14 years and never laid off a single person. Laid off 7 in the last 24 hours. Some thoughts:
1. This is going to happen with millions of employees because of the tariffs.
2. At least 1 douche is going to be like "sHoUlD hAvE pLaNnEd BeTtEr" - This is kind of fair to... say. Sure, I could have diversified supply chain or product line or raised my prices more or hired in a different way - everyone is just doing the best they can and many didn't expect such dumbass decisions to come to fruition.
3. DO NOT FEEL BAD FOR ME, I still have...

Here is some insight on how tariffs work. For the most part I don't see anyone that actually understands them at all. Take the backpack below. This item prob costs 15 USD to manufacture. When imported to the US, a tariff is a tax that applies a % to the cost of the... product. So if you pay 15.00 and the tariff is 17.6%, that would be 2.65 per unit that the importer pays. For the record, the importer in this example would be North Face. The issue is that 17.6% has another 45% added to it which raises the cost another 6.78. So North Face...

Some results from our DTC focus and trying to expand outside Amazon - just some random shit....
Again, we're throwing money at FB Ads to scale up a bit - I am positive this can be scaled drastically but am happy with the results over the first 8 weeks or so. I think... our floor for weekly gross profit is now 1K+ but I am confident we can 5x this by EOY with more paid marketing streams and a higher LTV.

If we step back and look at all revenue streams, there are a few things going on...
1. Overall Rev is down bc it's our slow season...

Here is a realistic request to Amazon:
1. You use a dim divisor of 139 for FBA shipments which is BS - NO ONE uses a divisor that low. You should change it to 194.

For everyone that wonders WTF a "dim divisor" is, let me explain...
When you ship a package, you are... usually invoiced based on the weight. Thing is, volume (space a product takes up) is an important commodity so all shipping companies implement a dim divisor. This allows them to charge more for large items that weigh very little. The formula is simple....

Below is just SOME of the math Amazon is forcing us to consider with these new BS Placement Fees. Look at this clusterf***. For each shipment to FBA we are supposed to choose the following options:
1. FBA from our own warehouse (single location)
2. FBA from our own warehouse... (2-3 locations)
3. FBA from our own warehouse (4+ locations)
4. AGL from factory to AWD
5. AGL from factory to FBA
6. AMP from factory to FBA

Doing the math is almost impossible because you need to consider:
1. Shipping cost from factory to port
2. Shipping cost from port to...

Okay, long thread probably...
1. The image on the left is how distribution used to work. You buy from your factory, use the sea shipping carrier of your choice, send goods to your own WH or 3PL. You can then distribute those goods as you please to multiple revenue streams.... 2. The image on the right is now what Amazon sellers have to deal with. This is a BASIC chart, it's actually much more complex but as you can see, there are now more decisions that need to be made.
3. The red lines show the exact path Amazon wants sellers to take. As you...

Here are 3 examples comparing Amazon AWD services to new placement fees. Placement fees are BS and should be removed but since Amazon used a complicated pricing model, many sellers are confused on their cheapest option. Amazon AWD is MUCH MORE expensive than placement... fees in many cases. The example below is not my opinion, this is MATH. On top of this math, Amazon also wants us (or not) to run inbound shipping comparisons of both services which they have made almost impossible to do. This whole workflow is f***ed up and I keep seeing a...

More numbers related to new Amazon Fees. Believe it or not I do more than just complain about them - so we're working to figure out how to minimize them. Here is some shocking data...Amazon keeps recommending AWS as a great alternative and here's why it's... a thirst trap. First, here is what Amazon has done to set the trap:
1. Roll out a service called AWD. This is a warehouse Amazon controls. You can send your inventory here and Amazon will send the goods from AWD > FBA. The storage costs for AWD are cheaper than FBA so...

New Amazon Fees: These are gonna F*** some of ya'll up. Here is a basic run down (not yet complete).
New FBA fees: First off, Amazon raised all of our FBA fees Feb 5th and is again recalculating them on April 15th. Overall this should be a net savings - below are some... examples of random products. So this is great news kinda - I sold 259,000 items last year so this should save me around 67,340 USD...okay, cool BUT....

Here is where Amazon is going to f*** us all. They are going to charge us to inbound goods into FBA. Standard size....

Lightning Deals on Amazon are trash now. "BuT MiKe, YoU dOn'T hAvE dAtA tO sUpPoRt ThAt!".... Peep this bois...
122 deals ran from Jan-July of this year across 16 SKUs and 4 random categories - all days of the week, all times of the day, variations, non variations... expensive items, cheap items (15-60 USD prices). The math just ain't mathing - Amazon runs too many deals at a time to collect moresubmission fee$ and it has made LDs not worth it. Sales are such ass that the 150 submission fee takes up 10% of the sales revenue. You are...

P&L post....
So trying to make 2M next year, made 350K net through Aug this year so way behind pace. Some random notes:

Ebay and Etsy are down trending garbage from my POV.
Fulfullment, Rental Income, Wayfair and the 2 blocked out channels are super low revenue but.... margins are really good - just no scalability.
Advertising is 13.8% of revenue - Deeper dive shows Amazon is 91% of ad budget....

My Amazon launches are not great but here is ROUGHLY what I've been doing:
1. Submit max qty to vine program
2. Launch at full price with 20-25% coupon for 3 days
3. Email customers to come buy our item for 20-25% off for 3 days. We use Amazon Attribution links here and... the results are kinda mid - our email lists are 400-2K ppl depending on the brand. As you can see below, we don't get much but I'll take it.
4. We queue up 7 Amazon posts and schedule one every day for the first 7 days
5. We add the product to compare tables on our other...

Amazon PPC Adjustment recommendations for Prime Day - Hmmm....lol. So....
1. Increase bids up to 35% before PD (makes no sense, this is when CVR tanks)
2. Increase 40-90% during PD
3. Keep bids up to 23% higher after PD.

I will be doing kinda the opposite. First.... we will lower our bids the week before PD to keep our spend down since CVR will suck a fat one. During PD we will keep bids lower but raise budgets. After PD, we will raise bids back up to where they normally are and slash budgets. A lot of ppl say "go create retargeting...

Off topic political THREAD: So for some reason everyone on here believes I am a Republican - that is 100% NOT true. I believe in helping people - I ain't crazy but would say I lean decently left - mostly based on social issues. Anyways, a recent interaction with the US govt... has me within inches of being a Libertarian. My buddy sent me this Ron Paul book a few years ago and I remember thinking "Ron Paul is a moron" (still think that) but recently the US govt has been lying straight to my face ab something to get me to give them....

So here is something I am pretty sure ZERO Amazon sellers have noticed:
Amazon has killed editorial placement and also done away with non paid placement that would say things like "best under 40.00" or "best for heavy duty" - this spots have been replaced with paid spots... Search "closet hangers" and you have: Top 5 spots are paid....

Okay, Here is a list of Amazon/Ecom apps I use. Do I know the owners of some of these apps? Yea. Do I get a discount on any of these or have a referral link? No. Would I post ab these apps on here if my friends asked me? NO. So here is some stuff I use in no specific... order....
Skuvault: This is my WMS and mosat expensive app. It pushes live inventory to all my channels, handles my POs, etc. You only need this if you run a warehouse.

Shipworks: Mehh, been with them 10+ years. They are desktop based shipping software. Both SW and...

Disclaimer - still no idea what I am doing but I put together some metrics to help me manage my cash better (I think). Kinda just making some stuff up on the fly. Anyways, here is a thread on it.... I've bought too much in inventory and hold onto too many items - felt like a waste of cash so I wanted some metrics to better understand what I am doing. I wanted these metrics on a PRODUCT level so here are a few of them....

Can someone at @amznsellerhelp tell me what below means? We are having some big issues with FBA inbound shipments splitting in weird ways and trying to troubleshoot it. The whole situation is a mess.... 1. On March 8th, I contacted Amazon with questions about opting into the "multiple destination" program. I then get a reply today that Amazon has opted me out (umm, I was never notified I was opted in?)....

Here are 8 random items and their sales and profit on Amazon over the last 30 days. Million ways to make money:
1. Sell tons of units at low margin
2. Sell very few units at high margin
3. Sell very few expensive items
4. Sell very few cheap items...
It all adds.... up. The hardest part is to get your first item and then BUILD around it. I never got this part until a few years ago bc I must be a bit slow. Take this as an example - let's say your first item is a basic TV mount and you get it to work...you now have 3 main categories...

So...I am in this group. I do NOT promote shit on here but here are my thoughts and feedback on this:
1. Comparing MDS to other groups.... I was in YEC. Price is cheap, A LOT of rich ppl in that group and very few Amazon guys. Good group of biz owners. I was also in...

https://twitter.com/mdsonly/status/1616640338587979778

Ecom Fuel. I only dropped Ecom Fuel bc I didn't have the time. Ecom Fuel is 100% Ecom businesses so big portion is DTC and not even on Amazon. Everyone in this group also shares their brands publicly. Price is cheap and @youderian runs it and the ppl in it are AMAZING...

THREAD: How I source and launch new items (mostly with a focus on timelines). So I went 2 years without confirming a new item from 2019-2020. I focused on improving our already proven items instead. I ended up getting caught with my pants down bc of this (no charges) so... here is how our sourcing "cycle" current works:
1. I keep a list of 50-100 product ideas in a spreadsheet at all times. Any time I come across an idea I just add it here. I treat this as a scratch pad and try to jam some random notes in for each item....