Last week I said I wanted this to be honest, not just a highlight reel. Week 2 is already testing that.
I spent a good chunk of this week going through Amazon settlement reports, actually sitting down and looking at what's coming in versus what's going out. It wasn't fun, but it needed to happen.
Digging into ad performance
Going product by product, one thing stood out: my phone wallet has been racking up ad spend with zero sales to show for it. That's not a "give it more time" situation, that's a "turn it off and rethink it" situation.
On the flip side, I noticed my toiletry bag has a return rate that's way higher than anything else I sell. So now I've got two different problems that need two different fixes: one product needs to stop spending, the other needs to figure out why people are sending it back.
Cleaning up the storefront
I also took a hard look at mlnecessities.com like an actual customer would, not like the person who built it. Some of what I found wasn't great. Placeholder social links that go nowhere, hero images that look obviously AI-generated, no real story about what ML Necessities actually is, and barely any reviews to build trust. None of that is a huge lift to fix, but it's the kind of thing that quietly costs you sales if you never go back and look.
Some wins too
Not everything this week was cleanup. I got Amazon's Multi-Channel Fulfillment set up so Shopify orders can actually pull from my FBA inventory instead of me needing to ship those separately. Small thing operationally, but it removes a step I was doing manually before.
I also swapped the QR code on my business cards, and I've been narrowing in on magic hangers as the next real product to push, alongside some other ideas like compression packing cubes and cable organizers that are still in the "maybe" pile.
What I'm taking into Week 3
The theme of this week has basically been: stop guessing, start measuring. It's easy to feel busy without actually knowing if what you're doing is working. Going forward I want to be a lot more deliberate about which products get ad dollars and which ones get cut.
Year 2 was always going to have weeks like this. Onward.