$0 to $10k per month in 4 months with Amazon FBA

I got my start in business by selling men’s fashion accessories to brick and mortar stores.

I’d go door-to-door, trying to get wholesale orders from independent boutiques.

I’d sell sunglasses, scarves, leather gloves…

…whatever my (still forming) prefrontal cortex could think of.

The products were private labelled and imported from China

They took weeks to arrive.

And when they did, they came in these beat up, firmly taped, cubic cardboard boxes. The boxes sometimes had significant dings in them. They made the trip halfway around the world… and it SHOWED!
📦💥

And, you know what else?

Guess what happened if I couldn’t sell the product.

My punishment was that the cardboard box would sit in my bedroom, taking up space, and remind me of my failure. I’d failed somewhere along the line: either in sourcing or selling. To make matters worse, I lived in a basement apartment. WITH carpeted floors. The humidity was thick. And the boxes would soak up the dense, moist air.

Smell that?

That’s the smell of misguided product selection! Lol.

Keep your MOQs low, folks 😉

(I don’t want you to think I’m complaining. It’s super nostalgic for me)

Anyway…

During this time, I met a guy who gave me tips on selling to physical retail. He was further on his his career, had seen a few more things. Here’s what he told me:

– you need proper models for photo shoots (my friends and I were the “models” before)

– clothing releases are done in 2 major seasons (e.g. Spring/Summer 2022, Fall/Winter 2022)

– put all your product photos in a catalogue along with wholesale pricing to share with retailers

– wholesale pricing is normally 50% of MSRP

– etc. etc.

He was a great help.

That’s why, when he recently emailed me saying he was selling on Amazon, I was excited to help.

He did a lot of things right.

I won’t directly call out his niche, of course, but his product selection hit a lot of the criteria I normally talk about:

– price point over $30 (this covers Amazon fees better)

– appeals to very specific demographic that has disposable income

– non-seasonal, similar sales volume year-around because it’s an indoor product

He also, in his first 4 months on Amazon, released 6 different SKUs at low MOQs instead of making 1 very large bet.

This has now paid off, with 2 of 6 SKUs becoming successful (and the other 4 are probably not going to be hits, but it doesn’t matter).

Where I really added value, though, was via the Amazon ads console.

He had run Facebook ads for ecommerce, but never Amazon ads.

When he started, he wasn’t doing enough revenue where it made sense for him to use AsteroidX (my company) for Amazon PPC management.

So instead, I gave him 2 simple tenets (which you can use, too):

(1) Launch 1 Amazon Sponsored Products Automatic campaign with all your products in it

(2) Every 2 weeks, download an Amazon Sponsored Products Search Term Report. From the spreadsheet, extract the terms that got sales, and use those to create SKU-specific manual campaigns. In his case, Product Targeting worked best in his Automatic campaign. So he made Manual Product Targeting campaigns

These 2 things alone helped his sales go from $0 to $10k in his first 4 months on Amazon.

I’m really proud of him, and happy to help an old friend.

I can do the same for you, if you’d like.

We have a team of Amazon ads experts waiting to serve you. We take the ads (plus Seller Central case logs) off your hands, freeing you up to do the most important function in the business: new product releases. Success on Amazon correlates strongly with SKU count.