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If we could work with folks selling out of their cars at flea markets, off tables on their patio, and just walking through estates we would be estatic. Isn’t it simply fun and doesn’t seem like “work” at all? Shan and I are happiest doing those things. Do the two of you get ungated in any categories? That might be the best thing going forward. As Amazon randomly walks through it’s business model, having been previously ungated may be the greatest asset on Amazon in the future.
26 months ago we started AZ with yard sale and thrift finds. We were enamoured with not having to store so much stuff and super passive income. How awesome to wake up and see you’ve made a couple hundred bucks and don’t have to do anything further? We moved on to RA and did very well with discontinued product lines and I would put in 7 or 8 marathon days a month sourcing in several states once we identified items that provided huge margins. We continued that and did a couple of white label procucts. Only one took off, but it did very well. Throughout all of this the gating and fee changes have occurred, margins dropped, frustrations rose, and we are building our pipeline even bigger.
Throughout all of it we maintained our ebay stores. For the most part, you know which way the ebay winds blow, you know that if you scavenge and list sales occur, and we just really enjoy scavenging for treasures.
Thank you for all you and Ryanne do to allow a great exchange of ideas.
What a well written and insightful article. From my experience I completely agree this is currently Amazon’s current mission. I have a couple of additional thoughts.
Amazon may very well change that direction tomorrow, next week, or next month. I think it is a fair statement taht Amazon does not have a direction that is clear to most of us. They seem to change with the wind. From online media sellers, to full blown retailer that built it’s pipeline on third party merchants, to pushing most merchants or small mom and pop operations out.
Diminishing margins encourage larger volume sellers but come with risk. Amazon is a bully and really makes no qualms about it.They constantly change selling requirements and fee structures unilaterally. Yes, they force sellers to acceot it in the initial agreement, but a tenent of contract law is that if one party has unilateral power on major changes the contract is likely null and void. Amazon doesn’t care. It is their sandbox. Have 5000 units in inventory and Amazon decides to suppress the listing or fee structure even though you are in full compliance? Tough stuff. You take the hit. So as scalability through wholesaling is touted as a positive, there is little security you can sell your 10k units on Amazon because they may change the rules. You already paid 1500 to be ungated. What if Amazon decides to extort another 10,000 once your large inventory is sent in? You have no sense of security. They have raised fees, including storage fees multiple times in the last year. Margins are down. Risk of stranded inventory is up.
I think most of us sell on ebay and amazon because of the income and the shot at having control of our day. Once we start fishing for wholesalers, scrubbing their catalogues for items we can make money on, and handling the volume, it starts to feel like a suit and tie kind of job. And that is what I no longer want. I am not looking to build an empire. I am creating a life where every single day I have control over the majority of things that happen and that they are primarily happy things.
I agree Amazon is currently going in the direction where you have to source through wholesalers. I believe they will change direction and that I have no security through Amazon and their unilateral willy nilly decisions. I know sourcing through a wholesaler is not the direction my life will go. i would be miserable and miss scavenging.
whiskey, stepping off his soapbox
Nice! Squids aren’t so bad. I was medically discharged after tearing my shoulder apart in a fire. Went to school and did 20 years in public service and now I have been full time for 3 years.
The shipping is changing I think. We were having the same experience you were– we get the same distribution center for large lots and have for over 8 months. The issue is that once our stuff was received, it would take a while to be redistributed, which we planned for and accepted given the reduced shipping costs. The new policy intimates that will no longer be the case. It sounds like we will be sending directly to the ultimate FBA center or some version of that.
Given the slim margins on books and media, I personally would never send books in unless they are high dollar and quick turn over. I do all my books FBM if they are of any value. But I also never figured out the penny sellers nor that market.
Best of luck and I would love to learn how to do books properly.
whiskey
You did much better than I did– I previously posted about a return on crystal glasses that were returned because they were smaller than needed for the whatever the buyer needed them for. One was chipped and one had the sticker removed. After two seperate trips through eBay including escalating to a supervisor on both calls I was shot down. I got the ding on the metrics removed because I opened a case on it. And we just got USPS to reimburse us but what a pain.
Congratulations on a great resolution!
Once we got our sales ranking under 8000, we had someone scrape the listing and offer a product that was not the same. We dealt with that, and now we have direct competition which is causing us to drop the price and spend more on promotions. It is still good money for the time spent although I don’t think we will continue to sell this product for more than a couple of months. Once the competition gets to be too much we will just launch something else.
Our minimum order quantity was 350 units. However, we have bought other things to launch where you can get started with 100. We have also walked away from items that required 2 or 3,000. We don’t want to commit to something that may fail.
We have it shipped to our door so we can inspect and make sure the quality is where it should be and then ship to the warehouse. We could have the skus applied at the manufacturer and then have them ship directly to the warehouse but we want to make sure it is okay first.
My numbers are goofed. We just went over 2000 on the white label. Not 20k, that’s total on everything.
Before I start with my rah rah Amazon is awesome speech, it is difficult.
And the recent changes make it a lot more tough for us and certainly for someone that is getting started.
We started out in September 2014 by sending in puzzles, books, and new old stock. We did okay, but as most folks that transition from eBay, found the fees to be high and the complaints to be many. But the volume was addicting. So we got ungated in many categories when the standards were soft. And we were very lucky.
We are primarily in health and beauty. That has changed. We did very well in other categories but our suppliers dried up. We moved around and ultimately found our niche in health and beauty. We do very well on discontinued lines that have a huge following and we can grab huge margins.
Our first “success” story was ortho volck oil spray. It was discontinued, we bought at a quarter a bottle, and we sold it as fast as we could get it in for $45 a bottle. We reinvested every penny.
Today, we are big into health and beauty. We have actually white labeled a product that we have sold just over 20,000 units. We make a lincoln on each one with about a 1.50 cost per unit and we sell about 20 a day.
It’s stressful as we have to constantly navigate Amazons random changes and competiton. Our own product has been improperly categorized on 8 occasions and it kills sales. But overall we are making enough to support our lifestyle.
Probably way more than you wanted to know, but there it is.
It’s hard work, but we control our future to a large degree and that is all we can ask.
Our returns on amazon are under 2%, we don’t deal with them at all, and we won our only A to Z claim. I know Amazon has a bad rap, but our experience is very different (we stay away from selling used and don’t buy stuff that has shelf wear to pass off as new, so there’s that) and we have over 20,000 items sold in 26 months.
I get that the buyers lie, and we get poked in the shorts with the return “fees” but overall we do really well.
We request items back that are actually returned to try to figure out what happened. Nine times out of ten there is nothing wrong nor was it opened. In the rare instance it was damaged by Amazons crappy shipping methods and we get fully reimbursed. But the number of actual returns is under 2%, SO ultimately we don’t care.
I thought that as well Retro Treasures
Looks like a primitive shaker comb of some variation
They are old codes that stores used to use so that they knew their cost by glancing at the tag?
B is 1, L is 2, A is 3, etc.
Something that cost five dollars would be coded KEE or 1.50 would be BKE. Once you memorize the codes its pretty easy to embed them in your listing in a small gray font somewhere at the very bottom. In a year when something sells you have the cost basis right there.
We are a bit more old school. We use wire racks and the free boxes that had reams of paper with identifiers on the outside. We started with A-1 and went up to D something. We started with plastic bins and found that over time the “vintage” smells were magnified in the bins. Further, we do a lot of old tupperware and it develops that sticky feeling when it is stored in plastic. This doesn’t happen in cardboard.
We have other random places that we store things and we name them with 1 or 2 letters and a number. We put these locations “A-1” etc at the end of our description typically in a smaller font and then we track it down pretty quickly when it sells. We back fill boxes as we list.
For items we pick up that we want to track our original cost we will use charleston or blackhorse as our price codes so we know what we paid later on.
