FBA Road Map | Sell on Amazon. Grow your business.

Use Social Proof to Improve Your Amazon Sales

“Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.” – Soul Asylum, “Black Gold”

Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a standing ovation for something you weren’t even paying attention to?

Maybe you were at your little brother’s high school graduation. Maybe the skinny, awkward 17-year old valedictorian was 27 minutes into a rambling speech about taking over the world. You don’t know. You zoned out 22 minutes ago.

Then, within a matter of seconds, you find yourself standing and clapping. You don’t know why, because you weren’t even paying attention. But everyone else is doing it. And you definitely don’t want to be the only clown sitting down while everyone else is cheering some mind-blowing speech.

Well, you are now a victim of social proof.

Keyword Research for Amazon Made Easy

There are few things in life that make me more excited than keyword research.

But one of those things is writing about keyword research!

And what’s even weirder is that I’ll probably do keyword research to find relevant keywords to include in this article about keyword research.

Yeah. Ponder that one for a few minutes.

Anyway, keywords are a big deal. Developers and copywriters spend tons of time loading up website content, meta tags and headings with keywords that are relevant to the site’s industry. Bloggers research keywords to use in their articles to increase their organic search engine results. Digital advertising managers run pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns that focus on keywords.

Why? Because every business in the world relies on keywords.

Don’t Lose All Your Profits on Your Private Label Products

My first “lessons learned” post was supposed to include data from my first sales. It was supposed to be about how I got 25 positive reviews. About how I already had to order additional inventory and was ready to add a second product line. It was supposed to include a pretty spreadsheet showing how this was going to be a profitable product.

Instead, I’m writing about none of those things. Four weeks since my last post, I have accomplished nothing. Zero inventory. Zero sales. Zero reviews. That’s not to say nothing has happened; I just have nothing to show for it.

4 Not-So-Obvious Private Label Product Categories to Avoid

I’ve been twiddling my thumbs and doing a lot of “fake” work lately. Not at my full-time job, of course. But I made the mistake of waiting until just before Chinese New Year (CNY) to pull the trigger on my first order of private label products.

Apparently CNY is not a party-one-night-and-wake-up-with-a-hangover type of holiday. Instead, the entire country of China basically shuts down and goes on vacation for the better part of a month. I paid the deposit on my order in late January, just before the factory closed. They returned to work on February 15th, and didn’t resume production operations until the 22nd.

So a word of advice: If you are wanting any inventory in January or February, get the order in before the end of the year. The normal lead-time on my products would be 3 to 4 weeks, but for this one, it’s more like 6 weeks. And that’s why I’m twiddling my thumbs.

So for a lack of anything better to write, I figured I’d cover a topic that will hopefully help someone avoid some huge pitfalls when starting an FBA private label business: products to avoid.

A Quick Guide to Understanding Private Label Costs and FBA Fees

One time I jumped off a waterfall into a river below. And that 3 seconds of fun ended with two shattered legs and 6 months in the hospital.

Okay. Not really. I would never do something like that without first knowing that it’s safe to jump. Would you?

And now for the clever metaphor for selling private label products on Amazon: I would never just pick a product and jump all-in without knowing what was under the surface.

There are numerous costs and fees involved with sourcing private label products and selling them on Amazon. And if you don’t consider all of them when you’re looking at products, they could break you (again, metaphorically…and actually financially, too). So let’s run through them. I’m going to cover each of these costs in the order in which they appear in the whole timeline of this process.