Get ready for a masterclass into inventory management, a critical skill for any e-commerce seller looking to reach their full potential. In this episode of the Seller’s Edge, we’re joined by Chelsea Cohen, a seasoned expert who has been helping Amazon sellers optimize their inventory strategies for years. As the founder of SoStocked, Chelsea brings endless knowledge to the table, covering everything from navigating Amazon’s trapdoor policies to implementing inventory-minded marketing strategies. As you’re prepping for Prime Day, intent on avoiding storage fees and costly mistakes, Chelsea’s insights will provide actionable steps to improve your inventory performance and boost your bottom line. Read the full transcript below.
Episode 32 of The Seller’s Edge – Chelsea and Jonathan talk about:
- [00:00] Introduction to Prime Day Inventory Prep
- [00:54] Current State of Inventory Management
- [02:47] Common Mistakes Sellers Make
- [05:30] Inventory-Minded Marketing
- [07:23] How Soon Should Sellers Plan Their Inventory
- [08:31] Demand Forecasting without Data
- [09:35] Overstocked vs. Understocked
- [10:46] Leveraging Buffer Stock
- [11:56] Inventory Performance Index Score
- [14:58] Liquidating Slow-Moving Inventory
- [16:10] Inventory Removals
- [18:54] Working Capital for Inventory Purchases
- [20:58] Planning for Supply Chain Disruptions
- [22:28] Managing Inventory After Prime Day
- [25:56] Best Inventory Management Tools
- [27:20] The Future of Inventory Management
- [30:18] Profit Forecasting
- [33:17] Recap and Closing Remarks
Key Takeaways:
- Re-evaluate Your Overstocking Risk: Assess the true cost of overstocking, including storage fees and potential losses due to aged inventory, especially before Prime Day or any seasonal surges.
- Implement Inventory-Minded Marketing: Tighten your approach to marketing and inventory. Review forecasts and inventory data to align marketing campaigns with available stock.
- Diversify Your Fulfillment Strategy: Don’t rely solely on Fulfillment By Amazon. Explore AWD as a backup solution to mitigate risks associated with FBA delays or restrictions.
- Refine Your Forecasting Process: Use historical data from similar products as well as competitor analysis to forecast demand for new products. Utilize tools like Keepa to understand market trends.
- Optimize Inventory Metrics: Focus on improving in-stock rates, sell-through rates, and reducing excess inventory to positively influence your storage capacity and overall inventory position.
- Proactively Liquidate Slow-Moving Inventory: Implement strategies like price drops, bundling, or liquidation programs to free up storage space and generate cash flow before peak seasons.
Full Transcript of Episode:
JONATHAN: I’m not a huge inventory expert, so I’m really, I have so many questions. I want to learn a lot. I’m curious just in the last few years, like what, what have been the major developments as far as inventory management is concerned?
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah, last five years things have changed a lot. They really started changing dramatically with COVID Right. So it was a problem. It became much more of a problem with, with COVID Supply chain went crazy. Amazon put on restrictions, so called restock limits. So all of a sudden you had people who are used to sell sending direct to FBA having to figure out how to get a third party warehouse. Now you had not just to forecast for your orders, but forecast for transfers, forecast based on how much inventory you could send in. And so that was a whole evolution in itself. Amazon then tweaked that to do capacity manager, which basically is, you know, this is your restriction. If you want more, you can pay us. But here are the stipulations. And so they laid out some ground rules on that and then they created Amazon warehousing and distribution. So that’s kind of been the. The evolution has been restock limits. Then you can bid for space. A ton of fees came into play about inventory. So you have too much inventory, it’s been sitting there too long. You’re going to pay a ton in fees called, you know, aged inventory fees. Then they introduced low inventory fees and then they introduced Amazon where housing and distribution was like basically will be your 3 PL. And you can forego a lot of these fees but you have to basically be stuck with Amazon’s system.
JONATHAN: Yeah. And then what are some of the most common mistakes you see people make with inventory? Especially around like something like seasonal surges or prime day.
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah, interestingly enough, kind of unpopular opinion, overstocking, putting, sending in too much inventory and that, you know, with my business back in 2018, that was a huge problem for me is when you overestimate that can be sometimes more expensive than underestimating. So I think that obviously we say, you know, stocking out is a problem or I like to say putting all your eggs in one basket, not having the backup plans of, you know, giving everything to Amazon and saying, you know, hopefully Amazon doesn’t screw up. You know, so that’s a problem that gets into stock outs. But I think it’s very underrated to overestimate, to say, I think I’m going to be doing really well this prime day and over order and I think sending everything into Amazon, having a bunch of stuff in there, you know, rather than dripping it in. I think it’s more important to head your bet and say, okay, well you know, this is best case scenario. But if I, you know, prime day seasonally or whatnot, what would happen if I hit my, my base, I didn’t sell all that I sold. What is the, what are the financial implications of that inventory sitting there and forecasting into the future, being able to see what is the, the damage of aged inventory and storage fees with all of that sitting there? Because it can be very substantial.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I’m sure. It’s so funny because I worked at, for an aggregator and there were many brand managers and for a time they were all keeping track of their inventory in a single Google sheet, which was not probably the best way to do it because obviously there were, you know, fat finger errors and all sorts of things like people changing copy and paste errors. So it was just like the discrepancies in inventory were just off the charts.
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah, yeah. And that’s the crazy thing for me is because we worked with a lot of, and still do work with aggregators, the crazy thing when we first started talking to aggregators was to find out that brand managers manage their own inventory. And so it’s basically you’ve got a brand manager that’s running an entire Amazon business without the upside of the business. You know, you go, you could go down a rabbit hole of that whole topic. But it was very shocking to me to find out that that was what was happening. And still our number one competitor is the Excel spreadsheet.
JONATHAN: I’m a die hard devotee of Excel versus Google Sheets because Google Sheets is a nightmare. Can you explain this concept of inventory minded marketing?
CHELSEA COHEN: So when we started out, one of the problems with the other software that was out there is that it was missing that component of adjusting a forecast based on your future marketing plans. So I came up with a term called inventory minded marketing to, to drive home the idea that you need to have these two teams speaking and coordinating in order to avoid stock outs and to mitigate overstock. To have not just the marketing team give data to the inventory team, but to have inventory proactively saying, hey, here’s these products you know they’re going to stock out, or here’s products that are overstocked, slow sellers. It’s going to cost you. You should market these products. And so it’s that interchange that increases the likelihood that you’ll have success in inventory management.
JONATHAN: I love that. And it makes perfect sense. And like, why wouldn’t you Be doing that. It seems just like, you know, the left hand and the right hand. I’m curious, why do you think that disconnect was there in the first place? Do you think it’s just like one. Marketing probably always feels like they have a more important job than inventory so they don’t get their hands dirty.
CHELSEA COHEN: Right. So, yeah, marketing, they. They tend to be, you know, shoot from the hip. So they’ll get an idea, they’ll try it, it’ll start to pick up, you know, steam. They will just run with it and just push as much as possible without, you know, it’s kind of tunnel vision. They’re seeing this great thing happening, and they’re just really, like, all in on it without really looking at the burn rate, you know, so. And I actually had a couple that I talked to a friend of mine. They were a husband and wife team, and they had the same problems where they put their heads on the scene, on the, the pillow next to each other every night, but there was still that disconnect.
JONATHAN: That’s funny. And I mean, it’s just like, I feel like it’s human nature and like so many times, and it’s like so many different situations too, because I’ve been talking to a number of people in so many different areas of a business that, like those silos and the walls between and like, how, how, how, like, it’s amazing that someone has not figured out how to break those down, really, like, make something a cohesive unit across the board.
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
JONATHAN: Speaking of, like, times like, you know, seasonal surges or prime day, what’s the best as far as, like, how far in advance should sellers be thinking about planning their inventory strategy?
CHELSEA COHEN: Months. I mean, you know, prime day is usually in June. They start looking at the data. If they have a large order, they need to make sure that their factories have the capacity to produce that. So starting those conversations, looking at the data and putting in those orders, you know, the first step is to ask your supplier, how long does it take? Because, you know, it’s not as dramatic a thing, but similar to when you, you know, usually place your orders July or August for, you know, the fourth quarter. It’s not the same, but it, it is a longer Runway. You have to do the analyzing and you have to do the, the orders in advance because of the large size and get those orders in before your competitors.
JONATHAN: It just baffles me because it’s just an area of the business that, again, like marketing, I was one of those assholes, for example, that, you know, had that disconnect. So it’s just really enlightening to hear all of this. I’m curious about. How can sellers accurately demand forecast, especially when it comes to products that they don’t really have a lot of sales history data for.
CHELSEA COHEN: Generally, it’s looking at similar products that they have similar products in their catalog and looking at the trends for those. And if they don’t, then it’s going to Amazon and seeing what are. What is the sales volume? You know, where do I essentially, you know, you’ve got competitors, what are they doing? What’s the market size? What do I think that I can, you know, take from that When I get to page one, when do I expect to get to page one? So taking those things and Keepa is a great tool. If you have the tool Keepa, that’ll give you historical. I think it might be a paid subscription to give you historical. I’m not sure. But that’s definitely a way to go about it. Getting those top competitors and figuring out, you know, are there. Are there sales spikes, is it rather steady so that you can kind of build a roadmap for your product?
JONATHAN: You mentioned as far as, like, people overstocking when it comes to the sales surges, I’m curious, like, how can sellers best kind of balance that, being understocked and overstocked? And are there any sort of specific strategies you’d have them approach that with.
CHELSEA COHEN: Amazon makes it hard. Like, you have to kind of thread the needle. So there’s never going to be a perfect system. The problems come when Amazon says, here’s the deadline. You won’t get your stuff in after this point. Point. So everyone puts their stuff in and sends it in in desperation. There are a couple of different things that you could do. I would say, you know, sending an inventory. You could use AWD as a backup, right? Having extra inventory there. Because if your inventory gets stuck at FBA, the fees are insane. You know, you have. It’s $0.78 per cubic foot. Fourth quarter, it’s $2.40 per cubic foot. And then you have aged inventory. If you. If the. I like to say, if the music stops, right, and you’re stuck somewhere, might as well be stuck at AWD. No aged inventory fees and 48 cents per cubic foot. So having that as a backup is a good idea. Always having some sort of buffer stock, right? Some extra stock that you can send in. And then I like to say having inventory that’s already produced and sitting at your suppliers so that if you do great, if it goes gangbusters. You can then contact your supplier and say, you know, ship the inventory over. Rather than saying, I’m placing an order, please ship it over. It’s. You have it there. So all you’re waiting for is the actual transit time as opposed to production time. So. So those are kind of, you know, cover your bases. And then the last thing that is helpful is if you really need to get inventory in to Amazon, doing small parcel delivery, even though it’s more expensive, that inventory goes straight to the docks and gets unloaded, as opposed to, if you send, you know, a truckload, they’ll take the, they’ll usually take the container and they’ll put it off to the side while they fulfill all the orders. So that is a way that you can get things into Amazon more quickly.
JONATHAN: I like those. I like that AWD is like the lesser of two evils. Like, it’s just like, yeah, I like that. And then talk to me about the inventory performance index and how does that affect a seller strategy going into something like Prime Day.
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah. So you always want to have your, your IPI score above, I believe it’s 400 now. It’s, you know, changed back and forth over the years, but I believe it’s 400. And Amazon will restrict your storage capacity based on that. It has less weight than it used to because there’s capacity manager, but it does, it will impact what Amazon is going to offer you in terms of the space. So it has some bearing on that. There are different formulas at play and Amazon likes to build, build different algorithms that don’t talk to each other and that conflict. So it definitely is, you know, has less impact. A friend of mine who’s probably one of the smartest people when it comes to warehousing, he has, has tested it out and he said, you know, there are a couple of people we worked with where their scores were dropping for no reason. You know, one, one client sent me trying to figure out. It keeps dropping. And I was looking at the metrics. I was like, you know, all of your metrics are good. You could, you know, increase your sales velocity. Right. But it’s all going in the right direction from your side and going in the wrong direction from the point side. And so, you know, talk to him. And his name is James McConnell. He basically was like, look, we’ve, we’ve done studies. It’s not as impactful. Like, it doesn’t make sense. And so it’s, it’s not as impactful, but Amazon is probably looking at those same types of metrics. It’s just I think that the IPI score is, is tweaked. Something broke there possibly. But the same types of things, you know, keeping your in stock rate, making sure that you’ve got, you know, a good sell through, making sure that you don’t have a lot of excess inventory. All of those different markers should be watched but because they’re going to influence your capacity. So they’re definitely markers that should be watched. Those are more important than the actual number itself I think at this point. So using the, the index from the perspective of not just the, not the number but the actual kind of substance.
JONATHAN: That’s interesting because I feel like there are a few other things I’ve been talking about recently where I feel like they’ve become antiquated and yet Amazon sort of still mentions them. And I’m like, I don’t know why we’re still having this conversation when it doesn’t matter anymore.
CHELSEA COHEN: Well, yeah, I mean the employees don’t know. You know, I have an 8 figure seller I was talking with and they were saying when the low inventory fees came out, they were asking their, the representative, you know, eight figure seller, their Amazon rep and he started explaining it as a storage fee when it’s a fulfillment fee. So I was like, they don’t, they don’t know. Even the, you know, the reps for the big sellers don’t, don’t understand those things. So it’s, you know, one hand not knowing what the other hand is doing.
JONATHAN: Yeah. And I mean all this stuff sort of escapes me just because I’m so distant from supply chain inventory and fulfillment. What are some effective strategies you would recommend to sellers for liquidating slow moving inventory before something like Prime Day to free up cash and storage space?
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah. So you know, dropping the price. If you have an email list doing sales via email deals of the day. Amazon has a liquidation program where you could get a little bit of money back. It’s, you’ll take a big hit to, you know, your profit. You’ll probably sell at a loss, but you will get some cash back. It’s a better alternative to, let’s say, you know, removals which cost a lot of money. So liquidation programs that are external liquidation programs as well. So. And then if you have other ways to sell on those channels, you know, on different channels that might make sense. Bundling is a good idea. Taking some of your slower sellers to creating virtual bundles to, to sell them off with your best sellers, get some visibility. So those are kind of some of the the ways to go about it. If you’re running DSP campaigns, it might make sense to do DSP since the cost per click is a lot cheaper than, you know, if you run a PPC ad.
JONATHAN: I haven’t even thought about removals because I always hear about people, like, selling through their inventory. So I’m curious, like, what does that actually look like and how much does that cost? Do we have any sense of that?
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah. So removals are. Yeah. Amazon basically charges you to remove your inventory. They will then send it to a location that you want them to and they’ll charge you a fee for it. The fee, when I was selling, the fee was $0.20 per unit. And in third quarter, you could pull inventory out for free before to free up space. And Amazon basically said you can, you know, within this window of time, you can pull inventory out. You won’t be able to send it for three, three months. So you wanted to make sure to not pull everything out. But it was free. And now it’s based on dimensional weight, which is the greater of a size calculation or weight. Because it looks at, if I’ve got a truck, I can only fit so many pounds and so much space. So instead of just measuring things by weight, they measure things by space as well. And they say your billable weight is, you know, your actual weight is 10 pounds, but your billable weight is 15 pounds because you’ve got your pillow and the pillow is big, and we can’t fit as many pillows on as we can gold bricks. So it’s based on that. The. Instead of a per unit cost like it was, it’s based on dimensional weight. And so you could Pay, you know, $14 to remove a single unit with, you know, large, lightweight products. It’s, it’s very, very expensive. Not often does it make sense. And some people don’t even realize how expensive it is. You know, we’ll talk to people, we do a profit audit where we’ll, you know, for free. We’ll look at the entire catalog and say, you know, here’s your situation. We’ll bring to light a lot of aged inventory. We’ll send it, you know, and send. Here’s your free thing. Before we discuss what’s, you know, what next steps are, they’ll, you know, come back to the next call, be like, oh, I just removed all this stuff, and removal will cost you more than six months worth of aged inventory. Like, it’s, it can be very expensive unless you have a plan for how you’re gonna make money. Say, oh, I’LL set sell it on, you know, my Shopify site or something like that.
JONATHAN: That’s insane. And it’s so, it’s just interesting cause like you have something like reimbursement fees for like, you know, break it and or like loss. It’s just like the fact that you have to go like fight tooth and nail to get something like that and meanwhile they charge like astronomical fees. Yeah, it’s just bananas. Would you have any insights on how sellers can balance using working capital towards inventory purchases and marketing spend?
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah. So in terms of the working capital, it’s. There are some things that are kind of overlooked. First place I, I would say to look is look at your, your current products, your slow sellers, your aged inventory. The. There’s money just going out the door. If you’re being charged aged inventory, that’s money that is, you know, being pulled from your cash flow on a regular basis. And that’s capital that’s tied up. So that’s kind of the first place to look. I advise people, you know, start looking at your business differently. Look at it as, you know, you’ve got capital sitting there rather than just focusing on revenue driving. It’s. Let’s recapture some of that capital even if it’s at a loss. You know, everyone hates to sell at a loss, but they don’t realize that they might already be selling at a loss if they’re incurring those storage fees. So that’s an approach. And then the other side is negotiating terms with your supplier. That’s a huge one. A lot of people, you know, try to negotiate profit, but terms can be much more impactful, especially if you’ve got cash flow problem. So negotiating terms. And one of the things that people sellers will do is they’ll pay for, let’s say three months of inventory. They’ll order it, they’ll pay 30% up front and then they’ll work with their supplier so that they’re only paying for what ships and, and shipping on a monthly basis. Produce three months worth of inventory, your supplier oftentimes will hold that inventory up to three months for free. So you’ve got the inventory sitting there. You’re not paying for local storage, you’re not paying Amazon fba and then you’re trickling it out and your cash flow is realigned to the flow of your revenue.
JONATHAN: That’s amazing. I’m curious. You mentioned Covid, obviously, and supply chain interruptions, which I feel like people have now realized that that can happen. Like are there, are there ideas that you might have for sellers to create effective contingency plans for supply chain disruptions without overextending their inventory position.
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah, so kind of back to that example of producing more inventory. Having your supplier keep that inventory on hand and then kind of drip it in that one is really effective. Having a third party warehouse is effective. So someone you know outside of Amazon holding inventory, it would be good idea to have them be able to also fulfill from there or have a separate fulfillment so that Amazon, you know, maybe even all your sales are happening on Amazon, but it should not be your only distribution channel. So if anything happens, you know, with your inventory getting stuck somewhere or lost, you know, we’ve had inventory lost during Christmas, you’ll still have the ability to pivot and distribute your products to customers. Sell through Amazon’s platform. Distribute even better if you have a company that is registered as seller fulfilled so that they can Seller fulfilled Prime so that they can fulfill your inventory to the standards where you still get the prime badge.
JONATHAN: I mean, as far as like, you know, post mortems on Prime Day, like what are the best ways to consider post Prime Day inventory levels and what strategies do you recommend for managing that that in the aftermath?
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah, so we talked about the, the side of things in terms of how to get inventory back in stock. But then the other thing to consider and Prime Day, they, they did this last year, they may not do it. They haven’t announced whether they’re going to do it this year. But if you had a Prime Day deal, they would allow you to have four weeks worth of sales after Prime Day that were not subject to low inventory level fees. So it’s important to have a strategy or at least factor in that you might be hit with low inventory fees after a big sales event. We don’t know if Amazon’s going to award it. You can also have deals without Prime Day sales without, you know, having any Prime Day deals. So Amazon wouldn’t necessarily award you that, you know, forgiveness of those fees. So knowing how that whole thing works, generally if you have a huge spike, a huge sales season coming out, not immediately, but about two to three weeks after that big event, the algorithm is skewed so that they’ll, you’ll start incurring low inventory fees. So that’s something to keep in mind. If it is a slow season or a slow period that’s, you know, you’re going to have those fees, but you’re not going to necessarily be heavily impacted. But you might want to consider adjusting your pricing up a little bit as you start to, you know, as you incur those fees, it’ll offset the costs and it’ll also slow down your sales generally going to slow down your sales a little bit faster so that as time goes on with the slower sales, that big spike rolls off and then you stop getting charged those fees because you get out of threshold.
JONATHAN: Interesting. What does that look like for most sellers in January? I’m curious, just like after Q4.
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah. I mean I haven’t taken a strong look at it. The if a person is running out of stock, then that’s going to be a problem. For those that don’t sell through their whole stock, that’s not as much of a problem. And the period of time is long enough and steady enough that I doesn’t seem to have as big of an impact as let’s say back to school, which is usually, you know, month, you know, a month spike and then you know, after, because Amazon’s looking at 30 days and 90 days. So if, if you’ve got 30 days of fairly consistent that or 90 days of fairly consistent, that 30 day spike isn’t going to be as, you know, as detrimental. But it is those, those huge spikes Prime Day, you may be able to get around prime day. So it’s not, none of it’s as, as, as impactful as people thought it was going to be, but it is those, those shorter spikes that can get you.
JONATHAN: Yeah, I just know it like I haven’t seen what most sellers are like. So I’m just curious, like I always assume that, you know, November and December is that like spike and then January is like a hard kind of like chickens come home to roost. CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah. Exactly, yeah.
JONATHAN: Yeah. And I mean all this stuff sort of escapes me just because I’m so distant from supply chain inventory and fulfillment.
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah.
JONATHAN: I’m curious like are there any specific tools that you would recommend to sellers for visualization and planning for inventory?
CHELSEA COHEN: It’s important to have a tool that works on a timeline so that you can actually see in the future. You know, one of the reasons that we built so stocked was because we don’t have it did the other tools only would tell you what your next order is and wouldn’t tell you with transparency what all those things were that made up that order. So having that transparency was important in what we, we built and we operate on a one year timeline so that you can predict on an annual basis. So that’s always been the foundation. But then we’ve been doing more and more to put the, the fees structure into that. So you can see, based on my, you know, based on my forecast right now, what aged inventory and storage fees am I going to be accumulating? And more and more, we’re actually getting close to releasing profit forecasting, which doesn’t exist right now and is a huge problem for people being able to look at, I’m profitable today, but three months from now, is this product going to be profitable? So it’s, you know, I think it’s important to, to shift the community toward offering those things because they’re not being offered right now and it’s, you know, it’s a huge problem.
JONATHAN: That’s brilliant. I love that. And then looking ahead, I mean, how do you see inventory management evolving over.
CHELSEA COHEN: The next several years because of all the fees? It’s gonna, it’s going to be something that people will have to adapt to, just getting better at it. I think people are going to start seeing how being more conservative might make more sense. Being more conservative with virality, that was one of the big things that we were working with a client and they had like $45,000 in monthly aged inventory fees that were going to be increasing month over month because they had huge viral event and then ordered based on that huge viral event, thinking that it was just, you know, a new normal. And so really figuring, okay, if I’m doing TikTok or if I’m doing, you know, these various different things, that’s going to create disruption in your normal patterns. And so having to change your strategy to sending smaller orders more frequently as opposed to, you know, going all in, that’ll have to be a shift as we have more social commerce. I think just based on, you know, what we’ve personally seen where people’s response has been, actually it would have been better to stock out. And you’ll see on D2C websites, people stocking out, you know, you’ll see promotions back in stock or coming back in stock, sign up for, you know, whatever. So as a lot of D2C brands are used to, if they’re really popular, especially if they’re products, you know, beauty products or whatnot that take a while to produce, they’ll constantly have these stock outs and rather than thinking of it as lost revenue, realize that you got all the revenue, but you just got it up front. The real risk is Amazon’s algorithm being upset and you having to re rank. But it can be more of a risk to overstock so much that you’re paying $45,000 a month in aged inventory fees.
JONATHAN: You know, it’s so interesting just because again, like, it’s something that’s just so outside of the part of the business that I normally look at. So it’s just like. Oh yeah, there’s just like so much here. Like, obviously I knew. I mean, I look at talk to people in supply chain or inventory and my mind just like, I feel like it takes a very specific person to be able to do that. And mostly marketing is creative, so it’s just like we stay well aware of it, but we like to make their lives more difficult, apparently.
CHELSEA COHEN: Well, that’s why we come back to, you know, how crazy it was that the aggregators were having the, you know, the marketers do the inventory.
JONATHAN: It’s baffling. It really is. And then as far as like, you know, is there something that we might not have covered or an offering from so stock that we might not have talked about that you want to discuss?
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah, we are doing a lot with. I kind of touched on it, profit and profit forecasting. And it’s been a huge piece that’s missing in, you know, in the offerings for software and the offerings just in general in training. So that’s been a lot of what we’ve talked about. It hadn’t been as much of a problem before the fees, but with storage fees, aged, inventory fees, all of the, the tariffs are changing. You know, shipping costs have fluctuated a lot over the years. There’s not a lot of transparency as to, you know, is my product not just profitable today, but profitable, you know, tomorrow? Or I am not as profitable as I thought. I go to sell my business, you know, true story. A friend who’s a broker had someone who thought they were at 20% margin to be acquired, 6% margin. So if you’re able to see your business and go, okay, here’s all, you know, shocker. I’m at a, you know, 6% margin or I’m at an 18% margin. I need to get to 20, be able to see which of those products are actually dragging down your margins. Maybe you’re making less revenue, but your margin actually gets to the range. There’s not tools that do that. So that’s one of the things we’re, you know, working on and we’ll be releasing soon. There’ll be iterations of it, but it’s. The goal is to get you closer and closer to actually understanding where your business is going to be in the future so that you can strategically make the decisions today that will impact, you know, Q4 when it comes around and you’re doing, you know, hit by $25,000 storage fee bill in November, which high seven figure sellers are shocked when they get this huge bill. You know, I’ve had people say, oh, you know, how do I get that money back? It’s not like, read the policy, you’re not getting it back. It’s not a mistake. You know, it is. What, what happened. So, been a huge, you know, champion for understanding what’s coming so that a stick of dynamite doesn’t become a grenade blowing up in your face. So that’s what we’re, we’re working on now. And we’re excited to be able to, to release that we’ve been offering profit audits. And so that will help to more greatly improve the benefit besides just giving the data, being able to give data on an ongoing basis so that sellers can actually use it to plan and to decide, you know, am I getting the biggest ROI on this product? Could I increase profit margin? Should I get rid of those products so that I can launch new, higher, you know, ROI products? Just thinking differently about your business because you can see it in black and white and it’s not just this kind of gut or it’s not just tunnel vision of, you know, revenue.
JONATHAN: Yeah, that’s great. I love that I’m going to have to have you back as you roll out those iterations and we can talk through case studies and stuff, because that’s just fascinating to me.
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah. I love that.
JONATHAN: Cool. Yeah. Chelsea, I appreciate it so much. Thank you.
CHELSEA COHEN: Yeah. Thanks for having me.
