If you’ve gotten into reselling recently, you may not know that Amazon doesn’t permit any meltable inventory from May 1st to September 30th. If you’ve been doing this a while, and knew this, well, a reminder never hurts, right?
So here’s your reminder: Remove meltable inventory from FBA now! Yes, you have a couple of days, but, lets be honest, the prices are dropping faster than manufactured spending opportunities.
Identifying Meltable Inventory
There is no silver bullet to identifying meltable inventory. The easiest answer is to go through your inventory – you likely have a pretty good idea of what is and what isn’t. Chocolate – that’s a no brainer. Cosmetics? Could be. Toys? Probably not. The general rule of thumb is – can the product withstand being stored in 100 degree temperatures?
Oh no! I have unsold Meltable Inventory! What do I do?
The good news is that if you identify your meltable inventory before 30 April, your removal fees will be nil! In fact, even if you don’t have anything that will melt, now is the time to determine slow or non-selling products for removal! Amazon is waiving removal fees through 30 April It doesn’t hurt to do an assessment of your inventory to see what just isn’t moving as fast as you may have previously anticipated.
Wrapping Up
This is just a good time to take stock (pun intended) of your inventory, both for meltable inventory, and also for slow moving inventory. Its definitely a great idea to leverage Amazon’s free removals until 30 April. As far as other inventory that you might be pulling back, other questions to consider might be: Could it sell better in Q4? Do you have the room to store it for a few months? Or if it might not sell, can you still return it? Every little bit can help.
You sell much in the grocery category Trevor? I dabbled in it back when I did RA, but seemed lots of work with all the multi-packing and dealing with expiration dates and lots of times smaller profits (though can have great ROI). I know people love the category, but hasn’t been one I really got into. Granted, now that I pay my prep server a per item fee no matter what, maybe I should be taking a closer look at some OA grocery.
I do a fair amount in grocery. I like working more with gated categories of late, it often means less competition. But you are right, the % might be great, but the $ amount isn’t nearly as good.
Agreed, i like gated too. I’ve been really focusing on shoes this year. Can really increase profit and ROI. Though the returns suck!
Why does anyone want to resell chocolate in the first place?! If you notice the reviews of most of any chocolate (especially those Lindt truffles!) you’ll notice it seems half of them are complaints about receiving a box of messy, melted chocolate goo. I apparently got lucky on my first order which came in pristine condition. Not since though. I’ve stopped ordering the stuff as it’s about a 50/50 chance of getting them in decent form and it’s not worth the hassle of returning and/or getting a refund when you do. And it seems like the seller acts like it’s no big deal, like it happens all the time (probably since it does!). How can a seller ship a product that is so unreliable and knowing half the time they’ll lose money on a refund for an un-resaleable item? You’re basically at the mercy of a delivery truck and if your box is going to be sitting in a hot van all day while out being delivered any time of the year.
Not sure how/why anyone deals with this particular product.