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February 18 was a noteworthy Tuesday for me and my business partner. We were officially up and running on Amazon.

In a Google doc I update regularly with notes and reflections on our e-commerce experiment, page 32 emphatically marks the occasion: “The paddles have arrived at Amazon, and the listing is live!!”

It was exciting, deserving of two exclamation points. We’d spent nearly two years brainstorming product ideas — we settled on pickleball paddles — and bringing the product to life. Many steps happened between the ideation phase and our first inventory order, which ran us a little more than $11,000 for 500 paddles. Half of them were sent to Amazon warehouses. The other 250, divided between five large boxes, are stacked to the ceiling of my studio apartment.

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If the product development process felt long, tedious, and exhausting, like getting over the finish line of a marathon, moving product is an Ironman. We’ve sold paddles through our Shopify site and at in-person events, but Amazon? It’s been the Sahara Desert. Nearly five months after proudly listing our paddle, we’ve sold exactly four units.

Take a look at our sales dashboard.

Kathleen Elkins via Amazon

Amazon Seller Central likes to remind us on a daily basis how little money we have coming in. It even provides overall business insights. The most recent one read: “Your store shows a declining trend in both sales and traffic since launch, despite maintaining excellent feature offer percentages.”

We get it. We haven’t figured out Amazon yet. We’re new, overwhelmed, and treating this very much as a side project. That said, we’re paying Amazon to store and list our product — and paying rent for our paddles to sit untouched isn’t exactly the growth strategy we had in mind.

Shaking things up by purchasing ads and exploring TikTok Shop

If I’ve learned anything from talking to and writing about successful entrepreneurs, it’s to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you or have already achieved what you want to achieve. Ask them questions, be curious, and learn from their mistakes.

Luckily, as a reporter, that’s part of my job description.

Based on conversations with people who know a lot more than me about e-commerce, here are two strategic shifts we can implement that could help get our product moving on Amazon.

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1. Buy ads

Tyler Walter is the cofounder of 330 Trading Co., a product-sourcing company. He works closely with US-based e-commerce businesses, advising them on everything from initial product development to creating diverse supply chains.

Walter told me, point blank, we have to spend money on ads.

“Ads are going to give you the best fighting chance of selling through all of your inventory profitably,” he said. “If you’re doing it right, a dollar into advertising should come back as $2 to $3 of revenue.”

Ideally, before we start throwing money at ads, we want more product reviews. In the Amazon world, reviews are rocket fuel — without them, our product will go nowhere.

It took nearly two years to design and develop the Peak Pro. Kathleen Elkins

With ads, “you’re paying to get eyeballs on your listing,” Walter explained. “And if you have zero reviews, every time someone looks at your listing, the chances of them purchasing are much less than if there were a bunch of reviews.”

So far, we have three Amazon reviews. Walter said a good short-term goal for us is to get to double-digits. Then, we can look at our competitors and adjust our review goal accordingly.

“Take the first five pickleball paddles that pop up when you search ‘pickleball paddle.’ How many reviews do they have? Can you get to a 10th of that?” he said. He encouraged us to think like a consumer: If we’re comparing products and see one with 500 reviews, one with 200, and one with two, we’re likely not going to buy the one with two. “But if you see 20, it makes you think, ‘This might be trustworthy. They have a better price. Let me give them a shot.'”

He told us that we may run into a bit of a chicken-and-egg dilemma: We want reviews before spending on ads, but might need ads to actually get reviews.

As far as how much money we need to spend on ads, he explained that Amazon ads are more affordable compared to Google, Meta, and TikTok ads since Amazon already has so much traffic, “so you can test it out with a very small budget.”

That said, we want to spend enough to make an impact, and, generally speaking, spending more will lead to better results. It’ll take some trial-and-error, and if we have the budget to hire a professional on a site like Fiverr or Upwork to manage our ad campaigns, we should.

As with most things in life, there are no guarantees.

“There’s a possibility that you put $700 in over the course of a week, and you don’t get a single sale. That is a possibility,” he said. “But very quickly, you’ll start to see data of how many people are seeing your ads, how many people are clicking in your ads, how many purchases you’re getting, what the conversions are — and if you’re working with a good professional, they can take that data and and tweak things and you should be able to get a pretty good idea of: Hey, if I put $500 into ads this month, I’m going to get an extra $1,500 in sales that I other otherwise wouldn’t have got.”

The author’s studio apartment doubles as the Peak Pickleball headquarters. Kathleen Elkins

2. Think beyond Amazon and explore TikTok Shop

I learned from Eugene Khayman, who built his own seven-figure Amazon business and now leads a community of 700 top e-commerce entrepreneurs called Million Dollar Sellers, that we should be thinking beyond Amazon.

It’s harder than ever to build a profitable Amazon business. Compared to when he started selling on the platform in the early 2010s, the fees are higher, the competition is stiffer, and the strategies are constantly evolving. Not to mention, tariffs, which added an entirely new level of complexity for Amazon sellers at the start of 2025.

“If people are treating Amazon as their whole business, they’re definitely more at risk,” he said, and “there are so many different verticals of e-commerce to serve.”

He pointed to TikTok Shop, where he sees “a lot of opportunity,” and compared it to Amazon in the early years before it became overrun with sellers. A smart strategy would be to couple Amazon with TikTok or other marketplaces.

He also emphasized that “complacency kills,” a hard truth that even the most established sellers in his community need to be reminded of. “E-commerce was really so easy the past few years, and we have to be more critical of ourselves and overall.”

The best way to avoid complacency and stay ahead of the curve is to keep talking to people who know what they’re doing.

“It’s all about putting yourself in a room with people that are smarter than you, so that you’re growing faster and you’re not making silly mistakes,” he said.

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