Building My Amazon FBA Business
I ran my business hard. With several full delivery trucks per day, I would quickly ramp up to needing a second employee to process inventory. It was more cost-effective to pay UPS to pick up shipments every day than have employees take the time to load and deliver shipments. My cash-back credit card alone was paying me more than all my personal living expenses combined. My Amazon profits were more than I would be willing to discuss. I can say that I was putting money into savings each month.
Sometimes 2 large orders would arrive at the same time. There was not enough room in the garage to store products while still leaving room to process outbound shipments. Inventory started to migrate into other rooms of the house. My neighbors were most likely starting to wonder what all the commercial traffic was about on my street.
Finding a commercial location for my Amazon FBA business
Yes, I needed more space, and having constant deliveries wasn’t going to attract unwanted attention at a commercial warehouse. Having my personal space separate from work with a commercial location would help me detach work-life from real-life.
The perfect space was found, however, I came to a crossroads when the Covid-19 pandemic started. I needed to hire 6 to 12 new people right when employees should be staying home. Again with my luck, my Amazon account was “suspended” at the same time as I was signing a long-term commercial lease.
I weighed out my options and decided to hold off on expanding till I saw how some things played out. This happened to be the right decision, as Amazon decided they were not going to allow me to have my selling privileges back. This was a very difficult period for me. There was a legal battle for months before Amazon would pay me for inventory they should have returned to me. And yes, Amazon would pay me. I brought them to arbitration, declined any notion of settling out of principle, and won my case.
This period is when I learned the lesson of not having all your eggs in one basket. Amazon had too much control over my business. I would get suspended on Amazon a number of times. The process of having my account reinstated was frustrating.
I ended up finding out through arbitration that Amazon was likely never planning on allowing me to sell again. Looking back, I could have diversified into other marketplaces or adapted my business model. It’s more important to learn from what happened and move on to a solution that allows me to have the deciding vote in what happens to the future of my business efforts.
This is when I started getting serious about writing this blog and helping other sellers. I’m currently working on a lot of tools for Amazon sellers and anybody else wishing to launch a business. For further information, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter below.
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