How does anyone sell big on Amazon?
I am sure we all know what a ball ache Amazon can be, from high fees to listing problems, error messages left right & centre and ever changing goal posts.
How does anyone make a decent turnover from Amazon? Do you need to employee a specialist to do it all for you do you think?
I hate it. Every time I get the enthusiasm to expand is it always quickly turned to despair with aforementioned error messages, useless SS etc
102 replies
Seller_7VbclcPFFRTnc
I make a living from it - have done for over 10 years on amazon - 13 years ebay
no employees
depends on what you call big though - big to some people means a full time income - to others it means they can retire at 30 and live on the beach
Seller_Yja9oH7DLHk2I
I don’t think Amazon would want big sellers. It is far batter for them to have millions of small sellers.
Lose a few through poor policies, crap support? Oh well we still have millions.
Seller_bxGApda6j8zcZ
As little shop says, it depends on what you class as big? Some companies have teams of people dealing with their Amazon/Marketplace account, some use an agency.
Seller_esvgLzKXw2YAl
It’s actually quite easy to trade at a medium scale.
to actually turnover bigger figures, is simply a case of getting more stock to sell.
Choosing wisely and you can make a good profit.
I posted something a while back, that gave the average seller on Amazon as being in the region of about £300k per year. Obviously that is just an average of the many, many sellers on here.
I would imagine however, that there are an awful lot more sellers, just doing very small quantities, than there are turning over £1mil plus.
An awful lot of it, is going to depend on what you sell and how you sell.
For instance, if you are a one product company, it’s unlikely that your going to sell a lot of goods, unless of course it’s the next dyson!
But what do actually want out of it? Enough to live on reasonably or to be rich?
Do you want to employ staff? To be a one man band?
The more you want it, the more you will do it.
The one thing about Amazon, is that there is literally no limit to how big you want to expand. It is quite feasable and relatively easy to do. Just how quickly you do it, depends on how much spare cash you can invest and your profit margins.
Seller_DTufFoxJuMU0M
I really don’t think Amazon care much about £25 a month in sub fees.
I paid them over £1.5k fees in March this year (doing tax return haha).
They make more money if I do well than having lots of people not doing well and leaving.
Like Littleshop I make a living on here with no employees. However I am not Vat registered (by choice, deliberately avoiding it for as long as I can) so would not class myself as “big”. Its just me and my daughter so I make enough to live on.
I actually find the fees on Amazon to be quite ok, ironically they are less than I pay to Ebay (I’m on their 15%+5p discount for low cost items), so an item I sell for £2 here costs me 37p, and 42p on Ebay, not to mention that the monthly fee here is £30 compared to Ebays £82.80 (which is cheaper than their £30 alternative because I have more than 650 listings)
Seller_Yja9oH7DLHk2I
I read somewhere that there is less than 10,000 accounts in the UK doing over £818,400 per annum.
This is why I get so annoyed about not having an account manager. They probably only need 500 to cover all those accounts.
Seller_Yja9oH7DLHk2I
I just checked again. It is actually only 1000.
Seller_WseB32EBb785w
Well you can certainly “sell big” on here as you put it. First of all, you have 10m+ individual site visits per day, who on average hit around 7 pages, that’s just on .co.uk. We based our first numbers when we started selling on here in 2014, to reach 1% of the then 9m and convert 1% of the 1% into buyers. That projected a large figure. We have never looked back to review anything like that, but did turn over just under 2m on here in 2020-21 and many business sellers do way way more than that. Our peak was though during the pandemic. Christmas 2020 was huge, but last year we were 60% down same period, and as a result, we were left with 56,000 residual units in our inventory in Jan. That was a seriously painful lesson and now, selling sensibly rather than selling big is more attractive. It is harder to make profit - fees are notably higher, we have the energy surcharge and have to pay more for everything we produce / buy. Of course you try to pass increases on, but right now, many consumers cant afford it. So, tough times, but potentially massive exposure on here and its a platform on which you can build a brand from scratch. We do have other trade customers though and at current ROS, Amazon alone isn’t enough for us to cover overheads, as we have 5 employees. It was in 2020, but its not now.
Seller_VZZFmxUVShXgl
I’m really interested to know how other sellers balance with other channels? Our Amazon sales are nothing like those being quoted but I’ve always been keen to balance sales across channels like the “Big E” and also a well known crafting site (as we sell beads so that one is good for us). We also do about 60% of our sales direct through a Shopify site. Obviously tying this all together requires some kind of central system. We use Linnworks but interested to know how other people manage this, or do you just stick to Amazon?
Seller_amUAzjvL5uIzu
Its a retirement business for me now 12 ish years here 30 years Ebay,although I stopped selling there a few years ago.I trade a bit under the VAT limit & spend 8-12 hrs weekly running the business.Never really had any problems with Amazon & launched my own brand in march to get away from the competition & its going better than expected.
