The $3 Million Formula: Anatolii Chychkaliuk on Why Systems, Not Products, Win on Amazon

When an American shopper orders a bottle of perfume, a children's building set or an oil filter on Amazon, the seller is usually not Amazon itself. Independent sellers, most of them small and midsize businesses, account for more than 60% of sales in Amazon's store. They are also one of the platform's key sources of revenue: in the second quarter of 2026, Amazon took in $46.78 billion in commissions, storage and shipping fees from these sellers, up 16% from a year earlier.

The sellers themselves are in a far weaker position. According to the analytics firm Marketplace Pulse, the number of active sellers on Amazon.com fell from 584,000 in January 2025 to 500,000 in March 2026. A survey Marketplace Pulse conducted this year found that only 23% of marketplace sellers are growing both revenue and margins.

The market is expanding while the number of people making money in it is shrinking. According to Amazon, the average independent U.S. seller sold more than $375,000 worth of goods in 2025. For many, that figure becomes a ceiling that no successful product, advertising budget or high rating can help them break through. Anatolii Chychkaliuk, an expert in international online retail and cross-border marketplace operations, believes the cause runs deeper.

As founder of the consulting firm Stellar Sky Consulting LLC, which helps entrepreneurs from different countries enter the U.S. market, he personally develops marketplace entry strategies for clients and oversees analytics for their projects. In his experience, growth stalls when a seller manages individual products instead of building a system in which assortment, reputation and capital work together.

Chychkaliuk applies the same approach in his own business. One of his companies, Netex Noex LLC, sells on Amazon, Walmart and Shopify. Its current results took time. He said that for the first two years after the company was founded in 2020, it made almost no profit, with everything it earned going to taxes, accounting and new inventory. In 2024, its revenue was $966,693, already above the platform average but still short of $1 million. In 2025, its sales on Amazon alone topped $3 million.

From January through August 2026, the company sold $2.64 million worth of goods on Amazon, compared with $1.81 million a year earlier, while units sold rose from about 83,000 to 126,000. In 2025, the company's Amazon sales were roughly eight times the average for a U.S. seller on the platform.

Chychkaliuk's bet was on breadth. "This isn't about growth driven by one or a few successful products," he said. In a year, the catalog grew from 1,300 to over 3,000 items, and capital moves to whichever categories the analytics favor, a hedge that single-hit sellers lack.

That scale required trust. Amazon reserves many categories for proven sellers, and large manufacturers are pickier still. "A few years ago, when we started working with a new supplier, we had to begin with small test orders," he recalled. Now his negotiations start with large orders, new brands and sometimes better payment terms. In 2025, he opened a brick-and-mortar location in Orlando, Florida, a signal to some manufacturers that he can sell beyond the internet. The company relies on about 10 to 15 specialists, while Chychkaliuk focuses on strategy, financing and new business lines.

Capital is the next constraint, since inventory must be paid for long before it sells. "Right now, one of the main constraints is no longer a lack of products to sell, but the amount of capital that can be put to effective use for purchasing," Chychkaliuk said. The problem is widespread: only 42% of small firms that sought financing received the full amount, and 22% received none, according to the Federal Reserve Banks' Small Business Credit Survey. He built the company's credit history early and secured financing from U.S. banks.

The work of Stellar Sky Consulting is built on that experience. The firm's consultants and analysts help foreign sellers set up businesses in the U.S., from company structure and sourcing to pricing and platform compliance. Chychkaliuk's methodology combines marketplace entry strategy, logistics, finance and operations management. He has also laid out his approach in academic papers. In a 2024 article in the Ukrainian journal Aktualni Pytannia u Suchasnii Nautsi (Current Issues in Modern Science), he proposed a method for building a product assortment on Amazon.

The article, translated from Ukrainian, is titled "Optimization of the Product Portfolio of an E-Commerce Enterprise on the Amazon Platform: A Methodological Approach to Assortment Formation." In 2025, Social and Human Sciences: Polish-Ukrainian Scientific Journal published his paper "Scaling the US Amazon Wholesale Business: An Integrated Model of Strategic Sourcing, Assortment Management, and Sales Channel Diversification." It describes how a wholesale seller can grow by linking sourcing, assortment decisions and multiple sales channels, the same approach he uses at Netex Noex.

His work has also drawn recognition in the industry. In 2024 and 2025, he served on the international jury of the ECDMA Global Awards, presented by the E-Commerce & Digital Marketing Association (ECDMA), in which he holds Senior Member status. In 2025, he won the Ukrainian Business Award in the Entrepreneur of the Year category.

What separates a $3 million seller from the many stuck near $375,000? In Chychkaliuk's view, the ability to turn assortment, reputation and capital into one self-reinforcing system: sales history unlocks financing, financing buys scale, and scale wins better terms and new brands. Netex Noex completed that cycle in 2025, tripling its sales, and is targeting about $4 million in Amazon sales in 2026.

Stellar Sky Consulting's clients now get the same formula. "The next task is to turn this rapid growth into a sustainable system," he said. Shoppers never see that system. But it decides who sells to them.