Emanuel Ruiz walks through cash flow problems Amazon FBA sellers hit while scaling. He covers short-term financing options like low-interest loans and 0% credit cards, then focuses on negotiating better terms with manufacturers and freight forwarders: lower down payments, pay-on-shipment deals, and net-30 freight terms to avoid tying up money in inventory.
The biggest issue when it comes to scaling, it doesn't even matter if you're a $10,000 a month, $50,000, $100,000, $250,000, $500,000 per month revenue seller, it's going to be cash flow. Because at one point or another, you're going to need to order more inventory. You haven't sold through your current inventory and you haven't got paid yet. So cash flow is obviously going to be an issue. And there's some practical ways and some necessary ways that you can go ahead and go around this. Um, in the short term, the, the one thing that everybody does is either take out low interest rate loans or get 0% credit cards to be able to purchase these actual inventory. But the most important thing is to build rapport with both your manufacturer and your freight forwarder. When you start building rapport, you start getting terms. That means you're able to go ahead and put a lower down payment. That means that your manufacturer will produce the products upfront without you paying for those items until they are shipped. There are even terms that you can go ahead and use that you don't pay your manufacturer until you actually get paid through Amazon. Same thing with your freight forwarder. You can have terms where you don't pay your freight costs until 30 days after they've been delivered into Amazon. So by building rapport by both your manufacturer and your freight forwarder is a cheat code to being able to scale and not having those cash flow issues.
