Hey guys, I'm back. Not sure for how long this time. I've been really busy trying to get my online businesses ready for the 4th quarter of this year. Last year, 80% of my sales came from the 4th quarter. If you work in the e-commerce space I'm sure you're aware of this. I created a list of goals that I'm hoping to complete by the end of this month to make sure I make the most out of this year's holiday season.
Amazon FBA
I'm really happy with the progress that my business is having with the Fulfilled by Amazon program. Now I'm not going to tell you what I sell because I don't want you to go and be dumb and rip off my products. What I can tell you is that it's in the novelty gifts category and that I create the products myself. I currently have about 245 listings on Amazon and 35 of them are FBA. I'm hoping to have a total of 50 FBA listings by the end of the month and have at least 100 of each product on inventory in Amazon's warehouses. Why only 50? Well, if I'm expecting the same crazy November and December months that I had last year, then it's best for me to have 50 at most to be able to keep up with the demand. We're still only a two-man band so we don't want to bite more than we can chew.
Amazon Merchant Fulfilled
Right now I have 210 AMF listings. The difference between MF and FBA is that with FBA Amazon takes care of fulfillment, customer service, and shipping. Plus, they make your listings Amazon Prime eligible which helps a lot with ranking and offers 2-day shipping to customers. With AMF the seller takes care of everything. It's more work fulfilling everything yourself, but this way your products are made to order instead of having to create a lot of one product and letting them wait and see if they even sell. Amazon's commission is a lot less too, so your margin is higher. My goals for AMF are to have at least 500 listings uploaded to Amazon by the end of October.
Etsy
I've been gaining a lot of traction with Etsy. About 3 sales a day lately which is pretty radical considering that previous months I've only been getting about 1 sale every other day with the same amount of listings that I have now, which is 245 by the way. Last month I really looked at how Etsy's SEO works. I did a little research and made changes to my listings. It seems like its paying off. My goal for Etsy is to upload at least 500 listings up by the end of the month.
Merch by Amazon
The MBA program has been treating me weird lately. I've been slacking off for the past 2 months so I haven't uploaded any new designs. I've just let the passive income come in from my existing designs. Unfortunately, they have been removing my designs, 100 at least. All because they haven't made any sales within the past 60 days. I can only upload 10 designs a day, so my goal for this month is to upload 10 daily designs until I fill up my 500 slots.
Shopify Store
Right now most of my business relies heavily on Amazon, which is good and bad. Good because I don't have to invest any money into advertising my business. I monetize Amazon's organic traffic. Bad because Amazon can terminate my account at any time. I try really hard to comply with their rules and regulations to make sure that doesn't happen, but you can never be to sure. I really want to build a brand, I already built a website for it. I just need to start driving traffic to it. I'm going to try to push facebook advertising to my best selling products to see how that goes. It's been a while since I've done advertising so hopefully not much has changed. I'll keep you updated on the performance of my ads.
Quick recap:
- 50 FBA listings up and running with at least 100 of each listing on inventory.
- Have 500 AMF listings uploaded on Amazon.
- Have 500 listings uploaded on Etsy.
- Fill up 500 design slots on Merch by Amazon.
- Have a profitable Facebook ad campaign running.
I'm really excited to see the outcome of this years holiday season. I'm sure it will be a very busy, stressful, and hopefully profitable time. I'm sure some things will go wrong and others will go very right, I'm ready to learn to be even more prepared for next year. Stay tuned I'll be posting updates here regularly unless I'm too lazy. Thank you for reading. Until next time, deuce.
