Debt of 2 million! He plans to sell his house and continue to run Amazon?!

"Should I sell my house and start Amazon?" "Should I give up Amazon?" These topics have always been hotly debated by people in the industry. How many people have joined Amazon just to realize their dream of buying a house, and how many people have sold all their assets in order to keep their Amazon stores going.

Amazon is like a besieged city. People outside want to get in, and people inside want to get out.

Sellers' dilemma

There was an Amazon seller on the forum who was struggling with the question of "whether to sell that house worth $1.8 million and devote himself fully to Amazon."

According to the seller, he is now 30 years old, has a wife and a monthly salary of over 10,000 yuan, but he has always lived in debt. He has to work until after 9 o'clock every day before going home, and he has basically no time to spend with his family after returning home. He has several years of experience in Amazon operations, and his side business has been running a store that was opened 16 years ago. He usually puts some products on the market and basically uses them to pay the monthly rent. Because the main business takes up too much time, he is unable to manage it.

But this kind of repetitive overtime work every day made him feel very painful. He wanted to calm down and start Amazon to find a way out for his future. However, he did not have enough funds, so he thought about selling the house worth 1.8 million yuan.

There are many people who share the same anxiety as this seller. In recent years, there has been a myth on the Internet that "working on Amazon can make a big comeback", such as "in his 20s, he made hundreds of thousands of yuan a month by working on Amazon"; or "he bought a villa in Shenzhen by working on Amazon"; and "he went from debt to a million yuan a year in two years of Amazon entrepreneurship"; "a college student made a net profit of 50,000 yuan a month by working part-time on Amazon" and so on.

It is precisely because of this information that many people feel anxious. In contrast, they are almost 30 or 40 years old and have not achieved anything, so they suggest to themselves, "Can I also rely on Amazon to take a chance on this dull life?"

Previously, there was a Shenzhen seller who made his first fortune selling on Amazon in 2015. He not only bought a house in Wuhan, but also had more than 1 million left. Now, affected by the epidemic and other factors, he has spent all his money, and has also lost nearly 3 million on Amazon, including 2 million in bank loans. Seeing his Amazon journey go through ups and downs, he was unwilling to give up and wanted to sell his house in Wuhan to get some funds to fight Amazon again.

Since last year, many Amazon sellers have been going downhill. Although the market has not shown any signs of improvement, especially this year, there are still many sellers who are making money. Many people still stick to Amazon even in difficult situations.

Should I give up Amazon?

Faced with fierce competition on Amazon e-commerce, some sellers said: "Even if I don't make money this year, I will continue to do it."

Seller Xiao Li said that he can't leave Amazon. He has been doing boutique operations on Amazon since 2015. At the peak of his career, he could earn 1 million yuan a year and later became a manager. After several years of hard work, he accumulated a sum of money and had suppliers, connections and other resources to support him. So Xiao Li scraped together 3 million yuan and hired five or six people to start a business next to a village in Shenzhen.

Because of the supply chain advantage and several hit products, it has made considerable profits in a year. Along the way, Amazon has made it taste too much sweetness. Until last year, the mold-making products that it was proud of were taken away by the market at low prices, and the ranking of core products also fell all the way, and sales plummeted.

In order to recover the losses, Xiao Li was forced to adopt a low-price sales strategy, but he did not expect all kinds of bad things to follow, such as malicious bad reviews from competitors, refunds, and various suppression policies of Amazon. After many twists and turns, the product link was preserved, but the loss was as high as one million.

“Now, as long as I can get an order, I will be very happy, even if every order will result in a loss”: Xiao Li said.

When asked whether he would consider withdrawing from Amazon in the future, Xiao Li made it clear that he would definitely not withdraw. As long as he could find his core advantages again in the competition, he would definitely be able to make back the lost money.

Seller Xiaolin is not so persistent. He believes that many people who cling to Amazon are suffering from the sunk cost mentality, thinking that they have invested enough manpower, material resources, financial resources and time and cannot give up so easily. Little do they know that they will lose more and more money in the future and need to invest more and more money.

Xiaolin always reminds himself, "It is better to eat less meat than to put yourself in danger."

In 2022, making losses on Amazon seems to have become the norm. Should you escape from Amazon and find another way out for yourself, or continue to fight and make back the money you lost when the wind changes?

This question makes most people feel entangled. If they continue to invest, they are afraid that it will be a bottomless pit. But if they want to quit now, they are unwilling to do so. Alen, a seller who has been working on Amazon for 7 years, said:

"I have invested so much energy in Amazon over the years. I have been through so many days and nights. I am unwilling to stop now. Talking to others about Amazon is my hobby. I think Amazon can make me shine. I don't know what else I can do if I quit now!"

In fact, when choosing to engage in cross-border e-commerce, Amazon is always an option that cannot be avoided. Facing the global cold winter, what choices should cross-border people make?

What else can you do if you don’t do Amazon?

Seller Xihua joined Amazon operations in 2019 and worked in Shenzhen, a first-tier city. He earned a considerable salary and lived a fairly comfortable life. However, all this was like a dream and was completely shattered after the Amazon account ban wave came.

Xihua said: "It was after the May Day holiday. A few days after I went back to work, multiple store accounts of the company were restricted. Soon, all the stores in five sites were blocked because of association. This was a bolt from the blue for both the company and me. I stared at the screen for a long time before I came to my senses. Since then, my career has been on a downward spiral. If I give up Amazon, I don't know what else I can do."

For Amazon practitioners, whether they are self-employed or corporate, they are all related to each other. Influenced by the industry environment, many Amazon employees have also chosen to change careers.

Someone has made other platforms:

Amazon is in fierce competition, and the European and American markets are becoming saturated. Many people who are optimistic about the cross-border e-commerce industry are still looking for other ways out for themselves, and no longer rely solely on the Amazon platform. Some sellers choose independent sites, some choose Southeast Asian e-commerce, and some place their hopes on overseas Pinduoduo Temu. No matter which platform it is, for Chinese overseas sellers, it is a trial and error opportunity. It is very likely that once they grab the life-saving straw, they can decisively give up Amazon.

Some people choose to set up stalls:

Now the "stall culture" is popular. When people cannot make money, they join in. Previously, a picture of an Amazon operator who changed his career to sell stewed food was widely screened. In front of an ordinary stewed food stall, a boss was busy cutting vegetables and preparing side dishes. Many people came here because of their reputation and said that their stewed food tasted very good.

Some people joked that they could recruit a few more people who used to work for Amazon to set up stalls to sell food, and form an Amazon boss snack street.

One operator said that due to copyright infringement, more than 1,000 items of goods were stranded in their warehouse for months, and the team leader decided to lead the team to the subway entrance to clear out the goods. This inevitably makes people curious. We often see various types of big sales at intersections. Are they all the once glorious Amazon giants clearing out their goods?

Returning to the essence of the problem, there are still opportunities in cross-border e-commerce, but relatively speaking, the market competition is more intense, and it is not easy to do well and make money. Amazon is just a platform, and there will be more platforms in the future. We don’t know the future dividends. We can only say that in cross-border e-commerce, adhering to long-termism is the way to win.

Some people say: For long-termists, even if they make a little progress every day, as long as they can survive, the compound interest effect will definitely bring huge returns to the seller.

The whole process of ups and downs on Amazon is worth savoring for sellers. No matter whether you leave or stay, at least we have left our mark on this track, and it is all worth it.

*The above sellers are all pseudonyms