Massive Scale Cross-Border Amazon Arbitrage

[Andy Black]

Set up initial Google Ads campaigns - NO

Don't overthink it.

Get something setup with a $5/day budget. Then you're in motion.

MARKETING - The Shortest Google Ads Tutorial Ever

It took me HOURS to create this. Let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions. Hope it helps! View: https://youtu.be/7z7kx3kJC4M EDIT: Once you're running watch these two short videos to make sense of the metrics...

www.thefastlaneforum.com

 

[Andy Black]

Do you find that letting Google figure out keywords and ad headlines works better than trying to do it manually? Is that good advice for beginners or even for experts like yourself?

I prefer to create the ad headlines. But if you're dealing with lots of pages then it can be a good tactic to let Google figure it out.

 

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

[Andy Black]

I already have thousands of product pages, so this is an interesting idea to help find which products are worth investing more time into.

The simple way is to create Dynamic Search Ads pointing at a wildcard containing all your product pages. E.g. goldfibre.com/products/*

I prefer to create an ad group and ad for each dynamic ad target (page). Then I can easily see the search terms for each page, and could even amend the ad description if I wanted. It gives more control and visibility when you create campaigns more granularly.

 

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

[Andy Black]

After reading up on Dynamic Ads I realized I was not doing it properly, and so then set everything up the correct way. I switched to manual CPC and took an extra low bid since I have an extremely wide product range.

Set a low budget too and watch as search terms start coming through. You can then create keyword driven campaigns targeting high potential search terms (and maybe add them as negatives to your DSA campaign).

 

[freek]

Your consistency is amazing, very inspiring. Thank you for taking the time to write an update every day. Although it's a smaller market i could help you with the required documents for the netherlands.

 

[Tiago]

2023 Recap​

View attachment 53259
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.

Great way of thinking. It's not all black and white, there's nuance to decisions. Instead of mitigate risk vs grow business, it's grow and mitigate.

Thanks for sharing your thought processes here, excited to see what you'll create in 2024.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

2 orders for about 40 USD profit (country 2)

Weekly Goals​

• Get account reactivated NOT DONE

My script finished deleting the list of 'risky' ASINs I got from Amazon and I resubmitted my POA, but it got rejected again. I am still waiting on a more comprehensive list and once I've deleted those too I will try resubmitting again.

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.

I've been putting off Shopify integration and so I decided to pick a relatively simple task and do that one first. The product descriptions that were imported by the third party app included html that sometimes had inline styling that made the text overlap itself. So I wrote a script that cycled through all the products on my Shopify store, strip out all the style attributes from the html, and then updated the product.

Some follow up things I need to add:

• Set compare to price
• Update price based on DB
• Update availability based on DB
• Set product tag based on Amazon product types
• Create collections based on distinct Amazon product types

I coded some of these but didn't finish testing them today.

 

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

[Andy Black]

This is a good idea.

The dynamic ad was only hitting 5 out of thousands of product pages, so on my to-do list today I was going to make a new dynamic ad and see if it picked up more of my catalog.

But I also know which of my brands and items sell the best on the Amazon marketplace, so I could make some specific ads for those as you suggest. For the brands I might want to make brand specific pages as well.

I understand you're building a machine that makes sales and revenues with thousands or millions of products. That's what that arbitrage company I worked for did too.

Just consider that the data you're gathering could be the more valuable output of your system.

I liken it to a farmer planting crops across thousands of acres and spotting some of the crops growing better because they're in darker soil. It turns out those crops love oil and you stumbled across a few oil wells. Should you start drilling for oil or just keep planting crops in more fields?

 

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

[MJ DeMarco]

This thread is giving me severe anxiety. I'm so sorry this is happening to you.

 

[StrikingViper69]

SaaS doesn’t need to be complicated - someone here posted a while ago about a web version of Mail merge that was making the developer 5 figures a month.

Are you wanting to move away from your current arbitrage endeavour?

 

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

[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goals​

• Work a total of 20 hours (33 / 20)
• Get a new revenue stream up and running DONE

5-7am​

I reviewed some competitor sites that do the same thing.

Go index me!

Makes sure all my pages are indexed by Google

goindex.me

I explored that competitor site a bit. His landing page is really nice, but once you get into the app it turns out there is no free version that is promised, the UI is broken in a few ways and the product is a bit confusing. He has 30k+ backlinks but estimated traffic under 10 visitors per day. It turns out he signed up for some affiliate service and this is where all the backlinks are coming from. I guess this doesn't guarantee much traffic.

I don't know if this is making any money or not

INDEXED.pro | Fast + Auto URL Indexing Tool for Google SEO​

This is a team of one tech guy and one marketeer. They had 50 customers pre-launch. Maybe those came from running ads to a landing page to collect email addresses. They spent two months building it, which seems about right with what I was able to do in a week.

Their X account doesn't have much traction, so I am assuming that most of the customers came from paid marketing.

I think their landing page is even better than the first competitor. However, they don't have any free version or show you anything about the product outside of the landing page. Once you log in they just put the subscription buttons in front and every link points you back to them.

Is this a good or a bad thing? On the one hand you are pushing the issue to get the customer to pay, but on the other hand you don't really know if the service will work or not, so you have to go by the social proof on the homepage.

Both sites rely on a service account key from Google Cloud, which is a pretty techy thing to require. In the FAQs they said it is required to make the service work. It would be great to find a way around this to make it easier for average people to use the product.

They have some ambitious plans to build a bunch of SaaS products this year. They have posted this table:
The table doesn't show that their first product was a flop and didn't make any money. This is assuming that every product afterwards will make money, but not as much as their indexing tool. I hope they can do it - they will definitely be on the fastlane if they can!

My Site: indexfast.app​

When I started looking at these sites I was initially overwhelmed by how good the landing pages were.

But now a few things reassure me:

1. The product is not that sophisticated - I can build it
2. I have a couple of ideas for improving on both of them, mainly the onboarding experience
3. Someone is actually making money doing this and with a similar time investment as mine

So I think for this idea to work I need to drive traffic somehow and make sure the product onboarding experience is so simple a caveman can do it. Maybe if the service account key is needed to make it work properly, there is a basic version that works without it, so the customer gets a feel for it. Then you tell them "In order to make this scale 100x we need to follow these steps." and walk them through it.

Another idea is to do this in different languages. Both of these sites only work in English, which is the biggest market, but maybe there will be less competition with a site in a different language.

I wonder if the first competitor I looked at is an example of a tech guy building something and then giving up or not putting enough marketing behind the idea. The products are essentially the same, but it seems like the second one is doing much better. The difference is really the marketing.

9-11am​

Using the competitor as a benchmark I redid the landing page.

Here is a before and after screenshot:

8-9pm​

Transactional work.

 

[Subsonic]

You are the single most consistent person I've seen here in regards to posting.

As I like to say, consistency is the only way to guarantee success.

I am super curious to see where this thread is going and when you are going to reach 200k a month.

 

[Andy Black]

You are the single most consistent person I've seen here in regards to posting.

As I like to say, consistency is the only way to guarantee success.

I am super curious to see where this thread is going and when you are going to reach 200k a month.

Agreed. Head down, doing the work, writing up what he's doing and the results.

 

[theag]

Sounds very interesting!

Since you mention logistics, I assume you will actually stock some products yourself instead of just dropshipping?

Did some quick research and found tools like PriceYak - the Original Dropshipping Automation Software. I assume that the competitors you mention probably use something prebuilt like that?

Seems like a business model driven by efficiency and whoever can afford the smallest margin will win. So having your own software definitely helps. I'd guess that the auto-ordering will be the bottleneck at scale.

 

[Andy Black]

Welcome to the forum @GoldFibre. I see you're already an INSIDERS and posted an interesting insight in the Earnout thread. I'm curious about your background and end goal as you've clearly got IT skills and also work for a company that buys companies.

As for this project, I love massive scale stuff being ex IT myself. I like niches where I can load thousands or millions of keywords and ads and start buying data and then leads.

I worked for a company doing PPC arbitrage 10+ years ago, and having millions of keywords and low bids was how we made it work due to the low margins.

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.

Great attitude. Problems become barriers to entry. I rub my hands with glee when things don't work and I have to figure it out. That's one more hurdle between me and the competition.

I'm currently measuring my progress with the number of 'BuyBox Winners'

It's great that you're measuring progress.

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

This is cool. I do lead-gen now and when we generate a lead we often just see that as the systems working end-to-end, while we keep building out campaigns etc.

 

[GoldFibre]

My automation is running off of a laptop in my home, and this morning I forgot to check it before heading to my full time job. When I got there and checked the web interface I realized that the bot had stopped running, and I don't have a way to restart it remotely. So I lost some time there and learned a lesson.

Progress:

• Discussed operational SOP with delivery partner
• Got my Amazon 5% cash back credit card approved and applied to all new purchases
• Handled a couple of bugs and exceptions that I found
• Increased search keywords to 800 using Shopify's product taxonomy

 

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

[amp0193]

Been following this thread out of pure curiosity.

I'm fascinated.

Keep the updates coming.

 

[GoldFibre]

So I didn't come near my goal for the week. Ultimately I found that there were more important things to work on and I intentionally didn't focus on the goal after the first two days. Still, we were only at 516 Fast-Mover Listings at the start of the week, so there was more than 15x progress. Hopefully this means that when my account comes back online I will get at least 15x sales!

Today I started the day by optimizing my offer updater automation because I found that some offers haven't been updated in a long time. I think that the oldest updated offer is probably a good KPI to track, because the more frequently I update the less likely I am to get an order for something that has gone out of stock in the source marketplace.

My primary DB table has grown so large that I can't rely on any complex queries or even simple counts on it anymore. So I converted everything into queues stored in separate tables. After this change I no longer have any DB locks and every query is back down to a few milliseconds.

Even after that my listing updater was running too slowly, and so I found one more opportunity to parallelize. At the current rate I can update about 11k listings per hour, but with now around 400k listings, it means it would take 36 hours to update every one, if I updated them in a single queue. I do have priority queues, but still it is taking too long.

I think for next week I will have two goals - one for each half of the business:

• Automation: Oldest Lowest Price Offer < 24h - not using 'BuyBox Winners', because my account is still blocked so I have no winners
• Fulfillment: Deliver all 5 pending orders to get account unblocked - this largely depends on me pushing my partner to expedite the last package, which only arrives in the US facility tomorrow

I put both of these goals on the home page of my UI, so that I'll see them whenever I start working.

For the automation goal, I need to start by adding some telemetry to this worker, so I can see where the bottleneck is. After that it is mostly async techniques of batching and parallelization. I've done a lot of this already and I think there are still more opportunities. There is a theoretical maximum speed based on the rate limits of the SP API, so I will try to estimate that and then get closer to it.

One way to scale horizontally is to have additional seller accounts, because each account has its own independent rate limit. Then I could split the products between however many accounts I have, multiplying the update frequency. To get more seller accounts I would need to register more legal entities, which takes a few weeks and requires some cash outlay. If things go really well and the increased benefit appears to be worth the cost, then I may pursue this later.

For the fulfillment goal, I will tell the partner I want it leaving on a Monday consol if they have one. And if they don't then I'll ask them to ship it direct to the end customer by international courier and I'll pay the cost.

 

[GoldFibre]

Losing BuyBox on Fast Movers​

I saw that on many fast-mover BuyBoxes I'm not winning even though I have the lowest price. Sometimes I even have the fastest shipping as well.

I can only think of two things that might be the reason:

• My offer on the product is newer
• My seller account is newer

There is one seller beating me on a lot of clothing products, even though my price is 30% lower. I checked their seller page and they have 21 ratings and 45% positive. And then on my account I have zero ratings so far.

Then looking a bit closer, I saw that they have a customer service phone number and I don't. So I went to my settings and added my number in case that is making any difference. I doubt it is, because several other sellers with low ratings were beating me even without a phone number.

I also changed my pricing algorithm to continue to lower the price bit by bit if I have the lowest price but do not win the BuyBox. It will do so until it hits my minimum margin of 5%, but on many of these items I had the lowest price on 20+% margin, so there is a lot of room.

The other thing to work on is my account reputation. I need to continue to fulfill orders on time, and also need some positive reviews. I will recruit some friends to buy items and then leave me a review.

Shut Down​

But then I kept looking at my catalog and I had ZERO items with a featured offer. Sometimes my offer would show up if you click on 'offers from other sellers', but if my offer was the only one on the product it would say the following:


So I'm effectively shut down, but I don't know why and there is no message on my account.

I wonder if maybe it had to do with some of the settings I changed yesterday. I did switch my address to remove the 'international shipping' banner, and maybe Amazon saw that as a problem.

I thought maybe I'll confirm an order and see if that does anything. It is also possible that the shut down was caused by early confirmation.

After searching online a bit, it looks like a lot of people have had this happen after changing their shipping templates too many times. It looks like instead of editing my template, I should have made a copy of it and incrementally switched my products over to the new one. One person said it took over a week to get their account back to normal.

So that's what I did next - I made a new template and made it my default for any new product offers or updates.

Once the customer service phone lines opened I called them to ask=beg for them to open my account again. They gave me the usual 'we will forward this request to our internal team and get back to you'.

Also as usual my account manager has no power or visibility to do anything. If there are any shortcuts to dealing with Amazon, I haven't found them yet.

I thought that maybe this restriction is on an offer level, so if I add new offers maybe I will be able to get the featured offer on those. So I switched around my queues to prioritize new listings and then checked if my offer would be featured, which usually takes around a few hours for new listings.

Unfortunately even my new listings were not showing up as featured offers.

I found an Amazon email address that some people used to appeal this situation and emailed them.

I also went on the Amazon seller's forum and posted my issue, because I saw that some people got their cases escalated by Amazon employees that work on the forums.

Pricing Error​

While investigating my account being shut down I came across a really bad error in my pricing that was putting some items up for a loss.

I've been cavalier with my coding thus far by not writing tests, but on the pricing in particular I need to be careful, so I wrote some unit tests on it to ensure the logic is sound:

Actual Costs​

After checking my spam email I realized I was getting daily delivery reports and also my first invoice from the delivery company a few days ago. I found that my cost estimate was slightly off because I forgot to include tax.

Anyway I paid the invoice and felt like I was running a real business with real vendors.

Inspiration​

I had woken up at 4am today and did all of the above in the morning, but by the afternoon I was feeling pretty drowsy and needed a break.

I read through a couple of inspirational stories on this forum I saw this quote:

One is the worst number. Never have just one. Always have two of something.

It made me think that I'm too reliant on Amazon as my one channel. Going from 100% to 0% sales in an instant due to breaking some unwritten rule is rough. Not knowing when my account will be reinstated is rougher. I could play the game of having more than one Amazon account, but apparently you have to use separate IP addresses or they will figure out you are the same and block the backup account without warning.

So I thought of two options for different channels:

• There is an Amazon competitor here that is very similar to them, but less developed
• I could run my own store on Shopify (prior to switching to Amazon I was doing something like this with automation)

I decided to try to list on the Amazon competitor, so I went through the application process and submitted all the company documents. It will take 2-3 days to review the application.

I never use this store myself, so for the first time ever I went on it and looked at the products and sellers on there. What's great is that you can see how many sales every seller has had over the last three months, and you can also see how many listings they have.

I found a lot of sellers listing in bulk like me, but with 1,000-2,000 sales, which is nothing great. But if the process is mostly automated it does give me some hedging even if it doesn't match Amazon sales.

Unfortunately they don't have an API. But maybe that is fortunate, because it is a barrier to entry. And maybe I can use browser automation to have it behave like an API.

The other big difference is that you can't piggy-back on listings like you can with Amazon. Every seller makes their own listings, which is more work. But then again there is more opportunity with differentiation via SEO and image quality.

Anyway I'm not sure the size of the opportunity here, but I'll use this downtime on Amazon to explore it.

 

[biophase]

Yes something like that.

I have two different types of cancelations:
1. Products I shouldn't have been listing in the first place, like 'live crickets'

Yes, but this is the problem. Only your problem listings are getting sales.

2. Products that are fine, but maybe one variation goes out of stock - Amazon US instantly removes their offer when this happens, but because my catalog is so huge and relies on polling, it takes me several days to discover it is out of stock. So then if a buyer wants that particular variation (like a particular size and color of a dress), there is no offer in the BuyBox, but they click 'see all buying options' and my offer is there

Again, it’s only when nobody else has it in stock that you’re getting the sale.

This would tell me that I’m not competitive in normal items.

Back when I was selling on my websites, some didn’t get any traffic and would only get a random sale if an item was mispriced. This meant that my website wasn’t any good. People wouldn’t pay a normal price for something. But if something was discounted too much, they would take a chance on my website.

 

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

[MitchC]

I have a couple of questions and thoughts that come from a lack of understanding of what you are doing

The obvious thing to do would be do what everyone else does, pick a product that’s not available or maybe isn’t good in your market and build a brand

I assume you have decided not to do this for a reason, not sure what that reason is but whatever

You mention the possibility of excluding brands and trademarks

If you aren’t sourcing branded products

Why source them from Amazon?

Why not source them from aliexpress for example

Also I wonder if you could take all these listings and have your bot automatically create Shopify products and have them rank organically on google shopping

Could you share an example of one of these products you’ve sold? Or even just something similar

 

[circleme]

That's basically Algo Trading but instead of trading stocks, you are trading physical products. That's really cool.

So maybe I need to resort to web scraping, which with Amazon is notoriously hard.

It's the same story with trying to get the available quantity. With the SP API you only know if something is in stock or not, but you don't know how many are available.

I've written a SaaS project a few year ago where I've compared the prices between two different marketplaces based on the ISBN, etc. It was a project during my studies, so it's been a while and I don't know how much has changed since then, but I had quite some success with faking headers as well as simulating the 999 trick. I've done the scraping part with Python & Beautiful Soup and the stock-tracking part with Selenium (like test-ordering 999 quantity of the given item in order to know the exact number of items in stock or if there are more then 999 items in stock) You will not know about the exact if it is above 999, but you will if it is beneath.

It was all quite challenging, but the selenium way worked at the end of the day.

Anyways, really nice progress thread.

Btw: Have you thought about selling the data as a SaaS solution instead of doing retail arbitrage. It kind of sounds like an "selling shovels in a gold rush" - opportunity the me.

 

[Subsonic]

Weekly Summary​

View attachment 51134

Last week I was hoping to double the profit, which didn't happen because I was too aggressive in uploading offers and got my account restricted in Country 1.

Since I don't know when Country 1 will get unrestricted, I will focus on Country 2. It would be an amazing feat if I could match last week's profit considering how low the sales are right now. I need to find another vendor to lower my costs and transit time. I might also start experimenting with ads, because there are a few items that have had repeat sales so they might be good candidates for paid marketing.

Hey man I want to give you some respect for sticking with this so long and taking so much action.
I am so happy for you that your finally making profit and I hope to see it going up more and more soon.

 

[AceVentures]

Cool concept - arb bot that helps connect buyers to sellers who might not have traditionally found each other. Is the idea that once your systems are up and running without getting blocked within given API constraints that you would be making purely passive income arbing listings without having to steer it?

What's the vision for where you take this project?
What is it's potential?

Seems like you've got good skills. I naively wonder if you're chasing an increasingly thinner slice from the value that's ultimately exchanged between buyer and seller.

 

[msufan]

Today's Stats​

View attachment 51823​

Weekly Goals​

View attachment 51825

• Meet Amazon employee responsible for country 2: scheduled for Friday

Amazon Relationship Work​

I set up a meeting with the country 2 expert on Friday.

Dangerous Goods​

I got three recent orders for items that are likely considered DG by the airlines and I will have to cancel them. I'm thinking I will just exclude all liquid items since it is hard for me to determine what is DG and not.

Account Health​

• Relationship Work (October)
  • Amazon Office Visits: 2 / 1
  • Account Manager Phone Calls: 1 / 4
• Country 1
  • Account Health: 152 (At Risk)
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes
• Country 2
  • Account Health: 168 (At Risk)
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes

I don't know why this thread is so interesting to me, but I really get a kick out of these updates. You have definitely got to figure out how to prune out more stuff but if you get the algorithm honed in, this is huge.

 

[msufan]

This is such a perfect example of something that one day will be seen as an "overnight" success

 

[msufan]

This thing is ramping up big time

 

[msufan]

Today's Stats​

View attachment 52415

Weekly Goals​

Complete at least two of the following:

• Lower my prices by lowering my logistics costs
• WIP Solicit reviews for my store to make customers more likely to buy from me
• Source products from multiple places to try to lower the cost of procurement
• DONE Run my selling applications automation on both country 1 and country 2

Transactional Time Under 30m​

I downloaded an app that lets you manage multiple timers and then did my best to remember to trigger them as I switched between tasks during the day.

Below are most of the results:

View attachment 52414

I went overtime on transactional things because I had to generate documentation and my script ran into three new edge cases that I needed to fix before it would run all the way through. Had these not been there I would have been under 30 minutes.

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Warehouse Visits: 1 / 2
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 2 / 4
• International Vendor Phone Calls: 3 / 4
• Local Delivery Vendor Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Update​

This morning I built an integration into my delivery partner's API to track and update the shipment statuses in my DB. This can be used to drive messages soliciting reviews whenever I deliver early, which is one of my weekly goals.

With the help of my multi-stopwatch I was actually really productive in that ~2 hours of coding. I built an entire API integration into my app and it is running smoothly.

In the afternoon my bot kept crashing because of random timeouts from the SP API. I opened a case with developer support and also added more error handling for this issue, which was failing without retrying when it was getting new refresh tokens.

Gotta be honest -- with the rate of return you are getting on this thing, I would not worry about staying under 30 minutes. I'd focus on max effort now to continue the exponential growth you've been experiencing. I do like the way you are always looking for inefficiencies that can be improved upon, though -- that is key for sure.

 

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

[msufan]

Weekly Update​

View attachment 52534

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.

$319 per day is 3.19 x the $100 per day you were doing just a few weeks back. If you do another 3.19X, you'll be just over $1000 per day. Not at all hard to envision at this point.

 

[maverick]

Those margins are insane though for arbitrage. If you can hit 20-30% margins on products, why not highlight the best sellers and source them directly yourself. You could easily hit 40-50% margins then.

 

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