Davan Strategic is the venture and collaboration of David (a pilot) and Ryan (a scientist) into the world of Amazon selling. There’s something remarkable about this duo’s partnership. The merging of their skills as they entered eCommerce in 2019 allowed them to rapidly scale their business and exit in just 3 years. How did they do it?
It was all thanks to a bunch of tools – Excel spreadsheets, to be specific. Tools they swear by and share on their website – which have helped hundreds of Amazon sellers ever since. One of these is Stockflow – their newest creation – an all-in-1 Excel spreadsheet that makes Amazon inventory management a breeze.
Ryan and David demonstrate Stockflow to our host, Amy Wees in today’s featured video. Watch below:
Stockflow: Stress-Free Inventory
Inventory management ranks up there as one of the least favorite activities on the Amazon seller’s to-do list. There are just so many things to check, expect, and watch out for – some of them hidden from plain sight and require a little more investigation to resolve. Stockflow gets rid of the guesswork and risky trial and error by acting like your inventory manager – but with much more efficiency. Stockflow automatically plots all important details in your inventory and logistics for you to see – showing you all actionable items waiting for your next step. Below is a list of Stockflow’s benefits as demonstrated in the video:
- Know all your numbers
- Forecast your sales trends
- Anticipate holidays and sales events (BFCM, Prime Day, etc.)
- Avoid stock-outs and overstock
- Anticipate all your purchase orders (from short-term to long-term)
Inventory Management for Small Businesses
Are you a small business owner? Good for you. You have a major advantage over big enterprises. What’s that, you ask? We know it may sound ridiculous at first. After all, bigger is always better, right?
Well, not in all cases.
Let’s talk about inventory management in a big business for a second. Big businesses have lots of products, variations, and SKUs – all of which with their own inventory flow. We’re talking thousands of SKUs that have to be accounted for. These cannot be managed by one person – sometimes, not even by a small group of people. That’s why large enterprises have several departments for managing specific areas of the business and collaborating with the rest. Between the adjustments and passing of information, there will always be a tendency for delays. Updates, reports, and purchase orders aren’t received in real-time. There’s always a risk of not getting the actual inventory numbers available in your warehouse. Imagine – you’re running out of one SKU whilst your marketing department goes full speed ahead on PPC for that SKU. Communication delay is a big pain point in a large-scale inventory process.
Managing a small business cuts down the communication delay since you’re only working with yourself – or maybe 1 or 2 other people at the most. There are no departments. All information can be available to you in real time (or close to it). But it’s also important to keep in mind that being on top of all your numbers – especially inventory – is not that easy. Only with adequate know-how and support from the right tools – can you simplify inventory management for your small business.
This is how Stockflow saves your business (and you from pulling your hair out in stress). Imagine – one spreadsheet with all your inventory details. Alerting you on which SKUs are running low or which ones look good for the next 45 days. Helping you manage the surge on special gifting holidays (Valentines, Mother’s Day, you know the rest). Assisting you in composing your next purchase order for relevant SKUs. Stockflow not only helps you avoid inventory issues – but it also helps you scale on those days you expect a rise in sales. Seasonal item? Enter the dates in the scheduler and Stockflow tells you how much more stock you need to be available before the day. Non-seasonal? Enter dates for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Prime Day, and maximize your sales on other special discount days on Amazon. It’s amazing how straightening out our inventory can save our business. The thing is, inventory problems were never easy to resolve – not until Stockflow happened.
MS Excel is amazing – we honestly believe that half the world’s problems can be solved with formulas in Excel. Ryan and David offer an entire suite of other helpful Excel spreadsheets for Amazon sellers – all available on the Davan Strategic website. Ryan and David’s 7-figure rise on Amazon (in record speed!) can be attributed to their masterful use of Excel formulas. And the best part? They’re more than happy to share their tools with all of us. Check out their products here.
Transcription
Amy Wees: Hey, what’s up you guys? Happy Friday. I can’t believe that it’s almost 2023 It’s like so q4, next week is Thanksgiving and Black Friday. I can’t I can’t believe it. What happened? It was just June, I don’t understand. Anyway. Anyways, you guys, happy Friday, and I’m here with? Well, you guys, you’re, I’m here with just Ryan, apparently, according to the Zoom screen. David, I’ve known these guys for a long time. They’re awesome. They just exited their business. And they have just done incredible things. They grew super fast. And they did it all by creating these really cool, unique spreadsheets. And, yeah, they’ve just created a new one. And we’re gonna unveil it today, because this is the coolest way what they’ve done with this sheet, it’s the coolest way to manage your inventory and prevent stock outs and all of that, like, it’s very simple, yet, it’s complex, but you didn’t have to do any of the Excel sheets, programming work. These guys figured it out. So anyway, you know, we’re gonna talk about that today. And I want to hear from you guys in the crowd here. I want to hear what are your troubles with inventory, right? What are your troubles of staying in stock? Like, what are your troubles with making sure you’re placing new orders on time, we want to hear from you. And you know, we can even make this sheet even better, you know, with all with all that. So without further ado, I want to introduce Ryan and Dave and really let them introduce themselves. Because there’s no way I could you know, I could brag about these guys all day long. So guys, why don’t you tell everybody a little bit about you and and your seller journey?
David: Yeah, we’ll just do a quick recap. So I’m Dave O’Brien. He’s Ryan, officially I’m an airline pilot, I fly an Airbus 350 Really fun aircraft. And one day I decided, hey, I’m going to start a side hustle, I’m going to start an Amazon business. And about a year in Ryan actually joined the team. And that’s when COVID hit. So we had quite a lot of free time. He’s a scientist. Yeah, I was doing science like hardcore molecular biology. And Amy, did you know it’s actually Dr. Ryan Shroyer? Did you know that? No one knows
Ryan: not not the reason you know, the PhD kind of Dodge and
Amy: mustache then.
David: Yeah, so every time I’m flying in, you have like a medical emergency. And so I’m like, is there a doctor on board, he’s like, I’m a doctor.
Ryan: You know what, I would probably be better at landing the plane.
David: Let’s get back to business. So we started an Amazon business, Ryan joined the team, you know, through our unique skills from our personal lives, we were able to actually scale our business really fast. Our first year, we had a revenue of 73,002nd Year 3.1 million. And the third year, we’re honored to do 5 million we did 2.5 million in the first six months, and then we exited the business. So it’s been an incredible journey, we learned a lot along the way. And
Ryan: definition of a whirlwind. I think, like did not expect this two years ago, but wouldn’t change it for the world. You know, I’ve essentially left science behind, or at least for now and open just embracing this new chapter of E commerce. I’m loving it. I don’t think
Amy: you left science behind you utilize your scientific brain to track every aspect of your business. And the cool thing about it was you guys shared your journey along the way. And you know, you you really nailed things down and you grew very, very fast. And every time you develop something that helped you with your business, you shared it. And so cool. Like, I’m so excited to have you guys as just such an awesome part of the amazing at home community, but also to help people meet you and see what you’ve done. Because it’s just so cool. When you guys said you reached a million dollars in what was it one month?
David:We did a million in five days.
Amy: A million in five days. I remember okay, you had his goal for a million a month and you got 2 million a month. And then you were like, Can we do a million in a week? Can
David: we do a million in a week? Yeah, we’re like, Can we do a million in a week? Like we would just challenge so I think the one of the reasons for success is we’re buddies. So we don’t take ourselves too seriously. But everything we do we take seriously because in his job if he doesn’t take his experiments seriously, you know he’s wasting government funds. He’s science doesn’t work. You don’t take seriously, if I don’t take my job seriously. I mean, you know, things can happen as an airline pilot, you gotta take it seriously. But life’s too short to be serious all the time. So we like to enjoy yourselves. We’d like to joke around. And because we’re buddies, we would challenge each other to crazy things. And as a matter of fact, that’s kind of how the Excel thing started to. So, Ryan as a mad scientist, I mean, you should see his desktop, there are about 40,000 folders polar opposites. Mine is clean, I’ve wanted to touch on it, I absolutely hate it. If it’s messy. If we would have to work on something, I’d be like, Hey, Ryan, we got to figure out some numbers for like the next purchase order, he will create this Excel sheet that had numbers everywhere scattered. And then you know, it made sense to me, it made sense. But he would close it, it would disappear in his computer somewhere, sometimes it’d be deleted accidentally, and we’d have to restart every time the beginning. And I’m like, Look, Ryan, there must be a better way to do it. And the one way I was able to convince them, that we should have a system that is so beautiful, that we want to reuse over and over again, was a We should make sheets that we could actually sell to other people. If they’re that pretty that we could sell it to someone else. One, we’re going to want to reuse them, and two will never lose them. And that was the start of our like spreadsheet business on the side, which was really funny.
Amy: I love it. You know, people say the whole world is built on Excel, you know? And it’s kind of true. And really, it was the one of the key tools to like build our business the way that we did, like, you see complex software’s out there. And people wondering how do I analyze this data, and we’re just like, man, if you know how to use Excel properly, it’s a powerful tool that’s available to everybody. So we just we just use it as Yeah,
and I love the sheets you guys have already built. So you guys have already built a bunch of sheets. And we’ve shared them in our mastermind group, you’ve shared them in our mastermind group. And you showed people how you ranked for three keywords at a time to page one by tracking all of these statistics that you were able to pull in to a sheet. And that was such a brilliant launch and ranking strategy. Like I just want to tell the world about you guys, because it that’s how you were able to grow to a million in a week. I mean, incredible. And you showed us how you apply that, that research to finding new products, find keywords, it’s really, really powerful the way that you present the data and the way that you use it. So know today that we’re going to show this new inventory sheet that came out of a need. And some asked from some members who already use your other sheets. But you guys already you track profitability, you track everything, your keyword ranking everything you track in your sheets, and you do it in a way that presents the data in a way that allows people to make key decisions. And you base all of your decisions on data. And I just, I think it’s so cool what you guys have built. So I’m excited to be one of the first I think the first
Ryan: set, it’s so well like we you know, I think there’s so many options out there. And you’re just inundated with data. And it’s like, that’s cool. But it’s just it’s sometimes so much and you’re like what do I do based on it. And so that’s, that’s the core of all of our Excel sheets, it’s boiling down the data into actions that you can take, like simple actions that you understand. And when you just start using these Excel sheets, like once a once a week and get into a routine, your business just slowly becomes automated. And it becomes a lot easier to manage. And especially just as two guys go.
Yeah. And Amy, there’s sorry,
Amy: tell me Well, tell me you guys. Let’s get into to the demo. But before we do you guys said something before we went live, you said this is why small businesses have an advantage over bigger businesses, small private label brands, they have an advantage over bigger ones and tell me why why do small businesses have an advantage, in your opinion over some of these bigger brands that are dominating.
David: So I kind of see it as like the David versus Goliath story, right. And to be honest, as a small company, we would never be able to compete with an ad spent of a huge company, there’s just no way they have money going at it. So what we have to do is figure out, okay, if you have a smaller ad budget, we got to make sure that we’re extremely precise with our ad spend, we got to put it to use at the right time. And you know, these big companies, they will have departments that run the company. So you might have the team that runs the PPC, you might have the team that’s just in charge of restocking Amazon. And if they don’t talk to each other on a regular basis, then what might happen is that even though you’re running low on inventory, they’re actually still pumping PPC money at it because they think well, that’s what I’ve always been doing. The numbers look good. So I pump it. And there they don’t have an overview. And as a small business, two people, three people even as a solo business, your advantages, you can look at everything at once. So it’s essentially like, you know, a big corporation, they have many little puzzle pieces, and once a week, they have to get together and put the puzzle pieces together to see the big picture. You might have a smaller puzzle piece, but that puzzle piece is the entire picture. Okay, so you can manage your business way more efficiently than a big corporation. And that’s essentially why in our business, we had a sheet it was called our life force. Oh Because Olga, literally, it was a custom build sheet just for our brand with all our products, all their skews, we’d be able to see the variation split, we’d be able to monitor our cash flow our because we took a million dollar loan. I mean, imagine two guys with no econ background. In year two said we’re going all in and we took funding for a million dollars, because that’s, that’s the only way we were able to scale so quick. And, you know, the repayments for that would be, let’s say, $60,000 every two weeks, if you don’t have 60, and sometimes more, right, that would just be like a base payment. So big, big numbers, and we had to make sure our cash flow game was tight as well. Now, when we exited the business, you know, we’re in different masterminds, and we love connecting with other ecommerce sellers. And people would say, like, Hey, Dave Ryan, can you guys build us a life force? And we’re like, you know what, that would be a custom sheet for each individual brand. I think it’d be too hard. And then, you know, Ryan, and I being buddies and having a couple beers, and we’re like, Can we do it? And he’s like, I think I can figure out the math. So Ryan, he’s figuring out the math on how to make a forecasting tool that works for all products, and he cracked it. And then we said, Okay, let’s see if we can build a sheet. And that was the start. And you know, that’s how we started. haven’t left the house in five. It’s been long time, you guys,
Amy: we actually have our first question, and then we’ll get into this test show. Amazing sheet and you guys are gonna be blown away, like you’re gonna get blown away. So thrifty 50s said this huge with analytics for coming out, I’ll have to take a look at your other sheets on the mastermind. I didn’t want to forget my question. Did you monetize mostly from those Excel sheets, or the shop itself via SEO? Cool that you’re sharing your story? Thank you hashtag, I need to find a scientist.
Ryan: Everyone needs their own data. Exactly. So the funny thing is like monetizing the spreadsheets, I think we I don’t think we’ve ever made any real money off it. You know, we sold a couple sheets, but it was never our main business or main business was always selling on Amazon. And that’s what kind of made it hard because we had to say, Where are we going to put our time and energy on? And I so much less
Amy: than? I think the question is actually, though, in your in your Amazon, in your E commerce business? Did you monetize using mostly to sheets or via SEO with your shop? LikeYou like, how did you grow your business that fast? Do you think it was mostly in the sheets? Or do you think it was in the in actually, like applying SEO and stuff that you were tracking on the sheets?
David: I mean, it has to be both?
Amy: It’s connected, right? Yeah
David: I mean, addition, sheets made it possible to take actions on SEO, yeah. And then SEO growing the sales made it, you know, that needed to be tracked somehow. And that’s how that’s what we use the sheets for. So
the two really went hand in hand. And to be honest, like when we went for a million dollar loan, we’re a young company, we don’t have a lot of sales history, we showed them our forecasting tools. And we sold ourselves to that funding company. And they said, Hey, these guys, it appears they know what they’re doing. They have a solid system in place. They’ve proven it over the last couple of months. And they’re willing to take a bigger leap of faith on us for the million dollars, because we had those sheets, right? So I honestly think without the sheets, we wouldn’t have been able to grow that fast. And I mean, in the you know, this too, as you grow, your headaches grow, you know, you’re sitting at the venue called, oh, my God, it’s already q4. And it’s like, imagine when you had like we grew during COVID. disaster for logistics, right? At one point, we had six containers crossing the the ocean at once, you know, in two different timelines, but a week, a month apart, and it was a massive headache, and you have to stay on top of all those numbers, where’s my inventory? How many do I need? What am I selling it? can I repay my loan, and none of that is possible without tracking them in some sort of system. And the nice thing is, we were able to do it in one simple sheet. It’s not simple, but it’s one sheet.
Amy: Yeah, it’s Ryan’s looking at you like simple.
Ryan: The necessity for this sheet, I think part of it comes from, you know, it’s a forecasting tool. And Amazon, just what we’ve seen from Amazon selling seasonal products. Amazon just plain out sucks at forecasting. They’ve recently, I think if you go to your restock Inventory page for some of your skews, you’re able to actually see now the forecast that Amazon has for you for the next 12 months. And I’ll never forget, I found it a couple of weeks ago, and I went to our most popular product, where we sold 10,000 units last Mother’s Day. And what’s an What does Amazon think we’re gonna sell next Mother’s Day? 700 700 and that’s their optimistic tone. And the thing is, they’re gonna base our inventory restock limits on that number. And so it’s just, it’s just completely false. And so we had to build our own forecasts and take that into account and ignore Amazon’s forecasting completely for our products.
DAvid: Yeah. So we don’t we don’t want to waste too much time. Alright, let’s dive right in.
Amy: Yeah, let’s do it. Yeah, and thrifty 50s While you’re sharing your screen, it says that’s why they’re down 65% and the stock market
forecast better. I mean, it’s so crazy to me, right? Like, they grew so much in COVID. And they got all these warehouses and everything. And now they’re giving restock limits and all letting people use that space. I think it’s, it’s crazy.
I love it. Anyway, excited.
David: We’re in. So what Ryan and I really tried to do was to make this is our beta version. So it’s absolutely free. Anyone can use it right now. It’s on trial basis, because we got to find out if there’s any little Excel bugs, right? Excel is very buggy sometimes, and it’s difficult. There’s a lot of info in here. Wait, so you can get it absolutely.
Amy: Free right now. For me.
It’s absolutely free. Yeah. Oh, my gosh, you guys are crazy. Yeah, we might be crazy. It might be crazy. Yeah. And we want it to get out for you. Because of Karen and our buddies that baked that’s where the sheet and we really want to help them out. The nice thing is you can use it now for free. It’s a 30 day trial. So we can get feedback from hey, look, this would be a cool feature. Can you guys add that, and then we’ll release like the full version. The math in here is 100%. Correct, because that’s the only thing we double check. But there might be like some conditional formatting coloring that might still be off. But give us your feedback, use the sheet. The nice thing is now it’s q4. So use it for q4. And also take a look at like your reordering for q1. And you’ll be amazed at how simple this makes all of that. So we made it extremely simple. Let’s dive in and do five simple steps. You pull two reports from Amazon, and the rest is done. And then we’ll show you how
to do just to note. So this is as of now only compatible with amazon.com marketplace. So it can only use data from there. Just Just take note of that. But yeah,
Amy: Brian, move it to the other market.
Ryan: p, we will we will it’s just just jumping around some formulas. And I’m gonna miss Christmas, aren’t I? Yeah. Yeah, so very simple. As Dave said, five simple steps. So when you first open the sheet, you just have to click the Update Now button. And when you click that, you get brought to this page. And this is where you get to build your own personal sales trends. You know, I don’t know if it sounds sexy, but it is sexy to us. Because like I said, Amazon, we don’t trust their trends, we want to be able to build our own. And so I’ll zoom in here too. So the viewers can see a little bit better. Essentially, what you do is you get to put in your own holidays that you expect peaks for for your products. And so for example, you’ve seen we put up here Christmas Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, back to school, Halloween, Christmas next year. So we’re already able to forecast that far ahead. And all you have to do is put in the dates of when the peak starts. And then the date where the peak actually, you know, peaks. And for most holidays, I think for all holidays, this is never the actual holiday. So for Valentine’s Day, it’s not February 14, it’s usually three to four days earlier, or for Christmas, it’s not the 25th. It’s the 17. So you just have to do a little bit of market research, look at your competitors look at their sales data from last year, or even better look at your own sales data from last year, just to find out when these holidays start and when the peak occurs.
David: And we make it super easy. So when we started out, we didn’t have our own data. Right. So what we had to do was use our competitors data, because we’re just trying to determine the marketplace trends. So let me just show you here an example of how we would use helium 10. So here, you can go on Helium 10. Use X ray on any competitor that was in stock last year during the holiday. And you would see their sales graph is down here. That’s a really nice even baseline. So you can see a baseline for us is how many average units per day do they sell. So on a regular Tuesday with no peaks, no holidays, on an average Tuesday, they sell about 127. That would be the number that I use as my baseline on the competitor. I can see if I zoom in here, it slowly starts to ramp up at around November 1. And it goes all the way up on the biggest day we see if we go down. It was December 17. That’s my peak day. And I see this old 1875 on the sheet, we have this multipliers you don’t I mean, you can just take your own calculator, but you can just put it was the most complex calculating the whole sheet. It’s just a division guys. Yeah. So So you put in the peak units, you put in the baseline, and it’ll tell you that this product in this niche does a 14.8 multiplier to their baseline. Now even if you’re new to the market, and you’re like Yeah, but I’m never gonna sell 127 When I start, no, you’re not. But if you sell, let’s say, let’s make the math easy. If you sell one a day, then what we’re saying is on your biggest day, you’re going to do 14.8 units, or it will say 15 units.
And that’s the power behind this Helium 10. Like people, all this data is there at your fingertips, go analyze your competitors and figure out what your peak is for the holidays. And it allows you to then forecast your own sales even with no history of your own. And then what we would do is we would look at like three or four competitors and try to take about the average multiplier for the niche. Right and then and then we have a multiplier for the marketplace which is good to know There’s a couple of things like if you’re analyzing it, obviously, we would want to, you know, prevent if there’s a competitive, massive stock out, or someone who ran out of stock way too early on December 2, and we know Christmas is, you know, later in the month, then we wouldn’t use their data, some of them would happen to normally. So we’d say, Okay, there’s enough products out there, use helium 10, or other tools, maybe we don’t know, right, and I always use helium 10. And you can at least get their data. So all you do is at the beginning, you put in these trends, and the nice thing is on the sheet, you can change them at any time, you can adjust them. If you know, after Christmas this year, you might
Amy: What if I don’t have a super seasonal product? What if I’m selling a supplement? That’s pretty normal all year round? Of course, I’m going to have a few peak days. But if my product is pretty consistent, and my competitors are pretty consistent, do I need to do this forecasting? Or maybe I just like for q4 season, I forecast the entire season that in there? What’s the answer for that one?
Ryan: Okay, so really good question, let’s say back to school, so let’s pretend our cattle. So here’s another thing that she does, obviously, in your catalog of products, they’re not all going to follow the same sales trend. So for example, if we have holiday gifts, they might have a really big Christmas peak, Valentine’s Day peak Mother’s Day peak. But back to like office, school supplies, let’s say they might only have a peak in August, you know, leading up to September back to school. So what we could do is in that case, leave it blank. So there’s no peak, we’re just baseline sales. And then it has the one peak in September back to school. And then you can even say I have Halloween products. Let’s say these guys don’t have any peaks. But maybe at around Halloween, they’ll have a massive peak. Right? We actually looked that up. And it was 270 of the baseline, which was insane. Absolutely insane. Yeah. Because I mean, throughout the year, they’re selling to three a day. And then at you know, leading up to Halloween, they go up to 1000 a day.
So well, even if you sell supplements, like you said, Amy, you know, you might not see these huge multipliers, but you’re still going to see multiple, like small peaks, like you said over Christmas or these holidays.
Amy: A few years when everybody’s trying to get healthy. Oh, I know. Years
Ryan: of years and one. Yeah, but exactly. So each products can have its own. And like Dave said, this sheet allows you to build up to three completely independent trend lines. If you’re able to separate your your whole catalog into you know, different category types. And then supplements, for example, on any product is always going to benefit from a Black Friday, a Cyber Monday, a Prime Day. And our sheet also allows you to put in dates for those down below. We call them shopping events, you can see them on the bottom half of this page. So shopping events are a little bit different. They’re not you know, these big holiday peaks that ramp up slowly peak and then drop off slowly. Shopping events are I don’t know what he’s doing right now.
David: I’m showing you the software. Right, I got this, I got this. Yeah, so perfect. So holiday peaks, you don’t have a ramp up and ramp down. But shopping events are just you know, you’re running a coupon. And so for like only five days, you see an immediate increase. And then after five days, it drops off or Black Friday, Cyber Monday, these kinds of days. And so I think supplements or any product is going to have these kinds of days, if you plan on running coupons or even just selling during Yeah,
Amy: I think one of the biggest troubles with marketing, you know, running extra marketing is that you don’t plan that into your inventory. So now you can you can say, Okay, we’re going to run special deals at Christmas, we’re going to, you know, get a little bit more sales during that time with that extra deal, or we’re running a launch promotion. Let’s forecast that.
Ryan: And I think sorry, I think one of the biggest or one of the main reasons Dave and I was had some really successful peaks is because if you just are on your own accord and thinking like oh, yeah, I think at Christmas, we could sell 600 When you think that sounds sounds good. Yeah. And then you actually look at the numbers and it says no, you’re gonna sell, you know, 30,000? Yeah.
Oh, you’re like, No, I can’t be and then you just we adjust the number, we trust the numbers, you go to your supplier, like we need 30,000. And then you actually hit the numbers, because you actually did the research and you didn’t go out of stock. So you’re in stock on the peak days when all your other competitors are out of stock, and you’re just winning all the sales organically, even sometimes it’s it’s the power behind properly forecasting your sales instead of just guessing at it.
So Amy, like think about our normal five day period, we would do about $10,000 In five days, because we did we our average sales would be let’s say 2000 2000 a day. Okay. And then on Mother’s Day, in the five days, we did a million. And if you would have asked us to do that blindly and just say a number we couldn’t do it. It’s insane, right? I don’t think our brain was able to comprehend that magnitude but we trusted our sheet and then if you trust the numbers, then you know you’ll stay in stock and we saw so many competitors just fall out of stock and then we’re the only ones left standing and you know we’re able to almost turn off PVC and go all organic because there’s no other competitors in stock. So really, really helpful. To summarize this page before I move on. I just want to show you what we would do if we had a supplement that didn’t have a holiday P If we would put in supplements, we would still give it a Christmas peak, but a very small one, maybe just 1.5. Right? So we could say like, okay, look, it’s just going to have the whole marketplace. q4 people are shopping, it’ll see an increase. And then I would just do the shopping events along the way, right. So supplements here, if I run a coupon will expect three sales on that day. For example,
again, this is all research you can do on your competitors, it’s really take the time to do that, because this is going to form the foundation of the entire sheet. So after you’ve built these peaks, and put in your multipliers, you’re actually able to just think about, you’re able to actually scroll through and visualize the piece that you just built. So if we get into Christmas, now you can see that the sheet starts building your your peaks for you. So you can see today is this green line across, you can see the forecast that you’ve built for your holiday products, your back to school products and your Halloween. And you can actually see over on the side here, your actual daily sales on a unit on a revenue basis, plus your forecasted units and your sales everyday moving forwar
So I know you know, there’s a lot of data. But this is just step one. So step one, we want to make sure that we have our trends in you can come back and edit that at anytime. So nothing’s ever locked in forever. So let’s just go ahead and we’ll confirm these trends. And then the next thing we would do is we would obviously just enter skews into the sheet because this sheet has to know what skews are we tracking so to do that you just click Enter skews, you’re able to enter your skews. Now, some people when they name their skews, they’re super long and complicated, or they’re just auto generated from Amazon. So what you can actually do is you can provide it like a nickname so that later on when you see it in the sheet, you know which product you’re referring to. The cool thing is we allowed it to actually you can assign it to parentage, that’ll be useful later, when we sort through the data, you might just want to look at that one certain parentage. And then what you have to do is you have to assign it to one of those three trends that you just built. Right. So before we called it, let’s say the holiday trend, we had the back to school trend and the Halloween trend. So once you fill it in, you just confirm it. And then Now’s the fun part. Now we actually have to upload the reports from Seller Central. So if you click the first link, it’s going to take you to Seller Central, and you’re able to download the restock report. Right, so it’s super simple, just click the link, it’ll open Seller Central. And then when you click on here, it would actually open up a window where you can import the sheet, all fully automated, right? So those are some macros. The next step
is pulling another report. This is called your all orders report. It’s a history of all the orders on Amazon. So same as the last step, you can go to Seller Central, download it, and then click on this button to import it. So just two reports. And okay, so
Amy: you’re actually step one, you’re downloading the report. And then when you click the Import button, it’s going to pull that report into the sheet.
Exactly. So you don’t have to manually do any of that. Cool. And it’ll it’ll check everything to make sure it’s the right report. You have to pull 30 days range here, it’ll tell you, Okay, you got enough data. If there’s anything missing, it’ll give you a warning. So there’s a lot of warnings along the way to make sure that you do 100%, right. But it’s all simple because you just follow the buttons, right? So let’s say so we did all that. So I’ll just skip this step for now. Sorry, Zoom was in the way. Okay, so and the last step, this is also where you want to do a bit of manual work, is you want to update some other inventory that you might have, right? So the reports you pull from Amazon will obviously only tell you, where’s my inventory that’s at Amazon. But you might have three peels, right, so the sheet allows you to enter up to five different VPLS in case you have it right we currently we always had two three peels. So you can call it three PL one three, Pl two, you can give it names, you can change it, and then you enter in on the SKU level, how many units of that SKU are at the three PL. And then you can say, Okay, I have a shipment on the water. So what Ryan and I would actually do is we would put, let’s say instead of calling a shipment, one, either the container number in there, or we would put the arrival expected arrival date in there. So anytime one of us would look at the sheet, we’d be like, Oh yeah, we’re expecting that to dock on that date. And how many SKUs are on the ship is essentially so we keep track of how many are on the water. Now it’s in transit but we’re not talking about in transit to Amazon, we’re literally talking about like from your manufacturer to your three PL and the last column is how many are in production right now. So you just put in how many SKUs are you producing right now and that’ll give you a nice total of where are where’s the inventory my entire supply chain
even just having this tab in your business is powerful because usually this these these data points are spread across several different spreadsheets, but now they get to live in one place.
Yeah, and all we would do is when I come in here if I would have to update something or Ryan would have to update it, he would say okay, you know what this ship docked and it ended up with three PL one. He would then you know, delete these numbers because they’re no longer in transit and then he would you know, put them in here at the three PL and then we just confirmed the inventory. So everything’s confirmed. And then it says you’re all set. And that’s all you have to do. And now you get this nice, simple overview, it looks a bit complicated, but walk you through it. It’s simple. It’s a dashboard. And there’s so many actionable items that you can take from this. And we just want to share, like, maybe two or three highlights that we’d like to do. And then I mean, but there’s tons and it’s like, here’s the information. And now, you know, find out your own strategies and tricks based on that information.
So to start, hy don’t you tell them how it works, like, without all the formulas, so essentially, from the, from the reports that you uploaded, we’re looking at your last 30 days of sales. So we’re telling you, okay, here’s your last 30 days from October 18, November 16, to give you an idea of, you know, your historical range there. So we’re going to present some some just basic stats from that window. But what we’re also going to do is forecast into the future, based on the sales trends that you built earlier on the sales trend page, how long into the future will you’re able to say that right now we have 45 days, that’s a good timeframe that we used to like we used to say, let’s always make sure we’re in stock at FBA for the next 45 days. So that’s what we put in here, we would also add a buffer just to be sure, in case sales were maybe a bit better than we expected, we just didn’t want to go to stock. So we might put in here, for example, a 10% buffer, just for safe just for safety. Once you put at that end, that’s essentially it, you can now go back and start looking at some data that the sheet presents. So over here, on the left hand side are your your skews your ASINs, your product names, here’s the product nicknames you gave them before. A couple of cool features here, too. If you click on the product name, it’ll take you to the product listing page. If you click on the little arrow next to the SKU, that’ll take you to the SKU page on Amazon, which has a lot of great information about the SKU as well.
I mean, they seem like small little features, but you know, often we use it like if, if we want it to be like, Ah, here, yeah, the current sales price is 3995. I forgot that we lowered the price. Let me look at the listing. And then oh, yeah, we ran a coupon or, you know, we’re currently running a promotion and all Opia more reviews, right. So it’s a very quick shortcut, when you’re managing your business, you can just stay in the sheet.
So this first module here, this total sales, it’s more just an overview of some of your key data, like like Dave said, your current sales price, your last 30 days, revenue per SKU, very powerful to know. And then what the sheet estimates you’re going to do for the next 45 days, or if you put in a different number, the next 30 days, you know, it’s completely up to you what number you put in here, and it will just automatically adjust the forecasting.
And that’s so powerful to me for cash flow, right? Like, if you’re trying to figure out how much money am I going to ever gonna be able to pay my bills, you know, I mean, you can type it in now you see it follows the trends, and then you have the number right in front of you.
There’s little arrows above every column. And so you’re actually able to sort they’ve built these, for us already sorting, you can actually click these arrows, and it will sort a column. So right now I’m sorting by the skews that make up the highest percentage of our overall revenue. So you can see right here, SKU six makes up 16% of our revenue. So it’s essentially the hero product of this catalog. And then you can scroll down and see all your skews from there.
Amy: And I love how you’re also showing it in units. Because, you know, yes, I can forecast revenue, but like, what does that mean? How many units am I going to sell. And so you’ve got the baseline estimated units per day. And then over the last 30 days, you sold 700. So it kind of helps, and then estimated over the next 45 days, 7000, I guess because that is in in a peak season. So
and that’s really nice, a nice set, let’s actually make them both 30. And I’m not even going to put a buffer. But because we are going into Christmas, you can see the difference, right? And the last 30 days only 762. And if you were just say, to say okay, I’m going to double up my sales during q4, I’m just going to take my average and double it. And we’ve seen you know, some other sellers. That’s literally how they do forecasting. They just say whatever, the average month is a Christmas I’m going to double it. And that’s such a poor way of thinking is you’re going to it’s it’s an exponential growth and humans it’s so hard for us to think exponential, right? Like, I know, we all know that story of the chessboard with the rice pieces or the like $1 a day and then you’d be richer.
Amy: Yeah, you know, I’ve had so many clients come to me and say, Amy, I’m, I need to sell $10,000 a month of this product, for example. And I’m like, Okay, what are your What are you basing that on? Right? Like, well, this, this competitors selling, you know, this much? And I’m like, and then I look at the competitor and they’re like the top competitor in the space, right? And they’ve got like 20,000 reviews and this person has 50 You know, and it’s like okay, well Yeah, you can take some of their sales, but you should pick some buddy who’s a little bit of a closer competitor to you. And you should look for those keyword opportunities, right? And you shouldn’t just assume that you can like, I want to, you know, and sometimes there’s not even space in that market at all, like, somebody will come to me and say, I want to sell $20,000 a month in this and it’s like, okay, did you study the market? Because there’s actually not a competitor even doing anywhere close to that. So what are you basing that on? Right? So it’s so important, like you guys said, use the data, look at your competitors. But don’t just look at the top seller, right? If you’ve just launched and you’re not really a close competitor, look at a few different data sets, do some estimations, and use the data to make you more confident about what you should be ordering. And then using a spreadsheet like this, you can actually estimate when you need to order it from you know, your suppliers, you can keep track of your purchase orders, you can keep track of inbound, you can keep track of everything that’s in stock. I mean, it’s it’s, we know
it let’s get that to that point. Right away. One last thing, actually what you’re saying about the competitors, it’s so true, and not just the competitors, but the market in general. So last year, it was still COVID bubble a little bit. And if you’re literally were to take just Okay, last year’s numbers, and I’m going to do the same thing, this year plus 10% increase in growth, hopefully, because e commerce is going a little bit, well, you know, the marketplace might have changed competitors might have come into your niche, this sheet will take a it’s a moving sheet. So the forecast always moves based on your real sales. So if your product gets a new, bad competitor coming in, that’s really giving you a run for your money. And your baseline drops a bit. This will adjust, it will adjust because it lowers your baseline. So then it follows the trend and it tells a you know what, just run a profitable company don’t order too much. The Marketplace change, you don’t need 50 A day anymore. You only need 30 A day, there’s a new competitor. Okay, so this forecasting lives. All right, moving along.
Yeah, so we now we get into a bit more than the heart of this sheet. And, for example, we for people who do FBM, David, I did a little bit. But if you have a lot of FBM sales, this will summarize how many units a day you sell on FBM overall and per SKU, how many you sold last 30 days, and what we estimate the next 30 days to be. So it does the same thing for FBA as well just a breakdown of your FBA sales. If for example, you have a product that you just launched, that doesn’t yet have an established baseline, you’re able to put in a manual baseline. So if we go down to some of these other products down here, you might see like, oh, it has a baseline of 00 units a day. That’s just that’s because this product just launched a week ago. So you have to make an educated decision here to say, Okay, I’m not going to forecast with the baseline zero, I’m going to forecast with the baseline of three units a day. And then the sheet will take that into consideration and override the existing baseline with your manual. So there is a little bit of wiggle room here, you can manually override some things.
So do you know how powerful that is? Ami a lot of people say like, I gotta launch in q4, how many units do I need, and it’s, it’s so nice even during, you know, when you’re placing your very first purchase order that you come in here and you put in a manual number, and you say, I think I’m going to sell three a day on a regular day, you put in your sales trends, and it’ll draw out the graph. And now you can make an educated decision on how many orders you have to place if you’re launching in q4. Yeah, various thoughts. So and then the real fun. So what the sheetmetal does, and you kind of teased this a bit before Amy is saying, you know, we know how many units we’re going to need? Do I have enough at FBA? Do I have to send them in? Where are they in my thing, what I’m going to do is put it back to 45 days because what that’s what Ryan and I would like to use, I’ll add the 10% buffer just because that’s what we did. So make it as realistic as possible. Now, if you take a look here, it says, And you know what, I’m going to clean this up for us look at this, there’s a parentage drop down. And I’m going to say I’m just going to focus on the holiday gifts right now. If I click holiday gifts, it’ll actually clean it up all the skews that before I entered saying these belong to the parentage holiday gifts. Okay, so I’m looking at the holiday gifts, it cleans it up a bit. And I just want to analyze these for a little bit. I’m going to actually say, okay, these are the estimated units that I’m going to sell in the next 45 days. And here it says I’m going to sell to somebody for total at FBA of 608. So it’s not read, everything looks good, I’ve plenty it’ll actually tell you that days of stock or meaning is 186. So this one’s actually been Overstock, it’ll stay the stock date will be the 21st of May next year. Okay. Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to sort by days of stock remaining. Okay, and I can see who a couple leaders are read, they’re gonna run out of stock in 19 dates. Okay, these are real numbers. So we this company has to restock this SKU. We’re going to run out of stock by December 5.
Before the heat the Christmas peak even hits its biggest thing even hits. Yeah.
Okay. So this is an example of like an actionable thing that you can just we would do once a week, upload our reports, and make sure that we always have enough stocks for 45 days. Okay, very actionable very quick, 45 days, sort by out of stock, nothing should be read. I mean, job
Amy: guide walks me through that I need to be uploading these things once a week and all of that because, you know, you guys are saying like, we would do this once a week, how do I know if I’m using this spreadsheet? For the first time? How do I know how often to upload my reports, where to make updates? Is that all in the guide?
So it’s all in the guide? I mean, the nice thing is, you can do it on a daily basis if you want. Sometimes we actually would, because, you know, we love this kind of stuff, and we’d be in it, because it shows you so much more. So instead of just saying, Okay, what’s the next 45 days, there’s another really cool thing, I’m gonna see if I can simulate like a case scenario that sometimes happens. What I’m going to do is I just want to look at the next 14 days. Okay, this is cool. I’m going to have to select all the skews again to try to find one. Let’s see if I can find one. Um, and what I want to do. Open this up, I’m going to sort by advance so what you just saw here on the sheet, what I can do is I can actually open it’s a plus button on top, it’ll ungroup it, and these are my total units at FBA. But we know that units that are FBA, they might be in different parts of FBA, they might be an FC transfer, they might be available to buy. So if you just focus on what’s at FBA, you’re lying to yourself, to be honest, so we got to do a smaller like a deeper dive. Now let’s take a look at this SKU. For example, on top SKU 44, it says it has 1000 at FBA, but there’s zero available. There’s not even any NFC transfer, they’re only inbound, right? So this person created a shipping plan and said, okay, they’re inbound. And but he hadn’t even arrived. Right. So it’s super important. But the case I wanted to highlight was actually let me take a look at this one. This one’s really good holiday gifts 17 SKU 70 And look at this. So add, it says estimated units in the next 14 days, I’m going to sell 46 of these. So in the next two weeks, I’m going to sell 46 of this SKU. If I were just to look at FBA, it says hey, you have 201 in there, that’s that’s good. But if I look closer, I only have 41 available. Okay, so that’s really tight, and the 160 that are inbound, there’s only 16 in receiving the 144 are still being shipped, like there’s somewhere UPS picked them up, but they haven’t even been checked in yet. Okay. And I mean, this one will almost get you there. So that’s 46 sales that you’re expecting. There’s 41 available. So that’s pretty close. But there’s another one here where you have like you’re expecting to sell 92. And there’s only 53 available and available is that status where the customer will combine with prime, right? It’ll ship immediately it’s available for sale. Right? So that’s one use case where it’s like, you don’t have to update it once a week, you can update it daily. And what we would do is we would base our PPC strategy on this available number. So there’s absolutely no point the order if there’s not even in receiving it, or they’re still in transfer, right. So when I was telling you before that small companies have an advantage over big companies is because a big company would see I have 200 FBA I’m only going to sell 46 Keep gunning are lots of PPC. And that’s
like no you have 41 available right now and why not tuned down PPC sales profit a little bit profit a little more profitable, wait until those other units check in?
Amy smites collapse this now so we can get. And I’m going to take this back to the 45 days, just so you can see what we’re building over here on the side. This is really, this is a no brainer section. This is I’m going to sort by so this is telling you what to send to Amazon. And I’m gonna sort by the number of units here. And so just if you take nothing else away from this sheet, except every Monday morning, wake up, put in your new reports, and then send these to Amazon. And that’s literally what Dave and I would one of our actions that we did every one day we would
send out two or three PL copy pastes or three PL and be like, please send those into Amazon for us. Yeah, easy peasy. That’s it. Yeah. And now we will
Amy send to Amazon numbers is based on the 45 day forecast, how many you sold? How many is your estimated to sell how many are available. You’re taking all of these different aspects of data. And then you’re putting that into a number that tells us exactly how many Amazon’s going to need in order for you to stay in stock.
And it’s making it’s making your IPI score. The more and more you use this, the happier the better your IPR score will probably be because you are making sure you’re only keeping 45 days of inventory in Amazon. And so if you have a problem right now with you know overseas Dawg and your IPI score is suffering. And your restock limits might be coming down because of that, then a little bit more optimization in your inventory in your storage at FBA, you know that she can help.
Yeah. And remember me, they just reduced it. I mean, it’s been a month or two now, right? Where long term inventory fees, it used to be like if it’s there for a year, they start charging more now it’s 270 days. So they’re really charging a lot more fees. So you don’t want to have a promo being overstocked at FBA, you definitely don’t
Amy yeah, you definitely want to be a seed feeding Amazon as much as you can, especially now, you know, there’s so many issues with higher charges, but then also, they’re going to cut your restock limits significantly, if you don’t seed feed them at the right times and stay in stock with the right skews, like it’s going to affect how much you can actually sell in the future and how often you’re going to have to send a new inventory. If you’ve messed that up right now. So it’s best to get it under control in the beginning.
And our three peel throughout the year was a third of the storage costs of FBA a third and they didn’t have peak fees. So imagine during the peak, there was like a ninth It was insane. Yeah. So what the sheets will do too, is it’ll protect you.
I’ve made this mistake. Yeah. Twice, but I kicked myself every time I each time I did. Yeah. You know, how many times have you guys said, oh, I need to send 160 units of this SKU into Amazon? Or do let’s do 432? That one’s done before? 30? Oh, yeah, true. That’s the better one. So why is it red? You might be asking, well, okay to send 432 units. Okay, I’ll just, I’ll just create the shipment right now send it to my three PL the next day, my three PL gets back to me. Um, we don’t have 432 units, we only have 192. And then you’re like, right, it’s, I wish I would have had that number right next to it. So I compare, well, here you go. Yeah, no,
because the thing is, now you have to cancel your shipping plan, right? There might be fees, like it’s a mess. So we actually
color code the numbers from what the sheet recommends to send it to Amazon, if it’s white. If it’s white, everything’s good. You have that amount, that number of units at your three PL and you can create that shipment. If it’s yellow, you don’t have that at your three PL. So you cannot send that in however, it’s yellow, because you do have some units upstream. So here, what we’re showing are the number of units you have in storage at your three pills, units in transit and units in production, the same numbers you entered in earlier. So even though we can’t send in 128, we have them in the pipeline. So we’re just aware that okay, eventually those 128 are coming.
And now actionable item, we got to start thinking about well, what’s the PPC strategy on that? Do I really want to push it hard? When is that ship supposed to dock? Or when is it going to arrive? And you know, there’s different strategies of what to do. If you’re about to go out of stock, we like to consider it as how long am I going to be out of stock, if I’m out of stock for two weeks, we’re gonna go full hot, and we’re going to run out of stock, because within two weeks, we’re back in stock. But if we’re gonna go out of stock for like a month or two months, we’re gonna make as much money as possible, because we’re going to have to re rank. And we’re going to take the profit from now to re rank it later.
And the final case is if it goes red, not only do you not have enough that your three PL, but you have none in the upstream pipeline. So you know, you have to go to your manufacturer and make these so that’s why it’s colored red. And that brings us to the final section of the sheet. And just another powerful aspect of the stock flow here is that already, it will start building up a purchase order based on your current in stock and and what you’re forecasting to sell, it will start building a purchase order for you. And you’re able to put in your lead time, your minimum order quantity your units per Carton, these data points, and it’s already going to tell you not only how many units to order, but when you need to order it by and how much it’s going to cost. You know,
it’s crazy. So what we normally do is, we I know it’s so nice, and like we’re so happy that we finally build this one for everyone, what we would do here actionable items I would come in, I would be in charge of placing the orders in China, I would put in I gotta have enough stock, you know, for 180 days, because I have 100 days lead time. And then you know, I want to have 80 days worth at my CPL at all times. So I’m always just have a buffer and I’m ahead of the game. So you put in let’s say for the sheet, you put 180 days, let’s say 10% buffer. And then look at this, I can literally say order date by and you know some of these, they should have already placed the order by because they’re going to run out of stock before this arrives. And the nice thing is you come in here and you just you know change the date. So you can do 14 days for available to see like ooh, are my units actually available in the next two weeks? Then you can put them 45 days, can I send him from a three PL to Amazon and you can build your purchase orders by putting in 180 days and just saying copy paste send to your manufacturer. I need to make them any
Amyokay, but guys, I have a question. So right now we’re showing all this views so What if we’re not ordering from the same supplier? I have three different suppliers for each of my products actually for when you count packaging. So I have different lead times and different MOQ for each of my suppliers. So do I just always have to alter that? Or is there a way to Oh over this AMI, this cue
almost like we planted that question, it was a little too.
That was way too good at that wasn’t too good. So you can or you can put this and it’ll take it for everything. Or you can say like you said, you have different manufacturers different lead times different mo Q’s. So let’s say this one has an MOQ of 1200. Right, and this one, you have 10 units per Carton. What it now does is it says the units required according to the sheets are 1600. It optimizes it now for your MOQ and your units per Carton. So for example, if I put it out 11 carton, 11 units per Carton, it’ll actually tell you to order 1595, because that’s a perfect multiple of 11. Got it right. So it’ll always optimize it for you. And it’ll tell you that 245 card, the cost while you entered in your cogs and the upstream inventory here on the SKU base, right. And it only really set up once at the beginning. And then if you get back to here, it’ll tell you, that’s how much it’s going to cost. We even put in a couple filtering here. So a little colors to get your attention. Now look at this skew at the bottom, the sheet is recommending that in the next 180 days, you would have to order 46 units, because you’re gonna be shy 46. But if your MOQ was 500, and you have 16 in a carton to match MOQ and cartons, you would have to order 512. Okay, so now it’s an orange to tell you like, Look, you didn’t make MOQ make a manual decision. Do you want to place that order now? Or do you just want to slow down sales a bit, maybe, maybe order it, you know next time, and it just it highlights it to you. So you can make that decision for you.
Amy Now, does it actually make my purchase order for me.
So I mean, you could write, so what I would do in your situation, I would go to the Settings tab, right, because you can edit this at any time. And what I would do is in the parented here is I would group them just for that use case by like the parented by manufacturer. So I would write manufacturer one, all the SKUs that are manufacturer one. And now the cool thing is if you come over here and go to the dashboard, you can actually sort by, let’s say manufacturer one, that’s it, we actually did it, that’ll print all your manufacturer one, you can put in the numbers, right, so you don’t have to manually override it. And you can see what you have to order. Now if you don’t want to do it that so that’s one way to do it. If you don’t want to do it that way. What’s also really cool is we put in obviously a manual purchase order builder.
Amy Oh my goodness, of course you did.
Right. So you can you can just manually type in the SKU, how many units you want to order, what’s the cogs? How many units per Carton? And it’ll tell you what’s the carton? And what’s the cost. Okay, so very simple, like it’s a very basic calculator that you can just copy, paste, send it to your manufacturer. And I think it’s
important to say like, you know, we always say like this, these are the numbers the sheet is going to tell you I think, rather than follow it blindly the sheet presents you with a lot of data that you can then take back and discuss with your business partner or with your team and take actions based on the data. And just knowing that it’s it’s it’s solid, and it’s not based on guesswork at all. So yeah, we would look at these numbers once a week and have a hard discussion what’s happening in the next 14 days, the next 45 days and the next 180 days.
And the beauty of doing it every week. Remember your baseline as you sell it adjust right a product becomes hotter, and it becomes more profitable. And you’re like, oh my god, it’s finally sticking. Well guess what your baseline increases, you’re gonna need to order more this sheet will know that because you just entered the multiplier, right? And then that Ryan did all the math for all of us for the whole world that that entire thing gets up, okay.
Amy For the world, Ryan,
I said I want to get outside more and
Amy
I have a hard enough time just calculating my max reps at the gym. Like
we’ll build you an Excel sheet for that area.
I think that’s it like we’ve been through it. You know, when you get into the rhythm get using this, it becomes second nature and you just make decisions based off these numbers. A lot of it is color coded to make the decision making a little bit easier.
Oh, do we have time? Can I give you one more really fun use case that we actually add to it? Yeah. So check this out. restock limits they suck at Amazon, right? It’s so annoying. So let’s go back to like let’s say the next 45 days I want to send him units right and what the sheet does is over here really big. You can see it in the next 45 days. It the sheet is expecting that any 25,000 units Okay, total at FBA of 36,000. So actually I have more because the person who was using it like these numbers are They weren’t using the stock flow long enough, once you use it long enough, right? The numbers become optimized on a SKU level. So we would try to always optimize on a SKU. So some of these skews are under stock. Some are overstocked. And that’s why these numbers are like, we all had that issue at the beginning, right? Use it long enough, and it’ll balance each other out. Now, let’s say I’m just going to increase the buffer year for the example, let’s say if you put in buffer, ah, so close. Yes, let’s say our forecast says in the next 30 days, I need in the next 45 days, I need 30,000 units. At FBA, I only have 36,000. But Amazon has a restock limit of let’s say, 35,000 right now, and I can’t send in any, right and it totally sucks. It’s like okay, so what am I going to do? Is there a different strategy that I can do? So what we would then do is we would actually group them into our parentage. And if you have a parentage, that is, for example, just a color variation, where you think that you can shift one customer who normally buys let’s say, the red one, to buy a blue one. So if the red goes out of stock, not a big deal, they’ll probably buy the blue one. If that is the case, then what you can do is you can determine Well, which parentage is fully in stock or not, and then decide which ones you have to send it. So let’s say they’re all holiday gifts, right? If I look at this parentage, for example, totally fine, it’s going to stay in stock. I need 780 And FBA of 3000. So that parentage, I don’t have to restock that one, it’s totally fine. Halloween decorations, right, next 45 days, I need 924. I have plenty at FBA. And you keep going down through your parents is to see is there room in one of the parentage? Where I could fill it up that way? Does that kind of makes sense?
I bet holiday gifts is a place I think Eve I bet even without the buffer. There’s just a holiday. Yeah, yeah. And so let’s say you can only send your your restock limit, it’s only allowing you to send in like 500 units. And you’re like, rather than sending like 10 of all of your skews, like Dave was just showing you have some parents kids that are going to be fine, they’re going to stay in stock. But look at this parent, it’s your holiday gifts, you don’t have enough at FBA. And so that’s the parentage that you need to focus probably all 500 Those units are rather than what you see other people doing or what Amazon recommend. Just I’ll send in a good mix of all your skews. It’s like no focus on the parentage that is in danger of going out of stock, because that’s going to take your ranking, and you just can’t have that. Yeah,
Amy I love it. I love it. You guys, I think we have one very important question to answer. And that is, how do people get the jeans.
So it’s super easy. I mean, it’s on our website, I’m sure you can share the link AMI, with everyone watching. So guides, it’s absolutely free. It only works with Excel, though you can’t use it on Google Sheets, because the macros that we built in so macros are they’re essentially macro application. So Ryan and I during COVID, we watched a lot of YouTube and we taught ourselves how to code. It was really fun because we wanted to use the power of macros, and we put in the macros into the sheet to automate them. And that’s why it only works with Excel not Google Sheets. So go to our website. You can find it at divan strategic.com
I think I can get that up on the screen. Therwe go. Oh, here we go. Divan strategic.com. So go to that one, right. And then you can just literally download it for free right now. It’s a free trial. So play with it, get a feel for it. And then once we get all the feedback, and once we get a final version, then you know, we’ll put up a sheet for sale in about 3045 days, something like that. But it’s a free trial going on now until December 16. So enjoy guys.
Nerd promoting us today. I think like Who else would talk about Excel for an hour straight and still have some gas left and we love it.
Amy Yeah, I love Excel too. I think it’s really cool. I’m just so glad that you guys do the building part and I just get to do I don’t like building it. See, that’s what’s different about me. I like creating and then I don’t like the the calculating and execution part so much. But if you guys create it, then I actually like the calculating execution part because I like measuring things. So I like ticking off to do boxes that makes me happy. So this sheet allows me to do a lot more ticking off to do boxes and measuring which which makes me really happy. So thank you guys so much for Thank you. Yeah, they love it. I’m so excited that I’ve gotten to be like little tiny part of your journey and have seen you guys grow and share and you know, amazing and one shameless plug is that Ryan is coming to our Christmas party. Yeah, he’s gonna be there. So if you want to ask him a ton of nerdy questions like hashtag I need to find a scientist for you. You can meet Ryan he’s gonna be at our holiday party. So you guys got to join us at who’s gonna
have time in Austin.Amy I’m excited. I’m so excited her all good things of Austin. So Austin
Amy is so much fun. It’s so it the weather’s nice. Like we can rent scooters and ride around the city. We always do that. There’s just great nightlife. And so yeah, we’ll see you guys at the holiday party. So head on over to divan, strategic two things to do today, head on over to defense strategic and check out all the things that they have to offer, join their Facebook group, because it’s awesome. I’ve shared this live video in their Facebook group, by the way, and, and did it for you guys. And then, you know, join their Facebook group, they have a private group called events strategic where they you know, do zoom meetings and share things with people all the time. And then also head over to seller meetup.com. And join us at December 14 at the holiday party that we’re going to do. We’d love to see you there just come to Austin for the night, right flying in the morning. If you’re from outside Boston, and come our party starts at 7pm. And then you can leave the next day or you can hang out a few more days because there’s so many great things to do in Austin. But those are your two action items today. And guys any other way for them to contact you reach out that you’d like to say or you read we just
ah, that’s basically it guys, Facebook and Facebook email. So check out our website, you’ll see you can read the whole fun story of how we made our million in a week.
Do we still have the dogs on our page? Oh, check out the dogs actually. Three check out the dogs on our on our web page.
Amy It is my one of my favorite websites. It’s so fun. And you know we featured at amazing at home and our seller portraits we featured these guys in their story before the accident. So you know, go check that out as well. It’s it’s such an inspiring and fun story. So
thank you. Well, thank you so much, Amy for being part of our journey as well. Yeah. Yeah, it
Amy was. It’s been a pleasure, like wow, I’ve learned so much from you guys, too. So it’s awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for being here. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. I know this was a long one, but it was worth it. And we’ll see why 20 minutes. And definitely will connect with you guys over some nerdery and sheets. So ask your questions. I’m sure David and Ryan during all my groups and stuff. So I’m sure they’d be happy to follow up on any of your questions. And this video is going to hit YouTube today as well. So it’s gonna be awesome. Alright guys, Amy and sorry, last
thing were we made a YouTube video explanation of the sheet which we’ll launch today to Yeah,
you’ll find a link to it somewhere.
e’ll send it will send you the link once we upload it.
Amy Yeah, okay. Sounds good, guys. All right, buddy. Bye, guys.
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