Are there still profitable opportunities for new sellers on Amazon?

Note: this is is not an ad

Background – I have over 7 years of experience working at Amazon dealing with sellers and vendors and now I have a consultancy practice where I work with a handful of brands managing end-to-end. Over the years I have noticed how difficult it is for established sellers to make money on Amazon due to the rising costs of FBA, more competition (leading to higher costs of ads) and higher cost to source (again due to the increase of people looking to do dropshipping/buy resell/private labeling). Not to mention vendors – they are literally squeezed dried!

I’ve been approached by a few small brands that are looking to get started on Amazon and I have declined the partnership simply because I didn’t think it was worthwhile for them (and for me frankly) because there’s just so much competition in the main markets (US, EU, even Canada). These brands actually have a product and brand, they’re not a reseller business – and yet I still think it’s so difficult.

So the question is: are there still any opportunities for a) new brands/products to launch on Amazon and b) resellers/dropshippers? I’m extremely interested to get POV from those especially who started on Amazon over the last 3 years – what was your journey? key learnings? was it successful/profitable? Most importantly, are there other opportunities in ecommerce that are more worthwhile? Trying to evaluate whether it’s truly an opportunity thing, or there are new frameworks/best practices i should learn about. BTW – I understand that you can find niche products, etc etc… but truthfully – a lot of categories are quite saturated. But if you have any tools on finding sustainable niches, would love to learn as well. Cheers