Mixing Selling FBA with FBM

You are correct to do so. I won't share the exacts about this because it's a secret. However, I would say , you are going to want to parent the FBA with FBM.

Far as sales - Lots goes into this. You don't typically see those people doing great coming to the forums to cheer. You won't. They don't want people stealing their products or strategies. Also there is the effect like reviews, people review more when they are upset than when they are happy about a product. Just the way it goes, same for sales, people run here when it's bad not when it's good.

FBM cap /Throttle - This is a myth. The reason people are being "capped" probably has something to do with other parts of their FBM equation. If you and 10 other sellers are selling "the same book" at around the same price for around the same ad cost, it only makes sense you'd see some days of good sales and some days not. That's because sometimes your ads will show to serious buyers and sometimes they'll show to people looking for a different book. However, both will click and the results are what they are. This also means all these sellers will group around the same "rank" and the organic boost from paid ads will cancel out unless you are dropping tons to sell more with paid ads and at that point you'll start losing money. However if you sold that book for much lower and spent more on ads you'd eventually eat a lot of the sales. Even FBA you would eat. FBA is favored but the bids matter and the price matters so you can overcome them it's just hard.

Take a 1 pound of less item , FBA fulfillment is like 5 bucks , shipping FBM is like 6-7 bucks. For one item FBA is cheaper and faster. But if you do the shipping template right after say 5 items, you should be able to out price FBA and become the better deal for bulk buyers. Now take a 40 pound item, FBA fulfillment can be crazy like 60-80 dollars while FBM you can send it Fedex One Rate 2 Day for 26.50. Your price is much lower FBM , shipping speed the same and you can spend a little more per click.

We sell a few items that are outdoors furniture for example. FBA prices for this are very high. Fulfillment cost and ads they barely make anything. I sell then 10% cheaper and have a 30% margin after shipping. Even companies in China that send the cheap stuff to FBA, because of the fulfillment cost they can't dodge and the fact I get the same cost and sometimes even cheaper on those products with the same cost or lower to land a container (we buy containers) , we actually beat them and we sell a higher quality product. FBM allows us to pull this off.

Some items just have no profit margin. Like a 50 x 30 x 12 items for example or Something large like that. FBA or FBM the cost is so much to fulfill that it really doesn't matter. I stay way from these products and you should too.

However, you say a 70% return rate on women's clothing so you'll need to deal with returns FBM , but this might be okay because FBA returns probably go poorly on things like clothing.

I hope this makes sense.