Turnover Tuesdays - All My Returns Will Now Going to be Inspected By Me, Not Amazon

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.



Update: It seems that this option allows Amazon to repackage any item that has damaged packaging and sell as new.  However, if an associate deems something sellable as is, there is no way to stop them from automatically putting it back into your inventory other than a removal order.  

It is Your Choice to Have Amazon Inspect Items or Do it Yourself

Amazon gives you the option of inspecting returns for you.  This is a service that they provide for free which is nice.  If they deem the returned unit to be sellable as new, they will put the item back into your inventory and sell it for you without you touching it again.

The other option is that Amazon will not inspect it for you.  You have to create a removal order, inspect it yourself and send it back in.

Having Amazon inspect it is nice.  It saves you time and money.  You don't have to pay $.50 to have the unit removed to you and the shipping back to an Amazon warehouse.  Until yesterday, this was the option I chose.

Turnover Tuesdays - January is Part of Q4

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.




I am currently outside the US on vacation so this will be an abbreviated Turnover Tuesdays.

January is Not Fun

I don't like January.  Last year, January was by far my worst month of the year for profits.  In terms of gross sales, it was actually right in the middle.  I had 6 months with higher sales and 5 months with lower sales so it wasn't the lack of sales that caused it.  

Last year it was the returns.  I had almost 2x more returns last year in January than any other month.  The only month that has ever come close to January of 2016 was December of 2015.

My profit for January was 2.77% of my profit for the whole year.  That's not good.  If every month was like that I would probably quit.  Compare that to 30.9% for the month of December.  Obviously, December is more fun than January.  

Turnover Tuesdays - When You Are that Shady Seller

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 last couple of weeks was a very, very tough week with ups and downs.

The Ups

One of the distributors that I work with through a friend (BN) found a great deal on a certain item.  The rank was amazing and competition was scarce.  We had a decent track record with them so It was about 50% ROI.  Everything was great.  The one catch was that item in China.  The distributor took care of the logistics of bringing it over but it was a 2-3 month lag time.  Anything can happen in 2-3 months including plenty of competition and price erosion but I was excited.


After a couple months, they finally arrived. I sent them in and magic started happening.  There were 2 other sellers including BN at $25 with me but I still selling 20-30 every day.  I've never sold anything like it when it wasn't Q4.  I was making about $6 on each one so that is amazing.  After about a week, we were already ruing the fact that we were almost out.

Turnover Tuesdays - I've Violated All My "Rules"

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.

Selling on Amazon has been a wild ride for me.  It's turned from a hobby/manufactured spend tool into a real business in a short amount of time (I made my first sale in April 2015).  I know it's a bit cliche to say it but the only thing that has remained constant has been the change and evolution of just about everything.  From the type of deals I look for, the strategies I employ and Amazon's ever changing fee structure, I'm constantly changing my business model.

I've Broken A Lot of My Rules

Rule #1 - Go for the Miles

If you looked at my inventory after about 6 months of selling you wouldn't recognize it now.  It was full of electronics and high priced electronics mostly.  It would be normal for me to have 20-40 iPads after a sale at Best Buy or Staples.  At first I was buying when I was going to basically break even after portals, gift cards etc.  That didn't last long.  Then I wanted at least 5% ROI, then 10%.  Now, it's been a long, long time since I bought an iPad.  The profit just isn't possible for it to be worth my time.

Mostly that is a change of reselling being a source of miles (and cashback) to a source of income.

I still think that if done properly, reselling can be a great way to earn a ton of miles from credit card points, portals, portal bonuses and the like.  If you are interested in that, iPads are probably still the way to go.  They are expensive, sell well, return rates are more limited than some other electronics and are sold by the right stores.  You have to be careful to buy the right products (not Apple Watches!) at the right prices or returns will make your miles very expensive.  That being said, it is very possible to earn a profit (albeit small) while earning miles.  If I had unlimited time I would still do iPads in addition but I don't so I won't.

Turnover Tuesdays - 2017 Goals

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.

2017 Goals

All the cool bloggers were putting in their 2017 predictions.  I have no clue how other companies are going to react in 2017 other than Amazon likely increasing storage fees again, doing something more to combat counterfeits (it's a big problem - just look at all the one star reviews on Speak Out game of Chinese fakes).  I do, however, have some idea on what I would like to do in 2017 so here it goes.

More Distributors/Wholesalers/Manufacturers

End of the Year Inventory Lab Checklist

I use Inventory Lab for my bookkeeping on Amazon.  I've been using it to keep track of eBay and Walmart sales and fees as well but it is really meant for Amazon since it automatically grabs all your sales, commissions and all your fees.  Inventory Lab saves me hours of time.  I literally wouldn't be able to do my business without some sort of service and Inventory Lab works for me.  It's not perfect as I will show but it is essential for me.


More information about Inventory Lab



Inventory Lab provides a taxes checklist of what you need to do before you can properly use their service for tax purposes.  They are all correct but I will add one more as well.

1) Make sure your buy cost is entered for every sale.  If you don't enter a cost for a $100 sale with $20 fees, it will look like a $80 profit when you paid $70 for the item.  You don't want to pay taxes on phantom profit.

You can easily find which sales have no buy cost associated with them by going to Accounting>FBA Sales.  In "Advanced" change buy cost from "All" to "Has No Buy Cost".  Also change the time frame from "within the last month" to "within the last year" or "all" if you want to go back further than that or if you don't do it now.


2) You can run a report that will tell you your unsold inventory valuation at the end of the year.  You don't need to do that now if you have Inventory Lab but you will need to change the date to 12/31/2016 if you don't do it today so just pay attention to that.

You can find the report under Reports>Inventory Valuation.  You can change the date to whenever you would like.


3) One thing that's a bit annoying about Inventory Lab is that they automatically default your returns either to defective or sellable.  They don't mark your returns in the correct disposition which they should be able to do automatically.

If you sell an item for $100 that costs $70 and then it is returned in sellable condition and you sell it again, if you have Inventory Lab default your returns to defective when you sell it again they will assume COGS are $70 again.  That's not true, your COGS are $0 for the second sale since you already accounted for the COGS in the first sale and return.  Your profit will seem artificially low.

If you set your default to sellable Inventory Lab will offset your sale of that item and assume COGS of $0.  If the item was defective and you had to send it back home, you never should have received that compensating credit so your profit will seem artificially high.

Bottom line is that you need to change your returns to the correct disposition.

I personally choose the default to be defective since I find most of my returns are in defective dispositions and that means when I change it I will have more profit than before.  That's always a nice change. I don't like seeing my actual profit go down later.  I know it's all psychological but that's how it affects me.


4)  Double check your reimbursements.   This is not in their checklist.  I have been looking through my reimbursements and they are way off in multiple areas.

If I receive an additional reimbursement after an appeal sometimes they will assume that it is connected to a new unit.  For example, if I received a $20 reimbursement for a $10 item, Inventory Lab will show me a $20 reimbursement with $10 COGS and $10 profit.  That's true so that's good. If I appeal the reimbursement and get another $5 for that same reimbursment sometimes it will show a $5 reimbursement with a new COGS of $10 which is a loss of $5 separate from the first reimbursement.  That's not true and not good at all. I received an extra $5 for that original $10 so it is a $15 profit on one unit not $15 with COGS of $20 over 2 units.

In addition, sometimes there will be no buy cost associated with a reimbursement such as a warehouse damaged when there should be.  I have one item where it looks like I got a $285 profit but it was really actually a $15 loss.  That's a major difference.

Again, it might make you feel better about your numbers but you don't want to pay taxes on profit you never made. That's just dumb.