I have been selling stuff on Amazon since August, and I suppose by stuff I really mean iPads. Using FBA has been an interesting experience. On one hand there are things that annoy the heck out of me. On the other it is so fast and easy that I wouldn’t want to resell on any other marketplace. That being said, I thought I would take a minute and recap some of the annoyances.
The first is that twice this month Amazon has lost inventory. The first was an iPad that I sent in and it was lost upon check in to the warehouse. I contacted Amazon and they initiated reimbursement in the form of money or replacing the inventory. For me they replaced the inventory and the item quickly sold.
The second time they lost an iPad was after two purchases and two cancelations. One person bought and canceled the item and then a second person bought and canceled the item. After the second cancelation, somehow the iPad was lost in the warehouse. I contacted Amazon and the response was to give them 30 days to find the item and if it cannot be found they would reimburse me. Considering that I usually sell my iPad’s within a day of them listing I was not too happy with having to wait up to 30 days to cash out.
Fortunately, Amazon found the item within 5 days and it went back into my inventory. The iPad sold the same day it went back into my inventory. (Have I mentioned before how much I love selling iPads?)
I would not consider either one of these issues to be major. Certainly, neither issue is going to keep me from using Amazon. The customer service is top notch and the website is pretty easy to use. It must be since I often feel like I have no idea what I am doing when entering product and things still seem to work (that is a post for a different day).
My next step with Amazon is to diversify. I got my feet wet with iPads but it is time to branch out.
Would love to see you write up an abbreviated buy-sell-cost-benefit cycle. Something that is averaged out to get rid of your overly bad and overly good cycles (unless there is an overly bad cycle that costs you a LOT).
I’m mainly curious about the time sink aspects, as well as what I call the “psychic stress” of possible hours of follow-up for the inevitable mistakes that happen (like what you wrote about in this post).
I’m sure there was a LOT of set-up and learning time, which you are still going through, too. Maybe it turns out that you could write a book , or hold a seminar, on THIS topic!
I’ve been thinking about posting a running tally of profits on the items I have sold. Problem is right now the running tally would be pretty boring. I am still stuck on iPads and just have not had the time to research other possible areas to branch out to.
Yeah, I guess the only people who would be interested in this topic are people considering doing it for themselves. Im not sure this fits my personality type, as it seems to require too much attention to detail, patience, etc. And with dubious payback ( for my taste).