I Tried Amazon FBA for 30 Days... Here's What Happened
Emanuel Ruiz ran Amazon FBA for 30 days and made $357,000 in gross sales with a $78,000 net profit. He breaks down every expense: $50k in ad spend, $67k in referral fees, $51k in fulfillment costs, and $76k in product costs. His biggest mistake was stockouts, which he says cost him thousands.
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I tried Amazon for 30 days and I made over $350,000. And for you guys that don't believe me, here is proof of $357,000 in a single month, not a year, in one month. And this video, I'm gonna go over all these numbers, all my expenses, and the number one mistake I made that actually cost me thousands of dollars. And if I didn't make that one mistake, I would have an even bigger month than $357,000. Which sounds crazy to me. But first, why am I even sharing this, right? Why am I giving you any secrets into my business or anything like that? And there's 2 reasons. I've been in Amazon FBA since 2018, and Amazon FBA has literally changed my life. I've been able to live life on my terms, purchase my dream house, and I'm still actively purchasing Amazon FBA business because I do think that it is undervalued and a piece of real estate that people aren't taking seriously, because right now there is a piece of a pie that you can still take and make life-changing amounts of money, especially when you sell your Amazon FBA business, which again, that's a different video for a different day. But number 2, I've noticed through being transparent with the products that I sell, the brands that I own, things that I'm implementing in my business to better scale them, I've noticed that 99% of people don't take action. Like in this video, most of you guys will watch this video, get all this information and we'll implement these strategies in your business. So again, use these benchmarks and analyze your business and actually take action to better your Amazon FBA journey. And before we get into all of these numbers, um, I've gotten asked if there's any mentorships, courses, one-on-one type of coaching opportunities out there. And I have finally released one and we are currently in the waitlist right now. So if you do sign up, you're going to get the best price possible. And in this course, you're going to get hours and hundreds of videos of strategies I have implemented in my own businesses to better help yours. And I also have partnered up with a lot of like-minded individuals. So the more people that actually join this program, we're all looking to win. And again, if you're not interested, it's fine, but it is going to be a game changer out there because I do think I poured my heart and soul into this to become the best Amazon FBA mentorship program out there. Currently, but enough pitching it. Here is my actual details, and again, I like to do this live, and I don't like to make any edits. So bear with me if I do make a mistake. So out of the $357,000, what came organically? Well, as you can see here, $275,000 of organic sales, where 82% came from Amazon PPC, which is a crazy ratio, to be honest with you, because usually I get 60% of my sales. Organically and 40% through sponsored products. But again, this is December time. So a lot of people go ahead and purchasing and I'm getting taken advantage of that by better ranking and people are purchasing me organically as well, but I can go ahead and go deeper into this, but let's go through the video. So as you can see, based on the units sold organic, there it is. So let's go over promo. So what I like to do throughout the entire year is offer 5% off coupon codes. That allow me to go ahead and get better visualization when somebody's typing in my product. And over here, it's— I'm refreshing this actual page so you can see that these numbers are still real, right? They didn't change at all, but here it goes. So as far as refunds or promos that were here, I like to offer a 5% off code because it helps visibility when it comes to Amazon FBA. You get a little green bar that allows you to go ahead and, and get your product clicked over your competition. Obviously there's more into this, But I do offer a promo code, which costs me around $7,800. If I go into this in detail, it's going to be a very long video. So I'm trying to go through this. So advertising costs, how do I split up my advertising costs through the different types of options that there are on Amazon? As you can see here, $50,000 is spent on sponsored products. $9,000 or $10,000 are spent on sponsored brands. Sponsored brands videos get close to $3,000 and sponsored display get close to $500,000. In this case, my actual cost per click for sponsored products is very low, as opposed to my, my shoe cleaning business. I run a lot more sponsored brands because it's a cheaper cost per click and it converts better. So again, this is just this actual business here, but keep that in mind and use this as a benchmark for your actual business refund costs, right? We also, we obviously have a lot of refunds when we sell a lot of units, right? So you can go ahead and see the breakdown here as far as Refunded amount, the promotion amount that I get back based on, you know, people returning their items, refunded commissions, FBA customer fee. You guys get the whole point. There is a lot of different fees that go into Amazon FBA, and you're going to see it right here. As you can see, all the different types of Amazon FBA fees, and I'm going to go over the main ones because the other ones, you can see that some of them are $1, some of them are $2. So let's go over the main ones. Referral fee, that is that 15% that Amazon charges you every time your item sells on Amazon, which I paid right around $50 $67,000. And then the FBA per unit fulfillment fee is to get these items shipped to a customer, right? So this actually cost me $51,000 to get my items shipped. Another fee is storage fees. You know that during December or Q4 for that matter, you do get charged a premium. So I spent $6,000 in a single month just on storage fees. And I also got charged an FBA convenience fee of $3,500. So what is this? Well, during Q4, I don't like to ship all of my inventory into Amazon because in October and November, I might not get a bump up in sales, but that storage cost is very heavy. So what I like to do to offset this is I like to either go ahead and ship it into my garage or ship it into a 3PL nearby. And I started dripping inventory as needed. If I don't need that inventory, then I'll wait until January to ship in this inventory. Um, but I have that as an option. So obviously I use this option because my items were selling. Very quickly. We also have, you know, liquidation brokerage fee, cause I did liquidate a lot and I did do a lot of removal fees. As you can see here, $1,400 for slow moving inventory that I just wanted to get rid of because during December time, you also have a reserve where you can't ship in a lot of inventory for whatever reason, right? Like during January through September, you can go ahead and ship in basically as much as you want. But as soon as Q4 hits, if you don't remove this item, you won't have space in Amazon to ship in your best-selling item, which sounds crazy, but it is what it is. Right. I also had Vine fees. Obviously I launched new products. I had Lightning Deals. I ran deals as well. Labium fees. You, you get the picture, right? I don't want to go over everything in detail because I really want to go over the main stuff here. So after that, the biggest expense is the cost of goods sold. You can see here that out of all the money, $357,000, my cost of goods sold was actually $76,000. And how many units does that account for? That accounts for right around 4,700 units that basically have my cost of goods sold. And as you can see here, the net profit that I actually made was around $78,000, which is a 22% profit margin and a 100% return on my money. Right. So again, what are the things that I've learned throughout selling $357,000 worth on Amazon? Well, The biggest thing that cost me more money that I mentioned in this video was that I ran out of stock. You see, I like to experiment with coming out with new products in Q4 because people impulsively buy products, right? So it doesn't even matter if you don't have a lot of reviews. If you launch a good product and you market it well enough, you'll start seeing results fast, whether a product is good or not. So because I ran out of stock, I went ahead and lost a lot of money and potential. Revenue, but that's why I'm excited for 2025 because as soon as I get the logistics down on this actual business and I get these actual winning inventory in for this Q4, we're gonna crush these numbers. And another mistake that I see that a lot of Amazon affiliate sellers basically fail in the future is that they don't have something like this, right? They don't account for all the different fees that Amazon has because you can see. You can't account for all of these actual fees. So that's why I encourage anybody to have a Helium 10 Profits tool or Sellerboard like I use, right? And to mention that I do have one of the best prices for Sellerboard because this is probably one of the crucial or most crucial softwares that I have in my business that if you don't have it, go ahead and take advantage of that discount code that I have with Sellerboard and basically implement everything that comes out in your Amazon FBA business into a P&L, into a balance sheet, just like we went over right now. And what are the things that you can go ahead and take away from this video? Right? Amazon FBA sure isn't easy. With all the money that I made, some people might say that only a 22% profit margin in the best month during the year. Well, the answer is yes. Throughout the year, I do have right around a 20 to 25% profit margin. But what other business allows you to scale this fast, right? You can go from not knowing anything in Amazon FBA and learning the keys to basically influencing people to buy your product over your competition in as little as 6 months and make life-changing amounts of money. Again, I wouldn't be making this video and making these claims if I didn't think they were true. So again, it's just crazy to think that when I first got started in 2018 and fast forward to today, I have these types of numbers in a single month. And again, if you are interested in learning from me, learning from like-minded individuals and entering this mastermind, please make sure to click that link below and sign up right now before that waitlist is over. Because again, you are going to get the best price before it goes ahead and launches. And for any closing thoughts that I have with my business is, again, take action. As I mentioned in the beginning of this video, most of you guys, especially a bunch of people have already clicked away, are not going to take action. You have a benchmark from somebody making $350,000 and seeing what their expenses are, how much they spend in ads and segmented into the different types of ad groups, right? So take this, look at your business and see if the percentages match up. You don't need to be making $350,000 for this video to make an impact on you, right? Just scale it down or scale it up based on what you're making. But that's, that's my closing thoughts here. Take action in your business, right? So again, if you guys appreciated this level of transparency, all I ask for in return is consider liking this video, subscribe to this YouTube channel because I have to be more frequent now. I want to go ahead and make a difference in your life. So don't— make sure to go ahead and not miss a single video because I'm always going to be transparent and giving you tools and different keys and tricks to better scale your business. But until next time, guys, peace.
