Tagging Miles

Reselling, the next frontier for Manufactured Spending

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Whether you feel the golden era of manufactured spending has passed or not, the fact remains that opportunities tend to close faster than new ones open up. Pure manufactured spending (Read: Introduction to Today’s Manufactured Spending) is still viable, but it certainly has gotten harder. Reselling, which I propose to be the next frontier in manufactured spending is no easier. But I would argue that if you take a higher level view, it can open far more doors. It also is your entry into becoming a Weekend Entrepreneur.

Reselling, the next frontier for Manufactured Spending

Manufactured spending at its purest is a form of arbitrage. You are effectively buying miles and points at a discount and redeeming them at a higher value than you paid for them. Reselling is no different in that regard. As we dive deeper though, there are rather pointed differences:

Reselling is a business

That means that you need to consider taxes and reporting responsibilities. 

Reselling avails you the opportunity to earn miles and points at negative cost.

Choosing the right products that you can earn a profit on in their own right, means that the miles and points become pure gravy. Scale that up, and you’ll have no problem with frequent flyer program devaluations but remember, that Amazon can be just like an Airline, they make the rules. 

Mile High Reselling Club

Copyright: lightwise / 123RF

Reselling can be riskier than pure manufactured spending

Because you are buying product, there is the risk that you might have chosen a bad product, or even if you’ve chosen the best product out there, you still have the liability of returns. Bottom line, there is more risk than just having to pay all of your expenses for a month with Visa Gift Cards (Read More: Considerations for Reselling as a Method for Manufactured Spending).

You’re still interested – what are the next steps?

The first step that I always recommend–once you’ve considered the risks—is to consider your risk tolerance and identify a seed budget. Yes, you want to generate thousands of miles and points, but you need to be reasonable as you dive into a business. You want to identify an amount of money that you are willing to lose. Reselling can be like gambling. You are making a bet that a product that you have purchased will sell. If it does sell, you are making the bet that you will make a profit or at least break even. So please, identify a budget and stick to it, as you get your feet wet in this new venture.

Once you’ve identified a budget, consider what marketplaces you want to work with. I’m a fan of Amazon. Specifically, I am a huge fan of selling via Fulfillment by Amazon. Why? Because they do most of the time sensitive work. You source, prep, pack and ship your products to Amazon in bulk. Once your products reach Amazon’s warehouses, all you have to do is tweak the prices to get the products to sell. As your products sell, Amazon pulls them from the bins in the warehouse (read: A Look inside Amazon’s Warehouses) and ships them to your customer. Amazon provides all of the customer service unless the customer intentionally reaches out to you directly—via Amazon. In short – it makes reselling as a side gig feasible.

If you’ve chosen Fulfillment by Amazon, well, you’re in luck, because I have a beginner’s guide that covers creating an Amazon Seller account, all the way through your first shipment and sourcing tips. Check out the guide below:

Once you’ve cut your teeth and sent a few orders, you could even apply to join the Mile High Reselling Club.

Wrapping Up

I realize that asserting that reselling as a method for manufactured spending is not a terribly popular idea within the reseller world. In truth, it increases competition, and it generally pushes down profitability in some areas. Just look at iPad or Apple Watch prices over time. That said, I don’t believe those depressed prices are primarily due to mile and point collectors. I tend to believe that anyone that gets into reselling will logically pursue profit as soon as they see how much work it is. If you think about it, Manufactured Spending is a lot of work in and of itself, and there your “profits” are usually in the single percentage range.

With that said, I still believe Reselling is the next frontier in manufactured spending. I believed this 5 years ago when I started reselling, and it is true to this day, (Read more: My evolution as a reseller). Just know that there is risk, and this is a business. What does that mean? First, always pursue profit, the points will come. Furthermore, this can become work. For me, I bound it in such a way that I enjoy doing it. That doesn’t mean it always balances out though! During busy times like the fourth quarter, I commonly finish my day job only to come home and work for another few hours on the reselling business. Weekends can easily become more time for the reselling business. But you have to have boundaries. If you do, this is an excellent side gig that can also help increase your miles and points balances, and if you do it right, you should make some money too!

My Experience with Glasshouse Inventory

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Glasshouse Inventory provides an exhaustive inventory reconciliation service. I signed up for Glasshouse Inventory’s service mid-2016. I even had them go back into 2015 to see if there were any reimbursements that I had missed. I even thought so highly of Ashley, the principle of Glasshouse Inventory, that I was happy to have her present at ResellingDO3. At the time I signed up, I had gotten what was really a sweetheart of a deal, I think I was paying as little as $35 a month. Others were paying anywhere from $25-100 a month. 

Ashley grew this business very quickly, and at some point, she signed up some bigger Amazon sellers, and decided that they needed to change their business model. On 7 December 2016, she sent this e-mail out stating that the business model would change effective 1 January 2017:

Glasshouse Inventory

A cleaner view of that new pricing option is below:

Glasshouse Inventory

I opted to stay on, as I was curious to see how everything would work out. Here was my response. 

Glasshouse Inventory

I received a response that essentially said that the lower subscription was a “beta testing phase” and the company had progressed. I get it, you have to make money. 

A few weeks later I received a refund, however it was insufficient, a couple of e-mails cleared that up, but it gave me my first concerns with the level of service I would now be getting, and in fact, paying more money for that degraded service. The key message though, was in response to my question of how the new business arrangement would work, this was the response:

Glasshouse Inventory

I was sent nothing. In fact, I received no communication from Glasshouse Inventory for nearly a month, then receiving an e-mail regarding a new dashboard:

Glasshouse Inventory

I get it, there are growing pains, but, again, related to my previous concern that as a smaller seller, I wasn’t going to get the same level of service as others, and I see at the end: 

If you’d like to schedule a training session, Ashley has availability the week of March 27

This e-mail was sent February 6. Message received, loud and clear. But I still held through for a week. Then, a week later, I had still not received an invitation to my new dashboard. I sent my message expressing my decision to change course.

Glasshouse Inventory

I received a response fairly quickly, directly from Ashley.

Glasshouse Inventory

She also included a screenshot of my dashboard–the one that I had never received an invitation to, mind you. It was still reassuring that she responded as quickly as she did. I want to highlight something here though, which again, gave me hope:

We will send an email when we’re finished with a record of your cases and reimbursements to explain your January bill and finish your services for that month so you can find an alternative going forward.

I responded to Ashley fairly soon after (as I was in Bali at the time):

Glasshouse Inventory

Ashley responded with what I thought was perfectly reasonable. She answered my questions.

Glasshouse Inventory

Then, a few weeks later, I receive an e-mail stating that I had a bill:

Glasshouse Inventory

Great! I expected this, and I had seen a couple of reimbursements come through, but the number seemed a bit high. So, I go to the link, then download the excel of the invoice, expecting to see, as Ashley had assured me I would see – a record of your cases and reimbursements to explain your January bill. What did I see? 

Glasshouse Inventory

Now, I don’t know about you, but that does not look like a list of all the cases and reimbursements. So, I logically sent an e-mail back–in fact, I sent two e-mails back, because I felt I might have been too harsh in my first response.

Glasshouse Inventory

I received no response to those emails, but, then I got another e-mail Saturday and Sunday morning. I get that this is likely automated, but it still frustrated me, because I was not being provided the information I needed to be able to properly compensate Glasshouse Inventory for their services. So I responded again, this time including every e-mail address of the company that I knew–because maybe this was just an automated e-mail address that no one actually reads:

Glasshouse Inventory

As of yet, I have not received any response, but the last bit of this did transpire over the weekend. 

Thoughts on my experience with Glasshouse Inventory

I have to admit, I was impressed with Ashley in the first few months of working with her. Like I said, I had a sweetheart of a deal; a fixed subscription cost. But when she made the change, I had the logical expectation that I’d receive those things that had been promised. Those included:

  • Two Legal Agreements explaining the services of Glasshouse Inventory and timing
  • A Mutual NDA
  • A Dashboard
  • A record of cases and reimbursements to explain my January bill

Unfortunately to the best that I can find in my e-mail (and I had to search through it to get all of those screenshots), Glasshouse Inventory didn’t deliver. Like I said, I get it, a growing company can encounter growing pains, but, logically, anyone would realize that when you’re telling your customer that you are going to charge them more, you want to back that up, right? 

I think the part that frustrates me the most is the lack of following through on promises. But, as I sit back and think about it, I can only imagine how many of the other “beta testers” feel. Glasshouse Inventory clearly cut their teeth on many of us smaller resellers, I dare say, many folks in the miles and points community, and to receive this caliber of treatment, is a shame.

Have you worked with Glasshouse Inventory? What was your experience?

Amazon Seller App Enhancements – 2017 Edition

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Earlier this week, Amazon rolled out changes to their Amazon Seller app. I call these changes because, I’m not entirely sure they are all enhancements. There are some new features though, which I’ll also cover in this post. You can see what the Amazon Seller App used to be like here and here.

User Interface Changes

Most of the changes to the Amazon Seller App appear to be more focused on the User Interface, and ultimately, the user experience. They moved some things around, and provide more detail and functionality on the “Home” screen. The below graphic shows the differences.

Amazon Seller App

 

You’ll notice that there’s more information here. There are a few things I’d like to point out below.

Amazon Seller App

Of particular note, the “Scan” button has been removed from the bottom, and instead resides in the upper left.

At the top there is a slider, where you see your sales for the day, number of products, current balance, next payment (all standard), and adds your Customer Feedback rating. I find that I don’t monitor my rating terribly often, so the functionality on the Amazon Seller App seems to be excessive, but I can understand how others might prefer that. I generally find customer feedback and my seller rating to be most easily managed from Amazon’s Seller Central.

An additional interface change of note, is the removal of a number of key functions from the menu bar on the right.Amazon Seller App

This could impact folks, I know it is impacting me and some of my workflows.

Amazon Seller App Enhancements

With any change, there are usually enhancements. I use this word almost like I would use for an Loyalty Program’s Change since Amazon acts unilaterally, like loyalty programs. In this case, most of the increased functionality seems to be in the data analytics of Amazon Seller App Enhancement

Historically, you could orient the graph to show you month or week, and dollar sales or unit sales. Now you can see a few more options in the screenshot below:

Amazon Seller App

 

I’d imagine that this is beneficial for folks that like to slice the data in multiple ways.

Additionally, you can click on a particular bar, and do further analytics by day.

Amazon Seller App

Again, interesting for those that like to do more data analytics on their phone.

Initial Feedback

I haven’t played around with the app too much, but others on twitter that have weighed in, have highlighted the app’s increased penchant to crash. My personal experience was that it seemed to be a data hog, and without a strong data connection, it was barely functional. In some of the places I source, I usually find that I have a single bar of signal, so this is a particular concern for me. That said, I think things are still pretty new, so it may be too soon to tell.

Conclusion

I’m glad to see that Amazon is continuing to improve the Amazon Seller App. I feel like in this case, they may have taken away some functionality that can be useful, and the new functionality, while nice, provides for a challenged experience. I think more data is great, but, to the same point, the point of the Amazon Seller App, in my opinion at least, is to facilitate sourcing and some business management functions. You have never been able to create shipments in the app, for example. That said, I’m not entirely sure why Amazon is enhancing the analytics, when there are other areas that they could be enhancing in the app, like enhanced recognition when scanning, perhaps an option to store data for faster scanning, list functionality, and more functionality in the “Inventory” menu, like a link to the listing within the app.

What do you think about the enhancements? Do you find the data analysis addition of particular value?

Amazon FBA adds Discounted Shipping Partner

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Amazon keeps adding features for Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) Sellers, in this case, Amazon FBA adds Discounted Shipping Partner. This has the potential to really help some, and doesn’t hurt anyone, a bonus in my opinion. Its amazing to see how much Amazon has changed shipping in the past year or so when I wrote the Shipping 101, Shipping 201, and updated shipping info posts. 

Amazon FBA adds Discounted Shipping Partner

Historically, Amazon has let you use your own shipping carrier, but they always had a preference for UPS. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve found UPS to be a great option. But, for those of you who may prefer FedEx, Amazon is now making it easier to choose them. Furthermore, it looks like Amazon now has a discounted rate with FedEx. Take a look:

Amazon FBA adds Discounted Shipping Partner

Amazon Shipping Service Choices

Conclusion

There has really been quite a bit of change with Amazon FBA when it comes to shipping. Most of it has been Amazon requiring more information like box level detail. But this latest development is definitely a positive. Who does this impact most? People who may not like using UPS, now have an option to get discounted rates with FedEx. Of course, every carrier operates differently, and every seller has their own preferences. In my opinion, more choice is a win for everyone. 

What do you think? Will you try using FedEx as your preferred carrier?

Amazon Restricts New Sellers from FBA Q4 2016

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In what may be the first time ever, Amazon Restricts New Sellers from FBA Q4 2016. This is a huge deal, both for new sellers that have wanted to jump into Amazon but hadn’t yet gotten around to sending in inventory.

All accounts indicate that Amazon has done this without any advance notice. Specifically if you haven’t sent your shipment in by 10 October, you won’t be able to send a shipment in until 19 December. Of course the initial reports of this came out late on 10 October, with more official reports coming out on 11 October. There’s already a short thread on Reddit of folks that are unhappy about this development.

Only so much Fulfillment Center space

The Bloomberg article references Amazon’s fulfillment center (FC) expansion–21 new warehouses this year through September 2016. The fact is, Amazon’s warehouses have been full for quite a while. This has been indicated by Amazon restricting shipment of products that sufficient quantities already existed in FCs, increasing FBA Storage fees, with even more changes, all geared toward getting slow selling units out of centers. After all, how could these cool little robots operate without having some space to move around?

Good for established sellers?

A lot of established sellers see this as a good thing. Fewer sellers to compete with for Amazon Prime buyers. In theory, this helps, especially considering ProPublica’s study saying that Amazon’s pricing algorithm favors Amazon and Prime Sellers over Merchant Fulfilled. For long time sellers, this is not a huge surprise. However, with the right undercutting, Merchant Fulfilled sellers can get the buy box, although that usually comes at a much lower profit. The likely increased number of Merchant Fulfilled sellers could shift the balance for the algorithm, but, it might not.

Still reason for concern for all sellers

This action, along with previous no-notice changes, such as brand restrictions are cause for concern. I’ve made the argument that Amazon is similar to Airline Frequent Flyer programs, in that they have all the power, and we have little leverage. The fact is, more and more, it is important to remember that things can change at any time. This is a very concerning reality, especially as many ramp up for Q4.

Wrapping Up

This is not the best of news for new sellers who have been looking at getting into utilizing Fulfillment by Amazon. The fact that Amazon restricts new sellers from FBA without any advance notice is awfully concerning for many. Hopefully this is the last of a string of less than positive actions, but, I suspect that there is still more to come. The real question for me is, whether these actions will help Amazon get the overfilled fulfillment centers under control.

What do you think of these latest developments?

Start Preparing for Amazon Prime Day 2016!

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A few days ago Amazon sent out a reminder to Start Preparing for Amazon Prime Day 2016!

While most of the action will be toward the bigger resellers who received invitations to propose a Prime Day promotion, the fact is, Prime Day generates a lot more traffic to Amazon, which is good for everybody! According to Amazon, sales were up 93%, and social media mentions were up 50% compared to the 30-day average. Full disclosure, those social media mentions were not all positive, but, as they say in marketing: any publicity is good publicity.

Here’s the part, looking back that struck me the most courtesy of Techcrunch:

Amazon customers ordered 34.4 million items across Prime-eligible countries, the retailer reports, breaking all Black Friday records with 398 items ordered per second.

Let me re-emphasize that: 398 items ordered per second. My friends, I have a hard time believing that all those items are lightning deals. More likely, the lightning and Prime Day deals draw folks in, and then they get to looking around. “Hmm, when was the last time I ordered coffee? dog food? Ooh, look at that iPad, it looks like a good deal, why not?” The logic can go on. Here’s an example from Amazon of what was sold:

Amazon Prime Day 2015 - Sold stuff

Amazon Prime Day 2015 – Sold Examples

Preparing for Amazon Prime Day

So what can you do to prepare? First, have all your stock into Amazon by 22 June 2016. Second, if you didn’t have Amazon ask you if you’d like to participate in a Prime Day promotion, that ship has sailed. However, having stock of anything you typically sell, in Amazon’s warehouses, and on sale is going to be key. The next question is: How close are you to the buy box? Figure that if the various tools, like ASINSpector say there are x sales per month, the conservative approach would be to divide those sales by 30 and then check competitor inventory. Example below:

ASINSpector 2

Use data like this, to determine your price. I would posit: If your desired price is within 10-20% of the buy box price, don’t change your price, unless there are sellers (either in quantity or high inventory) inside of 10% of the buy box price. With a breakout event like Amazon Prime Day, you could even go further outside of that range and still get decent sales.

Wrapping Up

Amazon Prime Day is a big deal. Various articles compare it to Black Friday — which is ironic, considering the conventional wisdom would say that Cyber Monday would be a bigger day. Long story short. This is like a rehearsal for the Fourth Quarter (Q4). The beauty of Amazon Prime day however, is that it is not necessarily about what is the hottest toy or gadget, I would argue, it is more about what folks want or need at the given time that they happen to click on Amazon.

Were you an Amazon Seller last year? Did you find the day to be better than the rest of January?

My Amazon Prime Day 2014 - for example

My Amazon Prime Day 2014 – for example

 

Amazon to restrict more Apple Products

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Mark this one as developing. Amazon has sent out e-mails to sellers of a number of Apple products’ ASIN’s, that come 2 June, they will no longer be permitted to sell them without manufacturer (Apple) approval.

On Twitter, Josh Lucas shared the news, and was kind enough to share the e-mail he received:

Apple Products being restricted

Apple Products being restricted

For now, it looks like the products are limited. The two ASIN’s in that e-mail are the Apple iPad Pro Smart Keyboard, and an Apple MacBook Pro (and in fact, some MacBook and MacBook Air products have been restricted for a while). I’ve also seen reports that the Apple Pencil is also restricted.

But wait, there’s more news about Apple Products on Amazon

As if the above news was not bad enough, Amazon seems to be doing an audit of UPC’s and associated identifying numbers. Also shared by Josh:

UPC Issue for Apple Products

UPC Issue for Apple Products

This product is again, an Apple MacBook, but I’ve also seen other products, including Apple Watch listings with a similar warning that the UPC, EAN, ASIN or JAN code doesn’t match the actual product. Some of it, seems to be derived from where you purchased the Apple products from–Apple has different model numbers for different countries. I ran into this issue a while back when I was reselling iPhones and the most popular listing was associated with the UK version, vs. the US. It took many messages back and forth with Amazon to get that clarified.

What does this all mean?

First, it is another reminder to always verify that you can list and ship a product before buying. Second, make sure that when you buy a product, it is really the product you intended to buy, and are listing under. I’ve had a couple of times, where I’ve bought stuff off of eBay and it came with a different product code, and this is not just for Apple products! One of those issues was a Cuisinart Griddler that came with a French product code (ended with FR), so be wary. The last thing I would offer is this: Don’t rely too heavily on reselling Apple products! There has been a lot of discussion over the past few months, that the margins are just not where they used to be, but they usually sell really fast, and the return rate is quite low/non-existant (at least not in my experience). But the fact remains, it is important to diversify.

Changes coming for Amazon’s FBA Fees in Q4!

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If you’re an Amazon Seller, you probably got an e-mail. If not, you can read all the gory detail of the changes to FBA fees in this post, or in the source article.

Monthly Inventory Changes

Amazon is perhaps a slave to its own success, when it comes to its Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service. The result, was back in March, Amazon started limiting quantities for particular ASINs. This made adding products not just to your inventory, but also to shipments, before buying very important. Well now Amazon, perhaps smartly so, is increasing the monthly storage fees. In the case of November and December, those fees are going to increase rather substantially, which means you will really want to be sure that your products are moving. Here’s the table:

New FBA Storage Fees

New FBA Storage Fees

Reduced Weight Handling FBA Fees in November and December

Perhaps to offset the additional storage fees, or just to incentivize attractive pricing, Amazon will be decreasing the weight handling fees. This isn’t as drastic as the increases in storage fees, but its a pretty nice gesture, and should certainly facilitate their goal of attractive pricing so things are sold in November and December. Here’s Standard size:

FBA Reduced Weight fees-Standard

FBA Reduced Weight fees-Standard

and here’s Oversize:

FBA Reduced Weight fees-Oversized

FBA Reduced Weight fees-Oversized

Like I said, not a huge savings, but something of a positive, since for the most part, I think we are all looking for a very quick sales velocity during the forth quarter.

Box Content Information Becomes Mandatory

Starting 1 November, 2016, Amazon will start penalizing those that don’t provide box content information. In fact, it was September of last year, that Amazon came out with an incentive for early adopters. I seem to think that they meant to require box content a whole lot sooner than 14 months later, so its not a huge surprise. Quite honestly, its not even a big deal, in my view, especially if you aren’t doing multiple boxes. If you are, its maybe a couple extra minutes. Again, nothing groundbreaking. And if that extra couple minutes is too much effort, Amazon is happy to charge you an extra $0.10 per unit January to October, and $0.15 per unit in November and December. Seems like a fair deal to me.

Preparing for Q4 – Determine Inventory Age and Coverage Needs

If you’ve made it this far, then I’ll give you more than just reporting the news. So as we prepare for the new storage fees, it is important first to determine your inventory age, the little graphic below illustrates how you can get the appropriate report – the easy string is: Seller Central > Reports > Fulfillment > Inventory Age > Request Download:

FBA-Determining Inventory Age

FBA-Determining Inventory Age

Amazon exports as a CSV file, but if you open the folder, you can select “Open With” then select Microsoft Excel. The key parts are in red, namely, the age of your inventory.

Now you know how long your inventory has been sitting at an FBA Fulfillment Center, but how much inventory should you be sending into Amazon? (And if you are doing any kind of scale and want to avoid fees – the answer is not “all of it”). You can find the data to make the right answer by going to Seller Central > Reports > Business Reports > Inventory in Stock

FBA - Determining Inventory Coverage

FBA – Determining Inventory Coverage

Obviously, you want to make sure you have enough inventory that you aren’t missing out on sales, but, that you’re not paying storage fees. There’s obviously some give and take, so you have to decide which you’re more willing to do – accept storage fees, or missed opportunities. If only it were that simple! Obviously competition plays into this too, but that is a post for another time.

Wrapping Up

Amazon’s announcement today isn’t unexpected. Quite simply, I figured it would’ve been much worse. Clearly FBA Fulfillment Centers have been reeling from a ton of slow moving inventory, so the fact that FBA fees are only raising the little they are, seems like we kind’ve dodge a bit of a bullet. It will certainly make things awfully interesting in November and December, when every day will matter (as if it didn’t before), and hopefully these increased fees and lower handling fees do not backfire and increase the amount of time from sale to ship. Time can only tell.

Are these increase fees surprising to you? Will they change your strategy for Q4?

PSA: Add a product to inventory before buying – Reselling

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There are a lot of things in reselling that you can’t prevent, like returns, waning interest in a product, and general market changes.

But there is one thing you can prevent, is having to return a product—or finding some other way to offload a product—because Amazon won’t let you sell it as new, or worse, won’t even let you send it into Amazon.

Restrictions on product conditions when selling

One of the common things that Amazon will do for some products (I’m looking at Samsung Galaxy Tablets here), is to restrict sellers from selling as new. There are ways around this, but the fact remains, when you have to sell a product as “Like New” you can’t price it higher than a product that is listed as “New.” You can try. You could even try putting comments in the condition description, but if you go too far, Amazon will catch you.

Samsung Galaxy Tab's can't be sold as new.

Samsung Galaxy Tab’s can’t be sold as new.

For my estimation purposes, I will discount the buy box price for new by as much as 20%. Meaning, if I can’t make my desired margin, selling at 20% lower than the buy box, I won’t go buy the product. I don’t sell a lot of “Like New” stuff as a result.

Shipping Restrictions

I first encountered this pretty early on in reselling, when I got an excellent deal on a Soda Stream machine. It was all the rage at the time. You could make your own soda, flavor it how you like it, and do it in the convenience of your own home! What more could you ask? Well, I think the component of the machine that gives you the fizzy bubbles, makes this product a Hazardous Material in Amazon’s eyes. They don’t want that thing anywhere near their warehouse, unless they purchased it themselves. For me, that was a frustrating day, when I had to take 10 of those units back to Kohls and explain, that despite the popularity, my huge extended family, had no desire for the product, and alas, my attempt at being a super generous son/brother/uncle/cousin was thwarted.

Restricted Shipping

Restricted Shipping

Another shipping restriction we’re seeing more and more, is that Amazon is restricting some products from being sent into FBA because, apparently, Amazon Fulfillment Centers (aka Warehouses) are too full! Online Selling Experiment has a good post on how you can check whether Amazon will let you send your products in, before, hopefully you buy.

Liquids in Glass Bottles

This was a new one for me, one which I encountered a week or two ago, when I sent in a very promising test product of barbecue sauce. I was very disheartened when I saw 6 of those products immediately tagged as “Distributor Damaged.” Like anyone, who takes pride in packing as much into a box as possible, I knew that these bottles of BBQ sauce were in pristine condition and shipped well packed, they could not have been Distributor Damaged.

So I put in a ticket, only to find out that Amazon doesn’t want things in glass bottles over 4 ounces that could fall from 6 feet, and make a big mess in their warehouse. Humorously, I paid Amazon to do the prep for the BBQ sauce, yet I guess they don’t even have the powers to properly protect a 6 ounce bottle of barbequey goodness.

Meltable Inventory

I wrote about Meltable Inventory last week – Amazon restricts any products that cannot withstand 100 degree temperatures from being shipped to, or stored in, Amazon warehouses, from 1 May to 30 September. That means, that great s’mores set that you can make a ton of money on for those sitting around campfires, is not going to be Fulfilled by Amazon during the summer.

Wrapping Up

The message is clear. Add a product to your inventory–whenever possible–before buying. It takes only a few seconds, and it makes it a lot easier when you start putting together shipping plans. It can also prevent you from having to do a bunch of returns, or otherwise dispose of products that you cannot send into Amazon.

Have you ever purchased a product that you couldn’t have Fulfilled by Amazon? What did you do?

PSA – Remove Meltable Inventory from FBA now!

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Fulfillment by Amazon

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.

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