Three tricks to quickly get rid of old Amazon inventory – and why you’d want to.
How to solve the problem of old inventory that isn’t selling
We need to discuss a pricing maneuver that you shouldn’t do often, but it has its place.
This chapter is for sellers who find themselves in one of two scenarios:
- You have old inventory that you need to liquidate.
- You need a quick influx of cash.
We’re going to talk about having a “fire sale.”
Why pricing is the biggest factor in getting sales
One of the things that consistently blows my mind is how little most Amazon sellers understand the extent to which pricing converts to sales. How you can take an item that hasn’t sold in a year, drop the price 25%, and get a sale within a day. Or, how you can drop prices across your entire inventory, and get absolutely flooded with sales.
Pricing is the #1 factor in how fast something sells.
It should be obvious. And it’s almost so obvious it seems almost not even worth stating. But a lot of sellers don’t act in a way that’s consistent with this fact.
Here are two quick moves you can make to turn inventory into cash, quickly…
Inventory Purge Move #1: “Flash Cash”
We can call “Flash Cash.” Or we can call it a “deep repricing cleanse.” This is for you you if you have not repriced in a while.
And be honest with yourself as to whether you are repricing enough. Many sellers who have profound repricing issues are in complete denial. I’ll talk to sellers who aren’t using a repricer, and ask “how often do you reprice?” And they’ll say something like, “Pretty often.” And eventually when I do several laps of interrogation to get a more specific answer. Inevitably turns out they’re hardly ever repricing.
So be honest with yourself. You may be in urgent need of the “Flash Cash” approach.
How this works
This one is extremely simple. Since you aren’t repricing, the majority of your inventory has probably been underpriced by multiple sellers. So to get a burst of sales, you’re going to tear through your inventory and drop prices on everything.
The more you drop your prices, the faster you’ll get sales. If you read my editorial on why you shouldn’t underprice other sellers, you know my thoughts on that. But drop your prices as much as you’re comfortable, up to that line of underpricing the lowest offer.
Once you reprice every item in your inventory, you will see a near-immediate surge of sales. It’s quite a feeling waking up the next morning and seeing you’ve received 50 sales overnight.
If you’re not getting the sales you want, there’s an almost 100% chance it’s simply because you’re not repricing your inventory often enough. So do this “deep cleanse” and you will get a tidal wave of sales.
Inventory Purge Move #2: Fire Sale
This is a more aggressive move. And it could be used by anyone, whether you’re repricing or not. And it’s just as simple as the previous maneuver.
Whereas in the Purge Move #1 we are simply repricing inventory that has not been repriced (which means you optimized prices in an unspecific way), with this “Fire Sale” approach, we are dropping prices in a very specific way.
How this works
Go through your entire inventory and just drop your price to match the lowest price. Simple as that.
Alternatively, if you wanted to have a “mini fire sale,” you could drop prices on your low demand inventory only. If you’re selling books, an example might be to drop prices on anything ranked worse than 3 million.
Do this, and you’ll probably wake up the next day to a flood of sales.
One thing that’s interesting is how dropping prices on higher-priced inventory that have been sitting for a long time can result in an immediate sale. Often there is pent-up demand for inventory that is priced higher than the market is willing to pay. You drop the price, and items with a Sales Rank of 6 million immediately sells. Either prospective buyers are stalking the page waiting for the price to drop. Or, a bunch of prospective buyers have price alerts set up in a tool like Keepa, that alerts them to a price drop. Happens all the time.
Inventory Purge Move #3: Price-slashing “dead wood”
With this move, we are cutting prices on all low-demand inventory in half.
How low is “low”? This is up to you. I would not get this aggressive with any book that has an average “best seller rank” of better than 2 million. You might push this much higher. I think 4 million is a good line, past which a book is definitely in very low demand.
Assuming you’ve had these low demand books in your inventory for enough time that they’ve had an opportunity to sell at their current price (at least six months), you may decide it’s time to get militant about converting these books to cash.
How this works
- Go through your inventory.
- Look at everything with a Sales Rank worse than your cutoff.
- Cut the price in half.
What if that means selling at a loss? This move is best applied when a book has been in your inventory long enough that it doesn’t matter if it sells at a loss. You’ve already concluded that either:
- The book will not sell at it’s current price.
- The book has been in your inventory too long (incurring long term storage fees, etc).
So at this point, it shouldn’t matter. You just want the book gone.
Drop the prices, get sales, move on.
The big takeaway
If your inventory isn’t selling, it is almost always a pricing issue. Drop prices, and see a flood of sales.
-Peter Valley
Great article. What would your advice be if even matching the lowest price, some books still don’t sell?
This is one of the approaches I cover in the article: Slashing the prices of those items in half should do the trick.
Thank you. I had skimmed it, I’ll reread it more throughly. I’m still learning the ropes.
How often do you find you need to do that with the books you buy?