I Placed my First Order + A Minor Setback – Part 8

There has been a couple weeks since my last Amazon FBA case study update but I am back today with a brand new update! You will see in this update that I have been very busy handling and placing my first order of my product.

Before we get into more information about my first order, I first want to make sure that you are all caught up on the previous updates for this case study. You can take a look at all of the case study updates below: 

I also did a webinar a couple of days ago where I talked about how to find products to sell on Amazon, you view the replay of the webinar here. There is a lot of good info packed in there and it seems like it was useful for a lot of people, so feel free to check it out if you are interested.

Before we get started, I want to let you all know that this post is more of an update post on my progress and not so much a how-to article. I still think you will find some useful things from reading this post and you will be able to see how I am progressing so far!

I Placed my First Order

I am very pleased to say that I have placed my first order and they are currently in the process of making 1008 units. Wooo

It Took Longer than I had Hoped 

It took a little bit longer than I had hoped to place my first order but I wanted to make sure that I had everything in place. I also wanted to make sure that I wasn’t making any mistakes before I paid thousands of dollars.

To ensure I was doing everything correct and that the product itself was exactly how I wanted, it took hundreds of emails between my supplier and I. The worst part about this is that the only time I can talk to my supplier is after 8pm because of the time difference. This makes for some late nights emailing my supplier back and forth.

These last couple of days I have stayed up till 3am emailing my supplier to try and place the order ASAP.

Some Details about the Order

I initially placed the order last Wednesday but my supplier would not start production until they had a receipt for proof that I paid. So I went to the bank on Thursday and placed a wire transfer to my suppliers bank.

I got the reciept and the production began that Thursday.

My supplier had me pay 30% upfront and then I will pay the other 70% of the payment once the production is finished. 

The total cost for manufacturing my 1000 units is $2,600, or $2.60 per unit.

This meant that I had to pay $780 upfront to get production started and then another $1,820 once protection is complete. 

If you remember from update #5, I said that my manufacturing costs were going to be $2,520 or $2.52 per unit. What changed?

I learned that I needed to have each one of my items poly bagged, which cost me an extra $.08 per unit. Not too bad! My supplier is also applying my FNSKU labels for my for free.

A Minor Setback

Even though I am very pleased with finally placing my first order sand getting everything in place to make my Amazon business successful there is one minor setback that I was not expecting. What was this setback?

Read the email below between my supplier and I(click to enlarge image):

Yup, it is going to take around 25 days to make my product. I had no idea that it would take this long and quite frankly I hadn’t put too much thought into the production time.

Right now I am looking at close to 2 months before my product goes live on Amazon, 25 days for production and 20-30 days for the shipping time. This sucks.

I was pretty bummed out when I learned of this and it does suck, but I will make the best of this extra 25 days that I have. 

There is Some Good News

Yes, the extra 25 day wait is going to suck but there is some good things that can come out of this. The first being that I will have more time to work on the launch of my product.

More Time to Grow Email List and Prepare for Launch

I will be doing all sorts of different strategies and techniques to try and grow my email list of people interested in my product. Growing my email list is going to be my main focus over these next couple of months.

Why an email list?

Simple, because I can sell to them WHENEVER I want. I just shoot out an email and a percentage of them will end up buying my product. I can also sell my second item, third item, etc to them once I get to that point. 

Another cool thing about an email list is that I don’t need Amazon to get me customers, I have my own. 

I will be doing a lot of different stuff to try and grow my email list. Everything that I do will be reported back to you all and you can see if it worked for me or not.

How Will I Grow my Email List?

I am planning on trying some of these different strategies:

• Ranking my website in Google for related search terms
• Ranking powerpoints via Slideshare for related search terms
• Making Youtube videos to attract new customers and emails
• Facebook pages/groups and ads
• Find related forums/communities and contribute to them
• Comment on related websites/blogs
• And more

I have no idea how well any of these strategies will work or if they will even work at all. I am going try them out and see what works. My background is ranking websites in Google so I will be starting there.

I think that I will be able to get some organic traffic from Google that I can hopefully convert into customers at some point. I will have much more detail about this stuff in a later update but I just wanted to give you all a heads up!

More Time to Cover Topics I May Have Skipped Over

I have covered a good chunk of the processes that it takes to get to the point of placing your first order when it comes to starting an Amazon FBA business. However, I realize there are some things that I haven’t touched on yet or may have skipped over.

With this extra time I can go back and cover some more topics that I may have skipped over. Feel free to leave a comment below or email me if you have a certain topic that you would like me to go over.

More Time to Cover Upcoming Topics

With the extra time I can make sure that I put a lot of effort and time into making the next updates as good as possible. I also want to make sure that I don’t skip over anything. 

Most of what I have covered so far in all of the updates is standard and could be found somewhere on the internet. The majority of the upcoming updates will be brand new stuff that will be coming straight from me, meaning I came up with the info.

Like I have mentioned, I have good experience with ranking websites and marketing them. I think I can do some really cool things by combining what I know with my Amazon business. I also have some really cool ideas for marketing my product and making sales from traffic outside of Amazon’s traffic.

Overall, I think I have some fresh and unique angles which I can use to help me Amazon business and I am very excited to start sharing those with you all.

More Webinars

I had a good time holding my first webinar the other day and I think it would be beneficial for a lot of people to hold more. They could be on any topic that you all want or it could be a Q/A webinar where I just answer your questions the whole time.

Either way, I want to hold more webinars in the future as it seemed a lot of people got some use out of the first one.

To Sum it up

I am very relieved and excited to have finally placed my first order even though it is going to take longer than I had hoped to get to Amazon. I am going to try and make the best of the situation since there is nothing I can do about the extra 25 days.

The next update is going to be on how to get your own custom brand/logo and place it on your product/packaging. I have gotten a couple of requests from people asking for an article on this so that will be the next thing I will cover.

After that update, I could either go back and cover some topics I may have missed OR continue on with updates covering new stuff. Please let me know in the comments which option you prefer. 

Thank you all for reading the 8th update! If you haven’t joined our FREE facebook group yet you can join from this link here – www.passionintopaychecks.com/click/fba-group