Most people running an OA business have like 7 different Gmail accounts, order confirmations scattered everywhere, and zero way to trace which purchase came from which retailer. Then CRA comes knocking and you're spending a weekend digging through inboxes trying to find a Walmart receipt from 4 months ago. There's a better way. And it costs about $20 a year. Here's the setup. Go buy a .com domain from any registrar. Namecheap, Squarespace Domains, whoever. Get something that looks professional, ideally your business name. I'd go with .com over .ca or .net because it just looks more legit when retailers see it in their system. Once you have the domain, go to the email settings and set up email forwarding. Here's the key part: in the email field, put a star (*). That's it. That star tells the system that ANY email sent to ANYTHING at your domain gets forwarded to your main Gmail. So now [email protected] goes to your inbox. [email protected] goes to your inbox. [email protected] goes to your inbox. You don't actually create these email addresses. They just work. Anything before the @ sign automatically forwards. Why does this matter? First, organization. Every retailer has its own email address. When you need to find a specific order confirmation, you search by that email and boom, there it is. No more digging through a cluttered inbox. Second, CRA audit trail. Every purchase receipt is automatically tagged by retailer. If you ever get audited (and as your business grows, this becomes more likely), you can pull up every single Walmart purchase, every Canadian Tire order, everything. Clean and organized. Third, and this is the one people sleep on: the signup coupon trick. A lot of retailers give you 15% off your first order when you sign up with a new email. With a catch-all domain, you have UNLIMITED new emails. [email protected] gets 15% off. [email protected] gets 15% off. They all land in the same inbox. You never lose access to anything. This alone can save you hundreds of dollars a month on sourcing costs.

Nobody talks about this stuff. Every guru shows you the $10K month screenshots, the "I quit my job" stories. Cool. Good for them. But nobody sits you down and says "hey, here are the 6 things that are going to punch you in the face, and here is how to not bleed out when they do." So let me be that guy. I call these the Six Pillars of Pain. Not to scare you. This is a budgeting lesson. Every experienced seller has dealt with ALL six. The ones who survive planned for them upfront. The ones who didn't? They're the ones posting "Amazon FBA is a scam" on Reddit. 1. LOST INBOUND BOXES You ship boxes to Amazon, and one shows up as "received zero." Amazon's warehouses process millions of packages. Things get lost. I lost my 7th box ever, about $400 worth of inventory. Could have quit right there. Kept going. You file for reimbursement, Amazon usually pays less than your cost. You eat the difference. Build a 5% shrinkage buffer into your projections. 2. INVENTORY SHRINKAGE Beyond lost boxes, units just disappear inside Amazon's warehouses. Quantities don't match. At the end of every quarter you see how much is "lost." The silver lining: lost inventory that's partially reimbursed is a tax write-off as inventory shrinkage. Not ideal, but it softens the blow. 3. RETURN ABUSE Here is the uncomfortable truth: the reason we can charge double the retail price is because customers know they can return whenever they want. There is a yin and yang to this. Amazon's return policy makes the marketplace work. It also lets people buy stuff, use it, and send it back as "defective." If you do FBM, customers pay return shipping unless it's your fault. That alone eliminates about 50% of abusive returns. FBA? Budget 3-5% of revenue for return losses. 4. RANDOM GATINGS You source a product, buy 10 units, go to list it, and Amazon says you're not approved to sell that brand. This happens. It's frustrating. And it's random. Your options: return to the retailer (most accept returns within 30-35 days), sell on eBay at a small loss, or flip on Facebook Marketplace. The key is SPEED. The longer you wait, the harder it is to return. If you can't list it within a week, start your backup plan immediately.

I’m seeing a lot of you using the default "US" settings inside SellerAmp. If you are selling in Canada, this is burning cash. Specifically, the "VAT Scheme" setting. If you have this wrong, the software is adding a phantom 5% fee to your calculations, making good leads look bad. I just dropped a complete Canadian SellerAmp Masterclass on YouTube to fix this. In this video, I cover: ✅ The exact "Audit-Proof" settings for 2026. ✅ How to calculate Inbound Shipping (Kg vs Lbs). ✅ LIVE SOURCING: I find 3 profitable leads in 20 minutes using the "Reverse Search" method I created a "Keepa Product Finder Filter Cheat Sheet" so you can have access to 3 different ways to filter your leads to never run out! To get it: Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM7QLQur61E Drop a comment on YouTube Drop a screenshot of your comment here and Il send you the PDF via DM as soon as I can! enjoy!