Peddling the ‘Secrets’ to Getting Rich on Amazon
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Wait what... I can't even. It's not Amazon's fault you bought something no one wanted then tried to sell it. You wanted easy money and it doesn't exist. You CHOSE to ship directly to Amazon so you didn't have to handle shipping, you CHOSE a quality item that kept breaking, they CHOSE to use Amazon, any they CHOSE to order a huge quantity of crap.
I simply cannot understand people who think like this. They plopped down a ton of money on something they didn't fully understand in a get-rich-quick-scheme and then blame the marketplace for their failures.
Can you make money doing this? Absolutely but it takes more research, time, and effort all of which they decided was beneath them and then got all mad when it didn't result in them raking in the money.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/10/03/654124255/epis...
Such people are the subject of several Coen Brother movies, including Fargo, Burn After Reading, Ladykillers, and so on...
(Not that I don't feel for them though. It sucks to lose your savings, even if you did it by being greedy/stupid).
Naive economic intuition has proven shockingly bad - especially historically. It is one thing not to grok rate of returns or market direction or make poor investments. Those people would be geniuses compared to historic economic fallacies.
We are talking things like the Ancient greeks thinking wealth could only be earned by conquest (logically implying that someone who conquered the entire world and enslaved it would be very rich but would not grow wealthier) and medieval thinking that merchants had to be frauds to sustain themselves given that goods had a value the same everywhere - despite the fact travel was known to be slow risky and expensive meaning just being a transporter is clearly an honest service even with the fallacious universal value assumption. Even if you are a lord who can afford something you may not have the time to travel to exotic locales to buy it directly from the source.
1. Find, maintaining, and keeping a high quality manufacturer in China is hard but doable.
2. Building a brand and audience is hard but doable.
3. Creating intellectual property and protecting it is hard but doable.
The folks I know who sell a lot on Amazon do all of these three things decently, and one (often more) extremely well.
From the sound of it, the folks in the article made a lame attempt at #1 and maybe a token attempt at #2 via Amazon ads.
This low level of effort simply will not cut it for most products.
I helped turn a sinking Amazon small business around last year. They did a little over $2m revenue. One of our promotions became so viral that we had $2000+ in orders with less than $20 in ad spend within a few hours. In this sense, things are always changing but I don't think it has ever been this easy to start a business with so little.
Information changes quickly so you can burn a lot of money on outdated information or pure ignorance. For example, my $2m+ client would probably have failed or were on the verge of failing because they weren't able to adapt to Amazon's increased competition in the last year. They had no idea what keyword ranking was, how to identify keywords, drive traffic, or launch products because they never needed to in the past. Because things change so quickly it is very hard to find experts who maintain their expertise... However once you understand the fundamentals, learn how to surf, riding the Amazon waters gets a lot easier.
If you can learn quickly and adapt, Amazon is still a gold mine, some risk involved, but with great payouts.
Or it's above them and they fell victim to a Dunning-Kruger situation?
> One of the constant themes is the silent sucker—the person who was taken in but doesn’t want anyone to know,” Balleisen told me. Today’s America is very pro-entrepreneur, anti–big government; many Americans don’t have sympathy for people who lose their money to these kinds of schemes, he said. We celebrate the self-made man who starts a successful business from scratch, but mock the people who get duped trying to do the same thing. No one wants to admit that they’re the only one who can’t make it work.
So if someone is selling you an expensive tool that will help make you rich, ask yourself why they aren't using that same tool themselves. (and if the answer is "I have all the money I need, I just want to help other people... then ask why they are charging $4000 for it...)
Caveat emptor
So yeah, filtering for your situation is the hard part, but you can't rely on someone else to do that filtering unless you're paying him to do it specifically for your situation.
No, of course not. Companies (and individuals) must specialize at some level. And I personally feel some of our largest companies have overstepped that line.
The best thing is that if you come back to me later and say you didn't find any gold at all, I can just tell you that you just need to give it more time... or that you didn't read all of the instructions and use it properly.
But once you hear of other people doing something (drop-shipping items from China to Amazon, or cryptocurrency mining), chances are very good that you will have too much competition. The only way to make it big is if you get into that business before you hear of it off the street.
Two economists are sitting at home. One says "Lets go out and look for $100 bills in the street." The other says "There are better ways to make money."
What is yours about?
This is the worst reason to not start a business. Markets are often big enough for multiple companies and many billion dollar companies were started in a market with previous competition, then dominated them by being better.
First mover advantage is a myth. It's hardly an advantage. It's only a disadvantage when the market is already flooded with options and a 2-3 monopolies already exist with it.
I avoid Amazon for anything other than books, lately. For anything else, there's no telling what you'll actually get.
As noted previously on HN, they're even selling fake books on Amazon. One was a Python programming guide.
it's pretty crappy because the author is going to make nothing off the sale, and i paid full-price for a defective item. obviously amazon doesn't care since they get their cut either way, and the fake is good enough that 99% of people wouldn't notice/complain.
Not sure if they'd do that for like a TV or something, but certainly anything under about £50 is an immediate refund with no-questions-asked it seems.
Now granted the gold profit is taking a cut but at the same time for both if they're so sure this is a great investment....
Plus if you control enough $$$ you can start controlling the market.
The reason people with big funds are focussed on growing their assets under management is they get an annual fee for assets under management, and this is therefore more reliable than the "outperformance" fee that they also charge.
There's your problem.
Heck even before that you have a big problem in your worldview. That you would choose to go into business and complain about making a loss after it didn't work out. If that's your mindset you're not ready to go into business.
"I'll teach you how to get rich on the internet." OK. Here's my money - now how do you get rich on the internet? "Simple. You teach people how to get rich on the internet."
I'll cut people some slack. It takes a little while to figure that one out if it's your first rodeo. But at some point hopefully you realize that "getting rich on the internet" and "getting rich" have the exact same fundamentals. And if you're learning tactics before you learn strategy you're going to get your ass handed to you on the battlefield.
It is a jungle out there.
And the flat cost of dead load storage is bad and similar enough for both cases.
Uhhh... People should know not to try to sell anything FBA that's fragile; Amazon never packages or handles fragile products correctly. Should have been covered in the webinar... obviously these people are just out to get a quick buck, not actually help others sell on Amazon. That and they partnered with a Chinese manufacturer that had minimum orders in the thousands... that seems like a ridiculous commitment for something that's essentially an experiment.
These people who fell for this seem like the same sorts of people who fall for MLMs...
I remember someone calling into Dave Ramsey's show saying they spent something like $60,000 on these "get rich seminars" going through different "levels" and didn't even make a penny. Unbelievable...
Just even the "how the hell do I get started?!" question (put yourself in the shoes of an absolute newbie with a blank computer - how do you even start programming? Like do you write stuff in MS Word and Save As 'myapp.exe'? Someone entirely new wont know without help) is helped by a classroom situation.
Selling stuff on amazon is pretty simple by comparison. Sign up, buy and ship some stuff to their warehouse, click a few buttons to create a listing, then wait for sales. I could 100% imagine my mum working this out on her own, but I see zero-chance of her managing to write "hello world" in javascript on her own without considerable coaching and help.
Maybe 12 weeks is also unrealistic unless they accept people who already have experience. $100k is $60k after taxes, which might cover rent in San Francisco.
Sure sounds like nothing has changed from P. T. Barnum's time who supposedly said "There's a sucker born every minute"
1. Solve a problem, which creates value, which is something people will pay you for.
2. Have a shtick and find a way to monetize it. i.e. be the "Let's get ready to RUMBLE!!!!" dude.
Sometimes I cringe when I see Ask HN posts with this term. Even though the answers are usually sincere and illuminating, it seems that the motivation for seeking out this type of information is usually to find an idea for an easy niche to monetize, which is what a lot of the consumers of these "Amazon expert" courses are after, too.
[1] https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/117-the-worlds-most-ex...
Oh, of course. Easy.
Nothing in life is free except a hard time. These "I'll show you how to make passive income" schemes have been around long before the internet. It's sad, but they prey on the people too desperate for an easy way to wealth to think logically.
These two took advantage of desperate people. There is little to no money to be made on AMZN today. No one is getting rich anymore.
Really? That's like saying there's little to no money to be made in entrepreneurship today. Are you saying everyone on AMZN operates their business at 0% or less net profit margin? Because that's essentially what you are saying.
To stand a chance at making some money as a small business (and I'm saying the more typical "some money", not the "strike the motherlode" type language many of the make.money.fast type scams promote), you have to have a good product idea, and do the full work of the low-margin retail business, with all that this entails.
In this regard I do imagine it's possible to make some money via Amazon with a traditional retail business. But even though it's the behemoth of American e-commerce, Amazon probably should not be a product's only Internet retail outlet. (You should probably have your own e-commerce site for a start... and other more focused outlets, especially if they fit a product's niche -- like, say, Newegg for a computing oriented product -- should also be pursued.)
I love how the author mentions this casually without any further context on why someone would think selling SLIME was a good idea in the first place.
SLIME!
Slime has been one of the most popular fads over the last few years. It even got to the point a while back that stores ran out of glue.
I’d say now the fad has mostly run its course, though I still see kits for sale at Walmart.
https://www.npr.org/2017/10/01/552422040/the-rise-of-the-sli...
To sell "how to get rich" information clearly implies that the seller is not getting rich. If they were, and even if they were exceptionally generous and wanted to share the knowledge, they wouldn't bother charging money for it.
Not to mention the franchise collects commission on the franchisee's ongoing sales, not just a lump sum up front and say "you're on your own, have fun." It's quite a different ballgame altogether.
If someone really is "retired but wants to help people", I would expect to see the core educational content available for free (or near distribution cost) with the option to pay for one-on-one coaching/consulting services.
There are plenty of ways to make money that aren't zero sum competitive markets. Some people want to share what they know and aren't hurt by it. But writing that stuff up costs time and energy, so charging for it makes sense.
It's a tad bit below my moral standards.