Warning on failure cases for new and old sellers on Amazon
In the past, through industry experience, we sorted out various groups of people in cross-border e-commerce and came up with the most reasonable way to run Amazon. This section will look at the characteristics of failed cross-border e-commerce sellers through actual cases.
Jack Ma once said: “Most successes are similar, but failures are all different.”
Instead of looking at the success stories of certain celebrities every day, it is better to observe the failures around you.
In recent years, the profit-making effect of cross-border e-commerce circles can be said to be very dazzling. There are also many novice sellers around me who earn hundreds of thousands of yuan a year, but everyone’s success has many of the same characteristics. place.
In a city like Shenzhen, you can talk about cross-border e-commerce while eating barbecue at a roadside stall. The content of the conversation is likely to be keyword layout, PPC (pay-per-click advertising), and ACoS (advertising sales). cost ratio) evaluation channels, overseas warehouse resources, etc.
There is an Amazon seller who lives in Shenzhen, and Huaqiangbei is a world-renowned electronic product center. In early 2016, he started to register an account and upload products. The product was mobile phone cases. He listed a bunch of Listing (products) ), but there have been no orders for a month. You must know that Amazon in 2016 was a product blank period. As long as you upload products that are scarce on the platform, you can get a large number of orders without doing marketing promotion. However, mobile phone cases are in a saturated state. Because I couldn’t place orders, I started to attract traffic off the site. I found a service provider and spent US$1,000 on off-site advertising. As a result, I only got more than 30 orders at US$9.9 each, which was a huge loss. At that time, I asked him to change the product quickly, but he found it troublesome. But I think he is just lazy and unwilling to try and make mistakes quickly in the early stages of starting a business. This is a classic failure story for new sellers.
In the spring of 2017, I met a Foshan seller selling small furniture. Of course, he has been running an Amazon store for more than 2 years and has rich experience. With the resource advantages of Foshan furniture production area, he quickly shipped goods through FBA to form a stable store flow. The product he was operating at the time was this shoe rack that could be hung behind the door. At that time, this kind of portable furniture was a hot product. He upgraded the product based on the negative reviews of the product. At that time, I thought he did a great job and put it on the shelf. Out of stock often occurs within a week, but think about it, in the assessment of sellers on the Amazon platform, goods have a great impact on product ranking and sales. So, he shipped 20 boxes of products by air and 30 boxes by sea to the United States at one time. Products shipped by air are very fast and arrive in the United States within a week. Then, the market situation suddenly changed. In the second half of 2017, many new sellers rushed into the US website. Many people saw the surge in sales of this product and immediately went to the factory to place orders. Some sellers with financial strength even lowered the price through bulk purchases. Even lower, by September and October 2017, sales dropped sharply. The goods shipped by sea were signed for a month later, but the excess inventory could only be cleared at a low price, and even ended up being cleared at a loss. In the end, this product not only made no money, but also wasted a lot of time and energy.
For a self-designed non-seasonal product, when sales surge, you can immediately apply for a design patent, so as to prevent plagiarism from other sellers from the source. Many mature American sellers It is also done in this way. Make minor innovations in the functions of already hot-selling products and apply for design patents. The intellectual property protection in the United States is very complete.
After 3 to 6 months of hard work, sellers who have achieved results are often born to be action-oriented. They select products, take photos, put products on the shelves, and ship them all in one go, without procrastination. Many people look for free resources to learn every day, but they never take action. Learning without the purpose of operating accounts is lazy and self-comforting.
In the past few years, plagiarism has become common among many domestic products, and the original design of the product should also be included in the production cost. This is an aspect that Chinese cross-border e-commerce sellers need to slowly learn.