This will not be the most glamorous of income reports. Indeed, I barely broke even this month! Read on to find out why I don't mind so much and why I still think that this was a very important month for me:

My Goals for these past 30 Days:

1. Get to 500 active listings. 

I'm currently at 407. So, no I did not reach my target goal this month. But I'm very still happy with the progress I've made seeing as I listed over 350 products this month. More importantly, I unlocked a selling limit of 1k items! I always told myself that if I can just get 1k postings up I know I can make a successful business. Now I'm one step closer to that BIG goal. Also, these past few weeks I really got into a good groove of posting items that I I know I will be able to continue with moving forward.

 

 

2. Profit Goal – Have no Goal

Not setting a profit goal for myself was critical for me this past month. If I did have a goal, I would have given up weeks ago. Instead, I just kept listing no matter what.

Other Achievements:

1. I got several more positive reviews this month. One I'm particularly proud of- a customer bought an item that arrived damaged. He insisted that I send him a new part even though I told him it could take up to a month to arrive and that it would be faster to exchange the whole item. Sure enough, a couple of weeks later he complained about the delay. When I contacted Home Depot they said they hadn't even ordered the part yet. So they expressed a whole new item to my customer for free. The customer was rude to me during the whole process but, in the end, left me a glowing review!

 

2. I started using hydralister. On the one hand, this cut into my profit this month because hydralister is $79. On the other hand, I was able to do a LOT more listings this month because I had it. I'm definitely a fan of it and will continue to use it going forward.

I also tried a listing software called HustleGotReal. They just opened access for US Ebay Stores. Overall, HGR has a great user interface. They even have a chrome extension that will let you list the item directly from your source's website. And they are cheaper than hydralister. What I don't like, though, is that it doesn't grab as much information as hydralister does. For instance, I still had to manually look up UPCs. And the process of approving photos was very slow. So I've chosen to use Hydralister because it is faster.

3. I signed up for Paribus. This is a website that checks to see if any items you bought recently have decreased in price. If they have, they contact the source for you to request a price adjustment. It works by connecting with your email and looking for order confirmations and tracking numbers.

Recently Paribus contacted Walmart for me because an item dropped in price 2 days after I bought it. Unfortunately, Walmart wouldn't price adjust because it flagged me as a reseller. However, Paribus did get Amazon to credit me $5 because an item it shipped did not get delivered by the promised date.

 

4. 1,000 Item Selling Limit!

 5. New Credit Card. I signed up and got approved for the Chase Sapphire Preferred which comes with a huge sign up bonus! 

The Numbers

Income:

1174.06    Gross Income from Sales

26.64         Cash Back

Expenses:

-14.99     sku grid

-79          Hydralister

-25          Ebay Store Fee

-713.15   Purchases from Sources

-177.55   Paypal Fees

-120.44   eBay Fees

Total Profit: $68.68

WTF Happened?

 

The last two income reports I made over $500. Now I barely broke even. How the hell did that happen? Here's the thing – I pretty much expected this to happen.

Those two months I basically relied on just two  products. One in particular sold like hot cakes (where did that expression even come from?). I sold at least one every day and on some days I sold as many as 7! At $50 a pop and at $5 profit per item, I was really raking it in. Then it went out of stock. And my other “best sellers” were copied by people who under priced me.

But I KNEW this would happen one day. I'm just glad it happened AFTER I got a ton of positive reviews, and enough sales to get a 1000 item selling limit.

This drop in sales also gave me a chance to concentrate on other parts of my business- namely listings. But I also got creative with finding ways to squeeze as much profit as I can out of every sale. Towards the end of the month I even found a particularly clever way to increase my margins at Home Depot. I'm really excited to see how this effects my profit next month!

Goals for Next 30 Days

1. Get to 750 listings. I have no doubt I can do this.

2. Average one sale every other day. The two best ways for me to increase my sales are to list more and to lower my profit margin a smidge. I lowered my prices last week and have already seen an uptick in sales. But my profit is pretty much $0 on them. I'm going to do this for a couple of more week and then tick my prices back up.