New FBM Seller – No sales so far

Hi,

Some context – I work for a small exporting company. We buy goods from wholesalers and export them overseas on containers.

An idea has been made to start up an Amazon account to sell some of the goods we have access to via Amazon FBM with the intention of keeping the orders flowing if and when we have down time in usual running order of the business outside of Amazon.

The goods we are looking to sell are mainly dry/ambient food goods with the exception of food related items such as cakeboards/carriers etc.

I have been given the task of starting up the amazon account, and to start listing some items we have in the warehouse that won’t be exported in our usual orders, and if this goes well we can then start to order in from our wholesalers specifically for our Amazon shop.

I have done as much research and learning as I can within a couple of weeks on setting up as FBM from start to finish, I am very much still as much of a novice as someone can get.

I have listed several products now and have a professional account, with 0 sales after around 2 weeks of them being live. These products are generic branded cakeboards and a specific roll of labels that have ‘Saturday’ written on them.

– The labels are already listed, so I understand my offer will sit in the other buying options tab.

– The cakeboards are my own listing. One thing I do not understand is, if I am the only seller on this listing, why don’t I have the buy box? I have read varying answers to why this could be.

I would like answers for the following / some advice if someone is willing to help please?

– Amazon doesn’t give FBM sellers buy box within the first 90 days of their account running. Is this true?

– I need good metrics to win the buy box. How can I do this if I have yet to make a sale? Wouldn’t this make it a chicken and egg scenario?

– Is it a matter of those products are not popular enough to sell regularly?

– Is selling food goods on Amazon that we purchase from a wholesaler a good idea? I think we have the advantage of already having a warehouse, staff and really strong buying power, which makes it hard to find someone online in a similar position, most if not all are sole traders?

I have spent some time setting this up and I would really love for the ball to start moving, I have done everything up to the point of making sales, I am just looking for advice on how to make those first sales with no metrics.

Thanks for reading, and thank you in advance to anyone that takes time to reply!