my biggest regret of 2020 for my
e-commerce business
is probably that i didn't make that much
money selling face masks
now i was following the whole cerveza
sickness thing very early on back in
january
because the university that i teach at
teach web development at
they had a student that was from muhan
china that essentially
ultimately tested negative but when he
got here they i think made him
quarantine until his test results came
back and
they kind of kept the community in the
loop as far as what was happening and
that kind of put me
uh i feel like it forced my hand to get
really knowledgeable about the cerveza
sickness
very early on back before it was really
mainstream
and the reason i shared that is because
the first thing i was thinking of was
how can i make money selling these face
masks and i was thinking i should sell
them on amazon fba
which ultimately i decided not to do
because i was too worried
that whatever country i ended up
ordering from because keep in mind we
couldn't order them from china china was
keeping them all for their own country
and i had already found alternative
suppliers in other countries but
during the production run or afterwards
even if it wasn't shipped out yet the
government could at any point in time
of whatever country i order from say hey
we're not exporting
ppe you know face masks or whatever
so i was too concerned with ultimately
lighting money on fire
by placing a big face mask order and
then it not even getting shipped out
because of some government order
i think private industry probably would
have still shipped it out but you know
when you involve governments
and it would have been reasonable for
them to say hey don't ship that out
so i mean i think we did that in america
too didn't we with um
ventilators or something i don't know
anyways back on topic
i didn't ultimately order face masks for
fba but as you guys know with print on
demand we were able to sell face masks
here's the thing i didn't i still didn't
sell that many face masks like
with redbubble that's probably the
marketplace where i could have sold the
most
the biggest issue i had was i have a
huge existing catalog of designs on
redbubble
but face masks didn't exist as an item
prior to 2020 in order for me to
sell face masks i would have had to go
in and manually enable them
by the way hit me up in the comments
below if you guys know some tool
that can automate enabling face masks
i'm not aware of that if it exists
so i would have had to go in and
manually enable all these face masks
that's too much of a manual task that's
too much of a lateral move for me
i'm trying to push my business forward
in scale so i ultimately didn't do that
but all of my newly created listings
have the face masks enabled as you would
expect
as far as amazon goes for selling face
masks
i did not push any face masks to amazon
the reason being they had already kind
of algorithmically cracked down on their
catalog
due to price gouging and due to people
exploiting you know my mom
i remember one day she's like i bought
these really nice face masks
and i was like ma like you either got
you either paid like
100x what they're worth or and
slash or they're gonna come in in like
three months and it ended up being both
i mean she overpaid maybe not 100x but
she overpaid and they
came in like literally months later you
know what i mean nobody had supply
so the the reason i shared that is
because it just wasn't gonna work on
amazon
uh they i don't trust their catalog
they're trying to police a massive
catalog
algorithmically using fresh code you
know code that probably wasn't tested
very rigorously so i'm trying to keep my
entire account
safe right i have my whole fba business
and my whole on print-on-demand business
under the same account if i list a face
mask
even through printful whichever i mean
that had been tested and lots of people
were doing it but like
if something goes wrong i'm putting too
much at risk so i didn't even do that
and as you can see here this came out uh
just yesterday i think on december
16th saying that they're disabling the
push for face masks
to seller central so for me it doesn't
matter because i'm not listing any but
it made me feel a little bit better
about my decision
not to sell any but let me know what was
your guys best seller of the year
this year like how were your face mask
sales did you take advantage of selling
them on redbubble did you
sell them through printful or some other
production partner i know pretty much
all
the pod production partners added face
masks as an option
um you know did you sell a bunch on etsy
i know that even the etsy ceo back in
like april was bragging that
they did i believe that he said it was
like 10 million plus so it was like
eight figures
sales revenue came through on their
platform of just face masks which of
course they were the beneficiary because
while the other platforms were trying to
be responsible about not letting people
get price gouged and scammed
there was even a big youtuber i forget
his name but there was a big youtuber
who essentially started some like
shopify drop shipping store
and sold a bunch of these like premium
fun looking face masks
and then just kind of closed the
business and
was never to be heard from again and
just kept the money um so people were
being
really shady and uh i guess with shopify
you can get away with it because you own
the
the business but anyways that's probably
why like amazon ebay were a little bit
stricter
and etsy of course just didn't care um
in true etsy fashion but
let me know how your year was as far as
face masks
in the comments below i'd love to hear
from you and also in the description if
you guys want to check out the weekly
print on demand giveaway there's a link
at the top
right next to my print on demand mini
course for free
the link is right there and my print on
demand facebook community but thanks for
watching guys i appreciate it
hit that like button and subscribe if
you're not already and i will see you
tomorrow
[Music]
you