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Hello everyone.
Haven’t posted in a long time, but life kept me busy. Between new job, supercharging Amazon, trying to keep Ebay afloat and vacation in Europe I did not find time to post the numbers but I did listen to every podcast.
I just saw the vlog and your rentals look amazing! You guys are a inspiration of entrepreneurship!Since I don’t remember what was the last month I posted I will just post 2 images from my GoDaddy account.
That has breakdown for everything (sales, returns, shipping, fees expenses and so on). That should show a realistic picture of how a business that is 85% Amazon looks like.
Here is the overall for 2017:
Overall 2017and here is the breakdown:
2017 breakdownThanks,
JohnHere are our April numbers:
Total Items in Store: 886 (492 Amazon, 394 Ebay)
Items Sold: 281 (221 Amazon, 60 Ebay)
Cost of Items Sold: $3,666.46 ($2,740.87 Amazon, $925.59 Ebay)
Total Sales: $21,361.82 ($18,116.33 Amazon, $3,195.82 Ebay)
Average Price Sold: $76.02 ($81.97 Amazon, $53.26 Ebay)After a fantastic month on March, another one in April. We are well positioned to meet our 100k goal for the first 6 months of the year (we are a bit over 76k).
A few interesting things we noticed during April:
– we did not list anything on Ebay for about 2 weeks (around the Easter) and after $2600 sales first half of the month the sales grinded to almost a full stop. We had 4 days with no sales in 5 consecutive days.
– We put some focus into Ebay store and things started to sell again (so I’ll say what has been repeated here and everywhere else: KEEP YOUR STORE ACTIVE 🙂 ).
– Amazon has been fantastic so far but it’s eating almost our entire time to keep it supplied (Wife is doing resell full time. I work after work Mon-Fri for 2-3 hours and 6-8 hours on Sat-SunWhile the money coming from resell have been fantastic this year so far, we decided that Sat we’ll do nothing after sourcing and Sunday we take off entire day. By working 7 days a week it’s starting to feel like a death march now.
Regarding the question how we do it with a full-time job (me) and 2 teenagers daughters? I have no clue. We are in cruising mode at the moment. After having kids for close to 18 years, you enter in auto-pilot at one point.
Hope you get better Jay and I’ll post again next month. (We do listen every podcast tough 🙂 )
Thank you for everything you both do!
It’s a combination of garage sales, estate sales, thrift shops, pawn shops and a few online sources.
Hi Linda,
on Amazon we sell mostly electronics, cameras and camera related gear.
Hi Jay,
last year in September some restructuring happened at my work and I got lay offed. I did receive a great severance package (32 weeks of pay and 6 months health insurance). I took the rest of the year off for 2 reasons:
1. To relax and re-energize after 16 years in the same job
2. To help my wife increase the Ebay/Amazon business.With so much time on my hands now I took a deep look at our finance and I sat down with my wife and had a serious discussion. Our monthly bills (bills only, nothing else) were $5400. We agreed that we need to pay our debt, because this time we got lucky I got a very nice severance package.
She also wanted for a long time to remodel our house (pretty old house that was never remodeled) and was eyeing my severance package for that…..LOL. She wanted to do kitchen, both baths, replace roof and fix the driveway.
In the end we agreed that will alternate: pay off 1 debt, do 1 remodeling.So far we payed off 2 debts and remodeled the kitchen. We are saving money for a new roof next.
I hope that in 2 years to be debt free (except the mortgage) and have the house fully remodeled.
After that we’ll probably pay off mortgage an pay for our 2 daughters college. (1 is junior high and the other is finishing middle school this year).By the time the 2nd one is out of college I hope to have their college paid and the mortgage paid off. (that’s 8 years out).
Once that is done I am also done working and we aim to live just the 2 of us off Ebay/Amazon and travel to see the country/world.
This is a long answer to a short question 🙂
I keep track of profit after all expenses (that includes shipping and office supplies, mileage, phone, internet).
Last year we had a 40% profit before taxes. This year we hover around 45% and I hope to stay there.March numbers:
Total Items in Store: 982 (503 Ebay, 479 Amazon)
Items Sold: 336 (100 on Ebay and 236 on Amazon)
Total Sales: $23,294.23 ($4,860.17 Ebay and $18,434.03 Amazon)
Cost of Items Sold: $4,481.94 ($1,108.92 Ebay and $3,373.02 Amazon)
Average sale price: 69.33 (48.60 Ebay and $78.11 Amazon)Last month when I posted my numbers I was hoping to reach at the end of March a total sales of Ebay and Amazon combined of 50k. I am proud to say I surpased that goal, reaching close to 55k
March has been a fantastic month. Ebay had a solid month (not in top 3 all time but still solid) but Amazon was the best month we had by far, being around 4k better than our 2nd best month on Amazon.Same as last year returns continue to be a high percentage on Amazon (around 9%), but I guess that is the nature of the beast. Reading on forums it seems like everyone doing FBA have a high return rate. Combined with the fact that most of our items are used it’s something I have to get used to.
I am only part time on this. My wife is full time working on the business. We sell just about everything with a focus on camera and electronics.
CONGRATS ON THE BIG 300! Let’s see 1000 🙂
Time to post my sales. Did not post in January and February because had a few crazy months. Very busy with the selling business, also did a job hunt to switch job s and did about 25 interviews (over the phone and in person).
Finally found a job I think I will enjoy a lot more than the previous job.Anyway, back to the numbers:
January
Items sold: 225 (91 Ebay, 134 Amazon)
Cost of items sold: $2,776.52 ($1049.88 Ebay, $1,726.64 Amazon)
Total sales: $15,594.4 ($4,058.82 Ebay, $11,535.58 Amazon)
Average price sold: $69.31 ($44.60 Ebay, $80.08 Amazon)February
Items sold: 237 (111 Ebay, 126 Amazon)
Cost of items sold: $2,561.24 ($972.94 Ebay, $1,588.30 Amazon)
Total sales: $15,796.78 ($4,939.03 Ebay, $10,857.75 Amazon)
Average price sold: $66.65 ($44.50 Ebay, $86.17 Amazon)We have a target to reach $50k sales for the year at the end of March, it’s going to be challenging but we’ll see.
I spend so much on supplies because most of my items need a box (usually big box) and have to be packed well. I spend on average for items shipped on Ebay around $3 on materials (box, tape, bubble wrap, other materials). Plus I need a lot of materials when I pack and ship to Amazon FBA. What I send to Amazon I need to keep using stuff from U-Line. I want to use boxes from stores/craiglist/friends for stuff I sell on Ebay.
I sold close to 800 items on Ebay last year so that’s about $2400, if I can cut that in half and it’s a nice chunk of change 🙂
LOOKING AHEAD – 2017:
1. Changed the way we track financial goal. Is very hard to predict a net income in a relative void. So, assuming a 40% ROI we’ll go with daily/weekly listing goals. We’ll start with $500/day Ebay/Amazon combined listing goal. Basically if you feed the pipeline at one point you have a relative predictable stream.
2. Add thrift stores to our sourcing (that should increase our sourcing by 20-30% in my estimation)
3. Enter the clothing market (we sold a total of 17 clothes listing – mostly clothes that kids outgrew). I feel like it’s a missing opportunity for us. Time will tell how this experiment go.
4. Reduce the return % on Amazon. As I said we started to change some practices in Q4 that started to pay dividends, we’ll try to see if we can improve further.
5. Reduce the cost of shipping supplies by supplementing with free supplies from big chain stores.
6. Add bread and butter to our stores (we did a deathpile push in November and it was mostly bread and butter, and it was a good chunk of our Dec sales). Our average sale price is 55.86 on Ebay and 84.22 on Amazon for the year. That is because we had less than 3% of inventory bread and butter. After doing the death pile push in November I noticed that I can list 50-60 bread and butter in about 4 hours so we’ll revise our principles when picking merchandise to include bread and butter that can be easily listed.Sales for month of December
Total items in store 502 Ebay (228 Amazon)
Items sold: 175 Ebay (151 Amazon)
Total Sales: $7,550.96 Ebay ($14,456.52 Amazon)
COGS: $1,764.50 Ebay ($3,012.38 Amazon
Average sale price: $43.148 Ebay ($96.38 Amazon)As I said last moth I will do a review of the year and also say what are the plans for 2017.
Looking back at 2016:
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THE GOOD:
– My wife initially had the goal to make from Ebay before taxes as much as she did at her full time job (around 24k). We beat that goal halfway thru October so we had to come up with a new goal: 40k, we beat that as well and ended up with a little over $50k before taxes.
– Q4 exceeded our expectations by a lot on Amazon. I could have sold probably double what I sold on Amqazon but kinda ran out of merchandise.
– Discovered in December that you can find a lot of good merchandise at thrift stores (up till December I did only garage sales and estate sales)-
THE NOT SO GOOD:
– The return rate on Amazon is around 12%. We started to implement some changes in Q4 and we are starting to see better results.
– We spent around 3500 on shipping supplies. Looks like I have to go pick up some boxes and packing materials from Big stores to supplement some of it.
– We tracked COGS by calculating the cost of the items that sold. That complicated the way we tracked defective items that we bought. I am switching to the formula INVENTORY_VALUE_JANUARY1 + MONEY_SPENT_THROUGHOUT_THE_YEAR – INVENTORY_VALUE_DECEMBER31. This way I don’t need to track items that I throw away anymore.LOOKING AHEAD – 2017:
1. Changed the way we track financial goal. Is very hard to predict a net income in a relative void. So assuming a 40% ROI we’ll go with daily/weekly listing goals. We’ll start with $500/day Ebay/Amazon combined listing goal. Basically if you feed the pipeline at one point you have a relative predictable stream.
2. Add thrift stores to our sourcing (that should increase our sourcing by 20-30% in my estimation)
3. Enter the clothing market (we sold a total of 17 clothes listing – mostly clothes that kids outgrew). I feel like it’s a missing opportunity for us. Time will tell how this experiment go.
4. Reduce the return % on Amazon. As I said we started to change some practices in Q4 that started to pay dividends, we’ll try to see if we can improve further.
5. Reduce the cost of shipping supplies by supplementing with free supplies from big chain stores.
6. Add bread and butter to our stores (we did a deathpile push in November and it was mostly bread and butter, and it was a good chunk of our Dec sales). Our average sale price is 55.86 on Ebay and 84.22 on Amazon for the year. That is because we had less than 3% of inventory bread and butter. After doing the death pile push in November I noticed that I can list 50-60 bread and butter in about 4 hours so we’ll revise our principles when picking merchandise to include bread and butter that can be easily listed.On Amazon you get Free Shipping on most of the items only if you are a Prime member. So that free shipping is seen like a perk. Plus with Prime you have 2 days guarantee delivery. People today want the item and want it now. Most of the non free shipping takes 5-6 days to get it.
Store Month of November
Total Items in Store: 498 Ebay (250 Amazon)
Items Sold: 109 Ebay (157 Amazon)
Cost of Items Sold: $1,703.00 Ebay ($1,985.07 Amazon)
The COGS is so high on EBay because I liquidated a lot of old stock using auctions starting at $0.99
Total Sales: $6061.95 Ebay ( $11,575.47 Amazon)
Highest Price Sold: $400 Bose Entertainment System (Ebay), no clue on Amazon
Average Price Sold: $55.61 Ebay ($73.72 Amazon)The month felt much slower than actual numbers. When I did the totals I was pleasantly surprised. I think this is due to a 3 months crescendo ( Aug -> Sep -> Oct) followed by a slow down in November compared to October (about 27% on Ebay and 18% on Amazon). So the lesson here, like Jay and Ryanne always say, DO YOUR NUMBERS 🙂
There were some small oddities: I sold fantastic on Ebay on Thanksgiving day but close to nothing on Black Friday. Amazon was fantastic on the Cyber Monday week, not so much on Thanksgiving week. December started strong on Amazon but Ebay has been lulling since Black Friday. I still get about 1k+ on sales per week but not the 1.5-2+k numbers from before.
One thing that I learned this year for Amazon FBA is that you really have to be prepared inventory wise for Q4, right now I am running literally on fumes (250 items vs 400+ I usually have) and I don’t see how I can get a lot on inventory during the winter. I guess I know what will happen this year once garage sale season open – my purse will open big :). This pas year I was a bit reticent to splurge on inventory for Amazon for Q4 (still spend 1000 to 1500 per weekend on inventory but it could have been more)As the end of the year draws near I am starting to look at the business overall, how we did on our goals, setting goals for new year, see what we should stop doing or improve upon. I will have a summary of the analysis on January along with December numbers.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to everyone!
