ATTENTION AMAZON FBA SELLERS - Suspensions | Long Term Storage | Donald ...

There are so many things to talk about in regards to Amazon FBA. So many people have been worried about suspensions, long term storage fees, the new president of the United States, and so much more. 

NEW 2017 Amazon FBA FEES Shutting Dow FBA Sellers.

Watch this video to find out about the new 2017 amazon FBA fees

HOW TO MANAGE LONG TERM STORAGE FEES WHEN SELLING VIA AMAZON FBA

HOW TO MANAGE LONG TERM STORAGE FEES WHEN SELLING VIA AMAZON FBA

By Ryan Grant

In today’s post I am going to be sharing my process for managing long term storage fees.  These fees occur on August 15th and February 15th every year.  On these dates, Amazon charges FBA sellers for items that have been in stock for 6 months or greater as of those dates.

First, I will go over the details of long term storage fees, and then I will dive into the strategies that I use to minimize the long term storage (LTS) fees I pay.

You can read all of the details about LTS fees direct from Amazon HERE.  A few noteworthy takeaways if you don’t want to read through the full page:

1. One unit of each ASIN is exempt from LTS fees each time storage fees are initiated.
2. Units in stock for 6 to 12 months as of the LTS fee date will be charged $11.25 per cubic foot
3. Units in stock for 365 days or more as of the LTS fee date will be charged $22.50 per cubic foot

Now, I will go over how to determine which items will be impacted by long term storage fees.  Here’s my process:

1. Login to your seller account
2. Hover over reports and select Fulfillment
3. On the left hand side of the screen under the Inventory heading, click show more
4. Select Inventory Health
5. Click the Download tab and click Request Download
6. Download the report as it becomes available
7. Open the text file that downloads
8. Click anywhere in the text file and select all.  This can be done by right clicking and then clicking select all, or can be done by holding the control key and pressing the letter A (Ctrl + A).
9. Copy the data you have selected
10. Paste this data into either Excel or Google sheets
11. Select the top row, click the data tab, and select filter
12. Then you will want to sort the columns with the heading “projected-ltsf-12-mo” and “projected-ltsf-6-mo” from high to low.  For me these are columns AN and AU, respectively.  Make sure to sort one column at a time.

Note: A similar report that will work for this instead of steps 1 through 5 is to go to Inventory > Manage Inventory > Inventory Dashboard > Inventory Age > Download Report 

If you go through the above steps, you now have the info needed to analyze which items you will be charged storage fees on.  The report you downloaded will let you know exactly how much will be charged in fees for each item as well.

Now, I will go over some of the strategies I use to make sure I don’t pay more in long term storage fees than I need to.

Pricing Strategies 

About a month before a long term storage fee date, I will go through my inventory and begin to get more aggressive on pricing for items that will be charged fees.  My first option is to get items sold so that I don’t have to pay an extra fee, and I don’t have to get the item sent back to me.

Use Amazon Promotions & Sponsored Product Ads

Another strategy I use about a month before is to run promotions and ads for items that will be charged fees.  These items have fees coming either way, so it’s worth spending a little, or offering a discount to get them sold.  If there is interest I will consider diving more into this topic in a future blog post.

Take Advantage of Free Removals 

This year from August 4th through 14th Amazon is offering FBA sellers free removal orders to help clear some space in their warehouses.  They have done this the past few times right before long term storage fees were initiated.  It’s not a guarantee that this offer will be available again in the future, but it’s reasonably likely.

If you are reading this the day it is published, you still have 4 days to take advantage of free removals before long term storage fees are charged.  There is one catch with these removal orders, and that is that you will be unable to send in additional units of the ASINs you remove for a period of time.  For the August long term storage fees, items of the same ASIN cannot be sent in again until January 1, 2017.

Manage In Stock Levels from the start 

One of the best ways to avoid long term storage fees is to manage the amount of inventory that you send in to FBA warehouses in the first place.  If you only send in quantities that are likely to sell in 6 months or less then you should have minimal long term storage fees to worry about.

Time When You Send in Inventory 

One other thing that can be done is timing when you send in your inventory to FBA warehouses.  For example, on August 15th you will be charged a long term storage fee for items that have been in stock for exactly 6 months.  However, you will not be charged for items that have been in stock for 5 months and 29 days.  So if you have items hit the warehouse on say August 20th, you have nearly a full year before you will be charged LTS fees.  This is as opposed to having an item hit the warehouse on August 14th, then you will only have 6 months and a day before a LTS fee will be charged.

Essentially, you can save some exposure from fees by strategically timing when items are sent to FBA warehouses.

Determining Which Items to Remove 

Most likely when it comes up to the day before long term storage fees, you will still have some items that you were not able to sell.  That means it is time to figure if you should pay the long term storage fee or if you should have the item sent back to you.  I generally go through this process as close as possible to the date of long term storage fees.  Generally this is 1 or 2 days beforehand.

The first step that I take in this process is determining what my costs are for having an item sent back to my location.  I want to calculate the time it will take me or someone on my team to go through an item, store it for 3 to 4 months, the time to process it again to be sent back in, and the cost of inbound shipping & supplies to send it back in.  This gives me a baseline to see what level of fee it makes sense to pay.

When there is a free removal promotion available, I typically will pay a LTS fee on any item where the fee is $1 or less.  If there is not a free removal promotion available, I will typically pay the LTS fee on any item where the fee is $1.50 or less.

I say typically, as there are exceptions to this.  For example if I have a toy that sells for $100 that is very likely to sell in December, I would be likely to pay a much higher storage fee in August.  If I was to remove it, I would lose the opportunity to have the item sell as I wouldn’t be able to send it back in right away.

On the flip side, if I have an item that will sell for $5 or less, I generally won’t pay any fee, and will just have the item returned to me if free removals are available.  Then I will donate or liquidate it.

On the items where the LTS fee is higher than my aforementioned threshold, I will evaluate each product individually to determine if a removal or paying the LTS fee makes more sense.  I look at things like current selling price, competition, what season the product is most likely to sell in, how the product is currently selling, among other factors.  Most of these items I will end up removing, and then either store in my warehouse to be sent back at a later date, or liquidate via other means.

By removing the items, I avoid the LTS fee and help to lower this particular expense.

One last note, as I am going through all of the items that are subject to long term storage fees, I am reviewing to see if there are ways I could improve my inventory mix to avoid these fees in the future.  This is a very important step, as generally speaking, I don’t want to have more than a few months supply in stock at a given point in time.

We’ll wrap it up there for today.  That’s my strategy for dealing with long term storage fees. Do you have any additional strategies you would recommend? any questions on this post? Let me know in the comments below

(SOURCE)

Ep. 63 - Making sense of Amazon FBA seller fees

- Now that makes things a bit more clear, don't you agree?

Learning to sell on Amazon shouldn’t be a huge investment!

Recently there have been a lot of courses launching claiming to teach success selling on Amazon.  Some of these courses are getting the mega-launch treatment attracting multiple “big hitter” affiliates seeking the fat 50% commissions and contest winnings on the very high priced courses.  As you might suspect, these types of “endorsements” aren’t always based on integrity.  It’s important you know the qualifications and intentions of the person doing the endorsing when you encounter a “mega-launch”.

Part of what makes these big hype launches so disappointing to me is that many (most?) of these “experts” who are promoting these courses have barely any (if any at all) qualifications at all to talk about setting up a legitimate business selling physical goods online.  They are just excited to get a big check for helping sell an expensive course that is being hyped with excitement and flare.

If you want to spend thousands lining the pockets of experts who are possibly only excited about their fat affiliate commissions,  while learning the same things that we teach around here in superior, proven, time tested courses that cost 1/10th the price tag –  that’s fine, but after you read this blog post at least you’ll know the full story from my perspective.

In this blog post I’ll make a simple case as to why you should consider an alternative to the “big launches” and stick with the long time proven courses with long term established communities and experts instead.  Save your cash for inventory!

Consider the ProvenAmazonCourse.com (the “PAC”) course in this case if you are ready to learn how to sell on Amazon.

Are you eager to jump into Private Labeling?  Check out ProvenPrivateLabel.com (by the way, you get BOTH courses in one place -> ProvenAmazonCourse.com for under $300)

Or, don’t buy ANY course and just get going with one basic idea that anyone can use (one of the multiple strategies we teach inside our PAC course) – here’s an 8 minute video I made that’s getting great feedback so far. It shows you how to get started selling on Amazon at virtually no expense at all.

Make no mistake, there are some great courses, books and sites out there besides the Proven Amazon Course, and I won’t say anything specifically negative about my competition because I welcome all sources of creative content, but here are some factors that I think really set our Amazon training team apart from all other options out there:

• For over a decade my team and I have been teaching everyone from newbies to our highest end clients how to sell physical products online. The PAC course has generated nearly 1,000 verifiable testimonials in the last 6 years alone. The BEST students are recruited and become our expert trainers and coaches!
• We are always improving our courses. For example, we partnered with a world’s foremost expert on the topic of Private Label rights and he created all original content for our students. He’s easily the most qualified expert in the arena of Private Label that I’ve ever encountered – he’s had huge success for years with it. If you were under the impression that selling private label is some sort of new discovery, it’s not. It’s also not the best place to start out on Amazon for the vast majority of people who are just getting started because it takes a LOT of work and investment before you see results.  We aren’t hyping it the way you’ll see others hyping private label.
• We don’t insult and hound our students with upsells (be ready for this if you buy most online courses in this niche). I don’t do upsells. We sell the ProvenAmazonCourse.com course ONCE and students get all future updates automatically. No surprises.  Ask anyone who purchased the Proven Amazon Course five years ago how much the course has been updated, improved, expanded etc. They’ve not paid an additional dime since then for the new ideas, updates and content.
• We teach multiple product sourcing and selling strategies (most competing courses teach only one). We have a wide variety of successful students –  everyone from those who’ve built a virtually hands free operation & never leave home while selling into numerous countries, to those who love shopping retail for a living and finding great deals in their spare time (while making a great profit). Our success stories are quite diverse.
• We offer hand holding coaching for those who want it. You can work one-on-one with one of our successful students if you want to ramp up quickly. Our coaches are ALL successful students who we pay well to assist newbies.
• Our community is VERY international. This is a global opportunity. One of our most successful students literally lives on a beach on a tiny island!  Where you live has nothing to do with your odds of success. See our community visually on this mapwe just launched in mid April 2015.
• Our support team is the largest, most well trained and most experienced among all other “how to sell on Amazon” courses available. We have nearly 35 people who are in a paid position of support for the PAC as at least part of their responsibility while they build their own successful businesses as well.
• Our community consists of over 18,000 serious online entrepreneurs many of whom are very successfully working any number of strategies in the Amazon niche (with no sign of saturation whatsoever because hundreds of millions of people are shopping right now on Amazon!)
• While our courses are worth thousands, we are charging so much less than our competitors.  Our popular ProvenAmazonCourse.com is the most comprehensive course on the market in the “Sell on Amazon” niche, and it includes a large number of modules that cover virtually every imaginable way to profit on Amazon – and as of this writing it’s only $300 ONE TIME fee – there are no “upsells” or recurring fees.

Once you purchase the PAC and join our active community and you’ll be surrounded by those DOING this business who are proud to be a part of our community. Some of our customers have been around for 12 years or longer doing this stuff – these are the people you want to hang out with if you are serious about selling product on Amazon.

(SOURCE)

- What do you think about that article? Let us know on the comments!

Why Amazon’s Fulfillment Costs Are Expected to Rise

By Adrian Stevens

Amazon’s fulfillment costs have gone up

Amazon (AMZN) has managed to steadily grow its revenue and margins. However, the company’s fulfillment costs have also grown rapidly. Amazon’s strategic push toward growing its fulfillment capacity is further expected to drive its margins in the coming quarters, with fulfillment costs to rise in tandem with them.

Fulfillment costs are the costs associated with fulfilling orders, including storing products in warehouses and shipping them to customers.

The chart above shows that Amazon’s fulfillment costs have also grown quickly. The year-over-year growth rate of these costs rose from 19% in 1Q15 to 34% in 1Q16.

Why the FBA program is important for Amazon

Fulfillment centers allow sellers to sell their products under the Fulfillment by Amazon (or FBA) program. The company considers FBA to be an important growth driver, as it provides customers with a variety of products to select from. Selection growth makes Amazon’s Prime program more valuable to customers.

Amazon plans to grow its fulfillment capacity before this year’s holiday season in order to better compete with rivals, including eBay (EBAY), Walmart (WMT), and Target (TGT). It has opened new fulfillment centers in a number of US (IVV) states such as California, Texas, New Jersey, and Illinois in the last few months.

(SOURCE)

- What do you think about this? Share your thoughts on the comments!

The Most Harmful Amazon FBA Sourcing Decision You Could Ever Make

by karon thackston

Did you know that a toy on Amazon ranked 10,000 today could have been ranked 500,000 yesterday? All it takes is one sale. Just one. One sale of that toy on Amazon could change the sales rank drastically overnight.

Would you buy a toy ranked 10,000 on Amazon to resell? Would you buy a book ranked 500,000 to resell?

I know there are lots of other factors at play in how you might answer that question, but my point in asking it is to get you to look at the sales rank. You view a toy ranked 10, 000 much differently than one ranked 500,000, right?

Yet every day many, many Amazon sellers are making their sourcing decisions based on today’s sales ranks and low prices. They find a toy ranked 10,000 and snatch it up, without checking to see that it was possibly ranked 500,000 yesterday. Or maybe it’s a book ranked 100,000 that was ranked 1.5 million yesterday.

There are two main reasons why you shouldn’t base your sourcing decisions on today’s sales rank and pricing data:

1. Amazon changes their prices often.

Amazon is known to change their prices across their website 2.5 million times per day. That’s just Amazon’s prices – that doesn’t include 3rd party seller prices, which are also being changed constantly throughout the day with repricers. Now, Amazon has hundreds of millions of products, and they’re changing those prices 2.5 million times per day, which is mind blowing if you try to think about what that means. The low price on items also change throughout the day when a seller sells out of an item and the low price bumps up to the next seller. If prices are changing constantly on Amazon, why would you make a sourcing decision based solely on this one snapshot in time of the current low price?

2. Amazon updates sales rank often.

Amazon recalculates their sales ranks every hour. That’s 24 times a day that sales ranks change on Amazon! If I’m looking at an item to resell, it’s too much of a gamble to base my buying decision on what the sales rank looks like on this one hour of this one day. The current sales rank is just a snapshot in time of how this item has recently sold. I need to make my decisions based on broader information than this one snapshot.

Whether you are in a store doing retail arbitrage or you are at your desk doing online arbitrage or looking at a wholesale catalog,you need more information than this one snapshot in time. You need more than just the current low price and the current sales rank in order to decide if you want to buy 1 of an item, 10 of an item, or 100 of an item. Your hard-earned inventory money is at stake here! You want to make your decision based on the best information available.

Making this type of decision on how to spend your sourcing money without using historical data from CamelCamelCamel or Keepa is the most harmful sourcing decision many Amazon FBA sellers are making.

I would be willing to go so far as to say that making sourcing decisions without CCC or Keepa is one of the top reasons Amazon FBA sellers quit their businesses. If you’re in this same boat, you might be spending all your sourcing money on inventory without looking at the historical data, the prices tank, the inventory never sells, and you throw your hands up in despair and say, “I quit! I tried Amazon, and it just didn’t work for me.”

Now, there may be other factors at play, but for many resellers (you included) using CCC and Keepa could be a huge game changer. You could find profitable inventory that will sell in a reasonable amount of time and won’t lower quickly in price.

I’m especially disheartened when I hear resellers saying they want to quit Amazon FBA over these types of inventory problems because this problem is so easily fixable. You canlearn to read and interpret CamelCamelCamel and Keepa. The graphs can make sense, and you can use them to make smarter sourcing decisions.

Both Camel and Keepa are free, easy-to-access programs that you can use on your computer or your mobile device, either in a web browser or from your 3rd party scouting app like Scoutify, ScanPower, or Profit Bandit (Amazon Seller app does not have links to CCC and Keepa, however). It only takes an extra 20 to 30 seconds (if even that!) to look at the sales rank and sales price history of an item when you’re sourcing. You can take a quick look at how often this item has sold and how it’s been priced in the past, and you can make an educated prediction about how it will behave in the future.

I want to encourage you today if you’re making sourcing decisions without using historical sales rank and pricing data from CamelCamelCamel and Keepa — there is a better way to buy Amazon FBA inventory! You can make smarter sourcing decisions. Your business will hugely benefit if you take the time to learn how to use these powerful free resources.

(SOURCE)

- Are you a CCC or Keepa user? Tell us how these great programs helped your business out with a comment!

How to avoid long-term Amazon FBA fees

Feedvisor has made some strategic hires of people with deep knowledge of how Amazon works.

In this case, and this video, you’ll hear from several people who have genuine internal knowledge of the Amazon infrastructure. 
-Why aren’t your items shifting? 
-How do you have more access to the Buy Box? 
-Is the Sponsored Products the way to drive discoverability?

The sources talk about what Amazon wants from FBA sellers and why they don’t succeed. 

You’ll hear from Peter Kearns, formerly of Strategic Sales FBA, Amazon and now Customer Success Manager at Feedvisor. 

Also sharing her expertise is Lori Vardi who is Director of Customer Success at Feedvisor.

This video/audio will be useful to anyone using FBA. It’s a deep dive and detailed. Required listening.

Watch it here.

(SOURCE)

We'd love to have your feedback. Please comment and ask any questions!

Here's what Amazon sellers can't stop talking about — and why that's great for Amazon

At a recent conference in New York City, professional Amazon sellers and consultants kept talking about one thing.

The topic that kept popping up: Fulfillment By Amazon, or FBA.

FBA first launched nearly 10 years ago to let businesses use Amazon's infrastructure to store and ship their goods, but it is still seen as one of the biggest opportunities for sellers right now, according to several people whom Business Insider spoke to as well as a panel of presenters talking about the "unwritten rules" of Amazon sellers.

Four of the five members of the panel answered a question about the biggest opportunity for sellers in the coming year by pointing to FBA.

"There are very few things in the world where you can say, 'If I just do this, my business increases 30 to 50%,'" Eric Heller, CEO of Marketplace Ignition, a company that helps businesses sell their goods online, said of FBA during the panel. "It's a huge opportunity."

By using FBA to let Amazon handle shipping logistics, sellers can cut their inventory and shipping costs (though Amazon does charge fees for the service) and make their goods eligible for Amazon Prime, the company's $99-per-year membership program, which offers free two-day shipping on more than 20 million items. The Prime aspect is a big part of what makes FBA so valuable for Amazon.

FBA is generally a hot topic in part because Amazon is investing in it heavily of late as it becomes a bigger part of its business. In its fourth-quarter earnings last year, Amazon said goods sold through FBA made up more than 40% of its third-party sales. The company also announced last summer that it would add six new fulfillment centers and more than 15 "sortation" centers in the coming year to help it improve shipping efficiency for both its own inventory and FBA goods.

The discussion of FBA at the conference was overwhelmingly positive, which is great news for Amazon.

Why? Because in addition to fees from third-party sales, FBA can provide a big boost to one of Amazon's most important businesses: Prime. The more businesses that use FBA, the more products Amazon can offer through Prime. The more Prime products there are, the more willing people might be to shell out $99 for a membership. And people with a Prime membership end up spending way more money on the site than other users.

A recent Consumer Intelligence Research Partners survey of 500 Amazon shoppers concluded that Prime members spent more than double what non members did.

Amazon has spent the past year amping up its digital offerings for Amazon Prime and investing in FBA because it banks on the fact that when it hooks people into its Prime ecosystem, it will make more money from their increased shopping.

"Amazon is investing in FBA right now," Heller says. "Amazon is using these things to drive up the frequency of purchases from Prime."

Despite the warm reception it received Tuesday, FBA isn't all sunshine and rainbows for merchants.

Victor Rosenman, CEO of FeedVisor, the company that hosted the conference, told Business Insider that the risks associated with using FBA were that businesses were handing over all their sales data to Amazon and that if they misjudge demand and send too much inventory to Amazon for FBA, it can be a very costly mistake.

"It's like a marriage," he says. "There are parts that are good and parts that are bad."

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.

(Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-sellers-fba-2015-5)