Are you looking at your business in the right light?

- Operating a retail business is base is based on One thing, making a profit. That is what any retail business owner must focus on every day and all day.

- Your profit is the life blood of your business and must be in the forefront of every decision one makes. If it is not, a business can go down fast.

- Amazon is a for profit company and is very good at making a profit any way it can. In reality, Amazon is nothing more than a broker between a buyer and seller and when one understands this, great success can be had.

- A person selling FBM can easily manage their business because all costs (commissions & shipping) are known up-front and fixed for every product sold. The seller only has to set their desired profit to be made. If no profit can be realized on a product, don't even purchase it to sell in the first place.

- FBA sellers are Amazon's cash cow. These sellers, especially new sellers, believe the hype of how easy it is to let Amazon do all the work for them. They see the videos and color charts on how they can save money using the platform.

But on a subconscious level, Amazon is distracting these sellers from the truth. The truth being that the seller IS NOT looking at their desired profit and CAN NOT get a grip on how much profit they are or are not making.

The reason is, Every Fee associated with FBA selling, comes out of a sellers UNEARNED PROFIT, before the product even sells.

Jeff Bezos created a great business model, for Amazon, but not the individual seller.

How, here's a question. After 8 years of selling, and deciding to stop, what have you ended up with? That may be nice to share with new sellers reading your post.

Please share your story.

Please share your story.

I also have very bad experience in amazon. The amazon changes policies without our consent. I last 4000USD and till now have no profit. I sponsored my product and the BSR reached to 3500 than the Amazon deactivated my account just for verification of account which is done after every six month. The account was deactivated and than they verified but the evaluation team was not cooperative . Now again I started advertisement of my product spending 20$ every day for last 20 days and the BSR is 800000. There is no sell. I will wait to sell all my inventories than I will good buy the Amazon. Doing business on amazon I lost a lot but gained nothing.

I am with you! I have had 5 years of hell with amazon. Changing listings, deleted thousands of them, brand issues, now suppressed listings, and hundreds of listings being merged with others for now reason. 

The problem is AMAZON! IT has always been them. They cause all the headaches in sellers lives. I ran a business prior to this and i didn't have nearly the amount of issues i had with amazon.

Now a days amazon seller support is hijacked by Indians, when we email on seller support , they if found is a pakistani account, they immediately deactivate the account , they did not look how much this account is complaint with amazon policies, they demand utility bill and then they never accept it, we lost huge amount of money due to indians hate and prejudice towards pakistani community, Hate and prejudice is due to leadership we are not. Amazon should take it seriously and fire any Indian manipulating amazon and targetting sellers

Amazon is no easy platform, most sellers agree. Their lack of transparency, sudden shifts in requirements; having to keep one-step ahead of IT glitches and ill-conceived, one-size-fits-every category bots is extremely wearing. Though we have nothing like your volume, often thought of just chucking it.

Sold here 12-1/2 years-and June has been our best summer month in years!! (Summers are usually slow for us-due to vacations and outdoor activity. More likely to take a kindle to the beach than a physical book!) July will tell the tale if hot weather is driving more folks indoors, into sedentary pursuits.

Somehow we've survived good times and bad-there's still terrific traffic here and we're able to control our profit since we're FBM-the reason we continue to stay.

Good Luck to you in your future

My question to you... Where do you go from here? We are in a similar situation to you. Amazon is driving us mad. Starting a site isn't great now. Other sites are getting worse than this site. Local sales plummeted last few years. So where do you go to balance this out? Good luck to you in whatever you do..