💰 Income Report: August 2018

Amazon FBA

Sales: 2,738
Revenue: $61,713.32
Profit: $12,528.12
Gross Margin: 20%
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $59,342.80

August marked a new record high for single-month FBA profits, reaching $11,656.62.

This new milestone was helped by that new SKU I mentioned launching in June. While the margins on it were relatively low (9% in August), the sales rank climbed very quickly and I gradually increased the price.

I still only have 3 SKUs doing the majority of the profit, but I also have a nice variety of SKUs doing 3-figure profits which rolls up nicely into the monthly numbers.

I've been in more of a "maintenance" mode lately with the FBA business, as I invested a good bit of time into my dropshipped print-on-demand businesses this month.

Amazon Merch

Sales: 409
Revenue: $8,548.87
Royalty: $1,792.68
Avg. Royalty: $4.38
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $12,111.63

This has to be considered a good month for Merch, as it exceeded the "new norm" of around $1,500 in profit by just about 20%, totaling $1,792.68 in royalties.

One thing to note - the average royalty climbed to $4.21, which was the highest it's been since the royalty nerf back in January

When a shirt sells, I try to check the listing to see if it's been reviewed. If it has, no matter what the rating is, I will up the price to $19.99.

Simply having a star review allows the listing to stand out amongst competitors and draw the customers eye to your listing. It shows that the product has been purchased and establishes a bit a trust in you as the seller.

I don't have exact figures, but I can 100% assure you that having any review at all on a listing will boost overall conversions.

Dropshipped Print-on-Demand

Sales: 902
Profit: $11,657.49
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $13,369.70

Sales by platform:

I have a lot to talk about here... but let me just start off by saying HOLY CRAP WHAT A MONTH!

My 2018 profit to date grew by 85% in one month. IN ONE MONTH!

This was largely owed to the fact that I got out ahead of a number of trends that I very aggressively pursued on the various sales channels listed in the table above.

Most notably, There was a single trend that got on my radar very early in August. At first, I thought to myself: Ok, standard approach: throw it up on some Merch T-Shirts, and additionally, post it to Etsy.

But the trend was a HAT! So about an hour after I had created t-shirt listings on Amazon and Etsy, I remembered that Printful.com allows us to design embroidered hats for sale, AND it integrates with more than just Etsy (Amazon too!)

I had to wait for Amazon to approve my GTIN exemption before I could list the hats on their marketplace, but there was no delays with Etsy.

I started by creating one initial listing... and I noticed something crazy after the sales started to pour in - Etsy had a sponsored ad running that put my listing at the top of the SERP!

Etsy allows you to pay to run Google Shopping ads easily to your listings. This was not that - this was the equivalent of an AdWords ad placing your listing at the top of the (non-shopping) search results page.

As a result, I absolutely crushed it and made easily over $1,500 in a single day when the trend was at its peak in the news cycle, helping me earn a 6% Printful volume discount that will take effect in September:

I will write more about what I learned from this experience in a separate post soon.

Google Ads

Earnings: $302.96
Page Views: 390,121
Ad Impressions: 1,420,302
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $1,956.2

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.