Do you ever have one of those days where it seems like any site you scan with OAXray just returns a bunch of items with .05% ROI and ranked 1,219,327 in Everything Else? Well the other day this was happening to me and I was extremely frustrated. So, I decided to take a break, grab a beer, and jump into my reports. I came across the report that tells you everything you’ve sold by ASIN and it dawned on me. I could use this report to find some new replens!
If you have been floating around the vast, wild, and sometimes dramatic space of Facebook FBA groups I’m sure you’ve heard the term “replenishables.” If you haven’t yet, then I’m glad I can be the one to introduce you to the term. A replenishable item is one that you can buy over and over again and make money on. Now, I have plenty of these with my wholesale accounts but the ROI tends to be lower on the wholesale side so I need to continue with regular OA for now. Having replens makes OA a lot easier. You can check your inventory and order what you need to stay stocked. These items may or may not stay profitable for more than a few months so you need to make sure you keep a lower stock on these. I try and not keep any more than a month’s worth of stock at any time. The reason for this is the price may tank, Amazon my start carrying them, a newer version comes on the market, or they just become unpopular. No matter the reason, you want to minimize your risk on these and you do that by holding less than a month of inventory.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re sitting there thinking, “Justin, that sounds awesome but that sounds like a lot of testing and research to find these replenishables.” It’s not. Not at all. You can find a few through the reports in your Seller Central Account and I’m going to show you how.
Step 1: Go into your Business Reports(this takes you to the screen that shows you your sales):
Step 2: On the left hand side of the screen you are going to see the dark gray column with the headings “Dashboards” “Business Reports” and “Amazon Selling Coach.” You want to click on the “Detail Page Sales and Traffic by Parent Item.” It’s under Business Reports>By ASIN.
Step 3: After that page loads you want to click on the “Download” button that is right above your list of items and then “CSV” to download the Excel version or whatever spreadsheet software you use.
Step 4: Open the spreadsheet and you should have something that looks like this:
Now this is where you are going to find all of your replens. You need to use a little discernment and judgment on whether or not these items were worth buying more of or if you know the price bottomed out on you and you barely made anything on them. Sometimes you have absolutely no clue which is fine. The reason this list is so valuable for finding replens is because you know these items are sellers and you know what you sold them for! I go through the list and try to remove ones I know were just a clearance special or the ones I know are not that good anymore. Once you’ve sorted through your list proceed to Step 5.
Step 5: This is where you track down the items you want to find more of. It’s pretty straight forward. Highlight the (Parent) ASIN in Column A and navigate your way to the items Amazon page. Look over the ranking, keepa graph, and take note of how many sellers are on it. If there’s a 100+ sellers and the rank is 65k, chances are there is a lot of downward pressure on that buy box price and it will eventually come crashing down.
Step 6: Keep the Amazon page open to reference back to. Now, find out where you bought these items. You can look through your invoices or just start Googling. A lot of times you can find the item cheaper somewhere besides the original place you purchased it. This is basically reverse sourcing. Pro Tip: you can use this method to find wholesale suppliers too.
Step 7: Once you find the item you need to reference back to the Amazon page and verify that it is indeed still profitable, and the rank is still within your buying range. Always double check your numbers to make sure you calculated them correctly. You can use Jungle Scout to estimate the number of times the item sells per month. Then take that number and divide by the number of people near the buy box price. I usually add two to the number of sellers: one for myself and one to cover my butt.
Step 8: Order your replen!
As I said before, replens make online arbitrage a lot easier. I believe one seller in our group stated that he could spend a thousand dollars on any given day in replens alone. That’s powerful stuff. Replens can transform your business and streamline the sourcing process. It is also a good step in the wholesale direction because it teaches you the basics of how much of an item you should order and how often. Once you find wholesale suppliers you will be able to quickly calculate your first order and get it in to your supplier. Sourcing tends to be the bottleneck for everyone. So, any time you can streamline the process and make it more efficient the better off your business will be.
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