[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here has been a lot of “heated” debates about whether or not you should let Amazon label your products on Facebook groups, in Amazon selling forums, Reddit and other places.  Whenever a decision comes down to impacting your businesses bottom line then, ANY, substantive and educated discussion around the subject is good for everyone. That’s the American spirit.  Debate and decide.

True costs explained

What we hear a lot of the debate centered around for labeling is the cost. Currently, Amazon charges $.20 cents per item if you ask them to label your product for you.  In order to make the idea more digestible, we wanted to share a cost example with a “volume” type of item that a lot of sellers are selling on Amazon. CDs. This could be the same for books as well and we know there are a lot of book sellers out there in Amazon ecosystem.  Same math applies for Private Label or Online Arbitrage sellers too. The chart is a little hard to see at it’s total length so we broke it up into two sections for you. The formula is pretty straight foward:

Sales Price of CD (minus) Cost of CD (minus) Cost of Labeling (minus) Cost of Supplies

And this first clip is on the “low end” of quantity, cost and profit.  Here is the same scale on the higher end of it so you can see the multiples.

So if you we’re able to sell all 1000 of your CDs for a minimum price of $9.99 then you would gross around $9,000 dollars. We didn’t back out the cost of labeling in the formula, but you can see it would cost you another $200 in profit.

The question we want to start a conversation around is if that $200 in savings is worth the time it takes to label those 1000 CDs?  Especially if you stand to make $8, 890 in profit.

True cost of your time

So the math we believe works out to be about 2.2% roughly on the 1000 CD example from above.  That’s how much profit you’re giving up in order to allow Amazon to label your products for you.

But wait,there is more… (I always wanted to say that)

If you chose to do the labeling yourself, then there are some hidden costs that you can’t forget about.  For example, those labels that you apply yourself, they cost cost money.

So now the cost savings to do your labeling is lower.  The item above (we made it a live link to Amazon if you really want to buy these labels) is for 1000 labels exactly (fits our example perfectly) and costs around $12.88 on a prime offer with no shipping.

So now the costs savings is reduced to: $200 – $12.88 = $187.12 or less if you didn’t get free shipping

But let’s keep it at the $187 figure for now.

But I can hire employees to do this work and pay less?

You sure can.  But is your small business ready to hire on your first employee?  Are you going to hire on this first employee just to help you label your items?  If you hired on a helper at $10 an hour, then of course there would be savings because it wont take someone 18 hours to label 1000 CDs.

So if you already have employees in place then your most likely a green seller and labeling would be a perfect task to keep them busy and gainfully employed.

But if you don’t already have employees then we would like you to consider these potential costs or hiccups:

• Costs of payroll and accounting (even if you use quickbooks, Xero or some other platform…they cost money)
• Adding an employee usually means more billable hours for your accountant because he’ll need to make sure your on the straight and narrow with Uncle Sam
• Costs of liability if your employee files a wage claim against you (you can’t always just 1099 them, check your local state laws and be careful)
• Costs of liability if your employee injures themselves on the job (you can bet they are going to sue or file a workers comp claim)

There are actually a lot more nightmare scenarios but we cant cover them all here and we think you get the point.

Pulling it all together

If you’re casually selling on Amazon and don’t process a whole lot of items each month then you should probably just label your items.  If you want to scale your business and compete with the big boy sellers across the markets, then you must always be thinking about scale and efficiency.  This is one of those decisions you’ll need to make.

What do you think?  Did we miss something?  Want to give your opinion on the matter?  Start or join the conversation below by leaving us a comment.  We love feedback!

When you’re selling on Amazon it can be really hard to manage all of the moving parts to your business.  There are all sorts of new terms you have to recognize and understand their meaning.

There is the MSKU, the ASIN, FNSKU, the UPC number, purchase orders and the ever elusive Inventory Health metric

It can be very overwhelming.

After all, you got into this Amazon business because you heard it was relatively easy, right?

Shop and source for products to sell, list them and ship them into Amazon’s warehouse and they do the rest, right?

Of course!

"Easy to make money" is why Amazon is bringing on over 100,000 new sellers every year.  But in order to really be successful you will inevitably need the right tools and a pinch of 📚 education to make any serious money in the Amazon ecosystem.

Whether you're doing Retail Arbitrage (RA), Online Arbitrage (OA) or Private Label (PL), the first place where you can employ some systems to help your business is going to be in the SKU of your product.

What is an Amazon seller sku or MSKU?

An Amazon seller sku  is a unique string of letters and numbers that a 3rd party seller assigns to their product in order to keep track of it.  The seller sku is all about the tracking.

But the seller sku or MSKU is one of the last strings of text you will find assigned to any product being sold on the Amazon marketplace.  

Any product usually starts out with a UPC code and then gets an ASIN and then gets a MSKU and then a FNSKU

What is a UPC code?

A UPC code stands for “Universal Product Code” and it’s assigned to products by the manufacturers who make those products.  It's a widely accepted form of tracking and registration system adopted by most countries across the globe.

More specifically, it's a barcode symbol encoding a 12-digit number called a GTIN-12.  The GTIN-12 is essentially the UPC data derived primarily from a GS1 Company Prefix and Item Reference Numbers

What is an Amazon ASIN?

For any physical item in the Amazon catalog, Amazon creates and attaches an ASIN number to it.  But that is NOT the seller sku.

An ASIN number stands for Amazon Stock Identifier Number and it's their own unique identifying number that allows them to catalog all the products they sell. Think billions of products.

You won't have to worry about the Amazon ASIN number at all because Amazon assigns that to all physical products but you will need to create and manage your seller sku or MSKU for every product you ship into the Amazon warehouse.

What is an Amazon MSKU?

The MSKU or seller sku is an acronym for Merchant Stock Keeping Unit.

It's literally the fancy shmancy number you assign a product that you are selling on Amazon.

An example of an MSKU could be something like this:

BOOK-BC.80-9/9/18-001

To the customer buying the product it's just a bunch of numbers, letters and symbols but to the seller it's holding a lot of knowledge about the product.

What is an Amazon FNSKU?

Often sellers get the MSKU and FNSKU mixed up.  If you sell on Amazon FBA then  you will have both assigned to your products you are selling.

That is because an MSKU identifies your product and an FNSKU identifies your product versus all of the other sellers who sell the same product inside the Amazon fulfillment centers.

Here is an example of an FNSKU label that would go on a sellers product and be sent into the Amazon warehouse:

Why do you have to manage the Amazon seller sku?

If you send in a popular book to be sold by Amazon then chances are that other sellers are sending in that very book to be sold too.  So you'll need your own seller sku or FNSKU in order to properly identify your book against the many other seller's books in the warehouse.

This is not only for proper inventory control but also how Amazon knows they have sold YOUR book and not your competitor's book.

Time to get paid! 💰Cha Ching!

Below is a great example of a bad MSKU and a good MSKU.  Do you notice the difference in structure between the two?

The Multiples are insane

Just thinking about how many products Amazon has in their complete catalog is daunting.  Just thinking about how much inventory you may have can be daunting as well.  One of the best ways to manage that inventory and give you valuable sales insight is to leverage a custom seller sku.

You are already tasked with creating a sku for each one of your products so why not make that seller sku work for you?  Knowing certain information about your products each and every time you sell it will help guide you as you set out to source more goods.

We've compiled some of the best tricks and tips for your custom seller sku below.  For purpose of illustration, we'll use the following custom sku and break it down piece by piece to explain its purpose:

5 ways to own your custom seller sku

Source Identifier:

When you're doing RA or OA, it's very important to keep track of where your products are coming from.  If you see things flying out the door that you got from Craigslist (CL) and all of the items you got from Walmart (WM) are collecting then where will you most likely keep sourcing from?   Craigslist.  So it's nice to know with each sale, where are you getting those items?

Product Identifier:

OK so common sense might have you wondering why would I need to describe the item I am selling when I can clearly see a picture of it on the Seller Central app or website?  Well, in a lot of cases, the picture isn't always clear as to what the item exactly is.  

A cover photo of a book can look a lot like the front of a CD and vice versa.  If you see a lot of CD descriptors in your item sales, then you'll know immediately without looking at the picture that you're selling a bunch of CDs and maybe it's time to source some more.

Date Identifier:

We happen to think this is one of the most important ways you can customize your Amazon seller sku.  If it's April and you see a bunch of items selling that were sent in last November, then you can immediately identify some trends either within that product or trends associated to the timing of the sale.  

Did you buy Spring clothes in November to be sold starting in April?  Guess what, your custom seller sku just validated your selling strategy.  Powerful huh?

Condition Identifier:

This one is important too because knowing the velocity of sales relative to the condition of the product is important for future sourcing trips.  Are items in NEW condition selling better than used?  Ok maybe it's time to source differently and stock up on NEW products instead of other conditions.

Buy Cost Identifier:

This isn't absolutely critical to your business because you already know exactly how much you paid for the item when you sourced but it could put a smile on our face every time you sell a CD for $10+ and your sku says you bought it for $.50 cents.  Oh yeah!!!

AccelerList makes it easy

If you want a super fast Amazon product listing application to help you build custom skus then you might want to try us out.  We make building your custom sku a very easy process.  Just select any of our pre-made tags or create your own custom one.

Putting it all together

The last digit on the custom seller sku is the actual # of the product within the batch.  So for the example sku above, this would be the 4th item in the box as we ship it in.

As your business grows these custom skus will mean even more and get even more precise.

For example, if you have hired remote employees to help you find and source product then you could incorporate their names within the sku.

No matter what system you set up for your business, custom skus can be executed as an inventory strategy at any size.

💡 Inventory Lab vs AccelerList

There is a handful of listing apps around the Amazon universe right now. Some are older, and some newer. Some try to help you with data, and some try to help with your workflows.

Whichever one you pick, you'll want to be crystal clear about the value you're getting; otherwise, you're throwing away good money.

In this article, we're going to give you a quick overview of the differences between AccelerList and Inventory Lab to help you make a better decision.

Of course, 🤷🏻‍♂️ this article is biased, but to be honest, there are major differences between Inventory Lab and AccelerList. We understand that not all of their customers will be a good fit for AccelerList.

Inventory Lab

Inventory Lab has been around since 2013 and has done a great job helping sellers with Amazon inventory management and listing products. They have a consistent UI (user interface) and have made the "listing" experience easy.  Like us, it was started by Amazon sellers.

You can do almost everything with them for your Amazon FBA business for listing and research.  You can print product labels and they have an easy to use interface. They also have a product scanning app that comes complimentary with the subscription.

✔️ Higher Costs and Slower Development

Inventory Lab has a large team of engineers but only pushes a fraction of the feature updates AccelerList does each year.  The 2016 Inventory Lab doesn't look or feel too different than the 2023 version.  For a business that may be growing as fast as yours, coupled with an ever-changing Amazon environment, we think they need to kick into a higher gear and offer more value to their users.  Especially if the price tag each month is going to be higher.

[su_note note_color="#ffc566"]As of 2023, they are the one of the highest cost product listing applications on the market today at $70/mo.[/su_note]

They have positioned their product over time to serve medium to large Amazon sellers that do not do retail arbitrage, leaving thousands and thousands of seller behind.

✔️ No Community

Some time in 2018, Inventory Lab closed their Facebook group and community and attempted to move it to a forum based channel on their website.  In our humble opinion, it didn't help them much.

Reselling and running a business on Amazon is a team sport.  Belonging to a community of sellers that you can lean on helps you grow and profit.  This community it seems as fallen by the waste side and the founders are not really active either. There is a very in-active "un-official" Inventory Lab facebook group currently running but the admins of such group don't seem to be very active and the group itself is not active.

✔️ No Multi-Channel Fulfillment Option (eBay)

Our team has worked really hard to engineer our multi-channel eBay integration and sellers are earning $300-$1,000 more a month on average because of this.

Amazon is also doubling down on their MCF (multi-channel fulfillment) business and they want you to expand your business with it.   Since Amazon has built their incredible fulfilment network they are now encouraging sellers to sell on other marketplaces and let them fulfill the inventory for you.

✔️ They don't have a repricer

Jumping around from application-to-application to get work done can be confusing and time consuming.  AccelerList has your inventory, accounting, multi-channel and repricing needs all in the same app.

This means you don't have to worry about importing or exporting reports on product buy costs to other applications.  It's all right in house for you and your team.

✔️ A Beautiful Business Dashboard

Every time you enter the AccelerList app, you'll be greeted with a comprehensive business dashboard that highlights all of your key metrics. This data is dynamic and updated hourly for you as you list or review your business details.

✔️ No Desktop version

Sometimes connecting your thermal label printer to a web application in the browser can be tricky. It's not the applications fault however. Due to constant security threats and fraud attempts, major browsers such as Chrome, Safari and MS Edge are always updating their browser software and this in return causes the connection to any hardware to fail periodically.

Because of this, AccelerList built a desktop version of our application so sellers can enjoy a more consistent and stable connection to their thermal printers.

✔️ Mobile app outdated

Although Inventory Lab has had their mobile app out for many years before us, once again it seems as if their UI/UX is dated and looks tired. Here is a look of both Scoutify and Profit Hunt™: