8 min read By Rick Wong  Updated Dec 10, 2025

If you’re aiming to be a merchant in Amazon, you might have heard of the FBA option. FBA stands for Fulfilled by Amazon. With this feature, you don’t have to be completely in charge of the fulfillment of you the products you’re offering. Instead, Amazon will be in charge of sorting your products in their warehouse as well as with shipping, packing, package tracking, managing refunds, and dealing with returns. FBA is highly beneficial for independent sellers and small business owners. It is a lot cheaper than doing your own fulfillment. However, before starting your new venture selling on Amazon, we’d like to remind you to avoid some key mistakes. The following Amazon FBA mistakes will help you avoid additional costs and adverse consequences.

The “Revenue Vanity” Fallacy: Miscalculating True Profit Margins

One of the most fatal mistakes new Amazon FBA sellers make is confusing revenue with profit. You might see a screenshot in a Facebook group showing $50,000 in monthly sales and assume that seller is rich. In reality, they might be losing money on every single unit.

The mistake here isn’t just ignoring shipping costs; it’s failing to calculate your Unit Economics down to the penny before you even source a product. Many sellers forget to factor in:

• Inbound Placement Fees: A newer 2024/2025 fee where Amazon charges you for sending inventory to a single location rather than splitting it across multiple fulfillment centers.
• Return Processing Fees: In categories like Apparel, returns can hit 20-30%. If you haven’t factored the cost of unsellable returns into your margin, a “profitable” product becomes a liability.
• The PPC Tax: You must calculate your Break-Even ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sales). If your profit margin before ads is 30%, and your PPC campaigns are running at 35% ACoS, you are literally paying Amazon for the privilege of selling your product.

The Fix: Never source a product unless you have a projected net margin of at least 25-30% after all Amazon fees. Margins naturally compress over time due to competition and ad costs; starting with a thin margin is a recipe for failure.

Ignoring the Terms and Conditions of Amazon

Be sure to thoroughly read the terms and conditions set by Amazon. Absolutely avoid missing something or forgetting any terms along the way. Violating these terms and conditions can get your seller account suspended. This mistake can also be costly for Amazon sellers… Especially if you have already shipped your items to a fulfillment center! You won’t be able to ship the items out if your account is suspended! Even worse, you can’t ship them out, so you still have to pay the Amazon fulfillment center for keeping your items.

We also suggest reviewing the terms and conditions whenever you are planning to make some changes in your product listings.

Too Much Competition For Your Product

There are about 2.5 million sellers in Amazon. Unless you are producing your own unique goods, there’s a huge chance that multiple sellers are already offering the same items in your product listings. That’s why before you start selling a specific product, you have to be aware of the number of your competitors. Also search if there are already established ones. The key is to offer products with less competition. This means you’ll also have a greater chance of expanding your market share.

On the other hand, if you think you can still pull off a product despite the number of competitors, you can look into how much the competitors are offering them. See if you can afford to offer lower prices to help attract more shoppers. Of course, remember to consider your items’ landing cost. Remember that Amazon users/buyers (or any e-commerce buyers in general) tend to prefer lower-priced listings.

Not Completely Knowing Your Product

Know your products well before uploading them to your listing. This can help you provide more detailed Amazon product descriptions. It can also help you easily answer the questions of users about your products. It’s good to note that answering the queries of shoppers can also help you convert them into actual customers.

Completely knowing your product also means that you know about your competitors. This can also help you avoid Amazon FBA seller mistake # 2!

Not Optimizing Your product Listing and Not Considering Amazon PPC

Amazon shoppers use keywords when searching for the items they want to buy. If you are a new seller, it will be hard for you to get into the first page of Amazon’s search engine results pages (SERP) for almost every generic search term possible. So if you want to be more visible… We recommend that you use a more unique or specific keyword, or a less competitive search term. This is where keyword research comes in.

It’s a must to search for keywords related to the product you’d like to offer before actually making a listing. This can help you realize the actual number of search results related to your product. Usually, the results in the first few pages of Amazon SERPs are the listings of more trusted sellers or those with plenty of reviews or orders already. It would be difficult to compete with established merchants which is why you may want to consider Amazon PPC.

Amazon PPC (pay-per-click) is where you pay Amazon when a potential customer clicks on your ad. This advertising option is available in three different formats: Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Products, and Product Display Ads. Sellers often believe that if their products are good enough, it would sell on their own, but it’s not always true especially if you have plenty of competitors out there. In fact, it is not bad to spend on advertising when you’re new in the business. You can first establish your Amazon profile as a seller with the help of PPC, then get more exposure and engagement as you go on.

Not being Aware of the “Honeymoon Period” for new ads

Amazon’s A9 algorithm gives new product listings a temporary boost in visibility for the first 14 to 30 days—a phenomenon known in the industry as the “Honeymoon Period.”

A massive mistake sellers make is creating their listing, letting it sit inactive while they wait for photos, or sending in inventory without a launch strategy. If your inventory checks in and you don’t immediately drive traffic (via PPC or external emails) and generate sales, you waste this golden window. Amazon will assume your product is irrelevant because it has impressions (views) but no conversions.

The Fix: Do not publish your listing until your images and copy are 100% optimized. Coordinate your inventory arrival so that the moment it hits the fulfillment center, you can turn on your Amazon PPC Auto campaigns and aggressive exact-match keyword campaigns. You need to prove to the algorithm immediately that your product converts.

Not Prioritizing Amazon Listing Optimization

Aside from keeping in mind the best keywords to use for your products, you also have to prioritize your product descriptions. In every listing, there’s a product description where you have to type in some of the best things about your product. You can just put a generic description of your product, or come up with your own. We prefer the latter, of course. If you come up with your own, you might as well make it enticing by describing the product as if you are talking to a potential customer face-to-face.

Apart from including a detailed product description, you also have to provide other product information such as the brand name, color, material, etc. As much as Amazon buyers often inquire on a specific product, they also opt for detailed listings that contain almost every information they need.

Not Updating Your Inventory and Stocking Too Much Products

New Amazon sellers usually deal with less inventory volume as compared to more established Amazon merchants. But still, they have to manage their Amazon inventory system properly to prevent supply shortages which could be bad for a seller’s Amazon profile. If you’re a new seller, you must monitor the number of orders you receive, and regularly update your inventory to prevent this from happening.

Meanwhile, storing way too many products in the Amazon fulfillment center could also be costly because you have to pay storage fees for these items extra. For more practical reasons, we suggest that you send out products to the fulfillment center only when they have been ordered by your customers already. This way, the item/s would be shipped out immediately to customers, and you don’t have to pay additional storage fees.

The “Single Point of Failure”: Relying 100% on FBA

While FBA (Fulfilled by Amazon) offers the Prime badge and ease of use, relying on it exclusively is a strategic error. What happens if Amazon creates a sudden storage limit for your account during Q4? What if your inventory is stuck in “FC Transfer” for weeks, leaving your listing inactive?

When your FBA stock hits zero, your listing disappears from search results, and your organic ranking freefalls. This is why seasoned sellers utilize a hybrid model: FBA + FBM (Fulfilled by Merchant).

The Fix: Always create a duplicate SKU for your product fulfilled by you (FBM) or a third-party logistics (3PL) partner. If your FBA stock runs out, the FBM SKU automatically takes over the Buy Box. You might sell fewer units due to longer shipping times, but your listing stays alive, and you maintain your hard-earned keyword rankings.

Final Thoughts: There are many Ways to Fail

Taking note of these common Amazon FBA seller mistakes can help you avoid committing them and from suffering from potential unnecessary costs in the future. If you have more questions about Amazon FBA in general, feel free to reach out to us because we’re more than willing to help you get answers.

FAQ: Amazon FBA Mistakes

The post Top 7 Common Amazon FBA Mistakes by Sellers appeared first on SellerMetrics.

Making sure you’re not leaving easy money on the table, here are 9 ways you can grow your Amazon sales:

Adding Variations

Quite possibly, the simplest way to achieve more sales is through variations. Not all customers will purchase your white variation; some want it in yellow, red, or blue. Research your niche and see what other competitors are selling. Are they selling another variation that is doing well? If so, launch that variation immediately, and capture those customer variation preferences.

Increasing variation does increase purchases and conversions, but be careful of diminishing returns on having too many choices/variations.

So as long as you don’t launch too many variations, this tactic would be very effective in scaling your Amazon business.

Adding Complementary Products

Since you are already selling to a target market, you can add a complementary product to your store. What is a complementary product? It is a product that your customer would potentially use on top of purchasing your product. One simple example would a battery charger and the batteries as a complementary product.

You can also create a tactic around complementary products through product upsells. By using an insert card in your package you can offer a discount on your complementary product and tap into your existing customer base.

To use the above tactic, please be sure to be TOS compliant, specifically your insert card should be directing them to purchase on Amazon only and not on your own website.

You can also use the grocery store tactic where you are actually losing money on one product, but you can make up the difference on the upsell on the complementary products.

Launch Your Product on Other Amazon International Markets

You can also launch the same SKU in your current active Amazon marketplaces to the other international Amazon marketplaces that Amazon supports. Currently, Amazon supports 17 marketplaces that allow 3rd party sellers to list on and sell.

Amazon’s Global Marketplaces:

• United States
• Canada
• Mexico
• United Kingdom
• Germany
• France
• Italy
• Spain
• Japan
• Singapore
• United Arab Emirates
• Brazil
• Australia
• India
• Netherlands
• Saudi Arabia
• Turkey (limited categories)
• Sweden

By parallel operating on Amazon marketplaces in different countries, which also have their own FBA, you do not need to source a new product and use current product photos. You can also negotiate a possible lower per-unit cost by ordering a higher MoQ. What you need to do is to get your listing translated and check if your current freight forwarder can ship your product to the target country

Look into the Wholesale Business Model

Another way to scale your Amazon business look into is to wholesale well-known brands on Amazon. There is a whole different community out there that only wholesales versus private labeling. If you are wholesaling already, you can look into private labeling as well.

Basically, wholesaling allows you to tap into existing demand for the product without driving the demand yourself. The same operations procedures apply to wholesaling, but the only difference is that product launch can skip for wholesaling.

A great free resource for Amazon Wholesaling I would recommend is from Chris Potter at Lesson Learned in Business, you can find it here

Duplicate Listing (Same Product, Different ASIN)

The next suggestion here will be a bit controversial. The duplicate listing tactic is where you will create another listing with a different ASIN using the same existing product. This works well in situations where the niche is already semi-competitive and where adding another listing as a competitor to your existing listing will not cannibalize your sales that much. Better to be a competitor yourself than having another seller’s listing be the competitor.

You can make your new ASIN different by creating another brand/logo and make sure your main photo has a different look than the one in your previous listing.

Having another listing, allows you to have multiple placements on the search result, or “taking up more real estate” as some will call it. More real estate on the search result means more exposure and thus more potential sales.

Grow Off Amazon

You can list your product on other E-Commerce marketplaces such as eBay, Walmart, or Etsy. By leveraging your existing product orders and logistics, such as Amazon FBA, you can increase sales without too much effort. Although these non-Amazon marketplaces won’t come even close to the potential orders you will see from Amazon, these are less competitive marketplaces and will probably require fewer resources to achieve high ranking.

Amazon Seller Financing

Okay, the semi-dirty secret that many people leave out in E-Commerce and especially Amazon is that it is a very cash-intensive business. All the growth tactics I previously mentioned would not be quite possible if you don’t have the cash behind it. Yes, you can use your profits to reinvest, but again that is limited to the cash you have on hand and, therefore, leaving potential sales on the table.

Amazon lending is an easy way for Amazon sellers to access additional cash to finance additional purchases. On top of Amazon lending, there are other 3rd party lenders out there that can give sellers a competitive interest rate. Some of the lenders that come to mind are Sellerfunding or Currenxie.

Interest rates for Amazon sellers are around 10 to 15% ARR. If you are quoted for more than, that I would shop around as a lot of these new Amazon seller financing services have sprung up over the years.

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

An offbeat way to grow your Amazon business is to start selling digital books. Through the KDP program, you can easily publish a book and have it sold either as an e-book where the reader will be reading it via Kindle or a physical book where Amazon will print the book on-demand once an order is placed.

The entire process of researching and launching an e-Book applies very similarly to Amazon FBA. The key difference is hiring writers in KDP to produce the content, and you will no longer need to deal with the ongoing supply chain.

Google SEO

The last and probably the most difficult way to grow your Amazon business is SEO via Google. What makes SEO hard is the different moving parts in the Google search algorithm, it not only takes into consideration the quality of your content but also the speed of how your page performs and other external signals such as your social media and backlinking.

Another difficulty of Google SEO is that it would take 6 months or more for the true results to take hold, and this can be quite different from the near-immediate results Amazon sellers are used to. But if you can get your product or brand ranked organically on Google, it will be well worth it.

The post 9 Fast Ways to Scale Your Amazon FBA Business in 2025 appeared first on SellerMetrics.