Amazon FBA - Anyone use this?

meerustar

Hi all.

I currently sell on my own website and on eBay. I'm thinking of moving from eBay over to Amazon using the FBA option. I currently rent office space (approx £470 pm inc VAT) and pick and pack my own products, pay postage, packing, labels, ink etc etc.

I know that FBA will cost more than eBay, however, my thinking is if they are storing my products and fulfilling them, I can get rid of this office and they price I'm paying here, will be offset by the FBA. Does that make sense?

Any pros / cons of switching to FBA would be grateful. Thanks.

LessImpecunious

We tried FBA for a while, as a very small seller of a rather niche products, and found the charges very high. Our Ebay total fees average/d c. 20-25% of sales, while with Amazon we found they were around 50%. We also had fewer sales on Amazon. This might work for you depending on how much you were selling and/or saving on your current costs, but we felt we were being sold down the river, so to speak...

meerustar

Thanks. I sell a variety of products from an established well known brand. The marketing has already been done if you see what I mean. It sells itself. 

Really 50/50 on what to do. 

LessImpecunious

In terms of the product then, I guess you will be competing on price and improving your ranking so your listing doesn't disappear among all the other listings selling the same thing...which will be similar to how things are on Ebay... That wasn't so much an issue for us selling our own brand niche products; as I said our own experience was really just that Amazon's fees were (in our opinion, and for our volume of sales) too high for it to be worth continuing. Plus, with so many items available on Amazon, I don't think we got many views of our products, which is a major reason we have stuck with Ebay - we trust that savvy shoppers will see our product there, do a search, find that our products are cheaper on our website, and buy direct from us, where our overall costs/fees are much lower. We still get reasonable sales on Ebay, but keep it on largely as a more-than-pays-for-itself form of advertising.

As a buyer, I find that many things are cheaper on Ebay than Amazon (the exception being big name, very high turnover items), and assume this is because sellers on the latter have to charge a higher price to cover the higher fees... So they're banking on the fact that not all buyers are moneysavers

Hopefully someone with experience of selling products more similar to yours will be able to offer more helpful advice - good luck!

meerustar

Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to respond

forgotmyname

Consider also the easy option to test and return items on Amazon and storage costs for returns which may outweigh the items cost.

Depends what your selling and how much competition your getting.

Michael242000

Hey, i was at the same point as you. I was selling until 2 years ago only on my shopify store & ebay.

One of my friends who was doing Amazon FBA for over 3 years at this time was begging me to also sell on Amz because in theory you do not have any more costs and you can reach new customer which you can maybe convert longterm to loyal customers who are maybe purchasing via your shop (which should always be the goal).

For Amazon there are just a few things to consider which are really different to eBay or your own Shopify Store.

Amz really does not display transparently all the fees which are applying. For that reason I can really recommend you to improve your business by investing in a software product which will manage & even improve your sales.

I can either recommend you SellerMagnet or Sellerboard

Hope this helps! Wish you all the best, keep it up!  :slight_smile: