After some months of testing selling used books on Amazon, I noticed that some other people online (Youtube) were selling new branded products and were able to achieve a much larger scale and revenue than I saw possible from buying books from charity shops/thrift stores. As a test, I placed my first OA order in February 2019 and sold 3 units the first day they arrived in FBA warehouses (compared to the typical 1-2 books per day) — I was hooked! I continued doing this from my bedroom for some months but had an obvious disadvantage of shipping from Ireland to the UK (this was even before any customs/border issues) - my cost of shipping goods was too high and it was difficult to compete with UK-based sellers. It was also a lot of hassle labeling and shipping products even at this small scale of 100-200 units per month.

To solve both issues, I tried out a prep centre in the UK but hated my first experience, there were too many steps to each shipment and the communication was slow - I could see no way that this would be viable long term. I had heard of Devan from the Amazon Youtube space and decided to give his new prep centre a go since the prices seemed competitive and I figured it couldn’t be any worse than my previous experience. I knew that a prep centre was my only real opportunity to grow from Ireland given that I was only 20 at the time and in college for most of the day. The experience with FA Prep was like night and day compared to the previous company - there was very little involvement needed on my part and communication was great whenever issues did arise.