An Amazon seller's running chest pack went viral in a Halloween costume video, hitting 2 million likes and flooding orders. But returns spiked to 25% after the holiday, and refund costs plus wasted ad spend nearly bankrupted him. Viral exposure isn't always a win.
Most business owners want to go viral, but one viral video almost bankrupt my company because I sell a running chest pack. And one of my running chest packs went viral on a Halloween costume video. If you guys don't believe me, this is the Halloween costume idea. They got like 2 million likes for this actual video. So I got flooded with a bunch of different orders and it was unusual because the end of September, the beginning of October is kind of a slow season. For my running chest pad. So why did it almost make me go bankrupt? Well, people bought this item as a Halloween costume, and right when Halloween was approaching, especially right after, I got flooded with returns. I usually have a 6% return rate, and this actual video made me go viral. And after Halloween time, I got a 25% return rate. Which is insane, right? Because not only do I have to go ahead and basically refund the customer, I just lost out money on ads, right? So on advertising on Amazon PPC, I lost out on fulfillment costs because I still had to pay the UPS driver to go ahead and drop it off, or the Amazon driver go ahead and do that as well. And more importantly, I lost the product because it doesn't go back into Amazon to be resold anymore. I have to discard the actual product because the last thing I want is for Amazon to put it back into my inventory, somebody else buy it and leave me a bad review because the item has been used or opened or whatever it might be. So again, I was trying to sell— I'm still trying to sell this actual brand itself. And this Halloween viral video did not help my cause. Okay. But I don't blame anything. I mean, this is the cost of doing business, right? I'm going to go ahead and win some, lose some. It is what it is. It was some nice exposure. But again, sometimes you want to go ahead and not go viral for the right reasons.
