how anyone selling commodity, off-brand stuff does it. I could see that being a huge race to the bottom as stated. The only people I know doing FBA stuff are going the private label route to avoid competing solely on price. My brother actually makes a full-time living off of FBA now via private label goods. He really enjoys being his own boss and providing a BETTER product than what was available before. I sold my first FBA product, not a huge success, but validated the business model is real if you work at it. FYI - I've started compiling info for small-scale eCommerce sellers at http://www.privatelabelweekly.com http://www.privatelabelweekly.com for any sellers interested.

rebootthesystem 10y ago

The FBA thing and the seminars are a slow motion train-wreck waiting to happen. You are right in highlighting the folks running seminars. They are running such scams. A good friend of mine jumped into the "amazing opportunity" he was presented with. He paid them $5,000 for an FBA course. Long story short, he ends-up importing a bunch of kitchen crap from China, dropping tens of thousands of dollars. As things progressed, many of the people on the same course did exactly the same. Very soon you had page after page on Amazon with poor bastards selling the same products from China under different brand names and packaging. I mean, exactly the same damn product. Here's an example: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=avocado+peeler https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3... Funny as hell if it weren't so tragic because of how these folks are suffering. People are losing their asses on this stuff. They are killing each other paying incredible amounts for Amazon PPC advertising. Amazon is laughing all the way to the bank and these vendors are bleeding right and left selling the same products, from the same suppliers in China at minimal, if any, profit. And then you have the Chinese suppliers who got wind of this and are doing two things: First, they raise their prices. How stupid do you have to be as a supplier not to recognize something is going on when you get call after call from would-be entrepreneurs using exactly the same script to negotiate with you. These suppliers are nailing people for all they are worth. Second, they are listing their own products on Amazon at the best possible prices because, well, they are the manufacturer! And then, to make things even more interesting, people following these amazing formulas start importing stuff that runs right smack into intellectual property issues. So, the patent or trademark owner files with Amazon and the listings are suspended. The inventory now can't be sold and, to make matters worst, the vendor has to pay through their teeth to have it shipped out of Amazon. Ship it where? None of these people are real businesses with real warehouses and employees! So now they have a a few pallets full of crap they can't sell almost anywhere in their garage and living room. In some cases IP owners have gone as far as issuing C&D orders to these vendors. The whole thing is absolutely surreal. Carnage is the first word that comes to mind when I think of the results. Sure, as always there are examples of folks who are just killing it because they got lucky, chose the right product or whatever. I'd say 95% of the folks who enter into these FBA "get rich quick, work from home, travel the world" schemes would have made more money if they took $5,000 and burned it. As for my friend, some $35,000 later he quit and licked his wounds. Not mentioned is the damage to consumers. These desperate, low capital, no-experience vendors are importing absolute crap from China. There are stores of phone chargers that go "poof" and other crap product issues right and left. And, if you dig deep enough, it will almost always land on some poor fucker who thought he or she was starting a business that would set them up for life. Could be the scam of the century. The only people getting rich with consistency are those peddling the courses.

fencepost 10y ago

I was getting confused by the "FBA" term, so for those curious this almost certainly means "Fulfilled By Amazon" which is the program where you ship your product to Amazon, list it there, and they pull it from their warehouse and ship it - basically using Amazon as a drop shipper. That's almost certainly a hard business to make money on - if you're doing common off-the-shelf items of any value, Amazon can simply add those themselves, and they're probably getting a better price on them with bulk purchases than anyone doing FBA can get. If it's direct sales of items you produce yourself then there are drawbacks if your items don't sell (high charges to ship them back to you apparently mean a lot of them end up being destroyed) or if you get targeted by scammers (e.g. NPR's Planet Money #724 "Cat Scam"[1], IIRC the "scam" part comes in with returns). [1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/09/14/493810206/episode-724-cat-scam http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/09/14/493810206/episo... and the Entrepreneur article it's based on https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278622 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/278622 in which people sell on eBay for 5-15% above the Amazon price, then simply order through Amazon and send as a gift. Returns go to Amazon and cost everyone except the drop shipper money.

s0rce 10y ago
I fell victim to this scam once, we lost our dog's favorite ball and looked on Amazon to get another, sadly, it was discontinued. Checking e-bay we saw some listings for the original ball. Ordered one and we eventually received, drop shipped from Amazon the new version of the ball. The seller clearly didn't update the autogenerated listing to the reflect the product Amazon was actually selling. I then returned the ball since I didn't want the new version and if I did I could have got it for Amazon for cheaper and easier in the first place. Other than cases of false advertising (likely unintentional here but still annoying) who goes to ebay before just buying the item from Amazon (maybe foreign buyers?). Nearly 100% of the time the shipping will be more expensive and the return policy worse, never mind the entire experience.
- fencepost 10y ago
  > who goes to ebay before just buying the item from Amazon[?] It's not so much people going to eBay then Amazon, it's people who go to eBay and never go anywhere else because it's obvious to everyone (in their mind) that eBay is of course going to be cheaper. They're buying through their preferred retailer, and their preferred retailer is eBay.

problems 10y ago

> China is learning how to beat them at their own game. Awesome, I hope that works out. I've been super concerned when I've seen friends buy products off Amazon for 2-4x the cost I find the same product on AliExpress for. It's ridiculously common to find identical hardware with a huge markup and a random logo stamped on it on Amazon. Some of the stuff is total junk, other things are actually quite good - but you may as well just buy it from the source and not pay a middleman several times the cost.

minxjinx 10y ago
There's two types of situation on that one, though - one where the unbranded product is being sold through Amazon but still comes as un branded product from China. The other is the product is being sold through Amazon (often shipping from the US) and either unbranded or "re-branded" by a more... reputable entity. In the second scenario, it is absolutely worth it to me to purchase from Amazon. I get my product faster (since it's shipping from the US) and I'm not stuck holding the bag if it turns out to be a dud.
- problems 10y ago
  Even with Ali you're not stuck holding the bag - they have buyer protection like most other reputable shopping sites. Most of the time they'll just let you keep the product too and issue you a refund.
Declanomous 10y ago
I've started ordering two (or more) of everything I buy from Aliexpress, just in case one is damaged in shipping, lost, or whatever. A lot of times both items end up being fine and I give one to a friend. Sometimes I take one apart to see how it works. What is really interesting is that a lot of things that appear identical on AliExpress are actually fairly different when you open them up. It's weird, because there is innovation going on, but they go out of their way to hide it. What really bothers me is that Amazon allows people to sell things that are shipped from China without making it blatantly obvious it is coming from China. I'm not saying it's hidden, but I use Amazon because I want stuff in a few days. If I wanted to wait six weeks I'd order from Aliexpress.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jfoster 10y ago

FBA seems a far worse business than affiliate stuff. Affiliates seem to have a lot more options (various affiliate programmes, ads as a fallback option, etc.), whereas an FBAer who buys bad stock or has their category become more competitive is out of luck.

philmcc 10y ago

Just to throw an alternative view to the "FBA is a Scam" threads. I had a similar thought when I first heard about it, but then decided that I should give it a try as I am always dismissing things out of hands for believing that they are scams. One year later I've quit my job (full stack developer), and sell full-time on Amazon and have never been happier. My current listings generate the majority of my income and require just a few hours a month to maintain. For the rest of my time I do whatever I want. It's not that things are inherently scammy, or unscammy. It's just things are or aren't easy based on your ability/work ethic, and the competition is or isn't steep based on how uninspired you are when competing. The whole "cheap chinese knockoffs" thing is dismissive and frequently inaccurate. The great majority of things that people purchase from Walmart/Amazon/Target are manufactured in China, full stop. Some of it is cheap, yes, but no more or less than the ones by the "name brand" private labelers.

CodeWriter23 10y ago
And it's going to be great until you hit the top 100 list in your segment. Then the cockroaches will move in and sell knockoffs of your product and you can spend your days proving to seller central staff that they are in fact knockoffs, with the requisite purchases and returns from your new competitors. And the requisite requests for escalation and emails to jeff@ when the associates refuse to escalate. Enjoy your pink cloud while it lasts. And maybe keep your full stack skills current as a hobby. But be assured, there is a competitor somewhere willing to flip your product for $0.01 profit per unit.
- philmcc 10y ago
  There is a hint of truth to the concerns you're articulating, but it shouldn't be enough to dissuade you (or anyone else) from doing this. The argument that people will always pay for the cheapest reasonable alternative would suggest that grocery stores would only sell the cheapest, generic brands. People will pay for quality and social proof, perceived or otherwise. Two identical products but one with (say) 500 genuinely earned reviews over time will always feel like a safer bet. My expectation isn't that Amazon FBA will be my career for life. I expect it will be a viable income stream for a few years while I reinvest this time (and some of the earnings) into more stable industries (I have so much time to play with VR now) and develop an SaaS (including one in the Amazon space, go figure).

kriro 10y ago

On top of that the FBA also seems to enable massive tax fraud. There was a report on German TV recently that the vast majority of products for certain categories that are produced in Asia (mostly China) shipped via FBA on amazon.de don't list any sales tax on the recipes and it seems the sales tax is simply never collected (the companies usually don't even have a tax number). Seems like very massive tax fraud, not sure if Amazon could be sued over this for enabling tax fraud at least it seems they are pretty lax about it. Iirc due to English laws, amazon.co.uk requires that every seller has a tax number.