Why you should care! Categorizing your inventory as an Amazon seller is important as your item grows count grows. Even inexperienced sellers know that certain items contribute more to your monthly profit than others. If this is true, why do most sellers give the same priority to all items when replenishing their inventory? We don’t mean that they replenish items that are unprofitable. We mean that they don’t account for greater lead time and demand variability for their highest priority items. What’s the right way? Professional inventory managers use the Pareto Principle when classifying their items, and you should too….

Previously we gave you some of the top methods to improve cash flow as an Amazon seller. One of these tips involved the reduction of product lead times, but we didn’t go into detail. We received several questions about this topic and thought we would provide some lead time reduction tips. 1. Use Air Shipping Yes, there are additional costs involved with shipping via air, but you might be surprised what these shipping companies can come back with if you negotiate. We found that for our products it was higher but well worth the benefit of reduced lead times. 2….

Amazon UK inventory forecasting is now available with Forecastly. The same profit-boosting tool used by numerous Amazon US marketplace sellers is now available to Amazon UK sellers as well. A professional inventory management tool like Forecastly assists sellers by decreasing out-of-stock events and increasing profits. Inventory management software can also analyze a seller's existing products to determine where excess quantities are present and make recommendations to free up cash that should be reinvested in better-performing products. Each marketplace is analyzed independently so you'll have inventory data that is useful for each of your accounts, but your other accounts are only...

How much does a stockout cost? Have you ever wondered what is the cost of a stockout for one of your Amazon items? This brief article will help you determine what that is. We'll use an example item for this. The first step in this calculation is to determine what the profit is for the sale of one unit. Amazon's Profitability Calculator can help with that. Here is the formula for our example item. Profit Calculation Price $36.99 Amazon Commission: $2.96 (8%) FBA Fees: $6.03 Cost: $7.00 Profit: $21.00 In this particular case, each time one unit sells we make $21....

Big changes are here! We've been working hard to build a better inventory management tool for Amazon sellers. We are helping sellers run better businesses and putting more money in their pockets. When we launched the beta two months ago, sellers were already blown away by our system. Since the initial launch we've made some serious improvements and the tool is even better. Here are just a few of the recent additions we've made to Forecastly since the initial beta launch. Inventory Forecasts Sellers can see the cost having a stock-out for a particular item. Wondering what it will cost you...

You asked for it! One of  the most popular feature requests we've received is the ability to add product annotations to our graph pop-up. We've been working hard to find a good way to do this and it is now ready for all our users! You can now keep track of price changes, new competition, SEO modifications, etc. to see what exactly made your product's rank change. Have questions about using product annotations? This help document includes a video to assist you in getting started.

Safety stock can be a confusing term for Amazon sellers. Some say it is inventory that is used to account for unexpected events. However, this isn’t technically true, because the calculation of safety stock is based on expected events. You are expecting variability in sales, so you put safety stock in place to prevent a stockout. Safety stock is calculated using some fancy statistics that use a service level you set and the variability in your historical sales. To put it simply, safety stock is your insurance against having a stock out that is a result of a change in…

Last week, we explained the difference between cash flow and profit. Now, we’ll give you six top tips to improve your cash flow by reducing your inventory levels. We promise that implementing just a few of these tips will free up some cash, allowing you to grow your Amazon business more quickly! These are general guidelines, and you should mold them to work for your business. Every business is different, but these are good starting points. Eliminate Obsolete or Slow-moving Inventory Everybody has items that just don’t sell. You thought the product would be a hit, but it hasn’t worked out that way….

A common mistake among Amazon Marketplace sellers is the confusion of profit with cash flow. This is common among many businesses and not just with Amazon sellers. We’ll just touch on some basic concepts since nobody here needs to know the nitty-gritty details. That’s what accountants are for, right? Cash is money in your bank accounts or the business. It is not inventory on the shelf or money in your Amazon settlement account. These items may eventually be converted to cash, but they can’t be used to pay suppliers, bills, or employees. It is easy to think if you are…