In an effort to try and be timely with these reports, I only report on my gross revenue, both for my Yahoo store and Amazon. I do have some other online and offline income, but these reports will focus only on income associated with product sales.
As I mentioned towards the end of my May Income Report, my Yahoo Store was hit by Google’s Penguin update and June was looking absolutely terrible. Well, things didn’t get much better and I ended the month with my lowest June sales volume in years. My niche typically does pretty well during the summer months, so this was disappointing to say the least.
What Happened in June?
Even though my Yahoo Store was the area of my business that took the hit, I decided to put more effort into increasing my Amazon revenue. This may sound counter-intuitive, but honestly, I can’t figure out this Penguin update. I mean, I know there are some SEO areas of my site that can be improved, but it’s generally a high quality, white-hat site. I’m hesitant to spend much money trying to fix things that *might* be the problem, so I’m going to wait things out a little longer and see what happens. The only steps in June I’ve taken in to improve my Yahoo store’s rankings is to build additional backlinks with varying anchor text. Honestly, I don’t think poor anchor text variation was a big issue for me, but it’s what many SEO experts are touting as the reason for many sites being penalized by Penguin. Beginning in July, I’ve started holding some sales, but obviously you won’t see this reflected in my June numbers.
So, I’ve spent more time trying to work on sourcing and adding new products to my Amazon storefront. I’ve also started researching some different Amazon strategies and have found a few approaches that are fairly interesting. For the most part these new strategies include sourcing products that are out of stock on Amazon. By doing this, you can become the only seller with this product and price in comfortable profits for yourself. This looks like it will be a lot more work than my typical approach, so I’m not sure if I will try it out or not…I’ll keep you posted.
So, like I said, I added a new line of products towards the middle of the month. The drawback to the new product line I chose is that has a lot of variations (colors/sizes), so one product can require a lot of inventory if you want to have stock in all the various sizes. The advantage is that not many people are willing to do this, so it limits the competition, which is good. I’m going up against some established sellers, but I’m able to match their pricing and still make a good profit on the items, which is nice. If this works out, there are other similar products I can expand into.
My revenue breakdown for June was as follows:
June 2012 Income Breakdown
- Yahoo Store (June):
- Total sales: $1,818.26 (I totld you it wasn’t pretty)
- Unique visitors: 9,986
- Page views/visitor: 3.55
- Orders: 35
- Avg. order size: $51.95
For comparision, my May revenue was $4,063.05 with 59 orders. I’m not sure why my average order size was down so much this month…typically, it’s in the low $60 range.
The good news is that my Amazon revenue has actually gone up during this period, so that’s been a big help financially.
- Amazon (June):
- Total sales: $8,569.90
- Orders: 456
- Avg. order size: $18.79
This compares to $9,132.29 in revenue for May with 440 orders.
So, in total I had gross revenue of $10,388.16 for June 2012.
Obviously, this is very disappointing compared to my May revenue and months prior. I can already tell that July is looking better and hope that this will be more in line with my April numbers of over $13,000. While you don’t see a big impact from the new line of Amazon products, I’m already seeing some orders come through and hope to see this continue to increase over the coming months. I’m also working on adding some other new products into the mix.
Oliver says
Hey, Dax.
So all of that income comes from ecom? What exactly does a amazon marketplace seller do? This is some serious income you have here. You seem very humble in talking about your income seeing as it is 10k a month. For most in the online space, that level of income would replace many jobs.
These Google updates are always a mess right? On the one hand you have all of your assumptions, on the other hand you have all of the “guru” assumptions and then you have what Google actually says. How much more confusing can it get? 🙂 Hopefully you can get it figured out. Good luck, I look forward to seeing your income rise continually in the future months.
Oliver
Dax Deegan says
Hi Oliver,
Yes, this income is all online through my Yahoo Store and Amazon sales. That’s gross sales, though. My operating costs are fairly low and profit margins are healthy, so I could typically count on net income in the mid-four figures…it’s been on the lower side since penguin. Fortunately, Amazon is still going strong.
As an Amazon Marketplace Seller, the goal is just like any other ecommerce business – sell inventory at a price higher than you purchase it, but I use Amazon as the platform to list and sell my products. All my sales come through Amazon.com so, even though their fees are high, I have no marketing/advertising costs associated with this aspect of my business. I personally use Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) for most of my inventory, so when an order comes in, they take care of shipping for me. For non-FBA orders, I’ve got to pack and ship the orders myself.
The Penguin update is really frustrating me. I hadn’t been hit by any of the previous ones, so I had been confident that my SEO techniques were viewed positively by Google. Everything was very white-hat. Now that I’ve been hit (and I’ve heard stories from dozens of other merchants just like me), it makes it very difficult to figure out what the next step should be. You’re right…everyone, including Google, is saying something different, so I just have no idea what direction to take. That’s why I’m sort of just riding the wave with regard to my Yahoo Store and focusing on Amazon right now.