Q4 Lessons For This Amazon Sellers

It’s a week away from Christmas and my Amazon seller account has been performing admirably … like most seller accounts this time of year 🙂 , But what I am loving about selling at this time of year is all the lessons I am learning.

This is my first year selling on Amazon so it’s my first ‘Q4’ experience. You can read all sorts of things over the interwebs about how Q4 sales differ from the rest of the year but I always take everything with a pinch of salt until I see it with my own eyes.

This morning I received an email from Amazon.fr selling coach (Part of Amazon’s automated emails to sellers) saying :

(Oh… By the way…I use Gmail translate to automatically translate the messages to English)

I read this and thought… I sell this item… or did. I logged-in to seller-central, found the item. I’d sold out! I did have about 20 in stock just the other day.

I bought this item in mid-summer and sold about 60-70 over a couple of months and then price took a tumble. Well below my price, so sales came to a halt. I held my ground and figured I would have a chance of selling the remaining stock once the other sellers ran out of stock.

At the start of December I remember checking this item and there were lots of sellers still selling at a low price… around the £10 mark and a few of the sellers had 100’s in stock. I didn’t budge on price…. stuck my ground!

So now I’m out of stock and you can see from the seller central inventory image I’d sold my stock for £17.99.

As you can see the item is quite a popular seller, ranked 478 at the time of the screenshot.

So… what’s the lesson here? HOLD YOUR PRICE ON GOOD SELLERS

Add Some AWESOME SAUCE!

If I have sold out, and I’m getting messages from Amazon.fr … where did I sell my items?

I took a look at my orders report. Here is what happened:

• Amazon.FR – 7 sales
• Amazon.DE – 9 sales
• Amazon.ES – 2 sales
• Amazon.UK – 2 sales

AND… the order dates just covered 2 days. Dec 10th – Dec 11th.

Now the nice thing about these European orders is that I have my Amazon account set-up to stick an extra £5 on the price of the item for any European country sales (excluding UK). So my price for most of the orders was £22.99.

So, I made some extra money on these orders …. Feels good!

BUT!

If I have sold out of stock… Orders were across Europe… AND… it is a popular product…. what is this item selling for now?

Go back to that last image and look at price. . . . £39.34 + £4 shipping. HUH… I guess I’m not as smart as I thought I was. Take a look at the current prices in other countries too…

Two countries (France and Italy) are out of stock and Germany is selling at EUR 62.89. That about $77.49 or £49.78.

I Could Have Added Tons More Awesome Sauce!

I love looking at stuff like this. There is no doubt I could have made more money on this item but what a lesson to learn. I’ve got to watch price more closely in the busy selling periods. I’ve got to have a better feel for sales rank related to the velocity of sales and, I guess… keep a look out for more lessons like this. Time to dig into my item sales history a little more 🙂

Lastly… A few more screenshots for this item…