[00:00:00] Will: Welcome everybody. We have another episode of Amazon Data Dudes. I'm Will Christensen. We've got Non and Brandon here on our, team. We're excited to be here.
[00:00:09] Brandon: Yeah, good to see you again, Will.
[00:00:10] Will: Hey, you know, it's been, it feels like it's been just such a long time. we've just recorded episodes back to back here. So it's, it's like, wow, that was like so long ago since the last episode.
[00:00:21] Will: this episode I'm super excited about. specifically non, as an eight figure seller, tell us about this new report. why should the seller even care, about this, this new report that we're talking about
[00:00:34] Nhan: So as we've seen like the past few years, the aggregator, the big aggregators, coming into the space and buying up a bunch of brands and thinking they can operate it, that if they accumulate enough efficiencies, they'll, figure it out. For economies of scale, right? As they found out that, just because you sell a lot on Amazon, just because it's so complex and so much competition out there, it doesn't mean you're making money and we've had years where we, grow our sales, but we lost money was that was what stemmed us to look into the profitability.
[00:01:10] Nhan: Of the, selling on Amazon. And so one of the components of profitability is like watching Amazon fees, like making sure that they don't grow over time. so there's a couple of components to that. But which report do you get that data from? but that's where it came from.
[00:01:29] Nhan: It's like build up reports, and I'll show you the report here. It's
[00:01:33] Will: the real quick before you show it. well, even while it's up there, I'll just explain this. So I was actually on the phone with a good friend of mine who owns, a large brand. she was having a serious issue last year where she wasn't watching this closely, and it amounted to like 100, 000 loss, where had she been watching this more closely, she would have seen the fee jump.
[00:01:58] Will: There was a fee change in April, of, 2023. For 2022. I can't remember which year it was that we're looking at, but she missed that fee change. And because she wasn't watching that closely, she was just watching top line. It it was something simple. She could change right about what was there that she could have avoided.
[00:02:19] Will: And so once they fixed it, it wasn't a big deal, but it was like 12 grand a month for eight months. So like very quickly, she lost a hundred grand because she wasn't watching this closely.
[00:02:30] Nhan: and because Amazon has so many moving pieces and so many changes that they change just like even like the inbound structure, things that they're about to change, right? or how they charge the fees are going up every year like those patterns unless you keep an eye out like you can get punched from the left field without realizing it.
[00:02:52] Nhan: And that's why I, built this for my own, selling company, my e commerce company. Uh, and then when I joined the center of the labs, we developed this and brought it over to, keep an eye out on it. So as you can see, this is like just month by month fees, and the major fees are advertising or coupons or storage fees and long term storage.
[00:03:13] Nhan: So we move all those to the forefront, the ones that tend to be a lot, or inbound shipments. So all those, especially the storage fees and long term storage fees, if you don't watch out, just like here, if you notice from October, it went from 2, 000, it goes up to 6, 000, 7, 000, 8, 000. We didn't send in three times more.
[00:03:34] Nhan: It's just like Q4, they charge three times as much for storage. And if you don't watch out these things, it can get into the 10, 000. So that's why we built this is like at a quick glance, you can. See down the line that things are Anomalies,
[00:03:50] Will: So
[00:03:51] Brandon: seen examples of this too, where that, uh, I think it was FBA storage fee, like, just got to be, like, obscenely big, like, people have just been sending in inventory, and, like, it had increased double or triple over the course of a year without realizing how much, how much they're actually spending on that, because that's not one you see, it's not tied to an order, so if you just, if you're just looking at, like, a A per order basis.
[00:04:12] Brandon: It's not accounted for very well.
[00:04:14] Will: interesting. So non, what are, what are some of the gotchas here? If I'm looking at this report, if I've just signed up for a, for an account, one, where do I find this? Can you show us in the menu where I would find it?
[00:04:28] Nhan: The uh, you go like right now it's in the lab because it's in beta and then you can go to the monthly amazon fees here
[00:04:35] Will: Okay. Gotcha.
[00:04:36] Nhan: is right now in the future. We move it out. It may be a different place But that's where it is right now.
[00:04:41] Will: Okay. And what are, you know, what are three things that as a seller, if you were like, you know, these are the three things I would look for every time in here or, some of those different pieces, what, what would you be focused on just anomalies?
[00:04:55] Nhan: basically, yeah, like Things that are are out of the pattern, right? For example ads that's an area that can grow pretty exponentially if you don't watch out for it And you know, it can grow from three four five thousand to ten twenty thousand like and you're not Gaining more profit. So those are the, areas you have to dig into or storage fees like that's there's nowhere in Amazon that tells you what you paid last month.
[00:05:21] Nhan: they don't make that clearly visible. So like it's a hidden cost that gets grouped into everything else. And unless you're watching that particular field like this in this format, you don't know how it does for month to month, right? Or long term storage. That's another thing that, and then there's other feeds that Amazon is about to tack on, and they may add another column called, if you don't have enough inventory, they're going to charge you for not enough inventory.
[00:05:47] Nhan: so it's just all those then inbound some of these, inbound inbound, and then this one is called the cart level, which is the manual processing fee. we at our e commerce company has chosen to pay instead of doing box content, we pay this fee because it killed our productivity. So unless you factor all those into your operation, those are the kind of fields you got to watch out for that can grow really big and like long term storage and definitely in the area of you're paying a lot that you should be recalling or liquidating that inventory before it gets a long term storage.
[00:06:24] Will: Got it. So Brandon, tell us just briefly, what does it take technically to build a report like this?
[00:06:32] Brandon: Uh, well, we've spent quite a bit of effort putting all this together, obviously. So we use the finances API. So we get data in and pretty real time. We're looking back at historical trends here, too. But we do get the data as soon as, like, probably by Minutes or hours after it's posted. So, but, yeah, we, we, we pulled in all that data.
[00:06:51] Brandon: If you weren't doing it through the API, you probably find this in the settlement reports. You'd have to go download those and find them and parse them out. And, uh, you know, that report has a bunch of columns and a bunch of types, and you have to map out. what all those types are to these name more convenient names here and to figure out what all those are.
[00:07:09] Brandon: So if you were doing this manually, you'd have to download and look at a bunch of reports and figure out how to consolidate all these. And we've basically done all that math and all that consolidation for you.
[00:07:18] Will: And you, I remember you saying Brandon built a dashboard, a while ago and he was, he was basically, trying to get it to the point where we could reconcile down to the penny. So the amount that goes into your bank account, we wanted to kind of line that up. and I remember how excited he was when he got it down to like, and it's to the penny, like we, we are literally millions of dollars in settlements down to the penny, able to show and account for every single transaction.
[00:07:49] Brandon: Yeah, that's that was a little bit of a trick, too, because you have to actually end up having to not count some things that Amazon includes in reports because it's like that duplicate counted or whatever. So sales tax get to got to be a little funky on whether you count it or not count or whatever.
[00:08:03] Brandon: So we finally got the right combination of all those things to get it to match the penny every time
[00:08:08] Will: Beautiful.
[00:08:09] Brandon: for the peso, depending on what marketplace you're in.
[00:08:12] Will: Yeah. To the peso. Exactly. Hey, there's a, we even got it to the peso. All right. So over and out guys, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Amazon data dudes. That's, the monthly storage fees. You're going to see more micro episodes like this, where we feature, you know, some new problem that we've been faced with by a seller or an agency.
[00:08:34] Will: And we've built something specifically in response to that. And we'll be kind of showcasing that and showing off what we're doing in here. Hey
[00:08:41] Nhan: All right. See you, everybody.
[00:08:43] Will: everybody. Thanks. Bye.
[00:00:09] Brandon: Yeah, good to see you again, Will.
[00:00:10] Will: Hey, you know, it's been, it feels like it's been just such a long time. we've just recorded episodes back to back here. So it's, it's like, wow, that was like so long ago since the last episode.
[00:00:21] Will: this episode I'm super excited about. specifically non, as an eight figure seller, tell us about this new report. why should the seller even care, about this, this new report that we're talking about
[00:00:34] Nhan: So as we've seen like the past few years, the aggregator, the big aggregators, coming into the space and buying up a bunch of brands and thinking they can operate it, that if they accumulate enough efficiencies, they'll, figure it out. For economies of scale, right? As they found out that, just because you sell a lot on Amazon, just because it's so complex and so much competition out there, it doesn't mean you're making money and we've had years where we, grow our sales, but we lost money was that was what stemmed us to look into the profitability.
[00:01:10] Nhan: Of the, selling on Amazon. And so one of the components of profitability is like watching Amazon fees, like making sure that they don't grow over time. so there's a couple of components to that. But which report do you get that data from? but that's where it came from.
[00:01:29] Nhan: It's like build up reports, and I'll show you the report here. It's
[00:01:33] Will: the real quick before you show it. well, even while it's up there, I'll just explain this. So I was actually on the phone with a good friend of mine who owns, a large brand. she was having a serious issue last year where she wasn't watching this closely, and it amounted to like 100, 000 loss, where had she been watching this more closely, she would have seen the fee jump.
[00:01:58] Will: There was a fee change in April, of, 2023. For 2022. I can't remember which year it was that we're looking at, but she missed that fee change. And because she wasn't watching that closely, she was just watching top line. It it was something simple. She could change right about what was there that she could have avoided.
[00:02:19] Will: And so once they fixed it, it wasn't a big deal, but it was like 12 grand a month for eight months. So like very quickly, she lost a hundred grand because she wasn't watching this closely.
[00:02:30] Nhan: and because Amazon has so many moving pieces and so many changes that they change just like even like the inbound structure, things that they're about to change, right? or how they charge the fees are going up every year like those patterns unless you keep an eye out like you can get punched from the left field without realizing it.
[00:02:52] Nhan: And that's why I, built this for my own, selling company, my e commerce company. Uh, and then when I joined the center of the labs, we developed this and brought it over to, keep an eye out on it. So as you can see, this is like just month by month fees, and the major fees are advertising or coupons or storage fees and long term storage.
[00:03:13] Nhan: So we move all those to the forefront, the ones that tend to be a lot, or inbound shipments. So all those, especially the storage fees and long term storage fees, if you don't watch out, just like here, if you notice from October, it went from 2, 000, it goes up to 6, 000, 7, 000, 8, 000. We didn't send in three times more.
[00:03:34] Nhan: It's just like Q4, they charge three times as much for storage. And if you don't watch out these things, it can get into the 10, 000. So that's why we built this is like at a quick glance, you can. See down the line that things are Anomalies,
[00:03:50] Will: So
[00:03:51] Brandon: seen examples of this too, where that, uh, I think it was FBA storage fee, like, just got to be, like, obscenely big, like, people have just been sending in inventory, and, like, it had increased double or triple over the course of a year without realizing how much, how much they're actually spending on that, because that's not one you see, it's not tied to an order, so if you just, if you're just looking at, like, a A per order basis.
[00:04:12] Brandon: It's not accounted for very well.
[00:04:14] Will: interesting. So non, what are, what are some of the gotchas here? If I'm looking at this report, if I've just signed up for a, for an account, one, where do I find this? Can you show us in the menu where I would find it?
[00:04:28] Nhan: The uh, you go like right now it's in the lab because it's in beta and then you can go to the monthly amazon fees here
[00:04:35] Will: Okay. Gotcha.
[00:04:36] Nhan: is right now in the future. We move it out. It may be a different place But that's where it is right now.
[00:04:41] Will: Okay. And what are, you know, what are three things that as a seller, if you were like, you know, these are the three things I would look for every time in here or, some of those different pieces, what, what would you be focused on just anomalies?
[00:04:55] Nhan: basically, yeah, like Things that are are out of the pattern, right? For example ads that's an area that can grow pretty exponentially if you don't watch out for it And you know, it can grow from three four five thousand to ten twenty thousand like and you're not Gaining more profit. So those are the, areas you have to dig into or storage fees like that's there's nowhere in Amazon that tells you what you paid last month.
[00:05:21] Nhan: they don't make that clearly visible. So like it's a hidden cost that gets grouped into everything else. And unless you're watching that particular field like this in this format, you don't know how it does for month to month, right? Or long term storage. That's another thing that, and then there's other feeds that Amazon is about to tack on, and they may add another column called, if you don't have enough inventory, they're going to charge you for not enough inventory.
[00:05:47] Nhan: so it's just all those then inbound some of these, inbound inbound, and then this one is called the cart level, which is the manual processing fee. we at our e commerce company has chosen to pay instead of doing box content, we pay this fee because it killed our productivity. So unless you factor all those into your operation, those are the kind of fields you got to watch out for that can grow really big and like long term storage and definitely in the area of you're paying a lot that you should be recalling or liquidating that inventory before it gets a long term storage.
[00:06:24] Will: Got it. So Brandon, tell us just briefly, what does it take technically to build a report like this?
[00:06:32] Brandon: Uh, well, we've spent quite a bit of effort putting all this together, obviously. So we use the finances API. So we get data in and pretty real time. We're looking back at historical trends here, too. But we do get the data as soon as, like, probably by Minutes or hours after it's posted. So, but, yeah, we, we, we pulled in all that data.
[00:06:51] Brandon: If you weren't doing it through the API, you probably find this in the settlement reports. You'd have to go download those and find them and parse them out. And, uh, you know, that report has a bunch of columns and a bunch of types, and you have to map out. what all those types are to these name more convenient names here and to figure out what all those are.
[00:07:09] Brandon: So if you were doing this manually, you'd have to download and look at a bunch of reports and figure out how to consolidate all these. And we've basically done all that math and all that consolidation for you.
[00:07:18] Will: And you, I remember you saying Brandon built a dashboard, a while ago and he was, he was basically, trying to get it to the point where we could reconcile down to the penny. So the amount that goes into your bank account, we wanted to kind of line that up. and I remember how excited he was when he got it down to like, and it's to the penny, like we, we are literally millions of dollars in settlements down to the penny, able to show and account for every single transaction.
[00:07:49] Brandon: Yeah, that's that was a little bit of a trick, too, because you have to actually end up having to not count some things that Amazon includes in reports because it's like that duplicate counted or whatever. So sales tax get to got to be a little funky on whether you count it or not count or whatever.
[00:08:03] Brandon: So we finally got the right combination of all those things to get it to match the penny every time
[00:08:08] Will: Beautiful.
[00:08:09] Brandon: for the peso, depending on what marketplace you're in.
[00:08:12] Will: Yeah. To the peso. Exactly. Hey, there's a, we even got it to the peso. All right. So over and out guys, thank you so much for joining me on this episode of Amazon data dudes. That's, the monthly storage fees. You're going to see more micro episodes like this, where we feature, you know, some new problem that we've been faced with by a seller or an agency.
[00:08:34] Will: And we've built something specifically in response to that. And we'll be kind of showcasing that and showing off what we're doing in here. Hey
[00:08:41] Nhan: All right. See you, everybody.
[00:08:43] Will: everybody. Thanks. Bye.
