💰 Income Report: February 2018

Amazon FBA

Sales: 1,181
Revenue: $32,015.87
Profit: $3,752.74
Gross Margin: 11%
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $7,038.16

February was a good month, and most of my profits were generated from a single SKU that I found via JungleScout.com's Web App that helps you find high revenue, low competition niche products.

That single SKU generated $8,740 in revenue equating to $2,487 of profit.

This ended up being much needed because I had trouble keeping my other best selling SKUs in stock (again, not a bad problem to have... but when you climb the SERP, sales can spike unexpectedly and you can sell out before you know it)

Many people run into cash flow problems trying to keep pace with restocking inventory, because you essentially buy your inventory + pay to ship it TWICE before you see any revenue from Amazon (They hold your money for ~2 weeks and pay you bi-monthly).

Fortunately for me, between working full-time as a Sr. Front End Web Developer & teaching multiple webdev courses at a local university, I could bankroll my FBA business with no problems, but you still have to watch inventory levels to avoid losing profits by holding too much stock for too long at the FBA warehouses.

Amazon Merch

Sales: 349
Revenue: $6,952.81
Royalty: $1,498.62
Avg. Royalty: $4.29
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $3,199.62

February was the first full month of feeling the hurt after Amazon increased their royalty from each Merch sale.

Much of my time was spent converting my best selling designs into sweatshirts and hoodies (hoodies require rendering the designs at different dimensions).

The Merch community was demoralized after having watching 25% of what was our profit be vacuumed straight into Jeff Bezos' coffers, but I personally stayed on track and continued to create listings with my eye on the long-term prize.

Dropshipped Print-on-Demand

Sales: 52
Profit: $244.57
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $511.17

Sales by platform:

I use the Amazon GTIN exemption to bypass UPC restrictions when creating my dropshipped print-on-demand listings, allowing me to post upwards of ~60 new products a day to the biggest online marketplace in the world.

Compared to Amazon where I could create as many listings as I wanted for free (aside from the $39.99/mo pro seller account fee), both eBay & Etsy charge a per-listing fee which discouraged me from cross-posting anything other than my best sellers to their platforms.

Google Ads

Earnings: $173.08
Page Views: 339,997
Ad Impressions: 1,222,040
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $328.13

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.