Finding Another Way

An Amazon FBA Journey, There and Back Again

Have you ever tried starting a side hustle? Felt there must be a better way to live than your current 9-5?

If so, you'll know that it's difficult...really difficult. Somehow you never seem to take that final step. Whether it’s the startup cost, the fear of failure, the ridicule from friends/family...something has always stopped you.

So what do you do? People make it on youtube right? Well I don’t have any ideas nor do I want my face on youtube. People make it by blogging right? Nope, I don’t have much to write about, yet. There must be something?

This post is intended to be the first part of a series in my journey to a side hustle (preferably more than just a side hustle). My experience with finally picking an option that looks promising...and in the words of Nike... just do it. This post is not a guide. It is not intended to be investment advice or a tried-and-true method of making money. No...this will likely be a total failure where you, the reader, gets to watch me lose money. It’s possible it could be a resounding success, maybe? Regardless, you might learn something from my mistakes or the journey in general. So, sit back...relax... grab your preferred drink, and come along with me on this experiment....

So step one (this is NOT a guide!) was to decide on something to get going. I’d considered the YouTube streamer thing, because even at the age of 30 I’m still a gamer who thinks getting paid to game would be amazing. Unfortunately I’m not good enough, attractive enough, or entertaining enough to really make that work (those are all lies, I’m awesome, just lazy). All that being said, my time on YouTube is what clued me into something called Amazon FBA (FBA-fulfilment by Amazon). After some research I realized it was essentially people selling products on Amazon, where Amazon handled the difficult parts like shipping and such. There are a lot of videos, going into just about every aspect of FBA on YouTube, but the gist of it all was:

1. Find a product on Amazon that fits the ‘right’ criteria.
2. Locate a supplier who can provide this product.
3. Buy stock of the product and get it to Amazon.
4. Create a listing on Amazon for your product.
5. Do some marketing.
6. Profit....???

Simple right? Well, yes...in theory, but let’s dive into each of those steps. Currently, while writing this post, I am somewhere below step 3, on the plethora of sub-parts. I will likely end this post somewhere prior to that and convenient so it will be easier to follow. That was probably a couple paragraphs ago when 95% of you lost attention....

So step 1.....this really isn’t a guide.... Find a product. This was a pretty difficult task. Amazon is pretty big right? Just about everyone I know has a prime account and has Amazon packages showing up at their doorstep weekly (or daily). So I knew it was big, but the sheer amount of things sold on Amazon is quite frankly, staggering. I was in luck though, there were many videos detailing the use of services such as Jungle Scout. Essentially these services, which you paid for, are doing some sort of magic in the background of Amazon to pull all the data that is important to us out and present it in a usable format. I will use Jungle Scout for my examples, as it is the one I am using currently.

Step 1-a.....get Jungle Scout and start product research. So i headed over to the Jungle Scout website. Forty dollars a month?!!?!?! Does it make me coffee? Just remember Nike, Tate.....*just do it. So I took the plunge, and holy moly.... Worth it? Without a service like this, finding a product on Amazon worth getting into selling would be like finding a needle in a haystack... on mars... that you had to grow the grass for first. So what can Jungle Scout do? Let’s take a look.

First off, the most basic thing I have been using is the product tracker. Essentially you can find a product that you’d like to sell, add it to the product tracker on Jungle Scout, and watch it. Watch it? What’s it gonna do? Tricks?....well maybe. You can watch it for sales or inventory changes. You can see their exact restocking dates, profits, history of sales, etc. This comes in handy to get a more detailed view of what a product can do on Amazon. Correction, what is already being done by someone further along than you. Is that product just seasonally successful? Did it do well for a month, or two, and then die?

Moving on, jungle scout has a search system (product database) where you can identify your search criteria and locate every product on Amazon that matches it. So for my plan, I wanted a product I could procure without an overly huge startup cost. Something simple, made of a single material, etc. Dildos come to mind, but I didn't really want that to be my first product. I mean, if this thing flops (pun intended) then I end up with a couple hundred dildos in inventory that won't sell because of some defect like excessive floppiness.

I joke, but dildos actually ended up being my inspiration. Silicone is cheap, has a ton of shape options, and relatively light. So if I could find a product to sell based on silicone, it would meet most of my criteria. Easy to procure. Cheap to ship. Low Amazon fees. Super simple.

Booooom. Example 1. I found something that might work. Silicone sponges. Here is where we start using another service that Jungle Scout offers. Actually more of a product. It is a one-time purchase of a chrome extension. TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS?@?Q#$%3!!? This thing better do more than make me coffee.... Just do it Tate.... So this extension operates like an overlay while browsing Amazon. You can use it on a search page or on a product page. Using it on a search page will pull up products on that search page (with the ability to pull from the next pages) and then provides you with data on all of them. You can sort and manipulate the data as you need, but one of the more useful features here is the score. At the top right it provides a score based on the results, essentially telling you what the general demand and competition is for that product. The thing to remember with this tool is that it only crunches the numbers on what you searched. If the search results have 15 different products, the data you get on the Jungle Scout extension won't be super useful. Ugly in = Ugly out. So you need to remember to curate the list by removing products, or outliers, you don't care about. Once you’ve done that, you have a basic idea of how a product might do. High demand and low competition?? Perfect. Low Demand and High competition.? Move along.

Now that is all pretty simple, time consuming, and thought provoking, but simple. Let’s add the next layer of complexity....for those keeping track, step 1-c? Anyway, the only way to get a true idea of what a product might provide in profit is to determine what you can sell it for, how many you can sell, and how much you paid for it in the first place. Well, Jungle Scout has provided us an estimate of the first two answers. Now it’s time to find out what it can cost us to start. Using the silicone sponge example, we can head over to a site such as Alibaba (essentially the Amazon for finding suppliers). Here we can find a supplier that can make silicone sponges on the cheap.

hmmmmmm.....

Do some simple math, and that’s how we can go through those searches on Amazon with more useful information. At this point we’re moving into the realm of step 2, but only a little bit to get an idea of costs.

Step 1-c through... 1-whatever. Now the process is to go back and forth, modifying criteria, trying to find something Jungle Scout suggests might not be terrible, and then searching for potential suppliers on Alibaba. Long story short, I found a bunch of products that appeared to be decent, but in the end had too much competition, not enough demand, or seemed too pricey to get into for my first product. After a few weeks (off and on, I have a day job ya know) of searching I think I finally found something that might work.

So, tune in for the next part of the series where I’ll talk about the product I found.

I hope you enjoyed my rambling. Feel free to leave praise, or criticism. Also, please leave questions, if i can answer them, I will.