Tamara Tee has been a full-time Amazon FBA seller since 2017. She’s also a full-time Amazon FBA coach. She helps people all over the globe start and scale their own Amazon FBA businesses so they too can enjoy mostly passive income and the freedom it provides. Needless to say, Amazon FBA’s been good to her. It’s given her a vehicle to achieve a level of success and lifestyle she never even dreamed was possible. And even she hates quite a few things about Amazon FBA.
Her biggest gripe is wait times. You go to Alibaba, find some potential suppliers based in China. Order samples. Wait. Finally get them. Pick the best supplier to go with. Place your first official order. Wait even longer. Tamara says it’s not uncommon for it to take six weeks for a manufacturer to mass produce your product. And now with how crazy the world is, it could take even longer. Ugh, that would drive me nuts. Six weeks feels like six years when you’re trying to make money online.
But it gets worse. When you go to ship the product from China to one of Amazon’s warehouses in the U.S., guess what? Yep, more waiting. Typically another few weeks, minimum, for that batch of product to make its way here by boat. Now imagine how painful all that waiting around would be if your product was selling well and you ran out of inventory, just knowing you’re losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars a day. Sounds like a nightmare. “So yeah, wait times totally suck,” Tamara laughs.
The second thing she hates about Amazon FBA is babysitting products and campaigns. Every time you launch a new product on Amazon, you’re gonna have to do some babysitting, she explains. You need to make sure your product is selling, make sure you have enough stock (going back to her last point), and you need to watch your pay per click ad campaigns like a hawk. That’s because you might need to adjust your bids up or down or switch up your keywords based on how they’re performing. Or you could be throwing money out the window.
The third thing Tamara says that makes Amazon FBA almost not even worth it is that it takes a lot of strong mental focus. It really is mind over matter; something a lot of people never overcome. You want money yesterday but that’s not how it works. There are a lot of steps and you have to do each one right and be patient and play the long game. Most wannabe FBA sellers aren’t willing to do that and so they end up either fizzling out or taking shortcuts that sabotage their success.
The fourth and final thing she despises about Amazon FBA is when she gets messages from random people all around the world, claiming that they already have it all figured out. It’s annoying. Nobody knows it all. Especially some slob in his mom’s basement, licking Dorito dust off his fingers before talking trash to Tamara anonymously on Instagram. Also, Tamara never claimed to know it all. Yes, she’s been doing it for four years. Yes, she’s made millions in sales. But there are things she still doesn’t know. She admits that.
Props to Tamara for telling the other side of the story, even if it costs her some course sales. These are all valid points. I’m honestly surprised at how popular Amazon FBA has become because, to me, all of the above are deal breakers. And that’s not even counting the biggest one of all: just the sheer amount of money you have to put out to get your FBA business off the ground. You’re talking three to eight K for a coaching program, another two K (at least) for product, and maybe two K more for software and advertising. Hard pass.
