Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
I use best offer on a majority of the things I sell. I also have to agree with Joe is that what a buyer offers is typically all they are willing to pay. Its very rare that I get into a price negotiation with a buyer. With most of my best offer items I price my offer exclusions at 10% of my asking price just to offer something off the price. The side benefit to doing this is the history of offers (assuming multiples from different buyers) that allow me to see if I have priced my item to high relative to what the buyers are willing to pay.
I am fairly anal about organization because simply put, I don’t want to have to look for stuff when I go to ship. The first thing is everything gets ‘Checked in’ when we purchase it. The check in process is simple info written on an index card and secured to the item. I basically keep date purchased, cost, and the source. If I do some research on the item I go on ahead and summarize that on there too. Its placed in a unlabeled death bin until we get around to cleaning, photographing and listing. At that point a SKU is assigned. Typically alpha character followed by numbers with no particular rhyme or reason to how they are assigned. Just has to be unique among actively listed items (once an item sells and there was only on of it we reuse the SKU). Once the item is listed we place in a labeled bin in our ‘warehouse’ (spare bedroom). This info I keep recorded in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet has a tab that is a list of all inventory that has been given a SKU; a separate tab that keeps actively listed items. As the items sell both tabs are marked to indicate so. Information is collected on both so I can see cost, profit, fees, item location in the warehouse, etc. At the end of each year a copy of the sheet is made and reduced to just those items that got sold.The main spreadsheet becomes the starting active inventory list for the new year. As for pictures and write up we create for each item, we keep those in separate computer folders named with the items SKU. This solution can not scale if my inventory gets real large as spreadsheets and folder collection can be a pain to work with when there is allot of data so my dream is to automate it which will make the data management much much easier. If and when I do I will make sure its is compatible with Excel and Google sheets to share with all.
Great podcast again. Per the Amazon FBA storage fees, I have been actively closing out my FBA inventory. It was just books. Started last year about this time as I kept seeing books at estate sales and figured that FBA would be a great supplement to my eBay sales. And of course the success stories were plentiful even though I knew that retail success breeds competition which can create a saturation point. I didn’t expect the saturation point to be Amazon warehouse overload but it makes sense that it is. Not sure I agree they are trying to get rid of the little guy yet through their actions. I personally think they are trying to get a handle on their business approach. It just seems to me that they allowed their warehouses to be overloaded by allowing everyone to send in anything for sale so to counter the impact they increased fees which should have the effect of emptying them out. If I am right I would expect in the coming months that Amazon will ease up in some way shape or form to bring inventory back in. I just hope that as they figure out how to handle their etail business model they will allow the little guy to still be part of it.
