Hi guys,

Since 2015, I’ve been running an e-commerce business selling a suite of products on Amazon. The past six years have been a series of ups and downs but I’m on a new track now. So over the next little while I want to share where I’ve come from and what my current mindset and work process is, so you can see how things change (or don’t) throughout this new process I’m following.

So…

…in 2015 I was looking for a small business and found an Amazon business for sale on Gumtree Australia. It had been set up by a guy who’d followed some you-beaut training and started a single product business selling on Amazon USA, but he’d grown bored and wanted to move it on. I bought the business, partly because about 2/3 of the price of the business was the expensive training course which would teach me to do the same thing. When I looked into the course, it was very exclusive as to when you could join (they only opened once or twice per year) and it came with a whole suite of tools and membership benefits. However while he confirmed this all came with it, once I bought the business I found this wasn’t the case, and in fact he’d just found some pirated versions of the training videos and was ‘selling’ those to me as part of my purchase! Needless to say I was pretty disappointed. However I followed through these as best I could and learnt some interesting points. I reordered the product (which he’d let go out of stock), dealt with all the poor reviews (as he dropped the customer service ball as soon as he decided to sell) and restarted the business while dealing with the fall-out of his poor decisions.

Nonetheless the business grew well, and when I got back in stock things moved quickly. In 2016 I sold about 4,500 products which generated just over $100,000 in revenue. Let me say at this point: that is REVENUE, i.e. it’s just the value of the sales. It is NOT PROFIT. But it’s a useful comparison point over time.