Amazon Ebay Abritage & Making $$ for the Holiday Season

[Silkk]

@Grizzly How many different items do you sell? I know in a previous post you said that you had 247 SKUs, are all those different products? Have you increased your number since then? Do you keep all of your inventory on hand and ship it all yourself for Ebay?

 

[CASHAPP]

Amazon suspended my account for bullshyt reasons before and I got them to reinstate it. Two things: 1.) Only talk to supervisors. Entry level customer support won't be able to do shyt for you. 2.) Phone only. Email just makes it easier for them to brush you off. They can't handle a real nikka barking on they ass in realtime. Keep blowing that customer service line up until you get what you want.

Thanks breh ill think if i should do that or not. What bothers me is they still keep trying to charge my card and sending me messages about it. IF they reinstate it they gonna go harder. fukk them.

I just learned that Amazon has something called Audible Associates which is part of their Amazon Affiliate program. Basically you can get $5 for each person you get to sign up for a free trial to Audible Associates which is their audiobook affiliate link. You can also obviously get paid if they buy a non audiobook product which we know already. But its the fact you can get $5 for them signing up for free trials that gets me. I wish i knew that before hand and before all this drama


By the way breh do you use FB promo for any of the side hustles you do? Do you also experience them shutting down your account and you have to keep trying to make another one or get logged out? This is another reason why Fedbook is turning into a ghost town. Ive seen more than one person online especially on YT talk about how they can be annoying as far as messing up a hustle goes.


I'm trying to promote Clickbank offers and I used SimilarWeb to see the traffic source of most of the offers and most make a bulk of their sales through Facebook. But when FB is being the Nazi of the internet it makes shyt so much harder.

I got so many ideas in my head of what i wanted to do. You know about that Dosh affiliate program right? I would have made a FB campaign and promoted it and got $5 for each person to link their card to Dosh.

ClickBank has been around since 1998...they pay people...very little issues..and FB gotta fukk the hustle up I hate to be a Debby Downer but man i dont know why im having all this bad luck

Man if it was as easy to get payday loans like back in the day i would have some capital to invest and get this shyt going

 

[MasterOfAllHeSurveyz]

Update: 4/18/19

• received purchase order quote
• paid for purchase order quote
• received purchase receipt
• started shipping process in Seller Central
• received product/pallet dimensions/weight from supplier/shipper
• sent box/case and pallet labels to supplier/shipper
• waiting on BOL (Bill Of Lading) email from Amazon

Purchase Order Quote:

Product Shipping Details:

The second yuckiest part of e-commerce . . . waiting for shipment.

Current April Debits/Credits:

-$39.99 (Amazon Pro Seller Account)
-€15/$16.90 (Keepa Premium Subscription)
-$177.50 (Ungate Restricted Brand - $100 Fee + 10x$7.75/item)
-$29 (Amazon Analyzer Subscription)
-$1209 (Product Cost - 156x$7.75/item)
-$105.24 (Amazon Partnered Shipping To Amazon Fulfillment Center - UPS Freight)
-$124.80 (Prep By Amazon - Items Are Fragile)
-$31.20 (Labeling By Amazon - I Don't Commingle My Product)
-$19.99 (DS Amazon Quick View Extended)
-$77.50 (Credit From Supplier)

Trials:
-$79.99 (RevSeller Yearly Subscription - 30 Day Trial w/ Coupon Code)

Current P/L: -$1676.12

 

[MasterOfAllHeSurveyz]

The bill of lading finally arrived. The carrier should make the pickup sometime today.

 

[MasterOfAllHeSurveyz]

My pallet is on its way.

I was worried about the holiday weekend and selected yesterday as the pickup date instead of Friday last week. I should have chosen it as I might have gotten lucky and received a pickup Saturday or yesterday. Luckily for me, the distance between the warehouse and the fulfillment center is about a 35-minute drive with light traffic. :D

I'll continue to update. The bad will be included along with the good. I'm considering using Amazon's professional photography service for my items. It's $50. I've never used it before, but I might risk it. I also sent in a message to Amazon on whether my items need prep for packaging since I indicated that I need it. If they inspect and say that I don't need it, that's $124.80 that I won't have to pay. I'm still paying for the labeling as I stated before. I don't want to commingle.

 

[Grizzly]

My pallet is on its way.

I was worried about the holiday weekend and selected yesterday as the pickup date instead of Friday last week. I should have chosen it as I might have gotten lucky and received a pickup Saturday or yesterday. Luckily for me, the distance between the warehouse and the fulfillment center is about a 35-minute drive with light traffic. :D

I'll continue to update. The bad will be included along with the good. I'm considering using Amazon's professional photography service for my items. It's $50. I've never used it before, but I might risk it. I also sent in a message to Amazon on whether my items need prep for packaging since I indicated that I need it. If they inspect and say that I don't need it, that's $124.80 that I won't have to pay. I'm still paying for the labeling as I stated before. I don't want to commingle.

Good shyt. You dropped A LOT of gems in just three posts even down to the Mechanical Turk mention. It's really good to have that in your back pocket just in case you need to pay for supplies or make big equipment purchases and you don't feel like going into your bank account.

I found out that I needed to buy emergency labels, poly wrap, impulse bag sealer, heat gun and two scanners to get started. Aight. I hopped on Mturk for a few days, ordered everything I needed, started doing FBA that same week and did not come out of pocket for shyt. That is one of the reasons I'll never talk shyt about Amazon because they give you so many avenues to make money. You can literally start with $0 and go straight from Mechanical Turk to FBA and supplement both of those with Merch By Amazon and Amazon Associates. One avenue is a launchpad for another one. It's a great ecosystem if you know how to use it.

 

[Grizzly]

@Grizzly How many different items do you sell? I know in a previous post you said that you had 247 SKUs, are all those different products? Have you increased your number since then? Do you keep all of your inventory on hand and ship it all yourself for Ebay?

That FBA inventory is being used to build up the selling history for my second account. I have PowerSeller status on my main account so I'm building this new one up to that same level. Once I feel it has a good enough history and enough positive feedback then I'm gonna turn it into another 1,000 listing store. My main eBay account will be at 2000 listings by next week. I taught my virtual assistant how to list, research and do SEO so they're working on that as we speak.

 

[Silkk]

That FBA inventory is being used to build up the selling history for my second account. I have PowerSeller status on my main account so I'm building this new one up to that same level. Once I feel it has a good enough history and enough positive feedback then I'm gonna turn it into another 1,000 listing store. My main eBay account will be at 2000 listings by next week. I taught my virtual assistant how to list, research and do SEO so they're working on that as we speak.

How many items do you have listed on Ebay and wtf do you store all of it?

 

[MasterOfAllHeSurveyz]

Damn. This must be a super-busy fulfillment center. They just listed my pallet as "Checked-In" as of today. The most it's ever taken for me to go from pickup to live is four days.

 

[MasterOfAllHeSurveyz]

My first twelve items have appeared in the Reserved Quantity (FC). What this means is that Amazon is shipping items to different fulfillment centers across the country based on prior purchase info for the ASIN in order to deliver the items with the two-day Prime guarantee. It's estimated that my product will be live on the 2nd.

I had to put in a request to split my listing from others listing as an incorrect variation (I put in the case ID and Amazon responded and fixed it within two minutes). It's a hack that Chinese sellers use to fraudulently makes sales of their inferior product off of the BSR (Best Seller Rating) of a legitimate product. Also, whoever created the listing just copied and pasted the headline, bullet points, product info, weight, dimensions and images without any though to optimizing it for a buyer. The only negative is that the bottom fall out on the BSR. I don't care about that right now as I can look at the product history for the ASIN and know that it sells.

The parent ASIN had 300 reviews but the sum was 3.6 due to the shyt Chinese products. For my product ASIN, there's only four reviews, but they're all 5s. :D I'm going to clean up the listing of the keyword stuffing, focus on benefits/specifics/warnings, etc. Then, I'll start a PPC campaign. The fukks were so stupid that they used metric for the US market i.e kilograms/liters/centimeters

 

[MasterOfAllHeSurveyz]

First sale. Nowhere near any inventory. I had 3 items out of 156 available on my listing as of this morning. 36 total have been in Reserved being prepped/shipped to other fulfillment centers. Since, I split my listing the other day, my BSR shot up to 356,735. One sale has dropped it down to 70,663. I'll probably have to get them on the phone to speed up changing the title, features/benefits (bullet points and product info. I want to do all that before I run PPC ads. I'm running @ $29.99, instead of $39.99 until Mother's Day. There's a trick that you can in the listing editor section where you list the MSRP (always higher than your sale price), your regular sale price, and a temporary sales promotion price. On your listing page, it will have the MSRP price greyed with a strike across it. Then, the next line will be in red showing your regular price. Finally, the last line that you're currently selling at will also be in red, with an indication stating how much a buyer will be saving in dollar amount and percent.

It gives the buyer the extra nudge to push the item to their cart.

I always try to aim for a profit margin of about a third when looking for products to sell. 1/3 for product price & shipping. 1/3 for fees. 1/3 for profit.

I calculated my buy price using this formula.

$7.75 (wholesale purchase price) + $1 (Amazon prep fees - $0.80 prep + $0.20 labeling) + $105.25/156 (Amazon shipping total price divided by total items) = $9.424615384.

 

[Silkk]

@MMS @Grizzly @MasterOfAllHeSurveyz

Signing up for FBA soon and I have a small product about the size of a wallet that I want to send them 100 pieces of. If I send them all in one box, Amazon will individually box each upon purchase right?

What if I want to double up and do a 2 for 1 deal, will I need to tape/package the two items together or just let them know?

 

[MasterOfAllHeSurveyz]

Just started my Automatic PPC campaign but ran into a roadblock with the product listing. I can't make the changes necessary to optimize the listing as it's brand controlled. So, I had to do some research on the company that owns the product. I've been hitting up LinkedIn and ZoomInfo. I called the company this morning, but the guy that's in charge of their online operations is off for the day, so I'll have to hit him up Monday to either ask him to make the recommended changes for me or have him somehow convince the catalog team to somehow give me permission to make the edits myself.

However, even with the suboptimized page listing, I'm getting sales. I have the daily budget for an automatic campaign at $30. I set my bid at $1 using the "Dynamic bids - down only" bidding. I've had four sales as of this morning since start it late Wednesday. I'm averaging a sale at about every 19 clicks. I'm not focused on turning a profit right now, I'm just collecting data to identify negative keywords and find buying keywords to put in a manual campaign. I had the budget at $25 yesterday but I ran out of budget around 9PM EST. If it runs out with $30, I'll bump it up by $5 increments until I can get it running 24/7. I won't make any changes until at least next Thursday.

My only gripe is they're taking a long time to make my full shipment available for my list. They only have a total of my 36 items marked as received. I have 15 on my listing and 20 under Reserved Quantity (2 Customer orders + 18 FC Transferring). Quantity is a sales metric that's taken into account.

 

[MasterOfAllHeSurveyz]

Update:

 

[MasterOfAllHeSurveyz]

@MMS @Grizzly @MasterOfAllHeSurveyz

Signing up for FBA soon and I have a small product about the size of a wallet that I want to send them 100 pieces of. If I send them all in one box, Amazon will individually box each upon purchase right?

Not exactly. You could poly-wrap or individually bag each individual item with a label. It's not my realm of expertise, but DM the brother @flipadollar on IG. Dude knows everything about packing your own stuff. He does retail arbitrage and has the back of his SUV setup to do all of his packaging, taping, printing, labeling, etc right outside of the store when he's finished sourcing products.

What if I want to double up and do a 2 for 1 deal, will I need to tape/package the two items together or just let them know?

Package them together and add it as a variation.

=====

Forgot to tell you to use Amazon's Partnered Carrier service to price shop for shipping. Could be better rates than trying to shop around.