This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
[Music]
I believe we can learn as much from failure as we can from success. If not, in fact, more. That's right, it is time, in fact, for another edition of Failure Friday. Failure Friday, our weekly collection of short stories about mistakes, missteps, disasters, and of course, failure. All those things that don't go well.
Well, let's just actually call it what it is. All those things that go very poorly. All those actual disasters. And today you're gonna hear one of those disasters, not just a small misstep, but an actual disaster. This story features Kellan from thesabicouple.com.
I really appreciate Kellan. We've heard from him a couple of different times in his early days before he had this blog, which is now a huge business. I'll say some more about that at the end. In his early days, he sold on eBay and amazon.com. And he sold all kinds of stuff, including yoga mats, which he will talk about here in the story.
And it was all going so well until a supplier problem led to him being banned permanently, effectively a permanent ban from Amazon. And fun fact, as I was listening to Kellan's story working on this episode, it reminded me of my experience many years ago. So this is kind of like my own personal throwback Thursday. I used to sell on eBay and amazon.com and ran into all kinds of issues. Sometimes it's not even your fault, but I might say more about that at the end as well.
In this case, he did have a little misstep, which turned into a bigger disaster. So let's hand it over to Kellan to tell the story. [Music]
Hey, what's going on? It's Kellan from thesavcouple.com. And my side hustle was drop shipping.
So originally I started making money online when I was 13, just flipping random items around the house with my dad, finding things in our closet, our garage, our basement, and taking those items, looking for how much they were worth on eBay, selling them, flipping them, making some quick cash. But eventually I ran out of things to sell. So around high school, around ninth grade, I started to look for drop shippers. So I needed a supplier to give me supplies that I could drop ship and sell on Amazon and eBay. And I started doing this through high school and college.
And in college, I ended up doing around $50,000 worth of drop shipping within a single year. Obviously the profit on that was about 10%. So not a crazy profitable thing, but perfect little side hustle to get through college, help me pay for college and give me some spending money. The issue came when I tried to scale a little bit too quickly. So I was specifically focusing on Amazon at this time.
I had a drop shipper that was sending me sports memorabilia and fitness equipment. And I would literally post their products up on Amazon. Once an order came in, I'd go back to the supplier. I would place the order and it would get shipped right to my customer. And I was basically the middleman dealing with customer service.
Well, I really wanted to scale this 'cause I saw there was a lot of opportunity here. And it's right around the Christmas time. And I ended up figuring out that you could use their entire inventory through an Excel sheet. And you could upload that to Amazon all in one swoop versus manually uploading each product, which was actually a better way of doing it because you could really make sure that all of the listings were correct and the right products were being listed at the right price with the right descriptions so that the customers were happy. Well, I ended up uploading over a thousand items.
A couple of them were very hot selling items like yoga mats. And I ended up, orders just started piling in. I became overwhelmed and realized that the Excel sheet was messed up. And that I was selling items that I actually did not have in stock from the supplier. So turns out I had to start canceling orders on Amazon, which is a big no-no for sellers.
Amazon obviously wants a good experience for all of their buyers. So if you start canceling items, your account starts to kind of get these red flags saying, "Hey, what's going on? "We need to fix this." Or your account may be banned. Well, turns out I sold, I believe, 20 of these yoga mats that I actually did not have in stock. So I had to cancel over 20 orders.
This was right before Christmas. And eventually Amazon gave me the ban hammer. And when Amazon gives you the ban hammer, they're not joking around. They would not let me open up another account. Basically my name, my social security account, my social security number, my credit cards, they've all been banned from selling on Amazon.
So I've tried a couple of times getting another seller account and it's impossible. They shut it right down. So they have some type of system to find out which sellers have already been banned and not let them back on the platform. So the lesson of this story is start small, only scale when you actually have the systems in place to do so. And if you are selling on Amazon and dropshipping, make sure you have very good trusted suppliers 'cause at the end of the day, that's what's really gonna make the business thrive, is having good suppliers that can fulfill orders for you when needed.
So that's my lesson. Have a wonderful day. Keep side hustling. [Music]
Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. I so appreciate Kellen bringing us that story.
As mentioned, a bit of a throwback for me because back in the day, I was also doing stuff like that and trying to sort out supplier issues, dropshipping, where am I gonna find inventory? Is Amazon gonna ban my account? And by the way, just as he mentions, Amazon doesn't mess around. Like if you make a single mistake, you're out pretty much. And sometimes in fact, you might not even make a mistake.
There could just be some sort of confusion or a buyer isn't happy for whatever reason, even if they received exactly what they paid for and you're just kind of out. And as he discussed, sometimes it's hard to make a new account and start over. So the whole thing just reminds me, you're not always in control of supplier issues, vendor issues, third-party sellers. In fact, most of the time, you're not. In fact, most of the time, those parties are in control.
So you gotta look out for that. You gotta be aware of that. Thanks again, Kellen, for sharing that candid story. Listeners, check out his website, thesabicouple.com or hear his origin story. Let's say and, you can do both.
Check out the website and hear his origin story of how he made his first $1,000 with that site back on episode 1878. So you can get to that on our website, sidehustleschool.com/1878. He has since built it out to a very successful full-time business. So fortunately, he didn't let this early disaster defeat turn into something long-term. In fact, it perhaps motivated him to figure something else out.
All right, that is all for today. If you have a question, an update for us about your hustle, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Let me know what's going on. I hope you all subscribe, follow, come back tomorrow, new episode every single day. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
You're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
From the Onward Project.
