Beginner Lessons For Selling Shoes on 

Amazon FBA

By Stephen Smotherman

When it comes to sourcing and selling shoes on Amazon, some of the hardest lessons are learned during the early stages of adding shoes to your Amazon business model.

Many of you know that Rebecca and I are a team when it comes to our Amazon FBA business. While I mainly focus on retail arbitrage and wholesale sourcing, she is the specialist when it comes to online arbitrage… and specifically sourcing and selling shoes.

Since my last interview video with Rebecca was so well received, I decided to sit down with her and record another Q&A  interview video with her. Rebecca has such a wealth of knowledge about sourcing and selling shoes and you’ll learn a lot in this video.

In the video below, you’ll learn:

• How our very first experiment with sourcing and selling shoes went (spoiler: it didn’t go so well)
• What we learned from that experiment
• How we almost decided to give up selling shoes – and why we’re so glad we didn’t quit.
• The biggest thing we wish we knew when we started selling shoes
• The mindset shift you need to be successful with selling shoes
• The biggest difference between sourcing items like books/toys and sourcing shoes
• How to overcome not being able to see sales rank history of shoes
• Which is better? Going wide or going deep when sourcing shoes?
• How to find confidence in sourcing shoes
• How customer returns of shoes are not as bad as returns from other categories (despite what other people might say).

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Selling Shoes on Amazon FBA – Should 

You Do It?

By Stephen Smotherman

Many of you know that Rebecca and I are a team when it comes to our Amazon FBA business. While I mainly focus on retail arbitrage and wholesale sourcing, she is the specialist when it comes to online arbitrage… and specifically sourcing and selling shoes on Amazon.

Since Rebecca has such a wealth of knowledge about sourcing and selling shoes, I decided to sit down with her and record a Q&A interview video focused on the biggest lessons we learned when we first started selling shoes on Amazon.

In the video below, you’ll learn:

• Why we added shoes to our Amazon business model
• How adding shoes impacted our Amazon FBA business
• How shoes helped our ASP increase substantially
• What the competition is like in the Shoes category
• Why brand restrictions in shoes don’t have to be a problem for FBA sellers
• How selling shoes has changed our lives
• Why we choose to source shoes via OA instead of RA
• How sales ranks of shoes are different than most other categories
• … and more!

Enjoy! Leave us a comment below the video if you have a specific shoe question and we’ll see about addressing that in a future blog post or video.

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Selling Shoes On Amazon And Why Most Sellers Do It Wrong

By Homemade Entrepreneur

Are you currently selling shoes on Amazon? If no, why not?

Selling shoes is a great way to increase your profit and also get away from much of the competition within other categories. What most people don’t realize is that selling in the shoe category means an easier time sourcing, prepping, and shipping your items . No that was not a typo, I really mean you will have an easier time sourcing, prepping, and shipping your items.

Before I jump into how to properly source and sell shoes on Amazon, I first want to address why most sellers are doing it wrong.

Most sellers are not sourcing correctly because they scan one shoe and determine if the entire line of shoes is profitable off that one items. First off, there are many different sizes and every size will have a different price, same rank, but different price. Secondly, there are multiple colors for each shoe, so the more variations there are, the more possibilities there will be that one of those colors will be profitable. Lastly, the Amazon best seller ranking should not be your only factor in deciding whether to buy or not.

Understanding Size

There are so many sizes to choose from, but what size should you buy. First off, I don’t recommend buying wide and narrow shoes. Yes, these will still sell, but from my experience they don’t sell as often. What I do is I like to buy men’s shoes size 9-11 and women’s shoes size 6-9. I periodically buy shoes that are smaller or larger depending on what kind of shoe it is. For example, basketball shoes I will go up to size 12 and 13 if the profit is there. Just remember you don’t need thousands of buyers for your product, you just need one person that is looking for the exact same shoe that you are offering for sale.

Understanding Color Variation

How important is color variations when talking about shoes? Well, pretty important. I personally purchased a pair of pink Nike shoes for men that were ranked at 20K in shoes (which is pretty good). Those shoes sat for about 11 months before they finally sold. Why? They didn’t sell fast because the color was not what people were looking for.

When it comes to color I tend to buy the basic colors and don’t stray too far from those. These colors include black, white, brown, tan, blue, and red. These are the most popular colors that people buy, so if you are deciding to buy a yellow or black shoe with the same type of profit, I would always go for black over yellow.

Best Rank To Buy Into

The Amazon BSR (Best Seller Rank) is determined by the amount of time in between sales. What this should tell you is that not all shoes should be created equally. For instance, if it is summer time and 100 degrees outside, then do you think there will be a huge market for snow boots? What about flip flops in the winter time? You need to consider the time of year, what sports could be going on, how people dress, and the current fashion in order to determine whether the ranking is decent enough to get into.

I have purchased soccer cleats by the hundreds, but I normally do this right before Christmas as I know that there won’t be a better time to buy at such low prices. The rankings are terrible, usually around 80-100K, but it is because the soccer season has just ended, which means nobody is buying shoes at this time. If you send those cleats off to Amazon before Christmas then you should see a decent amount of sales as people are buying these as gifts. With the increase in sales though, just be aware of the increase in returns as well.

As you can see, there are multiple reasons why you can’t just look at one pair of shoes and determine that the entire line is profitable or not. You need to look at multiple factors, check out the Keepa and Camelcamelcamel charts, and check the Amazon reviews. Everything comes into play here, so don’t skip a step.

Tips To Selling Shoes On Amazon

Be Consistent

If you want to sell shoes, then send them in on a regular basis. Far too often I see people sell a couple shoes here and there, then they move onto a different category. Figure out which categories you want to sell in and then consistently send in inventory. The more you send in the more money you will make. .

Don’t Overprice Your Inventory

One of the worst things you can do as a seller is overprice all your inventory. Why? The reason this is bad is because you will hardly ever get the sales. Yes, I understand you could make a couple more dollars, but the truth is that a couple more dollars is nothing compared to the amount of money you could make if you compound your profits every 2 weeks. Think about it, moving your inventory faster and with decent margins on each sale is going to take you further than getting that few extra dollars on each sale, especially when it takes you 2 to 4 weeks longer to get the sale.

Look For Multiple Brands

If you haven’t been selling shoes on Amazon for very long then you know that many brands are restricted from selling, right? This shouldn’t be a huge problem for you since there are many more brands out there to sell. When I first started selling shoes I would only sell Nike, Adidas, Reebok, and Crocs, now I sell just about any brand out there. The reason I recommend you look for multiple brands is because the more options you have the more sales you will get. For people that just sell Nike shoes they never get businessmen buying shoes for work. This goes for people that only sell Rockport shoes, they never get those athletes looking for their next shoe to wear. It is because of this that I recommend you sell all sorts of different brands. Remember, the more diversified you are the better off you will be on Amazon FBA.

Make Sure Box Is In Great Condition

I sell a little more than 100 pairs of shoes per week, which means I need to buy more than that to keep up. With all the shoes that I buy I like to have a great looking box to go with them. If the original box is damaged, then I will use a generic brown shoe box instead. If the shoes is a collectors edition or something that I know the person will want the original box, then I only buy it if the box is in perfect condition. In addition to keeping the box that looks the best, I will sometimes polybag the entire box to keep it looking pristine.

Take Off Prices

I should not have to say this, but I am going to since I just received a pair of shoes with the price still on it. As a seller we should take all the prices off the shoes when they are on there. This means you pull the price off the box, you take the prices off the shoes themselves, and you never leave your receipt inside the box.

Buy Sizes You Could Use

Something that I have been doing every since I could remember is I buy shoes that I can wear, my wife can wear, or somebody else in my family can wear. I do this because I like the idea of giving the shoes away as a gift if I ever were to get them returned to me for some reason. If there was a reason why I could not resell a returned shoe, then I would simply store the shoes until I can give them away as a gift. Not only do I give them away as gifts, I donate shoes that have been sitting for far too long to people that might be in need.

Ok, so now that you have some tips on selling shoes on Amazon and you have a better understanding of why so many people are doing this wrong go out there and make some money. Some of the places that I find the best deals on shoes are Marshalls, Ross, Nordstrom, Macy’s, Famous Footwear, and Burlington.

If you have any questions on selling shoes on Amazon or entrepreneurship in general then please comment below and I will do my best to help you out.

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Selling Shoes on Amazon FBA - Q&A

- Full Time FBA couple share their experience with selling shoes on Amazon FBA

Selling Shoes through Amazon FBA: Prepping and Processing (Plus Returns)

By Rebecca Smotherman

Knowing which shoes to source isn’t the only new skill to acquire when it comes to adding the shoe category to your Amazon FBA inventory. Prepping your shoes can also present some new opportunities to learn, but the differences from prepping and listing in other categories are easy to learn if you read and follow the Amazon guidelines.

Before I (Rebecca) dive into more details on processing your shoe inventory, I want to make sure you’ve had an opportunity to read the previous two posts in our series on Selling Shoes through Amazon FBA:

Post #1: Why We Added Shoes to Our Sourcing Strategy
Post #2: Buying Decisions

Ok, back to prepping shoes…

Inspect Your Shoe Inventory

Whether you inspect your shoes in the retail store before you make the purchase or after you receive your online order, careful inspection of your shoe inventory is a must. We’ve just about seen it all when we open up shoe boxes to check them out for the first time, and you want to make sure thatyou are the one to discover any oddities about a pair of shoes, not your customer.

Here are a few things you want to check carefully on every pair of shoes that you send to Amazon FBA:

• the correct style
• the correct color
• the correct size (including width)
• one right and one left
• the condition is new

We’ve received shoes in our online orders that were the wrong style, wrong color, wrong size, wrong width, two left shoes, only one shoe, one size printed on a tag and a different size printed on the shoe, shoes that have clearly been worn and returned to the store, and shoes in crushed shoe boxes. You also want to check for any markings in ink on the soles of the shoes or price tags stapled to the soles.

If you’re sourcing in a retail store, the obvious solution to any of the above problems is to not buy the shoes in the first place. If you are doing online arbitrage and receive shoes with the above problems, you can return the shoes for a refund, or you can sell them on a different platform, like eBay, where you can give details in your product description about the shoe being slightly worn, having a different size listed on the box, etc.

Note: You CANNOT list a pair of shoes in new condition on Amazon and attempt to put any type of description of the shoes in your condition notes. Shoes sold as new on Amazon must EXACTLY match the description on the product page and be in absolutely new condition.

Prepping Shoes

As I said at the beginning of this post, one of the keys to successfully prepping your shoes for the Amazon FBA warehouse is to read the guidelines. Here’s the excerpt from the guidelines about prepping and packaging shoes:

“Footwear, regardless of material, must be packaged with no shoe material exposed, either in shoe boxes or bagged in a polybag with a suffocation warning. Shoe box lids must be secured with a non-adhesive band or removable tape.”

In general, we make sure our shoe inventory is sent to the FBA warehouse in the branded shoe box it came in, and we use stretch wrap to secure the lid. We made a video to show you exactly how we secure the lids with the stretch wrap: https://youtu.be/xMbcyzKZJLQ

Typically we don’t bag shoes in a polybag, except for flipflops, crocs, slippers, or any other type of shoe that you would buy at a brick-and-mortar store hanging on a rack rather than on a shelf of shoe boxes.

Handling Returns

Almost without fail, when an Amazon seller talks about how great the profits are with shoes, the response they get is this: “Yeah, but what about the return rates? Is it even worth it with all the returns?”

I’ll be the first to admit: the psychological hit you take as a seller is harder when you get a return on a $120 pair of running shoes than for the return of a $15 toy. But the financial hit doesn’t have to be that hard.

When a pair of shoes is returned to Amazon, many times the warehouse workers inspect them and see that they haven’t been worn and simply enter them back into your inventory.

If the warehouse worker does mark the shoes as “customer damaged” and the shoes move to your unfulfillable inventory, that doesn’t necessarily mean the shoes are damaged. In these instances, have the shoes returned to you for inspection, and you can decide what to do from there. Sometimes the shoes haven’t been worn and can be sent back to the FBA warehouse in new condition. If the shoes clearly have been worn, you can still sell them on eBay with detailed condition notes.

We have found that the majority of our returned shoes can still be sold on Amazon, with a rare few needing to be sold on eBay. When you start crunching the numbers, the return rate for shoes may appear higher than other categories, but if you’re still able to sell the shoes in the end, the impact on your business isn’t that high.

Our hope for this series on selling shoes is that we’re able to help you make informed decisions about whether the category is right for you and to help you find success in sourcing and in prepping shoes.As I’ve put these posts together, I’ve realized that this series is only scratching the surface of what there is to say about selling shoes on Amazon – look for more from us in the future on this topic! To be sure you don’t miss out on future blog posts, be sure to scroll up and subscribe.

In the meantime, keep sharing your shoe selling experiences with us in the comments section!

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Selling Shoes through Amazon FBA: 

Buying Decisions

By Rebecca Smotherman

We’re excited today to continue our 3-post series on selling shoes through Amazon FBA. If you didn’t get a chance to read the first post in the series (Why We Added Shoes to Our Sourcing Strategy), you can check it out here at this link. Be on the lookout for the next post next week on how to prep and process shoes for Amazon FBA.

Let’s get down to the nitty gritty details of sourcing shoes for FBA, shall we?

As I (Rebecca) mentioned in the introductory post of this series, I personally don’t source for shoes using retail arbitrage (RA). I tried it and came up dry. I use 100% online arbitrage (OA) for my shoe sourcing strategy. The gist of this post, however, will cover topics that apply no matter what type of strategy you use for sourcing. I won’t get into details of what types of stores to find shoes in, what brands to look for, what styles to look for, and so on. Instead, I’m going to talk about some fundamental issues related to sourcing shoes that you can apply to your own personal sourcing strategy, whether you prefer RA, OA, wholesale, or something else.

Our Initial Two-Week Shoe Experiment

After we got approved to sell in the shoe category, we decided to spend a two-week period sourcing shoes through OA, track the resulting sales, calculate our return on investment (ROI) and profits, and then decide from there how we wanted to proceed with adding shoes to our overall FBA strategy.

Every day for two weeks, I diligently looked at the deals on my Your Sourced Inventory list, spent my sourcing budget, and waited for the shoes to arrive at our doorstep. The shoes came in, we processed them, and we sent them to FBA and waited for the sales.

And waited. And waited. And waited.

I didn’t source any more shoes online for about five or six weeks after that, as I waited to see how our experiment turned out. The sales trickled in soooooooo sloooooooowwwwwwwwwly from those two weeks of sourcing. I was very discouraged that shoes I thought were a low rank at the time I bought them turned out to not sell for weeks and weeks and weeks. I questioned whether I should stop thinking about buying shoes and just stick to toys, books, or another category I already knew well.

Rather than completely giving up, I decided to learn more, ask a ton of questions, reach out to people who have experience in the category, and try again. It was a slow process, but here we are a year later – and shoes are consistently our second highest category in dollar amount of sales.

For the rest of this post, I want to give you several points of consideration for making buying decisions in the shoe category that will hopefully accelerate your learning process.

What I Wish I Had Known About Sourcing Shoes Before I Started

1. Shoes take a LOT of capital to buy.

Unlike categories such as books or toys, with shoes it’s not possible to take a small amount of capital, buy items at a ridiculously low price and high ROI, and turn a fast profit that you can reinvest within a short amount of time. Shoes can give you a great ROI and a fantastic average selling price (ASP), but the buy cost for one pair of shoes typically ranges from $20 upward. It’s not uncommon to spend $50 or more on one pair of shoes.

2. Shoes are long tail items.

Not only does it take a large initial investment (relative to other categories) to start buying shoes, it takes a lot of patience. Shoes typically do not sell at the same velocity as toys, books, groceries, and other faster moving categories. Shoes aren’t typically something that you can replenish, either. You generally buy a style of shoe, send it in to FBA, and move on to finding the next pair of shoes.

I sank a bunch of money into shoes in our original two-week experiment and became frustrated and disappointed that I didn’t get my return on that investment as soon as I had hoped. I eventually did sell all the shoes from that two weeks, but it took as long as six months for some of those shoes to sell – and in some cases as long as nine months. Once they did sell, the high ASP was nice to eventually see in our disbursement, but if we had needed that money back any sooner than nine months, we would have been in trouble.

The key with getting a steady stream of high ASP sales from shoes is to give yourself several months to ramp up. It will take several months of sending in a steady stream of shoes, and then you have to wait for those high-priced shoe sales to start trickling in. If you continually source shoes and send them in on a regular basis, after a while you will see the fruits of your labor in the form of higher disbursements and higher ASP. Stephen is always saying that patience brings profits, and that is definitely the case in the shoe category.

One item of note: Because shoes are a long tail item, it is more strategic not to go deep in any one variation, but go wide and buy multiple variations of the same style instead. It’s much easier to sell out quickly of one pair in each of size 6, 7, 8, and 9 than to sell out of four pairs of size 8.

3. Sales rank for shoes is much different to gauge than in other categories.

Each shoe listing on Amazon can potentially have dozens of variations, depending on the number of colors and sizes available. When you look at the sales rank for a pair of shoes you want to source, you aren’t looking at the sales rank for that particular pair of shoes; you’re looking at the sales rank for all of those variations combined. If the Amazon product page says a pair of shoes is ranked #568 in the overall shoe category, you have no way to know which size and which color of those shoes are receiving the sales that give it that low rank.

To further complicate matters, CamelCamelCamel and Keepa do not show sales rank history for shoes. When I’m making sourcing decisions, I don’t even bother looking at Camel for shoes. Keepa, however, does provide crucial information about whether or not Amazon has ever been in stock on any variation of shoes, and it shows price history. I highly recommend becoming fluent in using Keepa for making shoe sourcing decisions (you can get started reading Keepa graphs with this blog post).

So how can we make smart sourcing decisions if we have no way to know the current sales rank or sales rank history for a variation of shoes?

Here are two ways I can limit my risk as far as shoe sales rank is concerned:

* I stick with buying shoes that have a low number of variations. I prefer to buy shoes with only a low number of color options, not 15 or 20 colors. I also prefer to source shoes that don’t have a narrow, regular, and wide variation for each size. Tons of colors and tons of size options means more variations, which means the overall sales rank becomes increasingly meaningless as far as each variation is concerned.

* I stick with buying neutral colors (black, white, gray, brown). The majority of people are going to buy neutral colored shoes, and I prefer to buy inventory that’s more of a sure bet. I don’t buy shoes in a crazy floral print or neon green, no matter how cute they are — unless the only options on a low ranking shoe are bright colors and no neutrals; then I’ll branch out.

4. Every shoe seller likes to take a different approach.

Keep in mind that I’m trying to give you some general principles for making shoe sourcing decisions. Every seller finds their own groove, and you have to figure out what approach you personally want to take.

Some sellers prefer to stick with common sizes and colors, while some sellers like to provide Amazon customers with the hard-to-find colors and sizes. Some sellers stay away from sourcing half sizes because they find they sell less than whole sizes, but other sellers swear by sourcing half sizes because they’re harder to find and therefore more lucrative.

Personally, I usually stick to sizes 9-12 for men, 6-10 for women (but if 5 or 11 in women’s is currently unavailable on Amazon, I will consider buying it). That’s a wider range than some sellers would recommend; many will only source women’s 7, 8, 9. Also, I tend to buy more half sizes for women, less for men.

5. Look at reviews to see popular color and size.

A work-around for making a shoe sourcing decision without sales rank history is to read the reviews. Within the Amazon reviews for any verified Amazon purchase, you can see what size and color the customer bought. It’s fairly safe to assume that colors with more reviews are receiving more sales. You can also read the reviews and look at the “fit as expected” percentage to see if shoes tend to run small, large, or as expected. You can assume that shoes with a high percentage of “runs small” or “runs large” are likely to have a higher rate of return, which is a risk you might not be willing to take with your sourcing budget.

6. Look at the average price of shoes across all variations, not just at the price of the variation you’re considering sourcing.

This might be the biggest lesson I wish I had known before I started sourcing shoes. It’s possible that one random person will be willing to pay 3x for a blue leopard print shoe in women’s size 11.5 – but it’s not likely. It’s less risky to source shoes you can price competitively with other variations of the same size or color, rather than keeping your fingers crossed that someone will pay way above the average price listed on Amazon for your particular variation.

Shoes aren’t for everyone selling on Amazon. The learning curve can be steeper than with other categories, shoes require a lot of capital, and the wait for sales can seem like an eternity. Even if you read every word I say above and every word in every Facebook group about shoes, it still takes trial-and-error to learn the category through your own experience. Everyone will have different results, and everyone will find different areas where they excel and prefer to source. What works for me might not work across the board.

But if you’re willing to commit the time and money…and some more time…and then a little more time to learning the category, the profits are worth it. We’ve spent the past year ramping up our shoe inventory and now have a continual stream of high-priced sales from shoes on a daily basis.

Have you found success selling shoes through Amazon FBA? Is there anything you would add to my above list of points to consider when sourcing shoes? We would love to hear from you in the comments!

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Selling Shoes through Amazon FBA: Why 

We Added Shoes to Our Sourcing Strategy

By Rebecca Smotherman

Today we’re going to start a three-post series here on the blog, covering our experiences over the past year as we’ve ventured into selling shoes through Amazon FBA. This first post will start off with the reasons we decided to sell shoes, and then in the next two posts we’ll give a summary of the lessons we’ve learned about sourcing shoes through online arbitrage and prepping shoes to send to the FBA warehouse. Stay tuned over the next couple of weeks!

If you’re not familiar with our story as a couple and as business partners, Stephen is the one in our marriage with the business experience, and I (Rebecca) am the one who came into this whole FBA thing with a bit of skepticism. Now that we’ve been working on the business together for a few years, we’ve found areas where I gravitate more than Stephen (check out our post about my experience getting into online arbitrage, for example). It’s been a work-in-progress to get to the point we’re at with our current roles in the business, and I’m sure it will continue to evolve – but for now we’ve found a system of sourcing that we love and is profitable for us.

One key component of our current sourcing strategy for Amazon FBA is selling shoes.We added shoes in the fall of 2015 (about a year ago, at the time of this writing), and after a slow start we are pleased with the difference this category has made in our business and are continually looking for ways to expand our shoe inventory.

Here are the main reasons we decided to add shoes to our FBA sourcing strategy:

1. Shoes gave us an opportunity to diversify our inventory.

Before fall of 2015, our main categories were toys, toys, toys, books, toys, home and kitchen, toys, and a smattering of sports, grocery, and health and beauty. We wanted to find a category where we could consistently source products and diversify our inventory away from being so toy heavy. Don’t get me wrong – we love selling toys and are always super excited when Q4 rolls around. But we wanted to branch out and try something new, and shoes were very appealing for us as a new category for diversification for reasons I’ll get into below.

2. Shoes have a high average selling price.

A relatively high average selling price (ASP) can be a step towards both saving time and increasing profits. Don’t we all want to make more money and spend less time doing it?

Think about it this way: You can sell one widget for $100 or ten widgets for $10 apiece, and you make the same amount in sales, $100. What about the prep and handling time, though? Those ten widgets require ten times the prep work, ten times the labels, ten times the handling to put into a shipping box. The FBA pick-and-pack fees will apply ten times to the $100 of sales. The one $100 widget, however, requires 1/10th of the prep work and only one pick-and-pack fee.

Shoes are a great way to increase the ASP of your FBA inventory. In 2013 and 2014 we sold a lot of $10 or $15 toys. A lot. In 2016, we’ve sold a much lower number of inventory items, but our ASP has gone up considerably because of the number of shoes we’ve sold. In the past three months, our ASP in the shoe category has been $71, while our overall ASP across all categories is now up to $34.

3. Shoes have fewer competitors for sales.

Shoes are a gated category for Amazon sellers, which significantly lowers the number of competitors on any given item. While many low ranking books or toys might typically have 100+ sellers, it’s relatively easy to find low ranking shoes on a regular basis with only a handful of sellers – or even one or none on certain variations.

When we got ungated in shoes, the process still required applying with a flat file and photos, so the number of competitors was even lower than it currently is. Now that automatic approvals are a regular occurrence, the number of sellers in the category has increased somewhat, but not enough for us to be unable to find listings with little or no competition. And even though some shoe sellers bemoan auto-ungating as the end of big profits in shoes, we’ve found that the recent round of brand and ASIN restrictions have further kept the competition at a minimum, and we believe it will continue to do so into the future. (You can watch our YouTube video for more on our optimistic view of the recent brand restrictions.)

4. Shoes provide an opportunity for me to source solely (that pun is for you, Stephen!) via online arbitrage.

I know a lot of people make big profits on shoes doing retail arbitrage, but not me. I tried it and hated it. Hated it. I mean it, seriously, I did not find even one pair of shoes to resell doing RA. Instead, I signed up for a couple of deal lists (Your Sourced Inventory and Gated List) and OAXray, and I’ve stuck with those for the past year. Over the course of that year, I’ve been able to switch from doing part RA/part OA across several categories to doing only OA, mostly in shoes with a handful of other categories. Before I started buying shoes, I couldn’t find enough inventory to buy online in other categories to spend my entire weekly sourcing budget. I would have to also go out and do RA to find enough inventory that fit my sourcing parameters.

Shoes changed everything for me as far as focusing on OA alone. My mileage records for 2015 prove it: I stopped recording mileage for sourcing at exactly the same time I committed to sourcing shoes online. Switching to only OA for shoe sourcing has allowed me to stay home more, put fewer miles on my aging car, and focus on other professional pursuits. Buying shoes through OA truly has allowed our business to make more money and spend less time doing it.

I do have to say, though, I wasn’t so sure at first that we would make shoes a permanent addition to our FBA inventory. After we got ungated in the shoe category, we decided to undertake a two-week experiment of spending the majority of our sourcing budget and time on shoes and then just see what kind of sales we could get before deciding whether or not to continue buying shoes. I’ll talk more in detail in the next post about why making a decision based on this kind of experiment isn’t the best idea when it comes to learning the shoe category, but for now I’ll just say we were less than enthused about the results. We asked a bunch of questions from people who know the ins and outs of the category, and after some soul searching (or sole searching – another pun! OK, I’ll stop) we decided to keep at it.

I’m so glad we did! I was afraid all the hype about shoes was just that…hype. But for us, shoes have lived up to their incredible reputation as an Amazon FBA profit powerhouse.

Shoes aren’t for everyone, and we’ll spend some time over the next couple of posts discussing the ways we’ve run into issues and learned to overcome those obstacles. Our hope is that this series of posts will give you a way to make an informed decision about whether or not to try out the shoe category.

Do you sell shoes on Amazon? Do you have any reasons to add to our list above? Let us hear from you in the comments! We would also love to hear your questions about selling shoes as we continue this blog series over the next couple of weeks.

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