My Amazon success is somewhat accidental. I didn’t wake up one day with an insatiable desire to sell stuff on a store named after a jungle. Nope! I got started because a friend of mine named Tony wanted me to help him sell some books online. Tony was a really smart guy, so in retrospect, I’m not sure why he wanted me to do it, but he did. So I set up an Amazon account, and listed several of his multi-volume book sets.
I think I sold one book, but I’m not even 100% sure. That was at the very beginning of 2012.
Around that same time my buddy Robert had started shipping things into Amazon for FBA. To make a long story short, he had some trouble with his Amazon account, so he asked me to ship stuff in for him under my account.
At the time, Angry Birds was pretty hot, and I remember him finding some Angry Birds erasers at his local dollar stores and sending them in to sell for $5 or $6. By the time I started working with him, he was making about $1500/mo.
This is back before we knew about any tools, before we had bought any trainings, and before we really had any idea what we were doing or what the potential could be.
Eventually, he got tired of using up his weekends to drive around the Detroit area looking for stuff, so he called it quits, and so did I.
Now, fast forward about 2 years…
Robert gets in touch with me and tells me he found this course online that was going to teach him how to sell on eBay and Amazon and that he was going to quit his job to go full time with it. That sounded crazy to me because he was making nearly twice what I was making working his sales job. He was often the top sales guy at the place and he had elevated his whole team to be the top team in his store… And he was just walking away from it all to start this e-commerce business having never really done it before.
Back then, I thought it was a bit of a leap, but we stayed in touch, and he kept telling me how well he was doing. A few thousand this month, a few thousand the next month, etc. etc. He did it consistently for quite some time, and he kept encouraging me to give it a try. At the time, I was working with a friend to expand his web site company, and I thought that it would be my golden ticket out of my job. (It wasn’t.)
Eventually, Robert’s persistence paid off, and as he kept telling me about his success, I finally gave in and gave it a try. I dropped the $500 on DS Domination Monopoly which taught me how to sell stuff on Amazon. The first weekend I got started, I sold three items. To be honest, I actually lost money on those transactions because I didn’t calculate the fees correctly, but I could instantly see that this was more scientific than selling on eBay.
I was hooked!
A couple of weeks after Black Friday, 2015, I got out of Amazon’s “sandbox” and finally got the Buy Box in some categories. My sales EXPLODED!!!!!
Within 4 or 5 months of selling on Amazon, I had made over $25,000 in profit. I wish I could tell you it was all downhill from there, but it wasn’t.
In January, one of my largest suppliers had a glitch with their systems which resulted in me NOT getting about 300 tracking numbers. Since I didn’t have them, I hadn’t marked my items as shipped on Amazon. Since my items weren’t shipped on time, they were all late.
In case you don’t know, Amazon is pretty particular about making sure sellers have good “metrics.” When sellers do too poorly in shipping items on time, in shipping items that are not defective, or in adding tracking numbers it can end in potential shutdown of your Amazon’s account.
In short, having 300 late orders was not even close to reasonable in their eyes, and they promptly shut down my account.
Frantic, I wrote in my appeal which was promptly denied.
I was DONE.
What does one do when your account is shut down? Well, stay turned to my blog as I will be revealing what I’ve been up to over the next few months!
I did try selling again by partnering with a friend of mine. It didn’t really work out.
But , there is good news…. It took me 19 months to get my account turned back on, but it is now active, and so I have just started selling again on my account in September, 2017.
So do I still have it?
I’m only 2 months in, and, well…. you can see the results for yourself.
This is a composite of drop-shipping + FBA for the last 30 days. I hope to give a more comprehensive updates Spencer Haws style, but we’ll see! So far, I’m pretty excited though to say the least! At the moment, all systems are a go, so we’ll see where we end up at the end of Q4.
That said, I AM BACK!
And with that, I’ll sign off! Thanks for reading, and welcome to my journey. I look forward to sharing with you more as we go along.
Now Go Dominate
– MarketerMatt
PS Fill out the form on this page if you’re interested in learning about how you can make money with Amazon also. Right now, it’s just a “waiting list” of sorts, but you won’t want to miss what I’m going to be launching over the next few months. So for now, tune-in, get the updates, and go DOMINATE.
Leave A Comment