Found a seller that I liked the look of on Alibaba and bought in some samples with my branding the samples looked good.

Now going to place the bigger order and I dont know if its languages barriers or theyre trying to shaft me on $ - but they keep seeming to come up with excuses and going back on their word.

E.g. originally there was no MOQ, then it didnt matter as long as they had 1000 pieces - then theyre saying it has to be 25 MOQ per SKU, because of the time it takes for them to make each product etc.

It's a bit of a headfuk..

My plan was to store the products at my house and sell via shopify + amazon + etsy + ebay and ship them out myself and see what happens, but if it starts taking off then ship direct to Amazon FBA and maybe look into shipping some to an American Amazon warehouse too and selling on amazon.com to cover europe + USA.

Would be good to share some tips/tricks in here.

It's all private label stuff btw.

You might already know this, but you can send everything to Amazon warehouse and still fulfill to eBay, Shopify etc. Either way, Merchant fulfilling is a huge pain in the arse unless you're only doing a few sales a day. Would gladly pay the FBA fee.

Goodluck brah, saturated market. Every stay at home mom is doing this

I didn't actually know that, so that's handy to know. So basically you ship everything to Amazon and if a customer orders from ebay or my shopify account - it will get auto dispatched from the Amazon warehouse and they will ship it? Sounds good!

I checked the pricing for Amazon FBA (its pretty confusing on their site) but it looked like for small packages that were light - then the storage was pretty cheap and i think each product was like £1.46 to ship with Prime (next day and same day) all over Europe.

I was thinking of starting the first batch order (around 1000-1500) storing them from home and manually shipping, just because I dont know how quickly they will sell etc.It's just a side gig tbh. I'm looking at clothing, which ties into my main income source too and I've already got a client database of ~2-3K people who'd be interest and a lot have already expressed interest too. If I can get any organic sales from people finding it on social media / amazon / ebay / shopify / etsy etc searches - then that would be awesome.

Not looking to set the world on fire here - using it more as a lesson. If it makes £10-25K /yr profit, then happy days - if I dont make anything - I've still taught myself the process of it , so if I change product down the line I'll know what to do.

Think of it like how youtubers sell merch.

FBA is just a tool. Nothing saturated about creating products and selling them. FBA just provides you with a place to store and distribute your products. I would try to focus on drastically improving/changing a product instead of just slapping your label on something though. It will create a much more sustainable business.The only thing is, you still have to tell it where to go. It doesn't automatically integrate as far as I know, at this point. Still some manual work, but still better than storing product at your home imo.

I used to make a living doing this back in 2015-2017. Still sell things every once in a while on eBay. Amazon was tough because you need to be approved to sell things in certain categories

That's a valuable skill

Not on Amazon but have own ecom.


My take:
* Having your own logo raises the MOQ. People think people give a fuk about their "brand" but they usually don't. You can start off with selling a plain product first with no "branding" to it. If you have a low price, people won't care about brand.
* Its better to have a bigger variety of products rather than few products in huge quantities




As for the seller, disregard him. Communication is #1 key, and if they are unclear, hesitant, vague, and only answers to every other question, its often bad news that will lead to headache. Your order quantity doesn't match with what he wants to sell, do both a favour and don't force it.

Ouch! Feel for the get rich on amazon scheme.

Not long before your suckin dinks for a living.


ouch!!

That sounds cool. Definitely worth looking into. Do you know if Amazon FBA organise/file everything for you? Or do you need to ship them the products seperately packaged within their SKU. E.g. 1 bag full of Product number X, Size Y - another bag of Product Number X, Size X? Or are they smart enough to figure that all out? I'm not expecting much seeing as they seem to charge so little.

I think what I'll do is order say 25 in each SKU, then ship maybe 5 of each of those to Amazon to test the waters at first and see how they get on.

I think also, my order is coming through at $9700 USD - so I'm going to have to presumably pay for some kind of shipping/logistics insurance policy on this.

I didnt get taxed on my first order either - not sure if thats because they were samples, or because it was just luck - or because it was under $150 or something? But im hoping I dont have to pay an extra 20-30% VAT/import fees on a 10k order lol.

btw strong saying FBA is over saturated. Thats like saying Fedex is oversatured lmao. If youre selling some generic wolf mug product that everyone will copy and undercut you on - then yeah its bad news.Thats cool- why did you stop?

I toyed with the idea of selling sex toys on amazon before in the past - but they were damn near impossible to advertise and banned against selling and I didnt want to end up with like 10,000 dildos in my house ha.100%. You learn a lot.
Own logo definitely raises MOQ and cost - I get that. If I was selling like something productive (say like a pen, or a flashlight, or BBQ utensils etc) then yeah a branding is pointless. But i'm doing this more like a merch type thing which is based off my brand / useful for normal people too but they wouldnt know the connotations etc - so its kinda needed.

100% agree with the bigger variety, at least that way you can see whats in demand and double down on that.

Do you stick to a big variety within related items though? Or branch off to other similar products too? Say youre selling sleeping bags for example (im not btw lol) - would you buy 20 different types of sleeping bags and colours and sizes? Or would you buy say 10 sleeping bags, then camping equipment, clothing, expensive stuff, cheap stuff.

My take: There are many ways to rome, and all strategies work if you go at it. So just do whatever. Constraints breed creativity - so you'll always have that.



When starting out, understand you're in an explorative phase. You're starting a new game which you have never played and there is no tutorial for. You have to learn, get to know/find the customers and fine tune it. I've seen many fail because they come up with assumptions; "I will sell ___ product, for ____ price, and become a millionaire". But then it doesn't go exactly as they fantasised it would, so they lose motivation for it.

Seek to understand and stay curious, much better way imo.



Regarding the 10/20 different sleeping bags; how will you split the order? Many will split it equally in each color, but more likely a few options will be much much more in demand than all the others. By having a small amount of each and putting it for sale you can quickly get a sense of what variants are more in demand, and then order better quantities based on that

Protip when dealing with chinese people (alibaba sales reps)

Make a new alibaba account with some asian dudes profile pic/name and speak in broken chinese. You will now unlock bargaining ability where they usually won't provide for others.

"E.g. originally there was no MOQ, then it didnt matter as long as they had 1000 pieces - then theyre saying it has to be 25 MOQ per SKU, because of the time it takes for them to make each product etc."

Completely normal. You need to be as clear as possible from the start and this includes all the extras you would want

"My plan was to store the products at my house and sell via shopify + amazon + etsy + ebay and ship them out myself and see what happens, but if it starts taking off then ship direct to Amazon FBA and maybe look into shipping some to an American Amazon warehouse too and selling on amazon.com to cover europe + USA."

Send most to your amazon fba and keep a few at home for marketing use and shopify sales etc.


Also be ready to calculate your new profit margins after finding out how much these companies fee you on anything they can.