Some people say that after working at Amazon for a certain number of years, there are basically only three options left: either become a leader, work alone, or change careers.

Among them, working alone is the most crowded and popular track. Whether it is a newbie in the operation or a veteran with many years of experience, there is no shortage of people who have a dream of working alone. After all, compared to being a cross-border worker, working alone has a higher degree of freedom and a broader imagination space for wealth creation.

A few years ago, in the era of cross-border e-commerce where money was being made everywhere, many individual sellers took advantage of the dividends to catch the growth train and achieved overnight success.

However, in the past two years, as the industry environment has become increasingly complex, the cost of trial and error has become increasingly high. Under the pressure of internal and external factors such as platform risk control upgrades, unpredictable policies, and intensified market competition, many independent sellers have lost all their money and ended up in a miserable situation.

Therefore, many sellers have raised questions: Is Amazon still suitable for individual sellers to work alone?

Looking back on his solo experience in recent years, seller Wang Sheng (pseudonym) summed it up in four words: a shame to look back on.

In 2019, Wang Sheng resigned from a management software giant and joined a distribution company to start his Amazon journey. He thought he could make a new start, but the reality was very bleak: under the triple pressure of stagnant performance, meager salary, and the pressure of supporting his family, Wang Sheng had no choice but to resign on New Year's Day the following year and embarked on the road of no return to work alone.

The cross-border industry in 2020 is in a golden age where the epidemic has driven the release of online consumption dividends. With the help of this trend and his own unremitting efforts, Wang Sheng's solo journey started off quite smoothly. After three months of hard work, his performance reached 100,000+ and his monthly profit exceeded 60,000.

However, as the platform policies became increasingly stringent and the economic environment became sluggish, Wang Sheng's business began to decline 22 years later. On the one hand, brand review became more stringent and various regulations continued to be upgraded , while on the other hand, market demand was weak and consumption was sluggish. As a result, the performance of Wang Sheng's Amazon store deteriorated and orders were drastically cut in half.

In 2023, the turning point did not come, but a darker moment came. One ordinary morning, Wang Sheng opened his mobile phone to check the store as usual, but received bad news: the best-selling store was suddenly banned because it had infringing products. The appeals he submitted afterwards fell on deaf ears, and his account could never be saved.

In fact, there are many such sellers. In 2020, they took advantage of the industry dividends to seize the growth opportunities, and the store started smoothly and the performance continued to rise; in 2021, a wave of account closures broke out and a large number of sellers were cleaned up. The industry returned to the rational track from the peak of wealth, and the explosive growth of orders was no longer easy to obtain; from 2022 to 2023, the platform risk control continued to upgrade, the competition environment became increasingly fierce, and the order dive and profit plummeted became the common situation of more and more sellers.

Wang Sheng is like a small microcosm. With the changes in the industry ecology, countless individual sellers like him have experienced ups and downs.

Compared with a few years ago, today's environment has changed a lot. With the intensified external market competition and stricter internal platform policies, the era of making money everywhere is long gone. Instead, a wave of branding is surging. Sellers must build sufficient competitive barriers to avoid becoming a grain of sand that is washed away.

For individual sellers, they face even more daunting challenges. Funding, costs, channel resources, etc. are all huge tests. It will be difficult to go long-term if they cannot make proper balance.

For this reason, in 2023, many Amazon solo sellers recognized the situation and gave up their fantasies.

Seller Du Li (pseudonym) felt this deeply. After five years of stumbling in the cross-border industry, he finally took the first step to go it alone, but encountered a difficult 2023.

I registered a store in March, but failed before I could accomplish my goal. I encountered an Amazon blacklist lawyer and despite repeated appeals, Amazon still ruled that I was abusing my brand. Then I applied for the whitelist and tried to ship a batch of goods, but I missed a good sales opportunity because it was the end of the season. In addition, purchasing power on the other side of the ocean weakened. Even though I spent a lot of money on advertising, orders did not improve. I had no choice but to sell the goods at a loss.

Seller Jason (pseudonym) also hit a low point in 2023. "I have been working for Amazon for three years. This year has been a difficult and tiring year. Five accounts have been shut down. Enhanced video authentication shut down three accounts. I rescued one, and relocated thousands of products for another, resulting in a direct loss of more than 100,000 yuan. The remaining one is still being rescued."

Some sellers even said: "Sales declined in March, the account was reviewed in April and all links were unavailable for sale, trademark infringement occurred in May, the brand was removed in June, and a large number of links were forced to reduce prices in July. I lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in one year of starting a business and I have no idea where to go next."

Looking back at 2023, the deepest feeling of many sellers is that the risk control of the platform has been improved. Various wave of account sweeping has been higher and higher, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, coupled with the ever-changing compliance policies, many sellers in 2023 are always in a state where every time they want to make a big move, they are defeated by a series of accidents such as brand association, account review, and infringement complaints.

Therefore, many independent sellers who lack the ability to withstand pressure have no choice but to return to the workplace after experiencing all kinds of dangers in the world and continue to be social animals . "Three months after leaving my job, I plan to go back to work. I was full of ambition and was determined to do a great job, but now I have to bow to reality."

Today, many sellers have their own dreams of going it alone. Compared with "living under someone else's roof", starting a business independently has more possibilities for getting rich. But in 2024, when the future is uncertain , is going it alone still a viable path?

First of all, the prerequisites for going it alone depend on the seller himself rather than the general environment. Many people's going it alone is just like talking on paper, with ambitions but lack of specific plans and implementation capabilities.

For Amazon sellers who want to work independently, the most important starting foundation is to have a sufficient financial foundation.

Specifically, the first is to have sufficient funds. On an asset-heavy platform like Amazon, store operations, promotion and marketing, logistics and distribution all require a lot of funds, especially under the FBA model. Once product sales are poor and inventory turnover is sluggish, it is easy to cause cash flow disruption.

Second, it has diversified channel resources. The success of an Amazon hit is inseparable from the support of multiple resources, including high-quality supply chains, or service providers in operations, marketing, logistics, etc.

Moreover, many businesses of starting a business on your own require sellers to do it themselves, so rich operational experience and excellent personal abilities are the foundation. Especially in the product selection stage, sellers working on their own can often avoid many detours by finding the right product. Therefore, doing a good job of market research and operational planning, and making a product as soon as possible to obtain stable income will be more conducive to the smooth start of the journey of working on your own.

Apart from the above factors, starting a business on Amazon alone is also a great test of the seller's spirit and willpower. From product selection, listing, delivery to promotion and after-sales service, the tasks are arduous. As a worker, you can still focus on the operation, but starting a business alone requires full control of the entire process.

Therefore, on the one hand, individual sellers need to set clear entrepreneurial goals, give up the fantasy of getting rich quickly and avoid blind expansion, with the absolute direction of maintaining profits; on the other hand, they need to implement their goals down to earth, concentrate limited funds, resources and energy on key platforms, and avoid being greedy and wanting to grow fat in one go.

From a macro perspective, as the high-growth dividend recedes, the current market environment has become more uncertain, and the room for survival for individual sellers has further decreased.

It is an indisputable fact that market competition has intensified since 2023. This includes both competition among peers - the market is becoming increasingly saturated, merchants are fighting each other to grab limited market share, and the fierce price involution of categories has squeezed a lot of profit space; it also covers the game between platforms - new platforms and new models are emerging, and consumers are harvested and diverted by multiple parties.

According to sellers’ feedback, at this stage, working alone generally faces the following pain points: lack of experience, so they often fall into traps, and they don’t know how to solve many high-level operational problems; their personal energy is limited, and the stacking of multiple operational tasks leads to low efficiency; lack of resource background, and they are restricted everywhere on the way to entrepreneurship; new links cannot be promoted, and most of them are in a loss-making state...

The above-mentioned pain points are caused by both the general environment and personal factors.

Objectively speaking, the times are different now. The success rate of Amazon sellers who want to work their way to the top of their careers has dropped significantly. Going it alone is neither a safe retreat for career setbacks nor the best shortcut for those who follow the trend to get rich overnight. Sellers who want to take this path need to think carefully in many aspects, and funds, resources, connections, and abilities are all indispensable.

Some sellers believe that, judging from the overall situation, most Amazon sellers are not suitable for working alone. If sellers who can only afford low costs insist on working alone, then there is only one solution: find the right product.

"For small sellers working alone, the best way to reduce risk is to find products with moderate sales or moderate link base levels to enter the market with differentiated products. To put it more bluntly, moderate sales means that the top sales are no more than 100 or 80 orders, and moderate link base levels mean that the top link scores do not exceed 10,000."

Therefore, whether it is suitable to work alone depends on the seller's product development capabilities. In other words, whether valuable experience has been formed in the past, including but not limited to mature operational experience in a certain category, supply chain resources for a certain type of product, or always being able to find opportunities in some small categories.

Building differentiated competitive barriers is a common topic in the current cross-border industry. For some sellers, if they want to carve out a path to success in an industry environment where challenges are constantly escalating, in addition to the right time, right place and right people, they also need to be good at discovering opportunities, understanding opportunities and seizing opportunities, and to find new ways in areas that others have not yet ventured into.