Quick and Easy Money on Amazon! Why Are You NOT Doing This?

Happy Monday!

I really hope the title of this post grabbed your attention, as it should have! Seriously – this is one of the quickest and easiest ways to add extra profit to the items you’re already selling on Amazon, but still for some reason very few people do this.

Today I want to talk about how you can make extra profit without needing to sell any new items, just by offering gift wrapping services to your customers. Let’s get to it!

Now first things first – if you use Amazon’s FBA service to fulfil your orders, then you’re already offering gift wrapping to your customers as Amazon offer this service as an optional extra on most items they sell (there are a few exceptions – if the size or shape of the item makes it very difficult to gift wrap, then Amazon don’t offer it).

But what a lot of sellers don’t seem to know is, even if you store and ship your items yourself, you can still offer gift wrapping.

You will however need an Amazon PRO account to set up gift wrapping options and it’s NOT available at all for basic accounts. I’ll show you how to set this up a bit later on, but for now I want to cover the wrapping process itself.

It’s honestly incredibly easy to do and with just a little time and practice, you’ll quickly become a gift wrapping pro!

I like to use Amazon’s service as a general basis/guideline of what to provide:

As you can see from the picture, Amazon’s gift wrapping service includes three different things:

• The gift wrap, box or bag (this will depend on the item)
• A decorative ribbon
• A printed card with a gift message on the top of the package

Now the main question when you’re deciding on the gift wrapping service to offer is whether to go for wrapping paper or gift boxes?

Well wrapping paper or gift wrap are the rolls that you’ve probably used for Christmas and birthday presents:

Gift boxes on the other hand are pre-made boxes that you simply place your item inside:

Which to use depends on a few different factors:

• The cost

Gift boxes are more expensive than rolls of gift wrap… a lot more expensive!

• The size/shape of the item you’re selling

Some items are incredibly easy to gift wrap – basically anything rectangular (games, books etc.) or anything that comes boxed. For such items I’d recommend using gift wrap as it’s not worth the extra cost of gift boxes when wrapping it yourself is so easy.

• The type/price of the item you’re selling

At the end of the day, pre-made gift boxes will usually look better than when you wrap an item yourself, so if you want to offer a really high-end wrapping service, then this could be a better option.

• Your wrapping skill (or your laziness!)

If you really find gift wrapping tedious or if your presents usually look something like this:

… then I would simply suggest using gift boxes as though they’re more expensive, they’re quicker and easier to use and you won’t be able to mess it up!

However there is one further option, a sort of middle ground between the two – gift wrapping SHEETS.

Instead of a long roll of gift wrap, you can buy pre-cut sheets – these are more expensive than rolls, but less expensive than gift boxes. They’re easier to use than rolls, but less easy to use than gift boxes – so yes, as I said, a middle ground basically and a good option if you struggle a bit with wrapping but don’t want to lose too much of your profit margin on materials.

But with all this talk about price and cost, let’s take a look at roughly how much gift wrapping an item will actually set you back, how much you can charge, and then most importantly – how much profit you’ll be making (that is the whole point, after all!)

First, cost:

Now I’m going to use eBay for the cost comparison BUT we all know that a lot of such products on eBay are extremely poor quality and honestly shouldn’t be sold at all. So to make it fair and use a very realistic price, I’m using this listing:

As you can see, this is for Hallmark branded gift wrap, so very high quality.

The price for 10x 3m rolls is £13.50 delivered. The rolls are 70cm wide and in total 3000cm long – so I’m going to estimate roughly 50cm x 30cm for one sheet (i.e. how much gift wrap you need for one item) which means you can wrap 140 items for £13.50… giving us a final cost of 10p per item in gift wrap.

And don’t forget this is using Hallmark gift wrap – just from searching a few other listings on eBay I can quickly find cheaper options:

But as I said, I want to be conservative so we’ll stick with the Hallmark pricing of 10p per “sheet”/item.

Next up is the ribbon and again I’m going to go for the more expensive pre-made bows:

These cost £2.50 for 20 bows, which works out at about 12p each.

And last but not least, some gift tags. Again I chose a high-quality option, 350gsm Kraft paper tags:

These cost £3.60 for 100, which works out at 4p each.

So in total, here are our costs per item:

• Gift Wrap – 10p
• Ribbon – 12p
• Gift Tag – 4p
• Total – 26p

And you could easily lower this cost by not using a pre-made bow, but instead buying simple string which you can then tie around your wrapped item, which would cost you roughly £2.50 for 20 metres…

So how much can you charge for your gift wrapping services?

Well Amazon themselves charge £2.99 which is actually the perfect price point I think. It’s a low enough cost to entice many customers to opt for this additional service and it still adds some decent profit to your orders.

Let’s see exactly how much.

Estimating that it will take you 5 minutes to wrap an item, that means you can do 12 in an hour.

At £2.99 x 12, that’s £36 “per hour”.

Minus your cost of materials, which is £0.26 x 12 = £3

That leaves you with £33 per hour spent wrapping! Or if you want to look at it in a simpler way, roughly £2.75 per item wrapped.

Either way, that’s good money! In fact it’s more profit than a lot of eBay or Amazon sellers make per item!

So I hope you’re now convinced and are planning to offer this service to your Amazon customers? If you are – great! Let me know quickly tell you how to enable this and go over a few more details.

As I mentioned earlier, you need a Pro account to be able to offer gift wrapping, it won’t be possible if you just have a Basic seller account.

Once logged in, you need to go to Settings > Gift Options – and from there you click on Edit and you’ll be able to add up to 4 different gift wrapping options:

Please don’t make the mistake of only offering one option as you’re leaving money on the table – make sure you utilise all 4 slots and give your customers some choice!

Offer different gift wrap/styles/colours etc. and make it suitable for what you sell. If you sell children’s toys, get some relevant gift wrap (you can easily find themed gift wrap which is perfect for children on eBay) with options for both boys and girls.

If you sell jewellery, get 4 options suitable for your target audience (so no Avengers themed gift wrap needed!).

You know your customers, so give them 4 distinct and different options to choose from.

Also, what I personally do and have had big success with, is offering seasonal variations… so for Christmas I’ll have 4 holiday themed wrapping choices, for Valentines Day I’ll offer 2 heart related (one geared towards men and one towards women) but I’ll keep two generic options for other purchases. You can even add a Halloween themed option close to October 31st, for Mother’s Day you can switch to 2x special options and keep 2 generic, etc. etc.

You should always monitor which designs sell best and cut ones that are unpopular once you run out of that design/style.

Once you’ve created these gift options in your Amazon account, you need to enable them for EACH product you sell, in Manage Inventory, as these settings are NOT applied automatically to all the products you have for sale. And this is actually ideal, as it allows us to not offer gift wrapping for certain items, says it’s a very bulky item or a weird shape, or requires specific packaging etc.

As the last thing we want is to wrap an item that then gets damaged during the shipping process and arrives to your customer looking less than perfect – the idea here is to offer added value and make a little extra profit while also making your customers happier – not disappointing them with a sub-par service.

I do want to really emphasise this point – if you can’t wrap to a high standard and don’t want to use gift boxes, then DON’T offer this service, as all you’re going to end up with is unhappy customers.

So PLEASE, nothing like this:

But overall, it shouldn’t be a problem for anyone at all to master gift wrapping with a little bit of practice.

And after that you have a super easy way of adding extra profit to your orders. Don’t underestimate this – gift wrapping can be HUGE, particularly around Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day and Amazon is the perfect place to take advantage of this as I’ve found it to be way more popular than eBay when it comes to gifts… This is probably due to their famous Prime next day delivery options (for those last minutes presents!) as well as the fact that they make it very easy to post orders to a different address.

If you sell items that are very popular as gifts, this may even contribute a decent secondary income for you! If you do find your wrapping services take off, you can even invest in some equipment to make the job quicker and easier, such as wrapping dispensers that attach to a table:

GiftWrapuk.co.uk offer a good selection of dispensers, and combined with a simple, cheap table from IKEA, you’ll have a perfect gift wrapping station.

Which pretty much brings me perfectly to the end of today’s post.

As always, if you have any questions or comments I’d love to hear them so please post below and I’ll personally get back to you within 24 hours (Monday – Friday).

Otherwise I’ll see you on Wednesday, when we’ll have our very first blog video for this year! 🙂

All the best,
Andrew