2021 was our year of bold steps into our eCommerce entrepreneurship journey. Just a brief intro, we’re a husband-and-wife tandem new Amazon seller and we knew we’re in for a ride. If we were to summarize our year 2021 journey in one word, it’s the word “painful”.
January to July – we sourced our product, Seagrass Plant Basket, from Vietnam because of the difference in quality compared to China suppliers. We made some improvements to the product to address top pain points with seagrass baskets sold in the marketplace (learn more about why our baskets are different). We ordered a few, went through quality inspections, and shipped them to our 3PL in the US. We had 2 weeks delay at the port before it reached the warehouse.
July – we got an issue with our Amazon Seller account. It got suspended for inactivity right when we just shipped the product into their warehouse! Took 1 month before they reactivated our account.
August – We found that Amazon categorized our product under the Oversize tier. It means that the FBA fee was high and it wiped out our margin. For the next 2 months, we appealed to Amazon to remeasure our product several times. But the result was always not what we wanted. We had to launch and we tried selling at breakeven, it was not selling. We tried selling at below breakeven price and still not selling. We spent a few on PPC ads to increase sales. We’re bleeding red and not selling as we want it to be.
October- We finally decided to recall our inventory from the Amazon warehouse to do some quick enhancement on the product packaging that would address the size issue. It cost us 1 month time and some labor costs from our 3PL provider.
November – Finally, when we shipped back to Amazon, they correctly categorized us under the Large Standard Size tier and we got reimbursed. Found hope at this point in time but there’s an uphill battle of getting sales again because of the lost rank from a month’s absence.
Lessons learned:
1. The importance of buffers – we learned the hard way to always have a buffer. Whether it’s related to size, costs, or timeline. Make sure the product size has a buffer always an inch lower than the size limits to give way for variances. Make sure you budget 30% more buffer for possible unexpected costs. Make sure you are ok with the timeline that is 1 month or more than the initial target, to make room for delays outside of your control.
2. Eat discouragements for breakfast – be mentally prepared to be discouraged time and time again. Be prepared for losses and failures. And when you’re in the trough, endure the pain, get back up and keep looking at the possibilities more than the difficulties. The growth is in solving problems one after another. Nobody said entrepreneurship was easy.
We’re hoping to see traction next year. We had a few positive reviews but we’re still observing if the market would find our product valuable. But whatever happens, we’ll keep on looking to find one that would add value and address real needs.
Hope you learned something from this sharing.