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Podcast Episode 178 – Things You Need to Give Up in Your Amazon Business

March 3, 2023 By Stephen Smotherman Leave A Comment

Giving up on an aspect of your business is often hard to do and can be considered a form of failure. However, this could not be further from the truth, since giving up certain things can often be the best for you and your business. In this episode, we talk about the four things you need to let go of in your Amazon business and how to focus on what is important.

Listening today, you will hear ways to free up capital for your business, essential resources that will help you save time and money, how to deal with negative seller feedback, how to increase productivity, and why you should consider outsourcing. To discover what you need to let go of in your Amazon business, why it is key, and how it will help, listen today!

Listen on the podcast player below.

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Key points from Episode 178:

• What to do with stale inventory that is not selling.
• Hear about a repricing tool that will save you time and money.
• Why you should not worry about a perfect feedback score.
• Learn why you should give up on old services and tools.
• How often you should review the software and tools you use.
• Find out why you should only focus on what is important.
• The benefits of outsourcing for your Amazon business.

Links and resources mentioned in this episode:

• BQool – Automatic Amazon Repricer
• JoeLister – Multichannel Fulfillment – Sell your Amazon inventory on eBay with only a few clicks!
• Podcast episode 10 – Outsourcing – Make More Money by Working Less on Your Amazon Business
• Podcast episode 20 – Improve Your Amazon Feedback Score the Easy Way
• Podcast episode 99 – Strategies to Sell Your Slow Moving Inventory
• Amazon Feedback Guidelines
• Increase Your Amazon FBA Seller Feedback Score + Feedback Genius Review

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Episode 178 Transcript:

 @j.bollenphotography https://jbollenphotography.com/

[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]

[00:00:21] REBECCA: Hello there, and welcome to Episode 178 of The Full-Time FBA Show. Today, we’re going to be talking about things you need to give up in your Amazon business. Here with me today to talk about this is my cohost, Stephen Smotherman. Welcome to the show, Stephen.

[00:00:37] STEPHEN: Hey, I’m excited about this episode, because we’re not going to tell you to give up your Amazon business, that’s for sure. But there are some things in your Amazon business that you need to give up in order to like find some success down the road. And we’ll talk about that in today’s episode of The Full-Time FBA Show.

[DISCUSSION]

[00:00:53] REBECCA: As entrepreneurs and business owners, we have the drive to always be successful, and that can make giving up on something hard to do. We think that giving up equates to failure, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth in some situations. In fact, sometimes the best move that you can make in your business is to give up on an aspect of your business that is either not working, or you need to give up on a goal that is impossible to achieve. Today, we’re going to be giving you permission to let go. Permission to give up on some things that just aren’t going like you first expected.

[00:01:30] STEPHEN: Today, we’re going to talk about four different things to let go of to give up. And the first thing is to give up on your stale inventory. Most of us have inventory that’s not selling. It’s just collecting dust in an Amazon warehouse, and it’s just accumulating monthly storage fees or worse, long-term storage fees, or aged inventory surcharges. It’s inventory that’s not selling. I mean, overall, we want the goal of our inventory to sell after the first one or two months. I mean, obviously, we’d love to sell them when it hits the shelves at an Amazon warehouse.

But on average, maybe one or two months where it takes it to sell. After two or three months, it might be a good idea to try some advertising or coupons, and we’d like to do multi-channel fulfilment via JoeLister, which is having our Amazon inventory also being sold on eBay. So, there’s a lot of different things to do. But after like three to six months, if your inventory is still not sold, then it’s officially stale inventory. We need to let go of that stale inventory. We don’t need to keep pumping money into storage fees or any other type of fees. Maybe we could try a liquidation repricing rule. We use the repricer called BQool. And we use a liquidation repricing rule that helps us to try to sell out our inventory pretty quickly. Or simply remove that inventory and maybe donate it to a worthy cause.

This will free up some capital if we’re able to sell that inventory, and if you’re able to be able to even donate it, that frees up some space and less fees with storage fees, so that you can better use that capital on better inventory that sells a lot quicker. Sometimes it’s time to let know that stale inventory and move on to better inventory that sells much faster and more predictably.

[00:03:13] REBECCA: The second thing you can consider giving up on is the idea of keeping a 100% feedback score. Honestly, gone are the days of sellers keeping a 100% positive feedback score after their first year or so of selling on Amazon. If you’re an eBay seller, just know that the Amazon feedback system is an entirely different ballgame.

Yes, it’s a great idea to do what you can within Amazon’s guidelines to eliminate negative seller feedback. The better the seller feedback score, the more Amazon rewards you with more time in the buy box. More time in the buy box equals more sales. But if you are obsessed with getting negative feedback removed, then you might not be using your time and energy to the fullest. Be sure you know the rules of what you can and can’t do to get that negative feedback removed. You don’t want to be doing anything that is outside of Amazon’s guidelines, because that can get you in even more trouble than just having less time in the buy box.

We’re going to put those guidelines in the show notes. So be sure to check that out. You can also hear more about feedback management in an earlier podcast, Episode 20 at, fulltimefba.com/20.

[00:04:22] STEPHEN: Yes, when it comes to getting negative feedback removed, sometimes it’s just going to stick and there’s nothing that we can do. So, it’s time to just move on and give up on the idea of having 100% feedback score.

[00:04:33] REBECCA: That’s really hard for me as a perfectionist. Yeah. But I understand that sometimes done is better than perfect and you need to be using your time wisely on productive activities.

[00:04:44] STEPHEN: Absolutely. The third thing to let go of to give up on is to give up on that software or that tool that you aren’t using anymore. I’m talking about Amazon reseller tools, whether it’s something that you’re using to save you some time or try to save you some money. But if that tool isn’t not accomplishing its goal, then maybe it’s time to give up on it. We’ve all signed up for a tool or a service that we thought we’d try it first, but then either never really did use that much. Or maybe it’s got a monthly fee or a yearly fee, and that’s just draining your bank account if you’re not using it to its fullest potential.

You might even be listening to this and know exactly which tool or service you’re paying for, that you’re not really using. So, it’s time to either, number one, recommit to that tool, so that you’re actually making good use of the funds that you’re investing in that tool. Or two, give up on that tool and cancel your services. If you’re not getting your investment back at least two-fold, then it’s time to put that business capital into either a better tool or better inventory to sell on Amazon. So, give up on that tool that you’re paying for, maybe do a little audit of your bank account to kind of see what are the things that you’re paying for that you might need to let go of.

[00:05:53] REBECCA: Yes, I would say I do this at least twice a year, maybe more often. I go through and I look at our credit card and our bank statements for the month and I see what are the regular charges that are coming out? And are we actually using all of those things? That’s what you mean by an audit. Just go through and look at the charges on your statement, and see, is it really worth it for me to be paying for those things?

Okay, so that brings us to the fourth thing that you should give up on or consider giving up on, this one, I highly recommend giving up on, and that is doing the easy work in your business. If you really want to turn part-time hours into a full-time income selling on Amazon, you really need to only be focusing on the most important aspects of your FBA business. This means that you need to give up on doing all of the things in your Amazon business, or the things that anyone can do or be trained to do.

So, we’re talking about outsourcing. We bring this up often because it is so important if you’re wanting to scale your business and be able to work part-time hours but get a full-time income. Usually, the first thing that people will say at this point, when we say outsourcing is, “Oh, nope, I can’t afford to hire someone. I’m going to tune this out.” But we want to say to you, you won’t grow your business if you do not hire someone to help you. When you’re first starting out hiring people to help you, you can look right where you are, and look around you to see, who are the people that you could pay just for a few hours.

Pay your kids, we do this regularly, when the kids are looking for something extra to do, and we have some stuff around the office that needs to be done. We hire them to do that because they are at an age now where we can train them easily to do those kinds of tasks. We pay them honestly and fairly. If you have a friend who’s looking for some extra work to pick up on the side, you can find a college kid that you know. A kid of a friend or somebody in your neighborhood, you can ask around at your church, if anyone is looking for extra work. There are many people out there who are looking to make an extra buck, just doing a little bit of work on the side.

We hired our housekeeper recently to also help with our Amazon business. She’s been coming to our house for years and years. We love her. She’s a friend. She had extra time in her week, and we asked her if she’d be willing to help out with some things, assisting us kind of on the side with our Amazon business as well. So, we’re able to get that going. We’ve had different people coming to our house to help us at different times. This doesn’t even get into all of the VA-type tasks, or virtual assistant-type tasks. But just start small, and just really give up on the idea that you can do it all. You really can be successful as a one-man show. You can, to a certain extent, but you’re not going to be able to grow to the place where you can work part-time hours if you do it that way.

[00:08:40] STEPHEN: Yeah. Coming back to the whole I don’t have the money to outsource. I will tell you this. When it comes to outsourcing, there is a very short-term sacrifice of finances and a short-term sacrifice of time that takes place at the beginning of outsourcing that just frees you up with long-term paybacks of more finances and more time given back to you because of outsourcing. So, it’s a short-term sacrifice now, for a long-term benefit later and that will help you in the long run, obviously.

[00:09:17] REBECCA: If you want to find out more about outsourcing, we have an episode, Episode 10 where we go into more details. Fulltimefba.com/10, if you want to know more about that.

[00:09:27] STEPHEN: So, when it comes to letting go of things, or giving up on things. There are some things that you can actually stop doing, or have someone else do, so that you can free yourself up and have the kind of finances to grow your Amazon business and the time to be able to invest in your Amazon business, to have more long-term success. By letting go of these four things, you’re going to be able to see that things are a little bit easier and can grow a little bit faster even by letting go. Those are the things that we wanted to share with you about letting go or giving up on, in your Amazon business.

[00:10:04] REBECCA: So, to close out today, we wanted to share with you an email we received recently from Orion. They say, “Hi guys, I’m just a few months into OA/FBA and came across your podcast a few weeks ago. After seeing how long you’ve been doing this podcast, I decided to listen to your journey from the start to gain some historical perspective.” I like that, historical perspective. Like we’ve been around as far as history.

Anyway, “I really enjoy your podcast and you’re upbeat, honest personalities. I just finished episode 27 and have already picked up some good tips so far. I can’t wait to listen to every episode.” Thank you, Orion for that message. We really appreciate hearing from you. If anybody that’s listening has any type of feedback you want to give us, leave us a review or send us an email.

That’s all we have for you today. As a reminder, you can find the transcript for this episode and the show notes with all of the links that were mentioned at fulltimefba.com/178 because we are on Episode 178.

[00:11:01] STEPHEN: Next week on the show, we’re going to talk about how to follow rabbit trails when sourcing to find even more inventory to sell. Because you can take both successes and failures with your sourcing, and there are rabbit trails that you can follow. We’ll talk about how you can do that with both retail arbitrage and online arbitrage, to find more inventory to sell. Thanks for those rabbit trails.

[00:11:20] REBECCA: I love a good rabbit trail.

[00:11:23] STEPHEN: Oh, yeah.

[OUTRO]

[00:11:25] 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 show notes 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]