what's up guys tonight we're going to
take a look at jungle scouts
state of the amazon seller 2021 where
they have key insights from almost 5 000
amazon sellers that help make up the
hundreds of billions of dollars
that amazon makes in revenue each year
this is going to be a good one it
shouldn't take that long to get through
it so let's get started
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quick reminder i run a weekly print on
demand giveaway you can enter for free
using the link in the description this
week two lucky winners
are going to win licenses to merge
titans for upload automation
merch ninja for research tools and all
sunsets premium pre-made sunset graphics
also in the description you can find a
link to my seven-day fba mini course
completely free it'll help you
find your first product and a link to my
fba
facebook community if you'd like to join
last but not least one more thing to
plug
tomorrow on thursday at 12 30
right around noon afternoon eastern time
i'm going to be going live
talking about an amazon wholesale
workshop that you can attend
for free and it's a multi-day workshop
it's good stuff
completely free so make sure if you can
make it
that you attend live at 12 30 tomorrow
all right now let's take a look at the
state of the amazon seller 2021.
first things first we got to shout out
jungle scout they put together this
report and they also have a suite of
amazon seller tools that
are great for someone like me who sells
amazon fba private label products
specifically their chrome extension that
helps me evaluate
the demand and competition for various
niches
on amazon also i use it every now and
then in print on demand videos when i
want to
see projections for daily monthly sales
and monthly revenue so i always have a
link in the description to
jungle scout in case you want to check
out their tools although it is slanted
primarily towards
amazon fba or amazon wholesale which
again i'll be talking about tomorrow
if you're here for print on demand
content uh it's not as useful for print
on demand anyways let's take a look at
the
key insights so the first thing that
they noted is that
62 of sellers said their profits were
rising in 2020 and i gotta count myself
amongst that majority two out of five
sellers said their business or 44
said their business have performed
better than expected because of the
cerveza sickness pandemic and
amazon sellers are looking to diversify
their e-commerce strategies 39
are considering selling on walmart in
2021 and i count myself amongst
that 39 percent i actually um had a call
with somebody who recommended looking
into shopify's fulfillment network
to sell on walmart because the previous
attempts i've made to
apply to sell on walmart have been
rejected probably they don't tell me why
but i'm assuming it's because
i only had my inventory stored at amazon
fba warehouses and they probably don't
want to give business to their biggest
competition
all right amazon profitability 85 of
amazon sellers are profitable
you know part of that is probably
because the ones that aren't profitable
aren't selling on amazon anymore just
saying
uh 44 of amazon sellers said their
businesses performed better than
expected
because of the cerveza sickness 14
started selling a certain product on
amazon because
of the cerveza sickness i thought about
it but i got worried that
the low-hanging fruit most relevant
products because i was i was following
the cerveza bug
early early january i've told you guys
the story as to why the school that i
teach at
um now we're completely remote but back
then i was going to campus twice a week
and
one of the students there was from wuhan
so i had to really take it seriously to
get informed
and uh yeah but i was worried that i
would dump a bunch of money into a
product
that then maybe that country the
manufacturer's country's government may
not let me
let them export it in case they needed
it for like a strategic stockpile or
something
so i ultimately didn't do that um i did
help
a business get their hand sanitizer
brand on amazon though
that was a pain in the butt but separate
story 13
priced their products higher because of
increased demand for their products due
to the cerveza sickness and i would
count myself amongst that group
as well some of it just had to do with
competition
fell off of the platform so that i could
get back up to the
profit margin that i thought i should be
selling at um sometimes i feel like i
get into a little bit of a pricing more
bringing
my profit margins down to undercut
competition i know that's
basically how the free market works um
so i was able to increase some of my
product prices as well for my fba
business
not across the board but certain ones
are sticking out in my head where i was
like oh wow
um you know my highest profit margin
product
it's something like 35 now that's
abnormal for me 35
is the highest i mean like i said it's
highest but um
yeah it was i was probably selling it at
like a 25 profit margin
and then i looked and i was like what
the heck all my competition's selling at
like 15 bucks a piece
and i was selling it like 9.99 to get it
ranked and then i
bumped it up to like 11.99 and i was
like hold up i can go to 14.99
and be competitive so um nice little
spike there and i know those percentages
don't necessarily match up when i was
selling it at 9.99 i mean i was probably
breaking even
uh 64 of amazon sellers are profitable
within their first year of selling
that's actually interesting i wouldn't
have projected it to be that high
new amazon sellers those with one to two
years of experience may be taking home
42 000 per year in profits nice
so who is the amazon seller
two-thirds of people that took their
poll are male
the median age was 39 years and the
location
half the world's amazon sellers are
based in the us but
2021 shows a notable rise in interest
from sellers in canada
turkey and germany specifically of
course
you can sell on the us market
internationally now i can't say that
definitively
for every single country because i
haven't lived and tried to apply
to get a seller central account from
every country but i know that
a few years ago i mean it's been a while
now they opened the doors to all
international sellers
and you know again it's been good and
bad right because if i'm seeing that
from a seller perspective i'm like
uh that's going to make my life harder
if i'm seeing it from a buyer
perspective
probably a good thing right all right so
selling on amazon is a primary source of
income for many there are millions of
amazon sellers around the world nearly
half of them
are self-employed and live off their
ecommerce retail business 47 percent
uh and 22 percent earn income from their
amazon businesses
alone yeah and i guess i'm technically
now self-employed it's been just about a
year since i quit my day job hopefully
that's the last time i have to
do the day-to-day commuting and you know
eight to nine to ten hour grind
at an office um of course right after i
quit
everybody's working from home anyways
which my biggest gripe was always the
time wasted commuting but you know
whatever i'll get over it
i'm not gonna lie i don't miss having to
do something
when i'm told to do it um you know you
know my job was never that really that
bad
as a web developer i kind of felt like
my own boss but now i'm really my own
boss so
and i mean you know i always like to
tell this brief story but
i literally made my annual income the
month after i quit
i mean a lot of it had to do with luck
if you will um
on the stock market but either way i
don't care money's money uh what else
most popular category amongst these
sellers pulled home and kitchen
represented 40
of the sellers that were pulled
median product cost 21 so more than half
of products sold
by amazon's third-party sellers cost
between 11 and 25
my median is probably 19.99 which
shouldn't surprise you guys that's such
a good sweet spot for i feel like a
purchase
um it's probably it's not exactly 19.99
i mean i've got some that are like i
was saying couldn't support a 10 price
point i've got i used to sell products
that were as high as 130
per sale uh with variations that dropped
to like 99
and that was good the only issue is that
they were oversized so now i try to
focus on
at least you know price point aside like
products that aren't oversized those
oversized products really ate away at
your profit margin because amazon
would make me ship them to three
different locations which
really increased my already high inbound
shipping costs
which just eats away at the profit
margin so my lower cost
products are um they're not oversized so
i can ship them to one location
most of the time sometimes not but
anyways getting off into the weeds there
the top seller motivation was they
wanted to be their own boss
42 percent of sellers seek financial
freedom through a new career path and
what's great about amazon fba
if you are amongst the people that you
know find
a profitable product and stick with it
and scale your business up
is that it it's probably the most
passive of all the business models that
i personally do i mean it's active when
you're launching new products but
like if you're just maintaining your
existing products it's
not that hard really you just gotta keep
your product in stock
and then you know obviously there's
other things you need to do manage ppc
but assuming that you've got everything
in a good position
it's not very active so you can actually
go down a whole new career path
while making money from your passive
amazon fba business
you know it doesn't have to be fba you
could do third party you could do
wholesale like we're going to talk about
but what i really love most about
selling these physical goods on amazon
is how truly passive it can be
amazon's third party sellers are
pivoting in 2021.
so when it comes to fba versus fbm
although most
third-party sellers still use
fulfillment by amazon sellers began to
use fbm more frequently in 2020 likely
in response to limitations of amazon's
warehouses
during periods of high demand due to
cerveza sickness
43 say they use fbm all or some of the
time
compared to 34 the previous year
and there's definitely advantages and
drawbacks to both i mean if you're able
to do both that's probably
ideal to be fluid and flexible
and for sure if i didn't read it right
there i would have told you i know why
they're switching to third party pretty
much out of necessity
because amazon was really impacting the
various
fba sellers businesses by not allowing
us to sell in er
sell send in the amount of inventory
that we know we need
in crunch time you know q4 especially so
that that was tough
uh top sales model private label that's
what i personally got started with but i
am looking into wholesale now
so 67 percent of sellers use this method
in which they create their own product
or brand or you know both realistically
through drop shipping and retail
arbitrage
though sorry though drop shipping and
retail arbitrage are increasingly
popular now
drop shipping on amazon i'm not a fan of
i'm pretty sure they do not want you
doing that
and retail arbitrage i know people are
not people in general but i know some
people that are really successful at it
it's just really active you know it's
it's too active like
this chair that i'm in i like sitting in
this chair you know i just bought myself
a lower back massager
and then i also bought myself another
like kind of upper shoulder massage so i
can just sit here
you know i still get my exercise in but
i don't want to leave the chair
it's comfortable i i like my day-to-day
like grind
you know but i'm very efficient from
this uh this chair this seat
you know with my three monitors and my
fourth if you count the tv this is where
i want to be so i'm not trying to do
retail arbitrage
all right and then it says nearly all
amazon sellers 96
plan to expand their amazon businesses
in 2021 hey myself included like we said
81 of amazon sellers advertise their
products on or off
amazon so for me my offline stuff i
don't advertise but
like i've mentioned this before as as
many of my products as i can
i want to put a website on the unit or
somewhere in the packaging
so that anybody that wants to go to the
website
if i ever want if the day comes where i
want to start like a shopify business
i can but for now i just redirect the
domain i mean i was a web developer so
this was like really easy for me to do
read redirect the domain back to my
amazon either a brand store
or directly to a product listing amazon
loves when you send them offline traffic
and each sale you make increases your
organic rank so
for me that was a no-brainer uh a
cerveza sickness era
of selling on amazon 71 of sellers run
their businesses
from home and 34 of amazon sellers
say prime day being moved to october
2020 from its typical dates in july
marked the start of the busy season
holiday shopping season all right that
one's switched on me
all right we're almost done growth of
e-commerce competition sellers are
looking for new e-commerce opportunities
of amazon sellers 33 of amazon sellers
said they
plan to start selling on other
e-commerce platforms in 2021
and 21 plan to launch their own
e-commerce store so i've done that
i've told the story i won't go too in
depth but
it's hard to drive traffic to that store
and again it's like
you're pulling trap sometimes i was like
i put my website on
each unit of a product that i was
selling
and i had a brand so probably 10
different skus in it
and each one had the website url but if
i'm taking people from amazon then they
go to the website url
and they don't repurchase from me on
amazon what if i start losing organic
rank
because of that you know and i know it's
like oh well then you have your own
customer i get it i get it i get it but
ranking number one organically on amazon
is probably gonna make you more money at
least in my mind
than you trying to pull people off the
platform and have your own like shopify
store which by the way still comes with
fees
i know amazon fees are high but it's not
like you don't pay fees if you
have your own website you still pay fees
and plus advertising costs all right so
where do amazon sellers plan to grow
their ecommerce businesses
according to the poll walmart was number
one number two instagram number three
shopify number four facebook marketplace
and number five
etsy etsy's interesting i never listed
my fba products on etsy but i did get
them up on ebay
and i got the occasional sale but it
wasn't really the products i sell
aren't really the this type of thing
that i would personally think of going
to ebay for
all right and then you've got walmart
poses competition uh
33 of sellers think walmart's online
business will be
strong competition for amazon in 2021
and 22
are worried about competition from
walmart
challenges sellers must adapt more
quickly than ever and a digital world
brand identity has become secondary to
product reviews that's something that
i heard scott galloway who's like a
really smart professor from nyu he's got
a great youtube channel
uh he started mentioning that like five
six seven years ago and i heard it and i
was like damn that makes a lot of sense
that's why
when i hear people saying like i wanna
make a brand and
force people to buy my stuff even if
they don't want it i'm just like well
i'm gonna take a different approach my
goal is to make money so i'm gonna
see what people are buying and then try
to sell them that
wherever they like to be when they make
their purchases right just keep it
simple
amazon sellers scramble to provide
superior products as they face constant
new competition frequent changes from
amazon and a barrage of threats
top amazon seller challenges number one
getting customer reviews
number two by the way getting customer
reviews feedback quiz
i think i put a link in the description
normally but that's like my go-to i use
it for my fbm sales
and my fba sales it auto it automates
emails
that are within amazon's policy
requesting honest feedback that leads to
more reviews you can use it it's
probably like i don't remember what the
monthly fee is probably like 20 bucks a
month but well worth it
those reviews make you way more money uh
support from amazon or key number two
support from amazon or keeping up with
amazon changes yes
amazon sends you a lot of long emails
three finding profitable products to
sell for advertising on amazon
you know advertising once you get it i
don't know if it's really that hard
five protecting against black hat
tactics counterfeiters and other risks
which in my personal opinion has
actually gotten much better
than if i was comparing this same period
of time to like three years ago
four years ago when i was first starting
off it was pretty bad
and that was closer to when they had
opened up the gates internationally
which
instantly led to a lot more of those
black hat stuff
competing with amazon is inevitable for
many by 2020 amazon was selling tens of
thousands of products on more than 100
of its own private label brands that is
a big threat
that i'm personally scared of as well
half of sellers say amazon sells
products that directly compete
with the seller's products ouch nearly
two thirds of sellers are concerned
about increased competition driving
price down yep for sure
especially if you're competing for a buy
box alright guys that's it so you can
download the full report again i'll put
a link in the description
to the jungle scout article and shout
out again to jungle scout for publishing
it
thanks for sticking with me till the end
guys quick reminder i wrote a full
amazon fba course i actually spent over
a year on it because it was the first
online course i ever wrote so it is the
most thorough fba course
you're gonna find anywhere and there's a
link in the description if you wanna
check it out
and that's it thank you so much for
watching guys like subscribe and i'll
see you soon
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you