The Top Amazon Mistakes (And How to Avoid Them)

New post from The eCommerceFuel Blog:

Fahim Naim is a former Senior Category Manager at Amazon and founder of eShopportunity. Over the course of his time at Amazon, Fahim did P&L management for a multi-hundred million dollar category, managed relationships with vendors, and negotiated terms and costs with vendors and his team. We take a deep dive into the ways to make your Amazon listings fully optimized, as well as the common mistakes sellers make using Amazon's platform. If you are an Amazon seller, you definitely don't want to miss the vendor advice that Fahim has to offer. Subscribe:  iTunes | Stitcher (With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Fahim Naim of eShopportunity) Andrew: Welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast, the show dedicated to helping high six and seven figure entrepreneurs build amazing online companies and incredible lives. I'm your host and fellow ecommerce entrepreneur, Andrew Youderian. Hey guys. It's Andrew here and welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in today. Today on the show I'm joined by Fahim Naim who is the cofounder of eShopportunity.com and a previous category manager at Amazon. So Fahim's got a ton of experience in this space with Amazon. We will talk about Amazon mistakes which was originally the intended focus of this discussion but we branched out a lot more. Particularly of interest to myself was the difference between FBA, Vendor Central, Vendor Express, how to negotiate with Amazon if they're buying product directly from you, which model, selling to third party or first party makes the most sense in different circumstances. So interesting discussion. I hope you enjoy it. But first, before we dive in, I want to do something I haven't done in quite a while and that is do a first sale shout out. I'm really excited to do this one for Laura Serino who...if the name sounds familiar it's because she's our community manager, she's the podcast producer here. I'm sure you've heard her or one of her episodes she's produced here on the show. So Laura, congrats on the first sale and her business is nhislandapothecary.com. Laura's been into the natural skin care space for quite a while and she's created her own proprietary line of skin care products with a little bit of island flare mixed in there. She lives on an island in Maine. So help Laura ramp up her business enough to where she can quit her job with eCommerceFuel. Check out nhislandapothecary.com. If that ever happens I'll be very sad to lose such an incredibly team member but thrilled for her and her business but yeah. So regardless, check it out, congrats to Laura and with that being said, let's go ahead and get in to today's episode with Fahim. So Fahim, before eShopportunity you actually worked at Amazon. What was your role there? Fahim's Amazon Background Fahim: I was a category manager. Managed one of the largest categories on the retail side of Amazon. Andrew: And what does that mean, to be a category manager? Fahim: Manage the first party so the direct part of the business. Anything that you would sell wholesale to Amazon. I was in the consumer electronics world under the PC components and peripherals part of Amazon. So essentially, manage all relationships with vendors, pricing, marketing, P&L ownership, forecasting, etc. Andrew: Do you miss it and why did you leave? Fahim: I do miss it although my consulting role and agency helps us stay in the game. The major reason I left was to move to San Francisco because of my wife who had to transfer for her work. At the same time, while everything was going well and could've happily stayed at Amazon, wanted to get out and do my own thing and get my skin in the game a little bit. So found a perfect balance with coming down to Bay Area, staying in the ecommerce space and still talking about going on Amazon as well as overall ecommerce. Andrew: Yeah,