Is this E-Commerce Side Hustle Really Going to Make You Money?

In this video, Matt reacts to a side hustle many have probably not heard of before until this video came out. With CapForge working with many clients who own ecommerce business, Matt tells you the facts about whether this is a good or bad business idea.

There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this new series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!

Video Transcript: 

Advice Video:

Side hustle I wish I knew about sooner part one and this one is going to make you a lot of money. So let’s get into it. So if we head on over to Amazon, this journal is selling for around $15 and it has been sold over 6000 times in the past month. So if we do the math, that is about how much this person has made. This person has made tens of thousands of dollars by selling a blank journal. So let me show you how to do it. You’re going to head on over to Canva and create a free account. Next, you’re going to search for journal templates and scroll down until you find one that you like. I would recommend changing a couple of things on this so that you’re not just copying and pasting exactly as it is. Now, you’re going to add in some pages. I would recommend adding between 100-200 pages. Once your journal is completed, you’re going head on over here and you’re gonna click download and we want to print as still with crops and bleeds and flatten and click download. Now, head on over to Amazon KDB and they are going to publish print, and ship the book for you. It will probably take 3 to 10 days for it to get approved and go live on Amazon. Now, Amazon’s gonna do all the work for you and all you have to do is sit back and collect the profit. Follow for more.

Matt’s Reaction:

Hahaha – Sorry fighting a cough here but that is pretty ridiculous. First of all the person selling 6,000 versions of that journal at 15 bucks a piece did not make $90,000. Amazon, if they were also doing the print-on-demand, then Amazon was taking a huge chunk of that. If they had bought them somewhere else and had them printed up and created as journals and sent them into Amazon for Amazon’s fulfillment then they were probably paying at least two bucks a journal but then also Amazon to stock it and ship it to the customers was taking another 

6.50 – 7 bucks out of that $15. And so they’re not making  $90,000, they’re making a small fraction of that depending on the profit margins.

But that also is separate from the issue of that person or that company selling that journal has likely been selling that for years. And they’ve established their organic ranking and they’ve gotten all their reviews and they’ve worked their way up to the top of the listings. A new product, no reviews, no credibility, brand new listing is not gonna be on page one of Amazon and not being on page 1 of Amazon is like not being on page one of Google. You might as well not exist. So in order to get there you now have to spend money when somebody searches for a blank journal, or you know cool journal, or fun journal, or journal for writing down my amazing thoughts. You wanna have to come up in that search somewhere near the top of page one to get anybody to even look at you. That ad spend is going to cost money and then in order to get somebody to pick you, a new product with no reviews, over somebody with 6,000 sales in the last month you’re gonna have to compete on price. So you’re not gonna be able to sell it for $15, you’re gonna have to sell it for 12 or 9.99 or 6.99 just to get some traction. Which means on every one you sell you’re gonna be losing money for a while, maybe forever. 

And the other part of this is that of course they don’t mention, there’s only so many people buying journals. If that particular example was the No. 1 blank journal seller for the whole month and it sold 6,000 how many total journal sales, do you think Amazon has for that size journal in a given month? 8,000 9,000 maybe. So product number one has at least 50% of the market there’s probably a second one that has 30% of the market and a third one that has 10% of the market. Which means there’s very little left over for whoever is No. 5 – 6 – 7. Which means if you sold 100 journals a month after spending add money, after dropping the price, you’d be lucky. And you’re not gonna be making money with it. Not to be a downer on this. Not to be saying that you can’t make money with products on Amazon but simply copying what someone else is selling and selling virtually identical products as a brand new seller against someone who’s been doing it for a long time and has thousands of sales and thousands of reviews is not as easy as this 90 second Instagram tutorial makes it sound.