January 2022 FBA Profit and Loss Report
How much did I actually make?
Intro
Welcome! This year has been off to a crazy start, with my book investment from the previous year coming into play as well as my transition from books to products in other categories. I’ve surpassed my expectations in every way imaginable, and am already preparing to outsource most of the work in my business - I’ve enlisted the help of a prep center in Montana (goodbye sales tax!), and just a couple of days ago I hired my first virtual assistant to help me with product research. I couldn’t have imagined I’d be at this point when I sold my first book in July last year, but here we are. Enough rambling though, let’s get to the numbers.
P&L Format
Since this is going to be my first post on the topic, I’m not exactly sure how I want these to look like so I’ll just wing it and see what sticks. There’s a couple of inconsistencies with the revenue numbers on Amazon Seller Central vs InventoryLab, but my assumption is that InventoryLab doesn’t count pending orders (orders that have been placed but Amazon hasn’t shipped them yet) and I have around 100 of those. Since InventoryLab tracks revenue, fees, and cost of goods sold, I’ll be using it’s numbers for my calculations and adding my additional expenses from GoDaddy Bookkeeping to generate a report that is somewhat accurate (I should probably hire an accountant…).
The Numbers
Without further ado, here’s the rundown:
Revenue: $27,296.06
Cost of Goods Sold: $11,154.86
Amazon Fees: $10,815.56 (includes shipping costs, fulfillment fees, storage, etc.)
Other Expenses: $883 (See list below)
Net Profit: $4,442.64
Other Expenses:
Leads List - $100
OnlineJobs.ph Account (website for finding VAs) - $69
Tactical Arbitrage (Full Suite) - $129
SellerAmp - $23
Profit Protector Pro - $60
InventoryLab (1 Year) - $480
Keepa - $22
Category Breakdown
One thing that’s cool about InventoryLab is that you can track your numbers by item category. Here’s what mine looks like:
As you can see, Books were just under 30% of my total revenue for the month and about 38% of my gross profit. This is because prior to this year I had around $4,000 worth of books in stock for the upcoming semester, and looking at this report I was surprised to find out that I wasn’t carried by books as hard as I thought I would be. Grocery has been my bread and butter this month, making similar sales numbers to books without previously investing any money into it. The margins are small, but a lot of the products move quickly to compensate. I don’t know how much more grocery I’ll be doing moving forward since prep center fees make a deep cut into the small margins, but I’ll probably still prep some items myself if it makes sense.
What’s Next?
I’m not sure what the numbers will look like next month. I don’t have 100+ books in stock, but my book sales have given me a lot of capital to play with. I’m going to have smaller margins due to outsourcing, but the outsourcing could provide more buying opportunities. I’m not really concerned with how much I’ll be making in the short term since this isn’t my only source of income, right now the focus is just to set up the business to run by itself (outside of me clicking “add to cart”). I also want to make sure I continue to provide content that will help others make money using this business model. I don't really know what the future holds, but that excites me.
Conclusion
Hopefully this post gave you some insight on how much money is actually made in this type of business with all the twitter gurus flexing their 100k revenue months from wholesale. If you have any suggestions on how I can improve these types of posts, I’d appreciate it. I’d also like to extend an invitation to BowTiedArbitrage for anyone looking to get into selling on Amazon so you can ask me questions directly.