💰 Income Report: July 2017

Amazon FBA

Sales: 51
Revenue: $2,157.50
Profit: $423.13
Gross Margin: 19%
2017 💰 Profit to Date: $607.12

While sales more than doubled from last month, they were still pretty modest.

I continued product research, and had a few additional SKUs either being produced or being shipped to FBA warehouses, so I knew sales volume would soon spike.

Organic rank of my initial SKUs also continued to noticable climb closer towards the first page.

Amazon Merch

Sales: 118
Revenue: $2,218.38
Royalty: $729.07
Avg. Royalty: $6.18
2017 💰 Profit to Date: $1,840.00

Believe it or not, I was actually banned from Merch by Amazon on June 30, 2017 (Tier 500 account).

It was an incredibly tough pill to swallow. It was the result of a combination of writing out bullet points for all of my shirts (which increases the likelihood of including a trademarked word), and chasing hot trends that were protected (even if they weren't Trademarked, Amazon's algorithm was protecting them).

I learned one thing the hard way: You will see listings on Amazon Merch that are copyrighted, I believe either manual review let them slip, or it's employees at Merch that publish their own designs (I see it WAY too often, to the point where I actually believe this is the case).

I emailed them at merch-notices@amazon.com asking them to reinstate my account, but was banned for the entirety of July.

Fortunately, they still allowed me to collect royalties, although I couldn't upload or edit any shirts.

Dropshipped Print-on-Demand

Sales: 6
Profit: $44.61
2017 💰 Profit to Date: $69.00

Sales were very slow, as expected. I sold 3 mugs on Amazon & 3 t-shirts on eBay.

I was aware going in that the dropshipped print-on-demand game was all about volume, as in, the more listings you have for sale, the more money you will make over time.

I put my existing Merch designs on mugs, shot glasses, and pillow cases, and had a queue of products to post as merchant-fulfilled on Amazon. Listings were free because I was granted a GTIN exemption.

New listings on eBay were costing me $0.20 each, so I only put my best selling designs up as t-shirts.

The great thing about dropshipped print-on-demand is that my sales were automatically downloaded into GearBubble.com and fulfilled for me, including adding tracking numbers to each order when they were shipped out.

Online Arbitrage

I'm not going to consistently report my online arbitrage sales, because it's not something I set out to do on a regular basis, rather something I do when an opportunity presents itself.

Sales: 15
Revenue: $1594.85
Profit: $595.35

Backstory: I was watching one of my favorite YouTubers who always wears Reebok Pump shoes, and I love collecting shoes, so before I knew it I was searching the web for a pair.

I saw a pair on sale at a website called JimmyJazz.com for $59.99 which I assumed was a scam, and caught myself about to pay over $100 for a pair from eBay.

At the last second I thought to myself, I should at least place an order on JimmyJazz in case it's not a scam... sure enough, it was legit, so I threw up around 5 listings for Reebok Pumps on eBay.

They sold pretty well, and I was also able to find great promo codes for JimmyJazz via my Ebates chrome extension which automatically searches for & applies discount codes for you on checkout pages (& gives you cash back on purchases).

* NOTE: There are multiple downsides to online arbitrage, one of which I experienced: If a customer buys a pair of shoes in a size that sells out, I have to refund them. If you process too many refunds, eBay will put your account in bad standing and take a higher (~14%) final value fee.

Google Ads

Earnings: $196.70
Page Views: 506,793
Ad Impressions: 1,567,316
2017 💰 Profit to Date: $963.38

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.