Turnover Tuesdays - Pricing for the 4th Quarter Madness

For those who are not familiar, I started a series a while back called Turnover Tuesdays. Every Tuesday I like to highlight one item that I have resold. This will include profitable and non profitable sales. I hope that there is always something to learn.

The previous posts in the series can be found at the bottom of this post.

Pricing During Q4 Busy Season

I'm going to officially declare that we have reached the Q4 busy season.  While things will probably still heat up a bit more in December, from talking to others and my own sales figures, overall sales are way up from even the beginning of last week.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm even selling items that haven't come close to hitting my price in almost a year.

Support Your Favorite Bloggers on Black Friday

Any day is a good day to support your favorite Bloggers but it's always good to have a reminder on a big shopping day.

The best way to support is by using Amazon links for categories that shopping portals aren't already paying out on those categories so that you don't lose out on any money yourself.

This is my Amazon link

In addition, take the opportunity to sign up for shopping portals that you will be using today as they usually give out a one time sign up bonus.

Here are the ones available for me

Top Cashback - I earn $10 and random promotions where you can earn $10
Ebates _ You earn $10.  I earn $5 for each referral and there is a bonus for referring more.
Mr. Rebates - I earn a percentage of your portal earnings (you do not lose any of your earnings)
Be Frugal - $10 for each of us
Splender - I earn $10, readers will earn $5 for signing up and spending $50.  Sorry :( I don't make the rules
Simply Best Coupons - I earn 5% of your earnings (you do not lose any of your earnings)
Extra Bux - We both earn $5
Giving Assistant - $5 for both of us
Sunshine Rewards - we both earn $2
Upromise - $20 for each of us.  I need to invite you via email.  Send me an email orensmoneysaver@gmail.com if you are interested.




Thanks for helping out.  In addition, to the monetary bonus, the thank you is very much appreciated when someone values your work.

Turnover Tuesdays - Update on My Miles vs. Cashback Opportunity Costs

For those who are not familiar, I started a series a while back called Turnover Tuesdays. Every Tuesday I like to highlight one item that I have resold. This will include profitable and non profitable sales. I hope that there is always something to learn.

The previous posts in the series can be found at the bottom of this post.

Miles vs. Cashback

Back in Week 47 I discussed the opportunity costs of earning miles rather than cashback.  I highly recommend reading that post as I don't want to rehash my arguments back and forth in favor of against miles or cashback.


In that post I showed that I estimated a possible increase in my account by $17,500 for 2016 based on what I had already earned and possible projections.  This is a picture of one of my accounts in Fidelity at that time.

Beware of Tax Implications of Transferring Points for Free Merchandise for Resale

Frequent Miler had a nice post yesterday talking about the possibility of transferring Membership Rewards points to Plenti to take advantage of the 50% transfer bonus for free merchandise.

Personally, I think Plenti is an underrated currency for resellers as it gives you access to free merchandise at Macy's.  If you are making the purchases anyways that earn points, you might as well sign up and use them.

In addition, like many loyalty points (Shop Your Way Rewards, Staples Rewards, etc.), when you use Plenti the purchase is tax free for the portion paid for with Plenti.  If you use Plenti for the entire purchase you won't pay any sales tax.  That can be a big deal.


While I don't disagree with Frequent Miler about getting free merchandise with your points (with his caveats), I don't think it's a very good idea to transfer the points to Plenti in order to resell the merchandise in most situations.


It is generally assumed that credit card points/miles are not taxable income (speak to your accountant).  If you transfer the points to Plenti and don't pay for the merchandise and then sell it, your COGS will be $0 and you will now need to pay taxes on all the revenue generated at whatever your tax bracket is.


If you have no other way of redeeming the points for a good value or you need the cash quickly you can do it but be aware of the tax implications and how they will erode the value of your points.

Turnover Tuesdays - Some Quick Holiday Tips

For those who are not familiar, I started a series a while back called Turnover Tuesdays. Every Tuesday I like to highlight one item that I have resold. This will include profitable and non profitable sales. I hope that there is always something to learn.

The previous posts in the series can be found at the bottom of this post.

Holiday Season

The holidays are a magical time full of beautifully expensive Unicorns where everything at Target and Walmart seems like a great deal (until everyone else finds it - which they will).  Shopping portals often increase their payouts and have spending bonuses (currently being offered by quite a few of the mileage portals).  

If you ever were thinking about signing up for a credit card with a large spending minimum for the bonus, now is the time.  

I've only been through one holiday season but I learned a lot from that experience, hopefully I can give over some of the useful information.

Using Inventory Lab to Check Which Shipment Contained Your Item

We've all experienced it.  You sent 6 iPads in but when you look at your FBA inventory you only see 4 there.  What happened to those other 2?

Well, one problem is that many, many things could have happened.  It could have never been received, it could have been lost once received, it could have been damaged in the warehouse, it could have been sent for relabeling and lost into the Amazon ether (yes, that happens a lot more than you think).


Amazon has some pretty good reports you can run on lost and damaged items.  It's all there though it's quite time consuming to go through.



Finding which shipment you sent it in can be a challenge.  If you are like me you have pages and pages of shipments.  It's impossible to check each one if you are missing one particular SKU.  Once it's checked in you can check the received inventory report based off any SKU but if it was never received probably you may be out of luck.


For a long time as part of my inventory tracking spreadsheet I would have a column for FBA shipments.  It was a way to easily go back to that shipment and check what happened.  It was annoying but worth it until I found out I didn't need it all.

Inventory Lab Tracks Shipments for You

Personally, I am a huge fan of Inventory Lab.  It would be almost impossible for me to accurately account for COGS, sales and fees at the volume I'm doing without some sort of software and Inventory Lab does a great job at that.  When you play around with it you start to realize that it also pays for itself.

The one thing that I'm starting to realize I don't like about Inventory Lab is that it doesn't support eBay or Walmart sales (as far as I know) but this post isn't about Inventory Lab.  You can read more about it here.



One nice thing about Inventory Lab is that I've always received helpful customer service.  I wanted to see if they tracked this data so I didn't have to.  You are creating shipments with them so maybe they have it available for you.


I sent them an email (support@inventorylab.com) and they sent back:

Here are the Circles and Arrows of what that means

On the dashboard you can pick "closed batches".  These are the shipments that have already been sent off to Seller Central

At the next screen you can input any ASIN and you will see all the shipments that included that shipment

Under "Name" you can see the name of those shipments.

You can copy the name of any shipment and go over to seller central and find that shipment.

Using the name function isn't as easy as the FBA ID is but if I don't have to track that info myself, I am pretty happy.

Turnover Tuesdays - Automation Beyond Amazon - JoeLister and GeekSeller

For those who are not familiar, I started a series a while back called Turnover Tuesdays. Every Tuesday I like to highlight one item that I have resold. This will include profitable and non profitable sales. I hope that there is always something to learn.

The previous posts in the series can be found at the bottom of this post.

The Elections

I sat down to write this post late tonight when the news was starting to come in that Donald Trump would likely become the next president of the US.  This isn't a political blog but I knew that I had little to no chance that anyone is reading so I figured it was time to give away some secrets!

Did I have you even for a second?  No?  Oh well.

Here comes a nice post that you won't read anyways.  I hope everyone had a fun election party.  I decided to pack boxes to keep my mind off the circus that is our election process (no party affiliation coming out there - I think both parties would agree to that).

Turnover Tuesdays - Past Performance is not a Guarantee of Future Results

For those who are not familiar, I started a series a while back called Turnover Tuesdays. Every Tuesday I like to highlight one item that I have resold. This will include profitable and non profitable sales. I hope that there is always something to learn.

The previous posts in the series can be found at the bottom of this post.

Using Data from Keepa to Your Advantage

The Keepa extension is probably the most important (and free!) extension available to Amazon sellers.  I use it to evaluate every single deal.  Rank is almost meaningless to me at this point.  Rank is a snapshot currently but sales significantly affect the rank.  If you used rank to evaluate purchases on Prime Day and Amazon put it on sale, every item would have been #1 rank in its category so rank can be very misleading.  You need to evaluate rank over time.  You need to see the number of sellers over time.


There is a ton to be gleaned from Keepa, some of it obvious and some of it not so obvious but it is absolutely essential.

One thing you can use Keepa for is to check out prices last year during busy seasons previously.  This can be a guide for you of what items have huge demand.  As I will show, this does not necessarily correlate to a big payout.