Turnover Tuesdays - Some Quick Holiday Tips

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.

Holiday Season

The holidays are a magical time full of beautifully expensive Unicorns where everything at Target and Walmart seems like a great deal (until everyone else finds it - which they will).  Shopping portals often increase their payouts and have spending bonuses (currently being offered by quite a few of the mileage portals).  

If you ever were thinking about signing up for a credit card with a large spending minimum for the bonus, now is the time.  

I've only been through one holiday season but I learned a lot from that experience, hopefully I can give over some of the useful information.

Using Inventory Lab to Check Which Shipment Contained Your Item

We've all experienced it.  You sent 6 iPads in but when you look at your FBA inventory you only see 4 there.  What happened to those other 2?

Well, one problem is that many, many things could have happened.  It could have never been received, it could have been lost once received, it could have been damaged in the warehouse, it could have been sent for relabeling and lost into the Amazon ether (yes, that happens a lot more than you think).


Amazon has some pretty good reports you can run on lost and damaged items.  It's all there though it's quite time consuming to go through.



Finding which shipment you sent it in can be a challenge.  If you are like me you have pages and pages of shipments.  It's impossible to check each one if you are missing one particular SKU.  Once it's checked in you can check the received inventory report based off any SKU but if it was never received probably you may be out of luck.


For a long time as part of my inventory tracking spreadsheet I would have a column for FBA shipments.  It was a way to easily go back to that shipment and check what happened.  It was annoying but worth it until I found out I didn't need it all.

Inventory Lab Tracks Shipments for You

Personally, I am a huge fan of Inventory Lab.  It would be almost impossible for me to accurately account for COGS, sales and fees at the volume I'm doing without some sort of software and Inventory Lab does a great job at that.  When you play around with it you start to realize that it also pays for itself.

The one thing that I'm starting to realize I don't like about Inventory Lab is that it doesn't support eBay or Walmart sales (as far as I know) but this post isn't about Inventory Lab.  You can read more about it here.



One nice thing about Inventory Lab is that I've always received helpful customer service.  I wanted to see if they tracked this data so I didn't have to.  You are creating shipments with them so maybe they have it available for you.


I sent them an email (support@inventorylab.com) and they sent back:

Here are the Circles and Arrows of what that means

On the dashboard you can pick "closed batches".  These are the shipments that have already been sent off to Seller Central

At the next screen you can input any ASIN and you will see all the shipments that included that shipment

Under "Name" you can see the name of those shipments.

You can copy the name of any shipment and go over to seller central and find that shipment.

Using the name function isn't as easy as the FBA ID is but if I don't have to track that info myself, I am pretty happy.

Turnover Tuesdays - Automation Beyond Amazon - JoeLister and GeekSeller

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.

The Elections

I sat down to write this post late tonight when the news was starting to come in that Donald Trump would likely become the next president of the US.  This isn't a political blog but I knew that I had little to no chance that anyone is reading so I figured it was time to give away some secrets!

Did I have you even for a second?  No?  Oh well.

Here comes a nice post that you won't read anyways.  I hope everyone had a fun election party.  I decided to pack boxes to keep my mind off the circus that is our election process (no party affiliation coming out there - I think both parties would agree to that).

Turnover Tuesdays - Past Performance is not a Guarantee of Future Results

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.

Using Data from Keepa to Your Advantage

The Keepa extension is probably the most important (and free!) extension available to Amazon sellers.  I use it to evaluate every single deal.  Rank is almost meaningless to me at this point.  Rank is a snapshot currently but sales significantly affect the rank.  If you used rank to evaluate purchases on Prime Day and Amazon put it on sale, every item would have been #1 rank in its category so rank can be very misleading.  You need to evaluate rank over time.  You need to see the number of sellers over time.


There is a ton to be gleaned from Keepa, some of it obvious and some of it not so obvious but it is absolutely essential.

One thing you can use Keepa for is to check out prices last year during busy seasons previously.  This can be a guide for you of what items have huge demand.  As I will show, this does not necessarily correlate to a big payout.

No Turnover Tuesdays for the Next Two Weeks

Tonight starts the holiday of Sukkot.  I will be off the grid on Monday and Tuesday of this week and Monday and Tuesday of next week.  That means no Turnover Tuesdays this week or next week.  We will come back with a vengeance in 2 weeks.

Enjoy the break!

Turnover Tuesdays - Prices Always Come Back, Except When They Don't

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.

Race to the Bottom

A Race to the Bottom is when one seller undercuts the price followed by more and more sellers undercutting.  Prices plummet in a hurry as sellers are racing to lower the price.

When an item goes on sale from one of the big retailers, there is almost invariably a race to the bottom.

My favorite saying is that you either need to be first or last to sell anything.  First because the prices are still high or last when prices finally recover.  Obviously, first is far preferable but not always possible if you can't get your inventory in fast enough or you bought too many to sell before the race to the bottom begins.  So I often find myself waiting for the price recovery to sell (unless I get impatient).  That is usually a good strategy.

My Last Miles Redemption is an Example Why I Prefer to Earn Cash, not Miles

Earlier this week, I pointed out that I was able to use Delta SkyMiles to book a trip from NYC to TLV for only 70,000 points round-trip per person.


If you have followed my blog for a while you may know that I highly prefer to earn cashback over points with my credit cards.  You won't see me whip out my Starwoods credit card for everyday purchases (I actually don't even have a Starwoods - I know, the pain!).


I will use my latest redemption as a real life example.


Let's assume I would have booked the same flight with cash as I would have for miles.  It's not true since I would have booked a more convenient direct flight since it was basically the same price as one with a stopover but let's gloss over that for a moment (even though that's one of my reasons for disliking miles).

Had I not had miles to burn I would have used cash which would have cost about $900.


My flight cost me 70,000 miles + fees.  Let's do some math.

Don't Discount Delta and their SkyPesos and The Value of Transferable Point Currencies

Tonight is the beginning of the Jewish New Year which continues until late Tuesday night.  For that reason, there will be no Turnover Tuesdays post this week.  Happy New Year everyone!  

For today's post, most people probably won't learn anything new but it was something interesting that happened to me so I thought I'd share and maybe somebody can learn something from it.

I was booking a flight to TLV from the NYC airports this past week.  I had always been told that the best way to book miles from NYC to TLV was with United. Since I'm Jewish I assumed advice from Jewish friends on the best way to get to Israel must be true.

I knew about using Avios to do it very cheaply but it was complicated, the availability was very poor, it took a while to piece together everything and I always had domestic short haul flights as a way to use Avios.  I would always check but it usually meant an hour to piece it together only to find out it didn't work for my trip.

When I first got into miles it cost 80,000 miles roundtrip from NYC to TLV in saver level awards.  Since then the price has gone up to 85,000 miles.  I have been known to measure miles in terms of how many trips to Israel it will get me.  For example, if I was ordering $2,000 worth of iPads from Staples and they were offering 5x United miles on the portal (that actually used to happen last year), that was 2/17th of a roundtrip ticket to Israel for just purchase.

Either way, last year at some point someone pointed out to me that  United miles aren't even the best way to fly United to Israel.  If you use Singapore KrisFlyer miles to fly on Star Alliance, it actually only costs 75,000 miles.  

This was a revelation to me.  It meant that collecting United miles was no longer even close to collecting Ultimate Rewards points.  This should be true anyways since Ultimate Rewards can be used for cash and many other partners and booking flights as cash directly at 1.25x-1.5x but if you know you are going to use all your UR points on United anyways, so then collecting United miles was pretty much the same as collecting URs since the URs were heading into United.

Now, that's not so clear anymore.  URs can be transferred to Singapore instead.  Not only that, Thank you Points and Membership Rewards can be transferred to Singapore too.  Those can't be transferred to United.  It opens up a world of consolidating points.

There are important factors to know before doing this including timing your points transfers, how to book, etc.  All not for now, but the point is that the once obvious choice for me wasn't so obvious anymore.

Delta to the Rescue?