💰 Income Report: October 2019

Amazon FBA

Sales: 2,499
Revenue: $50,698.04
Profit: $7,420.91
Gross Margin: 14%
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $77,553.74

* sales data from JungleScout Sales Alaytics

October marks the beginning of increased storage fees for items at FBA warehouses.

It feels a bit like deja vu each year when I look at my inventory levels and start have a minor freak out if I've got too much of any one SKU in stock.

It's a double-edged sword, because we need the added inventory to account for increased holiday sales, but at the same time don't want it all at FBA at any one time.

You can see in the screenshot above that storage fees were paid, resulting in a -$618.32 day.

At some point, if your Amazon FBA business reaches a certain point, it probably makes a lot of sense to keep mass-quantities of your product at a 3PL and then have it sent to FBA as needed.

I'm not at that point yet, so I deal with the increased fees.

I released a video at the beginning of October talking about Amazon's Q4 fee structure more in depth:

Here are my most profitable SKUs for the month:

* click to expand

My 3rd most profitable SKU was one I brought back from dead (Happy Halloween!).

Seriously though, I brought it back from the inventory graveyard. The brand is associated with my big website (the one that brings in the majority of the Google Ads revenue).

I had my man on the ground in China find me a better supplier and I got a great price on it. The listing already had over 20 product reviews, so I figured I'd bring it back to life for this holiday season.

One funny thing about this product - it's very lightweight, but not very compact. As a result, it costs 2x as much to ship from China to the US than it does to manufacture.

As in, it costs me $2 to ship for every $1 I pay to have a unit produced.

And here's my Campaign Manager statistics from Seller Central:

• Spend: $2,905.14 $807.58
• Sales: $9,855.47 $1,233.84 MoM
• ACos: 29.48% 5.15% MoM

My advertising costs rose as a result of my most recent shipment of my newest SKU arriving at FBA warehouses just in time for the increased storage fees.

They're my biggest & heaviest SKU, so I want to get rid of some to both help position them better (in organic search results) for the holidays, but also to avoid paying the high storage fees which I know are coming.

Note: I believe there's a "sweet spot" when it comes to advertising, meaning that throwing more money at something doesn't necessarily mean it will scale as expected.

Meaning, if you double your campaign budget for a product because the ACoS is low, you could very likely see it rise over time as a result of the increased ad spend (even if you keep bids the same).

When you have advertising success, file that thought away and re-visit it if you decide to be more aggressive with your spending on your successful campaigns.

If you're ready to start your FBA business, you can enroll below:

I show you exactly how I built my FBA business from the ground up, & how I run it today - nothing is held back.

Amazon Merch

Sales: 321
Revenue: $6,962.63
Royalty: $1,167.06
Avg. Royalty: $3.39
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $10,592.32

• USA
  $1,088.26
• UK
  £26.87
• DE
  €39.90

* sales data from PrettyMerch Pro

I had a 21% bump in month-over-month sales that can likely be attributed to the beginning of Q4 combined with the extra day of sales in October.

I'm hoping to carry this momentum into the coming months!

My goal has been to create a minimum 50 designs per week that I then upload to:

• USA: Standard Shirt, Hoodie, PopSocket
• UK: Standard Shirt
• DE: Standard Shirt
• (and all of the marketplaces listed in the Dropshipped Print on Demand section)

Sometimes I'll do a livestream of my research+design sessions in the private Facebook group for my Ryan's Method: Amazon Merch Course.

Here's my sales breakdown by day:

* click to expand

Breakdown by product type:

* click to expand

Breakdown by fit type:

* click to expand

And last, breakdown by color:

* click to expand

I also released a video about PopSocket research, because if you recall last year's holiday season, Merch sellers that took advantage of selling PopSockets made a killing with them.

As we pick up steam heading into November/December, right now is a great time to list some PopSockets!

If you're ready to take your Amazon Merch business to the next level, you can enroll in Ryan's Method: Amazon Merch Course below:

I show you every trick in the book that I used to reach tier 10,000, including niche research tips, design tips, listing optimization tips, AMS advertising tips, & automation tips in the bonus section!

Dropshipped Print-on-Demand

Sales: 339
Profit: $2,279.26
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $18,943.84

Sales by platform:

• Amazon.com
  130
• Amazon.co.uk
  5
• eBay
  3
• Etsy
  131
• Redbubble
  51
• Spreadshirt
  2
• Teepublic
  17
• Teespring
  0
• Zazzle
  0

The big story for my Etsy account is that on October 30th, I received an email from Etsy Legal that my account was to be permanently closed:

Let me use this as a chance to list some of my grievances against Etsy:

1. They ban the vast majority of new accounts, automatically, for no reason
   This is happening all the time, and one of the most common things people reach out to me about...
   
2. Their support team isn't big enough
   When their automated system bans you, you have to rely on their small support team to un-ban your account, which may take days
3. They have no support team to hear IP infraction disputes
   As a result, my account is banned! I have each infraction written down... they're incredibly silly and MAYBE, at best, one of them was an actual infringement... the rest were not!
   I also need to point out the irony of Etsy's guiding principles: "Our mission is to Keep Commerce Human." - this sounds good in theory but is far from reality of what they practice
4. Their support sucks
   Sorry if that sounds harsh, but I'm speaking from experience. I've been unable to remove free shipping from the majority of my product listings due to a bug in their system that they created!
   After multiple phone calls, I gave up on it ever being fixed. I also called their support about someone at Etsy hearing my IP infringement appeal, which should be easy to win.
   They said that someone from a specific Etsy team would reach out via email. Just like my issue with the free shipping, no one ever followed up...

I'll do a video talking more in-depth about being banned from Etsy at some point, but for now, that's all I'm going to disclose.

Since it happened at the end of the month, I haven't had a ton of time to do more research about how to resolve the issue.

Normally I'd share my Etsy Promoted Listing analytics for for the month, but when they close your shop you lose access to literally everything, which is also incredibly dumb.

For instance, see below - a customer wants to re-order shirts (to both my benefit & Etsy's benefit) & can't because of bogus IP infringement claims on my account that I had no way of disputing.

Well done Etsy!

Outside of Etsy, I'm doing my best to consistently upload products to the additional "third-tier" POD marketplaces that you see listed above.

Teepublic continues to be a nice surprise, netting me 17 sales in October for a $55 royalty.

I've heard of people having success on Teespring, so it's curious that I'm not seeing many sales from there.

It sucks because I can't upload any other shirts to their platform until I reach a certain sales threshold that I'm sure I will surpass with Q4 sales coming down the pipeline soon.

Google Ads

Earnings: $269.60
Page Views: 359,644
Ad Impressions: 1,029,410
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $1,703.90

* 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.