Emanuel Ruiz shares what went wrong selling on Amazon FBA. He spent too much on premium packaging and branding early on, which drove up costs and let cheaper knockoffs undercut him. Focus on functionality and keeping costs down instead.
All right, I'm gonna talk about mistakes that I made when I first got started with Amazon FBA, and this is one of them. This is one of my first products that I ever came out with on Amazon. Before it was called Deadstock, now it's called Factory Lace because of a trademark lawsuit that I got involved in, but that's a different story for a different day. But look at this, right? It looks so nice, premium. You go ahead and open it up and you can see how everything I went ahead and thought about as far as the branding is concerned when it comes to Amazon. But when you're going ahead and selling on Amazon, packaging really doesn't matter. The number one thing that a customer cares about is if the product actually works. Did I get good reviews based on the box and everything like that? Yes, I did. But the fact that this actual box here cost me around $1.50 to go ahead and produce— not only that, this EVA foam material that's right here, I could have used a cheap plastic But no, I decided to go ahead and use premium type of packaging to go ahead and make it feel like an elevated look. And you can see how everything is spaced out to make it look so nice. Well, my FBA fee cost is a lot higher than a lot of my competitors. So you see, somebody can go ahead and outcompete me on price drastically for this actual product. And you can see that if you go on Amazon, there's a bunch of different competitors that have copied my actual, uh, Uh, brand— not necessarily branding, but copy my actual product and is able to sell it for like half the cost of mine. Why? Because I focused on branding. Long term, maybe it'll work out, but when you're first starting on Amazon, do not, do not, do not overspend on stupid crap like packaging. Like, as long as your actual product works— like, look, even my actual, you know, bottle, professionally done dye lines Like all of my actual brushes have my actual logo on them, right? Looks super nice, but it does not move the needle. Trust me.
