💰 Income Report: September 2019

Amazon FBA

Sales: 2,852
Revenue: $54,177.20
Profit: $5,389.33
Gross Margin: 9%
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $70,132.83

* sales data from JungleScout Sales Alaytics

My FBA sales & profits were lower than expected for two reasons:

1. I ran out of inventory of my top 2 best-selling SKUs
2. I was selling one of my top-5 best selling SKUs at a loss to try and clear out inventory space in prep for the Q4 hike in inventory storage fees

There's a back story regarding my top 2 best sellers going out of stock.

I noticed an increased demand on the best sellers, which belong to the same brand, so I placed a very large order with my supplier in hopes to keep additional inventory in stock at all times to prevent running out of stock.

Unfortunately, I think they ran out of the raw material to produce my order, causing delays.

From 9/14 to 9/28 it had no inventory left at Amazon, and it had the "will be back in stock on October 3rd" message on the listing for a few days when a partial shipment arrived at Amazon.

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Because it's usually the organic rank #1 on the primary keywords, you can see that customers were still willing to buy it & wait as soon as it was available.

At it's height, it made as much as $362.64 profit in a single day, so not having it in stock really hurt.

There are ways to prevent this, like ordering additional inventory & keeping it at a 3PL in case you need to have an emergency shipment sent to Amazon on short notice to avoid running out, or shipping a new production run via air.

I have never had this experience with this supplier (that I've worked with for 2.5+ years), but in the future I will work on a contingency plan.

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This is a glimpse into my most profitable SKUs on the month, which was still lead by the two best sellers that were out of stock for bout half the month.

My newer SKUs were creeping up in organic rank & my hopes are that they will generate reliable, consistent profit in 2020.

Yes, I said 2020.

It takes time to rank organically on Amazon!

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

• Spend: $2,899.82 $42.27 MoM
• Sales: $11,788.92 $1,450.93 MoM
• ACos: 24.60% 3.86% MoM

One other thing happened in September:
I was almost banned from selling on Amazon!

I wrote a blogpost about the entire experience here.

In short, I violated Amazon's duplicate ASIN policy when I created a product listing for a video for my Amazon FBA course, and forgot to delete it (because I'm constantly pushing new products to my Seller Central account through the Printful integration).

This video also outlines what happened & how I fixed it:

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: 274
Revenue: $2,983.99
Royalty: $918.35
Avg. Royalty: $3.42
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $9,425.26

• USA
  $872.42
• UK
  £22.35
• DE
  €16.82

* sales data from PrettyMerch Pro

Sales slowed down from August, but I didn't spend much time at all on Amazon Merch in September because my slots were maxed out.

That is, until something big happened:

I was tiered up to 20,000!

It happened near the end of the month, so I've really been spending a lot of time planning my strategy moving forward.

I talked briefly about my plans in this video:

Here's my sales breakdown by day:

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Breakdown by product type:

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Breakdown by fit type:

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And last, breakdown by color:

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I'm planning on October being a bigger, better month for my Amazon Merch progression!

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: 396
Profit: $2,246.60
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $16,664.58

Sales by platform:

• Amazon.com
  158
• Amazon.co.uk
  14
• eBay
  1
• Etsy
  108
• Redbubble
  100
• Spreadshirt
  9
• Teepublic
  5
• Teespring
  1
• Zazzle
  0

The big news this month was that Etsy replaced Promoted Litings with "Etsy Advertising".

I made a blogpost where I review Etsy Ads here.

In short, Etsy decided that they would no longer allow sellers to control their advertising CPC bids.

This was a part of the sweeping changes introduced with the new Etsy Advertising. The reason for it is likely related to the fact that Etsy Advertising automatically opts you into Google Shopping ads, with no ability to opt out.

If you used Etsy's Google Shopping integration in the past, you know that there was no ability to control CPC bids. So it makes sense that if you opt to use Etsy Advertising, that you can't control your bids because your budget is now automatically split between Etsy advertising & Google Shopping

Many Etsy sellers including myself were furious with this change for multiple reasons:

• Etsy is forcing sellers that advertise to pay Google to drive external traffic to Etsy, which they profit from
• Etsy automatically opted sellers into "Etsy Advertising" UNANNOUNCED overnight

I had my daily advertising buget set to somewhere in the range of $60-$70 per day, which I used to never come close to spending when I was able to control my CPCs.

As soon as I was opted into Etsy Advertising, my entire daily budget was (easily) spent every day.

Fortunately I caught it relatively quickly and only wasted a few hundred dollars. You can find out more in the video below:

You can tell by the YouTube comments that I'm not alone in being pretty mad at Etsy.

Here are my Etsy Promoted Listing analytics for for the month:

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• Spend: $208.76 $265.65 MoM
• Revenue: $504.21 $1,146.17 MoM
• ACoS: 41.4% 12.5% MoM
• CPC: $0.262 $0.165 MoM
• CTR: 1.18% 0.19%

It's not completely evident in the data, due to the few days where my entire budget was spent, shortly after being opted into Etsy Advertising, but I actually saw an increase in profitability after changing my daily Advertising budget to $1.

I didn't know what to expect after essentially killing my advertising on Etsy, but am happy to report that I haven't seen much, if any reduction in sales.

I also has someone reach out and tell me that if your daily budget is set to $3.99, you will advertise only on Etsy & none of it will be used on Google Shopping.

It's worth a shot, I'll follow up in the future if it works.

Last, I made a post sharing my updated Redbubble product pricing - check it out!

Google Ads

Earnings: $236.06
Page Views: 333,519
Ad Impressions: 1,012,416
2019 💰 Profit to Date: $1,501.54

* 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.