I created my Amazon account in 2020 after attending a networking event, where I met someone who managed Amazon accounts for clients and introduced me to Amazon dropshipping using eBay as the supplier.
For a few months, things actually went pretty well. Then my account was suddenly hit with a Section 3 TOS violation for selling a brand I supposedly wasn’t authorized to sell.
I tried to fix the situation by paying someone to help me with the appeal process, but that ended up being a waste of money. For nearly six months we kept submitting appeals. Amazon kept asking for a receipt or invoice showing I had purchased at least 10 units of the product to prove inventory, which obviously didn’t exist with the dropshipping model.
Eventually, I gave up trying to recover the account and sold it to the same person who originally introduced me to the business.
Now, I keep hearing that private label or fulfillment is the better route on Amazon. But honestly, I’m still trying to figure out what product I would even sell.
Is private label basically just rebranding products from AliExpress or Alibaba and putting your logo on them, or is that more of a Shopify dropshipping model? How much capital should someone realistically save before starting?
Also wondering about the marketing side of it. With private label, do you usually need to build a full presence with Instagram, Google, and Facebook pages and run ads there as well?
Curious to hear from others who started with dropshipping and eventually transitioned to something else. What path worked for you?