For those who are not familiar, I started a series a while back called Turnover Tuesdays. Every Tuesday I like to highlight one item that I have resold. This will include profitable and non profitable sales. I hope that there is always something to learn.
Week 31 - Sometimes You Need to Stop, Refocus and Reprice
Week 32 - Target Cartwheel and other Coupons can have a Major Impact
Week 33 - Got a Return? You Might need to Reprice
Week 34 - Sometimes Returns Can be Very Profitable
Week 35 - Best Buy Gamer's Club
Week 32 - Target Cartwheel and other Coupons can have a Major Impact
Week 33 - Got a Return? You Might need to Reprice
Week 34 - Sometimes Returns Can be Very Profitable
Week 35 - Best Buy Gamer's Club
The Item - A Toy
I bought 36 units of one toy on November 11/18/2015.
I paid $13.84 after tax for each one. At the time that I sent in the item, it was selling for almost $23.50.
I had previously sold the same item for almost $25 so I wanted to hold out for me.
Had I sold at $23.50 I would have earned about $17 before shipping which would have been about $.50 a unit so I would have had a very quick sale with a nice ROI. Unfortunately I did not.
Instead, I waited and prices kept dropping (even during holiday season) because of the number of sellers. I missed out.
It got to the point where the same item was being sold for about $17. No way I'm selling for that cheap.
Fast forward to today:
The same item is now being sold for $23.99, About $0.50 more.
If I knew what would happen, I would have gladly sold back in December and not have to wait months for the same price. In addition, I have been paying storage fees which I would not be paying if I sold the item.
It Doesn't End There
I actually haven't sold the item yet, even though the price has recovered. Why? The Keepa Chart. This is a feature that I'm pretty sure has been there for quite some time but I only found out about recently.
Most people's Keepa charts look like this:
This is great information (you can read more about Keepa on this post) but there is even more information available if you are interested and I actually think the next feature is the most important information they give.
Click on "More Historical Data" in the bottom right corner and now you will see this:
The graph you see on the bottom shows you how many sellers are selling on Amazon currently and historically.
I can see that in the middle of December there were about 150 sellers and late December there were about 140 and now it closer to 50. The chart shows lots of sellers selling out and rarely being replaced (there is one blip).
This is good to know. It means that the price is likely to continue to rise until the next sale. That means I'm raising my price.
While I would have rather sold out in December, maybe it will work out even better now. Patience is tricky like that sometimes.
If you watch the number of followers closely you will see that prices don't change much while sellers drop out. Everyone is undercutting each other and it negates price rises, then you start to see a critical mass of sellers gone and prices really move higher. I'm hoping that happens here but it might still be too early.
Patience is a tricky thing! At least we get a new Keepa tool out of it!
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