It’s getting crowded in here: FBA competition surges

Sellers feel the competition as FBA merchants rise 65% in one year.

First, the good news: Prime memberships are up to 20 million. As an FBA seller, these are your customers. Two things to note about this figure:

• This is the first time I’ve ever seen Amazon publish numbers.
• This figure is literally 7+ times more than any previously published figure (that I’ve seen).

This news has little to do with this post, I just wanted to impart some good news before the less-than-good news.

Your FBA competition has jumped 65% in the last year.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve definitely noticed all the new sellers, in  a couple ways:

• Tons more bottom-feeder booksellers pricing everything at a flat $3.99 above the lowest merchant fulfilled price. There have never been so many $4.00 Prime offers in the book category. This makes it harder to price intelligently, vs desperately, the way these sellers do.
• While my overall profits were up last year, my average sales price per item dropped from $14.78 to $13.25. While not huge, its a drop of about 10%, and I think increased competition is to credit. There are simply more competing offers to price against.

More generally, there appear to be more FBA offers for every item. I’m certainly not an FBA veteran, but I do remember how few competing offers there were when I started. It seemed there was money to be made on most well-ranked items when I started with FBA, just like there was money to be made on most books in general when I started selling books on Amazon many years earlier.

The fools start complaining. The wise refine their game and double down.

Endnote: 2104 Update of Amazon Autopilot Available

I just spent a marathon weekend making tons of updates to Amazon Autopilot for 2014. A lot has changed since it was first published exactly one year ago, and this 2014 update is now out.

If you purchased Amazon Autopilot from this site, you should be getting an email soon with a document detailing all the updates.

Here are a few things I updated for 2014:

• Updated all shipping price figures, such as Super Saver Shipping increasing from $25 to $35, and CD and DVD shipping increasing to $3.99.

• Updated the known number of Prime subscribers to 20 million.

• Updated Amazon‘s weight based and storage fees.

• Updated section on scouting apps with all the new options available.

• Updated the obsolescence of a tactic for determining the number of items in each category, after Amazon made some changes.

• Updated suggested repricing methods to reflect the new option allowing the display of FBA offers only.

• Revised my editorial on all Prime customers being babies, and negative feedback going up after switching to FBA (I was wrong).

• Revised my suggested pricing strategy to account for the increase in competition.

• Tons of feedback-related updates: Issuing refunds, etc.

• Updated new figures on number of sales that happen through the Buy Box in the media category.

And tons more (including fixing 142 misspellings. Seriously.)

Click this link to download a synopsis of the updates.

If you bought Amazon Autopilot, email me with your PayPal transaction # and I’ll send the 2014 update.