In 2017 I decided to start looking for another income stream in my efforts to become financially free and stop feeling so stressed and anxious at work. After what felt like an eternity of combing through Youtube videos on Bitcoin, FX trading, dropshipping and so on, I came across Amazon FBA – a business model that seemed as though it could me give the huge rewards and financial flexibility that I was looking for, but without requiring me to quit my job and do it full time.
Following a few months of deliberating and making no progress whatsoever, I finally got my Amazon FBA journey on the road in May 2018, and since then I’ve continued to stay committed to my goals and my dream of being a business owner, and thanks to that, I’ve successfully built a 7 figure business that I still run in my spare time.
That’s right, thanks to the power of Amazon FBA, I run a 7-figure business as a side hustle… pretty much off my phone. So here is my Amazon FBA review – exactly how it’s been over the past 4 years!
What Is Amazon FBA?
If you’re not familiar with Amazon FBA, then, in a nutshell it’s where you send products that you want to sell on Amazon’s website to their warehouse, and then when a customer make a purchase, amazon picks packs and posts to the product customer on your behalf, and then deposits the funds into your bank account pretty seamlessly.
As it’s now pretty much 4 years to the day that I started to take amazon fba seriously and start building my business, I thought I’d share the key points of my journey guys so that you can see just how rapidly an Amazon business can grow when you know what you’re doing.
My Amazon FBA Review & Journey To Date
2018
In May 2018, after deciding that I was going to start Amazon FBA , I started to search for a product to sell Like everybody else, I found the process of product research pretty tough and boring, but I kept going because I wanted to prove I was up to the challenge, and I knew that if it was easy then everybody would be doing it and there would be no opportunity.
To make the process as bearable as possible, I decided to break up research sessions into 20-30 minute chunks, rotating between different product discovery methods each day. With your Amazon FBA product research, there’s no need to spend endless hours every day just sat at your computer starting at a screen, 20-30 minutes per day is fine, and if you follow this strategy then you’ll likely become much more efficient at searching for products in a shorter amount of time. Following this strategy will also help to ensure that you’re seeing fresh product ideas each day, and lower the risk of you burning yourself out and quitting all together. And this worked really well for me, because in June 2018 after just 6 weeks of searching, I finally found a product that I was happy with that had the 3 essential criteria that every product needs to have – demand, a 30% profit margin and an opportunity to stand out versus the existing competition.
After ordering samples from relevant suppliers and assessing their quality, I chose the supplier that I had the most confidence in, and placed an order for 1000 units in July 2018, which was a really exciting day.
Finally after 6 months of dreaming of having my own business after first discovering this opportunity, it was all coming to life.
The units that I’d ordered immediately went into production, and were soon dispatched to amazon’s warehouse. A lot of people ask me if I was nervous or worried before launching my product, but strangely I wasn’t – I felt I’d done enough research and homework to give it my best shot, and if it didn’t succeed as well as I wanted it to, then at least I knew I did give it my all, and I’d be able to recover what I’d invested.
Thankfully, all the research that I did do paid off, because after just one day of my product landing at the Amazon warehouse in August 2018, I started to get sales from shoppers on Amazon.
Here’s a picture of my first week of selling with Amazon FBA, where each orange bar is the amount of revenue that I was making from complete strangers across the country.
With Amazon FBA it’s such an amazing feeling to know that complete strangers are buying your product because they think its better than anything else that they’ve seen. When it happened to me in my first week and I started getting sales, I was over the moon, but things were about to get even better – in my second week as my product started to gain traction, I generated just under £5k in revenues and around £1k profit and by the end of September, so my fourth week – I had completely sold out!
So in my first month of selling with Amazon FBA, I:
- sold 1000 units,
- got all of my initial investment back and
- made a healthy profit
I was hooked – I immediately placed another order, and after 4 weeks of patiently waiting I was back selling, with my product continuing to fly off the shelves.
By the end of the year – so after around 2 active selling months, I had generated over £40,000 in revenues and made £15,000 profit, with £30,000 of that being made in December alone.
To be able to achieve all of that in the spare time that I had when I finished work and at the weekends was mindblowing, and now that I’d got a taste of success with Amazon FBA, I was completely determined to keep growing and growing.
Amazon FBA in 2019
In February 2019, after 6 months of becoming addicted to selling with Amazon FBA, I launched a second product under another brand that I’d thought of, which I managed to grow even quicker than my first.
By Christmas 2019, just after over a year of selling, I generated around £70k of revenues in a 30 day period, achieved from just selling 2 standard household products on Amazon that weren’t ground breaking and were available from other sellers – it was just that I’d made my branding and product offer better than the competition, compelling shoppers to buy from me instead.
Amazon FBA in 2020
Unfortunately, at the start of 2020 as the pandemic hit my business’s sales and profitability were negatively impacted due to my supplier’s factory closing, shipping costs going up, and demand for one of my products drying up as result of lockdown restrictions.
Rather than getting demotivated, giving up and letting my business die out, I kept my problem solving hat on, and found additional products to sell that I thought would be in high demand as a result of more people being at home, and that positive mindset and determination helped me to recover some of some of the sales that I’d lost towards the beginning of the year as a result of the pandemic.
2020 was certainly a tough year to be an Amazon seller, but as I’d already had a taste of success, I refused to give up and saw the challenge as a test for how much I really wanted to grow to become a 6 and 7 figure seller.
Whilst 2020 really did test me when it came to Amazon FBA, I did have the pleasure of being invited on to the BBC for an interview about my amazon fba business, which was a really great experience and something I’d never have been able to do had I not started this business.
Amazon FBA in 2021
This year is where my hard work started to pay off and where I was really able to scale my Amazon FBA business as a result of me launching additional products throughout 2020 and building a really good relationship with one of my suppliers who started to offer me exclusive products.
By the middle of 2021 I wasn’t spending a great deal of time actually working on my Amazon FBA business, probably around 3-4 hours a week, simply because there wasn’t a need, so this again is where I realised the power of having a profitable FBA business and refused to ever give up on this opportunity.
In July 2021 I was approached by an investor who wanted to buy my amazon business, and whilst the figure that was proposed was of course attractive, it still wasn’t anywhere near the size of what I felt I had the potential to reach.
By the end of 2021, my Amazon business had recovered from Covid, with December being a record month where I sold over 6,000 units and generated £90,000 in revenues with a 20% profit margin!
Amazon FBA in 2022
Whilst December is typically the busiest month of the year when it comes to Amazon sales, since then the orders have continued to flow through and in March 2022 I hit £100k in monthly revenues, which has continued to grow to around £140k in monthly revenues as of May 2022!
To go from £0 and absolutely no experience in May 2018, to running a 7 figure business (still in my spare time) 4 years later is crazy, and for me, despite the increase in size and products, my amazon business is more passive than it has ever been, as I’ve now outsourced the advertising of my products, reducing my weekly workload to around 2-6 hours in total.
The Future!
For the rest of the year I plan to launch a few more products using the strategy that I’ve been following since I first began, and fingers crossed I’ll hit £200k In monthly revenues by the end of the year.
So that’s my Amazon FBA review… the story of how I went from 0 both in terms of revneues and experience, to being an owner of a 7-figure business that I still run as a side hustle, for fun. The journey that I’ve been on, whilst it hasn’t been a walk in the park, it has been hugely rewarding and fulfilling, if you’ll excuse the pun!
If you want to learn more about how you can do the same with your own Amazon FBA business, then check out my free training where I run through my exact 5 step strategy that I’ve repeatedly followed to continue launching successful products.
Or, if you’re ready to begin your journey and want to start with the best chances of success, check out the Smashers Academy.
P.s. if you want to learn more about my journey (highs and lows), learn more about how passive is Amazon FBA here
