It's only been 9 months since our first sale in our new Amazon account. I've learned a lot of those 9 months, but this is not a post about what I've learned. This is a post with facts about my business for you to interpret as you will. See if you can figure out what I'm trying to say with the facts I've chosen.
Customers redeemed $70,621 in rebates from March 4, 2015 to Nov 30, 2015.
Our top 5 most promo-ed products add up to over 1600 units.
That 1600 units cost us over $13,000 out of pocket to give away.
We paid $10,000.00 to Zonblast for their launch services.
We started the biggest promo run of the year less than a week ago, which isn't included in that 1600 units.
We've had 876 returns, a large portion of which were manually processed after communicating with customers through our followup email sequence.
We've had $5,267 in warehouse fees.
We lost out on $10,000 in profit because we ran out of a product for 3 weeks.
Skubana handles inventory projections and automatic PO generation for "just in time" inventory management.
Our 27,868 orders for the last 9 months would cost us $4180 if we had been using Skubana the whole time.
Our Skubana bill in Nov 2015 is about $600.
It would cost somewhere between $3000 - $4000 per month to hire a full time US based Inventory Control Manager.
It would cost approximately $600 per month to hire a full time VA from the Philippines and train them to do Inventory Management.
We spent $10,492 on PPC from Feb 2, 2015 to Dec 1, 2015.
In November 2015 I started changing our PPC strategy over to Auto, Broad, Phrase, Exact.
Ad spend in November was $4,477.
We have $60,000 of inventory in Amazon as of Dec 1, 2015
Estimated retail value of $60,000 in inventory is $210,000.
Estimated profit from $60,000 in inventory is $73,000.
We ran 3 lightning deals from Oct 27 to Nov 27, 2015
Those lightning deals accounted for 2,300 sales in that time period or about $7000 profit.
The 2300 units we sold as Lightning Deals would have made over $15,000 profit at full price.
Ebay accounted for 0.3% of our total orders.
I started in January 2015 with $300.00.
In March 2015, my business partner Peter and I invested $20,000.00.
We are about to add $30,000 of 3rd party funding
We've grossed $430,000 from Feb 2, 2015 to Dec 1, 2015.
We're on track to gross over $1 million in the same time period in 2016.
Thanks for this, I’m going to dive down deeper when I have free time and pick your brain on some things. Again, I’m very grateful for this information!
Dr. Ben -incredible information and thank you for sharing your first 9 months journey. You are a trailblazer for us who are just starting out. Much continued success to you and yours.
Hey Ben . Like I’m always telling you “fricken awesome!” Lol.
I was wondering…do you think that there was anything you could have done to better last years results? Besides of course not run out of stock for those 3 weeks. Were there obstacles you think stopped you from making even more progress? Any paths (i. e. Products, promos, etc) that you feel you should have done or could have done without?