As you watch President Trump solemnly swear to protect, defend and preserve the Constitution this morning, you may start to feel the winds of change around you.
“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.” – Winston Churchill.
Amazon seems to be taking this notion to heart, with another set of changes for their FBA store owners. Effective on February 22nd, Amazon will be consolidating fulfillment fees, with the (suspected) aim of increasing prices for store owners using their warehouses as a cheap source of storage. If you are sitting on stock for more than 60-90 days, you may wish to look further into your inventory levels to see how you might be affected. As always, we will be updating our Amazon FBA Policy Updates guide, so stay tuned for more information on this and other Amazon changes.
It’s not all doom and gloom for the outgoing Obama administration though. Stripe announced today it has hired Sarah Heck, Director of Global Engagement at the White House, currently serving as President Obama’s lead advisor on global entrepreneurship. At Stripe, Heck will be leading partnerships and external affairs for Stripe Atlas (where our good friend Patrick McKenzie now also resides) – a program aimed at helping people all over the world start internet businesses. Read the brief below for more details on this story.
In conference news, Founder Thomas Smale spoke at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas with Chuck Mullins last week on “How To 5x The Value of Your Affiliate Website in a Year“. Videos will be up on our YouTube channel soon!
And finally, if you have been waiting for a large advertising business, today is your lucky day! We have listed a $2.5M listing that generates a huge 14M pageviews per month. Aimed at the growing gaming and tech niche, this is one you don’t want to miss out on! But if you’re looking for SaaS, don’t worry we also just listed an online payments platform with increasing average revenue per month and multiple growth opportunities.
To check out what’s going on in mainstream news, read below on Google’s new acquisition, how to avoid Amazon long-term storage fees and updates to MozBar.
Deal Highlights
Display Advertising – Games and Tech Blog – 14M Pageviews/mo – $74K net/mo
- 18% compound monthly growth rate
- $74K net/mo for trailing three months
- 13 Facebook pages with 14 million likes
- 8.7M average monthly visitors in the trailing three months
- 90% net margin
Net Income: $892K
Asking Price: $2.25M
SaaS – Online Payments – $6.3K MRR
- 50%+ compound monthly growth since launch
- Product-first with 100% Javascript codebase
- Increasing average revenue per account
- c.89% net margins
- Multiple opportunities for growth in sales, marketing & customer success
Yearly Net Profit: $59K
Asking Price: $142K
Sold
Advertising/Digital Product – Healthy & Natural Living – $7K net/mo
In the News…
Obama’s Team is Looking for Jobs
While Obama and his team exit the White House, they will be looking for new job opportunities. As mentioned above, Stripe, online payment software platform, has hired Sarah Heck, the (now) former Director of Global Engagement and Obama’s lead advisor on global entrepreneurship. Heck’s new role at Stripe will be leading international affairs and partnerships for its Atlas service beginning in February.
Atlas currently has users in more than 110 countries, enabling them to start their own online business. It will be Heck’s responsibility to expand Atlas beyond the startup community and leverage her experience to reach nonprofits and entrepreneurs who lack resources and technology to start an online business.
Generally good news for Stripe users as Stripe grows as a global internet business.
Google Acquires Twitter’s Fabric Dev App
Google picks up Fabric, Twitter’s mobile app developer platform, and its suite of tools, Crashlytics, Answers, Digits and FastLane. The Fabrics team will join Google’s Developer Products Group, working alongside its Firebase team. Fabric was born in 2014 with the purpose to provide developers with a set of tools to help them improve their apps. It currently services 2.5 billion users and 580, 000 developers.
Twitter has been struggling the past year, evident when they began entering in acquisition negotiations. Desperate to find quick solutions, it has already shut down Dashboard and revamped Vine as Vine Camera.
In the Fabric to Google transition, the team members will be onboarded, while Digits will still be maintained by Twitter and Crashlytics will become Firebase’s main crash reporting tool.
In hopes that it can reduce loss and save itself, this is another attempt for Twitter to be acquisition ready. We shall see what will unfold this year.
Avoid Those Long-Term Storage Fees
If you’re an Amazon Seller, you’re probably dreading February 15th. Why? Every year on February 15 and August 15, Amazon enforces a long-term storage fee. Products that have been in FBA for 6-12 months are charged a fee of $11.25. If the product stays in FBA for more than 12 months, sellers are charged $22.50 per cubic foot of occupied shelf space.
To avoid these fees, SellerLabs suggests that you first try to run promos and lower prices for stagnant products. Snagshout is a tool that allows you to easily do this. Patrick, an Amazon seller was able to avoid a potential fee of $3,135. He did this by running a liquidation campaign via Snagshout and earned $627.84 in gross profit. He also ran discounts which improved his SEO ranking and in turn also increased sales.
From sales, he earned a gross profit of $1,251.78, with a total gross profit of $1,879.62.
If you’re looking to cut fees, check out Patrick’s method.
Voila! New MozBar
After realizing that MozBar was not succeeding as expected after its launch in 2016, the creators at Moz decided that 2017 should be the year of the MozBar and rebuilt the tool. The focus was stabilizing the foundation, which meant rebuilding from ground zero. Last year, MozBar was experiencing data issues that would spiral into other issues. So with a new solid foundation, MozBar now includes a new Page Optimization Feature and added On-Page Content Suggestions.
So what is MozBar? It’s a free Google Chrome extension that makes metric and SEO features easily accessible. The Page Optimization feature allows you to instantly receive page optimization details for any keyword on a page. The new On-Page Suggestions sort your top results for the keywords you’re optimizing for and order the most popular topics by relevance, which enables you to analyze any page and keyword combination.
If you’re an e-commerce business owner, Moz just released a guide on how to identify your product page keywords via MozBar. You might find this useful when you’re trying to decide on what keywords to place on your product pages. Check it out on the Moz blog!