If you're an Amazon seller like me, you'll definitely recognise this post's title. Since early September we've been receiving these emails warning us that if we don't sell our minimum quota (25 items for most) by the end of this month. I wrote a post about 1 month ago about using book sales to boost your numbers, but if you haven't had chance to stock up on cheap books, and it looks like you might miss the requirements, you can use a strategy that led to me developing my current book one. It's not pretty, but it will raise your sales numbers. In another earlier post I wrote about creating your own gap in the market by buying out competition. This works in the same way but is less glamorous and could actually lose you some money in the immediate short term. Sounds crazy? The way I see it is if you don't take the small hit (mine was £26 when I did this in 2011), you miss out on the 2 golden months for toy sales. About £10.13bn was spent on toys in Nov/Dec last year, more that 60% of annual toy sales. You'd be crazy to miss out on your share of that for £26. Anyway, the technique is
very simple. Go to
Amazon's bestselling books
page and buy however many books you need to make up your sales gap from any of the books that've been selling well for a while (at least 10 days). When they arrive, relist them straight away on Amazon, undercutting the lowest price by about 10p. Obviously the more popular the book, the quicker it'll resell. I tested this out for you guys and bought 5 copies of
The Fault in Our Stars
, all of them sold within 4 hours of me relisting them. An easy way to work out the rough loss per book is to just take the postage cost as your loss value. Like I said, see this as paying for your masive Christmas profits. Anyway, hope this helps anyone who thinks they'll miss their sales minimum.
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