r/FulfillmentByAmazon

I got hit with a design patent infringement claim on a design patent that seems to be complete BS but it is somehow registered and approved with the USPTO. The guy wants a lot of money to be able for me to sell his design and he's kinda got me by the balls because my business depends on it, though I could redesign in the future. I noticed some of my competitors are selling the exact same design...should I ask them if this guy reached out or no? Not sure what the cons are of asking? I'm curious if it's worth hiring a lawyer to fight this or just pay the guy because I have no chance of winning. My design does seem to infringe on his design patent, but his design patent is not unique at all.

With 30% deposit and 70% before shipping, the whole order is paid for before it's on the water, and between production and ocean freight that's often 60 to 90 days before any of it sells. Some suppliers will move to taking the balance against the bill of lading, a smaller deposit, or net terms on reorders, but it seems to depend a lot on order history.

How did you get your supplier to agree to better terms than 30/70, and how long had you been working with them?

Like a bestseller going out of stock and you only noticed when the listing went inactive, ads still running on an ASIN with no inventory, a suppressed listing, a pricing mistake ... what was yours and how did you finally catch it?

Especially curious if you sell on more than just Amazon.

I've been spending far too much time looking into Amazon fees, PPC, storage, fulfillment, and so on.

Then I started wondering if I’m overlooking another pretty big cost:

currency conversion.

I am selling in the UK and the European Union, and I am paid in Euros and British pounds while my supplier is based in China.

The money basically goes:

Amazon,me,FX conversion,supplier,CNY

If I am charging fees every time the money moves, then I might be paying the FX spread more than once.

At a rate of $5k a month, it might not be a big thing.

But at a rate of $50,000 a month, those small expenses begin to accumulate very quickly.

Want to know how other FBA sellers are dealing with this.

Isn't it just the case that you let Amazon take care of the currency conversion? Do you keep the balances in  Euro and Pounds separately? Do you pay the Chinese suppliers directly in CNY or Euros? And do you use some sort of multi-currency account (are they safe)?

I should particularly like to get some feedback from those of you who are achieving sales somewhere in the range of $30k to $100k per month. What exactly are you doing in practice?

It seems to me that many of us put a great deal of effort into optimizing the fees that we can see in Seller Central, while some of the less obvious costs just go unnoticed.