How did you come to be selling on Amazon?

Ryan was a part of ASM and that what got him started. That’s what really piqued his attention. Ryan says that when he finds something he wants to do he really pushes ahead with it until he learns how to conquer it and ASM got him started on that.

He did very well on his first product despite it being a very commonly sold product on Amazon. He cites his creative thinking and hard working attitude to his success. He was able to take this generic item and really dominate the market with it. After his initial success, he was itching to expand with it.

From there he met with a good friend, Nakisha Muhammad and discussed some of the issues he was experiencing. She then became interested in Amazon selling and they went in together on a joint venture. She started seeing those same issues with seller central and limited reporting. She, being a world-class coder, approached Ryan saying she could build a solution. Together they worked on it and came up with their dream ‘seller central’. Thus, Hello Profit, was born.

What were the problems with seller central that made you feel the need to develop software to replace it?

In seller central, you see all these revenue numbers and it is extremely difficult to see what you’re actually profiting, even with Quickbooks or Xero. Once you have more than a couple skus, everything gets clumped together. If you launch a new item, it is difficult to see which one is profitable or which variation is actually profitable and which ones are draining you.

Can you describe the 3-5 commonest problems Amazon sellers have with profit and loss numbers on Amazon?

* Not being able to gauge how you are profiting

As mentioned before it is difficult to see where you are profiting. However, that really isn’t Amazon’s issue. It’s not the chore to make a cohesive solution. Their focus is customer service so there no benefit to them to make this. It’s up to us to understand how our business is doing.

2. The Payout Report

If you have ever downloaded this file, it is a mess. You could have 100,000 records of every little thing and way over on one side it the ascent it’s associated with. It is not humanly possible to go through all that manually, and figure out what’s happening.

3. Tracking Promotion Giveaways

It was difficult to tell how many promotions were given away on each day, and how that affects the bottom line. They give you that widget of like the top 5 promotional items, but if you have 10 or 50, that’s pretty much useless, plus it 24 hours behind or more.

How do you deal with Amazon ads costs?

A new feature that is going to be added to Hello Profit is a wizard that is going to help optimize ads. The purpose of HP is to help you see your real profit. Now. Amazon doesn’t make it easy to see this. So, HP pulls in reports through the API, and the main one is available the morning following today’s numbers. So you can’t see what today is doing, because the day isn’t finished, but you can see any day in the past, which is sufficient to tighten up your ad spending.

So, HP pulls that number in, on the merchant dashboard it deducts that range of ad spend from that range of sales. You can view the numbers from the very top, all the way down to every variation of every product and it pulls the information from every campaign and aggregates it for every product variation.

Do you deal with the keyword side of things, or strictly with the profit?

HP will have a campaign reports so you can see how your campaigns are doing. You choose any product you wish as well as any date range, unlike Amazon which only has a few predefined ranges.