Sales: 2,534
Revenue: $48,669.79
Profit: $2,895.52
Gross Margin: 5%
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $80,449.79
* sales data from JungleScout Sales AlayticsI wont bury the lead: The real story in November was Amazon FBA inventory storage fees costing me over $12,000.
Prior to November, the most I had paid in a month in inventory fees was $1,058.94. That comes to a 12x increase - crazy!
What really sucks is that more than half of my SKUs are NOT seasonal, and don't get a bump from the holidays (but I still pay increased fees for them).
My 2nd inventory fees bill was paid on the last day of November & should have likely should have counted against my December inventory fees, but for the sake of transparency & accurate record keeping, it will count against my November FBA numbers.
Here's a breakdown of my most profitable SKUs (Product names omitted) from Fetcher:
Not much changed here month over month, a I still a few products driving most of the profit. I'm also still trying to sell off a lot of extra inventory from one of my old best sellers that kind of fell off a cliff in recent months (to avoid paying storage fees).
Here's a glimpse into my Advertising Campaign Manager for November:
- Spend: $2,875.91
- Sales: $13,685.89
- ACoS: 21.01%
21% Average Cost of Sale (ACoS) is higher than I'd prefer it to be, but due to a slowdown in sales over recent months (and an abundance of inventory for some used-to-be high selling SKUs), I cranked up ad spend to try and clear out some inventory from fulfillment centers.
Looking ahead to 2019, I'm going to have to be more agile when launching new products, as the number of copycats has increased dramatically over recent months.
I think that launching new SKUs will be important as the number of Amazon sellers continue to increase.
Sales: 518
Revenue: $11,107.60
Royalty: $2,367.51
Avg. Royalty: $4.57
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $17,974.79
* sales data from PrettyMerch ProThe holiday sales rush beings right around mid-November, & sales start to slowly ramp up.
Last year Amazon's Merch team did NOT do a great job preparing for Q4 and very quickly ran out of inventory for a number of products. Not did they have enough facilities to produce the high volume of orders that came through.
So far, so good for November. If the back half of the month is an indicator for how December will go, then we should be in good shape for a big month to close out the year.
I'm also very glad that I took the time to re-upload all of my designs in prep for the holiday sales rush, as some designs had fallen off due to lack of a sale within the first few months.
I also think re-uploading ahead of the holidays just increases your likelihood of a sale because you occupy more internet real estate and get indexed on more keywords (unless you use the exact same title/bullet points).
My non-FBA AMS ad spend was right around $120 total and averaged out to under a 10% ACoS, which is all you can really hope for (I do tend to low ball my bids for print on demand products to protect my margins).
I should also mention that my 5 of my 6 best selling designs from November were from TV shows, and the other one was from a popular YouTube video.
If you're struggling to find hot niches, check out my post about finding profitable Merch niches, where I share how I found 2 of my 3 (lifetime) best sellers, including one design that netted me over $700 in royalties in a single day.
You can also consider checking out Merch Informer, a paid resource which tries to algorithmically determine high-upside, low-competition niches for you.
Sales: 597
Profit: $4,476.05
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $25,266.89
November was solid across the board, minus eBay, where it seems nearly impossible to sell print-on-demand products at a worthwhile profit margin.
My spike in eBay sales in October was the result of forward thinking on my part, as I dropshipped a trending sticker from RedBubble and charged $16 each.
As of writing this, there are currently 11 duplicate listings undercutting me by more than 66% (hence my non-existent November sales).
My Amazon merchant fulfilled dropshipped products saw nearly a 30% increase from October, and I expect that trend to continue into December.
I shifted my focus to uploading t-shirts to Amazon as merchant fulfilled via the Printful integration, because last year Amazon Merch was not prepared for Q4 and sales were much lower than anticipated.
This way, even if Merch listings are throttled, my merchant fulfilled products still have a chance.
I spent much of the second half of the month continuing to upload my designs to Redbubble, and I've seen a nice uptick in sales as a result.
Uploading to Redbubble can be tedious. Each upload will automatically be enabled for a multitude of products, but I'm really primarily focused on t-shirts, so I have to spend additional time clicking to disable the additional products.
That said, I stuck to it and got over 1,000 designs up by December 1st. I even reached the daily upload limit one day:
If you ever see this screen, it's time to go outside (haha). I ended up binge watching Making a Murderer Season 2 on Netflix, and the uploads just flew by that day.
My Etsy shop saw a minor uptick in order volume & revenue. As I mentioned in my October income report, I had reduced my ad spend in hopes of maximizing profits, as my shop has enough "social proof" in the form of 5-star ratings that customers should feel confident in making purchases from me.
While I was digging through the Etsy analytics dashboard, I came across this pretty cool feature that shows you where your customers live:
If you're on the fence about using the Etsy + Printful integration - what are you waiting for?!?
There's a GLOBAL customer base waiting to buy from yo! And don't forget that Printful has European fulfillment centers to help accommodate worldwide orders.
Here's a breakdown of my (lifetime) Etsy sales by product type through November 2018:
There's a trend: Ever since uploading my entire inventory of t-shirt designs to Etsy, there's been a shift from primarily selling hats to selling mainly t-shirts.
Here's my Etsy Advertising analytics for November:
- Spend: $288.44
- Revenue: $2,338.81
- ACoS: 12.3%
- CPC: 0.11 (avg bid: $0.16)
- CTR: 0.8%
And again I was able to earn a 5% volume discount that will count towards my December Printful fulfilled sales.
November was good - but December is going to be GREAT!
Google Ads
Earnings: $283.16
Page Views: 347,168
Ad Impressions: 1,163,711
2018 💰 Profit to Date: $2,429.56
* 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.
