Turnover Tuesdays - A Long Tail Sale and Calculating Storage Fees

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.

The previous posts in the series can be found at the bottom of this post.

Long Tail Sales

Long tail sales are when you are selling an item that doesn't have much demand and you don't expect sales to happen quickly.  Your turnover is much slower but that doesn't mean your profit has to be any worse.


We would all like to sell fast selling items but those can attract a lot of competition so profits often eventually erode.  So instead of (or in addition to) selling 20 a month of one item you can sell 20 a month between 200 SKUs with the same sales numbers and possibly higher profit numbers


The downside, especially on Amazon where they are storing the item for you, is that you are going to pay storage fees.  That's definitely true but that isn't always a significant factor.

Turnover Tuesdays - Start Your Own Listings

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.

The previous posts in the series can be found at the bottom of this post.

Keepa Charts

I know for myself that I sometimes get hyperfocused looking at Keepa charts to check out sales history and prices.  How many have sold in a week?  In a month?  At what price?

These are very important questions and it often influences how many of any particular item I will buy for my first purchase.

You can really learn a ton just by studying charts and your knowledge on what to look for on the charts will change over time as well as you read more charts

Turnover Tuesday- Getting Around (or Happily Paying) Quarter 4 Storage Fees

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.

The previous posts in the series can be found at the bottom of this post.

Quarter 4 Storage Fees

This year, Amazon has decided to implement a significant increase in storage fees during quarter 4.  I've talked about this before but now that Q4 is coming upon us rapidly (less than 30 days until the official start but we all know that the magic doesn't start in October) it is time to really get into the details of some strategies to help minimize storage fees.

Standard size storage fees are approximately 4x the regular monthly fee and oversized storage fees are a little less than 3x the normal monthly storage fee.

Ostensibly, the increased storage fees (and decreased fulfillment fees) are to encourage you to sell  inventory earlier in the season so Amazon's fulfillment centers aren't as overwhelmed or stuffed and prices remain lower for customers.  That being said, I think that will partially happen.  I'm not sure a ton of people will sell earlier but I do anticipate many sellers waiting longer to send inventory in to avoid/minimize the storage fees.  In the end I predict Amazon to make a ton of extra money due to the storage fees and to end up with some very unhappy sellers.  I'll explain that later.

Turnover Tuesdays - Check Your Refunds To See If You Had Inventory Reimbursements

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.

The previous posts in the series can be found at the bottom of this post.

Inventory Tracking

Without a doubt, the toughest part of selling on Amazon is keeping track of inventory.  As you build your inventory it becomes almost impossible to track everything without either great software or spreadsheets.  I've yet to find the great software but those who are coming to the Tagging Miles Reselling DO may find out about a company I use for inventory tracking (not from me) which I'll reveal publicly after the DO.

Unless your spreadsheets are great, you won't even realize that you are missing so many items.  Believe you me, the number of items that get lost, damaged and/or poof into the Amazon ether without reimbursement is frankly astounding.    The more I find out, the more I realize how easy it is to be selling very profitably and yet you have no idea that you could missing hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars of inventory that you didn't even know about.  It sounds impossible to be missing in so much stuff but you can get caught up in buying and sending in more and more items that you aren't paying enough attention to what's already there.  If you send in 57 of one item and you sold 53 of them and four are lost, without a spreadsheet there is no way you'd catch that, especially if it takes a few months to sell.  Even with a spreadsheet you may not catch that as you get larger and larger.

Remember, this is your money and your inventory, if you aren't doing what's necessary to protect it properly you may think you are profitable but you may actually not be.  It's really annoying to pay attention to it but if you aren't paying attention you'll be losing money you don't even know about.  So either pay attention or pay someone else to pay attention. If you think it's not worth it, just try it.  Where do you think all those inventory reimbursements are coming from?  Your stuff.  You will be astounded at what you find once you start looking.  I know I was.  More on that in a couple weeks.