My own experience selling on Amazon – and what I learnt

Welcome to the Bring your product Idea to Life podcast. This is the podcast for you if you're getting started selling products or if you'd like to create your own product to sell.

I'm Vicki Weinberg, a product creation coach and Amazon expert. Every week I share friendly practical advice as well as inspirational stories from small businesses. Let's get started.

Hello and welcome to another bonus Amazon made Easy episode. So today I want to talk about something we haven't actually covered quite a while on the podcast, which I can't quite, quite believe.

It's something I feel like I should talk about all the time, which is my own story of selling my products on Amazon. Now, I have done an episode in Bring a product idea to Life before talking in real detail about how and why I created my first product.

So I'm not going to go into masses of detail here because you can go and listen to that episode if you'd like to know more about how I got started.

So I'm going to give you the brief version, but then the thing I thought you might find really interesting is I sort of been doing a bit of reflection on, based on my own. My own story time I spent as an Amazon seller and obviously where it's led me to.

Now I was thinking back and thinking, okay, what were some of the things that I did really well when I was selling on Amazon and what are some of the things that I could have done better that maybe you can all learn from? So hopefully you will find this interesting business.

I've been doing a bit of reflection and I think it's quite interesting and hopefully you will too, because when I look back, there are actually some surprising things that I found out and I think it serves me really well when I work with. With clients now. So I started selling on Amazon and I can't remember the year. It was eight or nine years ago. I had one product, a single sku.

I also had a shop store, but I knew that I always wanted to sell on Amazon. So my.

The story briefly is that I was listening to a podcast about people who were selling yoga products on Amazon and the podcast really sold it to me. You know, the benefits of having an online business and not having to, you know, trade time for money and all of that.

And I was like, oh, this sounds really good. So I always knew I wanted to sell my products on Amazon, but I did also know that I needed my own website as well.

And actually that is one of the things I did do right. I did have a website as well as selling on Amazon and I think that was a really good call. I'm very glad that I did that.

So I sold baby products and my first product was a box of four bamboo baby swaddles. They were really high quality. They had no. They were 100 bamboo. They had no chemicals, not even in the dyes. They came in a lovely gift box.

I think they were really great. They were unisex, they were massive. They were designed to last a long time. I think they were a really, really good product.

And that is the first product that I had. That was the first product I listed on Amazon but that was quickly followed by some other products.

So I also had baby towels, baby bowls and plates and. Yeah, bowls and towels, baby bowls and spoons and plates and spoons. And they all came in a variety of colours. There were lots of color variations.

I ended up, I think of around 20 SKUs. In the end I had quite a lot and they all ended up on Amazon. I'm going to say now I'm really proud of all my products. I think they were.

I think the products themselves were great and yeah, it's one of actually the things I'm. I'm most proud of doing. If you want to hear why I stopped doing it, that's another episode as well. So I won't go into that now.

Let's talk a little bit more about Amazon. So as I said, Amazon was always in the plan.

I, as I said, I started with one product but I did know and something that I'd heard was that when you add subsequent products to Amazon, it can help with sales of your original products and having a range can actually be a really good thing. And that did turn out to be the case for me and I was selling on Amazon for a really long time.

I think it was four or five years in total until I stopped and I did really well over that time and I'm going to go through some of the reasons I think I did and some things you may find useful to know. So the first thing is, as I said, I have my own website. So I set up my website before I was on Amazon. I think that's really good.

I think having somewhere with customers and go find out more about you and your brand is always really good. And also I did lots of research before I created my product and before I listed on Amazon.

I guess I kind of did this in tandem because I always knew that I wanted to sell on Amazon.

A lot of my research into other products was on Amazon so I looked to see who else was Selling similar products, what were they selling them for, what were the features? I read the reviews, I found out what customers liked about them, what they I didn't like about them.

I looked at the price, I looked at absolutely everything.

And so by the time I came to list my products on Amazon I had a really good idea of where my products fit price wise, how I wanted to pitch it, what my USP was and have to say I think I had a really good product listing. I had really good text, I had some great images, I had lots of lifestyle images. So as I said I had baby products.

So I remember doing something on my local Facebook group looking for people with babies and then toddlers for some of the other products to model the products. My own daugh remodeled them. So I had loads of lifestyle shots of all of the products which I had taken which was really good.

I also had a video so I had a video talking about the brand and the story. I also had some product videos that my daughter was in showing how to use and the different products and I even had some A plus content.

Funnily enough the other day I found one of my old product listings on Amazon. I've got no idea how it's still on there and it's only for one of my products.

For some reason all the bullet points have disappeared but you can still see the titles there and the A content was there.

This was such a long time ago I'm amazed that a content was a thing but it was and and this was before the days you could have comparison tables on the bottom of a content. And if I haven't spoke about this before, I love comparison tables because you can show all the products in your range if you have a range.

I often see people use them to show the different colors so they might have a say.

For example, I was selling bowls, plates, towels and swaddles and I do see a lot of examples where will use the comparison table on the bottom of their listing for their bamboo bowls as an example to show all the different colours. But you don't need to do that, they're at the top.

So what I would suggest doing if you're selling bamboo bowls and you have a whole other range of products is in the comparison table have those other products, particularly if they're complementary products. I think that's such a good idea to encourage cross selling because not everyone will go to your store, not everyone will know that you have a store.

A store is good but they're on that product page already. Have a look at Mahabson table in your A content is great.

Funnily enough, when I, like I said when I was doing this, you couldn't even have comparison tables. It wasn't a thing in A plus content. It was really, really basic. But I have got a section at the bottom and I where I say, here are my other products.

I've got like a picture of each of them, a little bit of text. It doesn't link through to them or anything like that. It was way too early, actually. I looked at and I thought, wow, this is really basic.

But it was, at the time it was, I was. When A plus content was introduced, I was like, right, this is great.

And I think jumping on and using it was something I did really well and I still, and I still stand by that. So, yeah, I think that was really useful.

Also, looking back at my old text, so as I say, the listing that I had on Amazon, you can't, most of you can't see anymore. I have got all my product listing text and I was having a look through that as well.

And I was thinking, I actually think I did a really good job on that. Which isn't a massive surprise because for anyone who doesn't know, I do come from a communications background.

I've got some copy copyrighting experience. I do know how to write copy.

But I was something I was particularly impressed with when I look at my old Amazon product listings is how well I explained why to buy. I think I actually had something in there that said, why buy this bamboo baby towel, whatever it is.

And then I told the customer why I literally did it that blatantly.

I don't know if that's the way you do it now or not, but actually I think it was really good because I was really confident in what made my product different. What made it at the time the best product around. It won't be now, of course, because plenty of others have come along.

But at the time it was the biggest, it was the thickest, it was the softest bamboo baby towel you could buy. And I tell people that and I wasn't afraid of telling people that. And I actually think that's a really good thing to do.

And I also shared the USP of the brand really well. When I look through all of my old product listing text, it's really clear what the values of the brand were.

So I was wanting to create products that were unisex that also lasted beyond that baby stage. So my products that are towels and swaddles were all really big. They could be used for Other things.

So for example, when my daughter grew out of the swaddles, she was able to use them as a sheet on her bed in the summer. The towel, you know, interestingly, she's nearly nine. She still can use those towels.

She doesn't very often because they're, you know, they're towels for small children. But she could actually still. It's still viable as a towel. It's still, it really is that big.

And the bowls and the plates deliberately had no branding on the side or anywhere visible. Just a little bit of branding on the base so that once you didn't need the suction element anymore, you could still use them.

And actually we still use my tiny chipmunk bamboo bowls because they are beautiful bowls and they're still lasting. And that was a big point of the brand and we got that across really well in the product listing. I also did lots and lots of testing.

So I ran ads and I got really good at how to do ads. I did a B testing of main product images to see which one would encourage the most click throughs. I tweaked titles. I was often sort of doing things.

I would also change things based on what I could find out. So for example, quite early on I realized that Amazon was damaging a lot of my products when they were delivering them to customers.

And it was because the box wasn't quite sturdy enough, which obviously I had no idea about until this happened. Because I mean you've probably had delivery from Amazon and you can sometimes, so you might have seen sometimes the state in which they're left.

I didn't realize they'd be thrown about quite so much. My boxes weren't that sturdy. And then in my reviews people were saying the product arrived and the box was damaged.

But that was great because I was constantly reviewing things and I was, in my reviews I could see what people were saying. That was something I was able to fix. And then also I was able to tweak my text to mention the fact that we had this new box as well.

So I didn't want to put people off buying again if they bought previously and you know the product has come damaged. I wanted to let them know that I'd dress that and the box was better. So that was all in my listings. I corresponded with customers as well.

So back in those days and unfortunately you can't do this now is I had auto email set up so when someone, when the product was delivered, people would get an autoresponder email from me a couple of days later asking them to Leave a review, giving them some tips on how to use the product.

And the important thing was whenever somebody asked for a return, which luckily it wasn't that often, they would get an email from me saying, oh, I'm really sorry you want to return this? Is there anything I can do to help?

And actually that is something that can, you know, that is something that rented a lot more reviews because I was able to speak to customers and they were able to tell me what was wrong and I could often address it, which would mean they wouldn't leave me a bad review because I'd already better fixed whatever was wrong.

Unfortunately, as I say, this isn't something you can do now, but something I did that you can still do is I had something in my packaging the get customers over to my website. So I had a little insert came in the packaging, said, thanks for ordering. If you want 10% off your next order, go to this website.

And there was a little code that was a really, really good way of getting customers over to my Shopify store. And as I say, I think having the Shopify store as well as Amazon was really beneficial. It meant I could start building an email list.

So when new products released, obviously, yes, they went onto Amazon, obviously they were on Shopify as well. It meant that I could tell people, you know, what I was, what I was doing. I could talk to them about new products.

If I was running a sale, whether that was on Amazon, my website, I could let people know about it. So I think that was really beneficial. And you can still put product inserts in your, inside your product packaging if you want to.

And actually something I've seen that people do and I get this a lot, you know, as a customer, when I buy on Amazon is also I sometimes get a little QR code to leave a review because as we all know, getting reviews on Amazon super, super hard. I can't promise that leaving a code asking people to give you a review is going to get you more reviews. But then it's hard, right?

We all need to do what we can. And the other thing that I did that I think was really good, two more things actually related to inventory.

So I actually started using Invent, using Amazon to fulfill my Shopify orders, which while it cost me a little bit more money, it meant that I didn't have to go to the post anymore because I absolutely hated doing that. And one of the reasons I used Amazon FBA was so I didn't have to do that.

Although that does lead me to something that I would change, which we'll come to in a moment.

And the final thing I think I did really well is I was on top of it enough that I had a really good understanding of which colors sold best, particularly in the bowls and plates which came in I think seven colors each. So that meant that when it came to reordering, I had a really good idea of which colors to order more of, which colors to order less of.

And again, when I was sending stock into Amazon, I had an idea of, you know, how many of each descend in at each time as well. So that's the things I think I was doing really well, hopefully you find interesting. And now I'm going to talk about the things I did not so well.

So I mentioned that I got really good at knowing how many of each product send into Amazon. That is true, but that is not what I did initially with my very first product, which was my swaddles. I sent, I want to say it was 500 boxes.

It was a lot of boxes into Amazon FBA in one go. That wasn't my best call because that is a lot of boxes and it's a brand new product.

Bearing in mind that Amazon getting started on Amazon back then was easier than it is now. But still, there's still a lot of boxes and it took me quite a long time for them to sell and that was quite stressful.

And also it meant that, yeah, it meant that all of my stock was tied up in one place. So if I wanted to go and do a fair or a store, so I did that back then, do a few like market stalls or events for new mums.

I literally had all my stock tied up in Amazon. So if I needed some to do a marketplace or something, I then had to recall however many units back.

I did start actually doing this by going onto the site as a customer and ordering them and paying for them and then getting which is possible and it's a bit cheaper to get them sent to you that way. But still not ideal. So I absolutely should not have sent all of my stock in.

And as you can probably tell, as time went on I learned that wasn't the best idea. I ended up having some stock here. Even though I was still using Amazon to fulfill my website orders, I still had plenty of stock at home as well.

So if I went to do a stall or a fate or I wanted to, or sometimes a friend would want to buy off me or someone local. So if someone local to where I live bought off me, I would often deliver rather than post because it was a bit Cheaper. So that was an option.

So, yeah, not sending all, all of my stock in was, yeah, was a good, was a good call. So that's my first thing is that if you do have lots of stock and you can avoid sending it all into Amazon, please, please do so.

In the episode last week, we spoke about inventory and what happens if you have too much inventory in an Amazon fulfillment center. And hopefully that's been enough to put you off as well. The next thing that I did that I regret is I didn't sync Shopify and Amazon.

So there are lots of apps out there and Shopify integrations, I think they're called, where you can link up Amazon and Shopify so that when you get an order on Shopify, if you want to fulfill it from your Amazon stock, you can do that and it happens automatically. I did not do that. I didn't even consider doing that.

Which meant that every time I got a website order, I was manually going to Amazon and typing out the details and getting it sent. I also on that, did not tell my customers to expect the order to come in Amazon packaging.

So when I first started out, I was fulfilling orders myself until I got Amazon up and running. So I was using my own, like plain posted postage boxes.

But then when I got up and running on Amazon, I was fulfilling everything with my Amazon FBA stock, which I don't think is necessarily a bad thing. But some customers were confused at why their orders from my website were turning up in an Amazon box.

I usually could have got around this by telling people about it. And as I say, if I had synced up the platforms, every order I got on my website would have gone through to Amazon.

They would have picked it and dispatched it automatically without me doing anything at all. And that would have been a much simpler process.

So, yeah, another thing I think I could have done better, and the final thing I think I could have done better is I was selling in the eu. And I should say this was before Brexit. So after I started doing really well in the uk, I was like, well, this is really good.

I'm going to sell in the EU now as well. So I started listing my products in France and Germany and Spain.

I think it was only France, Germany, Spain and Italy at that time, but I just went and did it. I can't believe that now I did this. I just went and did it and didn't think or didn't know that there would be financial VAT implications.

And the bottom line is I ended up owing VAT payments in lots of different marketplaces. I had no idea how to calculate it, I had no idea what to do. I had to find someone who specialized in this and pay them to sort it all out for me.

I then had to make the payments. All of this was really stressful. I remember getting letters in German from the German tax people all the time telling me I owed them money.

It was really stressful. Shouldn't have done it. Absolutely should not have done it.

I think if I was going to sell in Europe today, I would be looking into all of the implications much much sooner. So I know you know what's you can do all of it. You can absolutely sell anywhere.

But you just need to know what that means to for you from attacks and VAT perspective. Because even if you are not liable for VAT in the uk, you be in Germany or France, especially if you're storing your stock there.

And even if that stock is stored in an Amazon fulfillment center, it's still your stock and you are storing it in that country and there will be implications. So I'm not saying this to scare you, but just if that's something you're thinking about, obviously look into it much better than I did.

So that is all. So that is my hopefully fairly brief run through of my time selling on Amazon and the things that I thought you might find useful.

So things to do and definitely some things not to do. I'd love to know what you think of this episode. If you have any questions you can get in touch. It's vickiweinberg.com and I will be back on Tuesday.

Next week I'm going to talk all about Amazon advertising, so that'll be a great episode. And of course we have another interview this Friday and every other Friday. So have an amazing week and I'll speak to you very soon.

Thank you so much for listening right to the end of this episode.

Do remember that you can get the full back catalogue and lots of free resources on my website vickyweinberg.com Please do remember to rate and review this episode if you've enjoyed it and also share it with a friend who you think might find it useful. Thank you again and see you next week.