What Skills Make a Great Private Label Business?

I own and run a large, successful ecommerce business including the use of amazon fba. I've found that the skills element (you ask about above) is actually a fairly small part of what is needed to drive excellent sales through PL.

Much more important is the mindset of building a long-term, sustainable business that is going to take time and energy to set up and an ongoing effort to sustain and further develop. This will help give you the necessary outlook, perspective, vision and the ongoing mental discipline required.

In other words precisely the opposite mindset that is encouraged around much of IM, particularly from the "get rich quick by using only your smartphone from the beach to make one million a day" jokers.

Also much more important is the creation of a powerful ecommerce strategy that will both shape and drive your overall growth. It acts both as direction giver and a route map forward. There are many strategies to adopt and these are nearly alway missing from the training packages i've seen around. Without it you are simply reduced to ad hoc development, reacting to the vagaries of change (of which there is a lot) and employing tactics rather than strategy.

Strategy before tactics. Tactics before operational methods. Operational methods before skill sets. In that order. You need all of these, of course.

An example is when i am (regularly asked by someone selling physical products) what product should I introduce next? I know immediately when I hear this that there is an absence of direction giving strategy and that the problem isn't product selection but strategic thinking. Strategy makes a huge difference to the bottom line.

Another example is when I ask someone what is your strategy and the reply is "I'm going to use FBA." Well, FBA isn't a strategy its an operational tactic that delivers on particular types of strategies and tactics.

I could go on as there is much, much more to creating big success using PL than developing a skill set. But I won't. Skill sets are obviously important but much less so that some of the stuff i've just mentioned.

Good luck with your venture.

The most important thing is to get out there and do something. Take action and get moving. Don't worry about killer sales copy or anything else. A lot of sellers on Amazon are doing VERY well and they suck at all of the typical IM skills. The most important thing is to jump in and learn as you go. I just started a few months ago and I went from no skills, inventory, sale, etc to hitting 1.5k sales in a week which is still small peas, but 100% growth week over week just due to taking action and trying.