Jump onto Amazon and type in something to do with skincare. See

how many listings come up. They are your competition. Matthew, why wouldn't you

sell food? Think about what it would take to get a

food item into Amazon. Returning things

on Amazon is so, so easy. Sort of almost encourages

the customer to buy and then return. That's why I would not

sell on Amazon. Number three of the products

that I would not sell on Amazon, at least I wouldn't start with, and that

is, I'm Matthew Fraser, and this is

Amazon Ecom Secrets. I'll be sharing with you the secrets that

helped me go from millions in debt to an eight-figure

entrepreneur. If you're ready to escape the nine-to-five and live

life on your terms, let me show you the way. In today's

episode, we're going to talk about what I consider the worst

markets to get into, certainly if you're brand new

to Amazon. What are they? What categories should I

avoid? But before I jump into that, have a think about

this. Does Amazon sell firearms or

guns on its marketplace? And I just stop and think,

I think, no, I don't think I've seen guns on

the Amazon marketplace, in the US that is. Because the US,

as we know, has got, what, how many katrillion guns

roaming the streets? But let me ask you, should

Amazon sell guns on the marketplace? And should it be

accessible to more people? Because when you think

about it, who has the guns? The police, the

defense force, the security. So why

is it that politicians and people of wealth can

have bodyguards and guns, but you, the common

person, you can't have that. You've

got to protect yourself with what? a

baseball bat in lieu of all of the knife

crime we've had, which is all over the TV right now. Should we

be able to, in Australia, have the right to hold

firearms legally in your house? Think

about that. They're now talking about security guards having

firearms to protect themselves and the patrons of

shopping centers, right? They now have to wear bulletproof vests, yeah,

to protect them against bullets and knives. But what about the

poor folk? Guns are banned in Australia. But

who seems to have them? The criminals. The criminals are

allowed to have guns. But you, as a normal citizen,

you can't have a gun to protect yourself when you need to. Let

me know what you think in the comments about what I've just said about the guns and

their availability. That would certainly be something that you would not

take to market for sure. But what are the other things that you would not take to

market in Amazon? But these are things, though, that are available

to sell on Amazon. Number one would be

skincare and cosmetics. No way.

And I do have people that come to me saying that they've got this amazing skincare

range and they want to launch it on Amazon. Now here's the problem, is

that the skincare market is absolutely saturated.

For you to break into the skincare market with any

type of topical cream will be so, so difficult because

you just do yourself a favor, jump onto Amazon anywhere, USA

in particular, jump onto Amazon USA, and type

in the search engine, skincare for X or whatever,

skincare element, something to do with skincare, and

just see how many listings come up. It is extraordinary, right?

It's pages and pages and pages. Now, think about this. If

you're thinking that you're going to get into Amazon because

you want to sell skincare, you've got to break through all

those other players. They are your competition. And what

you'll find, have a look at the listings, you'll see that a

lot of them have thousands and thousands of

reviews. Now that means that those products have

trust and credibility already established in the marketplace

of Amazon. And you're also competing against

so many massive brands in that space

already who have been in the marketplace of not just Amazon, but

just the world marketplace for years, if not decades.

And that is your competition. Let me tell you a story, because

of course I've got one. I have actually attempted to

sell in the skincare niche myself. So

go back a few years ago, I got in contact, well actually they contacted me.

I'd already started selling my now famous healthcare product,

which has done over $40 million in sales. And the

brand owner at the time of this healthcare product contacted another

brand owner. So the word was spreading that Matthew was

this amazing seller taking things to the next level. And so this,

I can't even remember the name, but it was an Australian skincare company. And

the person who was in charge there contacted me. She

said, Matthew, we're launching this brand new skincare range.

It's a high-end skincare product. And I think from memory, it was $150 odd

a bottle. And it was like, I don't know,

20 or 30 mils of this cream. And it was just this. some

sort of skincare cream to help reduce lines and make you look beautiful. So

she reaches out to me, Matthew, can you help us take this to market? We

want to try and sell this in the United States. Now,

me being fairly new and naive, I said,

yeah, sure, let's give it a go. So they, another

deal where I did, which was getting this product with

no money down. So she sent a whole bunch of product, test

products, so not a whole bunch, maybe, I don't know, 50 items, let's say, over

to the US. And then it came down to me having to do the SEO,

the bullet points, the title, the PPC. That was

my job. And I tell you what, it was really,

really hard. And I'm scratching my head thinking, well, this is supposed to

be an incredible product. Why aren't people just buying it?

And ultimately, it came down to, I think, two things. One

is the brand recognition was just simply not there in

the United States. The price point was very high for other

competitive type of products. You know, we're selling something here for $100 or

$150 competing against other brands in the market selling things for

like $29. And it didn't have

any market trust. It didn't have reviews,

right? So when people went to the listing, they couldn't look at other people's testimonials to

give them the confidence that this was going to be a good buy. So

for those reasons, it didn't work. Now, how could

have we made it work? Well, it would have come down to marketing

dollars. If we had hundreds of thousands, if

not millions of dollars to spend on marketing,

not just in Amazon, but outside of Amazon. So on Facebook

and Instagram and TikTok wasn't even around back then, but

those types of platforms, then we could have got more

eyeballs, and I would have even said, you know, if they could advertise in magazines, right?

Cosmopolitan, all these types of things, like specifically to women who is

catered for, then possibly we could have done well. But for someone

like myself, who was, didn't have deep pockets, the

brand owner at the time didn't have the budget to spend to

get it to where it needed to be in a new marketplace like USA,

it just wasn't going to work. That's a story and

the reason why I know for sure that it's really,

really hard to sell skincare on Amazon. Number

two of what not to sell on Amazon, and

I would definitely steer away from, clothing. Yeah,

clothing. You're going to say, Matthew, what do you mean clothing? Everybody

has clothes. Everybody uses clothes. Even if you

go onto Amazon right now and have a look at all the clothing there, you'll say, well, they

must be selling something. There are sellers on there who are making sales

for clothing, but it's so difficult to

get into. Now, here are the main reasons why I wouldn't do

clothing. One is you can't just simply come up with

one item. Okay, so let's say you want to bring in a t-shirt.

Now you've got to have like a small, a medium, a

large and an extra large. Are you going to have white only or

are you going to have white, black, gray, red,

blue, right? There's just so many variations of just

a t-shirt and then how many different like

logos are you going to have or pictures or images on the t-shirt

or is it going to be plain? And it's just so

much to think about and so many different variations that I think it's very hard just to

test a single product in the marketplace. And there's so much

competition, right? So in order for you to get

really, really good penetration in the market, you're gonna have to have

a lot of advertising. And secondly, unless you're gonna

have an absolutely monstrous MOQ,

so minimum order quantity, to bring your buy price down

to like 50 cents a t-shirt, It's going to be very, very

difficult because initially you're probably thinking, I'm going

to start selling, but I don't want to put in a lot of

inventory. I don't want to put in a lot of money. So therefore you're

going to have to have a low inventory, which means high cost per

item, and it's going to reduce your margin. and therefore less margin

is less money on advertising and it's just, you know, down from there. So

that's one of the reasons why we're not be selling clothing. And the other thing to think about is

the return rate. The return rate on clothing is actually really

high. So think about yourself and your spending habits. Are you

someone, when you buy something online, do you buy three

of something, you then get it at home, you try it all on

and then you send back two, is that you? Or are

you someone that just buys like 10 things, just tries them on, uses it

for one night and then sends it all back? If that's you, then

shame on you, you shouldn't do that. But that's what happens in

the marketplace now because remember this, returning things

on Amazon is so, so easy. that it

sort of almost encourages the customer to buy and

then return. So that's another reason why I would not

sell or start with clothing on Amazon. Let

me tell you a story of one of my clients who approached me in the very,

very beginning and she said, Matthew, I've got this amazing idea

for a t-shirt. I said, oh yeah, okay, great.

Tell me what it is. He said, well, you know, I've done a lot of research and I

think I can make a t-shirt that's catered to people

who have got money. Yeah. So the high class people, we're

going to do this amazing material and amazing print. It's

never been seen before. but I know that we can put a

great brand name on it and I'm sure that

people are going to buy this particular t-shirt and

it was at a cost it was like $150 a t-shirt

right which there was no extra cost to her

in the buy price it was just that she wanted to market it high so

it seemed like it was actually an expensive t-shirt with her

brand And I said, look, really, really

tough market to get into. This is the fundamental reason.

Why is someone going to buy your t-shirt? when

they can simply buy an established brand that you're now trying

to compete with, like a Gucci, like a Louis Vuitton, like,

I mean, the list goes on, okay? Of all the brands that are already

established in the marketplace that already have what I consider

credibility in the market, that people have an

attraction to, an affiliation, who crave particular

brands and all of a sudden you're going to come up with your brand which is going to have no

marketing behind it whatsoever. Kim Kardashian's not wearing

it and you think someone's just going to buy it straight off the cuff off

an online marketplace because you put an

interesting brand name on it and charged a high price and you thought it

was something unique by having a unique

print or a unique t-shirt quality. Simply just not

going to work. And so ultimately my client decided

not to proceed with that, which I thought was a great idea, and it's since gone

in to look at other things. Number three of

the products that I would not sell on Amazon, at least I wouldn't start with,

and that is food. I would not sell food on

an Amazon marketplace. You say, Matthew, why wouldn't you

sell food? Everybody eats. So

it's a huge market. And you're right. It is a huge market. But think about

what it would take to get a food item into Amazon

as your first product. Okay. It's going to be difficult. It's

got a poor shelf life. You're going to have to come up with something unique in

the marketplace of food because let's just say you've, you've

come up with an amazing spaghetti. What

is going to differentiate your spaghetti from somebody else's spaghetti?

Or let's just say you've come up with some really amazing chocolate.

What is going to differentiate your amazing chocolate from some

of the big, big brands like Lindt or Cadbury in the marketplace? I

don't know. It's going to be super hard to break through those

types of brands. So for all the reasons that I've kind of

explained for things, other things like skin care

and clothing, food is ultimately something that

I would not do. If you don't know, I also own a Hungry Jack's

restaurant. And of course, so I do believe in

selling food, but I think there's a time and a place. If

you're not listening from Australia, it's like Burger King in the United States,

right? Burger King worldwide, Hungry Jacks is its name in Australia, and

it's a fast food restaurant. The food is made to order. So

when someone pays me the money, we then make

the goods. Okay. On Amazon, you've

got to make the product first. You've got to hold thousands and

thousands and thousands, probably tens of thousands of dollars worth of inventory.

stock it in a warehouse, we'll ship it to a warehouse first,

then pay for storage fees, and then pay for advertising to

even then start selling it, right? Compared to Hungry Jacks, I

have the food in a freezer, it lasts for a long time, so the

shelf life is very, very long. And when someone buys the food,

I get the money first, and then they get the food item. And

that's how that system works. So that is the

reason why I would not sell food on the Amazon marketplace.

So guys, I've just given you three things that I would definitely not do on

Amazon. Skincare, clothing and food. But, and

I give you a great big but, I'm now going to put in a caveat because

all of those things that I've just talked about absolutely could

be sold on Amazon and you could be a huge success. I've seen

people who have done it before But

the likelihood of you doing it as your first product is so, so small. That's

why I encourage you not to do that. You know, if you could come up

with someone who was like a huge influencer like

Kim Kardashian and you had an amazing t-shirt

and a brand and you gave it to her and then she showcased it

on her Instagram and then people came to Amazon and

bought millions of it, then yeah, sure, that could be a way for you to blow

up in the clothing space or the skincare space or the

food space. Yeah, but there's really only two ways

for you to grow those types of brands. One is you're going to

have a huge marketing budget. So if you're someone that's

got plenty of money, I'm talking probably hundreds of

thousands of dollars of marketing dollars behind you in order to

get in front of people's faces. And secondly, if

you could get a major influencer like a Kim Kardashian, then

absolutely you could make it in any of those three types

of products on the Amazon space. Alright guys, that's

it for the show today. I hope you enjoyed that and gave you a lot of insight into things that

I would suggest you not do in the Amazon marketplace. If you want to learn

more about how to sell on Amazon, I've actually got a free community which

you're welcome to come and check out. Just look at the show notes down below, click on

the link and come and join me there. And I also do a

free monthly Q&A. So if you've got further questions about

selling these types of products or others, be in the room. Come and ask me what

I think about you selling your types of products. Before you go, it would

be a big, big favor for me, it'd be great if you could

leave a five-star review on Spotify or Apple

Podcast. And thank you so much, guys. See you next time. Take

care. Thanks for tuning into Amazon Ecom Secrets. If

you enjoyed this episode, the best way to show your support is

to give a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And

make sure to subscribe on YouTube so you don't miss an episode.

You can also find more at I'm Matthew Fraser

on all social media platforms. Thanks so much. Take