Problems I face with new accounts..

[amzpro]

First, a little bit of background. I'm currently doing ~ 25K / month in sales and plan to be at 100K / month by the end of the year on Amazon and decided it's time to diversify and get serious about making multiple accounts since it's a good idea to not have all my eggs in 1 basket in case Amazon decides to suspend me. What good is a million a year in sales if you can get randomly cut off anytime?

So.. here's some problems I face with new accounts..
First, the buy box. I compete with other sellers on pretty much 100% of my listings, and I'm usually NOT the lowest price. So if I'm not buy box eligible the account is useless. I'm also 100% FBA. I know for FBM you often don't get the buy box for quite some time. But will a new account be buy box eligible on FBA right away?

Next.. If I'm making FBA shipments, does Amazon have any way of finding out where the packages are picked up? The address on the Amazon account is obviously some mailbox somewhere, but I'd rather ship stuff out from my actual warehouse or my apartment. I don't think Amazon gets access to where it's physically picked up other than the city/state, is this thought correct?

And the big one.. UNGATING.. It's no longer trivial to get ungated in categories like health and personal care.. What's the best way to go about doing this? Doctoring up existing invoices?

And velocity reviews.. that's another issue. I can sell a few thousand $ / week on a new account (assuming I get buy box eligibility with FBA and can get ungated) right out of the gate. Is that going to be an issue even if I'm FBA?

As far as creating the accounts go, I have that covered.
Each account is:
- Owned by a different C Corporation
- Has a different physical address which is the corporation's officially registered address
- Different phone # (real cell phone)
- Real bank account/credit card registered to the corporation
- Different physical computer/ISP (I use VPSes)

All of the above only costs about $1000 in up front costs, so that's nothing. There's no reason to screw around with ⊗⊗⊗⊗ names/addresses/etc when I can just register a bunch of actual corporations for cheap.

[munkron]

As long as it's in the same general area, UPS won't tell Amazon, and Amazon won't care. There are plenty of Amazon prep centers, and many merchants using the same address.

FBA can get buy box even with new accounts, but it again depends on the product. Sometimes I will buy products for and not care about making anything just to help build an account.

Ungating... that's tough and it really varies. Health and Personal are not trivial, last I checked it can still be done, but that was a couple months ago. Everything's constantly changing.

FBA - you will still generally hit velocity reviews.

Why a different C-Corporation? Did you speak to an accountant about that one? No, not H&R Block, but a real accountant? It makes no sense to me most of the time, unless you are a foreigner, live in certain cities, etc.

There's other things to learn, but no need to burden yourself.

[yankee]

If you already have a S-corp, it may be best under to create LLCs under your already existing umbrella. Every situation is unique but this can be really useful in some situations.

⊗⊗⊗⊗ names and addresses, numbers are not a problem on amazon. It is the tax information and not getting linked for PC use and ASIN numbers overlap.

[amzpro]

The corporate structuring thing I'm not sure of yet, I will talk to an accountant about that next year once I start scaling up my business.

ASIN overlap is an issue? I sell items that are non-unique and generally have multiple listers. Is that still a problem to have multiple accounts on the same ASINs? One of the ideas behind multiple accounts is to get a higher buy box % by flooding ASINs with multiple offers.

[yankee]

amazon links accounts based on items for sale. If you have 25 items for sale and another account has the exact same 25 items for sale, it is a HUGE problem.

You need to dilute listings with other items. You can have VERY high prices on those items to eliminate chance of a sale. Most people say at least 5 new items for every item you have on another account. Many people say it should be 10+ new items.

[amzpro]

Wouldn't that in itself be suspicious? That 100% of my actual sales are FBA, and then I have a ton of FBM listings that are 10X overpriced.

And it's funny you say they link accounts based on items for sale, because I actually sell EXACTLY the same items as another seller (that's unrelated to me) because I looked at his storefront, found the manufacturers for his listings, and jumped on all his listings.

I obviously wouldn't have 2 stores that are exact copies of each other, but do sell similar items. (let's say, 80% of the listings are shared)

[yankee]

Search the forum. must be 100 threads about it....

Wish ya luck.

[amzpro]

Do inactive listings work for this? I could create tons of FBA listings that I never send inventory for...

[yankee]

Originally Posted by amzpro

Do inactive listings work for this? I could create tons of FBA listings that I never send inventory for...

Good question and I am not sure. A couple members who seem to be on sabbatical would know for sure. Maybe they will chime in soon.

You can list items seller fulfilled and list extremely high priced. Example I recently used dollar store batteries that sell for a couple dollars on Amazon and have a price of $69.99

[amzpro]

Yeah, I can do that, but if I can do it with inactive listings I'd rather do that. Sometimes people are stupid and actually buy some ridiculously high priced item, and I don't want to have to deal w/ that.

I think what I'll try to do is differentiate my stores so that each account has a somewhat unique offering, then only double list the most profitable items. There's no point having multiple accounts offering slow moving items.

[yankee]

People just wont pay $100.00 or $60 for a $1.00 item from dollartree and if they do, I would not mind spending the $1.00 to make 60X or 100X ROI....

[amzpro]

What about having a bunch of FBM listings, and then setting the account on vacation mode permanently?

And it's not the ROI that's bad, it's the fact that it's a pain to have to go and acquire the item and then send it to the buyer. Even if I make 50 bucks on an item that costs nothing, who cares? I'm doing FBA on inventory that isn't cost effective (oversize items where paying shipping to amazon and then adding FBA fees on top of it adds ~ 50% to shipping related expenses) just for the convenience so I don't have to worry about handling the order.

Anyway, the ⊗⊗⊗⊗ listings I added so far are on items with dozens of offers so my offer is nowhere near the buy box.

[phat le]

Hello,
I am new to this. How can I setup VPS? Can I just use any ISP?