NightOwlGear.com

I have posted the current FBA inventory on hand. In addition to this we have 10 Zebralight SC63 and SC63w, 5 EagleTac T25C2 XPH and an ATN XSight II 5x20 Scope on hand currently.

How much time you put in every day on this?

@Nargis.ali I spend about 2-4 hours a week. I was spending more and our traffic was much higher, posting on forums (Reddit, Candlepower) but haven't had time. Time is spent placing a new order, shipping product to Amazon FBA, adding new products (about 10minutes for a new product) and marketing (chatting on forums, putting together an special holiday or sale ad)

"We have run extensive advertising on Facebook, Google, CandlepowerForums.com, FlashlightForums.com and Reddit."

Can you upload an attachment with a break down of ad spend by month?

@slasher20 I've uploaded a sheet with the details. We actually spent a little more than what was on the P&L. I think I missed facebook & Amazon in the aggregate total.

We had paid for one additional item, advertising on CPF, for 1 month. It was 250$.
We didn't continue because it seemed like the Reddit /flashlight Forum was getting a lot more activity for free and was a more open community. We have established a really good relationship with their moderators and can work to hand that off to the new owner.

Hi, thanks for the informative listing! I have a few questions.
Why has your traffic gone down progressively over the last few months?
How much time were you spending on working on the site when you were peaking in revenue?
Finally, will you offer a breakdown of your marketing channels and tactics? Seems like you've got a few things going on :)

@asimo Hi there...

I have been spending about 2-4 hours a week on managing the site. Most of that time was spent on ordering product, adding products and shipping them to Amazon FBA. I have unfortunately had very little time over the past few months to focus on the marketing aspects of the site.

That is the primary reason for the drop progressively in activity.

What we were doing when our traffic was increasing and not decreasing:

Sales & Orders Google Adwords management.
We had been using a service called Sales and Order to manage our Google Ad campaign. We stopped going that. I would suggest that the new owner pick that up again (or another similar service). For a slight months management fee they were able to put in place an automated system for managing our ad's which increased our activity.

I would also spend slightly more time on adding in some of the new lines our vendors have. We have on average 6 or so products which are new, from each vendor, which can be added up.
This service calculates the profitability on each item and adjusts your adWords campaigns automatically to compete based on profit. It's a really nice service, which we should have stuck with.

Facebook
I was creating a number of posts on Facebook regularly of new products and boosting them for anywhere from 20-40$ for a few week period. This small amount garnered us ~3500 Facebook followers. I would continue that campaign and increase the # of posts.

Connexity (Pricegrabber, shopper.com)
We started advertising on convexity last year for a few months. We didn't get the pixel integration done so I wasn't able to tie sales directly to ad's on their end with pixel tracking (didnt implement it) but I would continue that also.

eBay
We never really did anything with eBay. We have a feed plugin which can send a feed to eBay but we didnt get to it.

NewEgg, Sears, Rakuten.
These are all channels which can be pursued which we didnt get to.

Amazon
I do some small advertising on Amazon, but we have really low ad spend. Our default is set to .11.
This seems to have not been an issue with our core products (Zebralight, ATN, oLight, MecArmy) as these products seem to sell regardless.

Reddit
We had been participating in the /r/flashlights forum and are listed as a vendor there. I was posting several posts/replys to comments on that forum and we are well known to the moderators. (they are great). This spent no more than 5-10 minutes a day, if that, but was well worth it. I simply have been dealing with selling my house and moving so I've not been able to focus on it.

CandlePowerForum
This is the big light forum. We havent really paid much attention to it outside of some initial ad's.

Overall, this business has tremendous opportunity. With a little time, and effort, someone could very easily get an increase in both traffic and conversions without breaking the bank on adSpend. A few hours a day managing the marketing aspects (participating in forums, adding new products, creating some sale ad's for the site and forums and setting up more feeds to channels like NewEgg, Rakuten, and others) would definitely move the site in the upwards trajectory again. When we were in growth mode, I was spending between 1-3 hours a day on the activities, which I believe helped get us the growth. I simply have too much on my plate at the moment and am unable to focus on this as much as I want which is why I'm selling it. It doesn't need a lot, but it does need some attention...

I attached a breakdown of the advertising to the attachments for this last year. I dont have a monthly breakdown for all of it, but for the ones I did, they are in the spreadsheet. Let me know if there is something else your looking for or have any additional questions...

:-)

Hi, I have a few questions:

1. Are you in any Trademark dispute with Night Owl Optics: http://www.nightowloptics.com/

2. For your "Amazon Direct Products" such as this Thrunite: https://www.nightowlgear.com/store/product/thrunite-tn32-ut-thrower-flashlight/ Are these being sold from your FBA Inventory or are you just getting an affiliate commision. I don't see your seller account when I click through and put it in my Amazon cart.

3. What is the name of the Amazon Seller Store? Do you have a link?

4. For non-Amazon orders place on the website, are those being shipping via Amazon FBA? How is that handled.

4. On your previous Flippa listing, Feb 16 revenue was listed as $17,262, Costs $11,356 and Profit $5905 but on this current listing it is completely different. Please explain.

5. Why the big drop in BIN?

Thanks!

@RichAP
1. No, we have no trademark issues.
2. The Amazon Direct products are sold through affiliate. We can order direct from them, but we haven't pursued the relationship yet.
3. www.amazon.com/shops/nightowlgear
4. Non Amazon orders get placed through Amazon FBA (sometimes we ship direct if we have time, but typically not).
5. The previous listing was partially completed for Feb.
6. I'm moving and would like to hand this off to someone who will benefit from it instead of letting it get impacted.

@ssholtis Let me double check the #'s in the spreadsheet again. Maybe I made a mistake when I updated it.

Rich, You were correct. I had started with the wrong spreadsheet and updated it.
I had used the Jan-March 2015 #'s and appended the 2017 #'s to that which was incorrect.
I have corrected the spreadsheet and uploaded the correct 2016 #'s.

You will see the Corrected Financials 2017 attached. Thanks for catching that...

Hi: nice site. I notice in your posted P&L that there is a lot of variation in the COGS as a % of sales. Why is that? (In some months it exceeds sales, which can't be. Which must mean you are recording COGS of other months in that month). Thanks

@pithecus We recorded the total purchase of goods for that month as COGS. Since we purchase in bulk, the # represents items added into inventory during that period.

@ssholtis, okay, thanks. (Actually, COGS should be the cost related to what you've sold that month. Not what you bought that month for inventory (which is a balance sheet item)). But I understand what you did. thanks

@pithecus Agreed, it would be better to show the COGS for the items sold for that period. We dont have COST as a field in the Woocommerce setup. We could add it pretty easily (take about 5 minutes to add it) but we would have to update the products in our system with the cost per item and we didnt do that. It would probably take a few hours to update the products with that data and it would be something the new owner should do I'm sure. Enabling that would make something like Sales and Orders work 100% effectively when advertising through their system since it automatically adjusts adspend up based on profitability per item.

@ssholtis, just thought I'd mention since it would give an accurate picture of your actual gross margin to buyers. But what you're saying makes sense and no need to do that at this point.

@pithecus Thanks!

How many products do you have listed on your website? Also, do you have any affiliate programs that you pay for them advertising your website?

@aaantonuk We have 996 products published for sale. We actively carry inventory for about 100-200 products on average depending on the time of year. The rest are affiliate or we offer backorder sales.

We haven't pursued affiliate advertising. That would be an excellent method to grow the site.

@ssholtis Thank you for the reply. On the video walk through it shows 70 orders, almost 10% refunded, can you please elaborate why so many orders were refunded? Also, your Corrected Financials report does not show any refunds on it, did you have any refunded orders this past year?

@aaantonuk Yes, I was asked that from a few people. ATN released this product Bino-X. (https://www.atncorp.com/atn-bino-x-hd-4x-super) We got several hundred of them early by buying them a few months before they were to be released. At the time there was a lot of buzz regarding them. We sold them too, but pretty quickly people discovered that these units had issues. Software patches, battery life issues, etc... So they returned them.

We in turn returned them to ATN so it was no harm on our end outside of some customers not liking the ATN product. That said, most did not return them. Instead the choose to wait for the software patches required and I haven't heard any complaints since about the BinoX.

With regards to the returns #. We did have some, not as many as 10%. We removed the returns from the sales #'s prior to putting it in the spreadsheet.

Our return policy is pretty simple, return it in 30 days for a refund if its defective. If its not defective, return it and you have to pay a restocking fee. All of our vendors will let them return defectives to them for either replacement or credit on a future order typically. Since we ship from Amazon, most returns go to Amazon and then we wait until we have enough and have Amazon send them to us. We then decide to either request Amazon refund us for the return (if the product is destroyed from the customer) or we send it back the manufacturer for credit.

Hi there, cool business.

In the Inventory report, is the "your price" the retail price? How come there's no field for your cost per unit?

It seems like the MecArmy SGN3 is something like 40% of your total inventory value ($5100USD). How come there's so much inventory of this one particular model?

What is the typical margin on these inventory items?

What do the manufacturers require in terms of order sizes for you to get inventory at good prices? What do Eagletac and Zebralight for instance need for order sizes ( you seem to have only a few select models from each) and do they dropship?

@darkcobalt

The Price listed is retail. We dont have a cost because the cost varies depending on how much we order from the manufacturer at the time we place the order, but mostly because we didnt track that per unit. Its something that should be done, but we didnt get to it.

We purchased several hundred SGN3's and have been selling them over time. We have a large qty because we bought so many to get a deal on the price. MAP for these is 42.90. Our cost was 20$

The cost however varies per manufacturer. We see from 20-65%. Typical additional breaks are around 1500-3k and range from an additional 3-5%. Usually if you go to 10k you can get an additional 10-12% off an order.

With regards to what they require, you typically have a large starting order required to do business, if they are taking new customers. We have already done that with these vendors so that's not required anymore.

Zebralight is the worst of all the vendors for markup because they have one of the best products and they know it. They offer an additional 1% at 3k, which pays for shipping typically. That said, we have never had a Zebralight stay in stock. Just the opposite, we cant get them fast enough. (We have an order open to them currently for 1800$ - our cost). Each vendor has a minimum required to order, but the bottom is 500$ mostly. Some, like PowerTac will let you drop ship one or two lights. Xtar will let us order whatever amount we want. So will oLight from Southern CA.

For EagleTac and ArmyTek and others which are shipped from China, we typically will order more in one order (a variety mostly with more of a few core sellers) so that we pay less for shipping. If you have them ship the items directly to Amazon, you would need to tell them which items go to which Amazon Warehouse address. You will pay a little more for that upfront, but save money in the longterm vs. shipping it to yourself and then to Amazon.

We have placed small orders from around 500$ to larger orders for 15k just depending on what we wanted to try to promote and what we thought would sell to a channel like Amazon or on the site.

Great answers to all the questions, thanks.

The Woocmmerce sales (I assume this means all orders placed on the site directly) - why the significant drop to nearly zero.

thx!

@puritanize I tried to explain this in a few other responses but basically I've not had any time to promote the site. We turned off Sales and Orders (adwords), Facebook ads and I havent posted in Reddit in a few months. Its the primary reason that I'm selling the site.

I would turn back on Sales and Orders, add in cost data into woocommerce, reenable adWords, Do a few Facebook sales and ads and start posting on Reddit/Candlepower forums again and Im sure the activity will increase again. (This is what I did initially and we saw pretty steady growth as a result.

@puritanize The other thing I would say is, our sales are not 0 either. We had roughly 20k on Amazon in Dec and 10k in Jan. We focused on Amazon as a channel primarily because thats where the customers were.

@ssholtis meant via the site sales portion only, my fault on missing that, it looks great - understood fully. THX again...

@puritanize Sure thing...

@sshotis is there some way to get a breakdown of what items provide what % of sales. I ask because some buyers may worry that one single product launch (like that Bino-X) might have accounted for some of those sales.

Can you also clarify if all your suppliers can simply ship to Amazon FBA? I got the impression right now you ship to yourself and ship to Amazon separately. Why not ship directly (as you mentioned), and does the current FBA costs account for receiving inventory from different sources at different times?

How are returns handled? Eg buyer ships it back to Amazon, and then what happens? How are the logistics of returning defective/unsatisfactory units to the vendor done?

I ask about logistics as I'm not in the USA and would need to have the FBA do everything (we don't currently have FBA experience)

TOP SELLERS
QTY - PRODUCT
185 Eagletac 3.7v 18650 2600mah battery
75 Lumintop tool aaa
62 Ultratac k18 keychain flashlight
59 Eagletac 16340 rcr123a 750mah battery
53 Atn x sight ii hd day & night scope
46 Replacement armytek wizard pocket clip
40 Panasonic sanyo ncr18650ga 3500mah 10a 18650 li-ion battery
40 Mecarmy sgn3 160 lumen every day carry key chain
35 Zebralight sc63 18650 xhp35 every day carry flashlight
17 Eagletac 3.7v 18650 3400mah protected li-ion battery
16 Eagletac 3.7v 18650 3100mah protected li-ion battery

I've uploaded Sales by Product with a breakdown for 2016 product sales for Amazon.

All suppliers can ship to Amazon, if you ask them to.

Here is the process we use:
1. Place order
2. Ship to us
3. We login to Amazon, create "FBA Shipment". When you do this, and this is the key to understand, Amazon tells you which warehouses to send what qty of the products you are sending to. So let's say that we are going to ship up 100 MecArmy's. Amazon may say, send 30 to CA, 20 to LA and 50 to WA.
4. After we create the FBA Shipment, we then ship those packages to Amazon.
5. Amazon handles the orders and the returns. Any returns are sent to them. They then get put into an "Unfullfilable" state. When we get enough in that state, we create a "Removal" order. Amazon then sends the products back to us and we send them back to the manufacturer.

Why are you sending it to yourself first ? The answer is, because, thats what we did.

Can you send it from the vendor to Amazon directly?

Yes. Our Vendors (of which there are 15) will all send the orders to whomever or whatever in whatever Qty we tell them to. They will of course charge shipping for that, but they will do it.

How would the process work if you wanted to send it straight to Amazon?

1. Determine what you wanted to order
2. Create Amazon FBA Shipment (you can cancel these, its not an issue if you have to) which will tell you what qty to send to which warehouse.
3. Place order with Vendor, tell them which Qty to send to what address.

Returns.

1. Get an RMA from the Vendor
2. Create a removal order per vendor. When you create the removal order, create it for each vendor's products and ship it back to the vendor.

This would completely eliminate your need to handle inventory and returns.

What about FBA costs per source?

That doesnt matter. Amazon charges you a hosting fee and a fee to do the removal order (to pay for the shipping). They wont charge you for shipping them products.

One more comment on the product spread. A good portion of the revenue are from higher ticket items like ATN scopes which cost 500-3000$. That said you can also see that a good portion comes from other items also. So, while we may have some higher ticket items (which have higher profit potential) we also sell a lot more of the smaller items which have better margin (lower $ per unit profit, there are more sales of these). Thats probably not really surprising. We sell more cheaper items and less more expensive ones. The more expensive items we make more $ per unit, but we make more profit on the volume of the smaller ones.

Hi Steve,

You show roughly $30k in revenue in Nov/Dec 2016 which is mostly from sales on Amazon but only show $8 in Amazon fees for those two months. Did you remove the amazon referral fee/commission and FBA fees from the revenue numbers or are those expense lines missing from the P&L?

Also, if all of your Woocommerce shipments are processed through FBA, where are you accounting for the multi-channel fulfillment charges from Amazon? That would be $6 per order minimum, is that expense line missing or did you remove that cost from the revenue line?

Regarding FBA - was any of your inventory in FBA subject to long term storage fees? What's the oldest age of current inventory in FBA?

Thanks

Does this sale include your Amazon FBA store account?

@drydl I didnt break down the Amazon fees per month for Apr to Jan. They are all in the last line item.
I dont have a break down of these #'s, so I put them in the last line item. The 8$ was a charge we were able to allocate to that month.

Multichannel fees are included in that lump sum.

None of our inventory was subject to long term storage fees yet.

We have a few lights which we will pull and resubmit or blow away at cost + fees.

6 lights - Sellable Age 181-270 days are the oldest. Typically these we can offload pretty easily or pull and return.

@Mseyoum Yes.

For orders placed directly on your website, what is the process to have that order shipped via FBA? Does Amazon charge for this?

@RichAP we create an order on the Amazon website and they ship it directly to the customer.

Multichannel FBA fees typically run about 3-3.5 per unit. That includes all the fees they charge. Scopes are a little more ~6. But it's a 600$ item so... This is much less than shipping costs you may incur if your shipping direct (unless you have Amazon negotiated shipping charges)

Also for Amazon orders, not Orders of our site, but direct from Amazon you pay to ship the item to Amazon but not to the buyer. This saves a ton on shipping costs.

Can you clarify what you mean when you say " They are all in the last line item. "? December's reported sales were $19,342 and profit is reported as $19,034. If your Amazon sales were roughly $19k, you should have had $2,850 in referral fee costs (15%) and around $1,500 in FBA fees but I only see running costs of $800 for the month.

@drydl it's not in the month column.

Like I said, it's not broken down per month. It's in the sum total at the end of the year. I don't have the fees broken down per month for that period. It's time consuming to split it out.

@ssholtis Ok, I can see that it's not broken out by month. But I don't see it in the totals. Can you pinpoint the exact cell on the sheet titled "Corrected 2017 Financials" where I would see total Amazon referral fee and FBA costs?

Based on the sales revenue and unit sales you've provided, your costs from Amazon would be close to the numbers below, these numbers exceed your stated Op expenses which include other items like Web Hosting, Advertising, Owner's Salaries, Outsourcing, Subscriptions and Office Expenses/Shipping. I'm just trying to figure out where those costs are accounted for.

$11,700.00 Amazon referral fee ($78k x 15%)
$7,362.00 Multichannel fulfillment FBA ($6 x 1227 units)
$5,460.00 FBA AMZN sales ($4 x 1365 units)

I see the $17,491 now, the lines not being totaled threw me off. That amount seems to account for the referral fees and FBA charges for Amazon shipments.

For NightOwlGear.com direct shipments - you show 1227 units shipped, how many of those were shipped by you and how many were by Amazon? Where are the multi-channel fulfillment charges for the Amazon fulfilled orders accounted for?

I was able to find a report that gave me the data for Nov and Dec (I had to remove all the other data to just get the fees and it only goes back to mid Oct) but this will give you a breakdown of the fees for those months.

Total fees for Nov - ($2,216.40)
Total fees for Dec - ($3,731.97)

The spreadsheet is attached. - FBA Fees Nov&Dec
That includes the Referal Fee's,

@drydl Regarding the Multichannel shipments, we started using Amazon to ship Multichannel around June. I haven't seen a line item in the fees called Multichannel. It's my understanding that this is included in the fee list, but its listed as part of the broken down items with the rest of the fees. There is no other report I can find which lists these separately.

@ssholtis Another words, its already in the Amazon Fee's.