Well, after spending a few months licking my wounds from April's financial disaster I thought I'd spend some time reflecting on March which was actually one of the best months the company has ever had in business (I'll get to April in a minute).

We finally managed to get the new 2015 Hibermate from China to Hong Kong to 3 Amazon Fulfilment warehouses in the United States.

That essentially meant that from the 3rd of March 2015 we were in business on Amazon.

Having said that, the company has also spent over $100,000 US dollars on even more new stock over February and March (most of which is currently enroute to Australia - due June 8th we hope - and some is going to Amazon to replenish stock levels there).

In order to fund such a big production run, we had to go into about $40K debt and I also tipped in $10,000 of my own money to keep things going. It's been a pretty risky time and everything needs to go as smoothly as possible to ensure we stay solvent!

It's fun running a business... but only sometimes.

April was obviously a complete disaster financially! In the end, I gave away almost 700 free Hibermates over Easter by mistake, valued at about $42,000 USD.

For March the total income:

March Amazon Sales: $15,696.90

March Website Sales: $20,769.75

March Total:                 $36,466.65

Screenshots

Then in April

Things got a lot harder to interpret! So much so that I've had to re-jig the accounting for these income reports.

The problem is that when Amazon 'sells' one of your products that's been 'promoted' (i.e. you've provided a discount of some sort) it still only shows you the 'non-promoted' value of what you sold in the top level reports. Basically after giving away a ton of stock worth about $45K, I think its safe to assume April was a complete and utter bust.

The following is the breakdown of typical reports which on the surface at least, shows a 'stellar' month:

April Amazon sales: $46,994.90

April Website Sales: $14,988.63

April Total:                 $61,983.53

Screenshots:

Wow. Yippee...

Not.

First of all, for some unknown reason, Hibermate.com website sales plummeted from March's $20,760 to April's $15,000. That's almost a $6,000 fall in revenue that I can only explain due to the shorter month and Easter. Why the conversion rate dropped from 3.5% to 3% is a mystery as there were no changes to the price or the website copy etc. 

Then there's the Amazon income, which looks great on paper, until you see the actual money Amazon paid the company...

Here's an actual screenshot showing the disbursements over that period:

A massive drop in income to say the least and a mistake that I'll never, ever, make again.

That's for sure.

And May's not looking too good either... I'll update you on May's figures in the next day or 2 as well as an update (now available) on why I think Amazon removed over 60 five star reviews from my product listing pages. In hours, we went from 97 reviews with an average 4.5 star rating, to 32 reviews with a 3.6 star rating... see below...

Before:

And then after:

When Amazon sinks the boots, it seriously hurts.

They sure don't care much for the little guys.

Anyway, interesting times indeed. Let's hope we can make it through.