#487 - Selling Less. Profiting More. The Anti-Scale Strategy

Selling on Amazon with Andy Isom

Andy Isom | Amazon FBA Seller & Agency Founder

Amazon, Business, Amazonfba, Selling, Marketing, Entrepreneurship, Personalbusiness, Productbusiness, Ecommerce, Onlinebusiness

4.9 • 816 Ratings

🗓️ 22 July 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Scaling isn’t always the answer—especially on Amazon. In this episode of Built by Business with Andy Isom, we break down the anti-scale strategy that’s helping e-commerce sellers boost profits by simplifying their product catalog, cutting deadweight SKUs, and focusing on what actually moves the needle.

You’ll learn how to:

Audit SKU-level profitability
Reduce complexity and increase margin
Reinvest resources into your hero products
Avoid the hidden cost of over-scaling

Whether you’re overwhelmed by too many ASINs or just want to grow smarter, not bigger, this episode will help you rethink what profitable growth looks like in 2025.

Request a free Amazon brand audit at www.weavos.io

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Scaling or simply increasing your revenue for the sake of growth may not be your goal.
0:05.8	What if the most profitable thing you can do is sell less but sell smarter?
0:10.0	In this episode, we're going to kind of flip the script on the Grow at all Costs Playbook.
0:14.0	I'm going to break down the anti-scale strategy that's quietly building stronger, leaner, and
0:19.4	more profitable e-commerce brands.
0:29.6	Welcome back to Built by Business. I'm Andy Isam. And today we're talking about a controversial idea that might just save your business, scaling down to profit up.
0:40.3	And this isn't to say we're trying to become a smaller business. It's more about becoming
0:45.3	a smarter business. I'm going to share some frameworks and examples and prompts and things that you can
0:50.3	use to rethink your profit margins, your catalog of products, and your sanity.
0:55.8	Growth may not be your goal.
0:57.8	Or it maybe shouldn't be your goal at this stage with your business.
1:01.9	Maybe it's time to focus more on profit.
1:04.0	A lot of business owners, including myself, confuse activity with progress.
1:09.8	More skews, more channels, more advertising spend, but a lot
1:13.9	of times that just equals more chaos. Scaling isn't necessarily a strategy. It's a consequence.
1:21.2	As Alex Hermosie has been quoted saying, scale is a reward for doing the fundamentals well,
1:27.0	not the strategy itself.
1:28.4	A 2023 study by seller app found that only 8% of Amazon sellers with 20 or more skews were profitable on every skew.
1:37.6	Again, less than 1 out of 10 sellers with 20 or more skews were profitable on all of the skews. Most had 5 to 8
1:46.4	skews that carried the brand. I've seen this with so many brands, including my own brand,
1:51.4	Remy and Rue. 20% of our skews drive 80% of our profit. So it may be time to ask yourself,
1:58.2	how many of your skews are actually pulling their weight. The anti-scale
	...

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