An Amazon Listing is NOT an Easy Way to Make Money With a New Invention

Making consumers aware of a new product can turn projected profits into losses.

Getting a product manufactured and offered for sale has never been easier, thanks to affordable 3D design and Amazon. However, making customers aware of a product and turning a profit has never been harder. Our VertiGrille® offers a fine case study. We went to market on our own after rejecting a deal from a major housewares company. To keep things easy, we decided to sell exclusively on Amazon with Amazon FBA (fulfillment by Amazon). We did some PR, which worked a bit. Tried advertising on Youtube, Facebook, Adwords and Amazon itself... and all of those ended up costing $10+ per order, which meant we lost money. So now, we're letting word of mouth slowly do its thing. We're now well into year 2 and our orders are running at approx 10 units per week (100X fewer than our projected worst case scenario)... but that's still far better than last year. Things are looking up! MUCH more could be done if we dedicated ourselves exclusively to the product - but we don't have the bandwidth for that since our primary focus is licensing. In short this was an experiment to find out if Amazon alone is a viable way to launch a new product. Our conclusion is that it's not. A far better way may be to launch a product via Kickstarter (build a customer base first) and then add Amazon as a distribution option. We're trying that with two products now and will report back. You can see VertiGrille® here: https://www.vertigrille.com/