The Complete Guide To Q4 For Amazon Sellers

Q4 is the best time of the year for Amazon sellers, but the majority of sellers won’t hit their goals due to lack of preparation and the right strategy, and I don’t want that to be you. This is your full guide to maximizing your profits this Q4 and every Q4 into the future, even if you’re a brand new seller starting from scratch.

Agenda for the guide:

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Important Dates For Q4

How to Change Your Gameplay During Q4

How I Crushed My First Q4

How I Crushed My First Q4

What To Get Ungated In

Sourcing For Q4

Finding an Edge

Retail Arbitrage

Merchant Fulfilled Strategy

Merchant Fulfilled Supplies

Merchant Fulfilled Shipping Templates

Merchant Fulfilled Shipping Costs

Restocking & Going Deep

Q4 Mistakes To Avoid

Important Dates For Q4

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Q4 is the fourth quarter of the year, spanning from October 1st to December 31st when consumer spending is the highest it is all year. This provides a massive opportunity for us as sellers to take advantage of higher demand, which leads to higher prices and lower competition.

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Early October - October Prime Day. Underrated sourcing time as retailers are competing with Amazon’s prime day deals which means more profit for us as sellers. This is mostly stock to FBA unless you see lots of people FBMing a listing, pump that stock to FBA with Boxem. Important to not speculate on inventory going up in price. This is a huge mistake beginners make. Focus on quick flips the whole time. 

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Late October - Halloween. Good sourcing sales this Holiday. Similar to any other major Holiday, Q4 demand has not peaked here yet, it hasn’t even really begun. 

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Early November - Early Black Friday Sales. The most underrated time of the year for sourcing! Deals are flowing left and right and it’s a great time to get your last stock to FBA for the year and to start to get FBM listings up on items that you can see other sellers FBMing on. 

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November 15th - 20th. This is always a popular question, when to slow down on FBA shipments and transition to FBM. This highly depends on your strategy and what warehouse you ship to and how their check in times are. But it should be around November 15th to 20th. Every specific product is unique and will become FBM friendly at a different time, but industry wide mid November is when a lot of items start to wake up, and when FBA check in times slow down. You don’t want to get caught with backordered FBA stock during peak Q4 in December, and don’t forget to use 2D barcodes for faster check in times. 

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Sunday Before Thanksgiving - This is when Black Friday sales officially kick off, several days before actual Black Friday. This gives you the chance to have FBM inventory listed during BF that you bought several days before during BF sales. Very important to be ready for the best deals of the year here. 

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Black Friday Cyber Monday - The best sourcing days of the year, and it’s not even close. Deals are going on everywhere here. Focus on taking full advantage of testing wide on as many asins as possible and getting them listed ASAP via merchant fulfilled.

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December 1st - Major FBM season officially kicks off. No more time for FBA shipments as check in times are very slow. Very important to note, many deals continue to be good all through early December for “early christmas” sales that are either the same as BFCM or a slightly worse version that ends up being better because Amazon prices rise. 

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December 5th to 20th - Peak Q4! The best time of the year by far. If you are planning to take any time off from your 9-5, do it in this timeframe. This actually won’t consist of much sourcing if you do it right, you’ll just be restocking stuff. This is also when you raise expedited shipping costs and raise prices on proven winners if you wanna get extra profit. I only recommend playing the raise pricing game for proven items. December 10th to 12th tend to be the best days of the entire year. But it’s important to note those days will be whenever you have your inventory and pricing strategy dialed in the best. 

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Christmas - Early January - Gift card season! And FBM slows down. However every item is unique. Listings don’t just go from good to bad in 1 day, they slowly become worse, and you don’t restock them. Many beginners think one day Q4 season just ends, when every item has its own timeline. 

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How to Change Your Gameplay During Q4

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During Q4, your strategy should be different from other times of the year. Q4 is a very compressed 2 month window of massive opportunity between Early November and Late December that can produce 30-50% of your results for the entire year, and catapult you to new heights. 

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Instead of doing lots of FBA, Q4 will have lots of merchant fulfilled, because competition is so low at the peak, prices skyrocket, and demand is through the roof because of all the holidays going on.

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Q4 is a lot of initial testing then hammering your best asins. The goal is to find 5-20 core asins you can squeeze to the moon. 

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How I Crushed My First Q4

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I had no idea what to do going into my first Q4, then I made $50,000 profit in just December. This was when I was building the strategies I’m sharing in this blog post for you guys in real time.

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It’s a mad rush of restocking, raising prices, and long hours fulfilling FBM orders.

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Really digging deep.

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I sourced a lot less than I expected too (was too busy restocking items), prepackaged items for FBM which was a game changer, and leveraged the early Christmas deals that kept going all through December as well as evergreen coupons.

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There are no rules, build your own strategy, have fun, think long term, and enjoy the ride!

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What Products Sell Best?

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This is a very popular question, truth be told everything improves in demand. A lot of new sellers get shiny object syndrome and want to pivot to toys.

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Focus on anything that is giftable. 

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Toys, beauty items, seasonal grocery, sporting goods, shoes, and clothing. Basically anything. Whatever you can consistently find profitable is the stuff you should focus on. 

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What To Get Ungated In

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Many new sellers are worried about getting ungated quick for new items during Q4, but truth be told you’ll be doing the least ungating you ever do most likely during Q4, cause you can be more focused and just take easy wins that are amplified due to seasonal demand.

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Definitely have the toy category unlocked, and as many big shoe brands as possible.

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Watch my full ungating tutorial here. 

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Sourcing For Q4

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Sourcing for Q4 does not exist. I want to make that very clear. Do not buy stuff and speculate, otherwise your competition will just pay less than you during BFCM. I recommend just sticking to your normal strategies and playing your game.

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As a beginner, you should primarily focus on storefront stalking, then do manual sourcing only on websites that have served you well. 

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A lot of beginners waste tons of time doing manual sourcing on unproven websites, or buy stuff and hope for it to go up in price and become profitable. Those sellers tend to get steamrolled by those who just buy quick flips. 

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Finding an Edge

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Sourcing during Q4 is easier than any other time, if you use the right discounting methods.

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Saving leads in SellerAmp Google Sheets and using the Keepa tracking alerts feature. 

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The problem is most beginners still don’t use all the ways to make items cheaper.

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What do I mean by this?

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Discounted gift cards from CardBear and TopCashback for another 4-10% off.

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Using a Catchall email via NameCheap for unlimited email coupons.

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Using free extensions like Capital 1 Shopping to find coupons.

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Seeing if the retailer has any sort of email, account, or text signup coupon on their website. 

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Asking customer service, networking with other sellers, and digging around on Google for further coupons.

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Rewards programs like Kohl's Cash and RackRoomShoes rewards.

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Maximizing their cashback with Rakuten and TopCashBack. 

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If you combine multiple of these and factor them in, a lot more items start to become profitable. Very few items are profitable at the advertised price on a retailer, you have to make them profitable.

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Retail Arbitrage

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While I think retail arbitrage during Black Friday is a mess, I do love the idea of some RA during the quieter days and last minute buy online pickup in store orders.

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Big websites will let you source your local stores from home using the filter to my store settings, and there’s been 10+ times I’ve picked up 200+ units from one store, and gotten them shipped out to FBA the same day or the merchant fulfilled them ASAP within 24 hours.

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Compare that to the normal cash flow cycle and it’s obvious why RA can be such a game changer. Make sure your local retail employees know you and that you take care of them and make their life easier. 

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Merchant Fulfilled Strategy

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FBM is a game changer for Q4. With a normal OA to FBA purchase, even with 2D barcodes check in times can take awhile especially during Q4.

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It takes 3-7 days for the OA order to arrive, then 1-3 weeks for it to check in.

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Meanwhile with FBM you can load that item into your inventory right when it arrives from the OA supplier. Some sellers love buy online pickup in store orders to get items to market ASAP.

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With FBM you learn quicker, make money quicker, and can restock sooner.

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I love 0 day Handling time to get more BuyBox share. It’s in your settings, it’s more work, but also more profit. 

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Merchant Fulfilled Supplies

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This is super important!

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I like 9x12, 12x15.5, and 19x24 grey poly mailers from Amazon.

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And boxes from Walmart or Uline. Just make sure they don’t have any branding on them. 15x12x10 and 12x10x8 box ranges are my jam.

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Merchant Fulfilled Shipping Templates

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This is a big mistake beginners make by not setting this up.

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I recommend charging free shipping for standard and economy orders.

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Then $30 + $1/lb for next day, 2 day, and expedited orders, some people even do more, many people raise these as Q4 evolves. Build your own strategy. 

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Merchant Fulfilled Shipping Costs

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For FBM costs to put into SellerAmp, use this guide:

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0-3oz $3.5-4.5

4-7 oz $4.5-5.5

8-11 oz $5-6.5

12-15oz $5.5-6.5

1lb-3lb+ $9-13 

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Buy shipping primarily through Amazon, just doing whatever is cheapest. Occasionally Amazon will be super expensive so check pirateship. If you ever charge a customer $32 for an expedited order thanks to the $30 + $1/pound templates, and Amazon charges you $12, you just made an extra $20 profit. 

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A huge mistake lots of beginners make is NOT toggling to FBM on SellerAmp leading them to think nothing is profitable FBM, when they’re actually doing it incorrectly. 

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Restocking & Going Deep

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Beginners always ask me when the right time to go deep on items are, especially during Q4. 

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The only time to go deep on an item in my opinion is when it’s already proven, aka it already sold really well.

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Too many beginners go deep on unproven items. 

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The nice thing about FBM is that you can restock stuff super quick, so you don’t need to go super hard on anything that hasn’t already done really well for you.

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Q4 Mistakes To Avoid

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Q4 mistakes to avoid include getting shiny object syndrome and trying to buy just toys. As well as buying stuff and hoping they go up in price.

 Another huge one is not having your shipping templates and FBM settings set up correctly.

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When it gets easy is when you go hard, and Q4 is that time for Amazon arbitrage sellers. 

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Hope this helps!

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Q4 can be a completely life changing time for you, it’s time to go hard.

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Doing 9,000 FBM orders one December really took a lot out of me, but it was worth it for the money for another $50,000 in profit or so. FBA stock carries a lot of good weight too!

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Whatever your Q4 goals are, work hard, stay consistent, and take so much action that it would be unreasonable for it not to work.

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Your friend,

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Flips4Miles