In 2002, Roger Whiting was attending an expensive art school when he ran out of cash.
To make ends meet, he used a credit card to buy items from thrift stores and flip them online.
Over two decades later, his Amazon business has really taken off. His store, Lluvia Gifts, brought in nearly half a million dollars this past year alone.
But running a business that size hasn’t distracted Roger from his life passion: creating murals with youth in underprivileged communities.
Recently, eComEngine caught up with Roger to learn how he was able to grow his Amazon store with RestockPro without causing his artistic endeavors to suffer.
Roger started off strictly selling books. Later, he branched out into CDs and other physical media, particularly focusing on Christian music.
He’s well aware that the market for physical CDs and records is at risk of drying up: “I need to start planning for the pivot,” he said.
Luckily, he's had experience with a category dropping off before and has managed to keep growing in spite of it. “I’m riding the wave while I can,” Roger said.
He’s also branched out into the gift market. And, he’s not just flipping individual items from thrift stores anymore; he has wholesale deals now to add to his income.
This type of flexibility and strategic risk-taking is crucial for any entrepreneur, including an Amazon seller. One might say there’s an art to knowing how long to ride the wave, and when to dive into a new category.
Expanding into a new international marketplace might be a good step, too. Roger already sells on Amazon Canada, and this year, he plans to bring Lluvia Gifts to the growing Amazon Brazil marketplace as well.
To keep enough time available to do his work with art and underserved youth, Roger needs to automate as much of his Amazon business as possible. Using Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA), rather than packing and shipping each order himself, is a no-brainer.
Fulfillment and automation are amazing for me because they allow me to take weeks off at a time if I need to without losing the profit stream.
But Roger does see a potential conflict of interest with some of Amazon’s features. When he considered starting to buy products wholesale, he looked at Amazon’s built-in restock suggestions and decided he couldn't trust them.
Amazon makes money not just when an item sells, but also when it gets stored too long at a fulfillment center. Overstocking any specific product can be costly to a seller because it suspends their cash flow in slow-moving inventory. What if Amazon's restock suggestions were leading Roger to overstock and harm his cash flow?
“It’s not viable to use Amazon’s tools exclusively to run your business,” he said.
At the same time, he found it challenging to know what his profit margins truly were as an FBA seller. The cost of shipping each item to Amazon, plus Amazon’s storage and fulfillment fees, were putting a dent in Roger’s margins.
While Amazon has changed its way of handling storage fees by instituting capacity limits, both the old storage model and the new one make it important for sellers to understand which items are most profitable and sell the fastest. It’s critical not to let slow-moving or low-margin items fill up a seller’s fulfillment center capacity while more lucrative products languish at home.
Because of all this, Roger knew he needed good, accessible data on what his profit margin was on each item, and which items were selling quickly. “I need to get the most bang for my buck,” he said.
But when Roger went looking for software that could give him trustworthy margin and sales velocity data and turn that into accurate restock suggestions, he found that most tools fell into two problematic categories.
One category was tools which claimed to be automated but still required the seller to be very hands-on. “That’s not worth my time,” Roger said.
On the other hand, some tools act as an autopilot that completely controls the business—and expect a cut of the profits in exchange.
“I don't believe in giving up a percentage of my earnings. I think my work is worth too much,” he said.
With margins already being thin on some of his items, he can’t afford to give nearly a quarter of those profits away for a software tool, as some companies require.
Luckily, Roger found RestockPro by eComEngine: a happy medium between the two.
I like RestockPro because it's a tool that I can customize. I can decide how I use it.
Out of the box, RestockPro is a fully functional tool that requires just a few minutes to set up. You can simply add supplier and cost information and connect RestockPro to Seller Central. The software then takes that data and runs velocity and margin calculations, allowing you to make an informed decision about what to reorder.
And instead of a percentage of earnings, the price is just a flat monthly or yearly fee for each plan level.
The payoff for that flat fee was nearly instant. Before using RestockPro, Roger’s business did around $20,000-$40,000 in annual sales. The first year he used RestockPro, his sales grew to $91,000, then to $176,000 the year after that.
“I wasn’t really able to pass that $50,000 mark before I started using automation software,” he said.
Roger also found that RestockPro saves him a lot of money by eliminating the need to hire as he grows.
For a brief period of time, he had an office and an employee to help him run his business but soon decided that he did better on his own: just him, Amazon fulfillment, and RestockPro.
I don’t need employees because RestockPro is my employee....the value I get out of RestockPro far exceeds the amount that I would be paying someone at even $20 or $30 an hour to make these decisions that RestockPro is able to make for me instantaneously.
When asked about his favorite features, Roger first mentioned RestockPro's reports.
“When I was first starting out, I really liked the reports because I was able to really quickly compare what my profit margins were on one vendor versus another.I was able to decide which vendors I wanted to pursue deeper relationships with based on what the overall margin was,” he said.
Roger also likes the flags RestockPro uses to alert sellers when an item needs to be restocked or starts to run low. RestockPro will also notify sellers when an item has been out of stock too long to get up-to-date velocity data.
“That way I know maybe I should buy more and leave it in stock longer, so that way I can get a true sense of the sales volume potential of that specific item,” he said.
The ability to sort and filter products by markup percentage, markup dollar amount, sales rank, and many other criteria is also helpful to Roger when he makes his replenishment decisions. Every purchase order has an opportunity cost, but Roger is confident he’s making good choices thanks to RestockPro’s extensive data.
“The power of automation is freedom,” Roger said. He shared that because his Amazon business has grown so much, he can afford to apply for a graduate program in psychology so he can better help the underserved youth he encounters in his work as a mural artist.
RestockPro allows me to be who I am and not worry as much about whether or not my business is making money. And my business is making money. I know it because I look at the numbers on RestockPro, and I only restock things that are definite winners, definitely profitable, and definitely have the velocity to continue making a profit.
If other sellers are looking for a tool that can help with their FBA inventory management, Roger has some advice for automating while staying empowered.
“Don't accept any tool that's going to take a percentage of your profits,” Roger said. “If your tool doesn’t underestimate your intelligence and allows you to set things up, then you're able to understand and control your automation.”
If you're a current RestockPro user who would like to share your story in an upcoming case study, please contact us.