Apart from Horizontal and Vertical scaling, there’s another scaling method we can use to make more sales with the winning products we’ve found.

This method is called “Fulfilled By Amazon”, or FBA.

Basically, it’s a scaling method that sends our products in bulk to Amazon warehouse and lets them fulfil the products for us.

Rachel introduced this scaling method to me through her Jumpstart Program. I applied to her program in 2017, and FBA was one of many good things I learned from it.

Why does FBA help you scale your LHS business?

In the LHS business model, we can list many products on Amazon and let Gearbubble fulfil the products for us.  

It takes around 7-10 days to make and ship a product to a customer. In the holiday season, the handling and shipping time might take longer.

That’s sometimes not what customers want, especially during holiday season.

They want to buy a gift for someone they love.

But many people usually look for gifts at the last minute.

They want the products within 1-2 days, because most people don’t plan in advance.

For example, New Year’s Day might be only five days away, but they will still place an order.

I’ve been selling products on Amazon for years, and many people have sent me messages asking whether my shop can send them a product tomorrow, and not during the holiday season.

It happens every year.

Currently, when we this shipping method (or FBM – Fulfilled by Merchant), we can’t ship a product fast, because GearBubble needs time to produce and ship the product.

That’s why we need FBA.

Have you seen this option on Amazon?

It’s an Amazon Prime option.

The fact is, over 64% of households subscribe to Amazon Prime.

All FBA products will be eligible for Amazon Prime free Two-Day Shipping, FREE Shipping, and other benefits.

That means that people will get your products within the next day or two after they place an order.

When people filter their product search by “Amazon Prime”, “Get it today”, or “Get it tomorrow”, your products will be shown up in the search results. Other products that are non-FBA will be weeded out from the results.

Let me search Amazon using the keyword “Nurse Mug” without adding any filters.

You will see results like this:

There are over 5,000 products associated with this search term.

Let’s check the “Prime” option:

Now there are over 1,000 products.

Okay, let’s try “Get It Today”.

Only 296 products!

As you see, you can avoid a lot of your competition just by using FBA.

Not only do you avoid competitors – you also get your product a better ranking.

If you check the products at the top of the list of any search terms, you’ll see that most of them are Prime products.

Amazon will give these products a better ranking, too.

It’s an unfair advantage that FBM can’t offer.

So, if you have found a few winning products and sense that more those products can be sold, I recommend that you start using FBA for those products as soon as you can.

But not only during general holiday season. All weird niches have their own holidays.

Pi Day, Engineer Day, Nurse Day, etc.

On these days, many people buy items as a gift for their colleagues or for themselves.

Plan to send the products to the Amazon warehouse in advance. It takes a few weeks for CustomHappy (Rachel’s company) to make and ship products to Amazon.

But be aware that there are some cons to using FBA as well.

FBA isn’t free. You need to pay fees.

When you order bulk items from CustomHappy, you don’t need to pay for shipping for an individual item. But you need to pay for the packing and shipping for each order in FBA. It’s a bit higher than the shipping cost we pay to GearBubble (FBM).

Also, Amazon packs items pretty poorly. They just stick a few plastic bubbles in the box when they ship a mug:

Many of my customers are unhappy about that, and most of them find that their item was broken.

So I need to order the item with the clamshell from CustomHappy, which requires an additional $1 for each item.

But at least it’s safe. I’ve had a few FBA products packed by Amazon, and I got a lot of negative feedback because the items were broken when they got to the customer.

Although Amazon removes negative feedback and sends replacements to the customers, they also block my product from the listings because of the negative feedback. So I think it’s worth investing in clamshells.

All of my FBA products are in clamshells.

So you need to decide whether your product is worth FBA or not. If it’s in high demand, you can increase the price and send it to FBA.

Okay, that’s all for now about FBA.

I will tell you more about how to scale FBA in the next module.

(Yes, it’s another scaling method of this scaling method!)