Showing posts with label private label products. Show all posts
Showing posts with label private label products. Show all posts
Saturday, 4 March 2017
When to give up on a private label product - ASK JUNGLE SCOUT EP #4.1
Ask Jungle Scout is a weekly show where we answer YOUR top questions about selling on Amazon, FBA and the private label business!
This week's questions:
0:15 How many sales should you look for when trying to identify a niche in the UK instead of the US? Does 3000 sales within the first 10 results still apply?
2:30 How do you prevent seeing an inflated sales number in Jungle Scout?
4:30 Should you ever give up on a product, and if so, when ?
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
How to Find Products to Private Label on Amazon and Free Product List��
Find out which products are best for private label selling on Amazon
Tuesday, 21 February 2017
How To FInd Private Label Products to Sell on Amazon FBA
The most revolutionary thing about private labeling on Amazon is there's a certain sequence of actually launching your product and there's some amazing tools and publicly available data that no other company, no other e-commerce company, gives you [00:01:30] to actually read the marketplace and understand what's already selling well and then be able to go deeper and understand what people really want and how you can jump into any market, really, and be able to compete day one of your sales.
Saturday, 18 February 2017
How To Sell Products On Amazon - My Amazon Private Label Product Researc...
Learn from this awesome tutorial from Online Seller Mastery.
Friday, 10 February 2017
7 Day Amazon Startup + Lifetime Access to The Private Label Collective
Over the next 7 days together we will find a product to private label on Amazon, research everything about the product, order a sample from suppliers, & have your Amazon listing and launch plan ready.
Monday, 6 February 2017
What Is Private Labeling on Amazon FBA Step by Step for Beginners
What Is Private Labeling? Free Training http://bit.ly/Free-List of Private Label Products for you to sell on Amazon
Saturday, 4 February 2017
Amazon Private Label Research - Home & Kitchen - Get Your Free Product L...
How to start a Private Label Business on Amazon using home and kitchen products!
The Amazon Sourcing Strategy That Really Works
By Andrew Tjernlund
The private labeling hype machine has been running hot for a couple of years now.
Just find a product that’s already selling well on Amazon. Then source a generic version from China. Slap a logo on it, and sell it using Amazon FBA. Boom! Riches are yours. Now just rinse and repeat.
But there’s something rotten in this private labeling utopia. Hordes of new sellers seeking their fortunes have descended, and they aren’t getting the easy success all the training courses promised them. Why not?
Well, finding a “perfect product” that will sell like hot cakes is hard. Really hard. Driven by all those online courses and schemes, competition from other sellers has become fierce. On the other side of the equation, buyers are starting to cry foul. Even these fly-by-night “brand names” bring certain expectations of quality and support, and many of them are just not living up to it.
So here’s the Amazon product sourcing strategy that I use. It doesn’t depend on importing, you don’t need to find perfect products, and I’ve made it hard to compete against. For me, it’s been hugely successful.
Why Private Labeling is Flawed
There’s a whole host of issues that make private labeling very difficult to do. In many cases, the business is certain to fail before it even gets off the ground.
Private labeling is about finding a “perfect product” – getting a home-run off-one shot. That’s more luck than skill. Good businesses aren’t based on gambling. When people go looking for the perfect product, they are going into an area where they already have competition – sometimes very stiff competition. There’s already an established player with months, if not years, of sales history that Amazon is going to reward in their search engine algorithm. You have to overcome that somehow.
Often it’s clear that a private labeler is selling a “me too” product, and at lower price points the difference in price can be very insignificant. If you sell for $22.95 and the established brand sells for $24.95, you are 8% cheaper. But realistically it’s just two bucks – not much of a competitive advantage. There’s often nowhere to go other than lowering the price further and further, cutting deep into your profit margin.
Private labeling almost always depends on buying from overseas factories. To do that affordably you need logistical scale and forward planning, so you can ship by sea rather than by air. Most sellers aren’t large or sophisticated enough to do that, so they have a lot of additional logistics costs.
You may also have quality issues because you haven’t been able to see the product beyond one sample. When things go badly they can go really badly, and you get unusable products with no recourse.
If you do manage to get established in private labeling, you can find other suppliers and sell wholesale. But you will have other issues getting the larger quantities you need, and handling much longer lead times. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t – unless you can ride a perfect fine line where everything goes just right.
Focus on Suppliers and Build a Broad Catalog
I believe that you have to sell a large catalog of products to get enough revenue to make your business grow. The easiest way to grow a catalog with minimal use of capital is by using domestic suppliers. When you focus on suppliers in your own country, you avoid a lot of scaling and logistics issues you have with buying from China or elsewhere overseas.
Very few people even look at the opportunities out there for legitimate manufacturers or brand owners locally. You can easily talk and meet with them, make lower order quantities, have less risk and so on – pretty much the antithesis of buying from overseas.
When you go the private labeling route, and try to get your “perfect product” made, manufacturers might set a minimum order quantity of 3,000, or a minimum spend of $10,000. That’s a serious investment. Could you do better by spending the same amount of money on a range of products?
Often domestic suppliers have some products with a good sales history on Amazon, but a lot of other lines that haven’t proven themselves yet. Rather than buying 3,000 of one unit, you could spend your $10,000 with this company and buy many different SKUs in their catalog.
That allows you to grow inexpensively, but you’ve also varied your product offering and diminished the risk by spreading out your inventory. If the orange version of an item isn’t successful, you have only a few items to liquidate before moving on and putting more money towards the red and yellow versions that sell better.
Suppliers appreciate that you want to carry more of their catalog, and not just the bestsellers. One reason is that they can point customers to a retailer that carries their entire line, rather than sending them to shop around multiple places, or have them buy the main product from them but accessories from a competitor. Manufacturers truly appreciate it, and I have dealt with many who will vouch for that.
Manufacturers don’t need help selling their bestsellers, they need help selling their less established products. That’s where you can really add value. If you’re willing to take those on, and not just cherry-pick, they might be slow-moving products – but you’re still making money on every sale. You just buy more of the best-selling items and fewer of the worse-selling items. When you take on an entire product line there are benefits for you, and there are benefits for your relationship with that supplier moving forward.
Local suppliers can also offer technical support and warranty services. It’s important to become a good customer of theirs. If you become a good customer, they’re more likely to work with you on those kinds of issues. They won’t want to upset you if you’re going from $5,000 a year, to $50,000 a year, to $500,000 a year with them. You will gain a lot of stature, and they will want to be in your good graces. Once you’ve reached that kind of level, you’ll be surprised at all the extra value that’s unlocked besides just better pricing. There’s a whole new relationship once you get to be one of their top ten customers.
Finding Suppliers
The vast majority of sellers search on Amazon to find products first, and a supplier later. I do the opposite. I try to find a good supplier for products that I think might sell – because I know a specific space or industry, or I have a hobby so I understand the products and can scan through quickly.
Once I find a really good supplier, I try to figure out how to sell their products on Amazon. By taking this approach, I already know the strengths and weaknesses of the supplier and can find products they sell that are underexposed on Amazon. That’s where the best opportunities are. That’s where you’re not immediately running into instant established competition on Amazon. You have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor on what could be a quickly blossoming product.
What to look for
Let’s say you’re really into camping. You know what products you use. You know what brands you like, and you know what you would like to use but it’s more expensive, or more difficult to get hold of, or you just happen to use another brand. If you go to foreign suppliers, you can scan through lots of items that you know are generic versions of really established brands. You will also know which products are junk, not useful or not applicable to your part of the world.
If you’re looking domestically, look for companies that you can eventually become a big fish to. They should be established and have some distribution, so people in your interest group can relate to their products, but the company shouldn’t be huge. They should be established brands, but that’s “brand” with a lower-case B. They aren’t household names, and are only likely to be well known within a very, very small category. They’re not generic products either – there should be some meaning behind the brand name.
As an indication of size, the supplier might have one sales rep for one half of the country, and another sales rep for the other half of the country who you have to deal through. But they will work directly for the manufacturer – you don’t have to go through a distributor or wholesaler. Or you might talk directly with the owner or someone else high in the chain of command.
Also consider:
If you’re planning to dropship, they should have a really good dropship program already in place.
If you’re planning to use FBA, make sure you can get to really low pricing relatively quickly – if you’re willing to hold stock and put a few thousand dollars behind it.
It’s a big help that these brands are already established. There might already be reviews, and there might be clear sales, but maybe no one is using FBA. That’s one of the more obvious opportunities where you can say, “Wow, these items are big ticket items. They have 25 reviews and still no one’s using FBA, I can immediately scoot to the top as long as the pricing is reasonable,” and take over the vast majority of those sales.
How to approach them
If you go to the number one brand in any industry, and say you want to become a distributor, they’ll just blow you off and send you to someone else. Who are you? You’re Joe Shmoe working in his garage.
But for some of these smaller brands, if you’re willing to come out and talk to them, learn about the product and have confidence in it, and place a $4,000 stocking order, they’re not going to blow you off – they’re going to roll out the red carpet for you! They’ll be happy to give you the best price right away.
That might be a company that only sells two, five or ten million dollars a year. Their salesman is not going to turn up his nose at a few thousand dollars stocking order. If you’re able to sell more and more, buying say $250,000 of products a year from a company with sales of five million, you’ll be one of their top customers. You will be one of the first they tell about new products or discontinued products, and all of the other things you can get a market advantage from.
Try to focus on products that you have expertise in, even if it’s limited expertise. When you contact them initially make it clear that you understand their market, the quality differences between them and their competitor, and how neat their brand new product is. They will appreciate that, and know that they’re going to have fewer customer service calls if the person they’re selling to understands their product.
Once you have an established product, you can look at other companies in that industry. If you can say, “Hey, I’m a seller of brand A and brand B, and I want to carry your brand as well,” then you will have a lot of legitimacy. They’ll see that you already have customers for these products and they will want to be where their competitors are. It won’t feel like a guess for them – they’ll just want to jump on it.
Once you have one or two brands, even if it’s a private label brand that you own, you can show them that you already sell related products, and present them with the opportunity for you to sell theirs as well. It adds confidence that they’re not wasting their time with you. Private labeling can actually be helpful in getting to that point – to get a track record.
At some point someone will take a chance on you. It may not be the perfect brand, but if you put $2,000 in front of them they will start selling to you. It’s not as difficult to get that first brand as you might think. People overestimate the difficulty and the awkwardness of selling a brand that is legitimate and established. If you want to get into private label first, and then find domestic suppliers that can add to your line, that’s a good approach. But private labeling should not be the be-all and end-all.
Sell the whole product range
You might find that a supplier has a wide catalog, and a few of their items are on Amazon but many are not. That’s a situation where you can stock, and use FBA, for a few of their best selling products that are already on Amazon. Then do fulfilled by merchant (FBM) for their other listings and be the only seller on those items.
If a couple of those new-to-Amazon products become a hit, you’ll gain momentum with that supplier and become a bigger and bigger customer to them. You might be able to gain a logistics advantage, make bigger orders, and get special deals – so your cost per unit drops. If you don’t offer their whole product range, you wouldn’t find the potential top sellers that are not already on Amazon.
Brands that have some successful products, but not the full line on Amazon, can be a big opportunity. The products already selling will be your meat and potatoes, but the dessert will be all those other products you have access to that other sellers have ignored.
You might be able to have a dropship arrangement for the slow sellers. The supplier may have a small processing fee or percentage on top for dropship sales. Make sure you factor that into your selling price. For the vast majority of my dropships and FBM products, I make a much larger margin than my FBA items, because there’s little or no price competition. Sometimes I’m not only the sole seller of that product on Amazon, I’m also the only person selling it on the internet.
Selling the Products
The vast majority of my listings are not beautiful. They don’t have great pictures. They don’t have great bullet points. Some of them have terrible bullet points that are very generic – because I’ve used the same text for the entire line.
Private label sellers put a lot of effort into getting their listings perfect, so they can rank well against all their competitors. But when you have an established brand that you put on Amazon, there will already be people searching for that brand. As long as you have the best price for that item, they’re going to buy it regardless – because they’ve already decided that’s what they want to buy. They’re going to Amazon to buy, not to shop.
That’s the big difference with Amazon that people often don’t understand. A lot of times people who use Amazon have already made their decision. They just want to go to one place where they know they’re going to get a fair deal and quick delivery. When you work with established brands, you can spend more of your time sourcing and working with the supplier and less time prettying up the listings and images. It’s not a private label brand where you need to artificially create value – the value in the brand already exists.
Potential buyers just need to know that they are getting the correct item. If there’s any kind of technical information, make sure you include it because people use that to check it’s the right product. Images are the same – they’re important to show which product it is rather than to sell it to someone who’s just browsing. Making it clear exactly which model you are selling is 98% of the job. Other tweaks might bring some incremental sales, but most of it depends on the existing brand value – you’re essentially riding on the tail of it.
Developing the Supplier Relationship
As you develop the relationship with the brand you can go for exclusivity. I’m the exclusive Amazon dealer for many brands. I’m also the person that sells their brand exclusively to Amazon. Once you have a few of those, that’s again when you can reach out to other brands and say, “Listen, I’m the exclusive distributor on Amazon for these related brands. I think there’s some opportunity you’re missing. I can simplify everything so you don’t have to learn this whole sales channel if you can give me some kind of exclusivity or better pricing.”
There are plenty of opportunities for that, because there are a lot of brands out there where Amazon is not their main focus – whether it should be or not is a different story! If they can have someone who acts as their Amazon agent, they’re happy not to worry about that channel and gain exposure without the infrastructure and skills needed to learn it.
Once you know an industry a little bit and you find suppliers that aren’t on Amazon (or just barely on Amazon) you can sometimes hit it out of the park. One thing I do is go on Upwork.com, search for “Amazon” and find people looking for someone to manage their Amazon account. I’ll say to them, “Hey, rather than using this guy for $5 an hour on Upwork, I’ll buy and stock your items. I’m really good at Amazon, and I do this for a bunch of other brands. You don’t have to manage me, it’s just money in your pocket.”
That’s a very compelling pitch for brands who don’t really want to handle selling on Amazon themselves. It might sound intimidating, but it’s just an email. You send it and then move on. Not everybody will be interested. I sell a brand of bottled water exclusively on Amazon. Why am I their only seller? Because I asked!
If you can find a supplier that nicely fits with what you’re trying to do, and will support your needs, that’s when you can create a really excellent, mutually beneficial system. The nuts and bolts of how you manage the business, rather than making an Amazon listing prettier, is what makes it grow.
Management and Optimization
Once you have established your business it comes down to inventory and capital management. You will have a limited amount of capital that you are going to want to expand and use, either with a brand you already sell or outside to new brands. You don’t want a lot of dead inventory, and you have to be smart about the items that you stock and the items that you dropship.
Replenishment
You need to manage your inventory with specialist software. Early on you can probably use some of the replenishment reports directly in Seller Central, but they’re not very complex and don’t break down the data that well. I don’t have any financial interest in these guys but I use RestockPro from eComEngine – they also make FeedbackFive.
RestockPro is a software program that allows you to set replenishment alerts specific to your needs – based on sales in the last year, two days, seven days, 30 days and so on, and also set different order thresholds and lead times for different suppliers. Then you can filter by supplier and say, “I should place an order with this company soon, but I need to spend $10,000 to get the price point I want. Do I wait another week or do I add a few other products to round out the order?” You can really be smart about how you’re managing your dollars, to get the best combination of price point and capital investment.
Focus on buying
Once you have your suppliers on board, the business becomes much less about selling on Amazon and more about buying from your suppliers. Amazon brings the customers, and the existing brand name gets interest in your products, so there’s not a whole lot you can do to sell better – all you can do is buy better. It becomes a totally back-end focused business, and there’s much more certainty in that because you have a direct relationship with your suppliers (unlike your customers) and can work with them to solve your pain points.
It’s a systematized business, not something where you’re speculating on random products and buying 500 units to take a chance on. That’s not a systematic approach – that’s just trying your luck. With my approach you can just calculate the price you need to buy at, then very predictably say, “I’m going to make $40,000 from this line if I just keep buying this quantity every two months for the next six months.”
Pricing
Pricing is not straightforward on Amazon. I highly encourage people to use a repricing program. The one I use, Feedvisor, is expensive but I believe it’s the best option if you are at a certain scale. It is about algorithmic pricing versus just having the lowest price.
Repricing is a huge deal when you’re selling against multiple other sellers. It isn’t always a race to the bottom. If I’m the only Prime seller or have a better seller rating, Feedvisor actually prices many of my items higher than I would normally sell them at. You just have to trust the algorithm to figure it out. There are some items I can sell for $18 more than the next guy and still get the Buy Box 90% of the time.
I don’t have competition for many of my goods so I don’t use Feedvisor on those. Instead I have a standard mark-up and some specific adjustments. I make it worth my time if I’m going to sell a low ticket item that only sells every once in a while.
For most of the products that I dropship I have no competition. The customers that buy those products are either determined to buy from Amazon, or the product isn’t available anywhere else on the internet. In those two situations you have a lot of pricing power. I’m not really interested in monitoring prices across the whole internet, and I’ll sell fewer to people who shop from other websites. Amazon is focusing more and more on keeping customers loyal, so it’s those buyers that won’t go elsewhere that I focus on.
Cash flow
If sales are good and you want to make a transition from say, dropshipping to stocking, you have to keep track of capital, inventory and price structure. Ask yourself three questions:
If you are willing to buy a larger quantity, will your supplier give you a better price?
What payment terms can they offer you?
What does that mean for your margins?
If you have limited cash, say only $10,000 to start with, and you’re dealing with some higher ticket items, you’ve got to be very mindful of what is realistic. If you see some really awesome opportunities, you may have to find extra cash to make those happen.
But you don’t want to get in a situation where you’ve invested all your money into slow-moving inventory, and your bestselling products sell out and you can’t replenish them. When you’re going through a growth spurt, you are almost certainly going to be cash-poor, because everything’s going faster than you realize. That’s when you’ve got to be extra diligent with counting the pennies.
Feedback
It’s a lot easier for people to understand that a product failure is not your fault as a seller, when you’re selling an established brand. With private labeling, if you sell XYZ products and your business name is XYZ, then they’re going to associate that failure in the product with you as a seller.
The brands I sell tend not to have many quality problems. An established brand that’s been around for 30 years hasn’t stayed in business that long by ripping people off, they’ve stayed in business by offering good products. Selling brands can even help balance out the quality issues you often get selling private label products.
In Closing
I started this post by talking about the shortcomings of private labeling. But private labeling isn’t fundamentally flawed, it’s just not used strategically. You can actually approach private labeling with the same supplier-driven thinking as you can for branded products. Instead of looking for a single perfect product, look for a supplier of generic products who has a whole product line that you can grow into. There are a lot of opportunities for that.
I’ve focused here on working with domestic suppliers, as it’s a source that is often overlooked. But the scale and experience you gain from working with domestic suppliers translates directly to working with overseas suppliers. Scale is particularly important when you’re ordering from overseas, so you can order container quantities rather than small packages. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about working with foreign companies, but choose them for their overall product line, not just a single product.
You can also use private labeling very well alongside branded products. When a particular brand model sells well, we’ll often go out and private label a similar product. Why would we compete with ourselves? From selling the branded version, we can see where a private label product would fill a gap in the product line-up. Then when someone searches for that category of product, instead of having four listings in the top ten, we might control eight out of ten. We even have situations where all of the top ten search results are our listings. Unless they go to page two, we’re going to make a sale!
Any questions? Fire away in the comments below.
(SOURCE)
By Andrew Tjernlund
The private labeling hype machine has been running hot for a couple of years now.
Just find a product that’s already selling well on Amazon. Then source a generic version from China. Slap a logo on it, and sell it using Amazon FBA. Boom! Riches are yours. Now just rinse and repeat.
But there’s something rotten in this private labeling utopia. Hordes of new sellers seeking their fortunes have descended, and they aren’t getting the easy success all the training courses promised them. Why not?
Well, finding a “perfect product” that will sell like hot cakes is hard. Really hard. Driven by all those online courses and schemes, competition from other sellers has become fierce. On the other side of the equation, buyers are starting to cry foul. Even these fly-by-night “brand names” bring certain expectations of quality and support, and many of them are just not living up to it.
So here’s the Amazon product sourcing strategy that I use. It doesn’t depend on importing, you don’t need to find perfect products, and I’ve made it hard to compete against. For me, it’s been hugely successful.
Why Private Labeling is Flawed
There’s a whole host of issues that make private labeling very difficult to do. In many cases, the business is certain to fail before it even gets off the ground.
Private labeling is about finding a “perfect product” – getting a home-run off-one shot. That’s more luck than skill. Good businesses aren’t based on gambling. When people go looking for the perfect product, they are going into an area where they already have competition – sometimes very stiff competition. There’s already an established player with months, if not years, of sales history that Amazon is going to reward in their search engine algorithm. You have to overcome that somehow.
Often it’s clear that a private labeler is selling a “me too” product, and at lower price points the difference in price can be very insignificant. If you sell for $22.95 and the established brand sells for $24.95, you are 8% cheaper. But realistically it’s just two bucks – not much of a competitive advantage. There’s often nowhere to go other than lowering the price further and further, cutting deep into your profit margin.
Private labeling almost always depends on buying from overseas factories. To do that affordably you need logistical scale and forward planning, so you can ship by sea rather than by air. Most sellers aren’t large or sophisticated enough to do that, so they have a lot of additional logistics costs.
You may also have quality issues because you haven’t been able to see the product beyond one sample. When things go badly they can go really badly, and you get unusable products with no recourse.
If you do manage to get established in private labeling, you can find other suppliers and sell wholesale. But you will have other issues getting the larger quantities you need, and handling much longer lead times. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t – unless you can ride a perfect fine line where everything goes just right.
Focus on Suppliers and Build a Broad Catalog
I believe that you have to sell a large catalog of products to get enough revenue to make your business grow. The easiest way to grow a catalog with minimal use of capital is by using domestic suppliers. When you focus on suppliers in your own country, you avoid a lot of scaling and logistics issues you have with buying from China or elsewhere overseas.
Very few people even look at the opportunities out there for legitimate manufacturers or brand owners locally. You can easily talk and meet with them, make lower order quantities, have less risk and so on – pretty much the antithesis of buying from overseas.
When you go the private labeling route, and try to get your “perfect product” made, manufacturers might set a minimum order quantity of 3,000, or a minimum spend of $10,000. That’s a serious investment. Could you do better by spending the same amount of money on a range of products?
Often domestic suppliers have some products with a good sales history on Amazon, but a lot of other lines that haven’t proven themselves yet. Rather than buying 3,000 of one unit, you could spend your $10,000 with this company and buy many different SKUs in their catalog.
That allows you to grow inexpensively, but you’ve also varied your product offering and diminished the risk by spreading out your inventory. If the orange version of an item isn’t successful, you have only a few items to liquidate before moving on and putting more money towards the red and yellow versions that sell better.
Suppliers appreciate that you want to carry more of their catalog, and not just the bestsellers. One reason is that they can point customers to a retailer that carries their entire line, rather than sending them to shop around multiple places, or have them buy the main product from them but accessories from a competitor. Manufacturers truly appreciate it, and I have dealt with many who will vouch for that.
Manufacturers don’t need help selling their bestsellers, they need help selling their less established products. That’s where you can really add value. If you’re willing to take those on, and not just cherry-pick, they might be slow-moving products – but you’re still making money on every sale. You just buy more of the best-selling items and fewer of the worse-selling items. When you take on an entire product line there are benefits for you, and there are benefits for your relationship with that supplier moving forward.
Local suppliers can also offer technical support and warranty services. It’s important to become a good customer of theirs. If you become a good customer, they’re more likely to work with you on those kinds of issues. They won’t want to upset you if you’re going from $5,000 a year, to $50,000 a year, to $500,000 a year with them. You will gain a lot of stature, and they will want to be in your good graces. Once you’ve reached that kind of level, you’ll be surprised at all the extra value that’s unlocked besides just better pricing. There’s a whole new relationship once you get to be one of their top ten customers.
Finding Suppliers
The vast majority of sellers search on Amazon to find products first, and a supplier later. I do the opposite. I try to find a good supplier for products that I think might sell – because I know a specific space or industry, or I have a hobby so I understand the products and can scan through quickly.
Once I find a really good supplier, I try to figure out how to sell their products on Amazon. By taking this approach, I already know the strengths and weaknesses of the supplier and can find products they sell that are underexposed on Amazon. That’s where the best opportunities are. That’s where you’re not immediately running into instant established competition on Amazon. You have the opportunity to get in on the ground floor on what could be a quickly blossoming product.
What to look for
Let’s say you’re really into camping. You know what products you use. You know what brands you like, and you know what you would like to use but it’s more expensive, or more difficult to get hold of, or you just happen to use another brand. If you go to foreign suppliers, you can scan through lots of items that you know are generic versions of really established brands. You will also know which products are junk, not useful or not applicable to your part of the world.
If you’re looking domestically, look for companies that you can eventually become a big fish to. They should be established and have some distribution, so people in your interest group can relate to their products, but the company shouldn’t be huge. They should be established brands, but that’s “brand” with a lower-case B. They aren’t household names, and are only likely to be well known within a very, very small category. They’re not generic products either – there should be some meaning behind the brand name.
As an indication of size, the supplier might have one sales rep for one half of the country, and another sales rep for the other half of the country who you have to deal through. But they will work directly for the manufacturer – you don’t have to go through a distributor or wholesaler. Or you might talk directly with the owner or someone else high in the chain of command.
Also consider:
If you’re planning to dropship, they should have a really good dropship program already in place.
If you’re planning to use FBA, make sure you can get to really low pricing relatively quickly – if you’re willing to hold stock and put a few thousand dollars behind it.
It’s a big help that these brands are already established. There might already be reviews, and there might be clear sales, but maybe no one is using FBA. That’s one of the more obvious opportunities where you can say, “Wow, these items are big ticket items. They have 25 reviews and still no one’s using FBA, I can immediately scoot to the top as long as the pricing is reasonable,” and take over the vast majority of those sales.
How to approach them
If you go to the number one brand in any industry, and say you want to become a distributor, they’ll just blow you off and send you to someone else. Who are you? You’re Joe Shmoe working in his garage.
But for some of these smaller brands, if you’re willing to come out and talk to them, learn about the product and have confidence in it, and place a $4,000 stocking order, they’re not going to blow you off – they’re going to roll out the red carpet for you! They’ll be happy to give you the best price right away.
That might be a company that only sells two, five or ten million dollars a year. Their salesman is not going to turn up his nose at a few thousand dollars stocking order. If you’re able to sell more and more, buying say $250,000 of products a year from a company with sales of five million, you’ll be one of their top customers. You will be one of the first they tell about new products or discontinued products, and all of the other things you can get a market advantage from.
Try to focus on products that you have expertise in, even if it’s limited expertise. When you contact them initially make it clear that you understand their market, the quality differences between them and their competitor, and how neat their brand new product is. They will appreciate that, and know that they’re going to have fewer customer service calls if the person they’re selling to understands their product.
Once you have an established product, you can look at other companies in that industry. If you can say, “Hey, I’m a seller of brand A and brand B, and I want to carry your brand as well,” then you will have a lot of legitimacy. They’ll see that you already have customers for these products and they will want to be where their competitors are. It won’t feel like a guess for them – they’ll just want to jump on it.
Once you have one or two brands, even if it’s a private label brand that you own, you can show them that you already sell related products, and present them with the opportunity for you to sell theirs as well. It adds confidence that they’re not wasting their time with you. Private labeling can actually be helpful in getting to that point – to get a track record.
At some point someone will take a chance on you. It may not be the perfect brand, but if you put $2,000 in front of them they will start selling to you. It’s not as difficult to get that first brand as you might think. People overestimate the difficulty and the awkwardness of selling a brand that is legitimate and established. If you want to get into private label first, and then find domestic suppliers that can add to your line, that’s a good approach. But private labeling should not be the be-all and end-all.
Sell the whole product range
You might find that a supplier has a wide catalog, and a few of their items are on Amazon but many are not. That’s a situation where you can stock, and use FBA, for a few of their best selling products that are already on Amazon. Then do fulfilled by merchant (FBM) for their other listings and be the only seller on those items.
If a couple of those new-to-Amazon products become a hit, you’ll gain momentum with that supplier and become a bigger and bigger customer to them. You might be able to gain a logistics advantage, make bigger orders, and get special deals – so your cost per unit drops. If you don’t offer their whole product range, you wouldn’t find the potential top sellers that are not already on Amazon.
Brands that have some successful products, but not the full line on Amazon, can be a big opportunity. The products already selling will be your meat and potatoes, but the dessert will be all those other products you have access to that other sellers have ignored.
You might be able to have a dropship arrangement for the slow sellers. The supplier may have a small processing fee or percentage on top for dropship sales. Make sure you factor that into your selling price. For the vast majority of my dropships and FBM products, I make a much larger margin than my FBA items, because there’s little or no price competition. Sometimes I’m not only the sole seller of that product on Amazon, I’m also the only person selling it on the internet.
Selling the Products
The vast majority of my listings are not beautiful. They don’t have great pictures. They don’t have great bullet points. Some of them have terrible bullet points that are very generic – because I’ve used the same text for the entire line.
Private label sellers put a lot of effort into getting their listings perfect, so they can rank well against all their competitors. But when you have an established brand that you put on Amazon, there will already be people searching for that brand. As long as you have the best price for that item, they’re going to buy it regardless – because they’ve already decided that’s what they want to buy. They’re going to Amazon to buy, not to shop.
That’s the big difference with Amazon that people often don’t understand. A lot of times people who use Amazon have already made their decision. They just want to go to one place where they know they’re going to get a fair deal and quick delivery. When you work with established brands, you can spend more of your time sourcing and working with the supplier and less time prettying up the listings and images. It’s not a private label brand where you need to artificially create value – the value in the brand already exists.
Potential buyers just need to know that they are getting the correct item. If there’s any kind of technical information, make sure you include it because people use that to check it’s the right product. Images are the same – they’re important to show which product it is rather than to sell it to someone who’s just browsing. Making it clear exactly which model you are selling is 98% of the job. Other tweaks might bring some incremental sales, but most of it depends on the existing brand value – you’re essentially riding on the tail of it.
Developing the Supplier Relationship
As you develop the relationship with the brand you can go for exclusivity. I’m the exclusive Amazon dealer for many brands. I’m also the person that sells their brand exclusively to Amazon. Once you have a few of those, that’s again when you can reach out to other brands and say, “Listen, I’m the exclusive distributor on Amazon for these related brands. I think there’s some opportunity you’re missing. I can simplify everything so you don’t have to learn this whole sales channel if you can give me some kind of exclusivity or better pricing.”
There are plenty of opportunities for that, because there are a lot of brands out there where Amazon is not their main focus – whether it should be or not is a different story! If they can have someone who acts as their Amazon agent, they’re happy not to worry about that channel and gain exposure without the infrastructure and skills needed to learn it.
Once you know an industry a little bit and you find suppliers that aren’t on Amazon (or just barely on Amazon) you can sometimes hit it out of the park. One thing I do is go on Upwork.com, search for “Amazon” and find people looking for someone to manage their Amazon account. I’ll say to them, “Hey, rather than using this guy for $5 an hour on Upwork, I’ll buy and stock your items. I’m really good at Amazon, and I do this for a bunch of other brands. You don’t have to manage me, it’s just money in your pocket.”
That’s a very compelling pitch for brands who don’t really want to handle selling on Amazon themselves. It might sound intimidating, but it’s just an email. You send it and then move on. Not everybody will be interested. I sell a brand of bottled water exclusively on Amazon. Why am I their only seller? Because I asked!
If you can find a supplier that nicely fits with what you’re trying to do, and will support your needs, that’s when you can create a really excellent, mutually beneficial system. The nuts and bolts of how you manage the business, rather than making an Amazon listing prettier, is what makes it grow.
Management and Optimization
Once you have established your business it comes down to inventory and capital management. You will have a limited amount of capital that you are going to want to expand and use, either with a brand you already sell or outside to new brands. You don’t want a lot of dead inventory, and you have to be smart about the items that you stock and the items that you dropship.
Replenishment
You need to manage your inventory with specialist software. Early on you can probably use some of the replenishment reports directly in Seller Central, but they’re not very complex and don’t break down the data that well. I don’t have any financial interest in these guys but I use RestockPro from eComEngine – they also make FeedbackFive.
RestockPro is a software program that allows you to set replenishment alerts specific to your needs – based on sales in the last year, two days, seven days, 30 days and so on, and also set different order thresholds and lead times for different suppliers. Then you can filter by supplier and say, “I should place an order with this company soon, but I need to spend $10,000 to get the price point I want. Do I wait another week or do I add a few other products to round out the order?” You can really be smart about how you’re managing your dollars, to get the best combination of price point and capital investment.
Focus on buying
Once you have your suppliers on board, the business becomes much less about selling on Amazon and more about buying from your suppliers. Amazon brings the customers, and the existing brand name gets interest in your products, so there’s not a whole lot you can do to sell better – all you can do is buy better. It becomes a totally back-end focused business, and there’s much more certainty in that because you have a direct relationship with your suppliers (unlike your customers) and can work with them to solve your pain points.
It’s a systematized business, not something where you’re speculating on random products and buying 500 units to take a chance on. That’s not a systematic approach – that’s just trying your luck. With my approach you can just calculate the price you need to buy at, then very predictably say, “I’m going to make $40,000 from this line if I just keep buying this quantity every two months for the next six months.”
Pricing
Pricing is not straightforward on Amazon. I highly encourage people to use a repricing program. The one I use, Feedvisor, is expensive but I believe it’s the best option if you are at a certain scale. It is about algorithmic pricing versus just having the lowest price.
Repricing is a huge deal when you’re selling against multiple other sellers. It isn’t always a race to the bottom. If I’m the only Prime seller or have a better seller rating, Feedvisor actually prices many of my items higher than I would normally sell them at. You just have to trust the algorithm to figure it out. There are some items I can sell for $18 more than the next guy and still get the Buy Box 90% of the time.
I don’t have competition for many of my goods so I don’t use Feedvisor on those. Instead I have a standard mark-up and some specific adjustments. I make it worth my time if I’m going to sell a low ticket item that only sells every once in a while.
For most of the products that I dropship I have no competition. The customers that buy those products are either determined to buy from Amazon, or the product isn’t available anywhere else on the internet. In those two situations you have a lot of pricing power. I’m not really interested in monitoring prices across the whole internet, and I’ll sell fewer to people who shop from other websites. Amazon is focusing more and more on keeping customers loyal, so it’s those buyers that won’t go elsewhere that I focus on.
Cash flow
If sales are good and you want to make a transition from say, dropshipping to stocking, you have to keep track of capital, inventory and price structure. Ask yourself three questions:
If you are willing to buy a larger quantity, will your supplier give you a better price?
What payment terms can they offer you?
What does that mean for your margins?
If you have limited cash, say only $10,000 to start with, and you’re dealing with some higher ticket items, you’ve got to be very mindful of what is realistic. If you see some really awesome opportunities, you may have to find extra cash to make those happen.
But you don’t want to get in a situation where you’ve invested all your money into slow-moving inventory, and your bestselling products sell out and you can’t replenish them. When you’re going through a growth spurt, you are almost certainly going to be cash-poor, because everything’s going faster than you realize. That’s when you’ve got to be extra diligent with counting the pennies.
Feedback
It’s a lot easier for people to understand that a product failure is not your fault as a seller, when you’re selling an established brand. With private labeling, if you sell XYZ products and your business name is XYZ, then they’re going to associate that failure in the product with you as a seller.
The brands I sell tend not to have many quality problems. An established brand that’s been around for 30 years hasn’t stayed in business that long by ripping people off, they’ve stayed in business by offering good products. Selling brands can even help balance out the quality issues you often get selling private label products.
In Closing
I started this post by talking about the shortcomings of private labeling. But private labeling isn’t fundamentally flawed, it’s just not used strategically. You can actually approach private labeling with the same supplier-driven thinking as you can for branded products. Instead of looking for a single perfect product, look for a supplier of generic products who has a whole product line that you can grow into. There are a lot of opportunities for that.
I’ve focused here on working with domestic suppliers, as it’s a source that is often overlooked. But the scale and experience you gain from working with domestic suppliers translates directly to working with overseas suppliers. Scale is particularly important when you’re ordering from overseas, so you can order container quantities rather than small packages. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about working with foreign companies, but choose them for their overall product line, not just a single product.
You can also use private labeling very well alongside branded products. When a particular brand model sells well, we’ll often go out and private label a similar product. Why would we compete with ourselves? From selling the branded version, we can see where a private label product would fill a gap in the product line-up. Then when someone searches for that category of product, instead of having four listings in the top ten, we might control eight out of ten. We even have situations where all of the top ten search results are our listings. Unless they go to page two, we’re going to make a sale!
Any questions? Fire away in the comments below.
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Selling Private Label Products on Amazon – 5 Tips To Beat The Competition
By Jake Cain
Although it feels like Spencer has been running an Amazon FBA business for a long time, he really just got started about a year and a half ago.
While that’s a relatively short period of time, I’ve been fortunate to go along for the ride and help move the business forward.
In the process of going from $0 to $60K per month in sales, we’ve tried a combination of both customized and private label products.
Today I want to breakdown some of the things we’ve learned about private label products specifically, and give you 5 tips to be successful in selling them on Amazon.
Defining a Private Label Product
Let me start by defining Private labeling, specifically in the context of reselling on Amazon. Private labeling a product means that you work with a manufacturer and buy a generic product that you can make your own by adding your own branding/logo to that product.
For example, you may find a manufacturer that makes safety scissors. After determining that safety scissors sell well on Amazon and you can make a profit, you work with that manufacturer and come up with a name for your brand of safety scissors and perhaps provide customized packaging designs for them to use. They manufacturer the same generic scissors they already make, but they label it with your branding so you can sell it as your own, new product.
It’s Not All Roses
I didn’t come up with this list of 5 tips solely from our successes.
In fact, we’ve had some private label products that really haven’t worked out well at all. Unfortunately, some of what I’ll share is stuff we learned the hard way.
The good news is, by taking action and trying some different strategies we’ve learned more about what works in private labeling and have now launched a few private label products that look quite promising.
Without further ado, let’s dive in:
1. Scout the Competition
Amazon is a super competitive place to sell, and as more people jump on the Amazon FBA bandwagon it naturally becomes tougher to find low competition products to sell.
While we sell products that have plenty of competition, we usually only enter those markets with a somewhat unique, customized product. When it comes to private labeling, we’ve been burned by trying to simply sell a product that is virtually identical to dozens or even hundreds of other products already selling on Amazon.
Here’s an example of a product that it seems everyone and their brother has already private labeled – Plastic Meat Claws:
While there is some variety in colors and materials, if you click through the first few pages of results on Amazon you’ll see many that look just like these 3 sets in the picture above.
To take a deeper look at this product’s potential I turn to the tool we use to analyze the competition – Jungle Scout Pro.
In particular, I use their browser add-on to quickly take a look at estimated sales and profit numbers for the Amazon search results. Here’s what page 1 looks like for “Meat Claws:”
On the surface it’s a tempting product because the top sellers are selling very well – over $41,000 in estimated revenue to the most popular product in the last 30 days.
However, when you get to the bottom of page 1 and particularly outside of the top 10 results the numbers are much more pedestrian:
From there, I go back to Amazon and click through several pages of results so I can take a look at photos and just get a feel for how deep the competition goes. Sure enough, I’m at page 3 of the results for meat claws and still see listings like this:
Why I Wouldn’t Private Label Meat Claws:
The first product we private labeled for Amazon had a profile very similar to this. We thought that because some of the products on page 1 had less than 100 reviews that we could quickly get to page 1 as well by giving away some discounted products to reviewers on AMZTracker. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out that way and we were left with slow moving inventory that we’d be happy to break even on.
Looking back at products like these meat claws, here’s why I’d avoid private labeling it if I could press the reset button and make the decision all over again:
Product Depth
There are so many plastic meat claws already on Amazon, selling via FBA with Prime Shipping. Even if you change the color of the product, you really don’t have any benefit to buying your product vs. the long list of others already for sale.
To be clear, if I felt like I could innovate and make a new version of meat claws that gives me a functional advantage it could be an excellent market to go into – but only doing a private label would be challenging.
What’s worse is that once you get to page 2, the sales numbers aren’t very impressive. So I know that unless I can crack page 1, I probably won’t sell many meat claws.
The Data is Confusing
If you’re like me, when you get excited about an idea you tend to put on rose-colored glasses and only see the positives. You become blind to evidence that suggests that maybe you should move on to another idea.
In this case, I like the fact that I see reviews on page 1 with under 100 reviews because I could probably use AMZTracker to get that many reviews within a month or 2 of launching.
However, I also see listings like this down on page 2 with 1,200+ excellent reviews, a competitive price, and pro quality photos:
To me, that’s a red flag.
They can’t be making much profit at $8.99, and if we did what it takes to get over 1,000 reviews and still not make it to page 1 of the search results, we’d be in serious trouble.
So when I see multiple pages of the product with listings from people who seem like they have done everything right and they still aren’t ranking and selling well, that worries me.
Lack of Margin
The first set of plastic meat claws in the organic search sell for $5.99 with Prime shipping. If you know anything about the fees associated with Prime, you’d almost have to get the products manufactured for free to make any profit on those sales.
As you look down the list, many others are $10 and under, which means to compete I’d probably be left with $1 – $3 per sale in profit which just isn’t worth the risk and effort it would take to try to compete with a set of private labeled meat claws.
So… What Should I Look For?
I’ve given you several reasons why we personally wouldn’t touch a set of private labeled plastic meat claws, but what does a good private label opportunity look like?
Honestly, giving you a fool-proof formula of how to pick a winning private label product just isn’t possible.
That said, the biggest difference in the private label products we’re making money on and the ones that flopped is the depth of the competition.
While it takes some more digging, I’ve started to set my focus on finding smaller niche products. Those could be in any category, but I’m talking about products where the top selling item maybe sells $5,000 – $10,000 per month according to Jungle Scout.
We’re ok filling up a product portfolio with a bunch of “base hits” that might sell a few thousand dollars per month and not being concerned with going after a home run that does huge numbers.
(Home runs are great, but base hits are easier.)
It seems that when the top selling product boasts big time numbers like the $40K+ sales on a $10 set of meat claws, competitors pop-up all over the place trying to get a piece of that success.
While some may find it, the vast majority of them get lost in an ocean of products that look the same and are left to compete by cutting prices and profits.
So while your private label product may have a few competing products that are the same, I like to see some irrelevant results showing up on the bottom of page 1 or on page 2.
For example, if I had searched “meat claws” and by the time I get to page 2 there are no more meat claws to be found and I’m only seeing related products like grill covers, grill gloves, etc. that would be a good sign for me.
2. Focus on High Margin Products
I mentioned that one reason I wouldn’t try to private label plastic meat claws is because my competitors are already priced so low. We try to focus on products where we can make at least a 40% profit margin after Amazon takes their FBA fees, but the more the better.
This is probably a personal preference, but I feel better about a 40% margin on a more expensive product and would like even bigger margins when doing a small dollar product – just because it still takes time to launch and maintain that product, so making $2 profit on at item that sells for $8 just isn’t that exciting and you’ve got to really do a bunch of volume to make decent money.
So if a product costs $10 to buy, we want to end up with at least $16.67 in revenue after Amazon has deducted their commission and fulfillment fee. OmniCalculator breaks down gross profit margin this way:
- find out your COGS (cost of goods sold). For example
$30. - find our your revenue (how much you sell these goods for, for example
$50). - calculate the gross profit by subtracting costs from revenue.
$50 - $30 = $20 - divide gross profit by revenue:
$20 / $50 = 0.4. - express it as percentages:
0.4 * 100 = 40%.
If you’d like to check the numbers on a product you’re considering, check out their calculator below:
Let’s look at an example of how you can check your margins on Amazon products before you spend any money on inventory.
Maybe I decide to private label a set of slate coasters just like this:
I’ll assume the sales numbers and competition all fit the guidelines I laid out earlier, and that we can get on AliExpress and order sets of coasters just like this for $2, including shipping to my house.
The next thing I’d do is go to the Amazon FBA calculator and get an idea of what the FBA fees will be when I sell my product. Even though I don’t have my own product on Amazon, I can get the ASIN number from the product listing from this set of slate coasters and put that into the FBA calculator. This works because my product will be nearly identical in size, weight, etc. which means my fees will be about the same as theirs.
In the calculator, I put in an expected retail price of $14.99 for my coasters in the “Amazon Fulfillment” column and hit the “calculate” button:
After Amazon takes their share, I’ll actually see $8.72 of revenue be placed into my seller account.
Now, I’d go back and put that into the OmniCalculator embedded above and see that my margin is about 77%, which is excellent.
After bouncing back and forth between both calculators, I figure out that I could take my retail price all the way down to $8.99 and be left with $3.33, which is a 40% margin in this case.
So, if I evaluated the competition and felt like I could reasonably fetch $15 per set, plus felt very strongly that in a worst case scenario I could easily sell them at $8.99 and make a little bit of money – I’d go for it.
3. Take Better Pictures
I won’t spend much time here because the headline pretty much says it all, but product photos that look professionally done can make a HUGE difference in whether or not people click on your listing and buy your product.
Another nice thing to look for when scouting for private label ideas is competing products who aren’t taking full advantage of their photos. Maybe they only have one photo instead of 6 or 7 from different angles, or maybe the photos they have are done with poor lighting.
If that’s the case, when and if your product ranks next to theirs in the search results, having top notch photos will be a real competitive advantage.
I don’t think you need a full set of professional equipment to get the job done, but if you have a newer smartphone you can use a portable lighting studio like the one below to take excellent photos.
4. Create a Bundle
At some point in the near future, I’ll be writing a similar post to this and explaining why I prefer selling more customized, unique products on Amazon instead of simply private labeling.
One of the obvious reasons is because you have some unique benefits and selling features that other products don’t.
In the private label world, it’s difficult to find a product on Alibaba or some other marketplace that a manufacturer is already making, and nobody is selling it on Amazon.
I’m not saying it’s impossible – but you can pretty much expect that when you private label, you’ll be competing against other sellers who are offering nearly the same exact thing you are.
One way to end up with a more unique product when doing private labeling is to create bundles.
Bundles are simply a set of individual products that are related to each other in some way that you package together as a single item. Going back to a barbecue related example, you’ll notice that when you search “barbecue gloves” on Amazon, you’ll see some suggested searches for things like “barbecue gloves claw” and “barbecue gloves and accessories:”
These kinds of search suggestions are an indication that people are actually looking to buy these products together – like a set of barbecue gloves and meat claws.
In this case, it looks like that particular idea has been done many times – but there are plenty of other bundles you could create and really add value for customers while standing out from the competition.
An excellent way to discover bundle ideas is to look at Amazon’s “Frequently Bought Together” section when you are on a product page. I clicked on one of first yoga mats I saw and it showed that this mat is frequently purchased with a set of yoga blocks:
We’ve actually created a bundle using this same approach that has just launched and is showing some promise for success.
Both of the items in our bundle are readily available to be purchased separately, but at this point we’re the only people selling a set of these 2 popular products together – so when people search for a set, they find our product.
Fortunately, our manufacturer already made both of the products so we just had to create some custom packaging and didn’t need to make any changes or customizations to the products themselves.
Buy Small Quantities
One thing I’ve learned when sourcing goods overseas (China, in our case) is that virtually everything is negotiable. So even if they say that the MOQ (minimum order quantity) is 1,000 units, you may well be able to talk them down to a trial order of 500, 300, or even 100 – particularly when you are doing a private label product that needs no customization.
Even if you are convinced that your private label product is a winner, I’d highly recommend that you start with as small of an order as you can to prove the concept and make sure it sells.
It’s a terrible feeling to order 1,000 units and then find that nobody is buying them, and now you have to worry about long term storage fees and just trying to minimize your losses.
Even if an order of 100 units means that you won’t make as much margin because the units cost more per item, it’s still a safer play because you can always come back and order 1,000 more once you’ve proven that you can sell 100 of them at a good price.
One idea I learned from Steve Chou’s podcast was to use AliExpress to buy really small quantities of private label products, even less than 100 units. On Aliexpress you are mostly dealing with wholesalers, not manufacturers. So they buy the meat claws for $1 and sell them to you for $2, but the good news is you can just buy 5 meat claws instead of 500.
From there you can create your Amazon listing, and then launch the product using Amazon’s sponsored listings to get some eyeballs on your product.
If it checks all the boxes we discussed earlier of margin, low competition, etc. then you can reasonably expect to break even, at worst on your small investment. At best, you might find that with minimal effort you start getting some sales and discover that the product has potential to be a real winner.
My favorite part about this strategy is that if you find a winner, you can eventually start working directly with the manufacturer (instead of an AliExpress wholesaler) and get better pricing, custom packaging, and even make changes to improve the product based on feedback. Since you’ve already got a listing for the product, you can simply update the photos, product details, etc. of that listing which probably already has reviews and ranks for some keywords on Amazon.
We’ve gone through this exact process ourselves and have found what seems to be a winning product. We started out by ordering 33 units for about $2 each and now we’re talking to manufacturers directly to make an even better version of this product that we’ll sell at a higher price, plus we’ll actually pay less for our inventory by working directly with the manufacturer.
Overall, I’m a big fan of using small batch private labeling to test out ideas that you can turn into more unique, custom products if they start to sell.
If you’d like more on this strategy in general, I’d highly recommend checking out Steve Chou’s interview with Will Tjernlund.
Wrap-up
Honestly, the vast majority of our success on Amazon FBA has come from selling unique, customized products – not private labeling. That said, we’ve turned a little bit of a corner when it comes to private labeling and those products are starting to add to our diverse mix of Amazon FBA products.
Hopefully you can learn from some of our early mistakes and more recent successes and skip straight to the success part in your own FBA business!
Stay tuned for next week when I plan to share more details on how we come up with ideas for more unique, custom products to sell on Amazon.
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