Why you should be using Fetcher for Amazon FBA in 2021
An area that often gets overlooked when setting up Amazon FBA businesses is the less sexy accounting side of the house. But let’s face it, if your business starts making you good money as it should, efficiently tracking your progress quickly becomes extremely important.
Just getting started with Amazon FBA? Head here first: How to Start an Amazon FBA Business 6 Step Guide
Not only to ensure you remain profitable but also to accurately document your financials, so you can remain cucumber cool when the tax-man comes knocking.
I was selling on Amazon for about 3 months before getting introduced to Fetcher. Thankfully it has a free trial, so I was happy to give it a go. Put simply, I was impressed and continued to use it. I’m convinced it remains to this day, the best accounting software for this business model – I hope it can help you too!
I intend to make a short video on this subject to help clarify and demonstrate the points covered in this post – watch this space.
What is it?
Fetcher is a piece of online accounting software that synchronises with your Seller Central account. It calculates your business-critical metrics like profit, PPC costs, refunds, fees etc – updating them every minute.
Basically, it takes all of the important information regarding your business, breaks it down in many ways and allows you to objectively overview your entire trainset. Something that is frustratingly difficult to do within Seller Central.
Below you can find an example of 4 days this month (July 2018) from one of my new brands.
These numbers represent one product with absolutely no reviews – I hope to see much higher numbers when I have the time to expand this particular brand to 5 products (end of the year fingers crossed).
This is the Fetcher ‘Dashboard’ that will give you an overview for a selected time frame. From here you can investigate further using the menu on the left. I find the product breakdown the handiest, as you can work out exactly how each individual product is performing (including PPC!).
Where can I get it?
Why is it helpful?
I feel like it’s rather self-evident why this software is helpful. If you don’t have a handle on your financials, you don’t have a handle on your business. Selling on Amazon can incur many more little costs and factors that you may not have originally anticipated. A few that are particularly hard to keep track of are refunds, discounts and PPC.
You may say that Amazon Seller Central can provide this data for us, and you would not be wrong.
However, to locate all the relevant information and export it to spreadsheets regularly is more than a bit tedious and takes up far too much of our precious time. I like to use my time to be creative with the next idea – not being an accountant.
Additionally, this makes Fetcher most suitable for those sellers without a full-time book keeper.
Below you can see the Profit and Loss Statement, which is great for a general overview of your business. Sorry for all the blurring of numbers – I like to be open but hopefully without detriment to myself.
How does it work?
It’s browser based so log in to their website and sync your account, this takes a few minutes. After a couple of days all my historic data was imported and accurately represented. At the time of writing I believe Fetcher will grab data up to 12 months old – a real plus.
From here you just use the different options to show your metrics in different ways. The image below demonstrates one of my cheaper products over a month period this year using the ‘Product Breakdown’ function.
When is the best time to use it?
From the moment you start making sales! In my previous business ventures, I made the mistake of not properly documenting my financials which very quickly became a headache to say least.
If you start using Fetcher from the early stages of your journey it will be a lot easier to measure your progress and give you the power to make informed, high-level decisions like discontinuing a product.
Pricing
Fetcher can be purchased for £15 ($19) per month. It’s one of very few subscriptions that I continue to entertain (the other being Jungle Scout for product research).
Thankfully they offer a free trial for a month, I would recommend using the trial like I did. This way you can see if you like the software before paying anything – always a winner.
Parting Thoughts
One of the greatest bits of advice I would give my former self would be to accurately document your progress. Fetcher allows me to do that without any extra work, this greatly improves how passive the Amazon FBA model is – which is why most us are here in the first place!
When tax considerations start to cloud your horizons, the data within this software can be exported to spreadsheets very easily, this makes April in the UK a lot less scary.
One thing I also haven’t mentioned is that it provides average sales per product over the last 10 days, which is very useful for a quick overview of how your products are moving without digging through the reeds.
Hopefully the inclusion of some real financial data in this post can also provide you insight to realistic expectations of sales and profits using Amazon FBA.
Mentioned Tools
I hope this helps, take care.
Did you know that if you have issue’s paying with your credit card on Aliexpress you can always pay with Paypal? Read our article here to find out how.
One Reply to “Why you should be using Fetcher for Amazon FBA in 2021”