Massive Scale Cross-Border Amazon Arbitrage

[GoldFibre]

2023 Recap​

I ended the year with record weekly orders and profit.

I started the year with no personally owned business and high hopes for my full time job. I have a senior position in a medium sized company and I have an incentive scheme which is something like stock options. The company’s January results were great but after that the company performed poorly.

Over the course of the year it became clear that my three year incentive plan that I worked so hard for would be worth absolutely nothing. What’s more is that the company was not pursuing a strategy in line with my incentive structure, so I was stuck with just my salary and potentially an outsized share of the blame if the shareholders ever decided that enough was enough.

Since my anticipated windfall was out the window I looked for a way to supplement my income. I had an idea about automated product scraping plus dropshipping. My first attempt was a Shopify store selling beauty products. I had it up and running for a few months with zero sales and a few hundred dollars in ad spend. This was all before I started posting here.

Later I heard about this Amazon business model from a friend, and the very same day I dropped the Shopify store and started building the Amazon bot. Even though there were already established competitors in the field, I thought that I could carve out some of the market for myself through superior software and processes.

The bulk of the development work happened during six weeks over the summer when by chance I was living alone rather than with my family. Especially with development projects, extended periods of focus are great for productivity and I made the most of mine.

This business draws on several skills I have gained during my slowlane career: software development, logistics, and vendor/partner relationship management. These saved me some time on the learning curve, but I think that anybody could accomplish the same as me, regardless of past experience.

There were also many new things to learn, especially the peculiarities of working with Amazon, which is something like driving a clown car through a minefield with a blindfold on and a demon on your shoulder that only whispers lies. That’s not a complaint at all — it’s a level playing field since all my competitors have to deal with the same environment. But the environment itself is ridiculous in many ways.

The business is scalable to maybe an additional 5x in its current Amazon-only form, but this form violates the C in CENTS. One change of policy from Amazon could completely eliminate my business. One mistake in my product filters could trigger some automatic block of my account. One lost consol from my vendor could get me de-listed for not fulfilling on time.

So I’m often thinking about how to allocate my limited time to invest: either grow the existing revenue stream, which is easier but doesn’t mitigate my risk, or grow a new revenue stream which is much harder but does mitigate my risk.

But binary choices like these are often just delusions we create to discourage ourselves from taking action. There are infinite possibilities in the world, infinite ways to make money, and infinite ways to look at the same situation. I need to accomplish both goals: to grow the business and to mitigate the risks. There is a way, and I can find it if I make the effort.

My main perceived challenge is finding the time to devote to improving my systems considering I also have a full time job and a family, much like the main characters in the Great Rat Race Escape . I’ve already made adjustments in both of those spheres to try to free up time, but it is never enough and I never run out of things to work on. Again I am probably delusional and need to take an objective look at things to achieve what I want.

I want to move at 10x speed and I have full confidence that with that speed I can make 10x profit and even structure the company for a sale. This is all possible in the span of one year, in 2024. If it doesn’t happen then it is only because I chose the slowlane out of fear. And if it does happen then it is because I manifested it through directed effort.

Happy New Year.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[MJ DeMarco]

Upgraded to gold, the consistency and process is off the charts. Your treating this like a science, which many fail to understand that is what business is.

 

[GoldFibre]

Hi guys,

A few weeks ago I started working on my latest project, and I will chronicle my progress here to help keep me more accountable.

The project is to use a lot of automation and a bit of logistics to do retail arbitrage between Amazon regions on different continents. This is not a new business idea, and actually there are about 20-30 players doing the same thing in my market. Some of them I even know personally and professionally. But I think I can create an advantage because none of them are technical and they have to outsource their development, while I think I can do it much better myself.

Basically I have to write automation software that manages millions of listings on Amazon to maximize sales. Additionally, my logistics costs have to be low enough that I can compete.

Three weeks ago, starting from nothing, and having never used Amazon's Selling Partner API before, I sketched some architecture and started work:

• In the first week I made something that searched and profiled new products to add. I also sourced logistics partners and set up SOPs
• In the second week I did the automated listing creation and launched it last Thursday night
• And this week I optimized the throughput of the system, fixed lots of bugs, and created some UI for myself to monitor things

There are five workers running in parallel that perform one step of the process and the push to the queue for the next one. The real challenge here was the Selling Partner API because it is not well-documented and it is not standard in any way. I found many surprising issues while working with it. I was happy each time I found one of these nice Easter eggs, because it meant another barrier to entry for potential competitors. My perspective is that the worse the API is, the better the result will be for me when I figure it out.

Anyway, I'm currently measuring my progress with the number of 'BuyBox Winners', which means that my listing is the featured listing on the page, and it is actually visible to potential customers.

On Monday I had 142 BuyBox Winners. Right now (Saturday night) I have 27,567 BuyBox Winners, with 20k of those added today.

And I have one sale so far, which is nice, but that isn't the focus right now.

Maybe 27k sounds like a lot, but this is on 126k listings and I understand that my competitors have 2-3 million. So I'm not at their scale yet.

My goal for the week (by tomorrow) is to hit 50k BuyBox Winners. The system is on pace for that in its current state. So tomorrow I will do some cleanup of my codebase and make a plan for next week.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

I've only heard about retail arbitrage with local stores providing the inventory. It sounds like you're trying to exploit regional pricing differences and somehow pocketing money. If purchases are being made from Amazon sellers (???) and have to be shipped directly by your store, it doesn't seem like there would be enough margin to arbitrage.

What's the 10 year old child summary of what you're doing?

This is my best try at a 10 year old child summary:

I have a robot that finds products in the US and puts them on Amazon sites in other countries.

The products aren't available in those countries, and some people are willing to pay more to get them.

I save money on shipping by combining small packages together into one big package.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Your consistency in approach reminds me of this thread...

GOLD! - EXECUTION - NEWSLETTER - Still not rich? Here's why you aren't, and what to do about it.

Do you think becoming a millionaire, or better, 8-figure+ multimillionaire, is just a fantasy? Impossibly difficult? It isn't when you change your perspective from years to days. These four charts are the most profound understanding you can give your future self. If only someone had given me...

www.thefastlaneforum.com

You're on a path to wealth. $650/day in profit is $225K a year.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Controllable Unlimited Leverage​

Ok so I've sat around for a few days with no sales, telling myself there is nothing I can do, when actually I know there is something I can do and I've just been refusing to act.

So after some harsh self-talk I immediately confirmed my five orders that are arrived at destination, even though they can't be picked up until Saturday. This is fine because of the way the milestones work in Amazon fulfillment. Everything will still make it on time, but my account gets opened two days early.

As soon as I confirmed the first order the account was back online. And I could have done this the second that my account got disabled on Monday. Lesson learned.

Then I thought to myself 'What other simple thing am I completely aware of that will multiply my business but I'm refusing to do it?'

With a single line of code I can list only items that are FBA.

If I make this simple change I will only have orders on items with shorter fulfillment times,

which means my account will be restricted less often,

which means my account's open order limit will go up more quickly,

which means I make more sales and more money,

which means I can later list the full catalog without risk of restriction.

So I did it.

'What else can I do?'

I can confirm my orders earlier in the process, since it doesn't affect the final delivery date.

If I make this simple change I get to confirm my orders earlier,

which means I will have fewer pending orders at any given time,

which means my account will be restricted less often,

which means my account's open order limit will go up more quickly,

which means I make more sales and more money,

which means I can later list the full catalog without risk of restriction.

So I did it.

International Shipping Costs​

Next I listed out a bunch of things that I could be doing, mostly coding tasks, then tried to sort them all by impact and value.

Ultimately the most important thing is lowering my international shipping costs. This outweighs all of the coding tasks put together BY FAR. I've also known this for a while and even wrote it in this forum thread over two weeks ago. It is even written on a post-it an stuck against the wall in my office!

And yet I did not do anything about it for weeks.

I even had dinner with my vendor last week and did not raise the topic.

He has even repeatedly asked me what he can do to help and I did not mention it, despite it being the only thing in my head.

Enough is enough. So I immediately sent some messages to my vendor to open the negotiation. I explained the business situation, the target pricing and even offered a different structure that guarantees them more revenue in exchange for the lower marginal rate.

I'm sure I will get somewhere with just a couple of text messages and a phone call or two. And it is going to make a big difference to the business.

Prohibited Items / Restricted Brands​

Besides increasing revenue, I also need to manage my account health, because I'm shotgunning product offers out there, and some of them result in warnings. Warnings can eventually lead to account restrictions. Account restrictions mean less revenue.

I already know what item types are prohibited, and I already have some brands I know I need to blacklist.

So I started working on a filter for this.

A Bug​

I found a race condition with my API refresh token that caused sporadic crashes, so I refactored to eliminate it.

Somehow I don't have any mental block against doing a bit of coding to fix important things, in contrast to everything above in this post.

Mental Fortitude​

I'm disappointed it took me so long to wake up on some of these issues, but I'm glad that I finally woke up.

I need to be tenacious when it comes to business, because nobody is going to do it for me. And if I don't do it then what makes me think I will beat my competition?

 

[Spenny]

I'm telling you, if you can keep your head above water & keep plugging away at getting these issues solved, it's going to be an explosive growth. Don't give up. I look at your weekly growth, and you were absolutely raking it in. I'm sure you can get back to those days.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• Get country 1 Amazon seller account unblocked DONE
• Get Google Merchant Center / Google Shopping / Google Ads accounts unblocked NOT DONE

I woke up to the nice surprise that my account has been reinstated. Thanks to an escalation from my account manager, the decision was overturned, without appeal.

I spoke with him and we decided to only list recommended ASINs, so I received a list of about 600k and will be deleting the rest. This means my catalog will shrink by more than 50% initially. Revenue and profit will also shrink but we can build it up over time.

I also got the invoice from my supplier and it was more than they initially told me. I also realized that I’m failing to take tax into account and so I was underestimating my costs a bit.

I want to make a claim for the damaged goods, but when I first mentioned it to them they told me I didn’t buy insurance. I want to push the issue with them.

I had 45k USD locked up in the account and was able to release all but 2k of that by requesting immediate payment. Now I can pay off the credit card and my suppliers.

 

[GoldFibre]

Upgraded to gold, the consistency and process is off the charts. Your treating this like a science, which many fail to understand that is what business is.

Thank you!

I was actually quite inspired by your book and I am always thinking about how I’m trading my time.

This is on the wall of my office and I look at it every day:

 

[freek]

I looked through some premium Shopify themes and found one that I think is a really good fit - it is focused on large stores and has good search functionality. Since I have millions of products, search needs to come first. I started customizing it and finished the product page, and then worked on a simple home page to start with. Then I purchased the theme for $380 and published.

How fast you are doing things is amazing! This whole thread is just execution, execution and action everyday, a perfect example and a kick up the a$$ for me. Thank you

 

[biophase]

Today's Stats​

Active Offers   81,599

Revenue              0 USD
Profit               0 USD

Workweek Goal​

Automate more of the fulfillment process

Daily Goals​

Create AWBs via API

Workweek Goal​

There are several opportunities to automate parts of the fulfillment process, so I'm going to start knocking those off one by one. This work will get reused once I eventually replace my fulfillment Google Sheet with an OMS.

Create AWBs via API​

The API docs were pretty straightforward. First I stubbed out all the calls I think I will use. Then I made the access token refresh and then worked on the create AWB API. The only real business logic is mapping the city/state values between Amazon's format and the courier's format.

And then I realized where I got stuck earlier trying to import orders - address and contact information is PII and there is some sort of authorization delegation involved that I couldn't sort out before. So I went back to the documentation to try to figure it out.

It turns out there was an option in the app settings to apply for access to PII and you have to fill out a lengthy security questionnaire. So I did that and now it is going through a manual review. Until that completes I won't be able to finish this feature.

Offer Ramp-Up​

I let the bot ramp up offers while I was at the office all day. The current cap is 100k offers.

Account Health​

Sixth day of featured offer ineligibility.

Congrats on sticking to this by posting everyday and analyzing and solving your problems.

One day you’ll realize that you are way too smart and dedicated to be doing what you’re currently doing.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

1. DONE Renegotiate international logistics rates
2. WIP Get Amazon Ads account unblocked

Update​

I updated my pricing to reflect my lower costs on the international logistics, and it will take 2-3 days to finish updating all my listings. I think my final prices should be 10-15% lower, depending on the weight vs product cost of each item.

My automated rating requests are working well. I had zero ratings on my entire account up until I started this, and now I have three five star reviews, which should hopefully influence buyers to choose me over some competitors that have terrible reviews.

I'm thinking about improving the customer experience even more by automating shipping updates. Customers often don't understand why the item is not marked as shipped, even though they ordered it a week earlier. I can make this clear in the automated mail and also give them more accurate delivery estimates.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

I'm guessing profit of about 670 USD.

Weekly Goals​

1. DONE Renegotiate international logistics rates
2. WIP Get Amazon Ads account unblocked

Update​

Still traveling. Will be back home tomorrow evening.

It feels a bit odd to continue making money while I'm on vacation. But maybe this is a preview of what like would be like if I left the full time job and still made enough money for a vacation-like lifestyle.

A few things are bouncing around in my head:

At what point do I look into getting a VA to handle customer service and other things that aren't possible to fully automate?

I looked at salaries for VAs in the Philippines and I'm looking at ~1,500 USD per month for a full-time employee. Right now I definitely don't need full-time. So maybe another option is to find part time and pay through an agency. Probably I will end up with a higher hourly fee but lower overall cost.

I think the correct answer here is to wait as long as possible and automate as much as possible before committing to going from zero to one employee.

Should I switch country 2 to the more expensive, but faster shipping to see if it will improve sales, which are only 10% of country 1?

Alternatively, I can provide multiple shipping options on Amazon itself. That would complicate operations a bit but will probably be an improvement over what I have now.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[MJ DeMarco]

Looks like The Commandment of Control has bit you in the a$$.

I hope you get this resolved soon, your progress and consistency is admirable.

 

[GoldFibre]

Surprise! I have zero Fast-Mover Winners. I actually have zero BuyBox Winners at all.

Right after I got three(!) sales in the morning Amazon automatically set my account to 'holiday mode' to block new orders. This is because I had too many unfulfilled orders as a new seller and they want to make sure I deliver them within their SLA before reopening my account. Since it will take at least a week to deliver from overseas, I won't have any more sales or BuyBox Winners this week.

And now that this week's goal is effectively impossible to achieve, I'm switching it from 1,000 Fast-Mover Winners to 20,000 Fast-Mover Listings. So when my account eventually comes back from holiday it will have many more good listings ready and waiting.



Progress:

• Discussed w/ Amazon account manager about 'holiday mode' and also about profiling strategies to reduce the risk of IP infringement claims - I already have one on my account
• Added a 'brand blacklist' feature to my bot to help with the IP infringement
• Got more domestic delivery quotes and lowered the cost a further 15%
• Set up a call with the delivery provider to sign the final contract and get their web portal access - I need this to generate the package labels
• Refined my delivery cost estimation code to handle the lower cost as well as the weight breaks
• Improved the order fulfillment Google Sheet with some additional columns requested by the international logistics partner
• Signed up for an Amazon Prime business credit card, which gives 5% cash back on the first 150k USD of spend at Amazon.com. This is the best credit card to lower my procurement costs
• Doubled the number of keywords in rotation to help reach my goal

 

[GoldFibre]

Weekly Update​

After a decline in the previous week from losing the buy box eligibility, this week is back to the positive trend. It's the most orders and the most profit of any week. And I think that due to all the automation work I've done recently, I've actually spent less time on procurement and fulfillment than in the past couple of weeks. So that's a good sign for scalability.

The key to the current growth is still increasing my active offers. And this is totally on autopilot for at least several weeks because of all the brands I have in the queue.

The other big lever for growth is to lower my international logistics cost, which is the matter of nailing down my partner and forcing a negotiation. Somehow I rarely get ahold of him, and when I do he is able to put off these discussions, maybe not for the obvious reason but nonetheless I'm not making progress. With one word he could lower my overall costs 10%, which should allow me to lower my costs without sacrificing profit per item, which should have an exponential effect on my overall profit.

There are also some speculative growth levers:

• Opening country 3
• Using Amazon Ads
• Opening an independent online store

Among these, I would say that Amazon Ads is the highest leverage option, because it's just a matter of configuration and it can be highly automated. However, my account has been blocked for a long time and my account manager in Amazon is not giving me the attention I need to make progress.

It seems I've got a common theme with my relationships in that I'm not getting what I want out of my suppliers.

So this coming week I think I'm going to commit to solving these two problems:

1. Renegotiate international logistics rates
2. Get Amazon Ads account unblocked

Even if I get zero coding done, if I complete these two business tasks I'm guessing I can double my current profit figures.

I've got a magic number in mind - this number is 1,000 USD in gross profit per day. If I can hit this consistently for a few months then I will consider dropping my full time job and focusing entirely on my own businesses. This week I made 319 USD per day. It's crazy to think that this magic number is not too far away.

 

[BizyDad]

Wow all of this stuff is very impressive, I just finished reading the Millionaires Fastlane and I want to do something along the lines that you are doing. Right now all I know is C++ for Unreal Engine (The tool used to make movies and games such as fortnite) and I want to learn more. How did you learn about all of this API stuff and how to make bots? I am clueless to all of these things and I want to learn more about things like these. I was planning to start learning HTML, CSS, and Javascript so I know how to make websites and things of the sort but I don't know where to go from there, I am just looking for some guidance as to how you learned about Amazons API in a week, and how you learned to write scripts that automate your processes. What languages did you use to make these? What is your education background? What education platform do you use to learn things (e.g. Udemy or YouTube)? And how much time did you put in to this? As for me, my education right now is highschool level. I have yet to learn about MJ's list of things that everyone should know:

"• Interest rates
• Taxable and non-taxable yields
• Amortization of mortgages
• The balancing of a check book
• Basic percentage calculations
• Calculating return on investment
• Why stocks rise and fall
• Why a guaranteed 15% return on a bank CD is screaming, “scam!” • How stock options work, such as calls and puts
• Why insurance exists
• How a mutual fund works • What bonds are and how they rise and fall • Global currency"

So this is something I should get to learning. MJ also mentioned C corporations, S Corporations, and LLC's, which are another thing that I don't know about. So I just have a lot of stuff to do and I don't know where to start, I guess I'll just start by learning the things that MJ thinks everyone should know. I didn't mean for this to be a personal dump of information that most of you don't care about, I'm just trying to request some guidance as you seem you know what you're doing. Thanks

This is the kind of thing that you should start your own thread about, not try to get a busy person to teach you every little factor of business.

Most of the answers to this can be found with Google searches. Start there...

And in all of this, I think you missed one of the most basic things that MJ teaches.

What value are you bringing to the world? What is a problem that you can fix for other people that they will pay you to fix?

If you don't have an answer to that, you don't have the start of a business and the rest of this stuff doesn't matter as much.

Hope that helps.

 

[xShepherdx]

@GoldFibre this is one of my favorite threads to check in on because of your relentless execution and how open you are about your challenges and goals.

I'm not sure I even understand your business but I've learned a ton just by seeing how you respond to challenges and set goals for yourself. You're a huge inspiration, keep it up!!

And that sucks about the possible COVID. I hope it doesn't hit you too hard and you're able to get back to 100% quickly!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Andy Black]

after that I want to set up some Google Ad campaigns manually to start pushing some traffic.

Following...

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Andy Black]

So I've read this entire thread over a few days and have to say kudos for the sheer grit/hustle shown.

However I cannot help but notice from the get go this venture doesn't really fit fastlane ideals. You have very little control (and in fact rely on Amazon itself for the bulk of your products too - at least I think so but little fuzzy here so could be completly wrong). Every other post is a reminder of this in other ways (Amazon completly shutting you down over and over again).

I can't help but wonder if you would've put this effort (and future efforts) into something more closely following concepts mentioned in the fastlane book how much better it would've been. Though I am at least a little hopeful from the posts where you mentioned you may try to directly source some of the items you are re-selling.

/end my two cents

Regarding your wifi troubles by the way if your laptop has an ethernet port you can go wired very easily - checkout powerline adapters. They let you put your internet signal through your electrical outlets (as insane/weird as that sounds).

I have similar concerns but think @GoldFibre will figure out how to sell the high volume/margin products from his own site eventually.

I worked for a company doing paid search arbitrage. They bought 1m visitors a day via Google Ads and sent them to crappy landing pages where they made money when people clicked Adsense or Yahoo ads to leave. €120k/day spend for €150k/day revenue.

One day the team of 35 Google Ads specialists went into work and all the Google Ads accounts had been suspended. They all had to be let go. (Thankfully I'd moved on at that stage.)

I always wondered why the company never made better use of the data they acquired. If these arbitrage campaigns for, say, care hire in the US were working enough to be profitable with that low value add model, then become an affiliate and setup a price comparison site. Or partner with a large car hire company and get paid per lead or sale.

In all the years they ran getting 1m visitors a day they never even captured a single email address. Imagine all the emails they could have collected and sent similar offers to over the years?

@GoldFibre... you're not just making revenue and profits. You're buying super valuable data. What can you build that's independent of Amazon so if you're system stops working you'd just shrug and work on fixing it while other revenue was still coming in?

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[Spenny]

This badass thread - reminds me to do better.

The Amazon issue is nuts. They don't even seem to care. Keep persisting & I'm sure you'll persevere.

 

[biophase]

Yeah I could try to juice my orders with a loss-leader, but the problem right now is that I'm not allowed to win any BuyBoxes. So even if I put a low price, it gets buried by Amazon and the vast majority of people that come to the product page won't see my price.

In order to use a new account I should have another legal entity. This would cost me $1,500 and take about a month. There is also a risk that if I use the same IP address to connect to both accounts Amazon will cross-apply the restrictions from the first one to the second one.

I find it interesting that the majority of your orders have issues. Is this because your competitors are filtering out these “problem” listings and not selling on them, so you’re the only option for the buyer?

If so, you aren’t competitive on any “legit” listings so far and are only getting orders because you’re the only option.

 

[BizyDad]

The amount of stick-to-it-ness being displayed here is fantastic. Solving problem after problem. Figuring things out as you go. Love it.

 

[MitchC]

Really interesting thread

Your margins are much better than I expected

This is just so opposite of how I would and most people would approach ecommerce but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong

Interesting

 

[msufan]

Today's Stats​

Profit                   36 USD

​

Digital Ads​

Both ad accounts are still blocked even though I disabled and archived all my campaigns.

Country 2 Vendor​

I have a cost saving solution for the moment, but transit time is still the same.

Coding​

Got a lot of coding time in. I was refactoring a lot of the core logic to support multiple marketplaces at once.

Since I was revisiting a lot of 'old' code, I took the opportunity to add some things I had wanted but never took the time to implement. The biggest one is to return an explanation of every update outcome, because there are so many possibilities and it isn't so clear sometimes why things are happening.

I did a lot of manual testing updating individual ASINs and examining the results before turning this on for the bot.

This refactoring actually slows down the bot because it has to check both country markets for competition, but I think on balance it is going to earn me more return than if I had kept it with Amazon's marketplace sync feature I was using before.

Account Health​

• Country 1
  • Account Health: At Risk
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: No (third day)
• Country 2
  • Account Health: Healthy
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes

Honestly with getting up near $1K of profit per week despite lots of account health issues, feels like you could be poised for a big breakthrough soon.

 

[amp0193]

So I'm planning to visit them this week and do a process improvement workshop. I think we are at a ~2% error rate now, and we should be at 0.1% or so.

Great. Nothing like eyes on the process to see what’s happening for real and help improve it.

I’ve done the “ohno circle” a couple of times in my own warehouse (basically, stand in one spot for hours and just observe), and I always end the exercise with pages of notes.

 

[The-J]

Today's Stats​

View attachment 52619

Weekly Goals​

1. DONE Renegotiate international logistics rates
2. WIP Get Amazon Ads account unblocked

Update​

I updated my pricing to reflect my lower costs on the international logistics, and it will take 2-3 days to finish updating all my listings. I think my final prices should be 10-15% lower, depending on the weight vs product cost of each item.

My automated rating requests are working well. I had zero ratings on my entire account up until I started this, and now I have three five star reviews, which should hopefully influence buyers to choose me over some competitors that have terrible reviews.

I'm thinking about improving the customer experience even more by automating shipping updates. Customers often don't understand why the item is not marked as shipped, even though they ordered it a week earlier. I can make this clear in the automated mail and also give them more accurate delivery estimates.

I knew this would be a good thread to watch. Keep going!

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• PARTIAL Solve working capital issues
• PARTIAL Speed up new listing processor (add more API keys)
• Add more remote working features to web app
• Unblock Amazon Ads accounts (carryover from last week)

Working Capital​

I called AMEX to try to raise my limit, but the request was rejected. So I asked what other options I have and I was able to transfer some credit limit from an old credit card I never use to the Amazon one. Now my credit limit is about 5k USD higher than before, but I actually need about 50k if I stay at my current monthly revenue without growth. With growth maybe I should have at least 100k.

But then I realized that the 5% cash back deal is only applicable on the first 120k USD each year, so I don't even want to use this card after a few months into 2024. I need a hierarchy of cards to use that maximize the benefits of the spend.

I have other credit cards that I don't use and they have plenty of credit. I just keep the accounts open because it is supposed to improve your credit score to have long-lived accounts. I made a spreadsheet of the cards, their credit limits and their benefits to create a sequence of which one to use. After the Amazon card benefits are used up, my next best option is 1.5% cash back.

I also researched other cards that have Amazon-specific benefits and applied for the Prime Visa card. It looks like this one has the 5% cash back offer with no spending limit. This is with Chase, where I have some other cards. So if I get that then I can transfer my limits from existing cards to the Amazon one and hopefully have plenty of credit to finance the procurement.

New API Keys​

To get more API keys I need access to more Amazon Seller accounts. I have six of them connected to my bot now, but the last time I tried to register a new account it was rejected without reason.

I tried to sign up again and should know within a day or two if it worked.

Performance Update​

When I got home I updated all my order information and got my final weekly stats, which were a bit higher than my earlier rough estimation:

 

[El1mination]

This is the kind of thing that you should start your own thread about, not try to get a busy person to teach you every little factor of business.

Most of the answers to this can be found with Google searches. Start there...

And in all of this, I think you missed one of the most basic things that MJ teaches.

What value are you bringing to the world? What is a problem that you can fix for other people that they will pay you to fix?

If you don't have an answer to that, you don't have the start of a business and the rest of this stuff doesn't matter as much.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for this, sorry, next time I have big things like this I'll create my own thread.

 

[BizyDad]

Weekly Update​

View attachment 52884
The business continues to grow on its own at a pretty good pace.

My goal this past week was to launch country 3, but my application got rejected on the last day. I will look for other ways to get this done as well as apply to other countries. I did modify my bot to handle a wider variety of countries, although a few more modifications are required to have it working perfectly.

So my goal for the coming week is to launch any new country.

Weekly Update​

View attachment 53032

There was a dip in orders and total profit this week. I suppose it could be that we are past the peak Christmas shopping time. In any case my bot continues to add listings, so the long term trend should continue to go up.

I failed in my goal of launching a new marketplace and kind of floundered around during the week. One thing I did do is set up a basic Shopify store as a second sales channel, although it only has a few products on it right now.

For my lack of productivity, I have the lame excuse that I got sick and barely slept, but it's still a lame excuse. If there had been a gun to my head I could have found a way to get it done.

I also got into some unproductive, time-wasting habits of watching YouTube and playing chess. This week I'm going to put myself on a complete ban of these things and report out on whether or not I held up the ban each day.

As for what to accomplish in the coming week, I want to find a way to get a large number of products onto the Shopify store, including images, descriptions and prices. This product sync doesn't have to be the final solution, just something to get started. And then after that I want to set up some Google Ad campaigns manually to start pushing some traffic.

Boy these updates are starting to get reeeeally interesting.

Look at these growth figures. Out of curiosity, how much of this is seasonal buying because of Christmas?