Can finally change my bio to seven figure seller🫡 Took the OA jump last June and never thought this would be possible, couldn’t have done it without all the amazing people in this community💵💵

Something I wish someone had told me earlier: Your first six months on Amazon are tuition. You're going to buy products that don't sell. You're going to miss sales you should have caught. You're going to misjudge a Keepa graph. None of that is failure, it's the curriculum. The only real mistake is quitting during the part where you're supposed to be bad at it.

I spent two years prepping my own inventory and telling myself I was saving money. What I was actually doing was capping the business at however many hours I could stay awake. The fee was never the expensive part. The ceiling was.

New sellers always ask what the secret sourcing method is. There isn't one. Reverse sourcing or Keepa Product Finder, run over and over until you're fast at it. Everything else is analysis paralysis dressed up as research. The sellers finding products aren't using something you don't have. They've just run the same method a hundred more times than you.

One of the biggest misconceptions on Amazon is that ungating is impossible. I've ungated 25 brands this year, a lot of them off retailer websites rather than distributors. Got every one. Not a single one on the first submission. That's the whole difference. Most people submit once, get the rejection, and decide the brand is locked.

Stop checking your profit. For the first six months every product you lose money on and every sale you miss is a lesson. That's what you're actually buying. Make sure nothing is broken, then stop looking at the bank account and go stack lessons. Show up every day and the money shows up later. It doesn't work the other way around.

Went from $5,000 in a month to over $500,000 in a month in two years. No trick to it. Reinvested everything, used FBM, and kept buying what already worked. The thing that actually unlocked it was realizing I couldn't deploy all my capital because I was spending 10 to 15 hours a week building shipments in my garage. Prep center took that. Then a VA took the admin and inventory tracking. Reinvest hard and get the stuff that only eats time off your plate.

The dream is the first 100k month and you can absolutely do it alone. No prep center, no VA. But that was never the goal. You started this to make extra money or to stop working for someone else. So if you're sitting at 40 to 60k, it's almost always one of four things: No time to source, get a sourcing VA. More than a couple hours a week prepping, get a prep center. Plenty of time but not finding products, go meet other sellers and put 2 to 3 hours a week into learning. Drowning in admin and reimbursements, get an admin VA. Fix one and you'll find another 20 to 30k a month.

If you're below 10k a month, this is the whole thing. To get to 10k you need roughly $5,000 to $6,000 deployed in inventory. That's about $1,000 to $1,500 a week. You don't need a new AI sourcing tool. Reverse sourcing or Keepa Product Finder. Pick one, watch videos on it, run it week after week. Stop chasing the next software and just hit your spend target every day.

Here's the math on why I use a prep center. Say you only spend 5 hours a week building FBA shipments. It's probably more. Put those same 5 hours into sourcing. One good lead an hour, $5 profit a unit, 10 units each. That's $250 of profit from one session, every week, against a prep bill that costs you less than that. I ran 100 to 200k months doing 40 to 60 hour weeks prepping myself. Once I committed to a prep center I did 150 to 250k without touching a single product.

Amazon is not a quick business and the timeline alone proves it. You order the inventory. Five days to get delivered. One to two days to prep. UPS picks it up, five more days to reach Amazon. That's two weeks before they've even checked it in. Then it gets dispersed to fulfillment centers, goes active, you win the buy box, it sells, it delivers. Then it's delivery date plus seven days to get paid. Four to five weeks minimum from spending the money to seeing it back. Plan around that.

One of the biggest misconceptions on Amazon is that ungating is impossible. I've ungated 25 brands this year. A lot of them off retailer websites, not distributors. Got every single one. Not one went through on the first submission. That's the part nobody says, and it's why most people try once and decide the brand is locked forever. I put the whole process in a doc. What to buy, the exact prompt to build your cover page, and what to change on every resubmission. Comment UNGATE and I'll send it over. (must be following)

Hard truth about Amazon: Year 1 you're the employee. Year 2 you're the manager. Year 3 you're the owner. Most people quit in year 1 because they wanted year 3 results. Acting like the employee forever is what keeps you there.

Prep yourself: no fee, about 20 hours a week of your time. Prep center: around $1 a unit, none of your time. Put your time at $50 an hour, which is conservative. That's $1,000 a week. At 1,000 units, the prep center costs about the same. Same money either way. One of them scales.

Found a good deal? Buy it, prep it, ship it. Dont go to bed and think you will buy it tomorrow lol I've lost more money to sitting on decisions than I have to bad buys.

PSA: stop buying Christmas product in November and sending it Fba You're not going to sell it. You're going to pay storage on it for 11 months and then panic sell next October at a loss. Seasonal gets bought 8 weeks before the event or not at all.