- Thread starter
- #2
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
599%
- Apr 19, 2015
- 99
- 593
On July 12th after some minor issues regarding shipment from Austria (as mentioned above) I stacked all the products in a trailer and in the car and drove just over the border to Germany where I would register the shipment and sent it to the Amazon warehouse. I left all of the 60+ cartons there and the pick up shop wasn’t quite pleased seeing me stacking up the cartons in their hallway. At the same day I got a notification form the tracking service that the goods were picked up and on their way to their destination.
On July 17th my products arrived at the Amazon warehouse. It took another day until they were finally ready. I still kept the listing as “inactive” because I didn’t want to offer something which was straight out of stock.
In the meantime I started to gather some customers who would be willing to test the product in exchange for an honest feedback for improvements which will be sent to me by email. (Important: no review!) I manually chatted with over 20 people to build trust because I couldn’t send the item over Amazon (since the listing was still offline) but rather had to send it directly to their address.
On July 20th, after a lot of Facebook chatting and picking trustworthy people, I sent out nearly 20 products manually. I drove to Germany once again because the domestic shipments were way cheaper than sending it from Austria. Total shipping costs were about 60$.
On July 23th, my products were ready to be sold. The stocks were updated and it seemed like I was ready to roll. Well, not really. I couldn’t look at the listing when clicking the direct product link and would get the error that the site didn’t exist. Well, after contacting the support again they told me it’s working for them and it has to be a problem on my browser or cache. Literally growing up in front of a computer I was quite sure that this wasn’t the problem. I tried to explain them that there’s a difference between sending a query from the internet or from their intranet. Long story short, after 10 days I finally solved the problem by myself, trying everything I could and changing up everything possible in the seller central. There was a problem with the launch date and starting date in the seller central. The starting date is mentioned on two different categories. If you change one of those, Amazon still sees it as an active listing however the product is still offline for everyone trying to access it over the internet. This was a problem which occurred first in 2013 and there was no solution for this problem till date. I found nearly ten cases of this problem which went so far that the sellers completely deleted their listing and started one again from scratch because the support would just stop responding.
I was really damn mad at Amazon before reflecting what happened:
I relied on them to fix the problem for me. I didn’t give 100% to solve the problem by myself. I told myself that there was nothing I could do in the meantime and slacked off for a couple of days. I tried to fix it myself a few times, but I never really committed 100% of my focus on it before finally coming across the made mistake. I accepted that it was my fault because I changed the dates and couldn’t remember that I did so. This was a good reminder for myself that I am in charge of making this work. It’s all on me and if I fail I have no one to blame but myself.
On July 24th I officially launched my product and was ready to see the sales roll in. As you can imagine it didn’t work out like this. I wasn’t even listed for the first few days and immediately started to pull through the launch process I clearly laid out while waiting for the Amazon support to solve the previously mentioned problem. I started to give away products and still talked to every tester personally to make sure they can really use the product. If you are familiar with testing groups on Facebook, you know that there are enough greedy folks on there who just want to tap some freebies. The first items were shipped out on July 25th to testers who hopefully would test it carefully and provide a useable feedback for me. I was looking forward to new ideas which could be used to provide even more value for future customers when I would place an order of the next shipment.
In order to rank higher, I suggested that they would search for a certain keyword and purchase the item afterwards. By doing this, the CR and CTR would be directly impacted which will positively influence my Amazon bestseller rank (speculations). I gave away about 25 pieces to an addition of the 20 I sent out earlier.
At this point I recognized that something wasn’t adding up. The costs for giving away those samples were insanely high, especially since Amazon still charges you the obvious pick and pack costs. I realized that I made a mistake by purchasing a product of this size. I have to pay about 5$ to Amazon to pick and pack the item plus an additional 3.5$ seller fee. This would leave me with about 7$ profit of a 25$ product, which wasn’t too bad after all. What I didn’t take into account was the PPC costs which would occur later on.
After the first few days I climbed up to the first and second page of all four main keywords which I identified using different keyword recherché tools.
As an important side note, I realized that the competition has just decreased their price of the product, now pricing it at about 17$ instead of their previous 20$. I was kind of nervous thinking about it but figured I would just let it run and see where it goes. I started an automated PPC campaign with a budget of 5-10$ a day and bided pretty low for the keywords in it.
After selling the first items with a huge 90% discount I gathered the first reviews which mostly came from the first 20 people I manually sent the items to. This process was over duration of 7 days and I ended the giveaway on July 31th.
On August 2nd, I received a notification that I sold an item. I thought that someone might has used his code just now and looked up it. I checked the transaction protocol and looked for the used code. Turns out it was purchased without a code.
I just sold MY FIRST ITEM!
I was thrilled and couldn’t believe it. I just came back from a quick gym session and couldn’t believe my eyes. Did I just earn a net profit of 7$ while lifting weights?
This day ended with my first and only sale of the day. However I didn’t mind, I was just happy that I made my first organic sale.
On August 3rd I sold my second item. I was thrilled and finally felt a long lost unique feeling of ecstasies. Similar to the feeling you had when you were little and you wake up on a Saturday morning realizing all you do today is playing around with friends or starting up your favourite video game.
It was great.
I continued to optimize the listing and bullet points. I formatted everything as good as possible to make it stand out even more. The reviews continued to come in and I had a smile on my face with each and every one of them. Especially if they added a photo of it while using it. I always thought about how this little product made it all the way from China to their home because one person decided to ACTUALLY take action.
On August 4th I sold exactly zero items. I was devastated. I thought and speculated what was going wrong. I sat the whole day in front of my listing and tried to figure out what I could improve, because there is ALWAYS something to improve. The day ended without a single sale and needless to say I wasn’t too happy about it. I decided to give away some more products to keep the algorithm going.
The following days a blend of organic sales and “code sales” came in. I started to strongly incooperate Amazon PPC and started to raise the budget up to 25$ a day. This wouldn’t get reached because I bid too low however it generated at least a sale a day with an acceptable cost point. At least I thought so. After looking at the numbers I realized that I make about 2$ per piece with the current PPC campaign. This wasn’t what I was aiming for. I decided to pull a risky move and increase the price from 25$ to 30$.
One day after this, I think it was August 19th, I sold FOUR items in one day. FOUR ITEMS AT 30$ EACH! I was baffled. As mentioned earlier I had to write a scientifically paper about Amazon SEO and remembered some speculations about the favouritism of higher priced items for the A9 algorithm (Amazon search engine algorithm). Looking on it from a logical view, a higher price equals a higher margin for Amazon so this made perfect sense for me. My margin increased from about 7$ to 10.5$ which would allow me to reconstruct my PPC strategy. I started to bid higher and really tried my best to rank first on every important keyword. It looked like everything was coming together and it was only a question of time until it would really take off.
The following days I sold two, one, two and two items. The PPC costs would down the net profit to about 5$ per product but at least I was profitable.
However I realized that something wasn’t right. I recognized that the other sellers were no little brands but huge companies selling all over the world and successfully taking over each and every amazon marketplace. They would sell 50-60 products a day taking up the whole first page with their different yet similar products. I lost my placing and was back down to page 2 and 3 on all keywords.
I was mad at myself that I only looked at their listings and and not on their overall business, which would have shown that their budget was out of this world compared to mine. This could potentially led to a cruelsome end, similar to @biophases thread about slowly bleeding a product listing to death. So far I spent about 630$ on giveaways and PPC and wasn’t even close to earning equally as much.
Suddenly the euphoria diminished and was slowly replaced by self-doubt, fear and insecurity. I did the exact math on all expenses linked to this business, from the credit cards to the business registration up to the production costs and so on and so forth. I projected the PPC costs and the actual lean profits I would gather from the first shipment and came to the following conclusion:
Zero.
I will most likely break exactly even in my first year of business.
Zero bucks for half a year of struggles, worries and endless hours spent organizing.
I was absolutely crushed.
I thought that I may miscalculated, however the numbers didn’t lie and it’s not too devious taking the high launching costs into account.
After letting it sink in a little I came to the conclusion that this isn’t so bad after all. The costs to start up and running my legal business are about 500$ a year. The launching process cost me about 650$. The amount of pieces I could sell dramatically decreased since I gave a nice bunch of them away for free which led to a loss of unrealised profits of about 600$ as well. (I hope I worded that correctly).
Additionally this was only given if I sell all of the items before November 1st. The reason for this? I made another mistake completely neglecting the saisonability even doe it was one of the most important criteria point for me. Till this day I didn’t know how I could miss this. It’s not too bad, however the sales will surely plumb from mid-November till mid-February.
So by the time I came to this conclusion there were about 70 days left until November 1st which would mean I had to sell at least 3 items a day to sell out or come pretty close to it. I didn’t know how I would be able to pull it off increasing the sales within days to meet my goal. If I would miss the goal I would have to pay for the space in the amazon warehouse which would cumulate even more costs and would surely put me in a loss for this year.
At mid-August I gave away the last few codes in my last attempt to climb up the listing ladder. Since I always thought highly of paid advertisement, I started to download the gathered information of the PPC campaign and carefully go through each and every keyword. I looked it up how well it converted and how much a click would cost me. I rearrange different keywords, bids and also started an automated campaign back up which converted good enough to make me at least 5$ profit per piece.
On August 26th the new changes reaped the first fruits and I sold four items that day. The following two days I managed to sell three pieces a day. I was happy with it and continued to change up the PPC campaigns on a daily.
Sidenote: I do however think that changing up PPC campaigns will negatively impact your sales and clicks per day. I would sometimes INCREASE my bid only to see that the impressions were 30% less than the day before where I would pay less. I thought that maybe Amazon checks it through an algorithm first before displaying it to their customers, so you can’t spam other non- related niches with your product and ruin the buyer experience.
/Sidenote
The following days probably changed up too much and my sales plumbed to one and zero sales, which ultimately led to me not touching it anytime soon. I rehearsed the settings and let it run. The mistake I made here was surely my impatience. Keyword campaigns need time to gather enough data and I knew that, however I changed up too much in a short period of time with led to this outcome. If you want to make changes, change one thing at a time to see how it impacts the performance.
It’s the same with lifting: If you stall on a lift and you change up EVERYTHING, your routine, your eating habits, your sleep, your caffeine intake, etc. you will never know what exactly is the reason for your in-or decrease in performance.
On August 30th I sold four items again. The following days would be likewise until the 3rd of September. On this day I checked the sales and I already sold three products before I even got up. On this day I sold six products which were the highest amount since I started. I finally cracked the 5sales/day milestone which was the second minor milestone for me. I was super happy and had a look at the PPC costs.
I generated a revenue of 180$ that day. Out of the usual 62$ profit, 20$ PPC costs came into account leaving me with 42$ net profit.
42$ I earned while going on my daily walk listening to audio books. 42$ I earned while I was in the gym. 42$ I earned while I was preparing meals. 42$ I earned while I was reading Unscripted . This was huge for me even doe it’s not that much money.
The following days the sales hovered around 5 sales a day, with a cave in of a single sale, which leads me to today, September 8th.
I know for sure that this is only the beginning and that I have a lot to learn, but I saw that it CAN work out if you try hard enough. There is still a more than enough room for growth; I’m still sitting on page two of most of my keywords which leads to nearly non existing organic sales. If I manage to claim my place on the first page I could imagine reaching at least 10 sales a day. There are also a lot of open options regarding advertising. Brand building, social media, influencer marketing, email marketing, lowering PPC costs, adding new products and try to bundle them and so forth.
On my selling lifetime I reach a conversion rate of ~20%. Since I updated and optimized everything however, the conversion rate went up to an average of 25% with some days up to 35%! Taking this into account, reaching the first page would surely boost up the sales. However I will wait a little longer and see where the PPC sales lead until I make further changes on my listing
Right now I aim to keep the sales up at 3-5 pieces a day until I come too close to running out of stock. At this point of time I will stop the PPC and try to stay at least a little bit relevant for the amazon algorithm over the winter months. I am currently in the process of placing my second order to refill my stock for spring 2018. I am currently trying to figure out what’s the best and cheapest solution for the transportation in order to increase my margin up to 100% so I won’t face cashflow problems in the future.
I know that I am not earning tens of thousands of dollars after 7 months of working on this, so please forgive me if you expected this huge wall of text to end in a superstar- 30 minute workweek- ending. Even doe I strive to sell at least 4 digits worth of products a day within the next year (revenue), I first and foremost strive to archive the freedom this system can and will provide for me. I will graduate on July 2018 and I strive to be fully capable of living of the system by this point of time while still reinvesting most of the profits.
If you’re now thinking why I would continue to do this if I made close to zero profit this year the answer is simple: I’ve learned so much in the whole process of doing this that even at a loss this year I would still profit greatly in the long run. I now know the exact steps I have to take to source, import and launch a product on Amazon and this is something no one can take away from me. I still have a so much more room for growth about this whole process that I am very optimistic about the future. I have yet to find more cost and time saving ways to source and import new products, find new ways to increase the value for the customer and try to incooperate the feedback of existing products for new orders to fully satisfy the needs of my customer. I can always learn more about marketing and advertising, optimizing PPC campaigns and perfect amazon SEO and that’s exactly what I’ll continue to do each and every day. Even if I decide to step back from this product there’s nothing stopping me from researching the market and identify new people’s needs and value cravings which I am more than happy to provide for them.
I might not struck gold on my first swing but I am surely digging at the right place.
Before I wrap this up I just want to thank specifically three persons on this forum for their valuable lessons they teach each and every one of us every day (even if they probably never heard of me lol).
@biophase and @Walter Hay : Thanks to both of you for providing such an insane amount of wisdom and expertise. I can’t even put it to words how much your posts helped me get this started and how much rookie mistakes I have avoided by following your tips. It’s insane to think about that a 22 year old kid living in a 800 soul village in the middle of nowhere can learn from two successfully established entrepreneurs from across the globe. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. I really appreciate it and can’t thank you enough.
@MJ DeMarco :Your book unleashed something I felt in me for quite some time but couldn’t figure out what it was. I will never forget the feeling of clarity in my mind while I read through TFM at 02:30AM at night. Connecting more and more dots and finally putting together the big picture what’s wrong with the current system is a priceless lesson which, when once taught and understood, can’t be forgotten nor ignored.
And last but not least and a direct product of MJ: This forum.
This forum is like a river filled with gold nuggets. If someone is patience and dedicated enough, you can pick all those little nuggets out of the thread-river and mold them together to an entrepreneurial dowser which will finally and absolutely lead you to your goal. The only thing you have to do is to listen, learn and ultimately act.
Thank you all.
(Afterword: As you may noticed I am not a native speaker so please excuse my poor grammar, phrasing and wording. I do now that it’s far from an enjoyable read so thank you if you made it through.)
On July 17th my products arrived at the Amazon warehouse. It took another day until they were finally ready. I still kept the listing as “inactive” because I didn’t want to offer something which was straight out of stock.
In the meantime I started to gather some customers who would be willing to test the product in exchange for an honest feedback for improvements which will be sent to me by email. (Important: no review!) I manually chatted with over 20 people to build trust because I couldn’t send the item over Amazon (since the listing was still offline) but rather had to send it directly to their address.
On July 20th, after a lot of Facebook chatting and picking trustworthy people, I sent out nearly 20 products manually. I drove to Germany once again because the domestic shipments were way cheaper than sending it from Austria. Total shipping costs were about 60$.
On July 23th, my products were ready to be sold. The stocks were updated and it seemed like I was ready to roll. Well, not really. I couldn’t look at the listing when clicking the direct product link and would get the error that the site didn’t exist. Well, after contacting the support again they told me it’s working for them and it has to be a problem on my browser or cache. Literally growing up in front of a computer I was quite sure that this wasn’t the problem. I tried to explain them that there’s a difference between sending a query from the internet or from their intranet. Long story short, after 10 days I finally solved the problem by myself, trying everything I could and changing up everything possible in the seller central. There was a problem with the launch date and starting date in the seller central. The starting date is mentioned on two different categories. If you change one of those, Amazon still sees it as an active listing however the product is still offline for everyone trying to access it over the internet. This was a problem which occurred first in 2013 and there was no solution for this problem till date. I found nearly ten cases of this problem which went so far that the sellers completely deleted their listing and started one again from scratch because the support would just stop responding.
I was really damn mad at Amazon before reflecting what happened:
I relied on them to fix the problem for me. I didn’t give 100% to solve the problem by myself. I told myself that there was nothing I could do in the meantime and slacked off for a couple of days. I tried to fix it myself a few times, but I never really committed 100% of my focus on it before finally coming across the made mistake. I accepted that it was my fault because I changed the dates and couldn’t remember that I did so. This was a good reminder for myself that I am in charge of making this work. It’s all on me and if I fail I have no one to blame but myself.
On July 24th I officially launched my product and was ready to see the sales roll in. As you can imagine it didn’t work out like this. I wasn’t even listed for the first few days and immediately started to pull through the launch process I clearly laid out while waiting for the Amazon support to solve the previously mentioned problem. I started to give away products and still talked to every tester personally to make sure they can really use the product. If you are familiar with testing groups on Facebook, you know that there are enough greedy folks on there who just want to tap some freebies. The first items were shipped out on July 25th to testers who hopefully would test it carefully and provide a useable feedback for me. I was looking forward to new ideas which could be used to provide even more value for future customers when I would place an order of the next shipment.
In order to rank higher, I suggested that they would search for a certain keyword and purchase the item afterwards. By doing this, the CR and CTR would be directly impacted which will positively influence my Amazon bestseller rank (speculations). I gave away about 25 pieces to an addition of the 20 I sent out earlier.
At this point I recognized that something wasn’t adding up. The costs for giving away those samples were insanely high, especially since Amazon still charges you the obvious pick and pack costs. I realized that I made a mistake by purchasing a product of this size. I have to pay about 5$ to Amazon to pick and pack the item plus an additional 3.5$ seller fee. This would leave me with about 7$ profit of a 25$ product, which wasn’t too bad after all. What I didn’t take into account was the PPC costs which would occur later on.
After the first few days I climbed up to the first and second page of all four main keywords which I identified using different keyword recherché tools.
As an important side note, I realized that the competition has just decreased their price of the product, now pricing it at about 17$ instead of their previous 20$. I was kind of nervous thinking about it but figured I would just let it run and see where it goes. I started an automated PPC campaign with a budget of 5-10$ a day and bided pretty low for the keywords in it.
After selling the first items with a huge 90% discount I gathered the first reviews which mostly came from the first 20 people I manually sent the items to. This process was over duration of 7 days and I ended the giveaway on July 31th.
On August 2nd, I received a notification that I sold an item. I thought that someone might has used his code just now and looked up it. I checked the transaction protocol and looked for the used code. Turns out it was purchased without a code.
I just sold MY FIRST ITEM!
I was thrilled and couldn’t believe it. I just came back from a quick gym session and couldn’t believe my eyes. Did I just earn a net profit of 7$ while lifting weights?
This day ended with my first and only sale of the day. However I didn’t mind, I was just happy that I made my first organic sale.
On August 3rd I sold my second item. I was thrilled and finally felt a long lost unique feeling of ecstasies. Similar to the feeling you had when you were little and you wake up on a Saturday morning realizing all you do today is playing around with friends or starting up your favourite video game.
It was great.
I continued to optimize the listing and bullet points. I formatted everything as good as possible to make it stand out even more. The reviews continued to come in and I had a smile on my face with each and every one of them. Especially if they added a photo of it while using it. I always thought about how this little product made it all the way from China to their home because one person decided to ACTUALLY take action.
On August 4th I sold exactly zero items. I was devastated. I thought and speculated what was going wrong. I sat the whole day in front of my listing and tried to figure out what I could improve, because there is ALWAYS something to improve. The day ended without a single sale and needless to say I wasn’t too happy about it. I decided to give away some more products to keep the algorithm going.
The following days a blend of organic sales and “code sales” came in. I started to strongly incooperate Amazon PPC and started to raise the budget up to 25$ a day. This wouldn’t get reached because I bid too low however it generated at least a sale a day with an acceptable cost point. At least I thought so. After looking at the numbers I realized that I make about 2$ per piece with the current PPC campaign. This wasn’t what I was aiming for. I decided to pull a risky move and increase the price from 25$ to 30$.
One day after this, I think it was August 19th, I sold FOUR items in one day. FOUR ITEMS AT 30$ EACH! I was baffled. As mentioned earlier I had to write a scientifically paper about Amazon SEO and remembered some speculations about the favouritism of higher priced items for the A9 algorithm (Amazon search engine algorithm). Looking on it from a logical view, a higher price equals a higher margin for Amazon so this made perfect sense for me. My margin increased from about 7$ to 10.5$ which would allow me to reconstruct my PPC strategy. I started to bid higher and really tried my best to rank first on every important keyword. It looked like everything was coming together and it was only a question of time until it would really take off.
The following days I sold two, one, two and two items. The PPC costs would down the net profit to about 5$ per product but at least I was profitable.
However I realized that something wasn’t right. I recognized that the other sellers were no little brands but huge companies selling all over the world and successfully taking over each and every amazon marketplace. They would sell 50-60 products a day taking up the whole first page with their different yet similar products. I lost my placing and was back down to page 2 and 3 on all keywords.
I was mad at myself that I only looked at their listings and and not on their overall business, which would have shown that their budget was out of this world compared to mine. This could potentially led to a cruelsome end, similar to @biophases thread about slowly bleeding a product listing to death. So far I spent about 630$ on giveaways and PPC and wasn’t even close to earning equally as much.
Suddenly the euphoria diminished and was slowly replaced by self-doubt, fear and insecurity. I did the exact math on all expenses linked to this business, from the credit cards to the business registration up to the production costs and so on and so forth. I projected the PPC costs and the actual lean profits I would gather from the first shipment and came to the following conclusion:
Zero.
I will most likely break exactly even in my first year of business.
Zero bucks for half a year of struggles, worries and endless hours spent organizing.
I was absolutely crushed.
I thought that I may miscalculated, however the numbers didn’t lie and it’s not too devious taking the high launching costs into account.
After letting it sink in a little I came to the conclusion that this isn’t so bad after all. The costs to start up and running my legal business are about 500$ a year. The launching process cost me about 650$. The amount of pieces I could sell dramatically decreased since I gave a nice bunch of them away for free which led to a loss of unrealised profits of about 600$ as well. (I hope I worded that correctly).
Additionally this was only given if I sell all of the items before November 1st. The reason for this? I made another mistake completely neglecting the saisonability even doe it was one of the most important criteria point for me. Till this day I didn’t know how I could miss this. It’s not too bad, however the sales will surely plumb from mid-November till mid-February.
So by the time I came to this conclusion there were about 70 days left until November 1st which would mean I had to sell at least 3 items a day to sell out or come pretty close to it. I didn’t know how I would be able to pull it off increasing the sales within days to meet my goal. If I would miss the goal I would have to pay for the space in the amazon warehouse which would cumulate even more costs and would surely put me in a loss for this year.
At mid-August I gave away the last few codes in my last attempt to climb up the listing ladder. Since I always thought highly of paid advertisement, I started to download the gathered information of the PPC campaign and carefully go through each and every keyword. I looked it up how well it converted and how much a click would cost me. I rearrange different keywords, bids and also started an automated campaign back up which converted good enough to make me at least 5$ profit per piece.
On August 26th the new changes reaped the first fruits and I sold four items that day. The following two days I managed to sell three pieces a day. I was happy with it and continued to change up the PPC campaigns on a daily.
Sidenote: I do however think that changing up PPC campaigns will negatively impact your sales and clicks per day. I would sometimes INCREASE my bid only to see that the impressions were 30% less than the day before where I would pay less. I thought that maybe Amazon checks it through an algorithm first before displaying it to their customers, so you can’t spam other non- related niches with your product and ruin the buyer experience.
/Sidenote
The following days probably changed up too much and my sales plumbed to one and zero sales, which ultimately led to me not touching it anytime soon. I rehearsed the settings and let it run. The mistake I made here was surely my impatience. Keyword campaigns need time to gather enough data and I knew that, however I changed up too much in a short period of time with led to this outcome. If you want to make changes, change one thing at a time to see how it impacts the performance.
It’s the same with lifting: If you stall on a lift and you change up EVERYTHING, your routine, your eating habits, your sleep, your caffeine intake, etc. you will never know what exactly is the reason for your in-or decrease in performance.
On August 30th I sold four items again. The following days would be likewise until the 3rd of September. On this day I checked the sales and I already sold three products before I even got up. On this day I sold six products which were the highest amount since I started. I finally cracked the 5sales/day milestone which was the second minor milestone for me. I was super happy and had a look at the PPC costs.
I generated a revenue of 180$ that day. Out of the usual 62$ profit, 20$ PPC costs came into account leaving me with 42$ net profit.
42$ I earned while going on my daily walk listening to audio books. 42$ I earned while I was in the gym. 42$ I earned while I was preparing meals. 42$ I earned while I was reading Unscripted . This was huge for me even doe it’s not that much money.
The following days the sales hovered around 5 sales a day, with a cave in of a single sale, which leads me to today, September 8th.
I know for sure that this is only the beginning and that I have a lot to learn, but I saw that it CAN work out if you try hard enough. There is still a more than enough room for growth; I’m still sitting on page two of most of my keywords which leads to nearly non existing organic sales. If I manage to claim my place on the first page I could imagine reaching at least 10 sales a day. There are also a lot of open options regarding advertising. Brand building, social media, influencer marketing, email marketing, lowering PPC costs, adding new products and try to bundle them and so forth.
On my selling lifetime I reach a conversion rate of ~20%. Since I updated and optimized everything however, the conversion rate went up to an average of 25% with some days up to 35%! Taking this into account, reaching the first page would surely boost up the sales. However I will wait a little longer and see where the PPC sales lead until I make further changes on my listing
Right now I aim to keep the sales up at 3-5 pieces a day until I come too close to running out of stock. At this point of time I will stop the PPC and try to stay at least a little bit relevant for the amazon algorithm over the winter months. I am currently in the process of placing my second order to refill my stock for spring 2018. I am currently trying to figure out what’s the best and cheapest solution for the transportation in order to increase my margin up to 100% so I won’t face cashflow problems in the future.
I know that I am not earning tens of thousands of dollars after 7 months of working on this, so please forgive me if you expected this huge wall of text to end in a superstar- 30 minute workweek- ending. Even doe I strive to sell at least 4 digits worth of products a day within the next year (revenue), I first and foremost strive to archive the freedom this system can and will provide for me. I will graduate on July 2018 and I strive to be fully capable of living of the system by this point of time while still reinvesting most of the profits.
If you’re now thinking why I would continue to do this if I made close to zero profit this year the answer is simple: I’ve learned so much in the whole process of doing this that even at a loss this year I would still profit greatly in the long run. I now know the exact steps I have to take to source, import and launch a product on Amazon and this is something no one can take away from me. I still have a so much more room for growth about this whole process that I am very optimistic about the future. I have yet to find more cost and time saving ways to source and import new products, find new ways to increase the value for the customer and try to incooperate the feedback of existing products for new orders to fully satisfy the needs of my customer. I can always learn more about marketing and advertising, optimizing PPC campaigns and perfect amazon SEO and that’s exactly what I’ll continue to do each and every day. Even if I decide to step back from this product there’s nothing stopping me from researching the market and identify new people’s needs and value cravings which I am more than happy to provide for them.
I might not struck gold on my first swing but I am surely digging at the right place.
Before I wrap this up I just want to thank specifically three persons on this forum for their valuable lessons they teach each and every one of us every day (even if they probably never heard of me lol).
@biophase and @Walter Hay : Thanks to both of you for providing such an insane amount of wisdom and expertise. I can’t even put it to words how much your posts helped me get this started and how much rookie mistakes I have avoided by following your tips. It’s insane to think about that a 22 year old kid living in a 800 soul village in the middle of nowhere can learn from two successfully established entrepreneurs from across the globe. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us. I really appreciate it and can’t thank you enough.
@MJ DeMarco :Your book unleashed something I felt in me for quite some time but couldn’t figure out what it was. I will never forget the feeling of clarity in my mind while I read through TFM at 02:30AM at night. Connecting more and more dots and finally putting together the big picture what’s wrong with the current system is a priceless lesson which, when once taught and understood, can’t be forgotten nor ignored.
And last but not least and a direct product of MJ: This forum.
This forum is like a river filled with gold nuggets. If someone is patience and dedicated enough, you can pick all those little nuggets out of the thread-river and mold them together to an entrepreneurial dowser which will finally and absolutely lead you to your goal. The only thing you have to do is to listen, learn and ultimately act.
Thank you all.
(Afterword: As you may noticed I am not a native speaker so please excuse my poor grammar, phrasing and wording. I do now that it’s far from an enjoyable read so thank you if you made it through.)
