Amazon Lesson #3 from Skydiving: The dangers of complacency

Not long ago, I wrote the first two posts in this series, Amazon Lessons from Skydiving. First we talked about the paradoxical relationship between safety and danger, and how risk isn't measured by feelings. We also talked about ways to reduce risk, both in skydiving and selling on Amazon – and how you can even […]

Business Lessons Learned from Skydiving: Part 1

Perry and I have been selling on Amazon since 2014. We didn’t come into this career with an education in business, but over the years, we have learned a lot of useful lessons. More recently, I became a licensed skydiver. I received my skydiving A license on November 11, 2021 after completing a training course of 25 jumps. […]

Build Margins with In-store Cash Back from Rakuten

Build Margins with In-store Cash Back from Rakuten ‍ I’m supposed to be working on other stuff, but this is too good not to share. We used to build margins with discounted gift cards, but those margins shrunk so much that we no longer use them for the stores we source. But here’s a new […]

Welcome to Ecom Toolbox

We’re Perry and Kim — and we’re glad you’re here. If you’ve ever felt like your Amazon business is running you (instead of the other way around), you’re not alone. Maybe you’ve noticed: You’re hustling 16-hour days, but still feel behind. You’re constantly putting out fires, worrying about what’s not getting done. You’ve created a […]

FBA Inventory Valuation Calculator (free Excel tool for Amazon FBA sellers)

Hey Seller Friends, You know how I love making and sharing tools, especially if they are spreadsheets! Here is one I use every single week to track our metrics. Do you find that some items in your inventory don’t have a cost assigned to them in InventoryLab? That happens to us because we use Scanpower […]

Our experience with Amazon’s Prime Try Before You Buy program

TLDR: we unenrolled all our inventory from Amazon’s newish Prime Try Before You Buy program because it’s tying up too much inventory, and stuff is being returned in unsellable condition. We have mentioned a few times about the Prime Try Before You Buy program, or TBYB for short. After testing it with a few hundred […]

Creating a Team Culture That Works

My friend Travis asked me on my personal Facebook page what makes my employees enjoy working for us in our Amazon FBA business. The original post he asked about is below: “You know what joy is? A new employee told me today that he was telling his son about his job with us, and he […]

URGENT: AMAZON SELLING ACCOUNT UNDER REVIEW (PART 4)

I couldn’t believe we had an answer just 25 minutes after submitting a Plan Of Action! And not just a canned response. We had a good answer, a real answer: Thank you for submitting your plan of action. We reviewed your plan and determined that you may continue to sell on Amazon.com. And we all […]

Urgent: Amazon Selling Account Under Review (Part 3)

Read Part 1 and Part 2 When I got off the phone with the Health Support team, we immediately hired Ed and his team. We knew we could probably handle this ourselves, but we also knew there was a lot at stake. Just one day of suspension would cost more than hiring a pro – […]