Sales: 2,825
Revenue: $57,933.73
Profit: $10,830.80
Gross Margin: 18%
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $21,625.98
* sales data from JungleScout Sales AlayticsI spent a lot of my free time in April on the [free] Amazon FBA mini course that you can sign up for here »
It was a big bounce-back month for me, after liquidating some of my slow-moving SKUs in March using things like Amazon Outlet Deals to help boost visibility.
I went from losing -$484.10 (on $82,492.02 revenue) in March to making 5-figure profit in April.
One of my two latest new SKUs went live in April, and I unfortunately received 4 complaints from customers on the first 14 orders :(
The factory had left some protective film on a glass compartment of the product to protect it in transit, but upon arrival to the customer, made it look very low quality.
After receiving a notification from Amazon that the listing would be frozen until I remedied the situation, I went in and updated the product listing to communicate to the customer that there was a film on the window in two places:
- In the product feature images (I replaced one of the images with a graphic showing the film being removed & a notice)
- In the bullet points (I lead with a "!" emoji to draw attention & highlight it)
Neither of the things I had to do were ideal, and will certainly have a negative impact on the conversion rate.
Unfortunately, what's done is done and at this point I'm simply trying to get some money back out of the product.
The supplier was made aware of this problem and knows in the future to remove the film before shipment to the USA (if I choose to re-order).
(In the sample order, the film was already removed... doh!
I also had a second new SKU in transit that wouldn't go live until May.
Here's a chart of my best selling FBA SKUs in April (product names omitted)
And here's my Campaign Manager statistics from Seller Central:
- Spend: $1,475.18 $1,403.78 MoM
- Sales: $6,131.31 $11,485.83 MoM
- ACos: 24.06% 7.72% MoM
My Campaign Manager statistics were trending towards being less-profitable because I had just launched a new SKU that has no sales history to back it, making me fully reliant on PPC traffic.
It's nothing to worry about though - it was pretty much working as I intended it to, & my established listings were continuing to generate profit.
Sales: 251
Revenue: $5,166.46
Royalty: $1,063.34
Avg. Royalty: $4.23
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $4,150.04
* sales data from PrettyMerch ProMy total # of sales increased by 55 month-over-moth, a 22% increase.
I credit this to two primary factors:
- My #1 best seller from April benefited from Game of Thrones premiering on HBO.
- I was also uploading new products regularly, using the Merch Titans Automation uploader
Now that I've automated the upload process (saving countless hours), I'm re-uploading my existing designs to the following products using the Create (BETA) workflow:
- Standard T-Shirt
- Tank Top
- Hooded Sweatshirt
- Standard T-Shirt (Amazon.co.uk)
- Standard T-Shirt (Amazon.de)
The uploader converts your content to German automatically...
Pretty much all of my sales were evergreen niches, & without revealing the design for my best seller, I'm willing to share that it was Game of Thrones related.
People that keep up with pop culture could see the Game of Thrones sales spike coming from a mile away...
While any design uploaded to Merch with a mention of "games" and "thrones" in the brand / title / bullets / description will likely go to manual review & get rejected, if you're smart about your keywords, you can avoid detection & enjoy nice organic sales from "protected" niches.
None of my designs infringed on Game of Thrones in any way - many of them were just quotes from the popular tv show.
As I've mentioned many times before, I never get too greedy or aggressive with my keyword targeting.
The last thing you want to do is receive a trademark infringement strike again your Amazon Merch account!
By the way, I should mention that I was in fact suspended from Amazon Merch back in June, 2017.
I'm sharing this because I recently published an article outlining why I was suspended & how I got my account reinstated.
That just about sums up my month on Amazon Merch!
Sales: 326
Profit: $1,969.33
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $6,017.94
Dropshipped print on demand profits grew by +24.2% month over month.
As usual, I would continue to add new products to Amazon through the Printful + Amazon integration thruought the day, every day.
I was also able to automate uploads to the following new POD markets via the Merch Titans Automation uploader.
I'll keep you guys updated on how sales are on those platforms moving forward. For now, I was growing my base of designs for sale (uploading existing designs).
Here are my Etsy Promoted Listing analytics for for the month:
- Spend: $579.77 $15.51 MoM
- Revenue: $1,489.13 $92.44 MoM
- ACoS: 38.9% 3.2% MoM
- CPC: $0.126 (avg bid: $0.16) $0.004 MoM
- CTR: 1.2% 0.1%
I've been experimenting with using lower max-CPC bids, but wont be able to report on the outcome until next month's income report as I changed them on May 1st.
It's clear that advertising on Etsy is slowly but surely becoming more expensive, as is to be expected once the secret gets out about how cost-effective it's been for sellers.
By the way, I released a video walking through how to analyze the profitability of your Etsy Promoted Listings campaigns that you can view on my YouTube Channel »
All of my sales helped earn my a 5% volume discount for my Printful sales in May.
The volume discounts go as high as 16% if you're able to crack $200,000/mo in monthly sales.
While April's $6,110.98 in sales was a far cry from that number, it never hurts to dream :)
Google Ads
Earnings: $139.34
Page Views: 268,068
Ad Impressions: 812,528
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $613.98
* data from Google Ads I run a few popular websites where I collect advertising revenue via Google Ads (formerly Google AdSense). I also collect revenue via direct partnerships with advertisers & from affiliate links, but for times sake, I'm going to omit those deals.
I won't be doing month-to-month write ups here because I don't spend much time maintaining these websites. They started out as passion projects that allowed me to become a better web developer, but today I spend very little time working on them.
