Hey Everybody – this is Gaye Lisby coming to you with some valuable info that will help you reach your Amazon sales goals.
Garry reviewed his numbers a little differently this month. Instead of just talking about the significance of his April 2022 data, he took a look at numbers from the past seven Aprils. This way, he was able to see trends and was better able to assess his successes over a longer period of time. Garry talked about how this reflection helped his ‘vision’. I’ll be reviewing my April numbers from a different lens as well. Looking at data beyond overall revenue and returns can give you a clearer focus and help you to analyze your successes.
I’m going to start by showing you the inside of my Inventory Lab account. I’ll be blurring out the column on the far left, so you can’t see the suppliers or stores that we are ordering from. This information is for our company alone, and for those on our daily finds list, but you can see the number of units sold, units refunded, revenue, profits, units left on hand, buy-cost, and more. The importance of this blurred column for our suppliers is that we can take the data and filter it for each buyer. We have three buyers, but this screen is showing us the results from one of our buyers. Looking down the revenue column, we can see where the losses occurred, and this can tell us which sources are not being profitable for us at that time. I set my column to show profits in descending order, so starting at the top, we can see that the first supplier shows a profit of almost $2,900 for the month of April. Proceed down the column to see the profit results from all our different sources. Scrolling down far enough, we eventually see red, indicating the losses.
I would like to point out that just because we see losses, it does not mean that the buyer is unsuccessful. What it does mean is that the data has somehow changed. Maybe the competition on an item is different. Maybe a novice seller didn’t reset the re-pricer correctly. We can’t be completely sure, but we can see which stores resulted in losses. If the losses from the store continue, and we see a trend or pattern of loss, we may need to reevaluate whether we should continue buying from that store. We also need to go a little deeper than just the profits & losses. If you look to the left of a loss in the profit column, you may see a substantial revenue amount. You need to keep this in perspective as you analyze your data.
Let’s continue to look at this buyer’s performance. Another thing we see about this particular buyer is a total revenue of $76,419, a total profit of $12,270, and an on-hand buy-cost of $36,578. We multiply the on-hand buy-cost by 2 and see that it is roughly equal to the total revenue. This indicates how much inventory we have going forward. Overall, we are in great shape with this particular buyer.
However, there have been other buyers that we’ve had to let go because they were not buying according to our specifications. This particular buyer not only left us with a loss, they were buying to make a profit for themselves and not for our company. We ended up with a lot of dead inventory, as they were buying too deep on items that were too potentially ‘wonky’. By this I mean a clothing size or variation that just didn’t pan out to be a good seller. This left us with $2,080 in losses for the month. You can see this on the chart below.
If you are fear oriented, you may be leery of this idea. Specifically, having someone who may not be able to do the job as expected. I’ll remind you that we need to look at the overall results of all our buyers. The entirety of our account shows $136,844 in revenue and $20,309 in profit and a good on-hand buy cost with almost $200K in potential revenue to carry us on to the next month. Our losses are only $2,080 and of that $760 is from the buyer that we have long since parted ways with. This data is positive and gives you a different perspective on what to look for, what to look beyond, and what decisions you may need to make as you move on with your eCommerce journey.
As a reminder: go to Inventory Lab – click on reports – click on supplier profitability, and this page gives us the evidence of what source stores are providing us with the most revenue. We will continue to look at our losses, as discussed above, to see if there is a pattern or trend that would help us decide to drop one of our source stores.
Looking at your data more extensively, as I have just done, will help you determine not only your revenue, but your overall success for the month and what decisions you can make and actions you can take to help your Amazon business thrive. As Garry said when reviewing his April numbers, you need a vision to keep yourself on track, to keep you motivated, and to help you set achievable goals.
