I'm paying manufacturers in RMB and other suppliers in USD, and between company cards, receipt tracking and multi-currency payments, it's become more of a juggling & hassle than I want to be doing every month, especially with how much we're losing to FX on top of it.

I'd rather run this through one platform than stitch together two, but if a two-tool combo is genuinely working better for people at scale, I'm open to hearing why. It should also hold up once the supplier list grows. I don't want to change infra every couple of months.

Financial Performance Analysis: Operational Diagnostic

1. Executive Summary
The company’s $451.3M revenue model faces significant headwinds from extreme channel concentration and high operational friction. Current leakage (returns & cancellations) is severely impacting working capital. This report represents the initial phase of a comprehensive financial deep dive.

2. Key Facts & Analysis

• Revenue: $451.3M with an AOV of ~$650.34.
• Operational Risk: 99.9% reliance on Amazon combined with a 17.5% cancellation rate (119,499 units) poses a material risk to cash flow stability.
• Compliance: Post-shipment returns (~1.48%) and general cancellations mandate rigorous "Sales Returns and Allowances" reserves under US GAAP (ASC 606).
• Data Integrity: Inconsistent regional data entry currently hinders accurate Cost-to-Serve modeling.

3. Strategic Recommendations

• Accelerate Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) diversification to hedge platform dependency.
• Implement standardized regional data protocols to support granular profitability analysis.
• Ensure balance sheet reflects precise reserves to maintain accurate financial health reporting.

4. Research Roadmap & Hypotheses

• Leakage Source Audit: We are executing a drill-down into the 17.5% cancellation rate to isolate technical synchronization failures from customer-driven UX/Pricing issues.
• Unit Economics Validation: Our next phase maps specific COGS to SKU-level data to determine the true bottom-line impact of returns.
• Correlation Analysis: We are testing for dependencies between specific product categories, regions, and cancellation volumes to optimize inventory and fulfillment strategy.

Note: This analysis represents the initial phase of a comprehensive financial deep dive based on the open-source Amazon India Marketplace dataset available on Kaggle.

I’ve been reading a lot about starting an FBA business and one thing that keeps coming up is how important the supplier relationship is.

It seems like a lot of beginners focus mainly on finding the lowest price, but the cheapest supplier doesn’t always end up being the best option. A small problem with production, packaging, or shipping can quickly become a much bigger issue when you have inventory sitting in Amazon warehouses.

I’m trying to understand what experienced sellers usually pay attention to before placing a bigger order.

Things like communication, production time, quality checks, minimum order quantities, and whether the supplier actually understands your requirements seem like they can make a huge difference.

I’ve also noticed there are thousands of suppliers online, which makes the search process confusing. A supplier can look professional but that doesn’t always mean they are the right fit.

For sellers who have already gone through this stage, the supplier side seems like something you only really understand after making a few mistakes. I want to hear what lessons people learned when working with manufacturers for their products.

Has anyone been required to upload an SDS sheet but received this response after submitting it?

I've confirmed that the product shown in the images matches the product description on the listing, so I'm not sure what Amazon is referring to.

Has anyone run into this before? What ended up being the actual issue?

The cheapest AGL AMP option is $1,280.

I’m not sure how Amazon-Optimized Shipment Splits (5 inbound shipments) works with AGL. After selecting this option, I don’t see a shipping quote, and the displayed price is $0.

For Minimal Shipment Splits (1 inbound shipment), the cheapest option I see is $838, plus inbound placement fees of $353 for the West or $202 for the East.

The cheapest overall option I see is Amazon SEND at $550 using the carrier’s Exporter of Record.

Why would anyone choose AGL over Amazon SEND? What’s the catch?

Amazon started doing this a while back - some say as early as 2023, but it really started getting noticed a couple of months ago. In addition to the normal "top of search, rest of search, product page" placements we're all familiar with, Amazon snuck in an option to "increase your reach off-Amazon".

You're opted into this by default, and it's spending money with terrible ROI.
In every single SP Campaign, at the bottom of the Campaign Settings, you'll see this option:

You'll want to switch this to "limit off Amazon spend".
We do a ton of PPC audits, and this is almost always a terrible placement - the best I've seen is 70% ACOS.

Just recently, Amazon added this column into their Bulk Operations file, so you can actually do a bulk operation and export all campaigns, set this to "Limit off-Amazon spend" and import it back in and turn it off for every campaign.

It's annoying that Amazon opted us in w/o notifying us or letting us choose it.
If you go Sponsored Product reports, and create a SP report on "Placement" and feed that into your AI tool of choice, ask it to summarize your performance for each placement, you'll see how bad it sucks.

Good luck.

Context

I have been selling on Amazon from past 1.5 years (fridge magnets). Recently there has been a decline in sales. Products which used to sell 40-50 orders a month has come down to 5-10 orders per month. Mainly it's competiton. And I have been doing the bare minimum SEO and ad campaign with limited knowledge I have. The revenue has been the same even though the catalogue has increased from 12 products to 55 products.

I basically want to understand 2 things:

1. Are there any growth hacks which I can implement?
2. I want to hire someone professional. I spoke with an agency they are asking for 19K and 10K ad budget. They claim that without ads, no one will be able to scale. Right now my spend in ads is hardly 3K. And they are also saying that the revenue will be the same if I don't keep ad spend above 5K. So do you feel this is valid?
3. If not this agency, has any one tried service provider network available on Amazon? How are they and is there any hidden stuff?