Finding Another Way

An Amazon FBA Journey, There and Back Again

This is the Third part of my series chronicling my journey/learning experience with Amazon FBA in search of a side hustle. Actually I’m really hoping to just make it big, get rich, and never work a 9-5 again....

So let's begin at the normal place you begin.... Where you left off last time obviously. Take a look at Part Two

Step 2 we discussed was next, let’s take a look at the steps again...

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....???

So locate a supplier, got it. Well we did that at the end of part 2, but that’s not good enough. From my time as an engineer (my day job) I deal with suppliers and such on a regular basis, so I already knew that finding a single source and just picking it wouldn’t be a good business choice. I contacted about 5 different suppliers for this particular product (silicone wine glasses) and asked them all a similar question.

Here’s where you might ask yourself... How do I talk to suppliers? What do I say? Why would they care about this random individual with no money? Well... My answer is, fake it till you make it. The same concept can be applied to job interviews. Act like you already have the job. Dress the part. Talk like you’ve been doing this a while. Give yourself a cool title because it may feel silly but it’s the goal you are striving for. Here is an example of what I sent to suppliers.

Greetings,

I am looking to procure a product such as yours pictured here. Your manufacturing capabilities in this regard will also inform my company if you would be a good supplier for a few other similar products (minimum monthly sales per product 400+).

I would like to start a dialog with you on the subject (to eventually include your lead time and shipping capabilities). Additionally I'd like to see what the cost of a sample and/or production quality part would be.

Looking forward to working with you.

Thanks for your time,

Tate Townsend
Procurement Lead - Prolyon

Simple as that. I provided inputs to the supplier indicating a decent amount of sales to them, as well as future sales on other products if I enjoy using them. I requested information on lead time, shipping, samples, and production parts. From this point the next thing to do is wait for replies.

Spoiler alert - All the suppliers responded. Keeping in mind these are suppliers from China and not all of them will have perfect English speaking correspondents...I had to sift through the ones that were hard to understand or price point was way off. In general I wanted to find a supplier I could easily communicate my requirements to. Here was a good point to recall all the things I needed to know.

Samples

1. How good is the quality?
   1.1Cost of the sample?
   1.2 Shipping cost?
2. Production cup
   2.1 Cost per cup
   2.2 What quantities will get me a discount?
   2.3 Is there a future discount after the first order?
3. Lead Times
   3.1 How long will it take for an order to be produced?
   3.2 How long in total from order to receiving it in the USA (at amazon)?
4. Full Order Shipping
   4.1 Capability, can they ship to the USA?
   4.2 Cost?

A lot of questions to get answered here, but luckily for us, this is what they do... so most of the questions should be normal and they should be prepared with the answers.

I decided on one of the suppliers. English communication was good (slight grammatical errors and such....far better than my non existent chinese)

Source: Giphy

Sample cost was zero dollars, but shipping for the sample would be around $40.00. This is just something to expect, a startup cost like the analytical tools we’ve already bought. The best thing to do here is to get everything you can on one shipment. This supplier was capable of making both shapes of cup that I was looking at and I asked her to send me both for inspection. I also decided it might be beneficial for my Amazon listing to have a bonus. I noticed the supplier was capable of producing silicone wine bottle corks which looked promising (these are also selling very well, possibly better than the cups). Without being asked she offered to include a couple examples of their corks as well as some glass markers (little clips or suction cup stickers basically). Simply by mentioning my interest in products they could make I was able to get a package of samples including 2 cups, 2 corks, and 6-8 markers for free (plus shipping). Time to wait for it to arrive.

Source: Giphy

Fast forward about a week and a half (pretty quick considering they had to wait for a production run of one of the pieces).

Source: Giphy

The samples arrived and were exactly what I expected. I forgot to mention, while the samples were being shipped I ordered the cheapest competitor cup on Amazon so I’d have a good comparison to what I want to be better than. The cups from my sample supplier were much better than the competitor’s, which was expected based on the fact it was one of the cheaper alternatives.

The corks were also good quality, a bit of a surprise to realize one of the corks is designed as two pieces essentially turning it into a pouring spout. Super cool. The markers ended up being a letdown. None of them work properly on the silicone cup, having been designed to work on glass. That’s fine though, I wasn’t overly interested in them at this time anyway.

I think this is a good point to cut this part off. Let’s recap.

Step 2, Find a supplier

1. We located multiple suppliers
2. Contacted them all using big words and fancy jargon (sorta)
3. Decided on one to move forward with based on ease of communication
4. Ordered samples, being sure to mention all our needs (and get more free stuff)
5. Inspected the samples

In the next part we’ll try to break the cups (since they are supposed to be unbreakable) while we communicate more with the supplier, and move on to step 3 and beyond.

Source: Giphy

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