Black Friday and Cyber Monday Shopping is the Greatest

Spend More!

Most personal finance blogs rail against excessive shopping and spending, and rightfully so.  If you want to retire early, you have to save a lot and spend even less.  However, if you manufacture products or sell stuff to consumers, you can’t help but love the magic that is December shopping.  I never really knew how crazy the holiday shopping season was until I started selling on Amazon.  Last year I saw a 100% increase in my sales in December and I didn’t have to do anything different.  There are just that many more people on Amazon looking to buy stuff for Christmas.

Truly Passive Income

Over Thanksgiving I went on a vacation and we flew back on Black Friday.  Our flight was at 6:30 AM which means I was up at 3 AM getting ready for the flight and traveling all day on planes and in a car until finally getting home at noon and passing out for a 4 hour nap to catch up on sleep.  When I woke up at 4 PM I checked my sales on Amazon and was pleasantly surprised to see $700 in revenue.  I’d check back in once an hour and I’d have another $100 in sales.  By the end of the day I had my best sales day ever, over $1,100 in sales, and I had done absolutely zero work that day.

Passive income is usually a pipe dream that’s used to sucker in wantrepreneurs to buy some fancy course or sign up for a training course that will just drain them of their money and leave them empty handed and heart broken.  That’s because you can’t do nothing and succeed.  There’s always going to be someone else out there who is going to work harder and hustle more in order to overtake you.  If you can’t outsmart them or outwork them, you will eventually fall and they will surpass you.  BUT, on a small enough time horizon, passive income is definitely real.  For a 24 hour span, I did zero work, and had $1,100 in sales.  My margin on that is around 30% so that’s around $325 in profit I made without lifting a finger.

Cyber Monday Whaaaaaat

As surprised as I was to see the Black Friday sales numbers, Cyber Monday was even more crazy.  The graph below shows my sales in units sold (not $), and you can see the first spike up for Black Friday, then the even larger spike up for Cyber Monday.  The total sales for Cyber Monday ended up being 124 units and $1,681.03 in revenue.  INSANE!

amazon fba q4 sales are crazy

Keep in mind, this is just my side hustle.  I have a full time 9-5 day job and 2 kids so I don’t have a ton of time to spend on growing an online business.  This is mainly due to the work that I put in several months ago to get these products up and selling and now they’re just growing like crazy from the huge increase of shoppers that come to Amazon in December.

New Product Launches

I have 2 new products in the pipeline.  The first one just got into Amazon’s warehouse and is starting to sell.  Amazon has banned the practice of giving away products in exchange for a discount so I don’t have any way to jump start my reviews and get the product ranking.  What I’ve been doing, to surprising success, is to just start advertising with Amazon PPC.  I’ve already got about 10 sales which is pretty amazing for a product with 0 reviews.  Hopefully this will allow me to climb the ranks and gain some natural organic traffic.

This new product is in the same niche as one of my existing products that is selling very well so I’m confident I can move up the ranks and really get the sales going.  Right now I’m selling about 30-50 units a day which is insane.  Before Black Friday I was only selling about 10-12 per day.  Now I’m at risk of running out of stock before I can get more product made and shipped in!

Next New Product

The next product I’m launching is kind of a pain in the ass.  It’s actually regulated by the FDA so I’m going to have to jump through some extra hoops to get it tested before I can start selling it.  My manufacturer is always extremely unreliable and it took almost 4 months for them to produce 250 units.  The worst part is this is the first product I’ve created that I’m actually excited about.  I think it’s better than other products out there and significantly cheaper.  It’s going to be a huge seller and my manufacturer probably won’t be able to handle the increased demand which means another long, drawn out search for someone that can make this product.  But I’ll cross that bridge when I get there.  For now I’ll just bask in the glory that is Q4 on Amazon and watch the sales numbers pile up.  Here’s where I’m at as of 9:30PM on 12/5:

Last updated 12/5/16 6:06:54 PM PST
Ordered product sales Units
Today $862.56 58
7 Days $4,971.31 347
15 Days $10,962.07 786
30 Days $16,911.40 1,226

I’m cautiously optimistic that December will hit $20,000 in sales but we’ll see how well this Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales spree continues.

Your Love of Spending Decides on Which Side You’re On

As a saver, I don’t like Black Friday.  It’s unbelievable people trample each other at Walmart to save $7 on a crock pot or spend money they don’t have to buy shit they don’t need.  But as a seller, Black Friday may be one of my new favorite holidays.

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