The Amazon Secret Seller: When A Penny Isn’t Really A Penny

The Amazon Secret Seller: When A Penny Isn’t Really A Penny


11 minute read

Tales from an average Amazon reseller, wheeling and dealing for that 30% ROI.

You’ll have probably seen me in a clearance section near you, or waving to the UPS guy, and I almost certainly live in the house that gets the most deliveries in the neighbourhood.

Some of the things we do, and see, to make our Amazon business succeed is pretty wild. I mean, who knew a decent packing tape and double-walled boxes would be this satisfying?

I found what I thought was going to be my meal ticket. Just a couple of weeks into properly starting my Amazon selling business, an online store I’d never heard of would become a staple supplier for the best part of a year.

The item wasn’t high ticket by any imagination, but the BSR was amazing considering Amazon didn’t seem to be on the listing. There were only four or five sellers and even selling at the lowest price it had a very decent ROI of around 100%.

Luckily, I’d stumbled across BuyBotPro at the start and thought I’d give it a go

I wasn’t relying on the BSR, which I didn’t think gave good context, I could see that it was likely selling well over a hundred a month - in the quiet months!

Having watched a couple of YouTube videos (I can recommend these, even now!), it sounded like it would be wise to find a few products that just brought in a regular bit of income. It didn’t matter how much profit, but at least provide some turnover.

I didn’t know how to find these products, really, but kept sourcing as I had been with my fingers crossed that I’d stumble across some.

I had tried a deal sheet already but, other than a good list of suppliers, their deals weren’t really doing it for me.

Anyway, as it happened one of the suppliers on the list was this one. They had a strange name and looked foreign (this was in the old EU days!), but they delivered to me, so I ordered fifty of them at around £2 each.

A few days later they came – a well-known brand name, super light and good quality which, at the time, I thought was important as I wanted good reviews.

I was prepping myself as it was early days, so I sat in front of the TV and got poly-bagging and labelling.

The next day, with a little trip to the local UPS Access Point, off they went.

A couple of days later, they popped up in my inventory and we were off. I’d set the price at £7.49 on Seller Central as the lowest price seller was now selling at that price, so I figured half of the sales with around £2.50 profit would be a great result.

The other seller didn’t see it that way. At all….

I checked the Seller App in the evening, and I hadn’t sold any. Not one. I wondered if BuyBotPro had let me down. Perhaps their estimated sales was way out.

But no. A quick look at the listing and the other seller was now selling at £7.48. This was the first time I’d seen this, and wasn’t sure if I’d just made a mistake. I wanted to make sales and this guy had the Buy Box with that price, so had to do something. 

I changed the price on the app to £7.48.

The first couple of sales came in! I must have had my share of the Buy Box – the first time I’d really seen this in action.

That next morning I woke up quite excited. I’d only made a little profit, but it was selling so BuyBotPro must’ve been right! 

Was this the breakthrough I needed? I’d listed a few products in the previous couple of weeks, but some weren’t selling and others I was being hugely undercut. It wasn’t the bang I had hoped to start with.

I had a quick look at the app to see if any more sold overnight, which I hadn’t. Ah well, people need to sleep, I guess!

Clicking onto the product listing, though, became the start of a battle which lasted for months….

That’s right, the other competitive seller was now on the Buy Box at £7.47! I did note that the other three or four sellers weren’t competing with this at all.

On BuyBotPro they all only had a handful of units, whereas my stock of 48 was dwarfed by the hundreds held by the Buy Box holder.

My heart sunk a little….this other seller who, so far, isn’t showing they were willing to share the sales was holding a lot more than me.

I didn’t really want to be stuck with these units not selling, albeit low value stock – at least now I consider it so. That meant one thing, let’s compete to make sales. It felt easy enough…sacrifice a little profit to make some sales.

I’d run big businesses before and sometimes you are better off with money in the bank than waiting for potential profit.

The plan was to get into the app a few times a day and just match their price, and I set a threshold at which point I’d pump the price back up and see if they did too.

Initially, I’d just raise the price up to about £9 every night. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. 

By doing this, their price would increase, not usually to my price unfortunately, but enough that I could match his price and still be making acceptable profit.

And sales came in….as many as twenty on one day. A classic case of BuyBotPro being conservative with their sales projection, a trait that has given me quiet comfort over the years of selling.

So, I was making sales, and a bit of profit. I’d decided that I’d double-down after about a week and order more. I ordered hundreds – which, frankly, was quite time-consuming to prep – and hoped that the competing seller would run out, or maybe get bored of changing their price all the time.

Now I look back, they were likely employing a repricer, and one that was following out its instruction fairly well.

They had a few more listings than me when I checked out their store, but who would sit there several times a day and price-watch like me? Fools!

I didn’t know about repricers then. I was probably a bit bullish about asking for or following advice in the Facebook groups I had joined. If I’d taken more notice of them, I’d at the very least have understood how they were doing it.

I convinced myself it was what sellers do – watch their prices like a hawk to stay competitive.

I started doing it with other listings, so instead of being on the app a few times a day for ten seconds I’d be on there for several minutes. I became a bit obsessive as, sometimes, it paid off.

Amazon is so dynamic - prices on any listing could change at any minute - and, whilst I wasn’t desperate for any sale at any cost, I wanted to turnover some sales. I refused to take a loss on ASINs that BuyBotPro showed that price fluctuated over the year, so I wouldn’t always make a change.

I got familiar with so many other stores names. Nowadays, though, I don’t really know any of my competitors names on my listings.

So, why is that? I know you’re asking. Well, I got wise.

I was getting very irritated at this seller who insisted in dropping my price by a penny….multiple times a day!

Don’t get me wrong, I’d sold into the thousands of units of this particular product by now.

I had also increased my listings to over one hundred different ASINs. I was on the Seller App an unhealthy amount of time – it was by far the most used app on my phone (doesn’t say much about my social life at that time!).

Amazingly, I didn’t hear about repricers through BuyBotPro. They run the best value one out there and, yet, they didn’t bombard me with emails about it.

I got sucked in, instead, by an alternative one that did. It only lasted the trial period as it just tanked my prices to the minimum I wanted to sell it at. Not only did I then lose profit, it ruined the listing for replenishing, as half the other sellers would pretty much follow suit.

A google search presented Profit Protector Pro. The website looked familiar, and quickly I realised it was linked to BuyBotPro. I’d been pleased with them so figured, given I only had to sign up for a month, the £20ish to sign up was probably worth it. 

If nothing else, I’d potentially be saving over an hour A DAY micro-managing my prices. A decent day of sales of this one ASIN would cover it anyway.

And so, that was it. My days of visiting the Seller App several times a day dwindled. I watched the sales from time to time, but the hassle of dealing with this penny-pincher was reduced to history.

I played around with some of the strategies to deal with the seller, checked how the prices were behaving every few days and allowed the sales to trickle through.

It was now the listing I hoped it might be at the start….selling regularly and profit I didn’t even really think about.

Frankly, I can’t even remember when I stopped selling it.

I’d grown my inventory and, with Profit Protector Pro, had higher ticket sellers that would usurp the listing that gave me the hope I needed at the start.

And with that I don’t feel the need to be on the Buy Box on most listings…I just have a profit margin I want and stick with it.

PPP seems to get me sales, regardless of my price, on a lot of them.

The supplier, in the end, put their price up. I suspect the seller I was competing with was the supplier, or they had their own supplier. Honestly, I was quite glad to be saving the prep time that several hundred a month cost me, though it had me sat watching a few Netflix series I may not have done!

By then I had realised that, in Online Arbitrage, very few listings last long term.

Some do, but it’s a numbers game. If something won’t make profit any more, I move on. Don’t get emotional about an ASIN….I admit I have at times!

Sometimes the good ones are worth revisiting - I still have a list of old ASINs that made me money on a whiteboard in the office, in case I can find a deal for them in future.

I wistfully take a look at that old listing once in a while, wondering what could have been. The supplier I used doesn’t sell them anymore, after Brexit the duty on getting them delivered wouldn’t have been worth it anyway, and Amazon are now on the listing all the time.

My old adversary is the only other seller now, they are selling it £3 cheaper than Amazon, and seem to get the Buy Box.

As for the penny-pinchers, if I find myself on a listing with one (if I hadn’t already spotted it in BuyBotPro before I invested) then so be it.

I hope they are doing what I used to do, price changing every couple of hours. The older sellers absolutely will not.

Newer sellers? Maybe they are. I get a nice little kick with vision of them finding their way the hard way, while I just let Profit Protector Pro deal with them.

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