💰 Income Report: July 2018

Amazon FBA

Sales: 1,957
Revenue: $46,500.56
Profit: $8,188.81
Gross Margin: 17%
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $46,814.68

An inbound shipment arrived towards the end of the month that restocked the SKUs that were sold out.

In total, I had 12 SKUs net me at least 3-figures of profit on the month, and the top 3 SKUs net 4-figure profit.

I had also been working with an account rep at Amazon that was helping me sell in European markets (amazon.co.uk, amazon.de, amazon.fr, amazon.it, and amazon.es).

The benefit of working with an account rep is some 1 on 1 support, along with the biggest benefit: they will bring over your Amazon.com FBA listings and translate them into foreign languages for you (if necessary). They will also adjust prices to account for value-added tax (VAT).

Only time will tell if expanding to Europe is a good investment of my time/money, but at the very least it will serve as a great learning experience!

Amazon Merch

Sales: 310
Revenue: $6,007.18
Royalty: $1,270.27
Avg. Royalty: $4.10
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $10,318.95

In July I sold 138 different t-shirts designs for a net total of 322 sales, amounting to $1,270.27 of royalties.

The new reality of Amazon Merch is that it's simply flooded with duplicate designs, many of which are prices to only net royalties of less than $2.

I'm not sure how these sellers think this is worth their time. If you think that low priced shirts climb in sales rank before swapping the price to $19.99, I can promise that this does not work most of the time.

I can also guarantee that Amazon cycles what shirts show up at the top of the search results and that buyers are willing to pay $17.99-$19.99 for what they deem to be the "premium" option, so undercutting is not typically worthwhile.

Dropshipped Print-on-Demand

Sales: 82
Profit: $409.88
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $1,712.21

Sales by platform:

The 19 Etsy sales that I was able to get in the month of July came without any ad spend on promoted listings or Google Shopping, which was great validation that my effort to create more listings (via the Printful.com integration) was paying off! (This was my best month to date on Etsy outside of December).

I was also able to get 63 merchant fulfilled print-on-demand Amazon sales via the GearBubble.com integration, which averaged out to 2 sales a day! Which that didn't total much profit, I am always thinking long term and I knew I was unlocking some of the potential.

I even got an eBay sale! ...just kidding. Dropshipped print-on-demand items do not seem to do very well on eBay, for whatever reason.

I have done by homework when it comes to eBay. I've sat through hours and hours of webinars that involve eBay strategy, and talk about setting up a store, using automated emails, and promoted listings, but my personal experience is that it still did not have a huge impact on my sales.

One cool thing about eBay promoted listings is that you don't pay per impression or per click - you pay only if your advertised listing click results in a sale - and you bid a flat % of the sale price. Pretty neat!

Google Ads

Earnings: $347.58
Page Views: 425,547
Ad Impressions: 1,530,467
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $1,653.24

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.