Finding Another Way

An Amazon FBA Journey, There and Back Again

This is the Second part of my series chronicling my journey/learning experience with Amazon FBA in search of a side hustle. Actually I’m really hoping to just make it big, get rich, and never work a 9-5 again....

So let's begin at the normal place you begin.... Where you left off last time obviously. Take a look at PART ONE

I know you were on the edge of your seat with that cliffhanger but that’s all over now.... Here is what I chose to work with.

Silicone Wine Glasses

There are a decent amount of sellers, but Jungle Scout’s score shows us it isn’t completely saturated and there are still plenty being sold. Here is where you need to get your mind right. Do you need to make something new? Do you need to be special in any way? The answer is no, not really.

Sellers of these glasses on the front page, second page, and even third page are making money off these things. The top seller with only a 3 star average review is selling over a 1,000 units, generating over 10,000 dollars in revenue per month. Is that the whole story? No, but it is enough information to know there is a market. So the idea is to just get a piece of that pie.

Source: Giphy

Ideally the plan is to differentiate your listing somehow though. Make your listing look better. Better pictures. Better descriptions and grammar. Better Reviews. More Reviews. Etc. etc. So for my product, I found that in general, it has good reviews on a lot of sellers listings. The main negatives of this product (the most popular being a stemless white wine style glass) was that it had the potential to tip easily, sloshing your drink out, or completely falling over. I figure if I can address that issue, and perhaps have a slightly different look...then I will be different than all the others and hopefully springboard my listing to the top. That’s the theory.

Source: Giphy

My idea in particular came from finding a supplier that offered a range of silicone products including the exact wine glasses I’d been analyzing. They also offered a different shaped wine glass. A small goblet/snifter style glass. The product appeared more sturdy, with an actual stem and base, as well as the curve of the glass seemed like it would hold liquid better at different angles.

This style of glass/cup only appears on the Amazon search once or twice. So that makes it fairly unique. One point for differentiating. The product appears to resolve issues found in other bad reviews. Two points.

Additionally the shape and such, in my opinion, just looks a little bit classier. Since it’s intended for wine, I figure thats a decent quality to have.

Ok, what have we learned in the first two parts?

Step 1, find a product

1. To do this we need some help (unless you're just lucky and come across something while browsing in the ‘healthcare’ category of Amazon). The help comes in the form of services such as Jungle Scout (there are others).
2. Once we find a product we also need to confirm its viability, using Jungle Scout, but also by moving slightly into step 2 and confirming the base cost for the product.
3. Rinse and repeat 1-1 and 1-2 until we find something that looks promising.
4. Begin thinking of how to beat the competition.

Step 2 is to find the supplier, which we touched on slightly, but locating, communicating, and negotiating with the supplier was a bit more involved than just selecting a supplier from the website.

I hope you enjoyed my rambling. Feel free to leave praise, or criticism. Also, please leave questions, if i can answer them, I will.