The picture above describes my feeling when I logged into my account to see a ‘Poor’ performance rating. Now before you think ‘Well are you ripping people off?’ or something like that, it’s not that at all.
Amazon has VERY high standards, and there are times when I don’t reach them. This week in particular, was one of them when I had to cancel more items than I cared to quite simply because I was out of stock of some of my sales. I promptly cancelled the orders and refunded the buyers their money, but because I cancelled so many, my rating took a nose dive.
I reached out to a friend, we kicked it back and forth and he gave some great advice. After sleeping on it, this was my action plan.
1. Slash Inventory- I just finished deleting over 150 or so products that just weren’t selling. I’m embracing the notion it really is about identifying those hot sellers and selling them over and over and over again.
2. The Rule of 100- I’m limiting my inventory to 100 items with the expectations of selling 10%-20% of what I list. So let’s say I list 100 items for sale. My items bring in a net profit of an average of $25. Now my quantities aren’t one, they’re always more in case an item is a hot seller. So out of 100, I have 15 hot sellers that sell 100 units in a month.
$25 net profit per item X 100 items sold = $2,500 net income.
I’m also going to give a product a week or two to perform, and if it doesn’t it’ll be removed and replaced with another. But staying with the rule of 100 will help me manage my inventory instead of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.
Eventually as I outsource more, I’ll ramp up to 200, but for now, 100 is enough.
The bad news is, of course, my account has a bad rating.
But the good news is, it’s fixable.
eem