My journey as a seller on Amazon

Right from my school days, I was always sure that eventually I wanted to start something of my own. In 2005, at the age of 23, I started my own business and being an electronics enthusiast, I decided to deal in IT based products and solutions. For the first few years it was quite a struggle trying to keep my little boat afloat among the bigger players in the industry. We began by catering to government clients, corporates, SMEs and domestic customers but it was not until 2013 that I discovered my true calling.

E-commerce had just come to India and moving towards that direction was definitely a game changer for me. I knew that the potential that the online format of doing business had was tremendous and felt that being tech savvy, this is what could bring out the best in me as well. I started investing more and more time and effort into the online business, and before I knew, Amazon had suddenly become our priority among all the marketplaces that we worked with.

We began with Easy Ship, quickly shifted to FBA and in 2018 we eventually moved to Seller Flex. This was a turning point for us and made a world of difference to the way I ran my business. I started to think bigger, take more risks, and kept pushing myself each day. We could add, inbound and refill stocks faster, process returns quicker and overall have everything managed much more tightly. We started to get aligned with more and more brands and it was our goodwill that we had built during all these years that made such tie-ups possible. Injecting more funds into the business had also become imperative and the Amazon Lending program helped us with that easily. Simultaneously I realized that I needed to bring in more team members, as well as upgrade our infrastructure significantly so that we can be ready to scale up further.

What I also realized is that despite having hard working individuals to manage the entire workflow, it was absolutely essential that I started moving towards automation as much as possible. That’s when I discovered the Amazon MWS and started implementing the API as much as possible into our daily workflow. What people were manually doing for hours was now being done in minutes, that too error-free. We automated our pricing, stock management, feedback requests, monitoring product rankings, generating various reports, accounting, reconciliation, etc. This gave me loads of confidence and from there onward I managed to successfully scale up significantly without having to worry about how the increased workload will be managed.

It’s not that this journey was smooth. There were a lot of hurdles and challenges, and there are a bunch of lessons that I’ve learnt, mostly the hard way, but I always believe that life is never about what you haven’t been able to do so far, it’s about what you still can!