Massive Scale Cross-Border Amazon Arbitrage

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Here's today plus catch-up from the days when I was traveling:

Weekly Goals​

• 700k Active Listings: not done

Yes it's trending downwards because I've been out of town. But I got home and added more than 60 new brands to the queue, so I expect this to start turning around. I also have a good method now for finding new brands, so hopefully I can keep it up until I'm ready to stop adding listings.

• Speak with Amazon Ads person: not done

Need to speak to my account manager now that I'm back.

• Understand legal entity requirements for country 3: not done

Need to speak to my account manager now that I'm back.

Account Health​

• Relationship Work (October)
  • Amazon Office Visits: 2 / 1
  • Account Manager Phone Calls: 3 / 4
• Country 1
  • Account Health: ??? (At Risk) This feature disappeared
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes
• Country 2
  • Account Health: 168 (At Risk)
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• 700k Active Listings: not done

After adding 60 new clothing brands and letting the bot run all day, the catalog grew by 18k listings. I will now do my 'brand farming' and try to add 100 new brands each day until I hit the goal.

• Speak with Amazon Ads person: not done

I got an email from the Amazon Ads person asking for free time slots, so I'm trying to set up a meeting for tomorrow.

• Understand legal entity requirements for country 3: not done

I haven't done this yet.

Account Health Assurance​

There is a new program in country 2, where if your account health score is above 250 for 6 months, they will not automatically shut you down. Maybe this is unnecessary with my paid account support, but if I ever reach those stats, I will definitely register for this.

Account Health​

• Relationship Work (October)
  • Amazon Office Visits: 2 / 1
  • Account Manager Phone Calls: 3 / 4
• Country 1
  • Account Health: ??? (At Risk) This feature disappeared
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes
• Country 2
  • Account Health: 168 (At Risk)
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes

 

[msufan]

This is such a perfect example of something that one day will be seen as an "overnight" success

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• 700k Active Listings: not done

Added 100 new brands that I 'farmed' last night.

• Speak with Amazon Ads person: done

Done, but I got no help. My account is disabled and this person pointed me right back to my account manager, who is the one who pointed me to the Amazon Ads person in the first place.

• Understand legal entity requirements for country 3: not done

Spoke to my account manager about this, but she is too busy preparing for sales and wants to address it later.

Deals​

I submitted about 11k listings to get deals on them twice in the next month. I'm using this as an experiment to see if running promotional deals will improve the overall profitability or not.

Account Health​

• Relationship Work (October)
  • Amazon Office Visits: 2 / 1
  • Account Manager Phone Calls: 4 / 4
• Country 1
  • Account Health: ??? (At Risk) This feature disappeared
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes
• Country 2
  • Account Health: 168 (At Risk)
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• 700k Active Listings: not done

The chart looks like I'm not going to hit the target, but I think I can make a big dent in it tomorrow. I remembered that I was taking out of stock products down completely, so I ran a DB query and pulled up hundreds of thousands of ASINs that were previously out of stock to re-update. I think this can get me over 700k by tomorrow.

• Speak with Amazon Ads person: done

No update here.

• Understand legal entity requirements for country 3: not done

No update here.

Record Dispatch​

I dispatched 50 orders for delivery today. I think the most ever prior to this was 32. This took me in total less than 30 minutes of work but still I have a number of ways I can either automate more of the process or get my vendor to do more of the work at no cost to me.

Account Health​

• Relationship Work (October)
  • Amazon Office Visits: 2 / 1
  • Account Manager Phone Calls: 4 / 4
• Country 1
  • Account Health: ??? (At Risk) This feature disappeared
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes
• Country 2
  • Account Health: 168 (At Risk)
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• 700k Active Listings: not done

My plan of refreshing the out of stock items didn't work too well last night. So I went back to brand farming and gathered up several hundred brands to add. It will take some time to get through them all and bring the total up.

The closing total for this week is 639k.

• Speak with Amazon Ads person: done

No update here.

• Understand legal entity requirements for country 3: not done

No update here.

Automation​

I finally got some programming time and automated a couple of manual tasks in my workflow:

• Automatically populate order value in the fulfillment spreadsheet
• Automatically populate the description in the fulfillment spreadsheet
• Allow bulk upload of keywords for adding brands (this used to be done copy-paste one by one)

One thing I could automate next is checking the delivery status of my orders and flagging any issues ahead of time.

Account Health​

• Relationship Work (October)
  • Amazon Office Visits: 2 / 1
  • Account Manager Phone Calls: 4 / 4
• Country 1
  • Account Health: ??? (At Risk) This feature disappeared
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes
• Country 2
  • Account Health: 168 (At Risk)
  • Account Active: Yes
  • Featured Offer Eligibility: Yes

 

[GoldFibre]

Weekly Update​

It was the best week so far again. Ultimately this is coming down to the number of listings in my catalog and that is where I have to focus. No need to make it any more complicated. Once I'm near the theoretical limit of listings that my bot can handle, then I can focus on other optimizations.

Fulfillment doesn't take too much time and I can always automate a task here and there to reduce the workload.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[msufan]

This thing is ramping up big time

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• 750k Active Listings: not done

I added some brands I farmed and also removed my restriction on the number of siblings a product can have.

Account Health​

My account health appears to be under control, so I'm going to remove that from this daily report.

Too Many Orders​

My account was temporarily restricted again for having too many open orders. It went away after I did the usual order confirmations for some items I should be dispatching on Monday or Tuesday.

Handling Days Bug​

I got a big order today that I had to cancel because the product was only going to be available a month from now. It turned out to be a bug with how I calculate my own handling days based on some misleading documentation in date-fns. Fixed now.

Productivity​

Even though I post every day about this business, at this point I'm really only on it for about an hour each day, and often I'm just checking that things are still working, which is very passive.

I feel like the business itself is so passive that it's affecting me and preventing me from taking real action. It's nice to sit around and make 200 USD per day doing almost nothing, and sometimes it's not so clear what action I could take to grow the business or make some progress.

On Saturdays I get a few hours to myself to do coding and I make some improvements, but most other days I don't actually work on my system.

I am going to set another goal of making at least one system improvement every day, no matter how small. Even though it can be small, it still has to be something that has leverage and makes some multiplicative change, rather than being transactional.

Here I will list out at least 20 things I could do as part of this:

1. Poll delivery status of dispatched orders and record in fulfillment spreadsheet
2. Switch initial status to 'order received' and then switch it to 'product sourced' once I make the purchase
3. Create some form for the product purchase to record to my spreadsheet as well as update the product cost
4. Clarify the 5% cash back discount in my pricing
5. Make a calendar of important dates for paying suppliers, calling my Amazon contacts, and so on
6. Add some try/catch and state reset to my selling applications script so it doesn't crash
7. Make a workflow that queues up brand updates whenever I add a brand via the web app
8. Add a product type updater, paralleling the brand updater
9. Sign up for more Amazon accounts to add new keys to my bot
10. Add price experimentation to try to find the price which gets the maximum profit
11. Tweak the transit time
12. Create a new merchant shipping profile that allows me to confirm orders earlier
13. Meet with vendor to offload some of the manual work to them
14. Figure out a way to automate scraping my competitors' catalogs
15. Figure out a way to automate my 'brand farming' activity
16. Work on bringing more of my fulfillment into the DB, rather than on Google Sheets
17. Set up Amazon Business API to auto-update tracking numbers and origin delivery status
18. Roll brand/offer updater into main bot process so I'm not doubling up on my API usage and going over my rate limit
19. Store more information on keywords to identify when they were created and if they are considered brands
20. Renegotiate my international rates
21. Renegotiate my local delivery rates
22. Get temperature control service set up on my local delivery account
23. CLI menu for my bot
24. Get my accounting system up to date
25. Switch to some free accounting software

I picked number 2 and did it quickly.

Relationship Work (October)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 2 / 1
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 4 / 4

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• 750k Active Listings: not done

My bot went down because there was a break in my internet and I didn't discover it until I got home from work. So we didn't add many offers. Anyway this is a lame excuse, so I'm going to add fallback logic that restarts the process after waiting 30 minutes if it ever crashes.

System Improvements 2 / 7​

To avoid crashes losing me lots of bot time in the future, I added fallback logic to the two main scripts I run all the time. Typically the only way a crash happens is if my internet temporarily goes out for 10+ minutes. So now when this happens I just wait 30 minutes and then retry. And it will keep retrying every 30 minutes regardless of what is wrong.

Ads Account​

I followed up with my account manager to get this reactivated and she says she is working on it.

Relationship Work (October)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 2 / 1
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 4 / 4

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• 750k Active Listings: not done

Despite my changes from yesterday to keep the bot up, it kept going down throughout the day because I missed one place where an internet outage can make it fail. Listings still went up though from adding more high sibling count items from my DB.

Daily System Improvements 3 / 7​

I fixed another place where lack of internet connectivity was causing the bot to crash. This was the refresh token scheduler, which is on a timeout - the token expires after an hour.

Let's see how long the bot lasts before the next crash. Also, I should get my internet fixed.

Currently the most common failure with the existing document automation is when someone has a city name that doesn't map to my courier's list of cities. I have a suspicion that it is the same 'non-cities' that are causing the failure each time, so I added a mapping override to the correct names for the ones I know about.

I also fixed one issue I had with my credit card cashback calculation affecting my declared value in the fulfillment spreadsheet.

Fulfillment Manual Work​

I prepared the documents for 50 orders today and timed it - it took me 32 minutes. The task is pretty mechanical and could be automated further, although this would have taken about two hours if I didn't have my current automation.

Basically I need to write a flow to download a set of PDF files from two different portals. For one of the portals I just need to click a button, but for the other one I have to print some HTML to PDF. I checked the Puppeteer documentation and it looks like there is an option for this.

Assuming I had this automation I think it would take my manual work from 32 minutes down 5 seconds plus waiting for the script to finish.

Fulfillment Errors​

I got multiple complaints from customers due to errors in fulfillment which came from my vendor in the warehouse. They admitted fault and offered to refund the amount, but it would be better to just not have the errors at all.

So I'm planning to visit them this week and do a process improvement workshop. I think we are at a ~2% error rate now, and we should be at 0.1% or so.

Relationship Work (October)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 2 / 1
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 4 / 4

 

[amp0193]

So I'm planning to visit them this week and do a process improvement workshop. I think we are at a ~2% error rate now, and we should be at 0.1% or so.

Great. Nothing like eyes on the process to see what’s happening for real and help improve it.

I’ve done the “ohno circle” a couple of times in my own warehouse (basically, stand in one spot for hours and just observe), and I always end the exercise with pages of notes.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

I only had one crash in the evening - otherwise this was running all day.

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Daily System Improvements 4 / 7​

I switched one gigantic array of blacklisted ASINs into a key-value pair, which will make checking the blacklist much faster, even if it doesn't really take that much time. Eventually this should be in the DB, but it works fine for now.

I also wrote some pseudo-code for my document automation to understand what the flow should be.

Fulfillment Errors​

I visited the warehouse and the warehouse manager had already made some improvements to the process that should reduce errors significantly.

On top of that, some information was coming in late, so we added some steps where the spreadsheet will get updated. This should prevent me from having late orders simply because I'm missing a tracking number.

We also discussed a bit about integration between our systems, but it isn't so clear to me that there is something to be gained from it.

Lastly, we decided to make a small change to the consolidation process in the US which might speed up my transit time by a day in certain cases.

The guys told me that the packaging now takes half a day to complete since I have 50 orders, and that if I get up to 100+ per consol they will have to add more staff. I told them I'm hoping to be at more than 200 per consol, so let's make things as efficient as possible.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

This ran all day, but now I'm running low on memory on this laptop so I have to find more things to delete.

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Daily System Improvements 4 / 7​

I was busy until late tonight and didn't get in any coding time.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

Even though the bot has been adding brands all day, it's still not adding new products as fast as before. I suspect this is due to the restriction on games in country 2 as well as that many of the brands from this list have probably been shared with my competitors already.

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Daily System Improvements 4 / 7​

I was busy until late tonight and didn't get in any coding time.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

The bot added brands all day without interruption and we ended up at exactly 750k listings.

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Daily System Improvements 4 / 7​

On Saturdays I have time in the morning to do a few hours of focused coding. I decided to automate more of my document preparation, since this is a bit of an issue now.

It took my only 30 minutes to automate the task, and yet I've been spending more than 30 minutes on each consol manually preparing all the documentation!

I spent the rest of the time improving the code to handle failure cases, to write a log of what happened with each order, and so on.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

Weekly Update​

Profit was up about $100 for the week, but orders up about 42%. Of course I prefer a higher AOV and it isn't good that it has gone down, but I think that this is just some statistical randomness that I didn't get many large orders this week.

In the coming week I am taking some time off from my full time job and will be heavily focused on this business. I want to really make some step changes in different areas and see if I can double the profit. For sure there are levers that I'm not yet pulling and that can make a huge difference.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

I'm setting a stretch challenge this week of getting to 1m active listings. I want to push myself to get creative with my approach and find ways to make it happen.

Today I didn't have a lot of time. Starting tomorrow I'm off work and have a lot of time to myself to make progress.

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 0 / 4

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Warehouse Visits: 1 / 2
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 1 / 4
• International Vendor Phone Calls: 2 / 4
• Local Delivery Vendor Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Ten 1% Improvements​

To maximize the use of my extra time this week, I'm going to try to do at least ten '1% Improvements' each day. Of course, I don't know the impact of anything I do, but I do know which things have leverage, so basically anything with leverage or some multiplying effect counts as a '1% improvement'. In aggregate they should have an impact on the business.

I wrote down a couple of ideas and then got started once I was in front of my computer:

1. DONE Register for another Amazon Seller account so that I can add the API keys to my bot
2. DONE Combine main bot with brand-updater script to avoid API rate limit conflicts and speed up overall processing
3. DONE Record completed brand updates in the brand table
4. DONE Add whitelisting column to brands and use it to drive the brand updates (moving away from the csv file)
5. DONE Call account manager, try to get on her radar and get something from her, and set up next in-person meeting (result: set meeting for Thursday morning, she promised me a list of vetted ASINs, will follow up on my blocked ad account, will vet the list of brands I had shared)
6. DONE Link keyword updater UI to the brand table
7. DONE Add priority queue function to brand list and apply it to those added via keyword updater
8. DONE Add country 2 option to document preparation script
9. DONE Add check to processing priority queue that it should have also been scraped
10. DONE Engage with Amazon team about getting approved for larger brands like Nike, where I can see that my competitors are also listing
11. DONE Run a query to find ASINs where the biggest competitor is, and add those brands to my queue (7,000+ brands)
12. DONE Fix selling application automation so that it doesn't crash
13. DONE Block risky brand list provided by account manager
14. DONE Add brands from new vetted list provided by account manager (16,000+ brands)
15. DONE Add 'bail-out' mechanism for brand updater that stops updating a brand if after processing 500 ASINs it hasn't added any listings
16. DONE Expand 'Relationship Work' section of my updates to make sure I'm regularly addressing all the parties involved in the business
17. DONE Work on country 2 rates (result: did price comparison based on second vendor quote, went back to both vendors to negotiate them down)
18. Try to negotiate down my country 1 rate (result: wasn't able to get ahold of the guy today)

The theme today was on brand updates, which is my primary way of adding listings now. I remembered there is a brand table in my database. When I checked it I learned that it has been diligently updating a list of now 500k+ brands in Amazon, so this made most of the above features a bit easier to develop.

The culmination of all these improvements was number 11 and 14. With a single line query and one copy-paste, I was able to add thousands of new brands to the queue that are 'safe' considering the top competitors already list on them. The features I made before number 11 enabled me to do this in an automated way, and now the bot will just run with it. For sure this '1% Improvement' was way more than 1% impact.

Of course it will take several days to process all these brands, but I eliminated the task of me having to look them all up myself, so I've automated more of the process.

Nearly everything in the list was done before 1pm and then I started running out of clear ideas. So here is some more brainstorming for the rest of the week, again trying to focus on increasing the active listing count:

1. Somehow use the percentage of ASINs to listings created to optimize the massive queue of brands
2. Look into the async code to see if there is a further optimization that will speed up the brand processor
3. Build the updater filter for the brands that will go on sale during the deal time
4. Optimize the selling applications automation by pre-reading the brand on the page to skip it without having to open the application page and examine it
5. See if I can reduce some wait time in the selling applications automation loop
6. Further prioritize brands by the number of ASINs on the brand where I'm beating the competitor
7. Add the brands where the other competitors are present
8. Keep track of the number of 'putOffer' calls made per minute and focus on improving it
9. Try to make the selling applications automation headless using CLI input for the OTP entry

Now I want to expand my thinking and go outside the box:

1. Find some non-amazon supplier of Chinese products to list on Amazon
2. Now that I actually have volume, reach out to five or six more vendors for country 2 rates
3. Ask my equity partner from another venture to employ me part time at a rate where I can survive, so that I can work 20+ hours per week on this business
4. Raise funds through my network to buy out my vendor, then lower my shipping rates to near zero and expand the Amazon business. Apply digital marketing best practices to the acquired business to expand it
5. Move to a lower-cost country, sell or rent out my apartment, and run this business remotely

I have bit less time tomorrow due to a commitment, but let's see how far we get.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Warehouse Visits: 1 / 2
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 1 / 4
• International Vendor Phone Calls: 2 / 4
• Local Delivery Vendor Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Ideas​

In the morning I was entertaining my very smart friend from out of town. I told him about the business and asked his ideas. Here are a few of the things he said:

1. Write a script to check multiple sites at the procurement stage to give you a best guess if I can buy it cheaper elsewhere
2. Diversify revenue away from Amazon in case they change their policy and kill the business model
3. Repurpose the software into an app that can be marketed to all of the 100k+(?) Amazon sellers
4. Applying data science to the product choice might be too difficult due to how 'slow' the data is

Ten 1% Improvements​

I flopped here as I was out all morning when I would have had my free time. At least I got some good input from my friend.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Warehouse Visits: 1 / 2
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 1 / 4
• International Vendor Phone Calls: 2 / 4
• Local Delivery Vendor Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Ten 1% Improvements​

I flopped here again as I attended a conference in the morning. Tomorrow I will have more time to work on this. Although I may be going to the Amazon office in the morning.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Warehouse Visits: 1 / 2
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 2 / 4
• International Vendor Phone Calls: 3 / 4
• Local Delivery Vendor Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Calling Everyone​

• I called my account manager about our meeting scheduled for today. She was too busy to meet, so we postponed to early next week.
• Spoke to my international vendor and will be meeting him in person tomorrow morning.
• I called my local delivery vendor and he didn't pick up.

Ten 1% Improvements​

I haven't done much over the past two days, but the improvements I made on Monday have been running smoothly and steadily increasing my active listings.

My buy box eligibility actually went away yesterday but I still had a great day for sales, so I can't complain too much.

I had time this morning and here is what I did:

1. DONE Optimize the selling applications automation by pre-reading the brand on the page to skip it without having to open the application page and examine it
2. DONE Automate password input and switch OTP input to CLI for selling application processor
3. DONE Automate merchant and marketplace selection, switch selling application processor to headless mode
4. DONE Create 'Unprocured Orders' web app page
5. DONE Submit missing personal info for new Amazon seller account
6. DONE Store item-level order detail in DB (ASIN, quantity and price)
7. DONE Display links to Amazon US in Unprocured Orders page
8. DONE Add form to update actual procurement cost to Unprocured Orders page
9. DONE Implement updating of costs on submit of form
10. DONE Add price comparisons to see where I'm better/worse than estimated

First I worked on improving my selling application browser automation. Before it ran with the browser open (not headless) which fully occupied one of my computers. This was due to some complexity with logging in with an OTP. Now I've automated all of the steps except that, and moved the OTP to a CLI input, allowing me to switch to headless and run this in the background. It is also about 10x faster because it checks if it has submitted a brand before and skips it if it has.

After that I did a bunch of work on procurement today. I felt that it was both taking too long and subject to errors because of all the switching between pages. So I added a page that simplifies my task. I can't fully automate procurement because there is human reasoning involved, but I can at least minimize the amount of mechanical tasks involved so that I can just focus on the human part each time.

There are still some quality of life improvements I can make to the procurement side, but after using it once tonight I can tell it is already a big improvement.

Here are some things I have in mind:

• Really, really call out visually when the quantity is not one
• Check the variant (color, size) in both US and local marketplaces to look for mismatches and then call them out visually
• Write the result to the Google Spreadsheet and update the status in the DB
• Visual feedback on the form processing
• Move back end to a server action so I can use the app over ngrok

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Warehouse Visits: 1 / 2
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 2 / 4
• International Vendor Phone Calls: 3 / 4
• Local Delivery Vendor Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Ten 1% Improvements​

I had less time this morning but did make progress:

1. DONE Connect new account API keys to bot (now I have five accounts connected)
2. DONE Sign up for another Amazon seller account
3. DONE Really, really call out visually when the quantity is not one in Unprocured Orders page
4. Connect that account API keys to bot (was getting some error about credit card validation that didn't make sense)

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Warehouse Visits: 1 / 2
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 2 / 4
• International Vendor Phone Calls: 3 / 4
• Local Delivery Vendor Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Ten 1% Improvements​

I did not make good use of my free time this morning:

1. DONE Add next account API keys to bot (now six accounts connected)
2. DONE Register another account

 

[GoldFibre]

Weekly Update​

Sales were down a bit from last week and I think the primary reason is that I lost buy box eligibility in country 1 halfway through the week. I'm not too worried about it because it usually only lasts five days or so, and this might be something I just have to tolerate since I increased my active listings so fast.

My goal for the week was to hit 1m active listings, which would have been far more than I have ever added in a week. I came up short, but still very close to the goal since I got creative with the solutions and was able to multiply the speed of adding listings.

This coming week even if I do absolutely nothing the bot will continue to add offers at the current pace. There is a question though if I could continue at that pace or limit myself, to avoid the risk of getting any kind of restriction.

Beyond that there are other ways to improve my 'yield' on the catalog:

• Lower my prices by lowering my logistics costs
• Solicit reviews for my store to make customers more likely to buy from me
• Source products from multiple places to try to lower the cost of procurement
• Run my selling applications automation on both country 1 and country 2

In this coming week I will try to knock off at least of two of these.

At the same time as orders and listings increase the amount of manual work I need to handle each day creeps up. It still isn't more than an hour, but there are ways I can automate it further. I'm going to set a target of spending less than 30 minutes per day 'running' this business, and with the current weekly income of ~1,500 USD it's like I am making 439 USD per hour. If I can maintain that <30m per day and increase the weekly income, then I can make thousands of dollars per hour and make some real lifestyle changes.

This week I will try to time the manual work I do on the business to see if it is within my target of 30m per day.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

Complete at least two of the following:

• Lower my prices by lowering my logistics costs
• Solicit reviews for my store to make customers more likely to buy from me
• Source products from multiple places to try to lower the cost of procurement
• DONE Run my selling applications automation on both country 1 and country 2

Transactional Time Under 30m​

I used a stopwatch to check how long I'm spending on 'transactional' things like procurement or manually appealing violations. I ended up at around 25 minutes, so I am still under the target for now.

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Warehouse Visits: 1 / 2
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 2 / 4
• International Vendor Phone Calls: 3 / 4
• Local Delivery Vendor Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Update​

The country 2 selling account got disabled today because of account health. This isn't such a big deal and I should get it back soon.

Today was a pretty good day for sales even though country 1 account doesn't have buy box eligibility. Let's hope it's a sign that the larger catalog is working.

I didn't have a lot of free time for coding today, but tomorrow will be better. With the little time I had I modified the selling application automation to work on both countries.

Since I was using the stop watch anyway for the transactional work, I also used it for the coding and it came out to just 4 minutes and 30 seconds. That's pretty eye-opening for me! I'm spending way less time on my system than I tell myself, and I can get a lot done with just a little bit of focused effort.

I will keep using the stop watch going forward and use it to drive my productivity up.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

Complete at least two of the following:

• Lower my prices by lowering my logistics costs
• WIP Solicit reviews for my store to make customers more likely to buy from me
• Source products from multiple places to try to lower the cost of procurement
• DONE Run my selling applications automation on both country 1 and country 2

Transactional Time Under 30m​

I downloaded an app that lets you manage multiple timers and then did my best to remember to trigger them as I switched between tasks during the day.

Below are most of the results:



I went overtime on transactional things because I had to generate documentation and my script ran into three new edge cases that I needed to fix before it would run all the way through. Had these not been there I would have been under 30 minutes.

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Warehouse Visits: 1 / 2
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 2 / 4
• International Vendor Phone Calls: 3 / 4
• Local Delivery Vendor Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Update​

This morning I built an integration into my delivery partner's API to track and update the shipment statuses in my DB. This can be used to drive messages soliciting reviews whenever I deliver early, which is one of my weekly goals.

With the help of my multi-stopwatch I was actually really productive in that ~2 hours of coding. I built an entire API integration into my app and it is running smoothly.

In the afternoon my bot kept crashing because of random timeouts from the SP API. I opened a case with developer support and also added more error handling for this issue, which was failing without retrying when it was getting new refresh tokens.

 

[msufan]

Today's Stats​

View attachment 52415

Weekly Goals​

Complete at least two of the following:

• Lower my prices by lowering my logistics costs
• WIP Solicit reviews for my store to make customers more likely to buy from me
• Source products from multiple places to try to lower the cost of procurement
• DONE Run my selling applications automation on both country 1 and country 2

Transactional Time Under 30m​

I downloaded an app that lets you manage multiple timers and then did my best to remember to trigger them as I switched between tasks during the day.

Below are most of the results:

View attachment 52414

I went overtime on transactional things because I had to generate documentation and my script ran into three new edge cases that I needed to fix before it would run all the way through. Had these not been there I would have been under 30 minutes.

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Warehouse Visits: 1 / 2
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 2 / 4
• International Vendor Phone Calls: 3 / 4
• Local Delivery Vendor Phone Calls: 0 / 4

Update​

This morning I built an integration into my delivery partner's API to track and update the shipment statuses in my DB. This can be used to drive messages soliciting reviews whenever I deliver early, which is one of my weekly goals.

With the help of my multi-stopwatch I was actually really productive in that ~2 hours of coding. I built an entire API integration into my app and it is running smoothly.

In the afternoon my bot kept crashing because of random timeouts from the SP API. I opened a case with developer support and also added more error handling for this issue, which was failing without retrying when it was getting new refresh tokens.

Gotta be honest -- with the rate of return you are getting on this thing, I would not worry about staying under 30 minutes. I'd focus on max effort now to continue the exponential growth you've been experiencing. I do like the way you are always looking for inefficiencies that can be improved upon, though -- that is key for sure.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[GoldFibre]

Gotta be honest -- with the rate of return you are getting on this thing, I would not worry about staying under 30 minutes. I'd focus on max effort now to continue the exponential growth you've been experiencing.

I've got two issues:

1. I don't have a ton of time each day, so if transactional work creeps up then I don't have enough time to work on growth
2. If I grow the catalog too fast it can cause account health issues, so I need to be careful about how much I put my foot on the gas

It's a bit of a balancing act.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

Complete at least two of the following:

• Lower my prices by lowering my logistics costs
• DONE Solicit reviews for my store to make customers more likely to buy from me
• Source products from multiple places to try to lower the cost of procurement
• DONE Run my selling applications automation on both country 1 and country 2

Transactional Time Under 30m​

Total transactional work was 39m:

Maybe my next feature will be to automate the account health work, since this is purely mechanical.

Relationship Work (November)​

• Amazon Office Visits: 0 / 1
• Warehouse Visits: 1 / 2
• Account Manager Phone Calls: 2 / 4
• International Vendor Phone Calls: 3 / 4
• Local Delivery Vendor Phone Calls: 0 / 4

I called everyone in the morning and nobody picked up. Hmm...

Update​

I get tons of email notifications from Amazon every day and I don't need any of them, so this morning I went into the settings and turned off as much as I could.

I added logic to mark orders that have early delivery, and then all the piping needed to send a message to the customer asking for a five star rating via the SP API. Then when I tested it, I ran into an authorization issue because once Amazon is aware that an order is shipped you cannot send this type of message anymore.

The seller portal has messaging options not available via the SP API, so I think the solution here is to use browser automation to send the message.

So I spent about two hours working through that (vs 15 minutes to build the API version). And then I let it run and submit 50+ messages to customers asking for a review. I hope that this results in some happy feedback and not just complaints!

I can now run this script at any time and it will catch up on all the old ones.

Today my account got restricted again for having too many open orders. I had about 40 orders to confirm for dispatch today, so the restriction got removed again quickly.