Are you making any money management mistakes with your ecommerce business? How confident are you in ensuring nothing falls through the cracks?

With Q4 approaching fast, it’s vital that you understand what pitfalls to avoid to maximize your potential on Amazon and other ecommerce marketplaces. 

In this webinar, Teikametrics is joined by Osome, who specializes in ecommerce bookkeeping and accounting directly integrated with Amazon and other ecommerce platforms. 

We discuss tips for ecommerce businesses across the globe for minimizing potential issues as we approach this critical season.

Show notes

Topics covered

  • Key bookkeeping practices that will help your business
  • How to manage your ad spend for a successful Q4
  • Planning inventory spend to be agile and successful
  • Cash flow management to accelerate growth

Watch the full Money Management webinar

Money Management highlights

It helps to have an accountant who specializes in ecommerce

“Look a bookkeeper or an accountant, they specialize in many things, like doctors specialize in many different things. The accounting profession is quite similar. So you would have an account who’s really good at retail stores, but you will have a specialist in ecommerce as well who knows how this ecommerce market and the segment actually works.” -Taimur Ghafoor

Better yet, get AI built by accounts who specialize in ecommerce

“If you go to a traditional accountant, and they know how to do accounting and bookkeeping, but they do it in a very manual way by downloading reports from Amazon, looking at the settlement statements, and trying to make sense of figures and push that through the system. Whereas with us, we streamline the whole process and our AI focuses on how to get that information into your accounting software.” Taimur Ghafoor

Brexit made selling in the EU harder

“Before Brexit, as you said, it was very simple, It was the most easy thing. So, people within the UK had the best opportunity, they didn’t have to register. They didn’t have to comply with anything else. They just sold goods within Amazon, Amazon did the rest, so it was easy life.

And as soon as Brexit happened there’s a big line between EU and UK, and anytime that line is crossed, there are three main elements that come in play.

Your cost, every time you ship goods, there will be a huge cost of customs, regardless of which way it goes. 

Compliances, you need to be registered in different places, different areas and you have no limitation, you cannot just start operating in different places without being legally registered in those countries. 

And the last thing is the market itself. You’re not able to reach the same market that you were able to. 

When it actually happened the first month, the end of January 2001, there was a report saying that 30% of the goods that were sent to Europe from UK came back. And when they actually came back, the cost of getting them back was a lot higher as well. So big retailers… made comments like, it’s better to just burn those goods rather than getting them back in because it’s so costly.” –Taimur Ghafoor

Budget and plan for inventory restrictions from Amazon

“With inventory, especially with Amazon, all those restrictions on restock, it has been a lethal arena so far. What I’ve seen is two solutions to it, and they both are quite costly. So, you have to focus on your cash flow and your funding. 

So, the first one is that you only order enough, then delivered directly to Amazon stocks from your suppliers. But every time you do that, you have to be careful of the input, values, customs you get in. 

The other option is to get your goods into the UK or Europe where you store. Have them stored in one of the partners, like a warehouse, and then they can use the fulfillment, or they can ship it to Amazon as soon as your stock level is down. 

Both of these elements incur extra cost, because you are not using Amazon FBA anymore. You’re using your own fulfillment to Amazon FBA with the restocks. So I have seen a lot of my clients, they’re forecasting, getting information from many different partners to understand how it actually will work.” –Taimur Ghafoor

Launching into new marketplaces is complicated so get expert help

“Because of these complications, you need the right partners with you, so you can delegate a lot of work to them. 

We are in a very globalized working environment at the moment and with ecommerce I’ve seen a lot of people try to be the one-man show and try to achieve everything themselves.

If you go out, you can see a lot of partners, partners in logistics, partners in bookkeeping, accounting partners, and funding, and it’s not as expensive as it used to be. 

So you need to build an ecosystem, right? You need to build a system where if you’re going into a different market, you have people in place who can work that market out for you. 

And it’s just that it’s slightly scary, and that’s why people are not jumping into it but I’m quite sure soon they will.” -Taimur Ghafoor

Bookkeeping can help your business throughout the year, not just at tax time

“A lot of people think bookkeeping is just a tool to keep your records up-to-date, compliance and do taxes, right? And I still get a lot of people saying that, we can do bookkeeping once a year, and we don’t need to do it on a daily basis, on a regular basis.

And I completely disagree with it, because bookkeeping now, especially with all of this automation and the AI, is a very analytical tool. It helps you understand your business in numbers and facts, rather than just making a guess. 

You can be making £100,000 worth of sales, But does it actually benefit you? 

Does it leave you any money to take home? 

It helps you control your whole infrastructure of your business, your whole ecosystem, You can budget, you can forecast. So bookkeeping is a great tool. And it should be used to maximum potential.” -Taimur Ghafoor