Prolong Lash sells professional lash extension cleaning equipment and aftercare products to lash technicians and their clients. Like many sellers who built their business on Amazon, they hit a point where the platform that had helped them grow started working against them. This is the story of how they broke free of Amazon FBA fees, rebuilt around Shopify, and scaled faster than before.
The challenge: priced out by Amazon's own fees
Prolong Lash had built a genuine following in the lash extension aftercare space, fulfilling orders through Amazon FBA. But as Amazon's FBA fees rose, the maths stopped working. Each fee increase ate further into margins, until the business faced an impossible choice: absorb the cost and barely break even, or raise prices and risk losing customers to competitors who could undercut them. Either way, Amazon's own fee structure was pricing Prolong Lash out of a market they'd helped build.
❌ Before Reilly's
- Fulfilling through Amazon FBA, with fees rising steadily
- Margins shrinking on every order despite steady demand
- Struggling to price competitively against rivals with lower costs
- Order volume falling to around 40 a month as the business wound down its Amazon reliance
- No realistic path to expanding beyond the UK
✅ After Reilly's
- Fulfilment fees significantly lower than Amazon FBA
- Profit margins restored to sustainable levels
- Competitive pricing regained in the lash aftercare market
- Order volume scaled quickly to 300–500 a month
- Now expanding into the EU with Reilly's support
Rebuilding around Shopify, not Amazon
Rather than staying locked into Amazon's fee structure, Prolong Lash moved their operation onto Shopify, giving them direct control over their storefront, pricing and customer relationships — without a marketplace taking an ever-growing cut of every sale. Reilly's connected their Shopify store directly through DespatchLab, so orders flow straight into the pick queue the moment they're placed, with none of the manual admin or platform lock-in that came with FBA.
The impact was immediate. With fulfilment costs no longer eating into every sale, Prolong Lash could price competitively again — and demand followed. Monthly order volume climbed quickly from around 40 to between 300 and 500, a genuine turnaround for a brand that had been shrinking under Amazon's fee pressure just months before.
From regaining ground to expanding into Europe
With a sustainable fulfilment model in place, Prolong Lash didn't just recover — they started looking outward. The business has now begun expanding into the EU, using Reilly's international shipping to reach lash technicians and retailers beyond the UK for the first time. What started as a fight to survive Amazon's fee increases has turned into genuine international growth.
Why this matters for other Amazon-first sellers
Prolong Lash's story is a familiar one for a lot of Amazon FBA sellers: the platform that helped a brand get started can, over time, become the biggest constraint on its growth. Rising FBA fees are a real and growing problem across categories, and for sellers with tight margins, they can genuinely price a business out of its own market. Moving fulfilment in-house to a 3PL — while shifting sales focus to a platform like Shopify — is one of the few ways to break that cycle without giving up the reach Amazon originally provided.
Selling on Amazon and feeling the fee squeeze?
Call 0116 444 0444 or visit our Amazon FBM fulfilment page for a free quote.