Massive Scale Cross-Border Amazon Arbitrage

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• Get into new routine!!!

Was planning to stay late at work and implement my plan and then the contractors told me they were coming at a super inconvenient time, I came home to make sure they were let in, and then they didn't show up until three hours later, which means I could have stayed late at work after all.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goals​

• Get into new routine!!!

I did my daily transactional stuff but I'm nowhere with getting into a routine.

 

[Bounce Back]

Today's Stats​

View attachment 54266

Weekly Goals​

• Get into new routine!!!

I did my daily transactional stuff but I'm nowhere with getting into a routine.

Are you still doing your full time job after this move?

 

[GoldFibre]

Are you still doing your full time job after this move?

Yes, still working my full time job.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Followed new routine: YES (7 out of 5 hours planned)

Weekly Goals​

• Get into new routine!!!

I wrote down specifically what I expect from my new routine, and will put in my daily posts whether or not I have followed it each day.

So essentially I have made this a part-time job by committing to 20 hours per week. If I'm in my hyper-productive state I can make a ton of progress with this time. If I am tired and unproductive, then 20 hours won't get me far.

I'm going to try to hit a minimum of 20 hours each week, even if I have to work extra some days to make up for other days when I couldn't meet the expectation. I started a timesheet to keep track of this.

Later in the evening I had some debate with my wife over the specifics of this schedule, but regardless of if the timings change, I will still go for 20 good hours per week.

Today's Tasks​

• Match catalog to recommended ASINs from account manager

I made a series of scripts that automatically cleaned up my catalog, deleting the vast majority of ASINs, leaving only those which were on the recommended list.

After running it for several hours I thought of a parallelization to make it go about twice as fast, so I implemented that and we will see how long it takes.

• Modify robot to only work from the recommended ASIN list

This turned out to be simpler than I thought because I had reusable code around managing queues. However, because my US accounts are blocked under the 'multiple accounts' policy, I'm not able to activate this yet.

I need to get help from my account manager to get those accounts unblocked as soon as possible.

I also had an idea to piggy-back on one competitor's listings since I know they also only work on the basis of Amazon recommended listings, but will have a different list than mine.

• Handle delivery vendor issues

I threatened my vendor because they made a number of mistakes, but the best thing is to manage them more actively. I sent them a series of messages to address a few issues and asked to schedule a meeting in the coming week.

Over WhatsApp we cleared all the account balance issues and scheduled a daily pickup from the warehouse to try to eliminate missed/late pickups.

• Add contact info to Shopify store mirroring competitor

My main competitor is active on Google Shopping and uses Google Ads, so whatever they have done on their site has passed Google's misrepresentation policy. I took inspiration from their contact info content and tried to replicate it on my own store.

I created graphics for my company email address, phone number and link to FAQs and added them to the homepage. There wasn't an easy way to put them into the footer of every page, so I need to work on that.

• Amazon account manager communication

I chatted with my account manager about the deactivated US accounts and he said he can only do something once he is back in the office on Monday. So we set up a call for the morning.

• Prioritize Shopify uploads

I added some prioritization criteria to which products I upload to Shopify, favoring a few brands that sell well for me on Amazon. Once I have the ability to run ads again I will try targeting these brands.

• Adjust minimum quantity

My bot sets the available quantity to 30 no matter what, and someone actually ordered 30 of one item today. Then when I checked I could only source 5 of this item, so I lost out on at 1.5k USD sale. I switched my default quantity down to 5, because I never really know how many will be available.

• Wholesale buying inquiry

There is one brand that I sell particularly well despite being in a crowded space. The company is based in the US, so I reached out to them to see about buying in bulk.

Other Notes​

Nearly all of the work I got done was while my son was at his Saturday morning activity. After he came home it became very difficult to focus. I think a good alternative on the weekend is to go to my full time office since nobody will be around to distract me.

While at lunch I wrote down a bunch of improvement ideas I had across a number of different areas. Afterwards I thought about which of these actually have some revenue impact, considering I'm reducing my catalog so much now by switching to recommended ASINs only. I wrote 'High Impact' next to a few of them and will focus my effort on those over the others in the coming days:

• See if any US accounts are still active and only use those accounts as my bot workers
• Validate safety of top selling brands with Amazon account manager
• Piggy-back on the listings of one competitor that I know only lists recommended brands

 

[GoldFibre]

Weekly Update​

This week my only goal was to get into my new routine. I flailed around in the beginning of the week and got my act together only yesterday.

Now that the source of my ASINs is a shorter list, my catalog is going to shrink by a large margin. So I will not hit the profit totals from the end of last year as easily.

In this coming week my goal is to maintain my routine and work at least 20 hours on this business.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goal​

• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (2.5 / 20)

I woke up at 5am today to try to get in 2-3 hours of work before the rest of the family woke up.

First I imported all of the recommended ASINs to my DB. Some of them were already there, but I did a pass over them to make sure they were in my base table.

Then I got my bot working on that list. I examined all the results of the listing processor and made a number of adjustments to the logic to get a larger percentage of the ASINs listed.

Later in the day I realized that I'm waiting around for Google Ads to approve me, but there are other ad platforms out there I could be working on. So I signed up for Microsoft Advertising and may try to open accounts for Meta and TikTok tomorrow.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goal​

• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (5 / 20)

Morning​

I started at 5am again today.

I fixed a few bot crash scenarios that have come up recently.

Then I signed up for a TikTok Business account and went through the setup process, as well as set up my first ad using a creative from one of the brands I sell well. The account is still under review, as is my Microsoft Advertising account.

I checked the products for that brand in my Shopify store and noticed a few issues from the automatic import:

• Pricing needs to be updated - I ran my Shopify API script to do this DONE
• A lot of variants were split into separate products with the exact same photos - I should figure out a way to merge these automatically
• My brand page needs a photo and some content - I can take it from the official brand page DONE

I tried to find a good way to do the product merging using an app or a built-in Shopify feature, but there wasn't anything that fit. So I started working on an API script to apply the logic myself.

Night​

My TikTok account was approved, but my ad creative was rejected for having sexual content. It was for women's underwear so that's understandable. I will try to find a way to make a tamer creative.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goal​

• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (7.5 / 20)

Morning 5-7am​

I wanted to make a new creative for a TikTok ad and saw that the Shopify TikTok channel can auto-create them. So I took the auto-created one and made some slight modifications and submitted it.

It's the same product (women's shapewear) as the one from yesterday, so there is a chance it gets rejected again.

While that was in review I worked on my code to merge products together in Shopify. I got some scenarios working but I noticed a few others that require some more complicated logic. I combined the products that are appearing in my TikTok ad first, and then cleaned up some full duplicate products, so that the brand page will make a bit more sense.

I thought of two ways to prevent this duplicate issue:

1. Before importing products check for the title in my catalog
2. Scrape my Shopify SKUs and store them in my DB

Option 1 is done synchronously even if there are edge cases it will miss, so I implemented that one quickly.

That brand emailed me back and asked me my budget for the wholesale order. I wrote back and told them which product I am interested in and asked them which size/color combinations sell the best. I said I would order about $2,000 initially to test the market. I also tried to schedule a phone call with them for later today.

My Microsoft Advertising business verification also failed, with no reason given.

Evening 6-9pm​

The plan was to stay late at the office and work, but by chance there were many people staying late in the office, so I wasn't able to really do anything on the business.

I did see that my TikTok ad was driving traffic and I had about 100 visitors to my Shopify store.

I got a reply from the brand I contacted about wholesale purchases and it looks like they have a whole system setup for both wholesale and dropshippers. It actually put me off a bit and felt like 'hitchhiking', but I will schedule a call with them and get the details.

 

[Bounce Back]

@GoldFibre I had a thought on this today. Is there any reason why you make a store or even listings on Amazon versus say a chrome plugin or something like that which allows people to just shop on the Amazon site and send the products to you in an order?

 

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[GoldFibre]

@GoldFibre I had a thought on this today. Is there any reason why you make a store or even listings on Amazon versus say a chrome plugin or something like that which allows people to just shop on the Amazon site and send the products to you in an order?

I haven't thought about it in detail. I guess there would be some different challenges to overcome.

But some advantages of this idea are that it could avoid Amazon fees (15%), avoid some strict Amazon policies, and kind of instantly make the entire catalog available, if you could figure out how to do the pricing on the fly.

 

[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goal​

• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (8.5 / 20)

Morning 3-7am​

I woke up at 3am with a monster headache and after drinking some water I decided to work it off.

The focus was on trying to get a conversion from TikTok.

I checked my product page where the TikTok traffic is going and found a bunch of ways to improve it. I fixed the weird color-swatch issue with my premium Shopify theme. I made the description clearer and removed strange styling. I manually took all the explanatory banners from the Amazon product page and aligned them in the product description.

Now I think it looks much more professional.

I worked on a revised ad creative, because the auto-generated one could be much better. There was a how-to video on the Amazon product page that looked great, so I took that and made it into an ad. Hopefully it won't get flagged as sexual content. One issue is that the ad creator cropped the video down from 55 seconds to 40 seconds. Maybe there is another way to create it that won't shorten the video.

I'll see if this ad performs differently from the first one and then take one of them down.

Right now I'm messing around a bit with TikTok, but I think I can take a more structured approach once I understand how all the parts of this conversion funnel work and what I'm allowed to do. I also should get a lot of support from the brand in terms of creatives and product information once I speak with them.

 

[GoldFibre]

Morning 5-7am​

VS Code crashed completely overnight, which has never happened before. I took a little time to figure out where all the scripts were and then restored everything.

My TikTok ad was rejected for sexual content and I looked for an automated way to generate a creative. However, the Shopify TikTok app is very limited in campaign creation and I couldn't get what I wanted.

The brand representative that contacted me didn't respond to my WhatsApp replies, so I messaged her again.

I spent most of the time exploring some other business idea that has been floating around in my head. It is an automated digital marketing agency for small businesses. It's clear to me that despite Google Ads and website builders being very simple to use, they are still too complicated for the typical non-tech business owner.

So the product starts with a simple landing page builder for small businesses, powered with generative AI - just type in your existing website URL or a description of your business. Out comes a landing page with a leadgen form to collect names, emails, phone numbers... Then connect your Google Ads account and it will automatically create and manage the campaigns.

Maybe this service also offers ad-hoc chat support by real people at a rate much lower than it would take to hire an agency.

This is in my head because a friend of mine has been paying $24,000 over three months to a digital marketing agency, and when I looked into his Google Ads account, they had only signed in once and set up a couple of smart campaigns. I've also spoken to other business owners that were being fleeced in different ways. Normally the agency preys on the owner's lack of digital marketing knowledge by pointing to non-value metrics like clicks or interactions to justify their service.

Anyway, there are new AI integrations with Vercel, and there is a cool app they made that does part of the process already: v0 by Vercel

So I wonder if there are enough tools in place to create an MVP that will add value to some of the business owners that I know. I would start with them because I could hand-hold them though any parts that I'm not able to fully automate in the beginning and could get a lot of direct feedback on the early versions.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Today's Stats​

Weekly Goal​

• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (11 / 20)

In the evening I just did my transactional work. After waking up at 5am, by the time I get to 8pm I'm totally zonked.

 

[GoldFibre]

Morning 5-7am​

I have a call scheduled with my Amazon account manager later this afternoon.

I spent the morning prototyping my other business idea and setting up the hosting. The working name is 'One Minute Marketer.'

Here is the v0: Create Next App

And here is a rough list of things I think I need for an MVP:

• Generate at least above-the-fold content with an LLM, maybe text only for now
  • Title
  • USPs
• Functional lead-gen form - maybe it connects to a Google Sheet? Or maybe the user can see the leads on my website?
• A way to sign up the user
• A way to save the page
• Host the generated pages on a subdomain

I wonder how much of that I can get done tomorrow. I have multiple contractors coming over during my scheduled working time, so it is going to be tough to focus.

 

[theag]

IMO you're overdoing the "fake it until you make it" on your new idea... I'd reconsider that.

The idea itself is good. I have a similar one, but limiting it to service providers in my existing industry. Unfortunately marketing to small businesses is notoriously difficult. And there are some potential footguns in there. For example I would consider LLM generated content as a mid to long-term SEO risk.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Afternoon 1-3pm​

I wasn't able to sleep due to a noise disturbance, so I turned off my normal 5am alarm. I felt it would be better to be well rested and work later in the day than to force myself awake and try to work as a zombie at 5am.

My Amazon account manager sent me 300k more recommended ASINs and about 100 risky ASINs. I loaded those into my bot and let it run.

Then I worked on v2 of 'One Minute Marketer' and polished it a bit, templatizing the landing pages and prioritizing the mobile layout.

I listened to the 'Million Dollar Weekend' audiobook while I worked and it gave me some inspiration to validate my ideas more. I have the temptation to just build and build things, which is better than taking no action at all, but which isn't as good as validating a business idea or a customer need.

 

[GoldFibre]

Weekly Update​

Weekly Goal​

• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (18 / 20)

I didn't hit my goal but got much more time in than previous weeks.

I am looking into starting a new business. I will continue to manage this Amazon business, but it is pretty much automated at this point and there aren't high-leverage tasks I can put in. Besides, it is extremely risky and my account could be permanently shut down any day now.

I started to build a landing page builder app, but after listening to most of 'Million Dollar Weekend' I'm convinced that I shouldn't be building right now, but rather validating the viability of business idea through market sizing and selling techniques.

I'm going to finish that book and then apply it to whatever I decide to do next, whether that builds on the Amazon stuff or not.

My goals for the coming week:

• Apply the 'Million Dollar Weekend' strategies to launch my next business
• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours

 

[GoldFibre]

Weekly Goals​

• Apply the 'Million Dollar Weekend' strategies to launch my next business (WIP)
• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (5 / 20 hours)

I worked 5-7am, 1-3pm, 8-9pm.

I finished listening to 'Million Dollar Weekend'. My main takeaways:

• I can do a much better job of validating my ideas before investing too much effort/money
• There are other effective marketing techniques besides paid advertising
• Just because one marketing technique isn't working it doesn't mean that another won't work

Using some of the advice in the book I thought through my landing page idea a bit more and took notes. I have some potential clients in mind and will be reaching out to them to see if they would pay for this service, and for a few other alternatives.

 

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[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goals​

• Apply the 'Million Dollar Weekend' strategies to launch my next business (WIP)
• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (12 / 20 hours)

5-7am​

I checked my TikTok ads and I had 3 ATC, 5 checkouts started and two abandoned checkouts. I added a 10% discount code to the top of the page and then made a second ad that had more informative pictures to it.

My price is still pretty high, and I noticed that Shopify was adding the tax to the total. I switched the setting to be tax-inclusive. I also reached out to the brand again to look into buying wholesale.

I restarted listening to 'Million Dollar Weekend', taking more notes and thinking about creative ways to take action.

4-8pm​

I scheduled time to work late on my business today and Wednesday this week.

I had a meeting with my account manager for an hour and we made progress on a few things. We will be expanding the catalog over time and trying to get back to around 2m ASINs.

He gave some tips for selling on FBA and for reactivating my US accounts as well.

My new TikTok ad got rejected and along with it the original one that had been running for over a week. I need to be very careful when advertising underwear it seems!

Later I spoke with the brand representative and I was feeling nervous to talk about my business, but she was fine with me selling on my own store and on Amazon, as long as it wasn't in the US. I'm going to research a bit more which SKUs I want to buy and then purchase 1-2k USD worth of stock.

I started a spreadsheet with all the orders I've gotten for this brand to see if there is any pattern in SKU, color, or size:


Based in my n=23 sample size, it looks like Medium Beige is the way to go. There was a similar weighting in the models.

Next I looked at a few other brands that the representative told me were more popular than the one I was looking at. I wanted to see if the number of reviews on Amazon would be higher - which should result in better sales. However, it looks like the one I went with has the most Amazon reviews.

So I think my first wholesale purchase will be a single parent ASIN with the following breakdown of sizes:

9-10pm​

The brand representative wrote me back and said that contrary to her earlier statement, they will not allow me to sell on Amazon, even outside the US. I wrote back and tried to convince her to let me sell until the company decided to enter our markets.

She said they can white label something for me, but this isn't going to work as well, because their product has over 1,000 reviews on Amazon and mine would be lost in a sea of products with no reviews.

I have a few options to consider:

• Find a new angle to convince her with
• Tell them I won't sell on Amazon and sell it there anyway without permission
• Only sell it on my Shopify store
• White label on Amazon+Shopify
• Don't buy this product

 

[GoldFibre]

No orders today.

Weekly Goals​

• Apply the 'Million Dollar Weekend' strategies to launch my next business (WIP)
• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (15 / 20 hours)

5-7am​

Since I'm struggling to market this underwear brand, I'm not sure about ordering in bulk right now.

I wanted to get a bit more data and validate my Shopify store before making such a big commitment to buying inventory. I decided to try TikTok ads for a few other products that should sell well, but which aren't at risk of rejection for sexual content.

After looking at my past orders I found two brands of boxing gear that both sold pretty well. I prioritized uploading these to my Shopify store and then auto-generated two ads using the Shopify TikTok app.

I checked out those brand websites and they do have wholesale options, but they are pretty specific that you should be selling in a retail store. I guess this will probably be a pattern. These brands don't want to sell to their perceived competition in other online stores, but would love to sell wholesale to a new channel. I could try to become a brand distributor, but that would be a pretty different business model with very different time commitments.

Then I went back to my underwear idea. looked a bit more at this particular niche of underwear currently on the local Amazon, and due to the ad policies there are zero ads being run. And almost no products being sold FBA. This is pretty unique, because typically on Amazon you get row after row of sponsored products and a lot of FBA. Maybe this is why I got so many sales in the first place - there isn't local competition here and my listing was not buried under ads.

Based on this, maybe I could go the white-label route. The only issue is that they told me the minimum order would be 180 units, which will be around 7k USD. Maybe I can negotiate this down or ask for a few samples to attempt to sell first. I messaged the brand representative and asked about this.

I'm wondering if it would be prudent test my idea using some technique with 'Million Dollar Weekend' or if my idea is already tested since I've already sold 23 units of the other brand. The unknown here is if I can sell well on Amazon with zero reviews on my product and what the actual market size is, roughly.

I called my friend who owns a retail/ecommerce business and he suggested to get the product at half price from Alibaba if I'm going to white label. But if there are low reviews on the product then it is an uphill battle to build up your brand.

So I'm also wondering if I can make some improvement on the product that would increase the value somehow. I was thinking some crazy prints instead of flat colors, but maybe there is something functional as well. I don't know enough about women's underwear to really tell. Maybe there is a forum about these products where I can read about common complaints.

9-10pm​

I got a list new list of ASINs from my account manager, and I added those to my bot. He also told me that one of my larger competitors was deactivated today due to a copyright complaint. I'm not sure which strike it was for them.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

5-7am​

I chatted with a supplier on Alibaba to send me a few samples of their product. I want to check the material quality and also put them up on Amazon FBA to see if they will sell even though I have no reviews. I also want to think about how I might modify the product to make it unique.

The supplier I spoke to only had two colors, so I ordered 6 pieces: small, medium and large for each color

I also messaged the original supplier that I spoke to on Monday and followed up on getting samples for their white-label option. If I compare them and there is a big difference in quality, then I would pay double the Chinese price for these other ones.

I also thought some more about @Bounce Back 's browser extension idea. I think that making the plugin work is not the main challenge. The main challenge is marketing the plugin to get active users. I could try to validate the idea with a landing page to collect emails of people that are interested in using such a plugin.

Let's say it costs me $5 to get an email signup, and I assume that 25% of people actually install and then buy something with the plugin. I would probably still make money overall, considering my current AOV and margin, subtracting out the Amazon fees I would be avoiding from the cost.

Finally I spent about half an hour learning how to make a Chrome extension and it is pretty straightforward. I got a div to appear at the top of any product page. Basically this plugin needs to make an API call to my bot to check if there is a price and then display the various states: loading, no price available, lower price available plus buy button.

A first version could have the buy button directly link to a product page on Shopify. A later version could implement a virtual shopping cart.

My waiting period finally finished and I submitted my appeal for Google Merchant Center. Since my last appeal I have added an email address and phone number to every page.

5-9pm​

My GMC appeal was rejected again with no feedback. Maybe I need to pay an expert $100 to review my store and see if they can fix it. I can only appeal again on March 20. I went on Fiverr to look for someone that looked competent and messaged a few people explaining the issue.

Two of them wrote me back pretty quickly and started giving some advice.

After looking at that plugin idea in the morning I decided I want to brainstorm more ideas of ways to leverage the data I have in other ways to make money:

1. Expand the plugin to detect when someone is shopping on ANY site, check if a similar Amazon product exists, and then either link to my shop if I can fulfill it or if not create an Amazon affiliate link back to Amazon. Not sure if the affiliate link will work since you are supposed to register a domain, but I guess there are ways around that like rendering in an iframe or linking to an intermediate page on a registered domain.
2. Sell access to the data with some kind of subscription or maybe charge by size of download. Is this prohibited by the API terms? Capture price trends and offer them up - this is something like Jungle Scout, which is a popular browser extension.
3. Go back to my previous idea that I worked on a little bit - some product type-wise price comparator that links to Amazon with affiliate links.

At night I discussed with my friend who is making decent side money as a partial CMO for some mid-size companies and we talked about how to scale that type of business using automation combined with good tech tools and outsourcing. We are going to throw up a website using some of his resources and see if we can generate some leads with the pitch we came up with.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Weekly Goals​

• Apply the 'Million Dollar Weekend' strategies to launch my next business (WIP)
• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (22 / 20 hours)

9-10pm​

I fell asleep late last night so I turned off my 5am alarm.

I woke up at 5am anyway out of habit. I just did a few transactional tasks and then went back to sleep.

In the evening I was also handling transactional work mainly.

During the day I did chat with my friend more about this marketing agency business idea. He has one of his vendors making the initial website for free based on a company we admire that has an amazing B2B customer experience in something other than marketing.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goals​

• Apply the 'Million Dollar Weekend' strategies to launch my next business (WIP)
• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (25 / 20 hours)

3-5am​

I debugged my updating code and found a few cases I wasn't handling properly. Then I reran the upload for the main brand of underwear that I sell and a larger percentage should go through.

9-10pm​

Transactional work.

Earlier in the day I spoke with my friend and the website guy is out sick, so our MVP will probably get done after a week or so.

 

[GoldFibre]

Weekly Goals​

• Apply the 'Million Dollar Weekend' strategies to launch my next business (WIP)
• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (26 / 20 hours)

I slept in until 7am today.

I only did transactional work in the evening.

 

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[GoldFibre]

Weekly Update​

Although the profit looks quite good, I'm a bit worried because most of the profit is coming from some bulky orders and I have some issues pricing these correctly. The end profit is going to be less than this for sure

Weekly Goals​

• Apply the 'Million Dollar Weekend' strategies to launch my next business (NOT DONE)
• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (26 / 20 hours)

I did work at least 20 hours, but wasn't able to properly launch a new business.

Most of the 'work' was not building anything but rather exploring some opportunities: distributing one brand I sell well, creating some white-label brand, building a browser extension to complement my business, and working with my friend to run a marketing agency.

None of these is properly started yet although I did gain some knowledge and eliminated a few dead ends.

Here is the rough status:

• Selling underwear brand: don't have permission but asked again
• Selling white-label underwear: waiting on samples to arrive from China
• Browser extension: played around with it and started the UI, but this probably requires some effort to get a public API working
• Marketing agency: we are outsourcing most of this through our network - have a guy building an initial website and maybe will have it up this coming week

This coming week there are a number of bot improvements I want to make on the main Amazon business, and then I will likely limit my time to high leverage tasks on these other business ideas.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goals​

• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (1 / 20 hours)
• Take care of all the major things on my bot to-do list (0 / ?)

One canceled order today because my inventory was out of date and the item was no longer available at the source.

Did my transactional work only today.

 

[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goals​

• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (4 / 20 hours)
• Take care of all the major things on my bot to-do list (1 / 5)
  • DONE Ensure queue is working properly
  • Fix country 2 shipping calculation on orders
  • Re-calculate cost on recent country 2 orders
  • Handle blacklisting in recommended ASIN queue
  • Apply competitor

5-7am​

I investigated my queue and found some issues that prevented a large group of ASINs from getting offers and then fixed that.

I also found some slowness with the query that fetches from the queue and fixed that as well.

9-10pm​

Transactional work.

 

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[GoldFibre]

​

Weekly Goals​

• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (9 / 20 hours)
• Take care of all the major things on my bot to-do list (5 / 5)
  • DONE Ensure queue is working properly
  • DONE Fix destination shipping calculation on orders
  • DONE Re-calculate cost on recent country 2 orders
  • DONE Handle blacklisting in recommended ASIN queue
  • DONE List 'safe' competitor ASINs

5-7am​

I fixed a bug with my destination shipping calculation. It means the cost will be higher that I had been calculating in both country 1 and country 2, although the bigger impact on my profit is country 2.

Then I recalculated the cost on a bunch of recent heavy/bulky orders. Only one order was pushed close to zero profit and the others just lowered the margin by a couple of percentage points.

5-8pm​

I called seller support about my US accounts being deactivated and they told me about some reason I wasn't expecting and that was not mentioned in any communication. I need to get my account approved in Country 3 for them to reopen it, but for that one I was missing some documents. I think I have what I need now so will try to get it all opened.

I handled the blacklisting in the recommended ASIN queue with a single line. The query performance is really slow though, so I will do it a different way later that doesn't require scanning my gigantic ASIN table.

Then I made a few modifications to list 'safe' competitor ASINs in addition to the recommended ASINs I'm currently listing.

So I ran out of things on my list for the week and had to think of something new to work on.

I had gotten a wholesale inquiry for 500 digital thermostats. Each one retails for over $600 so if it wholesales for $400 then it would be a $200k order! The trouble is that these thermostats as listed on Amazon work on US voltage, so I called the supplier to see if they made one that is compatible.

They referred me to their global office, who then referred me to another office, who then asked me to email them. It's amazing any of their products get sold with such a confusing customer service.

Lastly, I cleaned up my code directory structure a bit, because stuff was all over the place.

 

[GoldFibre]

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Weekly Goals​

• Follow new routine and work at least 20 hours (9 / 20 hours)
• Take care of all the major things on my bot to-do list (5 / 5)
  • DONE Ensure queue is working properly
  • DONE Fix destination shipping calculation on orders
  • DONE Re-calculate cost on recent country 2 orders
  • DONE Handle blacklisting in recommended ASIN queue
  • DONE List 'safe' competitor ASINs

5-7am​

Since I already did all the things on my bot to-do list, I came up with a list of more things:

• DONE Find a more reliable source for chargeable weight

This took the entire two hours. I investigated some items I under-charged for and found that the weight was mis-stated in the package information, but was correct in the item information in Amazon. I rewrote the logic to take the maximum value available on each dim of either item or package and use that to calculate chargeable weight.

Then I wrote a script to iterate over all my recommended ASIN list and update all those values.

9-10pm​

Transactional work.