[Journey] The Detour at Month 4: Etsy, FBA and Personalized Products

4 months into Amazon FBM, my workflow was running. Not perfect, but running. So I tried to expand, three ways at once: an Etsy shop, personalized products on Amazon, and a plan to move my products into FBA.

Should you sell print on demand on more than one platform? I think yes, eventually. I did it at month 4, and it hurt me more than it helped.

Three new fronts, 4 months in

Each one had a reason.

Etsy was about reach. More marketplaces means more impressions, more impressions means more clicks, and more clicks means more sales. Putting the same products in front of a second crowd looked like the obvious next step.

Personalized products, where the buyer adds their own name or text, were my way into more niches.

FBA, where Amazon stores and ships your stock, was about scale. Take what was already selling and scale it there.

None of these is a bad idea.

Was it the wrong move, or the wrong time?

Wrong time. I was 4 months into one strategy and I wasn't good at it yet. Amazon FBM was still something I was figuring out. The workflow worked, but it wasn't finished, and instead of upgrading it I jumped to strategies that needed things I didn't have.

Each one ran on different winning factors, and I hadn't nailed the first set yet.

Personalized products needed a different playbook

To make personalized products work you need a winning product, and then ads running on each one. That's a different strategy from the one I was still learning, with different winning factors behind it.

FBA needed a winner I didn't have

I looked at FBA again and did a lot of research, and it never got past research. My products weren't guaranteed to sell yet. There was no winner big enough to be worth a batch. The margin didn't make sense. And staying with the same supplier didn't look possible: margins won't work with Printify and I'd probably have had to go with a Chinese provider, and getting stock from there into Amazon takes around another 2 months.

It's the same order I argued for here: FBM to find out what sells, FBA for the few things that already do.

Etsy needed a second workflow

Etsy was the one that actually ran, and it made some sales. But bulk posting doesn't work there the way it does on Amazon. Etsy charges 20¢ per listing, so putting up 1,000 products is a real bill, not a free experiment. I had to post more specific products instead, which meant a different strategy, which meant another workflow.

I wasn't branching one workflow into two platforms. I was building a second one.

There was no synergy between the two. And a new platform is its own world anyway: a different crowd, different SEO, everything different.

Scaling all three back

I ran all of this for a few months and kept trying to optimize everything. Nothing died. Etsy kept making some sales. But looking back, if I'd put all of that energy into Amazon FBM, the growth would have been a lot faster.

So I turned personalized products off. I paused Etsy to focus on FBM. FBA never left the research stage. All three scaled back, and the time went with them.

One thing I'd change: if Etsy was going to happen at all, scaling the products that were already selling on Amazon might have been the better version, instead of building a separate catalog for it. Because I would be using one workflow and branching instead of creating an entirely new one.

That was one of my first real lessons.

One platform, one product, one strategy, until it's mature.

Get good at the first thing. Once it's mature, maybe you scale, maybe you add a platform. Branching early is a cousin of method-hopping, which I wrote about here. If you're a few months into your own setup and a second platform is calling, that's the part worth sitting with.

I'm writing this stretch of the journey as it happened, the moves that worked and the ones I had to walk back. If you want them as they land, you can ride along by email.

One thing at a time,
Nick T