Podcast Episode 194 – The Biggest Threats to your Amazon FBA Success

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Episode 194 Transcript:

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:01.8] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Full-Time FBA Show. In each episode, it’s our goal to help you turn part-time hours into a full-time income, selling almost anything on Amazon. Now, your hosts of the show, Stephen and Rebecca Smotherman.

[WELCOME]

[00:00:21] REBECCA: Hello there and welcome to this episode of the Full-Time FBA Show. We are on episode number 194, and we’re so glad you’re here with us. Today, we’re going to be discussing the biggest threats to your Amazon FBA success. Here with me to talk about this topic today is my co-host, Stephen.

[00:00:41] STEPHEN: Well, I’m excited to be here for multiple reasons. I mean, yes, I’m excited to talk about the biggest threats, but that’s kind of ominous. But I do have some good news, something awesome just that we’re celebrating. This month, June, we are celebrating our fourth podiversary, four years of our Full-Time FBA Show podcast, and that’s worth celebrating.

[00:01:00] REBECCA: It is worth celebrating, and I think it’s weird that we’re having an ominous topic on this occasion. But we’ll be celebrating all month. So we’re not only going to talk about such a downer of a topic this month.

[00:01:13] STEPHEN: Right. So it’s going to be fun. Four years of podcasting. Let’s do another four. How about that, Rebecca?

[00:01:18] REBECCA: At least.

[00:01:19] STEPHEN: All right. Well, let’s get into today’s topic, the biggest threats to your Amazon FBA business.

[00:01:26] REBECCA: So on this podcast, we usually talk about the things that you need to be doing to have success at your Amazon FBA business, and we try to keep it positive. We try not to have a negative outlook because we feel like your mindset is really important. If you have a growth mindset, and you’re looking for ways to improve and make the most of opportunities, then you’re going to find the most success. We don’t like to focus on what’s dragging us down but instead to focus on opportunities. So that’s our approach. But today, we’re really needing to talk about some of the big threats that might be facing you. These are things that you shouldn’t worry about but that you should be aware of, and they are all things that you can deal with.

So we’re going to get into some of these threats now. Stephen, why don’t you start us off with the first one that we need to talk about?

[00:02:15] STEPHEN: Yes. Some of these threats, they’re not so obvious. They’re kind of underlining kind of under the surface. So that’s why we’re bringing them to your attention today. Threat number one is how you deal with failure can threaten your Amazon FBA success. Many of you know I love baseball. It’s the goal for my wife and I to go to every major league park in the US and Canada. So we love baseball. You can actually learn a lot about failure from the game of baseball.

I mean, for example, someone who is the best, the hall of fame hitters in the game, usually have a batting average just barely over 300. That equates to a 30% success rate when trying to get a hit, which means they fail 70% of the time. So that’s a lot of failure going on. But even the best of the best have a 300 average, 30% success rate.

The same can be applied to sourcing inventory. There’s going to be a lot of time spent sourcing inventory, and it can be hard to find profitable items sometimes on a consistent basis. For retail arbitrage, most of what you scan is not going to be a winner. For online arbitrage, most of what you see online is not going to be profitable. For wholesale, most of the brands you try to reach out with are going to tell you no.

This applies to restricted products too. When trying to get ungated, most of the brands you apply to sell will deny you. I mean, this is a lot of failure going. Some of them will let you sell, and you can focus on those items that you can sell, rather than pouting about what you can’t. But you know what? You want to try to be successful as much as possible. The more you get out there, the more you source, the more you reach out to brands, the more you’re going to start to find success.

When it comes to landing wholesale accounts or getting ungating or how you deal with any kind of failure, that’s going to determine your success in this business. When you’re just starting out, there’s way more failure than success, and that’s probably one of the reasons why some people quit selling on Amazon because they just can’t handle the failure. But those who commit to the process, stick with it, continue to learn, tweak their strategies, they’re going to come out on top and eventually make it to the Amazon FBA Hall of Fame, which there is none. Maybe we’ll found an Amazon FBA Hall of Fame one day. I don’t know.

[00:04:19] REBECCA: Because we have nothing else to do but start a hall of fame. I don’t even know what would be the qualifications to get into that. But having the right mindset is the number one key to being in the hall of fame that we just invented.

[00:04:32] STEPHEN: Yes, I like it.

[00:04:33] REBECCA: Okay. So the second threat to your FBA business that we want to talk about is that how you deal with your to-do list can be a big threat to your Amazon FBA success. Selling on Amazon is not just a simple business. It has many facets to learn and many things that you need to master over time and if you’re still a one-person Amazon business, which we were for a long time. Stephen was a one-person business. Then we were a two-person business.

But let me tell you that the biggest threat to your Amazon FBA success is actually you. Here’s the cold hard truth that you might not want to hear. The success of your Amazon FBA business is severely limited if you’re the only one in your business. Now, we don’t mean that you need to go out and start hiring employees right away. But we do suggest letting go of certain aspects of your Amazon business that you really as the CEO have no place doing in your business.

That’s something we talk about a lot is that CEO mindset. You are the CEO of your business. Take a moment to think about all of the responsibilities that the CEO of a toy company would have to do every day. Are they responsible for taking out the office trash? No. The CEO does not do that. Are they in charge of delivering the toys to the toy stores? No. They are focused on the most important aspects of the toy company, not these simple easy tasks that just about anyone could do.

Here’s what we want you to understand. You as the CEO of your Amazon business need to focus on the biggest needle movers in your business. Those needle movers are the things that are going to help you make progress and earn more money faster. So if you want to make more money and work less, you’re going to need to change your old ways of thinking. Change your mindset.

The old way of thinking about success is this. The more you work, the more money you can make. That statement might be true in some businesses, and it might be true for you as you’re just getting started. But when it comes to Amazon FBA, that doesn’t have to be true. Especially over the long run, working more is not going to lead you to success. So you need to have a new way of thinking about success, and that is that the more work you can outsource, the more money you can make. If you can hire someone else to do certain aspects of your work for you, then you can make more money at your FBA business.

Jessica Jackley is the CEO and Co-founder of Profounder, and she had this to say about success with outsourcing. Successful entrepreneurs know that you live and die by your ability to prioritize. You must focus on the most important mission-critical tasks each day and night. Then share, delegate, delay, or skip the rest.

We do this all the time with both our Amazon business and our coaching business. We list it all out, everything we need to do. That to-do list can be quite long. Then Stephen and I come together, and we decide what are the most important needle movers in the work that we have to get done. This is something that I do every week, something that Stephen and I do throughout the week. We look at what are those needle movers, and we focus on those activities on our to-do list. We outsource or delegate or skip the others.

If you’re needing some help on what to outsource in your FBA business, check out episodes 10 and 184 of the Full-Time FBA Show. We talk about multiple areas in your Amazon business that you can outsource and why doing everything yourself is a bad habit that you need to break. That’s a bad habit that we need to break too. We’re still working on this. I am always looking for new things that we can outsource. We’ll have some helpful links in the show notes from today’s show. Be sure and check that out for today’s episode at fulltimefba.com/194.

[00:08:37] STEPHEN: So the third threat, and this will be the final one we talk about today, the third threat threatening your success when it comes to Amazon FBA is how you choose what to sell on Amazon can threaten your FBA success. Obviously, as Amazon sellers, the actual products that we actually sell on Amazon, that’s of critical importance. That’s where we need our skills to be at our best. When reselling on Amazon, we need to make the best decisions when it comes to what to buy, what to pass on, how many or how deep to go on a buy, where we’re buying it from if we’re approved to sell it or not, if we’re approved, how to get approved. The most important part, how we can find that same item again and again to sell again and again.

The skill of sourcing is vital to our success, and it’s the number one skill that we need to learn and improve on over time. Even if we’re outsourcing our sourcing, we need to have the right skills to properly train the people that we’re teaching how to source. If the skill of sourcing profitable inventory is the most important skill to have as an Amazon seller, then it’s something you always need to be focusing on improving.

Think of it like working out at the gym. How do you build up muscle? You do repetition. You lift something a little heavy until it gets easy to lift. Then you move up to something heavier. As you lift heavier things, your muscles actually tear a little bit. It’s not like a tear where it hurts. This is just how muscle building works.

[00:09:59] REBECCA: But that is why your muscles get sore.

[00:10:01] STEPHEN: Right, exactly. So it tears a little bit. You get a little sore. But then it heals back stronger than before. That’s how muscle growth works. Gradually, over time, that repetition of minor tears and healing stronger, it builds up your muscle. You gain more and more strength. The same goes with becoming an Amazon seller whose strength is finding and sourcing profitable inventory. The repetition of sourcing again and again, sourcing, making mistakes, those are the minor muscle tears. Learning from them, the muscle is healing back stronger. Then continuing to source those profitable items again and again, over time, your Amazon FBA sourcing skills become stronger and stronger and lead you towards success.

[00:10:41] REBECCA: So if you’re a seller in Amazon or you’re thinking of starting to sell, and you want to really start to build up your sourcing strength and finally become a professional seller on Amazon, the kind of seller who successfully sells your inventory over and over again on a consistent basis, who’s able to make a full-time income selling on Amazon, I want to invite you to a free five-day online workshop called the Amazon Income Accelerator Workshop, where we will show you how to realistically make a full-time income selling on Amazon in 2023. The signup link for that workshop is fulltimefba.com/workshop.

In this free online workshop, we’re going to show you how to find unlimited sources of inventory to sell on Amazon for consistent profits, how to make the best inventory sourcing decisions like what to resell, what to pass on, how deep to go on a buy, how to always have profitable inventory in stock, as well as showing you the full-time income success path and how you can realistically snowball your Amazon profits to a full-time income.

If this sounds like something you’d want to absorb into your Amazon reselling mind, then join us for the Amazon Income Accelerator Workshop. Sign up now to get that content that only the people who sign up for the workshop are going to get. There’s so much more, but those are just the highlights that we covered just now. So again, the link to the five-day workshop is fulltimefba.com/workshop.

[00:12:12] STEPHEN: This workshop, it’s going to start July 17th. So if you’re listening to this episode when it drops, we’re three weeks out from when the workshop starts. But don’t wait because there’s three weeks to sign up. You see, this is only the second time we’ve offered this workshop. The first time, we had almost 500 sellers show up and took part in the workshop, and they had an amazing time and grew their Amazon business.

But the workshop is going to be a little bit different this time in a few ways. The first time we held the workshop kind of in a late morning time slot. But for this workshop, we’re going to be hosting it in the evenings at 8 pm Eastern and 7 pm Central. It’s going to make it easier for those with daytime responsibilities to show up live for the workshop in the evenings. But if you still can’t make it, you don’t need to worry about that. We’re going to record every episode, every session of the workshop, and we’ll send out replay emails but only if you register, full-timefba.com/workshop.

So sign up for the workshop now because we’re actually going to be crafting this workshop to best serve you and help you overcome some of your biggest struggles in your Amazon FBA business. So sign up at fulltimefba.com/workshop and find out how we’re going to be customizing this workshop to best help you. Yes, you.

[00:13:24] REBECCA: Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Full-Time FBA Show. It’s been episode number 194, and you can find all of the links we mentioned, plus the show notes and transcript, at fulltimefba.com/194.

[00:13:38] STEPHEN: Next week on the show, we’re going to be having an interview with a successful Amazon seller and listen to her story. We’re going to learn how Christy had her Amazon business that was able to grow her income so much that it helped her move to Texas, buy a ranch with cash, and some other awesome things too. So we’re going to save that for next week, and we’re going to interview her. You can hear about her success, how she was able to do it, and how you can do the same thing. So we’ll talk about that next week on the Full-Time FBA Show.

[00:14:04] REBECCA: I want to buy a ranch with cash.

[00:14:06] STEPHEN: That sounds good, doesn’t it?

[00:14:07] REBECCA: Doesn’t that sound awesome?

[00:14:08] STEPHEN: That does sound good. I think I like that. Let’s put that on our bucket list.

[00:14:11] REBECCA: Okay.

[00:14:11] STEPHEN: All right. So see you next week on the Full-Time FBA Show.

[OUTRO]

[00:14:17] ANNOUNCER: That’s all for this episode of the Full-Time FBA Show. So head over to fulltimefba.com/podcast where you’ll find the show notes and links from this episode. While you’re there, subscribe to our newsletter where you’ll get several free downloads of our popular and helpful Amazon FBA resources. Now, take action on what you’ve learned today, so you can find success at turning part-time hours into a full-time income with Amazon FBA.

[END]