Podcast Episode 085 : Amazon FBA Growth Hacks (That Require No Sourcing)

At one point or another, you are going to run out of sourcing money, but that does not have to mean you cannot grow your business anymore. In today’s episode, we hear about seven ways you can grow your Amazon FBA business that do not require any sourcing.

From improving your product listing to advertising and spending time on your education and mindset, there are many ways to expand without additional sourcing capital. It just takes a bit of creative thinking and willingness to think outside the box. If you need some inspiration on how to scale without the cash injection, then be sure to tune in today!

Listen on the podcast player below.

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Key points from Episode 85:

• Improve product listings of high-dollar items or a product you have multiples of.
• Manually or automatically re-price any inventory you have available.
• Advertising and multi-channel fulfillment to help more people see your current items on Amazon.
• Look into ways to improve the different areas of seller health of your Amazon account.
• Ways to improve your IPI (inventory performance index).
• Go through your returns to see if you can still sell some of those products for profit (or at least get some capital back).
• Become a better Amazon seller by taking a course.
• And so much more!

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• Fix product listings: Amazon Advantage
  
• How to Open an Amazon Seller Support Ticket
• How to Manually Reprice Your Inventory
• My Top 6 Repricing Strategies
• BQool – Our Recommended Automatic Repricing Tool
• BQool Review – Plus, How to Get Our Repricing Rules That Doubled Our Sales
• Amazon Advertising
• JoeLister – Multi Channel Fulfillment Tool
• JoeLister Review
• How to Deal With Inauthentic Complaints – Interview With Kim Coghlan
• How to Improve Your IPI
• Amazon’s Feedback Guidelines
• Full-Time FBA Courses – Learn more to earn more

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Episode 85 Transcript:

[WELCOME]

[0:00:01.8] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Full-Time FBA Show. In each episode, it’s our goal to help you turn part time hours into a full-time income, selling almost anything on Amazon. Now, your hosts of the show, Stephen and Rebecca Smotherman.

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:21.0] STEPHEN: Welcome to episode number 85 of The Full-Time FBA Show. Today we’re going to talk about seven Amazon FBA growth hacks that require no sourcing. If you’ve ran out of sourcing capital, here’s some suggestions on how to keep growing your business without money. Joining me to talk about this today is Rebecca, are you ready to talk about some growth hacks?

[0:00:39.8] REBECCA: I am, I don’t know why this makes me think of like you need a machete for it, you’re like hacking away the growth but that’s a different kind of hack I guess, and a different type of growth.

[0:00:49.1] STEPHEN: Yes, just some strategies to grow your business, even if you don’t have money right now. If you run out of sourcing money, we’re going to give you some ideas and no machetes involved.

[0:00:58.2] REBECCA: Okay.

[0:00:58.9] STEPHEN: That’s good.

[0:00:59.5] REBECCA: Good to know.

[0:01:00.4] STEPHEN: All right, let’s talk about this on today’s episode.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:01:07.1] REBECCA: All right, as we said, we are going to be talking about growth hacks for your FBA business. These are things that will help your business continue to grow even if you don’t have any sourcing money. All of these things should help you to be able to continue to generate some sales even if you’re not able to spend money right now on new inventory. These are ways that you can work on your business and helps to improve things in your business with inventory that you already have at the FBA warehouse so that it will continue to grow.

Stephen, I’m going to ask you about each of these and you can kind of give me an idea for the topic that I give you.

[0:01:44.2] STEPHEN: All right, sounds good.

[0:01:46.3] REBECCA: The first one, what is a type of growth hack that will affect your product listings, a product listings hack?

[0:01:55.7] STEPHEN: One way you might be able to increase sales is if you have multiples of an inventory item in stock or maybe some high dollar items that are in stock and their product page on Amazon needs improvements. Maybe it doesn’t have a good quality picture or maybe you could have an improved title or bullet point, something that’s in the listing that maybe if there are some other keywords involved in that listing, more people would find it and more people would buy it.

Definitely not something to do with an item you have one of but if you have multiples in stock or a high dollar item, you might find a way to improve the product listing and there’s a couple of ways that you can do that, one is just editing your inventory, the product listing within seller central but a lot of times that doesn’t stick. Most of the time, to actually make a change stick, you need to open up a case and provide proof like maybe a website from the manufacturer with whatever information or pictures you want to submit to improve it and usually those will stick.

If they don’t then one of the brands can do it. You’re trying to at least improve the product page to help increase your sales.

[0:02:54.4] REBECCA: Okay, can I give a hack on top of this hack?

[0:02:57.8] STEPHEN: Yeah, hack the hack.

[0:03:00.1] REBECCA: There’s even times within your inventory where Amazon suggest that you improve the listing. One place where it’s going to show you this is if you look in your inventory dashboard and if you have any excess inventory that is effecting your IPI then it says on your excess inventory tab, it will give you recommendations for how to handle some of those items and edit the listing is one of the options that it gives you and it will give you some suggestions within there of how to make improvements.

You can kind of go in there and see if any of the things that you’ve just talked about or ways that you can improve the listing and again, like you said, it might not stick if you just do it within edit the listing so you might end up having to open up a case to fix it but Amazon does make those recommendations so that’s a good place to start.

[0:03:46.9] STEPHEN: Yeah, definitely. We’ll put a link to those pages, even how to open up a ticket with Amazon, we’re going to have a ton of links in the show notes so just be sure to go check the show notes for episode 85 when we’re done. Yeah, being able to update a product listing might help increase sales of stuff you already have in stock.

[0:04:03.6] REBECCA: All right, another hack and I can tell you right now, are you tired of saying the word hack? Another one that will help improve your sales without having to spend any new sourcing money because we all reach that point at different times where we’ve run out of sourcing money, this one is a pricing hack.

[0:04:22.1] STEPHEN: Yeah, if you have inventory in stock, now might be a good time to go in and manually reprice your inventory or even better yet, set-up automatic repricing for your inventory. Making sure that our prices are always competitive is always a good move and so if you don’t have money to go out and source any inventory, making sure that your current inventory is priced really well, we’ll have a link on how to manually reprice in the show notes.

I’ll send a link to the automatic repricer that we use and how you can even get our own repricing rules, we use the repricer called BQool, it updates my prices every 15 minutes and it’s amazing, it’s one of the top four things that I use in my business that has helped move the needle forward when it comes to our profit goals.

Making sure your prices are always competitive, whether it’s manually repricing or setting up an automatic repricer could help you get some more sales.

[0:05:13.9] REBECCA: Okay, that’s a couple of ways that we can improve our sales, increase those sales, product listing improvements, pricing improvements or setting up the automatic repricer if you are not wanting to do manual repricing. And for this third one, hack, strategy, whatever you want to call it, let me know what are some other ways that we can increase sales, we’re going to kind of move past the increasing sales after this one so this is kind of a combo hack to increase sales.

[0:05:46.0] STEPHEN: Yes. There’s a couple of strategies that really work out well for some items. Again, most of the items that I’m going to suggest will be working on items that you have multiples in stock or high-priced items. That strategy is advertising, throwing a few dollars at some pay per click advertising to get your inventory in front of more eyeballs, having your inventory show up earlier in the search results.

Advertising could help. Amazons got a quick training video on how to get started with Amazon advertising, I’ll even put that in the show notes to get you started. Another way that you can help increase your sales, getting more eyeballs is always a good idea on your inventory is multichannel fulfillment so selling your inventory items from Amazon to other platforms like eBay or Shopify, there is a tool called JoeLister that helps do that automatically where it will post your inventory on eBay or Shopify or both if you decide to do that.

If an inventory item sells on one of those platforms, it adjusts the inventory on the other platforms so you never make a double sale. Just another option to get more eyeballs on your inventory. I’m going to stop saying eyeballs because it just sounds weird now.

[0:06:54.4] REBECCA: We’ve got hack and eyeballs, these are the banned words for the rest of this podcast episode.

[0:06:57.6] STEPHEN: Yes, we should not use hack and eyeballs in the same sentence. Anyway, that’s another way to increase sales, getting more people to see your inventory to buy it.

[0:07:06.6] REBECCA: All right, moving on to our fourth tip, I’m going to start saying tip now. Let’s talk about a way that you can improve the health of your seller account because that’s a big deal and it’s something that we don’t necessarily focus on in a day-to-day basis, it’s not one of the more glamorous aspects of doing FBA but it’s really important to your overall growth. Improve the health of your seller account.

[0:07:29.4] STEPHEN: Yeah, that’s something you can spend some time doing, we don’t have sourcing money. If you go to seller central and you hover over the performance tab, you can choose account health and you can see all sorts of information about your account health, how well your numbers are, how your customer service is doing, return rates, refund rates, all sorts of different type of information.

You can kind of see where Amazon has maybe flagged some issues in your account health to work on. If there’s an issue with maybe an inauthentic claim, you know, you want to make sure you take advantage of dealing with that. If you’re curious how, we have a whole podcast about that, Kim Coghlan walked us through how to deal with inauthentic claims.

You can find that out at fulltimefba.com/24 because she was in episode number 24 but just looking at that, your account health and trying to fix as much as you can and even going looking at your feedback score if there’s any feedback scores that are negative on your account as a seller, if they break Amazon’s feedback policy then you can get those removed and so, we’ll put the links to talk about that feedback policy in everything you know about that in the show notes.

Those are some ways that you can check here the account health and make sure that you’re chugging along just fine.

[0:08:38.7] REBECCA: All right, that’s a good one. We’re on number five now and we’re going to talk about how to improve your IPI, your inventory performance index, we already touched on this earlier when we talked about checking out your excess inventory and seeing if there are any listings that need to have some improvement done to them but that’s only one aspect of improving your IPI, there are several.

What is your one tip for us today about how to improve your IPI because that’s a big deal for the amount of storage space that you can have at the FBA warehouses?

[0:09:09.9] STEPHEN: It is, depending on the time of the year or when Amazon decides, if you don’t have an IPI score high enough then you do not get unlimited inventory storage at an Amazon warehouse and of course, we want to have as much inventory storage as possible.

The better the IPI score, the more storage that you have available to you and so, one of the ways that you can improve your IPI is to remove your inventory that’s not selling. Some people call it dead inventory, it’s just inventory that’s collecting dust at an Amazon warehouse, advertisements haven’t worked, multichannel fulfillment hasn’t worked, all these different type of strategies haven’t worked and you’re just paying monthly storage fees, getting close to paying long term storage fees and honestly, if there’s anything in your inventory that you haven’t sold in like over two months, that’s something that you should probably think about removing.

Whether it’s removing it from an Amazon warehouse to store it personally, maybe in your garage or storage unit or something, just so that Amazon knows that the inventory that you do have in stock is moving quickly and then you can slowly start sending that inventory back to Amazon as it sells slowly but if it’s not selling fast enough, remove that dead inventory and get it out, you can go to seller central, hover over inventory, click on the manage FBA inventory and on that page, you can click and see your inventory dashboard and they’re going to give you a better idea of what inventory is selling well, how long it has been there and some suggestions on improving that.

[0:10:31.6] REBECCA: All right, on tip number six, let’s talk about ways to get more sourcing capital, just right there within your own seller central account. We have talked I think in the past, we have a podcast episode about ways to get more sourcing capital but this one is going to just be right there within your own seller central account.

[0:10:51.1] STEPHEN: Just being able to go through your old returns, stuff that you’ve stand back and removed, setup removal orders and there’s inventory items that you need to have either removed and dealt with, maybe a customer returned an item and it was customer damaged or they said it was defective but you know, you can remove it and possibly see if it’s actually still good enough to send in new condition or not.

If it’s not then maybe you can see if you can sell it in that category in used or collectible condition and find ways to squeak out more capital from your return inventory item. Maybe you’ve got like a stack in the corner of your office of stuff that you’re, I’m going to deal with later, this is stuff that I need to figure out, maybe sell as used or collectible or even if it’s still good, I had one of my friends confessed to me, their whole garage is full of this type of inventory that they did returns and they just never went through it.

Well, if you run out of sourcing capital, that’s inventory they could potentially make use of money so go through that inventory and send it in. If you can’t even sell it on Amazon, here’s other platforms that you can try to sell it on as well.

[0:11:52.9] REBECCA: All right, that brings us to number seven, let’s talk about a way that you can just become a better Amazon seller in general. This is something that will truly help your growth of your business over the long term, almost more than anything we’ve just told you.

[0:12:06.8] STEPHEN: Yeah, absolutely. That is improving your mind by taking a course, whether it’s a course that you purchase or maybe you’re looking at YouTube videos or reading vlogs and stuff but taking a course that’s really focused on a particular topic can help you grow in that particular topic.

Of course, we have options with us, if you go to fulltimefba.com/ourtrainings then you can see all of our trainings that we offer here, everything from beginner stuff to export stuff that can help grow your business and take your business to the next level.

The more you learn, the more you can earn, that’s something we totally believe and it’s what helps us turn those part-time hours into a full-time income when we learn more and then begin to grow our business and see results.

Those are some hacks, some tips, some strategies, some plans, some things for you to consider when you have no sourcing money but you still want to grow your business, some things that you can do in your business to help move the needle forward and continue to see that growth in your business.

[CLOSING CONVERSATION]

[0:13:07.5] REBECCA: All right, as Stephen mentioned before, we have many links to give you for this episode, you can find all of those in the shownotes for this episode at fulltimefba.com/85, the number 85 because this is episode number 85.

[0:13:22.5] STEPHEN: Next week on the show, we’re going to talk about how an Amazon fulfillment tour impacted how we sell on Amazon. Rebecca and I got to tour an Amazon warehouse facility, it was amazing, we’ll tell you all about it next week on The Full-Time FBA Show.

[OUTRO]

[0:13:37.7] ANNOUNCER: That is all for this episode of The Full-Time FBA Show. So, head over to fulltimefba.com/podcast, where you will find the shownotes and links from this episode. While you’re there, subscribe to our newsletter where you’ll get several free downloads of our popular and helpful Amazon FBA resources. Now, take action on what you have learned today so you can find success at turning part time hours into a fulltime income with Amazon FBA.

[END]