April 2017 Side Hustle Update
April was a great month for sales on Amazon. I did just over $27,000 in sales and got back in stock on some of my best selling products. Profitability took a hit this month for a few different reasons I’ll expand on below.
I’ve signed up for a service named Fetcher which calculates my profit by subtracting product costs, shipping costs, and advertising spend. The only thing it’s missing is product photography costs that happen when I launch a new product and any software/services I buy outside of Amazon.
Here’s what April looks like on my Fetcher dashboard:
Yah that’s right. A whopping 2% profit margin! This month I had my latest shipment come in from China with $15k worth of product on it (which has a retail value of about $90k). I had to pay for this product to be sent from my freight forwarder’s warehouse to the Amazon warehouses which cost around $2,200.
If you add that back in you’d get about $3,000 of profit which would be an 11% margin. Still not great, but better than 2% 🙂
The other headwind that contributed to the margin decline was that I had a product with huge costs that have come down a LOT, but I’m still selling through the old inventory.
When I originally launched this product I was paying $6.30 per unit. The cost now is only $1.48 per unit but I’m still stuck selling my old expensive inventory. So for every unit I sell at $12, I break even with the $6.30 unit cost and the $5~ or so that Amazon charges me. Once I’ve sold through those (I’m about half way) then I’ll be making $5 per unit instead of breaking even. So far this month I’m on track for a 14% margin so I should be seeing that profit come through soon enough.
Niche Website Income – $63
I’ve got 2 niche websites. One I purchased on Flippa and was making about $50 per month. The other is one I was building from scratch using a VA from the Philippines.
The Flippa website made $56 of the $63 last month and is just humming along quietly. I haven’t spent much time or effort (literally zero last month) since this website is just so small. If I spent a lot of time on it and doubled it, I would earn an extra $50 per month. If I double my Amazon business then I’d go from $30k to $60k in sales per month which would be HUGE so all of my effort is going towards that right now.
Here’s the Amazon Affiliate income from last month:
My plan right now is to leave the Flippa website alone, maybe buy some more articles from Text Broker, but not dump too much time/money into it.
I’m always looking for new websites to buy but most of the stuff on Flippa is complete garbage. I bought a site a few months ago for $500 and it seemed promising but the traffic basically disappeared after the files were transferred and I think we got the site blocked from Google because the transfer of the site was so poorly done that Google must have thought we were deleting the whole site. Lesson learned.
