How to Get More Value from Amazon FBA

It’s great to be an Amazon merchant. Being an entrepreneur allows you to work on your own time as well as your own terms.

Additionally, by taking advantage of outsourcing, such as through Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), you further streamline the use of your time and increase capacity.

Maximizing FBA Services

Even though FBA can make your life easier, deciding when and what SKUs to reorder can still be a lengthy, headache-inducing process. To do it right, many merchants use a variety of spreadsheets -- as well as a lot of brain cells -- to decipher Amazon’s reports and make accurate purchasing decisions. Facets to take into consideration when restocking include:

How many units of each SKU are selling?
Which SKUs are out of stock?
What is the pricing for each SKU?
What is my cost for each item?
What is each SKU’s margin after deducting FBA fees?
Who are the competitors selling the same SKUs?
What is my competitors’ pricing?

How and When to Restock

After taking a look at all this, there are still more questions for SKUs that are out or running low on stock:

Do I want to restock?
How many pieces of this SKU should I reorder?

The answers generated here put together all the pieces so you can see the big picture and allow you to make more profitable purchasing decisions.

But how much time does this take? And… are you a victim of “paralysis analysis?”

RestockPro Does the Heavy Lifting

As every entrepreneur knows, time is money, so let RestockPro help you out on both counts. RestockPro is a supply chain management tool featuring the best aspects of software available in larger companies’ enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, but it is designed specifically for Amazon merchants. RestockPro can save hours of time each month by helping automate the FBA decision making process. It works well for businesses that are purchasing products from wholesale suppliers, reselling those items, and then restocking SKUs when they are low.

Designed for businesses who are capturing a minimum of 500 - 1000 orders per month and stocking products from at least a couple suppliers, RestockPro puts an end to “paralysis analysis” and places data synthesis all in one place.

RestockPro does more than offer powerful reports based on sales data. The tool identifies the most important items to reorder, takes each supplier’s lead time into account, and forecasts the number of pieces to reorder based on rules you set up within the program. RestockPro allows for both cross docking (receiving from a supplier and immediately shipping to Amazon Fulfillment) and drop shipping (inventory sent directly to Amazon). The software tracks inventory at the SKU level through every step of the shipment process. In addition, RestockPro allows administrators to set up multiple logins for staff and assign them access levels as well.

Your accountant will love RestockPro, too. The software tracks the value of inventory at various parts of the supply chain, from those items on order to products sitting on the shelf at Amazon’s fulfillment center. It also provides reports that make closing the books at the end of the month or quarter a breeze.