September was a weak month. Competition continues to increase and some of my best selling products went out of stock so I had one of my lowest months in a while.
Profit for the month was just over $2,000 which was good but I’ve already launched 2 new products this month which cost about $1,500 so that profit is already gone, reinvested into new items.
Here’s what my sales and profit looked like for the month:
I’m still going to focus on finding new products and launching them, but it’s getting harder and harder. I’ve got about $8k left in loans to pay to Amazon which is about 4 months worth of payments. I’m trying not to take on too much debt when launching new products but it’s really tough. Even a small order of 500 units @ $5 per unit is $2,500 or 1 month’s profits. Then usually when I reorder I’m looking at 1,000 units so I can stay in stock which eats up any profit generated from the first order. I also usually launch at a lower price point to help drive sales so there isn’t a ton of profit on the initial order.
Selling physical products is not easy! I was watching Shark Tank on Friday and there was a couple who started a line of chips. They were projecting $10 million in sales for the year but planning on losing $1.7 million!! The grocery game is completely different from Amazon but still shows how tough it is to bring a physical product to market. Competition is increasing every day and there’s sooo many blackhat sellers on Amazon getting fake reviews and gaming the system that it can be hard to keep up.
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