The Best Way to Use Amazon Quiet Periods

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As an Amazon seller with a few years behind me, I can’t believe that I’m still constantly surprised by my sales. It used to be the case that I could reliably say that I knew what times of the year it would be easier to source deals and what times of the year would be dry. As time has gone on and unprecedented events have hit us, I can no longer predict when I’m going to be busy trying to dig for gold, and when I can take my hands off the wheel.

As I’ve got multiple businesses – Amazon selling being just one – I have to pick and choose when I’m going to focus my time into making it my priority. I tend to do less for Amazon at times when I’ve restocked and when I expect that sales should be slower.

If I was full-time on Amazon, these are the things I would be focusing my time on:

Optimising Processes

This comes first. The only reason why I’m able to generate thousands of pounds of sales every month and treat Amazon as a side thing these days is because I spent so much time refining my processes, so I only have to spend a fraction of my working week on Amazon-related things.

I have made sure that my tools, team and past activity is doing all the work for me. If you find that you spend loads of time copying and pasting things on Amazon, you need to invest in software that does this for you. If you’re manually repricing your inventory, you need to find a better way of doing it. And write it all down.

Building Up Your Team

Having a team means multiplying your time. I agree that it’s very daunting having this extra expense when it was previously just you on your own, but how exactly are you going to grow if you’re working at your full capacity with all the time you have available to you.

When things are quiet, it’s the best time to train other people how to do parts of your job, so that you can hand it off to others whose responsibility it will be to do these things – and do them well!

Analysing Your Inventory

Do a real deep dive into the things that you sell and understand why you bought them, whether they were good purchases and how you’re going to advance from here. If I ever sit on any stock, I try and figure out how I could have made the mistake and how to avoid it in the future. The same goes for great buys – I need to set it processes to make it easier to acquire more of them in the future.

This is a truly underrated task, as lots of people just get into the habit of buying from the same places, getting the same products and so on. Once they face a roadblock – like a discontinuation or increased competition – they don’t know how to respond to it. It’s up to you to be prepared for anything, and that starts with your inventory.