Original Post:

Happy New Year Everyone! It’s the beginning of another month, and that means that it is time for me to share my financial results from the past month.  This is my third month selling online since quitting my job in September.  You can find the post with October’s results HERE, and November’s results HERE, if you would like to compare to my results this month.  From last month’s post you can see that my goal for this month was to have at least $6,500 in profit and to continue to increase the percentage of my profits that are coming from Amazon FBA.

First, a little background on how my time was spent this month, and then we’ll get to the numbers.  December has been a very busy month for me, but a significant portion of my time was spent on activities not related to earning this income, which is a very cool thing.  For the first week of December I put in well over 40 hours of work, as I knew that I would not have as much time available later in the month.  From December 9th through the 21st, the majority of my waking hours were spent working on my other business, www.textbooks4you.com, and I spent at most 2-3 hours per day related to online selling.  For Christmas, I did not work from the 22nd through the 27th, and also did not work from the 30th to the 31st to spend time with family and friends over the holidays.  So, my efforts directly related to selling things online for profit were somewhat limited due to my other business and time off.

Before we get to the numbers, one more topic to discuss.  My goal with sharing my financial results is to prove that this can be done, and is not meant to be seen as bragging or anything of that sort.  I just want to show that working hard and smart, and sticking with your plan  can pay off.

December 2013 Financial Results

With that said, let’s get to it.  The numbers below are basically the profits that I am making for the month.  The profits are calculated only on items that have been sold and shipped during the month.  They were calculated by taking selling prices, minus all fees, minus all shipping and packaging costs, and subtracting the cost of the items.  The number shown in the FBA profits for the month also factor in returns of products, shipping costs to ship products to amazon, and inventory reimbursements from amazon for products that were damaged at amazon warehouses.  This won’t be the exact number that goes on my tax returns as there will be additional deductions for mileage, cell phone, home office, etc.  However, these are costs I would generally be incurring anyway, so for simplicity I will be leaving them out of the calculations.  Also for clarity, this does not include any income from www.textbooks4you.com, it is simply my income from amazon and eBay.  My goal for the month was exceeded by over 38% which I am very happy about! This is due largely to the work that I completed in November and the first weeks of December building up inventory, as in the middle and end of December my time was largely spent elsewhere.

Another very large factor is that people are buying gifts for Christmas.  The demand for items is very high this time of year and that leads to sales for sellers who have items that are often given as gifts in stock.  I tried to sell as many of this type of item as possible during December to cater to these buyers.  As with last month, there were several items that I made over $100 profit on that helped boost the profit numbers, but the bulk of the increase can be attributed to the large increase in volume, as this month I sold 969 items and last month it was 299.

Here some screenshots from my amazon and eBay accounts to provide some backup for these numbers(click to enlarge):

These are the same 2 as last month.  Amazon recently added a sales by product report to show which categories sales are coming from, here’s a look at this report for December:

This report shows that the bulk of my sales came from the toy and grocery categories.  I have been working on finding as many grocery items as possible, as they are easily replenish-able and can provide a consistent stream of income.  The toys category was one that I put extra focus on during November and early December as I wanted to capitalize on people buying toys for gifts.  As a result, this was my largest category for the month in total sales dollars on amazon.

I am very excited by these results so far.  I am really looking forward to the next year to see what I can do with this business, as I have seen many people post results much greater than this who have been operating a similar business for just a few years.  I will be doing a separate post next week to outline my goals for 2014, so stay tuned!

If you enjoyed reading, sharing is always appreciated!

Click here for my results from January 2014.