Less than three years later, ChristaQuilts.com had grown from a means of supporting Watson’s quilting hobby into a thriving business. By 2006, Watson realized that her site had the potential to support her family. Her husband, Jason, quit his job as a certified professional accountant, and the couple decided to grow the business enough to provide two full-time incomes.
“At that time we were getting a bunch of emails from Amazon asking if we wanted to sell there,” Watson recalls. “Jason said we should try it for six months, just to test the waters.”
According to Amazon, there are two million third-party sellers on the site. The Watsons decided to become one of them. Thinking like the CPA that he was, Jason thought precut fabric bundles, rather than yardage, might do best on Amazon. He set aside some new stock to experiment with and the couple’s Amazon business took off.
After just a few months, the couple saw that their Amazon sales were strong, but discovered a flaw in the new business — fulfilling orders had become an all-consuming process. After doing some research, the Watsons decided to step things up and try the Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) program.
FBA allows Amazon sellers to use Amazon’s fulfillment services instead of trying to fill orders on their own. Sellers send as much inventory to Amazon as they’d like, and Amazon scans and stores it at their fulfillment warehouses. When a customer places an order, Amazon packs and ships the items and manages customer service.
“Once we decided to use Fulfillment by Amazon, it just went through the roof,” Watson says of the couple’s fabric business on Amazon.
The Watsons closed down their eBay and website shops and focused their efforts on selling precuts on Amazon.
“Precuts were the ticket. It’s just so much less labor. Before Amazon, I was cutting fabric eight hours a day,” Watson says.
What it takes to succeed
According to Watson, there are a few tricks to making Amazon work for your business. For instance, realizing that commodities do best on Amazon will save you some effort, Watson says.
“Think of something you can order a lot of and restock easily. I tried selling yardage bundles for a while, but it just bombed,” she says. “Independent stand-alone units do best.”
Watson says other examples of craft supplies that might succeed on Amazon are things like skeins of yarn or rolls of ribbon.
Listing and selling as much as possible is the key to being successful on Amazon, Watson says. At any given time, Watson’s ChristaQuilts Amazon shop has about 1,600 items listed.
“In order to make a profit, you’ve got to make it up in volume,” Watson says.
Amazon’s FBA program encourages sellers to sell inventory quickly. After six months in the fulfillment warehouse, Amazon charges a storage fee of $11.25 per cubic foot. If that inventory is still in the warehouse 12 months later, the storage fee doubles.
“It’s hard to envision what that storage space size really looks like, but it’s small,” Watson says. “It can cost us thousands of dollars. We try to never let it wait that long. We either ship the inventory back to ourselves or we (sell) it at a deep discount just to turn it over.”
The seller culture
Participating in the Amazon marketplace is a very different experience than selling on other ecommerce platforms like Etsy or eBay, Watson says. On Amazon there can only be one listing per item site-wide. If a listing already exists, you have to use it.
“You can’t make the listing better. You can’t change it. If the wording is weird or it doesn’t list some important features, you still have to use it,” Watson says. “And you can’t tell your story.”
Sometimes, she says, listings have serious errors, like an incorrect UPC code. To get the error corrected means wading through Amazon’s bureaucracy.
“It’s a headache and a hassle when something is wrong. Sometimes sellers cheat,” Watson says. “They try to create their own listings and we have to report that. That’s what Jason does. He spends a lot of his week on the phone with Amazon clearing things up.”
Having a single listing with many different sellers behind it encourages a particular type of behavior among sellers. When a customer searches for an item, Amazon chooses which of the many available will come up first in search results. Other sellers’ items also are listed, but they appear lower on the page and require extra clicks to sort through.
“Most customers are going to purchase that one that pops up in the ‘buy box’,” Watson explains.
Customers have the option of using Amazon Prime or Super Saver Shipping on FBA products. The formula behind Amazon’s search results is proprietary, so Amazon won’t disclose how they choose the items that pop up on top of the list, but Watson says using Amazon’s FBA program seems to help.
Still, even with the FBA edge, Watson says sellers are “all competing with each other and end up lowering our prices to get into the ‘buy box.’”
“We can’t add our business card or a postcard to say ‘thank you,’ or even a sticker,” Watson says. “There’s no commingling of brands allowed. The brand loyalty for customers is to Amazon, not to you. You can’t feel precious about your own brand.”
Fulfillment By Amazon sets the schedule
These days, much of the Watsons’ workweek is spent preparing and shipping inventory to Amazon’s fulfillment centers. On Mondays, they report to Amazon how many of each item they’ll be shipping that week. Amazon sends back a manifest telling them where to send each product.
“Typically, we have to split things up and ship them to three or four fulfillment centers,” Watson says. “So we might have 400 items in 15 different boxes with some going to California, some to Texas, and some to Pennsylvania.”
Each item is bagged individually and gets a UPC code sticker, a seller barcode, and a suffocation hazard sticker.
“It’s a ton of labor and it’s boring,” Watson says.
Is selling on Amazon shameful?
When she first started selling on Amazon, Watson realized that many small business owners view the online giant as a ruthless predator, not a partner. For a while, she wasn’t sure that she should tell people in the quilting industry about her Amazon site.
“At first, I didn’t want people to know about it,” Watson says. “I worried that the shops where I teach would see me as a competitor who is undercutting them.”
But Watson sees herself as a colleague, not a competitor. Christa Quilts is a family business run out of the Watsons’ two-car garage. And, Watson says, being intimately involved in selling so much fabric provides her with valuable insights on what works in the marketplace.
“I’m hoping to one day design fabric,” Watson says. “Selling fabric on Amazon allows me to see what types of fabric people are drawn to and what is appealing from a design sense. I know which company I’d love to work for since their fabric sells the best and it helps guide what I’ll write about and design patterns around.”
Watson has come to feel proud of her Amazon fabric shop. “We see Amazon as a means to an end. It’s a way to earn money for our family,” she says. “It’s the day job.”
Very interesting read. Thank for sharing your experience.
“At first, I didn’t want people to know about it,” Watson says. “I worried that the shops where I teach would see me as a competitor who is undercutting them.”
You ARE undercutting them and you’re doing so by using a company that notoriously exploits and endangers their workers, is the largest contributor of plastics pollution, and yes, has forced the closure of independent shops around the globe.
You justify this by proclaiming yourself a “colleague” with “insight” you hope to use to your advantage when you start manufacturing your own line of fabric. That doesn’t sound like anyone who’s looking out for the well being of anyone but themselves. I’m sure you’ll be wildly successful.
I would be so much more impressed by your business if you’d gotten as far as you have WITHOUT cutting ethical and moral corners to make a buck.
Email me when you’re ready to be a comrade, not a colleague.
Apologies Janette, I didn’t mean to respond directly to your comment. Please disregard.
Wow, thanks for sharing the ins and outs! I don’t think selling on Amazon is shameful. As you’ve said, it’s a way to support your family. And a lot of times, it’s boring! I’m shipping out Amazon orders right now, from our family’s small media mail shop. I have come to appreciate Amazon as a buyer and a seller.
Great insight … Thank you so much for for article!!
Fascinating! I’ve been wondering about this, and in all honesty, it’s put me off the idea… very helpful 🙂
I’ve always wondered how you did Amazon, Christa! Thanks for sharing!
SO much great information here, Christa. Thank you!
I was very insterested in learning about this. I very briefly looked at FBA and just found that it would not be a profitable way for me to go at this time. I’m glad that it worked out for your business!
This article is so interesting! Love this forum where we get to see the ‘insides’ of difference types of commerce. Very educational!
What great read and very informative – thank you….I was curious about how FBA worked but really had no idea where to start looking for information. Thanks to Kristin for providing this link….And thank you Christa for sharing so openly about your experience with FBA….as others have said I am happy for your success and because of your honesty above, can now make an informed decision whether FBA may work for mine – thank you so much!
Thanks for sharing your story Christa. Your hard work is to be commended. Can’t wait to buy the fabric you design.
Thank you! It’s always fun to share what works and what doesn’t 🙂
Thanks for the insight. I think it took a lot of courage to step out and make that decision. I’m glad it’s successful for you.
This is such a wonderful read. Thank you, Christa, for sharing your story! I applaud you for all your efforts and courage. I’m a surface pattern designer and wonder how I could market my own fabrics. You’ve shown us a very important piece of that puzzle!
Thanks for sharing your story. I prefer not to shop Amazon, the work conditions are intolerable.
“At first, I didn’t want people to know about it,” Watson says. “I worried that the shops where I teach would see me as a competitor who is undercutting them.”
You ARE undercutting them and you’re doing so by using a company that notoriously exploits and endangers their workers, is the largest contributor of plastics pollution, and yes, has forced the closure of independent shops around the globe.
You justify this by proclaiming yourself a “colleague” with “insight” you hope to use to your advantage when you start manufacturing your own line of fabric. That doesn’t sound like anyone who’s looking out for the well being of anyone but themselves. I’m sure you’ll be wildly successful.
I would be so much more impressed by your business if you’d gotten as far as you have WITHOUT cutting ethical and moral corners to make a buck.
Email me when you’re ready to be a comrade, not a colleague.
Interesting to read through this article 7 years after it was written, I feel like we need a follow-up with Christa to see how it’s going now! Especially since I know she’s had a few lines of fabric made since then as well as a number of FMQ books and such. It’s fun to find her fabric and books in LQS on occasion. Also, this article’s insight info totally turns me off of wanting to sell anything through Amazon, especially at this point since it has grown ridiculously since 2015.
Thank you for sharing this article in the CIA newsletter.