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When the pandemic drove everybody indoors back in 2020, it was the start of many new hobbies for a suddenly bored population. Sourdough bread, TikTok dances, arts and crafts, and DIY projects helped people make better use of their time than simply watching TV and waiting for the news that it was safe to go out again. Denese Depeza looked at this newly created time at home as an opportunity to make some extra money and became a seller on Amazon.
Adhering to the philosophy that you should sell what you know, Denese set up her shop within the beauty niche, and took a retail arbitrage approach to stocking inventory. She’d hit up the stores in her area and start looking for products that she could buy and resell on Amazon for profit.
With a 9-to-5 corporate job as a contract specialist, Denese was already comfortable with technology and knew to go looking for software that could help her manage her Amazon shop. She landed on InventoryLab to manage her shipments and stock, and found a prep center to assist with the packing and shipping of items to the FBA warehouse. With all the pieces in place, Denese made quick work of launching her shop and making sales.
And then, the world opened back up. Denese’s day job was a 45-minute commute away from home and, as a contracts administrator, she was stuck in an office all day poring over legal documents. With a lot less time available to oversee her Amazon store, she decided to look for further assistance from software. She landed on Aura, a repricing tool that would help her earn more on the sales she was already making.
The Problem
Denese said Aura worked just fine for her, but a hefty price increase came with its latest AI updates. And while it’s true that she was making sales, her profit margin wasn’t where she wanted it to be. Denese started to realize that revenue is only half the battle.
My average monthly sales are between $20,000 and $25,000 and in Q4 … it goes up to like $40,000. So I’m not a big seller. And I’ve changed over my focus from making sales to making profit … I’m not looking to say at the end of the year, “Oh, I have $500,000 in sales and I made $15,000 in profit.” If I make $500,000 in sales, I want $50,000 minimum in profit. So I’ve changed my strategy this year.
Denese had 300 ASINs in her shop, but was now paying for a subscription tier that only covered 250. There were 50 items in her store that weren’t getting repriced, and she’d have to upgrade to the next level, which maxed out at 1,000 items. The difference in cost did not justify itself for another 50 items. And she didn’t have the time to take on hundreds more ASINs to make Aura worth the cost to her. Because of this, all the new AI features just had the effect of eating into her profit. The search for new software began.
The Solution
As luck would have it, Denese didn’t have to search for very long. As an InventoryLab subscriber, she got regular updates about the goings-on in their world. So she read with interest an email update about IL joining Threecolts. It was practically kismet that the same email alerted her to the existence of a Threecolts acquisition: SmartRepricer.
SmartRepricer did what Aura did, and had been built on AI from the beginning. She wouldn’t have to pay “extra” for its core functionality. A few hours of research later, Denese asked herself the kind of question that usually comes back to bite people: What’s the worst that could happen? (Spoiler alert: the worst did not happen.)
Denese set about methodically learning the new software through a Threecolts video tutorial and also picked up some strategies from other users who’d posted their own YouTube videos.
And then I said, “OK, I can do this.” So I started about 8 o’clock that night, doing my strategies, letting things populate … it took me about three hours to do everything because I have … about 20 strategies in there. I have this range of strategies running from like 1% to 300% ROI. So the actual process of switching over the software was pretty easy.
Seeing improvements in her sales turned out to be pretty easy, too. Denese told us that her average daily sales before switching to SmartRepricer were around $600. On day one with SMR, she did $1,400 in revenue. Day two was $1,100—same ballpark as the day before—and Denese’s excitement over what was possible grew. When day three yielded only $800 in sales, she started to get nervous. But that didn’t last long. She realized it wasn’t a matter of the software underselling her items, she was just running out of inventory quicker and didn’t have as much available stock on that third day.
Denese said she’s not used to running low on stock and, in fact, a lot of her time before had been taken up trying to avoid storage fees by manually repricing items that were hitting their limit in the Amazon warehouse: better to make a smaller amount of profit than to get hit with fees.
When things get to 90 days is when they start charging you … and if I start off at [a margin of] 99%, then I drop it down to 50 and then I may drop it to 40 … just to get the product moving. And some of them are still selling at [SmartRepricer’s] higher prices. It’s moving but still selling at the higher prices. And I was like, “I just don’t understand.” [But] I don’t need to know why it’s doing it. It’s working and I’m happy.
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Ready to try a repricer that can increase your margins and sales at the same time? Start your free trial of SmartRepricer here.
Aura is a copyright of Vendrive, Inc. SmartRepricer is not affiliated with Aura in any way.
