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Ok… I guess I will start this one.
I had 450 items in Amazon FBA. I only started sending things in a few short months ago to FBA and everything I had were new items from thrift stores or yard sales and lots of books (both used and new). Now I wish I hadn’t ever sent them in. I decided to have half of my items returned now and I’m leaving CD’s and games in there through the holiday season to see how things go since I have never experienced FBA sales during fourth quarter. I’m kind of like you guys, having mixed feelings about FBA at this point. If things don’t sell, I will pay to have them sent back in February.
Debbie
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Debbie,
Amazon and Amazon FBA is still a great way to sell items, you can run a report to see what your estimated long-term storage fees will be. Report–Fulfillment-Inventory Age. Take a good look at how much they will charge you after a year. Its not a whole lot per item as long as its a media item and its not a crazy size.
Your board games will end up costing you a lot in fees if you leave them in for 6-1yr.
So be picky on what large items you send in, keep track of when the fees are due and just return or destroy items if the fees do not balance out in the risk vs reward of keeping them past the year mark.
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You have to do the math to determine if it is worth it. It looks like my 6 month fee for my books will be between $70-80. I have 143 books in stock. My average LTSF is $.50 per book. After the fee is initiated I get another 6 months to sell them. Assuming a modest $7 average profit a book and assuming I sell a very conservative 50 books, then I make:
$350 after fees profit – $80 LTSF = $270 profit. No that’s not a lot of money, BUT I’m not losing money. Not even close! You effectively get a year to sell your long tail books. Some books I make much more than $7.So yes, I decided to leave everything at FBA. Going forward my sourcing will be much more conservative. It helps now that they flag slow moving items while using the seller app.
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Hi All, So as discussed before, about half of my FBA items are being sent back to me. I am expected some of it on Saturday, I believe. Today I decided to use the scan feature within the eBay app to list a book that was destined to be sent to Amazon that never got sent. It was a cinch to add it to eBay from my phone and it looks like I should get a fair price for it on eBay as the book seems to be moving there. I am going to price my returned items to move on eBay or perhaps cross post to Amazon Merchant Fulfilled.. not sure yet. I will let you know how it goes. So far, I haven’t had any further FBA sales, so it really slowed down since I have stopped sending things in.
Debbie
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A lot of people are overreacting to the new long term storage fees. Yeah, it sucks, but it isn’t the end for “scavenger” sellers, especially for books.
I did remove about a third of my Amazon inventory after the new fee was announced, but most of those were books where merchant fulfilled people were selling it for a dollar or less.
I think a lot of Amazon’s stale inventory problem stems from FBA sellers sending in virtually any and every book, without regard to rank or MF price, and just letting it sit there for years at a non-competitive price. I certainly am guilty of that.
While I eliminated many books from my inventory, I also lowered the price on a lot of others to bring it closer to the MF price. Unsurprisingly, a lot of my stale inventory has finally started moving. Yeah, the profit isn’t as high as I had hoped when sending it in, but it wasn’t making any money just sitting there in the warehouse.
I am going to be more picky when sourcing books in the future. I’m not giving up on long tail books, but I’m not going to send in long tail books where the price is less than $20.
I guess for me, it really comes down to a three things.
1. I can find books locally for less than $1. If a book sells for $20 and after normal fees totals out about $10 profit, even if I had $2.50 in overall storage fees, I still made $6.50 profit. Some books sell for many times that amount, making the equation more appealing.
2. eBay sucks for books, generally speaking. Amazon built its business on books, and it is the place people go to buy them.
3. FBA gives me a sales channel where I don’t have to worry about photographing the item, shipping it to the customer, or customer service. I can just slowly build up a pile of books and send them to the warehouse when I have time. I’m out at sales looking for eBay stuff anyway, so why not look for books for Amazon?
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Our current formula is to send in books that are under 1.5 million rank, they have an ok chance to sell before the 6 month fee and a very good chance before the 12 month fee. Even if they incur a LTSF is relatively small say .50 to keep it another six months. If the book is over 1.5million and greater than $20 we list it locally and cross-platform list it with amazon,ebay,half, alibris to increase its chances of selling since its a long tail book.
The biggest issue is that we have been sending in items for almost four years and we had thousand of items that were LTSF eligible in February. Games and toys were the biggest offenders due to their size some of the fees were $6-11. So we sent back things we thought we could sell on Ebay or was worth keeping around for merchant fulfilled $20 and up. Destroyed around 1900 items that were not worth sending back.
Other ship in rankings
DVD/CD under 80k
Toys/games under 30k
Video Games 18k
Software 5k-
I know you have a large FBA operation, so it’s great to hear how you’re handling the new storage fees. You had 1900 items destroyed!!! That’s a big decision to make.
For us, I’m worried that long tail books won’t sell on Amazon in six or even twelve months. We’re going to try to list books on eBay and see what happens.
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So after listening to the podcast, there was a feel that some of these books do sell on Amazon, but the fees for storage are a concern. If books sell better on Amazon, wouldn’t it be worth it to do the ‘vendor fulfilled’ stuff on those?
I know it was mentioned that why do that if you’re already utilizing Ebay in that way, and putting it on Ebay, but if a particular type of item sells significantly better on one site, wouldn’t that be a determining factor to push it over?
Sorry, I know so little about the subject but that question has been rattling around since the talk of moving away from FDA. I guess the experiment is to see if the books sell just as well on Ebay?
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Appollyon,
Amazon is THE place to sell books that are mainstream ie. textbooks, selfhelp, cookbooks, fiction really anything other than older collectible books or signed copies. As Zach pointed out, when people go to buy books their first stop is amazon.
Amazon recently changed their FBA storage fees, starting February 2017 all items are subject to a long term storage fee. Before the change, the fees were minor for any individual item, and only duplicate items incurred a long-term storage fee. Still viable to send in books for FBA just have to gauge their sellability and recall them if necessary before they hit their LTSF.
There is no reason why you still couldn’t list items as merchant fulfilled. They will still sell if priced competitively. I consistently sell long tail books of 2 million and higher out of my garage and send in everything else to Amazon. (Now 1.5million rank will stay.)
I double list all of my long-tail merchant fulfilled books on both amazon and ebay, amazon outsells ebay easily. Probably a 70/30 split in books over the month.
Hope that helps.
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Everything is automated, I upload an excel file to a program I use. For example, I listed 500 DVDs/Sets Saturday in about three hours.
It would be a hassle to list/delist each item on all of the venues and take the risk of double selling before you get the chance to remove it.
Program is called Monsoon, they take a commission but its well worth it in time saved and cross marketing profits.
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