Sales: 2,334
Revenue: $46,887.21
Profit: $10,425.15
Gross Margin: 22%
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $69,767.95
* sales data from JungleScout Sales AlayticsFBA sales held steady in September, and I stocked up on additional inventory in anticipation for increased Q4 sales volume.
There wasn't too much of note, although I did notice that one good selling product of mine was in a bit of trouble, as I was selling it for $25.95 in order to make around a ~22% profit margin, but other sellers were competing on a listing that sold for between $18-$19.
As you would imagine, this was a bit of a shock to me, as I'm clearly either overpaying my China-based supplier, or there is a US supplier with a much cheaper price.
The odd thing is that the carton size is pretty large and I know FBA fees have to be high for the other sellers, so there can't be too much profit in there for them.
I dropped my price to $21.99 and am paying a $9.91 Amazon Fee per order, product costs are $4.68 per unit, and shipping is $5.63 per unit... yielding $1.77 in profit per sale, which will have to be enough for now as I monitor the BSR and position in search results.
Here's a glimpse into my Campaign Manager (Not including AMS) advertising statistics for the month of September:
Sales: 367
Revenue: $7,814.87
Royalty: $1,643.21
Avg. Royalty: $4.47
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $13,754.84
* sales data from PrettyMerch ProMerch sales declined a bit from August, but were still respectable. I continued to capitalize on trending designs that I saw on TV shows, which ended up being my best selling designs on the month.
I continued to leverage AMS headline search ads as well, as they allowed me to target keywords that I'm not able to include in my Merch listings, due to potentially triggering their copyright/trademark protection.
If you read the previous sentence and thought I was breaking a law or infringing on copyrights - I'm not - Amazon Merch's detection system is not robust at all and very unforgiving. It's become easier and easier to get shirt submissions rejected, to the point where I only include the minimum (Brand + Title) on my submissions.
I've found success in AMS headline ads, with typical ACoS's of under 10% which yields decent margins when resulting in sales.
Sales: 485
Profit: $4,084.49
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $17,454.18
The first thing to note about my dropshipped print-on-demand sales is that my eBay account is finally returned to good standing!
If you aren't familiar with the back story here, back in 2017 I had made about $1,200 doing online arbitrage selling sneakers from JimmyJazz.com to eBay customers.
It worked great, but if a customer bought a pair of a shoes in a size that eventually sold out on the website I was buying them from, I had to refund the buyer. Naturally this happened enough times that eBay put my account in bad standing and charged me additional per-order fees, and this lasted for a little over a year.
That said, now that my account is back in good standing, the profit margins on my eBay sales is up a few percentage points.
In August, most of my sales were due to a single trending design, which was getting fewer and fewer sales as time rolled by. Fortunately, I was able to keep the momentum up by expanding my offerings, finding new trending hat & shirt designs.
Here are my Etsy promoted Listings Analytics for September:
These sales helped me earn a 5% Printful volume discount that will be applied to my October sales:
Google Ads
Earnings: $282.62
Page Views: 396,269
Ad Impressions: 1,398,446
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $2,238.82
* data from Google AdsI 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.
