Hmm..I sell on Amazon as well and don't find this to be the case. You need to figure out whats happening to your products and the market. The thing with Amazon is that if you introduce a product that has any sort of demand, you will sell. If it's a "dud" product discount the inventory and move it.
You absolutely can quit your job with an "Amazon" business - and I know many people who have done. However, there is risk of being JUST on Amazon. As I said before, focus on a MARKET and bring those products on Amazon - then transition to your own website sales so you can start building a business that's not dependent on Amazon.
Scaling on Amazon is generally not hard (although time consuming and cash intensive). A model many people follow is 10 sales a day per product, and at LEAST $20/SALE, then scale that until you hit your revenue goals.
If your products are tanking due to bad reviews - you need to fix that first. Hard to say without looking at your products/business but your problem IS fixable.
Hey Jason, Appreciate the response.
All my products have excellent reviews. I don't expect to sell on Amazon forever and I am gradually in the works of expanding onto my own website(slowly collecting emails), but I'm sure you know that it is extremely difficult to run profitable paid ads for your own ecommerce website. Figuring out how to bootstrap and be profitable with my own hosted store is still a challenge for me. I am pretty technical and experienced with outsourcing as well, but the challenge lies in being profitable from the get go (paying for all the inventory, paying for a fulfillment service, paying for a good shopping cart, paying for paid ads and being PROFITABLE after all the overhead).
I think the main reason some of my products stop selling well is that there are more competitors with more MONEY (folks that are going all in with lots of reviews all at once and one-upping my products). When this happens, it's very unfortunate as a seller because you are stuck with a bunch of inventory that isn't moving which messes up the cash flow to expand as an ecommerce guy.
From my experience, hot selling Amazon products have a "shelf life" if you will. If you hop on a trending product, you will sell well for up to several months and then things start to slow down due to an influx of competitors and what not. From there, you gotta troubleshoot and find a way to convert better than the competitors that are taking your market share. I would say this is ultimately what's keeping me from making a break through. I've launched over several products and have done upwards of $20000 in sales for just one product and this has been my experience. Sales really doesn't mean anything as an Amazon seller because of all the overhead, especially for the PPC.
When I release a new product and it does well, I'm not really excited because I know there's a chance it's going to slow down soon and I'll have to keep managing/watching it, which I hate to do because I want to "set it and forget it" and move on to the next opportunity you know?
Anyway, I'm happy to talk more about struggles in ecomm
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