by Usama Ahmad | Dec 25, 2017 | Roadmap
A few days ago I told you we’d started on the development of storage fees. I also reported that as usual, Amazon won’t make it easy to get to the metrics YOU want (profitability by SKU), as they are only interested in the metrics THEY want (how much to charge you).
Here’s how I explained the challenge back then:
– The storage fee reports come with an ASIN and an FNSKU alongside the storage charges for one month. So, we can certainly provide a breakdown per ASIN, but when it comes to assigning the cost to a product for product profitability calculations, we need to assign it to an SKU rather than an ASIN.
– We can certainly convert the FNSKU to an SKU, that is not a problem. However, in the cases where there is no FNSKU on the report, we are stuck.
– Cases with no FNSKU include comingled inventory and inventory where the UPC or EAN numbers are used instead.
After much head-scratching, here is how we have specified our way out of this mess:
If the Storage Fees report shows a row with an FNSKU present and the FNSKU maps to an SKU, assign the storage fee in the report to its deduced SKU (stemming from FNSKU).
If the Storage Fees report shows a row with FNSKU not present, or FNSKU does not map to an SKU:
– Accumulate estimated-monthly-storage-fee for that report row to an ‘unallocated cost’ bucket
– When all FC/ASINs/FNSKU in the report have been apportioned to their respective SKU, if there is any amount left in the unallocated cost bucket, apportion that amount to the remaining SKUs of the ASIN which have not yet had a fee charged, based on their current inventory on hand
Example
ASIN B0101 has 6 SKUs
– SKU0101
– SKU0102
– SKU0103
– SKU0104
– SKU0105
– SKU0106
Storage Fees Report shows 4 rows for ASIN B0101, two rows which can be directly attributed to an SKU and two rows which cannot
– ASIN B0101 -> FNSKU X0101 ->SKU S0101 cost 5.00 Avg Untis 30
– ASIN B0101 -> FNSKU X0102 ->SKU S0102 cost 3.00 Avg Units 70
– ASIN B0101 -> FNSKU X0101 ->SKU NULL cost 2.00 Avg Units 50
– ASIN B0101 -> FNSKU NULL cost 3.00 Avg Units 80
Processing of the Storage Fees reports rows results in:
a) Calculated total storage fees for ASIN B0101
— $5.00 + $3.00 + $2.00 + $3.00 = $13.00
b) Fees directly attributable to SKUs from the report:
– – SKU 0101 Cost $5.00 (From report)
– – SKU 0102 Cost $3.00 (From report)
c) Fees which are not directly attributable to SKUs from the report (Unused cost bucket) :
— Total $13.00 – ($5.00 + $3.00) = $5.00
d) Unallocated SKUs for ASIN B0101 which have received no cost yet
— SKU0103 current inventory 150
— SKU0104 current inventory 0
— SKU0105 current inventory 60
— SKU0106 current inventory 90
e) Apportionment of Unallocated Bucket Cost to Unallocated SKUs as follows:
— Total units in stock for unallocated SKUs = 150 + 30 + 60 + 90 = 300
— SKU0103 cost = 150 / 300 * $5.00 = $2.50
— SKU0104 cost = 0 / 300 * $5.00 = $0
— SKU0105 cost = 60 / 300 * $5.00 = $1.00
— SKU0106 cost = 90 / 300 * $500 = $1.5
I am sure you cannot wait to spend what is left of your Christmas day to tackle this issue, so I’ll come back and read your comments in an hour or so.
Just kidding. (but we’d be very happy to hear what you think, though)
by Usama Ahmad | Nov 10, 2017 | Roadmap
Well, whaddayaknow …!
It does not happen very often 
, but I’ll admit it, I was wrong. (It often happens I’m wrong, just that I rarely admit to it.)
It’s about the storage fees thingy. I have, for a very long time, maintained that Amazon do not provide us storage fees by ASIN. It turns out they do.
There’s a report we already download for other purposes which contains the storage fees by ASIN. A couple of subscribers kept telling me of that report, and I always dismissed it.
I never denied that the report contained ASINs and that it contained storage fees. But I always said these were not reconcilable with the financial transactions we receive from Amazon, which form the basis of all the financials in SellerLegend. So, I was adamant we would not use this.
Now, thanks to Michael’s tenacity, he forced me (yeah, against my will), to have a second look, and lo and behold, there was light!
The storage fees we receive in Amazon’s financial transactions do not carry an ASIN. That is because they are organized not by ASIN, but by fulfilment centre. And also, the fees are delayed by one month. So September fees are passed in October, for example.
Once you take these two facts into account, (and you disregard the fact the report says the reported storage fees are just an ‘estimate’), the report with the ASINs matches the financial transactions by FC exactly.
What does that mean, you say?
Well, it DOES NOT mean that your profits or fees in SellerLegend will be any different. We always considered the storage fees in settlements and, recently, in the P&L. But we counted the storage fees at the total aggregate level.
But it DOES mean that we will soon be able to assign monthly storage fees to ASINs and therefore save you a load of time calculating this manually. It also means you will be able to have a more precise product profitability.
It also means that you’ll be able to gauge how much an ASIN costs to store in FBA and compare the cost against 3rd party storage solutions.
Now, how we squeeze this in the development cycle is another story. I’ll keep you posted.
by Usama Ahmad | Aug 26, 2017 | Roadmap
We were sent us a support ticket today asking:
“Is there a way to filter for repeat customers by specific ASIN?”
And we had to reluctantly respond that we do not have such facility.
This is not the first time such a question was asked and every time I bend my head in shame. Important as this function is, I have been resisting distracting Yasir and his team to develop it, as they are currently working on a very important piece of functionality which we have been yearning for, for ages.
So, as a stopgap measure, I have developed a Google sheet which provides the facility.
Don’t get me wrong, we will eventually add this functionality natively into SL, but for the moment, this will help those of you who want to create FaceBook custom and lookalike audiences from your customer data or use the info for marketing purposes.
In conjunction with the existing SL filters, this Google sheet will allow you to find customers with repeat orders for several use cases:
– By specific ASIN or by a list of specific ASINs
– By specific date range
– Excluding customers who have refunded
– By City, State or ZIP code
– Customers who participated in a specific promotion ID
– Or by any combination of the above
Please make a copy of the following Google sheet onto your own Google Drive and follow the instructions on the “Read Me First” tab of the sheet.
https://docs.google.com/…/1O1-kx4faMvLPLgvSySyFyQO4Sy…/edit…
by mgimena | Jan 1, 2017 | Roadmap
Here’s a bit of a roadmap for the 1st Half of 2017.
We intend to spend a good month cleaning up and implementing the following functionality:
Already Developed But Awaiting Quality Assurance
- Dramatically improved, intelligent versions of bulk COGS / Product Settings / OOE download and uploads
- Managing Max Order Quantities
- Role-based access permissions: Guest account segregation by marketplace and within marketplace, by screen
- See filter context without needing to access filter pane
- Add a product group, brand selector to both the Overall and Product Dashboard
- New overall Widget: Average Customer Lifetime Value
- Product Inventory: Reorder Quantity Calculation Enhancements
- Send SellerLegend subscriptions EU VAT invoices
- Two-Factor authentication login
- Save/Edit multiple user-customized views of any dashboard
- Interactive guided setup.
- Add a column to orders table to record order was refunded and date of refund
- Add the ability to assign custom nicknames to promo codes
- Ability to select multiple products at a time and assign Product Groups, Tags and other product specific settings to all of the selected products
- Allow a variable number of custom-defined fields on both orders and customers
Pipeline Improvements (resources assigned but development not yet started)
- Notifications: Excessive quantity ordered (when product order qty exceeds a preset value per product)
- Notifications: Out of pattern sales velocity
- Notifications: Amazon Settlement Transfer failed
- Notifications: Listing quality issues
- Notifications: Suppressed Listings
- Watchlist: Report on number of instances when customer hit the watchlist for the specific reason, with date of the last hit
- Product Dashboard: facility to enter a parent ASIN and obtain an aggregate dashboard of all the child ASINS
- Inventory: Storage Fee Calculator and Long Term Storage Fees Manager
- Convert FBM orders into multiple FBA orders
- In VAT Settings, add a date of registration. Do not calculate VAT for orders passed before the VAT registration date
- Additional Listing Changes functionality for split testing
- When customer refunds, add an automated customer note. Add the promo code if one was used, with text .
- When Order Item returned, add customer note with text ‘ASIN/SKU/Internal name returned by customer, ‘ [detailed_disposition], [reason], [status]
- In Inventory, add Get Inbound Guidance data
- Show an aggregate EU dashboard
New Features And Directions
- We have a long-standing commitment to developing an interface to the Nimble CRM. This is a sponsored development (meaning someone is providing us with the facilities for us to test it). As such, this will be the first ‘adaptor’ from SellerLegend to an external service. We intend to develop adaptors to popular 3rd party systems throughout 2017. Adaptors will be priced independently on top of the SellerLegend standard subscription.
- Talking about subscriptions, we will be soon be migrating from a single subscription fee to a subscription scheme based on numbers of orders per month and length of retained sales history. The single subscription fee does not allow us to adequately scale our offering. Indeed, we have a great number of sellers with well over 30,000 orders a month and 5-7 years of history, who are causing us to upgrade our servers to keep up with them. This is obviously not sustainable long term. Once the new subscription scheme is implemented, we will be moving from the wait-list model (join-by-invitation-only) to an immediate access model.
So, sometime by mid-February, we will again be able to focus on the more interesting features:
- PPC is again top of the list. This had to be delayed as the seller talent pool who were to assist us in the feature design were just too busy during the 4th quarter to pay any attention to us. In hindsight, we should have been able to predict this would be the case. What were we thinking … ?
- Another candidate feature for mid-Feb onwards is the Reimbursements Assistant (claiming for lost inventory, FC damaged inventory, returned inventory which is not for resale).
- We also have lots of ideas about some very cool inventory management and prediction features.
- We have lost interest in developing an email system. This is because we see a distinct possibility that Amazon will curtail the ability to communicate at will with your customer. So we will be sitting on the fence on that one and revisit in about 6 months time.
Looking into the near future, we can predict there will be a trend towards external PPC solutions and integration of 3rd party platforms and marketplaces, multi-channel fulfillment and the like, as sellers realize it is time to divest and build an e-commerce business rather than just be selling on Amazon. So, we’ll start analyzing what that means for us in the new year. If you have any suggestions we will be delighted to listen to you!
And we are constantly involved in capacity planning and performance enhancements to make sure that your response times are reasonable. We know performance is not stellar and we are unhappy about that. We will need to adopt a segregation strategy for high-volume accounts so that common mortal sellers enjoy a lot more breathing space.
So there you have it. A lot to do as we grow this baby into a respectable adolescent. I probably have left out a few things that you may have been expecting, but I have no doubt you will remind me if that is the case.
