If you want to learn what has caused people to fail on Amazon and how to avoid them, then stop what ever else you’re doing and watch this video now.
Not only do we run our own successful physical products businesses on Amazon, we’ve taught over 30,000 people how to become successful sellers on Amazon and they’ve even been featured in Forbes Entrepreneurs Success Magazine and Business Insider.
After reading about the five deadly sins for selling on Amazon & how to avoid them, be sure to check out our FREE training series at Amazing Selling Machine, where you can learn how to build a successful business with Amazon.
So the first deadly sin of selling on Amazon is focusing on personal preference rather than on data. You know this is one of the biggest things that people had to get over and we started teaching them this model years ago. It’s that you know everyone has a brilliant product idea. There’s something that they want to sell that nobody’s ever sold and they think is going to do great. The problem is is that if you’re building a business to make money that’s a very risky way to do it. The good thing about selling on Amazon is Amazon gives you the data of what’s selling well. You can find out how many competitors are. You could find out how many reviews that they have. So Amazon has a massive amount of data but that gives you the opportunity to really filter down into opportunities that are proven with high sales volume and low competition. So you don’t have to guess. So don’t worry about you know trying to be the first person to market with some brilliant idea. Let Amazon tell you what the best products are and start there first.
Number two is not enough profit margin. And this one is absolutely huge because if you don’t have enough profit margin you’re not going to be able to take advantage of really putting any marketing efforts into it. One of the biggest things on Amazon right now is Amazon’s marketing plan from our advertising platform in a way you can really dominate your competition is making sure you have enough profit margin in there to actually afford to spend ads. And the big thing that happens with this is people tend to get a little lazy when they start looking at the pricing. They just find out exactly what the manufacturer will sell it for and they say Okay well then I can sell at this price and there is a profit margin but there’s more to it than that. And Amazon actually has a fantastic free tool that allows you to know exactly what to target what your expenses will be. And in my personal opinion I recommend no less than 20 percent profit margin. You really want to focus for around 30 percent. That’s a really a magic number where it gives you a lot of freedom to be able to spend money to grow and market your product and then be able to take profit out for yourself as well.
The third deadly sin is selling a low quality product. A lot of times when somebody comes to us that’s who they’ve been through our training or has never been through our training and they’re like I don’t understand why my business isn’t working. One of the first things we always look at is their product. Are they selling a good high quality product. I’m a one time we were sitting in a private mastermind and this guy had his product up on the screen and was like I don’t know maybe I’m not doing some of the advertising stuff right. But Jason was talking about I’m not getting my traffic from outside of Amazon to work well and the people are giving them nice marketing ideas. And I started looking at his reviews and I was like looks like your product doesn’t actually work. That’s something that you need to sort out first before anything else. Otherwise you’re going to be fighting bad reviews. You’re not going to get as many positive reviews.
You’re not going to get as many referrals sales and repeat buyers. So first things first. Make sure you have a good high quality product that you’re selling on Amazon.
Poor inventory management. This one will kill your business. And when you’re first launching on Amazon and first starting you’re going to run out of inventory. We actually never recommend anyone buying too much inventory because you want to make sure your product first sells. But then once your product starts selling then you gotta take strict control of your inventory because one of the things that happened is as you run out of inventory and other people are able to take the momentum that your product being void has gained once you get your inventory back in you have to fight climb and scrape to be able to get those sales back. It takes you a lot more spending on Amazon ads. It is just a lot of work. But if you forecast and I recommend trying to do a 24 month you can do a 12 month but almost a 24 month rolling forecast of your expected inventory needs so that you can really understand how much inventory you have how long it’s going to be and you can order in the right amount of time poor inventory management will absolutely crush a business.
The fifth and final deadly sin is focusing on traffic before conversion. A lot of times you know especially if you like marketing especially if you’re trying to build your business fast. Like I just want to start getting sales and the easiest way you think to get sales is to start just turning on ads.
Maybe you’re turning on Amazon ads maybe you’re turning on Facebook ads or any other source of traffic you have access to your posting on social media.
Any way you can get people to find and buy your product. You start doing that stuff first. The problem is if that’s backwards you want to make sure before you start especially spending money for people to go check out your product on Amazon that you have a good high quality product listing and on Amazon that means good photos good title good bullet points good description at least a handful of good solid reviews because if you get all that stuff in place first then all of that traffic is going to be way more profitable otherwise you may spend too much money on ads and be like ad is business just isn’t working. Just keep losing money. I don’t really get it but if you would have just focused on creating the best listing possible first then turning on the ads much more profitable and you’re off and running it can start scaling your business.
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