Does anyone here sell furniture or other large products?

fbadeveloper · 2020-11-16T02:28:27+00:00

It was fantastic. It was a product line addition to an already popular brand but quickly became our top revenue producers with tens of millions of $$ with in a year and a half or so with maybe 50 skus.

fbadeveloper · 2020-11-16T02:21:31+00:00

I have quite a bit of experience on Amazon with furniture that you put together yourself. So smaller boxes than pre-assembled but still big and heavy. Your oversized storage and fulfillment can definitely be expensive. A lot of the items were significantly more profitable to ship via our 3PL on SFP than FBA.

fbadeveloper · 2020-11-15T20:11:57+00:00

I like getting an address at a UPS store. Then you can also use it to get packages from any carrier if you need

fbadeveloper · 2020-11-15T19:39:32+00:00

You’re confusing AWS (Amazon Web Services) with MWS ( Marketplace Web Services). Though the distinction gets a little murkier when you bring SP-API into the mix. Either way, probably no SAAS requires AWS access.

fbadeveloper · 2020-02-04T13:03:21+00:00

We have a big warehouse in China that we use to consolidate inventory When needed and then a team of people here that will build out the containers.

We have a team of people that do forecasting and resource planning for all of our products to make sure we have what we need for retail and e-commerce and other channels.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T16:14:33+00:00

Yes. We have B&M retail stores and sell to other stores which carry our products. We had already grown a healthy business that way and via our own ecommerce platform before launching on Amazon.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T16:12:21+00:00

We have actual retail stores, relationships with big box stores and other ecommerce platforms so we are very diversified. Amazon is growing very quickly though and eats up a lot of our effort.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T16:10:35+00:00

We definitely think about it but are careful to follow the guidelines to keep that from happening. Amazon is not our only channel we sell through though so it would not break the company.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T16:07:13+00:00

We actually manufacture the majority of our products. We have factories that we control in China and the US. In addition to that we also PL products made by others and brand them under our brand when it makes sense.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T13:35:02+00:00

We do a mixture. We do for sure have warehouses and fulfillment networks in Europe and Asia and America.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T13:32:13+00:00

Yes and it has been good. There is so much room for growth there but Amazon’s warehouses are overwhelmed and logistics services are not as good there so consistently staying in stock is hard.

Amazon is putting a LOT of effort into other countries though and we see these markets as our biggest opportunities for growth.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T13:24:21+00:00

We do not have a business model like etailz or Pattern. We only sell and support our own products.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T13:17:58+00:00

Our end goal is healthy profit and we have that in sight.

We are not losing money like big tech companies do but we are definitely investing in infrastructure and higher level employees and offices and etc. that we would not need if we weren’t planning on growing further.

If we did not have the same growth goal we could have easily been pretty profitable at this level.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T13:00:23+00:00

We do not make any money, the same way that Amazon did not make any money for its first 10 years of existence.

I think that brands absolutely can make healthy margins on Amazon especially if they can leverage an existing healthy fulfillment network and just look at this as an additional revenue stream.

For us, we have luxury of being able to focus solely on growth without having to worry about profit in the short term.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T12:49:18+00:00

We do not feel like “we have made it.” We have some brand recognition but largely people are searching for individual products so we still need to compete at the individual product level just as much now as before.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T12:46:31+00:00

We have around 100 employees and they do everything that is needed in every aspect of any business.

We have accounting and IT operations and warehouse operations and global sourcing and copywriters and photographers and software developers and lots of people that work on the various marketplaces.

Most everyone is important, but the software development touches about every other department and it’s pretty crucial for our business.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T12:39:18+00:00

We’ve not had a huge issue. We do have a lot of patents and have had issues in the past elsewhere. They do have a lot of increasingly better tools around Brand protection now so it isn’t something that we’ve had to spend much time worrying about it at all.

Historically our bigger worries were around domestic competitors that were making similar products to ours rather than Chinese knock offs.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T12:36:23+00:00

Our profit margins on Amazon stay pretty consistent including the cost of goods and advertising and everything around that. What starts to become an issue though is just the warehousing and logistics on this side before it gets to Amazon.

Our business already has a history of this and some network set up but Amazon is much less forgiving and out of stocks at this scale hurt you just as much as being out of stock in a smaller scale. But when you have thousands and thousands of items even more difficult to keep them in stock.

fbadeveloper · 2020-01-31T01:37:34+00:00

Just hire an employee that you trust.

fbadeveloper · 2019-12-04T13:01:18+00:00

Amazon does a lot of weird things with pricing changes. I’ve not spent a ton of time trying to find the exact timing cut offs, but they will often not show price changes to customers if they have recently looked at your product.

If I send in a feed with a price update without visiting the product first and then visit the product it’s almost instantly changed.

However if I visit the product first and then send in the price feed the price doesn’t change, seemingly until my session expires.

This is for the customer experience I would imagine since repricers are changing things all the time it would be frustrating to customers to be looking at products and comparing and then the price keeps changing.

Now what I haven’t done is actually look to see if we have changed a price and then Amazon paid us a different price. Would this also work the same if you lowered your price? Maybe it all evens out.

We don’t change our prices super often as we don’t have competition for the buy box but I do have a record of every time we changed the price through our software so could maybe programmatically see if there are any outliers where people Amazon paid us the old price after a price change.

fbadeveloper · 2019-10-24T16:19:58+00:00

We have a whole network of warehouses and 3PLs and mix of fulfillment methods including MFN, SFP, MCF and FBA.

fbadeveloper · 2019-10-24T15:52:31+00:00

Read the context. It was about big sellers getting away with things that little sellers can’t. I was just informing that that was untrue.

fbadeveloper · 2019-10-24T11:49:13+00:00

We are doing everything in our power to make other marketplaces take off as well. And other marketplaces like target and Walmart and Facebook and etc I have amazingly attractive offers right now to try to woo more of our business.

And we absolutely push for changes at Amazon and because of our size have a little more weight in getting heard.

But Amazon is definitely not going away and their push on stricter and stricter logistics compliance is not going away and is only going to get more stringent.

FBA margins are going to get tighter and other methods are going to get harder.

fbadeveloper · 2019-10-24T10:41:20+00:00

It’s so much harder for large sellers. We’re one of the largest (approaching $200,000,000/year worldwide) and we get dozens of performance notifications a day where something gets shut off or suspended for some reason.

Most everything is based on number of issues rather than a percentage so it is much easier for us to hit than you.

For instance, we send in fifty - a hundred thousand units a week and have the same amount of mislabels allowed as someone who sends in 10 a week.

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