Comment by Peretus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Peretus | Hacker News Reader

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I completely agree with your opinion on the FBA (Fulfillment by Amazon) crowd being the same boat. It's not a great feeling to have your business built on someone else's platform and I'm doing everything I can at the moment to reduce our reliance on Amazon.

I'm surprised that you felt that selling things via FBA is scammy. I have a full-time job but I also own a business that (currently) grosses about $150K on Amazon. I can honestly say that I don't feel like we've out-manipulated anyone or have done anything but create a very competitive product that we're able to sell at a competitive price.

I agree that it quickly turns into a very painful race to the bottom when dozens of vendors are selling variations of the thing (e.g. silicone grill gloves or meat claws), but it's completely different when you're able to take the time to create a really great product. It's been a rewarding experience; I highly recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind answering the occasional support email and is completely committed to excellent customer service.

Yeah, there are definitely too many FBA sellers who are 100% reliant on the Amazon audience for sales. No online store (Shopify etc.), no marketing, no email list etc. It's hard hearing those cases where seller accounts get turned off for some reason and the seller has to fight to get them item back online.

As for some being "scammy" - yeah sure, there's definitely a bit of people looking to make a quick buck on whatever they can at FBA. Every market has that. But the people I've seen have the most success on FBA do just what you mentioned

- listen to the customer via reviews - improve value via product fixes, bundling, packaging, etc. - provide good feedback & service

That said - I don't know how anyone selling commodity, off-brand stuff does it. I could see that being a huge race to the bottom as stated. The only people I know doing FBA stuff are going the private label route to avoid competing solely on price.

My brother actually makes a full-time living off of FBA now via private label goods. He really enjoys being his own boss and providing a BETTER product than what was available before.

I sold my first FBA product, not a huge success, but validated the business model is real if you work at it. FYI - I've started compiling info for small-scale eCommerce sellers at http://www.privatelabelweekly.com for any sellers interested.

Care to share a little about your products, or at least the product category you inhabit?

Sure! We operate in the toys and games space, but regardless of the space I'd follow the same process: 1) Locate a mid-popularity product with a ranking of < 4.3 stars and what appears to be profitable margins 2) Look over the neutral and negative reviews looking for improvement suggestions and complaints customers have 3) Figure out an improvement or a way to fix the issues

People will tell you what they want in the reviews. The hard part is figuring out a way to fix it for a price they are willing to pay. Price wins on Amazon every time, unfortunately, so you have to be prepared to sell for less or equal to the competition while at the same time having a superior product. We sell a product for around $20 when the competitor is priced around $18. Our product is 4.9 out of 5 stars with ~400 reviews while the competitor has significantly more reviews but only around 4.5 stars. It's obvious to customers that they're paying a slight premium for a better product when they purchase from us, so we're able to compete. That being said, there's one direct competitor that sells a 3.8-star product for $12 that outsells us 4:1, showing once again that price wins on Amazon's platform.

If you have a superior product, the rest will take care of itself. The marketplace may change and the market may change, but if you have a great product and you offer amazing customer service you'll be fine.

Of course, I'm glossing over tons of details here, but that's the gist of it. You're welcome to ask questions here or follow up with a PM. I'll be glad to help in any way I can.

I think the case of the 4:1 product at about half the cost but wall less positive reviews also calls in to question how effective Amazon's presentation algorithms are.

A logical solution would be to have their ranked search cherry pick the highest (number and score) reviewed results for focus within a given price category.

However I normally hate their ranked search since it's results normally don't seem relevant to my needs. Thus I tend to manually do that by sorting by price and then eye-ball filtering for quality/look in picture (yeah, I used that as a quick filter for poor quality).

It would be nice if I could instead directly assign weights to different type of metrics and have Amazon present the list according to my score based on perceived importance. They could use the data from that and actual buying outcomes to tune their default filter (that one might better balance high scores on multiple metrics being sorted to the top of the list).

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