Last week I broke the 6 figure mark for my Amazon FBA business... but its not really the glam life I was expecting at this point. By that I mean its not really passive, not at all actually.

Here is my video on the things that makes Amazon pretty shitty, even after 6-figures. Also what I would change if I had to do it all again.:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0Op95mc960

Here is some of the points from the video for those that don't want to waste data watching.

1- Its not passive, at least not if you want to grow the business.

Dont get fooled by some people that say you can start with 5k and then quit your job for days on the beach. You will need to invest more money, time, and effort than you would at any day job, and you will need to grind for a while before you can truly be "passive".

Where you can just leave the account to your VA's for a month and go to Hawaii. Until you have thousands upon thousands of units, you will want to baby each product day and night.

2- Hijackers can ruin you.

I have had 8 products under my brand since I started 6 months ago, and 3 of them have been ruined by hijackers. I know it gets talked about a lot, but its insanely frustrating when you have to deal with these guys stealing your customers & money for days on end.

3- You have very limited control.

Amazon can make or break your investment. They have very grey lines for some things, and sometimes you can get the short end of the stick. One of my products didn't have a pure white background, I had some text and color around the main image because that's what my competitors where doing.

Amazon only decided to take down my images and red flagged my listing. I had to deal with this listing not having pictures for 5 DAYS! I finally got them back up, but there was nothing I could do to have them take my competitors images down. Aster speaking to an american call center agent in Seattle, it turns out that some rules dont apply to the big sellers. Depending on your monthly sales, Amazon will decided to let you get away with certain thing (including images).

Now for what I would do differently...

1- I would get the money first. And put all my eggs into the best basket.

When I started I wanted quantity of products to avoid the risk of one going bad. But what I learned was that spreading your resources too thin can hurt you way more than it can help. And also, if you know what to look for and how to create a grand slam, then you dont have to be worried about your products success.

If you clearly are coming to market with something unique, then you will almost always succeed.

Too many products at once also means less inventory of each, which eventually turns into cashflow problems when trying to keep up with orders.

2- Don’t treat this like a hobby. Dedicate more time!

My mindest early on was that I could get into amazon as a “side hustle”, and then keep running my catering thing full time.

Now this doesn’t mean I didn’t act fast. I jumped in within the first month of discovering FBA with 2 products… But I really didn’t spend enough time doing my research. I got excited with the idea of “order a product - list it for sale - forget about it”. I didn’t think big picture enough, and I ended up treating it as a hobby. 1-2 hours a night.

I just saw all these people killing it and making it look easy, so I guess I assumed it would be easy. Wrong! The lack of actual time spent doing my homework ended up costing me 2 of my first products.

3- Get samples. Always.

This one cost me a few thousand bucks, so lucky for you you can learn it for free. Get the samples. 3 times I didn’t get samples, 3 times I got screwed.

1st time, I got hit on the pictures. Didn’t get the samples, so I decided to just photoshop competitor products and put my logo on them, and change the background. 2 weeks later, I was hit with a copyright infringement. Now since I'm Canadian I couldn’t even order my product to my house to take new pictures since I only sell .com and ship within the states.

So I had the supplier send me pictures, but this was the first time that supplier made this product. So it wasnt like they had nice pics, they just sent me phone pictures. Big disaster, I no longer have that product.

2nd time, I just ordered based on the pictures the supplier had on alibaba. That product got destroyed in reviews because the product didnt even match the picture that the suppliers gave me. I no longer have that product.

And the last time I didnt get sample. Fool me 3 times… a similar thing happened. I got a variation product. One blue and one red. My logos on the variations didn’t match. This one wasnt the worst, but still was something that could have easily been prevented with a FREE sample.

So I hope you get some value out of me sharing my journey. Amazon is a tough road at times, but at the end of the day it was still worth it. If I spent the same amount of time and money with something else, I'm not sure if I would be able to crack 125k within 6 months (just over 40k profit). So go do it if you are up for it! ...Just dont get caught up in some of the BS online that tells you its a "care free passive income instant millionaire formula". Its not.