Amazon Product Failure Part 9

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Chris Thomas joins us for a product failure and battle scars from one of his catalogue of Amazon Product Failure, just like the rest of us…

This Amazon product failure will focus on the product called the doggy fun.

It’s an automatic dog ‘fetch’ machine
Dog put the ball in the top and shoots it out so the dog can go and fetch it and bring it back, load it up and fire it again

What convinced you this was a winner?

Chris was in a trade show in China and saw the machine being demoed
He went up and got a price
The unit cost was about $35 FOB and a bit more on getting it to the US and Chris partnered 50/50 with a pal
Placed a test order of 200 units
There was only one other seller on Amazon so Chris was feeling confident
Later turned out that his product was a rip-off of the other (i-Fetch) which was originally a Kickstarter project and was crushing it
Doing $150-200k / month just before Christmas in 2015
Knew when Christmas came it would go bonkers
No competition apart from iFetch

Chris was seeing dollar signs and Christmas
Took a long time to get it over in US
Live about March 2016
Sales took off the 200 units went quick
In April, they were back in China and hooked up with the Supplier again who had a new version
Search Amazon for Play-ball Automatic Ball Launcher to se it
Chris fed back that the balls in their first order were very ‘fuzzy’ and the balls got jammed and slobbery causing some returns
Chris helped the supplier smooth their balls
It took about 9 months to get the improvements done
Was about USD$25 and an MOQ of 500 this time

There were now more competitors in the market
Into Jan 2017 and they launched it
Within a couple of weeks, Chris’ partner in the States received a cease and desist from iFetch’s lawyers
Went back to them and said we’ll just sell out and not re-order
So they pushed through to end of May and sold out the 400 units left
Then did the honourable thing and stopped selling the product
Came out with a profit and sold all stock

If the lawsuit had kicked in then Chris could have ended in a hole with this Amazon Product Failure
Getting the stock into Amazon as they are heavy to ship so not a huge margin
Matching iFetch’s price when they started so was making $52 per unit profit
The 2nd Shipment landed but a new competitor had dropped the price down from $150 to $70 so slim margins

The Cat laser toy
In August Chris bought this new product for $9 and about 600 units
Within 30mins of launching the listing the product was shutdown by Amazon as it was mis-classified as a hand-held laser and was restricted
So looked to sell the product on eBay and ways to get rid of it
But looked a couple of weeks later and anothe seller was listing exactly the same product and doing okay and still there
So Chris re-listed and managed to sell this pet-toy product and selling through to Christmas

Searching for patents as part of product selection? Chris not doing so much of this as it’s too costly
Could go into Google Patents and local Patents to search cheaply
Or prefer to ask for forgiveness after the fact than seek permission in advance, the entrepreneur way

Not scared of electronics and there is money in it too, chris has domain knowledge in this space
Looking at pet-driers a hair dryer for dogs
People are selling human hair dryers and re-branding as a pet-dryer, pretty smart approach
Chris is developing a set of sleeping earbuds and is watching a competitor that’s using sports bud and just re-branding

Try and modify if you are private labelling, don’t do a ME-TO
Work with your manufacturer
Bundling is okay but if you do 2 someone else will come and do 3
If you can’t add significant value to a product then it’s a short term play for you