Here’s the current Gorilla ROI Amazon sales progress. To see the interactive version, go to our income reports page.

Note: These monthly updates are for educational purposes.

Agenda for the September sales report. Fairly short this month.

• Diversify your suppliers
• #1 deciding factor in ranking on Amazon
• Dilemma of trying to grow outside Amazon
• New Gorilla ROI features and data

First, the numbers as usual.

September stats

• $421k in sales
• 100% growth from the same month last year
• -1% growth from the previous month
• Conversion rate of 30%
• ACoS rose to 26.6%. New person hired to focus on PPC full time.

Diversify Your Manufacturers

COVID is here to stay. That’s not a political statement, but a realistic statement based on what is being pushed hard in the media.

Because of this, Amazon and online sales will continue to increase and certain categories are going to be major winners during Q4 and as next year rolls in.

Our goal is to obviously make the best out of every opportunity.

At the top of our list is to be less reliant on our best selling SKU. COVID increased the demand for this SKU by 2-3x and we aren’t able to get enough.

It’s a good problem if the supplier is cooperative. When dealing with a supplier who repeatedly ignores emails, rejects POs, and doesn’t care for your business, the increase in sales is a royal pain in the a**.

Eager to hear the latest episode?

We received four pallets of defective units which we reported to them quickly.

No response. No care. Just a shrug.

Took 3 weeks to get anywhere and finally, they took the product back. But they haven’t processed the credit back to us for over a month.

Again, no response, not a care in the world. This is supposed to be a well run US manufacturer too.

What’s the lesson?

Don't be reliant on one supplier or SKU. You can become hostage to it.

With an Amazon business, the biggest risk is that 98% of revenue comes from a single platform.

The second biggest risk is if the majority of your revenue comes from a small number of SKUs and suppliers.

Just as we all know that we “should” be diversifying away from Amazon, the same concept applies to suppliers.

If this US supplier made up 100% of our revenue, we’ll likely be out of business soon.

Here’s a quick list of how business with a supplier can turn bad.

• The supplier stiffs you and decides to cut business relationships.
• The supplier closes down.
• The supplier is banned from importing to the US (it happened to the biggest manufacturer of gloves, Top Glove).
• The supplier drastically raises prices on you.
• The supplier starts ignoring you.
• The supplier sells your product to someone else.
• and in many other ways.

Since diversifying away from Amazon is much harder than diversifying suppliers, we are currently working with a new company to replace the SKU from this existing manufacturer.

Hoping for less gray hairs in the following year.

#1 deciding factor that ranks your product

Conversions.

Amazon wants to make a sale. Whoever makes the best sale will get the best rank.

I’ve been watching and listening to some big sellers and it’s clear that the main strategy to product launches and rankings are based around giveaways.

Nice photos? Good copy?

It helps.

But if it’s not ranking, no one is buying.

The most important thing is to get the product ranking and see whether the listing can organically convert once the giveaway period is over.

The bad news is that organic product launches for products outside your main vertical are close to impossible.

It’s a pay to play system.

If you mainly sell blankets, but now want to sell slippers, there’s no way to do it without spending. It’s so competitive that going out of stock requires a mini launch.

As much as I write about preventing stock-outs, we’ve had some of our good sellers go out of stock for a month.

With the inventory back in Amazon FCs, the sales is 20-40% of what it was before.

Hate going out of stock because it’s such a costly mistake.

To get it back up, it obviously needs higher velocity and conversions. Some work to do and money to spend.

Growing off Amazon

This is an area we I constantly fail at.

We know that we need to diversify because of the risk of being suspended, ASINs being delisted, attacks by competitors, and the works.

This year without covid was supposed to have been a big boost to our offline sales and tradeshow sales as we were working on a lot of wholesale and reseller agreements.

All of those have been canceled with many going out of business.

Unfortunately, influencer marketing doesn’t work for our products. We sell boring and low priced products that influencers don’t bother to respond to.

This needs more focus in the following year, but knowing myself, it’ll likely be procrastinated on.

New updates and tutorials

We introduced new features to Gorilla ROI.

• NEW: FBM is fully supported. You can set the parameters to select between FBA and FBM. Check the documentation for the latest.
• NEW: Get order details using GORILLA_MANAGEORDER().
• NEW: Here’s why a Chinese NNN agreement is more effective than an NDA 
• NEW: Free lead time calculator, formula, and management

More free Amazon FBA spreadsheets for all

We’ve added more templates for both basic users and PRO spreadsheet buyers. More free Amazon spreadsheets are being created too.

You can download it immediately without having to sign up for anything.

Just copy straight to your account.

If you want to get updated data straight into your own Google sheets, you can use Gorilla ROI. It makes work so easy when you don’t have to manually update data or log into accounts constantly and wasting time.