Welcome back friend!
When every SKU is one you can never run out of, none of them are
In January 2010, a man died at Massachusetts General Hospital while the alarms on his heart monitor were going off.
The loud alarm, the one for a crisis, had been turned off. The quieter ones still worked. They beeped at the nurses' station for 20 minutes while his heart rate fell, and then his heart stopped.
Ten nurses were on duty that morning. None of them could remember hearing the beeps.
So how do ten nurses miss an alarm?
Because it never stops ringing. On one 15-bed unit at Johns Hopkins, staff counted 942 alarms a day. That's about one every 90 seconds. The Joint Commission, the national group that inspects and accredits hospitals, put the share of alarms that don't need anyone to treat the patient at 85 to 99 percent.
If a monitor misses an emergency, the maker gets sued. If it beeps for nothing, the maker pays nothing. An MIT researcher, Roger Mark, told the Boston Globe: "Missing a real event is much more costly to the manufacturer." And if a nurse misses a beep and the patient dies, that's on the nurse. So monitors get built to beep when a patient sits up, turns over or coughs, and the nurses learn to tune them out.
A seller in one of my groups asked a question this month that sounds exactly like that hospital. Their team is paid to never run out, so they pad every order. Now a big pile of the company's cash is sitting in warehoused inventory.
I don't have a team to blame. Since April I've been my own inventory manager. So I scored myself on both sides for the last 90 days.
Too little: 10 of my 57 products went out of stock, 302 days out of stock between them. 4 of the 10 were my top sellers, and 3 more top sellers have under 28 days of stock in FBA as I write this.
Too much: $35k of my $92.7k of US stock (at cost) sits beyond 180 days of sales. It's $43k if I use my inventory software's own sales rate, which runs low, mostly on products that just ran out.
The 39 products that earn 19% of my revenue hold 87% of the extra. My top sellers turn 3.4 times a year. My smallest sellers turn 0.5.
Before my next PO, I'm writing down the handful of products I will never let run out. Those get extra stock on purpose, and I check them every week. Everything else gets a limit on how much I'm allowed to hold.
The IVS
Big thanks to my good friend Peter-Paul Maan for graciously agreeing to provide a tip to the SFTB Audience for this week’s IVS. You can find Peter-Paul at his new venture as a marketing consultant w/ NORM4U. Peter-Paul helps brands understand how people decide and how to turn that understanding into sales.
The Salesperson You Never Hired
There’s a new salesperson selling your product. You never hired it. It’s not on your payroll. It’s AI: Alexa, ChatGPT, Google, Perplexity. And the list keeps growing.
A good salesperson adapts the story to every buyer. Your listing speaks only once. AI adapts at scale. And it doesn’t only read Amazon. When I ask Alexa what its advice is based on, it tells me: forums, among other things.
I have a simple principle for you. If you know all the questions out there and you own the answers, you dominate your category.
Try the prompt in the link below. 10/10 butt not guaranteed
How do you do that? You start with your buyers. What do they want to know? Where do they doubt? Then put it out there. Video, TikTok, forums, your own site. Not every buyer cares about a benefit in the same way. You want to be the authority in your category. It feeds the shopping assistants of today and tomorrow. It makes your product relevant.
I believe the search bar will disappear completely. But as long as it’s here, you want to beat your competitor. Every single search. I have a tip for that. And the nice part: it feeds Alexa too. Quick win: take one image and read it. Pull it apart. What does the image say on its own? What does the text add? And the icons? How does it all come together? That’s how AI reads it. And so does your buyer.
More, and a prompt to try it yourself: norm4u.nl/sftb
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Amazon News Week 43/52
Amazon is still creating virtual multipacks for selected FBA brand-owned products, and any not deleted by November 10 become purchasable on November 11. Check by searching _VMP in inventory. |
CBP moved the international-mail entry deadline from October 22 to January 20, 2027, giving shippers more time, though duties are unchanged. |
Seller Central now shows return reasons for FBA partial refunds and supports passkey sign-in as an easier way to log in. |
The latest SP-API update adds new IVP audience values for the Listings Items API in EU5, JP and CA, plus a new order change notification type. |
The Deep Dive (Premium Content)
45 sellers and specialists have written the Instant Value Section (IVS) for us. Most of their tips are sitting in old emails.
Think of this as hack-a-thon you don’t have to attend.
This week's deep dive puts each tip in one place…
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Tsunami Panic and a Broken Pole
Sometimes not a lot happens in the neighborhood. This week we had two episodes.
First, a big earthquake hit Panama. Within minutes our community chat was full of tsunami talk from a bunch of gringos who have no idea what they are talking about. One lady posted a ChatGPT answer explaining why we were at risk. Hot mess. For about 30 minutes the hysteria was wild, until someone finally posted the official government statement: no risk.
Then a crew replacing an electric pole managed to break it, and that took out the power for a morning. That one was more of a pain. We don't have a backup generator at the house. Our old condo had them, but they only worked maybe 25% of the time and were a constant fight with the HOA. Our backup workspace had no power either. So I rescheduled a couple of calls and took the family out for an early lunch. The boys are off school for two weeks, so they needed a reason to get out of bed anyway.
I will say, in the nine years since we moved to Costa Rica, losing power in our area is pretty rare. We get the odd surge and the lights flicker now and then, but overall it's solid.
Next week I'm off to Canada for a week. Time to dust off the two pairs of jeans I own.
Cut Your Subscribe & Save Discount and 80% of Orders Still Bill the Old Rate Two Months Later
Before you bump your Subscribe & Save discount for Q4, know it's close to a one-way door.
Subscribers keep the rate they signed up at.
Read that again.
One of my best sellers is set to 10% (it used to be 15%). Two months after the first 10% order showed up, 80% of its subscription orders still bill 15%. The new rate only reaches people who subscribe after the change.
Three more things that change what S&S really costs you:
• The extra 5% customers get when five or more subscribed items arrive together is Amazon's money, not yours.
• Your coupons stack on top of the S&S discount. A 5% coupon on a 10% product hands subscribers 15%.
To see what you're really paying, download a settlement report (Payments, All Statements, Download Flat File V2) and divide each Subscribe and Save Promotion amount by the ItemPrice amount for the same order ID.
(or just ask Claude)
If you raise it now to chase Q4 sales, plan on paying that rate to those subscribers long after Q4 is over.
Pick Your Thanksgiving Flight Day Off Last Year's TSA Numbers
US Thanksgiving is next month (Happy Thanksgiving already to my Canadian friends). The TSA posts how many people it screened across the country every single day on its passenger volumes page, with archives going back to 2019.
Here's Thanksgiving week 2025:
• Tuesday: 2,675,261
• Wednesday: 2,753,036
• Thanksgiving Day: 1,559,165
• Friday: 2,392,036
• Saturday: 2,696,816
• Sunday after: 3,134,613
• Monday after: 2,893,451
Thanksgiving Day had about 57% of Wednesday's crowd. The Sunday after was the busiest day of the whole stretch, and Friday was the lightest day to fly home.
It works for any holiday: Christmas week, spring break, a long weekend. Line up days by where they fall around the holiday, not by calendar date (These are national totals, not your airport).
Fly on Thanksgiving Day. Come home Friday.
Don't worry about whether things will be hard.
They will be.Ryan Holiday
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