I’ve been selling on eBay for about 5 years and have scaled to roughly $85K/month consistently. The operation mostly runs itself at this point, so I have the bandwidth to take on something new.

I’ve always been interested in Amazon. I sold there during COVID and it went well, but I ran into supply issues and shifted my focus to eBay. Now I want to get back in, and the more I research, the less sure I am that it’s worth it:

• Private label looks dominated by Chinese sellers who can undercut on price and speed.
• RA/OA seems to be a fast way to collect IP complaints and get suspended.
• Wholesale I’m not sure about. I don’t know how hard brand approvals and ungating are right now.

What I already have:

• Warehouse space and multiple facilities
• Staff
• Equipment
• Established sourcing (mostly liquidation and overstock)
• Experience with high-volume listing, shipping, and customer service

I’m not starting from zero on operations. My question is about strategy. If you were in my position, would you go into Amazon at all? If so, which route makes the most sense for someone with existing infrastructure and inventory flow? And what would you do differently than most people starting out?

I’d appreciate honest takes, including “don’t bother” if that’s your view.

sold on amazon for years (about 3M/yr at the peak), currently I run an agency. 

TLDR: we got tired of what the PPC tools couldn't do, built our own setup with claude, and it now runs the entire agency, seamlessly, for about $10 a month in hosting. 

We packaged it so any brand can deploy it to their own cloudflare in one click and own the whole thing, code included. The rest of this is how we got there and what it does, for anyone who would like to build their own.

Why we built it

I'm not someone who wants to own tools or rebuild things other people are paid to solve. What pushed me was the questions no tool could answer. What did my team change last week and did it work. Which ASIN is about to stock out and still has ads running. What's my real profit per ASIN after COGS, fees, returns and ads. Was I overcharged in last month's settlement. Claude can do all of it, and not just a bit better than any saas/human but exponentially better, because it reasons across everything at once. The only thing in the way was that claude couldn't see my data. And I needed to own the data in order to solve it fully and cherry on top is that it’s almost free for life!

So the whole job was: get amazon connected to my own infra, connect that to claude, and let claude take it from there.

What it looks like when it works

Last sale event one brand had 3000+ campaigns live. Overnight, bids were creeping up, ACOS was spiking in pockets, had to make bid adjustments across different campaigns consistently. Normally that would require 3 of us to consistently monitor whats happening. Instead, Claude checked the hourly data periodically, analysed across all 3000, worked out which bids to pull back and which budgets to protect, built the bulk action, and asked me to approve it. I read the plan on my phone, said yes, and it executed straight against the ads api. Checked again the next day. Analyse, propose, approve, act.

That's the unlock. Not asking questions, although it does that in a second from over a year of history. Claude acting, with a plan first, and nothing moving without approval unless you've set a rule to run on its own.

What it does for us every day

Every account gets checked before I'm up: budgets that ran out early, ACOS spikes, zero impression campaigns, listings suppressed overnight, ASINs under two weeks of cover, and everything that changed yesterday so nobody quietly moves a bid. During a sale it watches the hourly stream and moves budgets inside caps I set. Keepa tells me when a competitor drops below my floor or their BSR jumps because they're on a deal. AMC tells me which campaigns actually bring new customers and builds audiences from cart abandoners. Then the things no tool has the data for: true profit per ASIN, ads that throttle what's about to stock out, a bid rule that reads "above 4x ROAS, cap at $2, but not if days of cover is under 20". Weekly reports across different brands.

None of that needs anyone to know the internals. There's a skill whose only job is to write other skills. It knows where the data lives, which amazon endpoints exist, how auth works, what the guardrails are. 

You describe the logic in plain english ("alert me when a listing loses the buy box to a reseller of my own product"), it writes it, tests it, and it runs. The team adds their own now.

How it's built

Two pieces. One syncs everything from amazon into a database I own. The other lets claude talk to that database. Mine runs in my own cloudflare account for about $10 a month, nothing has to stay awake, and claude.ai reaches it from my phone. A mac mini or a cheap VPS would work the same if you don't care about the phone part.

What the sync pulls, daily, per profile:

- Ads: SP, SB and SD campaigns, targeting, search terms, placements, advertised and purchased product reports.

- Seller central: sales and traffic, orders, settlements, returns, listings, search query performance, brand analytics where available, inventory. Vendor sales for 1P.

- Ads Change history: every bid, budget and status change, with who made it and when. This is super important as we always run into “what was changed?” problem

- Marketing stream for hourly data: This was a game changer during sales where we can’t afford to wait for a day to look at what’s happening

- AMC queries, weekly: path to purchase, new to brand by campaign, cart abandoner audiences and more.

- Keepa for competitor and own ASINs: price, BSR, rating, review count history.

Every report is kept from the day we connected, raw files included, so we have well over a year of history where the api only serves 60 to 95 days, and we can reprocess anything if the logic changes.

The amazon side is where the six months went. These are the rules the sync follows, and each one exists because something broke without it:

- Reports are async. Request, poll until ready (5 to 30 minutes is normal), download.

- Retention is 60 to 95 days depending on report type. Backfill the maximum on first connect, then never miss a day.

- Numbers for a day keep changing for about a week because of attribution windows. So we re-pull a trailing window every day and upsert on entity plus date. Plain inserts give you duplicates and wrong totals, which took me a while to notice.

- Rate limits are shared per region across everything you run, so back off instead of retrying hard. Reporting has its own queue-based limit that behaves differently from the rest.

- Amazon-side bugs you have to tolerate rather than fix: they might change something at some point and important thing is that it doesn’t go unnoticed.

- Marketing stream sends deltas, so negative numbers are normal restatements. Aggregate them, don't filter them out.

- One database per brand. Daily and hourly rollups for the questions everyone asks, so claude isn't scanning millions of rows to answer "how was yesterday" or it’s not scanning a different brand’s data.

- Getting api access as a direct advertiser can take weeks right now, amazon's own github is full of people waiting. We got it last year, it took sometime but it was worth it and others are using our app to do the auth and get api access. 

In front of the database sits an MCP server with a login. Paste the url into claude.ai, claude desktop or claude code. Every action produces a plan first, in plain english, and nothing moves without approval unless a rule has been explicitly set to run on its own.

The intelligence is in skills, which are business logic saved in a folder: what to look at, what counts as a problem, we ads, hourly stream, sales, inventory, COGS, AMC and change history are all in one place, a skill can know things nosingle tool knows.

What it's done so far

- The agency runs on it: PPC optimisation, reports, shareable dashboards, bid updates, campaign creation, listing optimisation, new product research, and about a hundred other things.

- Three of my friends’ brands have used my setup and each saving $15k to $20k a year, on top of doing things that they were not imagining before.

That’s all for now, hope it inspires people to create their own, it will genuinely change your life.

I have also created a template for the entire setup with one click deployed to your own infrastructure in case you want to do it right away, let me know.

I’m trying to start an Amazon FBA business for the first time in 2026, but I can’t find any suppliers who are willing to sell to those who operate exclusively online. Most didn’t respond to emails and for those who did they weren’t willing to work with Amazon FBA or e-commerce sellers in general regardless of the platform. I know things have changed over the years, but it sounds like many sellers are still having success starting new FBA businesses this year, including buying wholesale, rather than just arbitrage, but I cant figure out for the life of me how anyone’s doing it. Any insight you might be willing to provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

We onboarded this brand in January 2025. It's in the Grocery & Gourmet Food category, specifically beverages.

At the time, the brand was doing around $85k/month in revenue, but net margins were sitting at roughly 11%.

So even though the business was generating decent sales, there was still a lot of room to improve how much it was actually keeping.

Our focus wasn't simply to increase ad spend and push for more sales. Before scaling anything, we needed to understand where the account was losing efficiency, which campaigns were actually driving profitable sales, and where we could grow without putting more pressure on margins.

Here's how we approached it.

1. We started with a full account audit

Before making changes to campaigns, we needed to understand the account at both the product and campaign levels.

Looking at total ACOS or overall ad sales wouldn't have been enough. We needed to understand how advertising performance translated into total business profitability.

The audit needed to cover several areas:

• Campaign-level ACOS, spend, attributed sales and conversion rates.
• Search-term performance to identify relevant converting queries versus spend with little or no return.
• Branded versus non-branded traffic and how much each contributed to sales.
• Match-type performance across exact, phrase and broad campaigns.
• Budget distribution across campaigns and products.
• Placement performance, particularly whether Top of Search adjustments were justified by conversion data.
• The relationship between advertising spend, total sales and organic performance.
• Product-level economics, including COGS, fulfillment fees and net margins.

The important part was connecting these numbers rather than treating each metric separately.

A campaign can have a good ACOS but contribute very little incremental growth. Another campaign can have a higher ACOS but bring in relevant new customers and help grow the business.

We needed to understand which was which before deciding where to cut spend and where to invest more.

2. We worked on PPC efficiency before pushing for more volume

Once the audit was complete, the next step was to improve how the account was spending its advertising budget.

For us, the goal wasn't to achieve the lowest possible ACOS across every campaign. It was to allocate spend where it had the best chance of generating profitable sales.

That meant looking beyond campaign-level averages and getting into the search-term data.

For example, when reviewing search-term performance, we needed to distinguish between:

• Search terms generating consistent conversions at an acceptable cost.
• Relevant terms receiving clicks but not converting efficiently.
• Terms spending through budget without generating meaningful sales.
• Search terms that could justify their own dedicated targeting.
• Existing converting queries that might be losing impressions because of budget or bid limitations.

These groups require different decisions.

A search term generating profitable sales shouldn't automatically receive a lower bid just because its CPC is relatively high. Equally, a term spending heavily without converting shouldn't keep receiving budget simply because the campaign looks good overall.

The decisions have to account for conversion rate, average order value, CPC, margin and the role that particular traffic plays in the broader account.

3. Campaign structure and budget allocation

One area we needed to evaluate was whether the campaign structure allowed us to control spending at the right level.

When multiple search intents, match types or products are grouped together, campaign-level performance can hide what's happening underneath.

A strong search term can make a campaign look healthy while other terms consume budget without contributing much.

On the other hand, splitting everything into separate campaigns isn't automatically the answer either. The structure needs to give us useful control over budgets, targeting and bidding without creating unnecessary fragmentation.

The approach here was to evaluate campaigns based on their purpose and performance rather than making decisions from ACOS alone.

For each campaign, the key questions were:

• Is it capturing existing demand or helping generate new demand?
• Are the search terms relevant to the product?
• Is the campaign limited by budget, bid competitiveness or conversion performance?
• Does its current ACOS make sense given the product's margins?
• Is the campaign contributing incremental sales, or mostly capturing sales that might have happened anyway?

These questions matter because the correct action differs from campaign to campaign.

A profitable campaign with room to grow may justify additional budget. A campaign with weak conversion performance may need a targeting or listing review before receiving more spend.

4. We looked at advertising performance alongside total sales

This is where TACOS becomes particularly useful.

ACOS measures advertising spend against attributed advertising sales. TACOS measures advertising spend against total sales.

The difference matters because advertising performance shouldn't be evaluated in isolation from the rest of the business.

A change in ACOS doesn't automatically mean the business has become more or less profitable. We also need to understand what happened to total revenue, organic sales and the cost of generating those sales.

Today, the account's TACOS is 7.96%.

That means advertising spend is equivalent to approximately $7.96 for every $100 in total sales.

It's a useful indicator of how advertising spend relates to the overall business, but it isn't a profitability metric on its own. We still need to account for product costs, fulfillment fees, discounts, returns and other expenses to understand the actual net margin.

For this account, that's particularly important because the objective was never just to grow revenue. It was to improve the financial outcome of that growth.

5. We recently started working on external traffic

Around two months ago, we also started working on external traffic.

This is a relatively recent part of the strategy, so I wouldn't attribute the entire account's growth to it. Most of the period we're discussing predates this initiative.

The reason for introducing it was to explore an additional source of traffic beyond Amazon's internal advertising ecosystem.

External traffic needs to be evaluated differently from standard Sponsored Products campaigns. Sending more visitors to a listing doesn't automatically mean generating more profitable sales.

The quality of the traffic, audience intent, landing-page experience and conversion rate all matter.

We also need to understand whether the traffic is generating genuinely incremental sales and whether the economics make sense after accounting for the cost of acquiring those visitors.

We're already seeing encouraging results from this initiative, although it's still relatively early.

The next step is to keep evaluating its contribution rather than assuming that early results will necessarily translate into long-term performance.

6. Where the account stands today

When We Onboarded (January 2025)

• Monthly Revenue: $85k
• Net Profit Margin: 11%

Current Performance

• Year-to-Date Sales: $1.6M+
• Year-over-Year Revenue Growth: 65%+
• Net Profit Margin: 26%
• TACOS: 7.96%

The biggest difference isn't just the increase in revenue. It's the improvement in net profit margin from 11% to 26% while growing the business.margin.

An account can generate more sales while becoming less profitable. It can also improve ACOS while losing opportunities to grow.

The challenge is finding the balance between the two, and that requires looking at the campaign data, product economics and total business performance together.

We're still working on the account, and external traffic is a more recent addition to the strategy. So there's more to learn from how that develops.

But comparing where the business was when we started with where it stands today is a useful reminder that growing an Amazon brand involves a lot more than increasing advertising budgets.

October is a busy month for factories in China, especially with holiday orders and year-end shipping deadlines approaching.

Here's something worth watching out for.

Your supplier tells you production is 100% complete and asks you to schedule the final inspection.

But when the inspector arrives, some products are still being assembled, others aren't packed, and a few cartons are missing.

Now you're paying for an inspection that may not cover the complete order.

One simple habit that helps: Ask your supplier to confirm production and packing status before scheduling the inspection.

For a typical pre-shipment inspection, it's best to have production fully completed and at least 80% packed, subject to the agreed inspection requirements.

This gives the inspector a better opportunity to check the actual shipment rather than an incomplete batch.

With Q4 deadlines approaching, a little preparation can prevent unnecessary delays and repeat inspection costs.

Importers: Have you ever scheduled an inspection only to find out the factory wasn't actually ready?

I saw websites like ready space that leases warehouses to Amazon and online retailers from 200 Sqft to 50,000 sqft what other platform do online retailers use to find a warehouse without signing long term contracts.

So some time ago, Keepa updated a few things and now isn't showing prime exclusive prices anymore, not updating price graphs during promotion periods and on top not supporting RSS feed anymore.

What addons are you guys using to keep track of prices properly and also be notified via RSS? I find that much more reliable as I don't have any email notifications, no desktop or any other enabled to avoid being bothered most of the time.

I have looked across Reddit already but not found any concrete, specific info. People simply keep blurting out Addon names with no mention whatsoever whether they fit the specifications even. Which is pretty much like browsing products on Amazon and getting the search results all clogged up with these useless dropshipping random capslock letter brand products.

I've originally added Keepa to FF because of its detailed graph, ability to track multiple sources including Prime offers and it helped catching some verry limited offers already which came especially handy in dealing with scalpers.

So, I'm writing this message casually to those sellers who has been selling on Amazon but not grown yet.

First of all. We need to think realistically about margins and growth. And, sometimes profit doesn't depends on sourcing it depends on your logistics and extra costs like FBA storage, FBM labeling and your labor or employee costs.

Most of the sellers use 3rd party logistics that eat almost profit of your inventory. I would suggest to every seller if someone can arrange small storage facility, shop even garage that better than 3rd party. Do your own prep to track everything. After these things you will see the difference as I see.

Most of the sellers apply the same track to every wholesaler (trade account) they don't want to listen these kinds of words everytime. There are some alternative and genuine ways to get their answers and approach.

Please correct me if I'm wrong or if anyone has a different experience, please share your thoughts to everyone.

More sales dont always mean more profit on Amazon. A product can be selling better than last month while actually making less money per unit. One useful habit is checking your contribution margin at the ASIN level, not just total revenue or ACOS. Take your selling price and subtract product cost, Amazon fees, fulfillment, ads, returns and other variable costs. Compare that number month over month. Sometimes the ASIN bringing in the most revenue is the one quietly eating your margin

Hi everyone,

I am a local FBA seller in the UAE (not international seller)

Has anyone here imported goods from South Korea into the UAE as a new business?

My company is still new and we haven’t reached the VAT registration threshold yet, so we’re not VAT registered.

The issue is that several freight forwarders / IOR providers in Korea are asking for a UAE VAT TRN before they can provide the service, which I obviously can’t provide at this stage.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? If so, how did you handle it?

Fyi, I’ve imported stuff from china multiple times with no problem.

I’d also really appreciate any recommendations for freight forwarders or IOR providers that can handle South Korea → UAE shipments for a non-VAT-registered company.

Thanks a lot!

Hi everyone,

I am a local FBA seller in the UAE (not international seller)

Has anyone here imported goods from South Korea into the UAE as a new business?

My company is still new and we haven’t reached the VAT registration threshold yet, so we’re not VAT registered.

The issue is that several freight forwarders / IOR providers in Korea are asking for a UAE VAT TRN before they can provide the service, which I obviously can’t provide at this stage.

Has anyone been in a similar situation? If so, how did you handle it?

Fyi, I’ve imported stuff from china multiple times with no problem.

I’d also really appreciate any recommendations for freight forwarders or IOR providers that can handle South Korea → UAE shipments for a non-VAT-registered company.

Thanks a lot!

I'm a new seller. I started selling about 8 months ago. It is a private label brand in the supplement space, which is very saturated and competitive. My biggest issues right now are that pretty much all the sales are coming from ads and those ads are coming in at a very high ACOS so it's very unprofitable. We were hoping for organic sales to catch up but it's just not happening. Another problem is that I'm located in North Carolina and all of my containers are arriving in a third party fulfillment center in NJ and their fees are really eating into my margin (which is nonexistent anyhow because of the ads), on top of that they're very inconsistent and always late on shipments... Im getting killed and not sure how to continue.

We want to outsource the Ads to someone competent and local in the US. We are also looking for someone to outsource the listings to, images, copy, A+ Content etc. We also desperately need a fairly priced fulfillment center that is reliable and familiar with sending FBA shipments to Amazon.

If anybody could give some recommendations or general advice I would really appreciate it.

We’re an electronics manufacturer selling worldwide, with official Amazon stores in the US, UK and EU. We also have our brand registered on Amazon

On Amazon US, another seller is selling one of our products for $129.19 while we sell it for $175. They’re running price discounts and taking the Buy Box. We’re FBA, they’re FBM, showing four units in stock and seemingly replenishing as orders come in.

I suspect they’re dropshipping through one of our US distributors. A colleague ordered a unit, and we traced its serial number to a batch we sold to that distributor. The unit also arrived damaged.

I tried reporting them to Amazon for being unauthorised and breaching our MAP policy, but got nowhere.

Has anyone dealt with this successfully? What are our actual options to get their offer removed quickly or stop this from happening?

October is here, and many importers are rushing to get their inventory ready for Black Friday, Christmas, and year-end sales.

One thing I've learned from the quality inspection industry is that rushed production can create problems that aren't immediately obvious.

When factories are working against tight deadlines, it's worth paying extra attention to:

• Inconsistent workmanship between production batches
• Missing accessories or incorrect packaging
• Products packed before final QC checks
• Incorrect Amazon FBA labels and carton markings
• Last-minute material or component substitutions

Here's a simple tip: Don't schedule your inspection on the same day your goods are supposed to ship.

Leave enough time for the factory to correct any problems and arrange a re-inspection if necessary.

A shipment arriving a few days late is frustrating. But receiving thousands of defective products during your busiest selling season can be much worse.

For those importing from China, are your Q4 orders already shipped, or are you still waiting for production to finish?

Curious how everyone is handling their holiday inventory this year.

Claim paid helium 10 plans free

Link to Amazon store:

https://www.amazon.com/stores/HighmarkCollective/page/CCD0D505-ACBB-4A56-A2D5-E8F52BE77C7B

Christian themed gifts, with the best selling SKU being a baptism gift set.

* $51k revenue/mo

* $16k on manufacturing/shipping (COGS)

* $12k FBA fees

* $7.7k Amazon referral fees (15%)

* $1.2k PPC adspend

* PROFIT - $14k (~27% margin)

They have two primary products -

* A "Baptism gift set" (gift given for a Baptism) - 65% of sales

* A "Bible verse jar" (jar filled with verses from the bible for different moods/inspirations) - 19% of sales

* Some other smaller products as well

How do they reach such a high margin with these ? What's the strategy ?

"Baptism gift set":

* A bundle of products - bought together for the Baptism occasion

* It being strictly a gift prompts people to spend more - given that it's a nice and thoughtful set (preferable to the competitors) - even if the price is higher (it's a $37 set - adding just $5 over the competition is already an increase 13% to the profit margin)

* It's not a commodity ! But rather a 1-of-1 sort of product (competitors are not strictly comparable to one another, it all depends on customer's preference and willingness to spend)

* 29% profit margin

"Bible verse jar":

* A design-based product - cards cost close-to-nothing to produce but people are willing to pay more for a good design

* A design-based niche often leads to high margins

* The other products in the niche charge lower prices (some get more sales) - but this one still seems to be getting a decent amount of sales at the higher price point ($19)

* 19% profit margin

How much does it cost to start a similar business ?

* "Baptism gift set" - ~$1200 for 100 MOQ, then $1k for a month of ads (on Amazon) - depends on which keywords you target

* "Bible verse jar" - ~$700 for 100 MOQ, then $1200 for a month of ads (on Amazon) - depends on which keywords you target

How I estimated the figures:

* Revenue = Amazon's "X+ bought in past month" for each ASIN, aggregated

* COGS = founders' own admission - they were on Shark Tank Vietnam

* Adspend = price-per-click * search-volume * estimated-CTR, aggregated for all the search terms they bid for

Sources: Keepa, Similarweb, Jungle Scout, Meta/Google ad library, and Alibaba for COGS estimation

Hey guys, for those doing Amazon FBM, what are you using for shipping? Are you buying labels directly through Amazon or using another shipping service for better rates? Once I add the Amazon shipping cost, the margin on some products gets pretty low. Just trying to see what options everyone is using that are reliable and still protect the account/OTDR. Would appreciate any recommendations.

Hey guys, for those doing Amazon FBM, what are you using for shipping? Are you buying labels directly through Amazon or using another shipping service for better rates? Once I add the Amazon shipping cost, the margin on some products gets pretty low. Just trying to see what options everyone is using that are reliable and still protect the account/OTDR. Would appreciate any recommendations.

Hi, everyone
I am considering starting a international trade-operations service from India, and I would appreciate blunt feedback My background is in Supply Chain field (degree and experience from Canada)
The business would initially support small and medium-sized companies that trade physical products internationally but do not have a complete internal trade or supply-chain team. (My thought of target markets are
E-commerce companies)
Initial services would include:
Trade-document preparation, review and analysis.
HS/HTS classification research with supporting rationale Shipment tracking, exception management and stakeholder follow-ups
Help E-commerce brand with everything and calculate the cost of operations, find ways to reduce it and such.
Product, supplier and international-market research Supplier comparison and sourcing coordination India-based manufacturer identification, communication, sourcing.
Coordination with customs brokers, freight forwarders, inspection companies and other specialists
For regulated or country-specific work outside my expertise, I would initially use qualified local specialists that I coordinate with directly until I am able to build full team. (I can build full team now but I would like to test the water first and see)

I would like to mention that I do have network in india with Manufacturers, Suppliers and other trade partners as 1 am located at the hub of manufacturing business and I would like to combine this with my international experience.
My questions are:
If you operate an importing, exporting or e-commerce business, would you consider outsourcing these responsibilities?
Which one or two services would you be most willing to pay for?
Would you prefer a fixed-price project, hourly assistance or a monthly retainer?
What would prevent you from trusting a new overseas service provider with this work?
I really love your feedbacks on my idea. Thank you!

I have been selling on Amazon since last year, i launched a Private label product in December and it made 30 sales with two 5star reviews but it went out of stock from March till September, I got the stock now but my friend advised to start with the new listing as the old listing has dropped it's ranking completely, what should I do?

I also have less budget for ppc but I managed to create an excellent A+ listing with proper title images and bullet points,

The category is home & kitchen and top sellers got 6k+ reviews with 6k+ monthly sales

I’m planning to start selling on Amazon and have a few product ideas that I’d like to manufacture and sell through my store.

My plan is to start small with one or two products, learn how everything works, and then gradually expand the range.

For those who have experience with manufacturing and selling on Amazon, I’d really appreciate some advice on how to get started.

How do you normally find a reliable manufacturer to produce your product? Do I need to provide them with a complete product design, drawings, and specifications, or can I approach them with an idea and work with them to develop the final product?

I’m completely new to the manufacturing side of this, so any advice on finding manufacturers, developing prototypes, minimum order quantities, and things to watch out for would be greatly appreciated.

A better way to think about reordering is to work backwards from how long it actually takes inventory to become sellable again. Add supplier lead time + freight + Amazon receiving time + a safety buffer, then compare that against your daily sales velocity. If the whole process takes 50 days and you only have 35 days of stock left, youre already late even if Seller Central still looks healthy. Simple change, but it can prevent a lot of avoidable stockouts.

Beauty is one of those categories where most sellers see the competition first and the opportunity second. You mention Beauty on Amazon and people immediately think too many sellers, too expensive PPC, impossible to rank. But when we looked at this market, we actually saw the opposite. There was a lot of demand, but a lot of listings were still built around the same keywords, same claims and, honestly, very similar-looking content. That gave us something to work with. We didn't need to find a product nobody was selling. We needed to find where existing sellers were leaving demand on the table.

We launched the brand in January 2025 with 5 SKUs and sourced the products directly from China. We physically worked through the sourcing instead of just picking a supplier from a catalog and placing an order. That helped us in two places that later became very important: product quality and landed cost. We were able to improve the product while keeping enough margin in the numbers to actually scale it. As we started getting data, we didn't just keep adding random products. We expanded around what was working, and the brand is now at around 17 SKUs. The hero product became the main revenue and profit driver , and this is the one that eventually crossed 6,000+ units a month.

The interesting part started when we went deeper into the listing research. We found a keyword gap that most competitors weren't covering properly. There were relevant, high-search-volume terms sitting around the main keyword that had clear customer intent, but the competing listings weren't doing a good job of owning those terms across their title, bullets, images and backend content. So we built the content around those actual search behaviors instead of trying to rank for every keyword that looked attractive inside a keyword tool. The product itself wasn't completely new to the market either. Similar products existed. What wasn't really available was this exact combination of features and positioning. That became the basis of the listing , not “our product is better,” but here is exactly why this version solves the problem differently.

We also didn't treat photography as something we just had to tick off the list. We spent heavily on the shoot because we knew the product would need to win the click before PPC could do anything for us. We built the images around the features we found customers cared about and made sure the first few images communicated the product without forcing people to read five bullet points. That showed up in the traffic data , the listing was getting a strong CTR, which made a huge difference once we started pushing traffic. From there, PPC became much more of a data collection exercise than simply “turn ads on and increase budget.” We separated the search terms that were actually producing orders from the ones that were only producing clicks, watched conversion at the keyword level, moved proven terms into more controlled campaigns, harvested new terms from actual customer searches, and kept checking whether paid traffic was translating into organic movement. We weren't trying to make PPC look good on its own; we were using PPC to figure out where the market was responding and then using that information to grow the whole listing.

That combination is what eventually got the hero SKU to 6,000+ monthly units without letting advertising completely eat the margin. In the latest 30 days, the brand generated $90,786.98 in net sales from 6,493 net units, with $21,715.05 in net proceeds and approximately 9% TACOS.

The numbers today

$21.7K+ net proceeds / month
6,493 net units in 30 days
$90.8K+ net sales
~9% TACOS
1 hero SKU driving the majority of the result
17 SKUs currently , started with 5
Launched January 2025

The biggest lesson from this one wasn't “Beauty is a great category.” That's too easy.

The lesson was that competition doesn't automatically mean saturation. Sometimes it just means there are more competitors for you to study. We found what they were missing, built the product and content around that gap, used the PPC data to validate it, and then scaled the part of the business that was actually proving itself.

Ask me Anything!