Right, Thursday live is done and what a messy, brilliant, chaotic hour that was.
TikTok banned me FOUR times during the live. Four. For "reproduced content." While I was sat in my chair. Talking. To real people. Live.
But between the bans and the appeals and the hay fever absolutely destroying my voice — we covered some proper ground this week. Grab a brew. Here's what went down.
The honest revenue numbers. Someone asked me live what I make, so I just showed them. £120k this year so far — and we're only three months in. Margin sitting at 15–17%. Not bad. But this month's going to be low because Amex cut my credit limit in half and I've had to pull the cash flow right back, pay it off completely, and then go again next month. Revenue looks great. Cash flow management is where the real game is played. Always.
The £8,000 UPS nightmare. This one is still frustrating me. Two months of chasing UPS, threatening letters about closing my account, and absolutely zero ability to dispute the charges. Nobody responding to emails. In the end I just had to pay £8,000-plus in import duties. And here's the worst part — it's completely inconsistent. I send 60–70 boxes a month into the US. Around 20–25 get hit for import duties. The rest sail through fine. Same product. Same route. No pattern. Trump's 10% tariff kicked in end of February and it's the same story — first shipment got hit immediately, next two got through clean. Makes it impossible to properly calculate your margins when you don't know which boxes are going to get dinged.
The AI thing is very real. I've been spending about nine hours a day in Claude AI at the moment and I cannot overstate how game-changing it is. I've built ScoreMyAsin — a live Amazon product scoring tool with a Chrome extension and a connected Amazon Selling Partners API — without being able to write code. Just conversations. I described what I wanted. Claude built it. I tested it, gave feedback, it updated. Repeat. I've also got two other projects in the pipeline, completely outside of Amazon, built the same way. If you're still on ChatGPT — switch to Claude. I promise you won't look back.
The best bits from Thursday's live:
"Amazon is saturated with people who don't know what they're doing — and that's YOUR opportunity." The market isn't dead. Clueless sellers aren't competition. Learn it properly and there's still massive opportunity.
The payment terms hack. Get 30–60 day payment terms from your supplier, pay by Amex or Capital on Tap, and you can generate Amazon sales and collect payment before you've spent a penny of your own money. Cash flow cheat code.
High-ticket warning. I will never sell laptops, cameras, or expensive electronics on Amazon FBA. One return on a £600 item wipes out the profit on five or six other sales. Build experience and cash flow before going anywhere near it.
ScoreMyAsin vs ByBot Pro. They give you data. ScoreMyAsin gives you a verdict. Plug in an ASIN, get a score, know whether to sell it — without doing all the analysis yourself. Free to try at scoremyasin.com.
Freedom Ticket for beginners. If you're brand new to private label and want a proper foundation, get Helium 10 Platinum and go through the Freedom Ticket videos. I spent four or five months on them when I first started, two or three hours every night. Still the best free resource in the game.
TikTok Live bans (again). Four appeals. Four approvals. Four re-bans. The topic that TikTok apparently cannot handle? Selling on Amazon. Groundbreaking stuff.
If you missed Thursday's live — I go live every Thursday on TikTok, same time, same chaos. Come and ask your Amazon or AI questions live. I answer everything.
ScoreMyAsin is free to try at scoremyasin.com — plug in any ASIN and see what the algorithm says.
And if you want mentoring — starting all the way from scratch, what is an ASIN, what is the buy box — drop me a DM. I work with complete beginners.
