2024 Year in Review

Profit, mistakes made, data, lessons learned, etc.

Happy New Year, friends.

I hope everyone had a lovely holiday season and is rejuvenated, motivated, and excited to crush 2025.

Today is the day I like to take a very detailed look back at my business so that I can analyze and improve for the year ahead. The goal here is to identify areas where I may be making mistakes, spending money inefficiently, not capitalizing on certain opportunities, etc.

Basically, just a long hard look in the mirror. Let’s kick things off with what the favorite question usually is — profit?!

Amazon Sales:

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Walmart Sales:

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eBay Sales:

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Analysis:

First, please keep in mind that these numbers are still being reconciled and finalized. I don’t use any P&L software for eBay, and this is my first month using one for Walmart — numbers should be close but I don’t have my exact numbers yet. Once my accountant digs into my finances in the coming weeks, then Quickbooks will have a true P&L.

But early reporting is showing about 250k net profit on Amazon (this should actually be at least a few thousand higher since I over-estimate my buy costs, inbound shipping, etc. for repricing’s sake), around 20k net profit on Walmart (not bad considering October was my first full month on the platform), and eBay is hard to tell exactly without a tracking software.

Keep in mind that a good chunk of profit on Amazon is “lost” to customer returns, which are then sold on eBay to recover some or all of the buy cost of a returned product. So while technically eBay isn’t pure profit, for simplicity sake I count the buy cost of the products against my Amazon profit.

With that in mind, net payouts for eBay (after fees and shipping) was 41k, the majority of these sales being damaged customer returns where the buy cost was already subtracted from my Amaozn profit. There’s also some free LEGO gift with purchases in this total, some graded Pokemon cards, and some first to market toys that I wanted to sell quickly after receiving them.

Other fun income stat, snagged about $17k in cash back from credit card rewards.

Rakuten cash back accounted for $591 in 2024, and Top Cash Back accounted for $3,610.16 (bleh, more on these failures later).

I held one garage sale earlier in the year of only damaged customer returns and got back about $2k.

Local sales were low, I don’t put a lot of effort here. I think I net a few hundred bucks here for the year.

Received several thousand dollars worth of free points from LEGO, Gamestop, Funko, etc. These aren’t really reflected in any tracking software since I always use my ‘worst case’ buy cost for repricing purposes, but those savings will be reflected in Quickbooks. Definitely nothing to sleep on, the savings from these points will equate to the cost of a decent vacation.

Some of my costs that may be of interest to you (most of this has been reflected already in the above numbers but just want to highlight some):

$6k spent on my repricer (I really hate seeing this number, but SellerSnap is too good not to use)

$4.6k spent on shipping boxes (I really need to work on lowering this either by re-using boxes more or finding a local supplier)

$5k spent on Polybags (this number should go down in 2025 since I can use less expensive polybags for Walmart [I currently use UPC blocking ones from ILoveSupplies])

$4.1k spent on my storage unit (can’t believe this rate has more than doubled since I started with them just under two years ago)

I spent about 15k on discounted gift cards, with savings ranging from 5-15% (mostly in that 5-8% range since Target is the one I buy the most of). So probably about $1k total savings by using this strategy. I can definitely increase the savings here next year.

The next two stats aren’t directly related to my business, but they sure don’t help. Over $4k spent on Doordash last year. Go ahead, shame me. Yes I’ll be reducing it this year.

Another stat, one I can’t believe I’m typing out and am so embarrassed to say— I spent $4,800 on Vitality Bowls last year. I got into the healthy but expensive habit of always starting my day with an Acai bowl since it’s conveniently located next to the post office where I do my morning drop offs. Definitely stunting my business growth here, but hey at least they don’t use any added sugar! 100% cutting this back to once a week max.

Overall, I think 275k net profit after all expenses is a pretty safe, conservative estimate for how I’m ending the year.

Again, I like to over-estimate the negatives and under-estimate the positives, but I’ll have a more clear picture in the coming days/weeks.

While I’m still a good chunk away from my $500k / yr net goal, the great part is that most of my expenses aren’t going to increase. Repricer stays the same. I already prep enough units to get to my goal, so supplies should remain the same or improve. I can easily cut personal costs in the food category. And I’ll be talking about how I can increase my cash back later. Overall, even though I’m just barely halfway to my ultimate end goal, I think the growth to get there can be much easier than the work it has taken to get to this point.

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Now let’s dive into some actual toy data…