Sellers’ Voices丨Amazon Entrepreneurship Records after the Epidemic

This epidemic is almost a devastating blow to the offline real economy, and my former employer is one of them. I used to be the deputy store manager of an offline store of a chain home furnishing brand. Logically speaking, our industry also needs someone to stay in the store during the Spring Festival.

This year, it was my turn to take the Spring Festival shift, but the epidemic broke out before New Year's Eve. Wuhan was locked down, and the city where the store was located quickly issued policies requiring supermarkets to close. I could only take a truck back to my hometown. At that time, I had not yet thought that I would never be able to return to my original position after leaving.

I think everyone can guess what happened next. It was nothing more than spending the longest spring break at home. The company issued notices of delayed return to work again and again. Finally, in April, we received a notice that the capital chain was broken, and we were asked to contact the finance department to collect the last month's salary and compensation before leaving.

I stayed at home for too long, and I realized something was wrong, so I started preparing for a way out before the company even notified me. But the epidemic hit offline businesses in almost every aspect, and all companies in the industry were having a hard time. At the time, everyone was laying off employees to survive, and it was almost impossible to switch jobs.

Although I usually have the habit of saving money for a rainy day, and the surplus money in my hand can last for a long time, the state of unemployment makes me very anxious. Even if the job search is fruitless, I still want to find something else to do every day.

It was probably in April. I had a small gathering with my college classmates and talked about work and the situation this year. Coincidentally, his original company also laid off employees due to the epidemic, but he did not choose to look for a job like me, but planned to start his own business. At this dinner, we talked about cross-border e-commerce and Amazon.

Although we are both novices in this area, I have worked as a deputy store manager in a home furnishing store and have some experience in product selection and sales data. My classmate is engaged in domestic e-commerce operations and has resources and experience that can be utilized. We hit it off and decided to work together to start a business on Amazon.

At that time, when the investment manager was still able to create an account, we used a friend's business license to register a store, and then I selected some products that might sell well and put them on the shelves based on my previous experience in home furnishing stores. Although we both had some experience, we were completely clueless when it came to the actual operation of the store and had no idea how to operate the backend.

During that time, we joined the seller group (here we are talking about our group, if you need to join the group, scan the code at the end of the article and I will add you), many sellers in the group would discuss specific operations and management issues, and I learned a lot in silence. In addition, our investment manager was quite responsible, and I successfully uploaded several products.

We didn’t choose to ship to FBA right away, but sold the products by ourselves for a while. However, because the shipping costs increased significantly during that period, we made almost no profit after shipping a few orders. We decided to be more ruthless and use some of our savings to hold back some products for FBA.

Although we were able to put our products on the shelves before the FBA warehouse was overwhelmed, after switching to FBA, we received fewer orders than when we delivered our products ourselves. We did a few more reviews and opened in-site ads, but there was still no significant improvement.

Then I launched a few new products. They have been selling well but not very much. The income is not very ideal, definitely not as much as the salary of the deputy store manager at the beginning. But at least I have a way to make a living, and we don’t invest much. Basically, we can earn back some of the investment, so there is not much financial pressure.

The most important thing is that I am very optimistic about the prospects of cross-border e-commerce. Whether one of our products becomes a hit, or each product has a stable number of orders, it can easily exceed previous income, and there will be no income ceiling.

This year is bound to be an era of reshuffle. Many people will probably be forced to rethink their careers and life plans this year. Many people, like me, have entered Amazon to test the waters, but some people cannot persist.

I have heard from an old seller in the group that it is no longer the time to make quick money on Amazon. Small and new sellers should take steady steps and explore niche industries and categories. It is basically not a problem to make enough money to support a family. Although I have not experienced the period of making quick money, our small store is now steadily growing. I think Amazon is a new idea worth considering in this post-epidemic era.