Podcast Episode 112 – Six Q4 Pricing and Sourcing Strategies to Increase Your Profits

When it comes to selling on Amazon, Q4 is a whole different ballgame than the rest of the year, and that also applies to your pricing and sourcing strategies. In today’s episode of the Full-Time FBA Show, we let you in on six Q4 pricing and sourcing strategies that will help you to increase your profits.

We start off with three pricing tips, including the reasons you shouldn’t blindly lower your prices, when you should increase them, and what information you can glean from your pending sales. We then move on to a few sourcing strategies and advise you as to why you should consider expanding your sales rank limits when sourcing during Q4, how to grow your profits by sourcing as much profitable inventory as possible, and the importance of ensuring your items are stocked in the Amazon warehouse as quickly as possible.

Listen today to find out how you can tweak your business model during Q4 to sell more items, make more money, and simply enjoy the Q4 selling season.

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Key points from Episode 112:

• How Q4 (October-December) is different from the rest of the year and requires different pricing and sourcing strategies.
• Why not to blindly lower your prices to match the lowest price.
• Tools to track pricing and sales rank history, and automatically reprice items.
• When you should increase prices on items during Q4.
• The vital information you can glean from your pending sales.
• Why to consider expanding your sales rank limits when sourcing during Q4.
• How to grow your profits by sourcing as much profitable inventory as possible during Q4.
• The importance of sending your inventory to Amazon as soon as possible.
• And more!

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• Keepa – Amazon price and sales rank history tracker
• How to Read and Understand a Keepa Graph
• The Reseller’s Guide to Keepa video course
• Join the Full-Time FBA newsletter

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Episode 112 Transcript:

[INTRODUCTION]

[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.

[WELCOME]

[0:00:21.3] REBECCA: Hello there and welcome to this episode of The Full-time FBA Show. We are glad you have joined us. We’re going to be talking about Six Q4 Pricing and Sourcing Strategies. Q4 is this wonderful time of the year that we’re in right now, October, November, December and this time of year, you might consider having some different pricing and sourcing strategies than you have the rest of the year.

Here with me today to talk about it, as always, is my co-host, Stephen. Hello Stephen.

[0:00:48.6] STEPHEN: I am excited to talk about Q4. I love Q4.

[0:00:52.3] REBECCA: It’s a great time of year definitely.

[0:00:53.8] STEPHEN: Absolutely. Yeah, so we’ll talk about some strategies to help make your Q4 even better with some pricing and sourcing tweaks.

[DISCUSSION]

[0:01:03.6] REBECCA: We are really in the thick of it now with Q4. It is going strong. I hope that you are all seeing some great improvements in your sales and increases in the profits that you’re making during this time of year. It’s just a whole different ballgame than the rest of the year and so that also applies to your pricing and sourcing strategies.

[0:01:21.5] STEPHEN: Yeah, in this episode we’re going to talk about three pricing strategies and three sourcing strategies, so we’ll kick off with pricing for the first half of this episode.

Tip number one: don’t blindly lower your prices to match the lowest price. I already get some Facebook messages in our Full-Time FBA Facebook group and some emails of people saying, “Shall I lower my prices? My competitors are lowering their prices and I am not getting any sales. Should I lower my prices? It is causing me to freak out.” Take a deep breath, breathe good air in and get the bad air out, just don’t freak out.

The deeper we get into Q4, sales velocity will increase, your competitors that are taking their own prices will begin to sell out and you just need to be smart about how you handle the prices. As always, you want to make informed decisions on your prices. You want to check Keepa, Keepa being the tool that tracks the pricing history and sales rank history of almost every item on Amazon.

You kind of want to see how things reacted last year, you kind of want to look at what it looks like it’s going to be this year and then also if you are using an automatic repricer like BQool, you just keep your repricing rules set up and be happy with your minimum and it could increase your price later to your maximum. You never know what’s going to happen but trust the process, be patient, don’t just blindly lower your prices to match your competitors or everyone is going to lose.

[0:02:37.2] REBECCA: Our second piece of advice, kind of going off of that first one that Stephen gave us, is taking that a step further, in addition to not just blindly lowering your prices, you actually probably want to raise your prices on some items. Like you were saying you want to check out the trends on Keepa, see what happened last year, see where things are headed this year and you might see that the competition on an item is dwindling.

There might be fewer sellers, they might have less in stock and the price is then increasing, and that you can suspect that that trend will continue if things keep going the way they are. You can see that again on Keepa and so if that’s the case, then you are going to want to increase your prices on some items. Keep that in mind as you’re thinking about pricing, that prices on items might actually go up during Q4.

[0:03:22.7] STEPHEN: Absolutely. Another tip when it comes to pricing is to keep an eye on your pending sales. Now, I know I told you before in a previous episode, don’t obsessively check your pending sales just to see how awesome it is to see how the listings of all the sales that you’re getting, but there is some information you can glean from your pending sales. You can know some trends.

Check out what happens when your most recent shipment arrives to Amazon and gets checked in. If you have items that sell really quickly, I mean maybe when you priced it a week ago when you first sent it into Amazon that was the best price that you wanted it to be at, but if you see pricing inventory items selling really quickly on new shipments, you might need to go back in and double check some of those prices, or if you see trends of multiple sales of the same item.

You might have items in stock for a long time and then all of a sudden you sell four in one hour. Well, you might realize that maybe your price is the lowest and there’s other prices that are higher than yours that you can raise your price. Be able to keep an eye on your pending sales, notice those trends and adjust appropriately when it comes to your pricing.

Then on the sourcing side of things, you can see what your pending sales, which items are selling quickly so you can go out and see if you can find more and replenish some of those items as well.

[0:04:26.5] REBECCA: Okay, let’s keep going with sourcing here. We’ll get into the next three tips all have to do with sourcing and so the first thing we want to talk about is that you might consider expanding your sales rank limits when you’re sourcing during this time of year.

You might have a particular limit in a category for the rest of the year but realize that higher sales rank items are going to be selling faster in Q4 than the rest of the year just because the volume of items that are being sold on Amazon is so much higher at this time of year that a sales rank means a different thing during Q4 than it does the rest of the year.

As an example, during the first three quarters of the year, as your sourcing criteria in the toys category, you might have a max sales rank that you’re looking for of a 150,000 for your average sales rank. Anything higher than that, you’re not really interested in but then during Q4, you might consider expanding your max to 250 or 300,000 because those items are going to be selling faster at those ranks than they would the rest of the year.

Also, popular items are going to be selling out and that means that there is going to be more buyers for those higher-ranking items, and you might be getting sales on items at that time of year that you wouldn’t be getting otherwise because people just don’t have any other options.

[0:05:37.3] STEPHEN: Absolutely and the fifth strategy for Q4 pricing and sourcing tweaks, source-source-source. It is simple math that you only sell a lot of items if you have a lot of items to sell. Now, this doesn’t mean just go blindly buy inventory to send to Amazon. No, it means focusing on trying to source as much profitable inventory as you can, send it to Amazon as soon as possible and then have those items sell, take that disbursement to get even more inventory and have that type of snowball effect, where you’re able to grow your profits because you are sourcing and sending it into Amazon as soon as possible.

The number one job of you during Q4, especially in the last few months, is to source as much as possible profitable items to sell on Amazon and be smart about it, of course, finding those items that are going to be profitable to sell quickly.

[0:06:22.7] REBECCA: Our last bit of advice for you then following up on that bit of advice to source-source-source, is be sure that you send that inventory to Amazon as soon as possible. The faster you get your inventory to Amazon warehouses, the faster it’s going to sell. Even if it is getting close to Christmas, there are still going to be buyers who are shopping after Christmas and if your inventory is in stock at the Amazon warehouses, it will sell quickly.

People who either didn’t get their buying done on time or who have gift cards now to sell or they didn’t get what they wanted so now they are just going to buy what they wanted for themselves. If you have inventory in stock, it will sell even after Christmas. Again, check Keepa, make sure you are making smart decisions but buy that inventory and send it as fast as you can so that it will be listed on the Amazon catalog as soon as possible and available for your customers to buy.

[0:07:12.4] STEPHEN: Those are six simple Q4 pricing and sourcing strategies that you can tweak in your business model during Q4 to help you sell more items, make more money and just really enjoy the Q4 selling season as much as possible.

[CLOSING CONVERSATION]

[0:07:31.3] REBECCA: Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of The Full-Time FBA Show. We’re always glad that you join us. If you want to check out any of the links that we just mentioned, be sure and check that out at the shownotes for this episode at fulltimefba.com/112. That’s fulltimefba.com/112 because this is episode number 112.

We’ll have all of those links there for you and we also have the transcript for this episode if you want to check that out and you can also while you’re there be sure and subscribe to The Full-Time FBA newsletter, where you will be getting a weekly email with tips and tricks and all sorts of articles and other information that will help your full-time FBA business, turn part-time hours into a full-time income.

[0:08:13.4] STEPHEN: We’ve got a listener review for you. Thank you so much for the person who left this review. The title is called, “This podcast alone will help you scale your business” and it’s five-stars.

They put in the review, “I have never in all of my school years been shown as much knowledge and gold as this podcast here. I 10,000% advice anyone who works with Amazon retail arbitrage, online arbitrage or wholesale to listen to this podcast. This podcast will dramatically improve your Amazon FBA business.”

Thank you so much for leaving that review and we really appreciate it. In fact, you can leave a review too. If you go to fulltimefba.com/leaveareview, we will show you how to leave an Apple Podcast review but if you’re listening somewhere else other than Apple Podcast, just leave us a review on your favorite podcast player. We’d appreciate it.

[0:08:56.2] REBECCA: All right, we hope you will join us again next week for The Full-Time FBA Show. We’re going to be talking about whether or not you should take out a loan to buy inventory for your business. Spoiler, we’re going to tell you all the reasons why you shouldn’t but just be sure you check that our because there’s a lot of good conversation to be had around that concept of whether or not you should go into debt for your FBA business inventory.

[0:09:17.5] STEPHEN: Yes, and we’ll see you next week on The Full-Time FBA Show.

[OUTRO]

[0:09:22.9] 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 full-time income with Amazon FBA.

[END]