One in three today have either "come out on Amazon" or have already "come out with Amazon" - and this is no joke.
At the start, everyone thinks that they have found a gold mine: they say, I'll find a magic product, get a card, get a little free in the PPC and get high in Bali. But a year passes, and everything ends with a minus in the bank account, hanging boxes in the warehouse and the phrase "well, this is just not my business model."
I am an entrepreneur and the owner of a consulting company. And if I was paid every time another "e-com founder" comes to me with the question "Why did everything break?," I would not write these articles anymore - I would buy advertising space from Bezos.
We read carefully and draw conclusions before, not after.
1. You have no business. You have a product.
Business is a system. And you have dust from Alibaba in a beautiful box.
One Product + One Sales Channel + One Traffic Source = Death
As soon as the trend fades, Amazon changes algorithms, the supplier mows with deadlines, or someone cuts your price by $0.50 - you are out of the game.
Here's the story. I had a client - let's call him Nikita. He launched a "revolutionary" massage gun.
Flooded, pumped advertising, sold the first batch - $30k turnover per month. Already started dreaming about Lamborghini and Instagram in Dubai.
After 3 months: 10 Chinese clones, 200 returns, warehouse packed. PPC eats into profits.
And that's it.
The business ended before it even started. Because it's not a business. It's an outbreak.
2. There is no unit economy. There is an illusion of profit.
I constantly hear:
"We made 20 thousand sales this month!"
Okay.
And how much did you leave after commissions, returns, fulfillment and your mediocre advertising campaign?
It's simple: if you don't know how to count unit economics, you are not an entrepreneur, you are a casino player.
Nikita with massagers had such a story: purchase $17, sale $49. It would seem - gold!
Until we counted:
- Amazon fee — $8.50
- FBA storage — $1.10
- PPC — $22 (!)
- Returns - 12%
- I also forgot to put the packaging
The bottom line? Minus $4 on each sale. Now multiply that by 2,000 orders. Congratulations, you just paid $8,000 to sell people what they don't really need.
3. You don't build a brand. You copy cards.
While you copy other people's listings and choose a font on Canva, someone else builds a community, hires designers, makes videos and gathers a real audience.
Imagine that you are not "just a seller," but a real businessman with a model.
Nastya launches a brand of beauty gadgets: she thought out the whole strategy in advance, made an analysis of the target audience, built sales on the principle of content marketing and understands how her product line will work. The result? A few months later, she received a stable income - $87K of turnover and $17K of net profit.
This is what you get if you understand your model.
Nastya did not spend money on advertising with an unclear result, because she knew which key metrics to target. She did not expect luck, she built processes.
This is the difference between success and failure. You can achieve results if you understand how your business model works.
Amazon is not just a marketplace. It's a giant sinkhole where you either become search junk or a brand you're looking for on purpose.
If customers don't come back to you, that's it, you lost.
If you don't know who your customer is, how they think they are being triggered, what their pains are and what to offer them as a second commodity - you're not even in the game.
4. You don't know how to do analytics. And Amazon can.
Amazon collects data on you. You on yourself - no.
You don't even know what ACOS or TACOS you have, how the CTR has changed after changing the photo, which keys work, which drain the budget.
And it's not even a joke. Once a client came to me with a question:
"What to do, my ROAS dropped from 4.5 to 1.3 in a month."
We open the office. And there:
Same search term in broad and in exact.
Clicks go to creativity with New Year's snowflakes - in March.
The entire budget goes to the word "massage," where the competition is prohibitive and there are zero transactions.
You're not in control. You go with the flow. And the algorithm drowns you.
5. You don't plan. You react.
Amazon loves those who calculate moves 3 months ahead, and not those who run to look for a new delivery the morning after the hype.
Nikita, remember?
I made the first batch - 2000 pieces. I did not calculate the season. I did not take into account that traffic falls in February. 600 massagers remained in the warehouse. And Amazon began to wind up storage fee. He tried to arrange a sale, merged at cost, invested in advertising - and still did not get out.
Nobody taught him:
- Count reserves for a month in advance
- Do ABC analysis
- Shoot dead stock
- Predict traffic and seasonality
I work with brands that have been on Amazon for a long time, and with them you can see how they succeed. Take the same Anker, for example, which has become one of the largest brands on the platform. They have everything built on models: they test products, build long funnels, think over every step. Yes, at the start they didn't have everything perfect either, but they built the system, and now their product has been selling stably for years.
And now for the case: how to survive?
- Build a system. From scratch. Assortment, channels, marketing, units, people.
- Analyze everything. Advertising, metrics, LTV, returns, reviews, loyalty.
- Throw out everything that doesn't work. A product that is not for sale is not "just in case." This is a mine under cashflow.
- Automate. Without CRM, analytics, service customizer, AI tools - you will not scale. Never.
- Learn. Fast. If you don't develop faster than Amazon's algorithm, you will still lose. Just not today, but in two months.
Business is not a product in stock. This is the model, people, processes, metrics, control and speed of decision making.
And if you don't get it - Amazon will teach. But expensive.