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Comment by jlangenauer | Hacker News Reader

I think "business" is far too grand a word for what's being described here. This is old school trading - buying something, and selling it for more than you bought it.

But it's being done in a highly competitive environment, where everything is commodified. Alibaba has commodified manufacturing, shipping was always a commodity, and Amazon has commodified the marketing and fulfilment end.

The problem with commodities is that it's very difficult to create a competitive advantage - if you do happen to find one, it'll be transient and fleeting as others cotton on to it.

I hope the author is also keeping track of the time he spends on this. At $7.64 profit per item, assuming he does sell all 200 handbags, that's $1528 in profit. If he's spent 152 hours on this, that's just $10/hour for his effort. If he ends up spending 211 hours, he's earning less than the US minimum wage.

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I assume, if successful, he will be able to expand to tens of product categories and get volumes into the thousands or tens of thousands, and then his 'hourly rate' could end up looking better.

Most chinese suppliers are very willing to make changes to the product too, so it's quite possible to make some small design tweaks to improve the quality of the product (I always rewrite all the instruction manuals to be real english, and sometimes add weights to plastic items so they don't feel 'cheap'). That can give your product an edge over competitors with minimal effort.

"add weights to plastic items"

sigh

It turns out that density is a big bit of what makes you think a product is high quality.

Take an iPhone for example - it's more dense than pretty much any other phone out there.

People say they want light stuff, but they actually buy thin but dense stuff.

Have you ever opened an old phone earpiece, maybe as a kid? They contained a big slab of cut metal inside.

Weight, or more appropriately density, is a big part of how an object "feels" in your hands.

It is a common practice.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3131799/A-ch...

He said side income + experiment. If he can do many products we are talking about different price per hour. And you can do the work in Thailand near beach.

A friend of mine is making many thousands of dollars profit per month from FBA. It's real.

Through his own trademark or just like link above?

Like the link. Started with one product and was willing to loose a few grand, now has about 5 products doing really well. He just went over to China to meet people to expand into new products.

Is he aware that Trump ended the program that subsidizes shipping cheap products from China? I imagine this will pretty much kill all FBA when it goes into effect

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/trump...

FBA isn't just used for generic products from Alibaba, it will survive no matter what happens with China.

Almost all sellers I saw were happy about that. FBA sellers are importing in bulk, not in small packages that were subsidized under UPU.

That's for direct to consumer mail shipping (USPS) that like DxExtreme, Wish, Aliexpress, etc use. FBA shipments are usually sent directly in bulk to an Amazon warehouse from China thru normal commercial shipping companies and wouldn't be affected.

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