We recently interviewed Riccardo Squarcina and Riccardo Masin, founders of Sakari, to understand how they went from being simple students to international retail entrepreneurs thanks to Amazon FBA and ZonWizard.
In 2020 I was finishing highschool and because of the Covid pandemic I spent many hours at home, so I had lots of time to devote to studying a new business.I started studying retail FBA on Amazon in January 2020 from an Italian trainer, attracted by the scalability of this business, after discovering it almost by chance from a classmate of mine. Then in June I got my first VAT number in Italy, just a few days before graduating from highschool.
We basically buy products from Italian and European suppliers and resell them on Amazon. From the beginning we have always done just that, retail. At first, in all kinds of sectors. Now, however, we are specializing more and more in health and personal care, supplements, and the pet industry. Then seasonally we go back to gardening products, but the first three we said are the main ones.
It was in the middle of the COVID period. In June I had opened my one-man business in Italy, and in August I made the first sale. I remember it well...it was on August 12, 2020. Since then I believe...we’ve sold about 80,000 units, because in the last 12 months we’ve sold around 35-40 thousand units.
The next step, the one that changed everything happened in March 2022. That’s when I and the other Riccardo decided to scale this business for real, joining the pan-European program with the desire to really go big on Amazon and expand across Europe. We set up a company, no longer in Italy, but in the Czech Republic, where we got our first office...
Well, actually we wanted to move to a capital city outside of Italy, and after visiting a few countries with a good ratio of quality to cost of living, Prague, in our opinion, was the best. There was no fiscal or practical reason. Mind you, Italy is not a good country in which to do business or at any rate it is not an easy place to do business. The first thing you think of before you even make money in Italy is, "oh God I will have to pay taxes! ha ha"
In the beginning of operations, our biggest challenge was keeping up with orders. Let me explain...the more volume grows, the more capital you need to reorder goods, so we had to calibrate the orders really well, to make sure that we kept growing. You have to focus on the products where there is more margin and drop the ones that cause you the most problems.
Sometimes it can happen that products that sell a lot on Amazon only just break even or even make a loss over time. To understand what you are actually getting from each individual SKUsold you need to check the margins made. This is where ZonWizard's product view and profit table are indispensable.
Definitely to follow the logistics aspect, that is, to calculate the time it takes for the goods to arrive, otherwise the money gets stuck and you create a cash flow problem.
Then you have to be very careful to always have stock inside Amazon because we have noticed that not stocking the warehouse perfectly decreases visibility and therefore the possibility of winning the buy box. Not to mention running out of stock, which is the worst thing for any retailer.
The Inventory Section of Zonwizard Analytics in this area too, lends a real hand in understanding which products are running out of stock so that they can be reordered and shipped to Amazon in a timely manner.
Well let's start with this assumption, without ZonWizard you're not going anywhere. Consider that we come from a small town of 10,000 people, so finding an accountant was already a challenge, finding one with experience in e-commerce was practically impossible. So from the start we turned to ZonWizard that facilitated all the tax part with the Accounting Tool.
Without it...I just wouldn't know how to manage the tax register, VAT returns , invoices and OSS. Then also all the other features give you an incredible hand and the more the business grew the more we used the Profit Tool and the Analytics Tool in ZonWizard
Well let's start with this ... it's super easy to increase revenue on Amazon, but do you know what the real problem is? It's figuring out the margin you're left with after selling all that merchandise. Finding out that you haven't made any money after moving thousands of pieces...that's the real pain for a seller.
And ZonWizard is capable of measuring this perfectly and automatically with the Profit Table. I think if you can maintain or increase margins over the months it means you are also doing a good job...in general, as an entrepreneur.
Then inventory management to check for out-of-stock products and adjust with reorder timing. We used to check from seller central and it was really complex and time-consuming, a tedious and inefficient task to say the least. Instead having all the data within the ZonWizard Inventory Table is simply perfect.
Well, after Amazon's 2021 commission increase, our marginality had decreased to 9 percent. That was quite a drop. In the following years we worked hard on product selection and margin optimization. With the help of ZonWizard's comparative views we were able to increase it significantly, doubling it in 2022. Now it’s around 20%, and this is the result we are most proud of at Sakari.
At the start of operations in 2020, the average margin of products sold by Sakari was around 15% .
In 2021, with Amazon's commission increases, there was a sharp drop in the margin of total sales.
In 2022 we recovered margin with product optimization through ZonWizard's Profit Tool
We have now found our dimension and in 2023 we are continuing to achieve this margin
Yes...We have now reached 255 active items! Just think, from a few dozen products sold in 2020, we have grown to 737 SKUs transiting our warehouse. Thanks to ZonWizard we are able to manage more and more products without increasing the complexity of the business and without losing sight of margins either.
SKUs have passed through our warehouse from the start of operations to today.
Types of products sold regularly every month on Amazon to customers across Europe.Our shipments now travel in full pallets.
Our main goal is to strengthen our retail sales in Germany, France, and Spain. We will try to double the sales from these countries in the coming year.
We are also developing the resale business in off-line channels and have launched our first Private Label Brand. By 2025 we would like to activate 2 more.
Since this year we have also become distributors for other brands in the Czech Republic for some international brands and we think this is the right evolution of the FBA business.
Thanks to you for the opportunity to spread the word about us and to ZonWizard for making all the aspects of our work easier, from profit control to inventory management, from feedback requests to reimbursements and taxes and more. See you soon!
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