How I would fix your Amazon profitability in 30 days

At times it helps to create constraints to push creativity, thinking, and action. I know the title of today’s edition is a bit click-baity, but the intention is to lay out an analysis and a roadmap that would start moving profitability in the right direction within 30 days.

Before I go through my approach, let me be clear about what 30 days means here. It is not enough time to see margin materially improve on a P&L (with one exception I will talk about). But 30 days is enough time to do the thinking, make the calls, and put the right things in motion, so that the improvement shows up not long after. Think of 30 days as: long enough to diagnose honestly and act on what you find, short enough that you have a real deadline to get things done.

And one more thing before we start. Does this apply to you? If your Amazon sales are under $10K a month, the honest answer is that you need to solve for sales before you solve for profit. At low volume, margin optimization has a ceiling. Everything below assumes you have enough sales velocity to make the levers worth pulling.

Start with P&L

The first question I would ask is what is your margin on Amazon. Not the rough in-and-out, but a real monthly P&L. No judgment if the answer is no. Amazon accounting is genuinely confusing, and most sellers are working off incomplete pictures. But you cannot fix what you cannot measure, so this is where 30 days starts.

The benchmark question is what is your net margin after fees, COGS, advertising, and inbound shipping? If you are sitting below 15% on your core SKUs, you have a structural problem, not an optimization problem. I want to make a distinction here between structural and optimization problem, because the fix for a structural margin problem is different from the fix for an execution problem. Confusing the two is how brands can spend months tweaking ads when the real issue is that the product was never priced correctly for the platform. Or, also, a right product, with the right price was placed on the platform.

Self-diagnose before the analysis

Before I go near the data, I would ask you: why do you think your profit is low? You might say, well, that is why I hired you. But the reason I ask is that you carry knowledge I do not have: the history of the business, the decisions that were made, the things that have been tried. That context shapes where I look first. So here I am appealing to your business sense, knowledge of your own business, more than your Amazon expertise.

Eliminate the glaring problems first

Then I would look for the big holes before the small ones. I Product compliance issues: listings taken down, not addressed, or not reinstated despite effort. Shipment problems, or chronic out-of-stocks. Ads running out of daily budget by mid-afternoon. Account health issues that suppress visibility. Ironically, having a big obvious problem is sometimes what creates the fastest result once fixed.

Look at brand control

Before getting into numbers, I would look at your brand control. Do you have resellers? How is your pricing stability? Who owns the Buy Box and how consistently? It takes me a few seconds of looking at your listings to see whether brand control (or lack thereof) this is a structural issue, a minor annoyance, or a non-issue.

The reason this comes before unit economics is simple: you cannot improve what you cannot control. If unauthorized resellers are constantly undercutting your price, any margin improvement you engineer elsewhere gets competed away, because you will always be under pricing pressure just to get a sale. So we would want to fix the foundation before optimizing on top of it.

Unit economics

Now the math. Price - Amazon fees - COGS - inbound shipping to FBA/AWD, Or your FBM shipping cost. I leave out big variable (PPC/marketing), and smaller variables like returns, short-term promotions, monthly storage fees at this stage because I want to see the structural picture clearly first. The question here is not whether you can squeeze more out, but more of if the the boat belongs on open water at all.

If a SKU cannot produce 30% or better under normal operating conditions, the answer is rarely to spend more on advertising. It is to look at whether the price needs to move, whether COGS can be negotiated, or whether that SKU belongs in the portfolio on Amazon at all.

Big caveat here: some low or non profitable SKUs can serve a purpose of market validation, acceptance for reasons outside of Amazon. If you want to get into a big retailer, they often want to see product success in other channels, and no other B2C channel can proof you belong on any digital or retail shelf than Amazon.

Raising price

If you are in full brand control, have strong reviews, but struggle with margins, then look at where your price sits relative to comparable products in your category on Amazon. If you are in the bottom ~30% (not a scientific number, range can be lowest 25%-50%), then raise your price. You can also access price benchmarking data in Brand Analytics - Search Query Performance.

The single biggest and fastest improvement to margin is often not an operational fix or ad optimization. It is a price increase. Nothing else changed. Just the price.

Many brands resist this out of fear that customers will drop off. But context here matters more than the price itself. Shoppers don’t evaluate your product in isolation. They evaluate it relative to what else is available in the category. If your product has better reviews, stronger brand presence, and better perceived quality (and hopefully better, or at least on par creatives) than the products priced above you, there is definitely price increase opportunity.

That said, there is an important constraint to flag. If the exact same SKU is sold across other online channels, such as your own website, iHerb, target.com, or any other retailer, Amazon's Fair Pricing Policy comes into play. Amazon monitors prices across the web, and if your product is available for less elsewhere, Amazon can suppress the Buy Box. If that is your situation, you cannot raise your Amazon price in isolation. You have to approach it across all channels simultaneously, which is a different and more complex conversation. But if Amazon is your primary or only online channel, or if you have pricing alignment across channels, a price test ccsts you nothing to try and often surprises you with how little it affects conversion.

Brand presence and conversion

Once the structural picture is clear, I would look at your pages. Not creatively, commercially. Are the images doing the work? Is the copy answering the questions a buyer actually has? Is the A+ content earning its place or just filling space? Do you have a video on pages? Easy scannable infographics? Conversion improvement is one of the fastest ways to improve effective margin because it lowers your customer acquisition cost without changing the fee structure.

Ads: does the math, math?

I would look at advertising last, not first. Most people do it the other way around (probably because advertising is the largest controlled expense, and biggest marketing lever). But then you are at risk of optimizing a symptom. The questions I would ask: what is the ad spend per product, and does it correspond to the revenue that product generates? Are there SKUs consuming half the monthly budget and contributing 20% of sales? What is the actual customer acquisition cost based on your average bid and your conversion rate? What is your TACOS, and is it trending in the right direction?

Then I would talk to whoever manages your ads, or consult with mine, about optimization opportunities. But I would have this conversation with the full P&L picture already in hand, not before.

Kill things

One of the most underused profit levers on Amazon is subtraction. I would look hard at the SKU portfolio and ask which products are genuinely earning their place from a sales, margin, or brand-entry-point perspective. You would be surprised how often removing two or three underperforming SKUs simplifies the operation, frees up ad budget, and actually improves the performance of what remains. If you have size or flavor variations, I would run the P&L on each individually.

What 30 days actually gives you

You will not see the full margin improvement within the month. But that is not the point. What 30 days gives you is clarity, decisions, and right actions: you know your actual numbers, you have removed the things actively working against you, and you have made the two or three changes most likely to move the needle in the following 30 to 60 days.

What I have found, working through this with brands, is that profitability problems on Amazon are rarely one thing. None of them catastrophic alone. You have to work through them one a time.

The 30-day work is also not about finding a new strategy, but aiming for re-alignment: getting honest about what the numbers actually say, subtracting what is not working, and focusing what remains. It is harder than optimization. It is also faster.

If you are reading this and recognize your business in it - good sales velocity, but margins that do not reflect the effort you are putting in - this is the work I do. Not audits for the sake of reports, but a clear-eyed , discerning and much knowing look at what is actually driving the gap, and a practical path to closing it. If that sounds like a conversation worth having, you know where to find me.

Saludos,

Irina