3 years of private label
Just hit my 3 year mark selling PL on Amazon. 14 SKUs now, 2 completely failed, the rest do anywhere from $2k-$18k/month.
Supplier negotiation matters more than product selection. I've seen average products crush it because the seller negotiated 30% better COGS and could afford to run heavier PPC. My best-selling SKU is genuinely boring but my margins are fat because I spent weeks going back and forth with suppliers instead of days.
Your first 3 images and A+ do 80% of the work. I used to obsess over PPC before my listing were sorted. Wrong order. Most shoppers never scroll past image 3. When I flipped this priority, conversions went up across the board. Do lots of A/B tests!
Stop adding SKUs, start fixing the ones you have. I spent most of year 2 launching new products when I should have been optimising my existing listings. When I finally went back and rebuilt the content and images on my top 5, revenue jumped about 30% without a single new product. Felt stupid for not doing it sooner.
Both my failed products looked great on paper. Should have low competition, decent margins. One got hit with a design patent complaint I didn't catch. The other had a seasonal demand curve I completely missed. Now I spend way more time on due diligence before placing an order.