Entrepreneur Who Lost $10K Launching His Product On Amazon Lists The Biggest Mistakes To Avoid A Similar Outcome
Launching a successful Amazon product is both exciting and challenging too.
Getting a product on the biggest buying website in the world takes time, knowledge, and patience.
Sellers often fail to realize it takes more effort than just listing a product for sale and waiting for the money to pour in.
AJ Rantz is a former bartender turned entrepreneur who turned his idea for drink mix recipe cards into a business after going viral on TikTok.
“Over the past ten months, I’ve been able to launch cocktail cards, my very own business on Amazon, and it’s been absolutely incredible,” explains Rantz.
The entrepreneur was willing to share that while his recipe cards are currently selling well on Amazon, he made several costly mistakes when first launching his business.
He chronicles those mistakes in this video, “The Top 5 Mistakes Starting on Amazon,” and explains how he lost $10,000 in the process.
The first big mistake Rantz made was not outsourcing a bulk of the day-to-day work.
At first, Rantz launched the product and designed all of the cards on his own.
Unfortunately for the mixologist, he’s not a designer, and his original cards looked amateur. Eventually, Rantz hired a designer but admits that he should have outsourced other tasks as well, like social media management, video editing, and general email and DM correspondence.
The second mistake Rantz admits to making while launching his Amazon business was not trusting his gut.
“There were a lot of decisions that we had to go back to because I just didn’t trust my gut,” explains Rantz.
Rantz’s mistake involved including QR codes on each card, which he had initially, and then took off each card. Finally, he realized the QR code was a smart idea – after polling his fans – and put them back on each card.
This wishy-wash approach costs Rantz time and redesign dollars.
Not being firm with expectations from people was Rantz’s third mistake when launching his product on Amazon. He wanted to avoid confrontation, but in the end, the processes took longer because he wasn’t specific about what he wanted and expected from employees.
Rantz’s fourth mistake was believing he could please every single customer.
“A good example of this is when I got my first order. I did 700 units by plane and 800 units by ocean.
Well, the plane came to me in a week, and the ocean took around five weeks, and I really had no idea we were gonna sell so well. On Indiegogo, we actually did really good marketing, and by the time I got the plane shipment, I had sold all 700 units already.
At that point, I’ve already had this expectation that I’m shipping out to customers that I just convinced myself that if anyone purchases on Indiegogo, they would not be willing to wait a month for the product to be shipped to them, which is kind of silly, because Indiegogo is a crowdsourcing platform where people invest to be one of the first to get a project.
They typically know that it’s gonna take anywhere from 1-to-6 months to get their product.”
Rantz estimates this mistake cost him anywhere from $5-10K.
And the final mistake Rantz made while launching his product on Amazon was not continuing to push the product after he’d sold out.
Rantz said he waited three weeks to promote the cards again in hopes of supplies being replenished. Many of his mentors told him to keep pushing the product even when sold out.
Rantz estimates this costly mistake also lost him about $5-10K in sales.
To hear more about Rantz’s story, watch the YouTube video below.