Modern Retail+ Research: How 3 Amazon sellers are navigating tariffs, stockouts and shifting consumer demand so far in 2025

Focus group members

Stacey Tank, CEO of Bespoke Beauty Brands, parent of Jason Wu Beauty and KimChi Chic Beauty. KimChi started selling on Amazon about 18 months ago, but the company also sells through other channels, including DTC, TikTok Shop and traditional wholesale.

Chuck Gregorich, founder of Net Health Shops, an outdoor goods brand selling fire pits, fountains, hammocks and other bulky garden items. Gregorich has been selling his wares through Amazon.com for nearly 20 years, but he also sells on other marketplaces including Home Depot, Lowe’s Walmart and more.

Monil Kothari, founder of Haus of Brilliance, a New York City–based fine jewelry brand.

Supply chain whiplash

Tank: “We exited China for our cosmetics products. Our two main sourcing locations are Korea and Taiwan. We’re out of China, with a couple of categories that are difficult, like makeup brushes. There isn’t a lot of capacity in other places at a cost of goods. And then anything that is a merch-type item, like a plushie or a fun water bottle, those are largely sourced from China, so we’ve put the brakes on some of those things. I don’t think we have any open [purchase orders] right now in China. You have to have a plan A, a plan B, because we don’t know what’s coming. Trying to build more adaptability into our supply chain has been key.”

Gregorich: “The struggle this year has been the tariffs. It has cost us over a million dollars already. We delayed some of our shipments in March and April because we didn’t want to pay the reciprocal duty, which cost us about $2.5 million of sales. But I guess it’s less painful to lose $2.5 million of sales than incur $1.6 million of new costs. By January, we had found about 80% of our products we could source outside of China, mainly Vietnam and India.

We have over 1,000 SKUs, and we have about 60 or 70 that we’re out of stock on right now. And it’s because of trying to find these new factories and getting them to start producing. They’re not as fast as the China factories we’ve been ordering from for 10 years. We’re trying to figure out which factory we’re going to source from. Right now, we’re placing our spring orders, and at a 50% tariff in India, that doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Kothari: “Yeah, oh, Chuck, it’s not been fun. Our trade is very India-dominated. None of us saw [the tariff on Indian imports] coming, so right now, we’re struggling to find our bestsellers because they are also out of stock, for the most part. Roughly 25-30% of our catalog is out of stock right now. Right now, we’re looking at shifting production to Thailand. We’re also working with vendors here locally in the U.S. and pushing their product online, and where that helps us is we may still have to pay higher costs, but we’re not fronting the tariff mill upfront. That’s basically going to be the wholesaler, in this case. And I still think consumer demand is so robust that we should be fine, for the most part, except for our India production and bestsellers.”

Pricing pressure

Tank: “We’ve been able to take about 55% of the cost out of our own operations so that we could try to eat as much of the inflation as possible. And then, very selectively, very minimally, we have taken a little bit of price, but it’s in the single digits. We have 850 SKUs, and we’ve taken price on less than 10%.

[Amazon has] to have the lowest price out there, or you don’t have the Buy Box. [Raising prices] is tricky, even within the Amazon platform. We had a sneaky unknown player who, on the weekends, when they knew we were not there sitting there on our computer looking, they were undercutting us on price, [losing us] our Buy Box.

If we sell things for less than $10 at MSRP, we start to lose money. So we had to get a sense for what is the right pack size and what is the right economic equation. Our typical price points are usually $20 and under. We do have some price points that are a little bit higher than that. Our foundation is $29, and we had to get a sense for what price points were going to resonate with [Amazon] consumers, and then make sure that we don’t flip upside down in terms of the economics of selling on Amazon. So for us, the lower, opening price point items are tougher, and that’s when we need to look at two packs or different creative ways of bundling.”

Gregorich: “We had raised our prices 9% in June and July, on average. And frankly, it’s not enough. You’ve got to raise your prices at least 13% just to cover that product cost. But you’ve got to raise it higher than that, because you’ve got to pay Amazon a commission on that. I probably should have been raising my prices 18%. We’ll probably do those in January. We’re holding off on any price increases because I want to see where India settles.”

Kothari: “We raised prices. I think we did duties as high as 20% just to hedge a little bit, assuming that [the 50% India tariff] was not anywhere realistic and was not going to happen. But the problem with our business is we have over 3,000 SKUs. We sell across 20 different channels, and it’s a mix of marketplaces, DTC and retailers. Doing cost changes frequently isn’t tenable. Some of our retailers won’t even allow it after, let’s say, August, for quality-planning purposes. Holding [prices] could give us a competitive edge, because there are other sellers who are [raising prices higher]. Hopefully we can clear out some of our older inventory. It could be a silver lining. But to Stacy’s point earlier, there’s only so long we can keep this under control before we have to update our prices.”

Consumer demand holds firm

Tank: “We were on [Amazon] in those early days, it was a growthy time, so we’re ahead of plan and climbing the charts in our different categories — loose powder is our No. 1 category, with a product called the Puff Puff Pass. We’ve now cracked the top 10 [on Amazon]. Because of that, out-of-stocks are something we always have to keep an eye on, because when you launch on a platform, you don’t know what customers are going to love and where the energy is going to go. The Puff Puff Pass went out of stock, which is a champagne problem. [During Prime Day], we saw a 360% increase in sales, and it was profitable for us.

Kothari: “Not only do we have to contend with tariffs, but a lot of our products are made out of gold. Gold has been on a surge, and yet demand is still very robust, which is really interesting. Surprisingly, our [sales] are up big time over last year as a business despite increasing costs, which is amazing.”