I Tried Amazon FBA for 6 Months - The Honest Results

today we're going to share exactly how much it costs troy to start selling his passion product on amazon including how much it actually cost him to start selling all the design all the the initial production run then we're going to go month by month share his revenue his amazon fba fees his product costs all the other expenses associated with selling on amazon and his final profit and make sure to stay till the end of this video because at the end of this video he's gonna share with us some of his biggest mistakes and his biggest lessons learned and he made one mistake that cost him sixteen hundred dollars in one day it was a very easy to make mistake very simple i felt really bad when i heard it so let's get started off let's talk a little bit about what your passion product is and let's get right into how much it cost you to start selling yeah so i was a a college tennis player so i'm very familiar with tennis products and when i was doing research and what product i wanted to do i had some other ideas in mind and then i just like well i like tennis let's see if there's something i can do with tennis and came across that i can get into tennis scripts affordably for my first uh initial production run and i think i can get into that market space and so the first cost that we i sat down with him and we listed out everything every single expense and the first cost he had was the trademark and to be honest i thought he spent a little bit more but let's talk a little bit about that yeah so i was intimidated in getting a trademark and i didn't want to mess anything up so i talked to a guy a lawyer who could help me out and he was like a hundred ish bucks to do it for me and i was like great you take care of it and i actually enjoyed him because there are a couple like things that he was able to hash out and now that i'm building into more products he's already taken care of those products in the trademark so i don't have to like add or edit or do anything yeah and that's totally fine i'm just pointing out you don't need to necessarily pay someone you can always go to uspto and do it yourself but let's back up even further how did you find a manufacturer for this and let's talk about the process including how much it cost you to get samples totally so i just went to alibaba and went through i typed in tennis scripts into their search engine and it came up with a thousand different products so i found one that fit my budget and my uh moq yeah um and so an moq for anybody that doesn't know minimum order quantity some people are like you got to buy 50 000 grits which is a lot for yeah yes i did have to buy a little more than i wanted to but in the long run it ended up working out just fine to get the price down to where i wanted to be um but i just had like 10 different companies ship out uh maybe a little less than that but i had uh i got like eight different grips that i was able to sample like tacky grips not like dry grips and i found the grips that i liked to use the most and what i most commonly see out there on the tennis courts and this is one of the key things why i think troy's story is so great is he understands his product it's something that he is passionate he's a great tennis player i've played with him and he crushes me and it's he understands what makes a good grip versus a bad grip or someone like me if i was just following the numbers i wouldn't know what's a good grip first i mean sure this one's stickier but maybe maybe stickier is not always a good thing right and how much did it cost you to get the samples it cost me well the samples were cheap a dollar too but the shipping is where they get you so it cost me about 20 per shipping for each sample so let's just say anywhere from like 100 to 150 bucks i spent on sampling stuff and then the next fee you got to keep in mind is the amazon fee and the amazon fees are on 39.99 at what point did you start did you sign up for the professional account and start doing it did you did you wait until inventory was ready or i did it early i kind of wanted to familiarize myself with the seller central account so i probably paid for three months of not selling anything so the 39.99 cost me what a hundred and i wish i would have talked to you so there are times i this happened to me where i was able to get reimbursed for the first two months so it might be too late now that you've yeah and it's not that big of a deal but the other really big cost is the production run how much did your initial production run cost you so it's supposed to cost me 3 600 um which was totally totally good with that so when i first was talking to my manufacturer they sent me uh like the logo and everything that they were gonna put on the packaging and i was like great looks great let's do it so they packaged everything up and then i found out from my trademark lawyer that i couldn't use my logo that i wanted to use i wanted to use aiken but aiken was already taken so and his brand is taken so that's why yeah taking grips and so um so i had to talk to my supplier and be like hey i can't use this packaging i need you to repackage my grips and so it cost me an extra 400 for them to repackage which i was kind of pleased with how much that cost me i thought i thought that it was going to be a bigger deal yeah and this will be a repeating theme you'll see some more mistakes coming up but there's usually solutions to different mistakes and so then after you got so it's four thousand dollars for your total production run what about ship how did you ship it over did you do sea shipping did you do air shipping i did sea shipping took about the the 30 day sea shipping is a lie because you like when you finalize give them the money it takes them like five days to package it and get it off and then it takes a couple days to get to see and then 30 days on c and then amazon has to get it and then it takes amazon seven days to get it up and running so like maybe 40 45 days is like the 30 days another key principle of entrepreneurship that nobody talks about everything takes longer than you think it will and you got 15 days longer isn't as bad as i've had it where it takes months longer sometimes i'll email people and this actually just happened to me i'll email them and they won't get back to me for a week two weeks and then it's just i have to wait for that person i have to wait for the next person so that's not too bad and then other fees another big one is did you go with an llc or a dba and how much did that cost you i did like a sole proprietorship so a dba and uh it cost me about eighty dollars okay so that's not bad and the only thing you need for that is to get a bank account and it just makes it a little bit easier to sell on amazon and a lot of people you don't need an llc unless you need legal protection like for performance nut butter my passion product i need legal protection because if someone eats it and gets sick i don't want them coming and suing me it's a limited liability company another fee that a lot of people have to deal with is bar codes and some people they cheap out and they get the cheaper barcodes did you end up getting the the legit gs1 and how much did that cost you i did end up going with the gs1 i'm i'm in it for the long term i didn't want to exactly i didn't want to do the cheap ones then it gets taken away um but yeah that was barcodes were confusing to me between the sku and the asin and all those different like numbers were i had to kind of watch i mean i came across your video on that and like i had to really pay attention to that because i was confused so i ended up watching a video that said just get the gs1 if you're gonna do it so i paid 250 for 10 barcodes because at the time i only had two items but i knew i wanted to get into colors so i was going to add more products so that's why i was comfortable doing 10. and it can be confusing at first basically the fn sku is the barcode that goes on the package so that you can send it into the amazon warehouse where the upc code is i think it's universal product code basically if you ever see the upc code if you ever see an item scanned at walmart or some store that's the upc code amazon needs you to have a upc code to show that it's a legitimate product but they want you to put the fn sku on the product so it can get a little a little bit confusing and then the last i think expense you had was software and you wanted which software did you go with right i think i just found the best deal on viral launch and i'm actually i've i follow those guys on podcast and i'm a big fan of those guys i really enjoy listening to them and i think they're honest about a lot of the information they get so i like they did good branding in my opinion um so i've i haven't tried jungle scout or in the other ones but i've just been happy with viral launch so i've stuck with them uh they can be a little pricey at like 85 bucks a month when i'm getting started oh wow um because i wanted to do the they have cheaper packages but for some of the analytics that i needed i had to go to the bigger account um and definitely think it was worth it and then once i got my product up and running and i didn't need them then i don't pay the 84.99 a month totally yeah yeah and there's helium 10 viral launch and jungle scout i did do a video i'll link up here and down below where i compare the different platforms one thing i also want to mention is i did pay for pictures if we didn't that's good that's a good thing to include um so i paid 150 for i think it was viral launch's team like they have a another third party that does pictures so i paid 150 for like seven pictures so i got a main image and then a bunch of uh side images and did they take was it computer renderings or well so what i did is i bought a white board and then took pictures with it and sent it into it and then they got creative with it and put text with it or they put it like a tennis player in it i had to like ask them they put a tennis player that holds a rocket like this and i was like that person doesn't look like a tennis player can we get a different person for this image again this is where having passion and actually understanding your product comes in handy because i'm sure if you were on amazon and you saw grips with someone holding it up like this you'd be like what this isn't right you feel legit yeah but in total it costs you around 5 800 to get started which isn't an insane amount but it also isn't cheap like what are your thoughts on that right yeah well i thought that it was gonna cost me 3 600 to like do it and then so there's another 2 000 of unexpected fees that a lot of people don't tell you about another principle of entrepreneurship there's always unexpected fees always unexpected delays but you'll see we'll we'll go over month by month his numbers in the long run it's 100 worth it so let's get started with your first month selling on amazon and we talked about this before your launch strategy was pretty much just launch it have some friends so have some people buy it and leave reviews so the first month you sold was around 250 units or so and what total revenue from that was around was it yeah so total revenue was around 1200 and i was selling at a cheaper price point than what i'm selling at now and so for selling 250 units i was pretty stoked on that like looking at the numbers i was hoping to be i was hoping to get to about 500 units so the fact that in my first month i had done 250 units i was pleased with that and i was definitely using a lot of friends and family that don't share my wi-fi to to get some purchases to get started so technically it's against the terms of service to get friends and family to buy products here's the little i mean you know i don't want to get anybody in trouble but as long as you don't share wi-fi amazon doesn't always know so be careful though you know be just be aware of that kind of thing and it was like 10 family and friends so i wasn't go every person in my contact hey man i'll send you a venmo for seven bucks to buy my product it was just like a couple people to get me off the ground and really amazon doesn't care about i mean my experience has been and other people i know his experience has been amazon doesn't care about that they care about the giant companies in china that are getting 500 fake reviews that's the people they're really trying to target in all honesty you gotta imagine if you're amazon and someone's promoting hey go to amazon and buy some stuff they probably are gonna turn the other cheek but yeah i don't wanna i don't wanna get any comments about how i'm going to get people banned yeah so let's so obviously that's really great and so total revenue was around was it 1200 or so and it's great revenue is amazing but as you and i both know revenue is not profit let's go over all your different costs so how much did it cost you to do how much to actually make the products each individual product well so my unit cost came out to be about a dollar 37 including packaging including shipping including the product everything so if we let's just round it out 1.50 so because then ppc also takes so if i'm selling at that point i was selling it for six dollars so a dollar fifty i was about 450 amazon was taking about 350 at the moment for that so i was like profiting almost a dollar of a sale okay so in total for your first month it was about breakeven which this is another big wake-up call for a lot of new sellers breaking even on your first month's actually a good thing because what troy was doing was he was paying for ppc he's paying for data he's paying for the algorithm to recognize that he's got a legitimate product and it's okay so the people that win in amazon in entrepreneurship they're the people that are in it for the long run so let's let's keep going month number two uh how many units did you sell how much in revenue did you do yeah one two one two was great i did about 250 units so i was 50 units better i'm getting towards my goal i did about 1600 in revenue i also at some point decided to try seeing if i could sell at a little higher price point and it didn't affect my sales at all so i was able to keep it there and i also came across something called small and light shipping which basically it means i can only sell on amazon so if i wanted to sell on ebay or self sell i couldn't have ebay or i couldn't have amazon ship it for me but it took my cost from amazon taking about three dollars and fifty cents to taking three dollars so that added 50 cents back in my pocket and i raised my price of dollars so it added a whole a dollar fifty of straight profit into my pocket and another very important principle is if you want to make more money you can either decrease your cost which troy did or you can increase your price which troy also did and that that's really an easy way and a lot of times another big principle people aren't always as price sensitive as you might think on amazon people if it's a dollar more or a dollar less a lot of times they're just gonna buy whatever they want and whatever looks good it doesn't make that big of a difference so i would recommend always trying to be within reason the most expensive and the best product rather than trying to be the cheapest and the you know trying to just be the cheapest and the worst product that's not a long-term strategy so let's move into month number three how much revenue how many sales month three actually decreased a little bit which i'm not exactly sure why i think i also might have run into a little problems with revenue as far as like i did uh when i did my first shipment i did three packs and then i also did like a bulk 60 pack which weren't selling at all so that was a big problem and so what i had to do was i had to create a removal order for all those and i sh and then i bought my own packaging and my own fn sku numbers to put onto the packaging and then eventually i shipped those back into amazon which was a couple unexpected costs that you know i had to do 100 worth of baggies and then to print the labels and then about another 50 to 100 of shipping it back into amazon right so after after product cost amazon fba fees all those different things you have a total profit of around 200 i think yeah okay so at this point how are you feeling about amazon are you feeling like it's a good opportunity or are you still kind of iffy yeah i'm i'm feeling good about it as far as i'm profitable after month three which which i was stoked on to be making money there and i knew that i could keep going and that if i started to do things right because i i knew i was making mistake after mistake and i knew like eventually i would get things streamlined and like get costs down and so if i could get that up to like five hundred dollars to a thousand dollars like i would have been i would have been really happy because i was just my goal is kind of about to to pay for rent basically with it's like make around a thousand dollars-ish with with it but let's go into month number four where you did about eighteen hundred dollars in revenue and sold around 300 units right so i was getting back on track i'd also put colors into my repertoire now because i took those mix 60 packs and i now sent them back in as three packs with different colors i think that helped get me back yeah so then i had my best month um again profited around 300 ish um and so i was like okay well i'm growing a little bit here by month by month but now comes the really big mistake that cost you sixteen hundred dollars and make sure to smash that like button because this is troy he's bringing the value here like he made 600 1600 worth of mistakes so you can learn from him smash that like button but let's talk about the mistake and let's talk about month number five yeah so month number five is when everything changed for me so i had i was doing about 10 or 10 units a day which is about 600 of of profit but then the 300 of ppc i was doing so 300 so sticking around 300. so on june 14th i woke up one morning and all my inventory was gone very good thing usually right i saw like ten twelve thousand dollars in my amazon number and i was like wow this is i i'm gonna be out but like who cares i just made 12 000 of revenue yeah but then i realized that i didn't have anything in like my profit center or like where transfer is over like i had a bunch of things in promo and rebates so i was like what promo rebate do i have going on so about a week before i had a customer reach out to me and said hey i didn't receive my product amazon delivered it to the wrong address so i was like okay i know where is that here's here's a free coupon for uh for code also i don't think you can give away a free coupe like 100 free yeah i don't think you can so i tried to do it at 99 so i made like a a taken free 99 code to that i customized i didn't know that there was a difference between promotions and coupons and the way it works out is if you create a custom coupon it goes out to the entire world without or custom promotion it goes out to the entire world no matter what so everybody got access to my grips so people were buying hundreds of grips at a time which i have since seen on ebay people reselling my grades oh that hurts yeah um so but either way so i contacted amazon right away luckily i woke up and like it would only like been an hour past since that had happened so i called ebay cancelled as many orders as i could but some of them had already been processed so about 250 of them had already gone through which at seven dollars a grip it cost me about sixteen hundred dollars which that's just what amazon took because i had to pay the full seven dollars plus the dollar fifty that it cost me to make the grip so it was like an eight dollar and fifty cents error per the 250 dollar or to the 250 units that i lost so in month five you sold around you did about four thousand dollars in revenue sold sold again around 400 units or so and then after your product cost amazon fba fees all the other fees what was your your net profit yeah so i would have net profit at about a thousand dollars but due to that error i ended up losing about 600 that month ouch but here is where things start to get really interesting is a lot of times what i found in my life and you'll see in a second here sometimes the worst things that happen end up leading to some of the best things with your business and in life so let's go into month six and this is where things start turning around a little bit month six how much in revenue how many units did you sell right so since i had that huge mess up that i was doing about 10 units a day i started doing about 15 units a day 20 units a day all of a sudden i was doing 3 30 units a day and was was crushing it and i was kind of taking my ppc cost down dollar by day to like since i didn't need to spend so much since i was doing so well and now i'm doing about a thousand units a month ever since that so once five six seven have now been a thousand units and if i'm profiting two dollars you know that's around two thousand dollars a month that i'm profiting so that's enough in santa monica which is where i live where he lives at a freaking amazing town where rent's extremely expensive enough to pay rent in what i assume is probably one of your dream locations there's nowhere else i'd rather live that to me is the power of amazon and also the power of thinking long term but before we go into troy's biggest lesson comment down below about a mistake you've made that ended up leading into something really amazing and let's transition if you could go back in time if you could tell your previous self before you started selling on amazon one thing what would it be and why yes so many so many things but i think the biggest thing would would be to have somebody to talk to so that i don't have to make these mistakes that like i had two older brothers and it was so nice to learn from all their mistakes that i didn't have to make those mistakes growing up so like when i was doing this i just watched youtube videos and then went ahead and did it which was a great learning experience yeah it taught me a lot but it would have been nice to like talk to somebody about the shipping whether i want to do by c or buy a plane and just get my inventory in and start selling um so those were would be some things like i didn't know how to create a campaign or like what images would be right or like i kind of knew some good keywords but there's also like because i'm competing against wilson in head but like can i use those keywords in my listing i don't i don't know it's like it would have been nice to have somebody to talk to about that who's been there and done that and this is one of the most important principles don't try to do this by yourself the biggest success i've had is when i've surrounded myself with other people at my level and when i've been able to have people ahead of me to ask questions to and if you want my help for free you can watch this video right here learn how to take my course for free and get step-by-step instructions on how to launch your own passion products so click on that video we'll see in the next video and thanks for watching

Channel: Travis Marziani

Views: 1,243,071

Keywords: Amazon FBA, private label, amazon private label, amazon fba, how to sell on amazon, amazon fba tutorial, how to make money on amazon, how to sell on amazon fba, 10000 on amazon, private label products, fba, amazon private label selling, make money on amazon, how to make money online, amazon fba 2020, 6 Months in Amazon FBA, Money Lost in Amazon FBA, private label results, amazon fba for beginners, selling on amazon

Id: Gejj9Mqmv_Q

Length: 21min 25sec (1285 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020