#086 - How to Get Good Amazon Distribution Deals with Joe Saville I The Amazon Wholesale Podcast

#086 - How to Get Good Amazon Distribution Deals with Joe Saville I The Amazon Wholesale Podcast Speaker 2: All right. Welcome back to another episode of The Amazon Wholesale Podcast. So we've got a repeat guest on here with us tonight. We've got Joe Saville, a man who many of you in the audience probably know who he is. Many of you in the audience have probably had the opportunity to hang out with him at a trade show or at an industry event. He is pretty much everywhere. He's pretty active on social media as well. And I see him chuckling over there. It's making me laugh. But, you know, he is someone who's grown to be a good friend of mine. He's also very heavily involved in the Wholesale Network Mastermind, specifically when it comes to organizing a lot of our group buy opportunities. We're going to talk a lot about that in this episode, but I wanted to have him back on the podcast just to run through some of the stuff that he's been up to, because I think you're going to be really intrigued and really impressed by the level of deals that he is doing at the distribution level, in addition to what he's doing in his own Amazon business. Joe, happy to have you back, man. Looking forward to kind of talking through the nitty gritty of some of these deals that we're working on. It's exciting stuff. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Hi. We're back on the cast and the pod here, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, man, absolutely. Well, we'll definitely have to put the original episode that you were on in the show notes. I want to say you were on by yourself, probably episode like 20 or 30 something. Then we did one probably six months ago or so with me, you, Kate and Jonah, I think. Speaker 1: Oh, that's right. Yeah, I kind of forgot it. I think this is it. I mean, we're in the new building now, in the new warehouse. So, I think the last time we did it, we were still in the other warehouse, I think. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. So, let's start by talking about that. Let's talk about the new warehouse. What do you have going on there? Speaker 1: Well, if you look around here, we're in the men's section, which was a JCPenney's For us that grew up in the 70s and the 80s, that was a department store. I'm just kidding. Speaker 2: I'm well aware of a JCPenney. I've sourced from there before, in fact. Speaker 1: Right, right. Yeah, so we're in old JCPenney's. So just over 30, I think it's like 34,000 square feet. So two loading docks. It's really a nice setup. I actually share the space. My buddy Mike, and I think you know Mike, Mike's been in the business wholesale for, I think Mike started in 2017. He started at the same time as me. Yeah, he's a large, large seller. A lot of volume, all wholesale and some brand stuff. And then we also have another gentleman in here that's been full-time eBay for five or six years. So actually he's been slowly starting to take over all returns, unsellable product for Amazon, damaged box stuff, stuff like that. So he has his own business he runs, but now he's handling that for us as well, which is just awesome. He's right here in the building with us. Speaker 2: So that's really cool that you're surrounded by other people in the business, like other big sellers, right? Like you mentioned Mike, he's a big time seller. He's literally, I mean, you share a warehouse with him, right? He's your neighbor. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: And you've got another big eBay seller too. So it's cool to be a part of, you know, a local group of sellers like that because a lot of people, you know, that, I mean, most people don't have that, right? Myself included. Speaker 1: Yeah. And especially, you know, we have our community, obviously the, the wholesale network and surrounded by great people, but just having somebody here physically to go over and just sometimes just blow off smoke with or borrow a forklift or stuff like that at all. And that's where we've been teaming up on a lot of stuff. It's really cool. I mean, I have, you know, it's kind of, I have about 5,000 different sized boxes in inventory and, you know, both guys know they come over, they have a little clipboard, they write down what they take and once a month we kind of settle up. But by that time I've borrowed from them or, or, you know, needed help, a box truck or stuff to run the UPS or FedEx. You know, we just, it's, it's really cool. I mean, it's, I'll tell you what, anybody looking for space, look at your old malls and plazas near you because the price per square foot. Speaker 2: Well, and let's touch on that too, because I know you and I were talking recently and I think you've got plans or maybe I think you've already done this to open up a storefront in your mall, your local mall there and you and leverage that storefront. To land wholesale accounts with brands or distributors that might have that brick and mortar requirement. Is that an accurate understanding of what you're doing? Speaker 1: That is 100% accurate. I was kind of looking behind us to see if we could see it from here. So as this was a retail store, JCPenney's in the mall, we typically don't use that entrance. We come and go by the loading dock doors and stuff, but we have a whole bunch of doors that slide open into the mall. So I've lost in the last several months and it might even be more, but I lost three brand directs in the last few months and I'd say in the last five months that was. And these are brand directs where we've been selling the product right along. Two of them I really care a lot about because I like the product. We've seen growth with them. We've seen growth because we've been, really, because we've stayed in stock. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: That's key. They have other gift stores that sell their items online, but we were the ones that always stayed in stock. I was buying heavier volume. I was shipping FBA. I was shipping Zero Day during the holidays, FBM, on top of an FBA listing. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: Cut us off because we did not have a retail. Speaker 2: And when you say a retail, you mean like a brick and mortar storefront, right? And for the audience, right? That's a very common objection that you'll hear from brands and distributors is that they'll require you to have some sort of physical storefront location in order to sell to you. And a lot of times the reason for that, Joe, correct me if I'm wrong, is because it weeds out a lot of these small time sellers, right? If you have a storefront, if you've got a brick and mortar location, you're probably a serious player in the retail space because otherwise you wouldn't commit to that level of overhead and make that type of investment, right? Speaker 1: Exactly. Speaker 2: So that is a requirement from a lot of these big brands. Speaker 1: And these items all have a map policy too. And I think that's I think for a lot of these vendors, truly it's brand protection and maintaining their price point and their... A lot of these brands want to keep their price point higher because it shows the quality of their product, where they're not looking to cheapen their product. A couple of these, there's some very high-end or close Chinese knockoffs, but the original product, which is what we sell, made here in the US, they're able to fight through that and still hold true, even though sometimes they're two times higher than that knockoff. Keeping their map, I think, is very important to them because it just shows, consistency and control of their brand and integrity to their brand, that it's really their brand. It's not some knockoff that's selling on the listing at a third of the price. Speaker 2: Right, because it's just not a good look when a product that normally sells for, say, $40 is now selling for $22 on Amazon, right? Speaker 1: Exactly, yep. Speaker 2: What does it actually look like, you say, to open up a storefront in the mall to land these accounts? What does that look like? Did you literally sign a lease on a storefront there in the mall? Is this like a booth? What does this look like? Speaker 1: All right. We got to keep this quiet. We don't want anybody to know. Wait, this is going out. Speaker 2: Yeah, let's hear all about it. I want to hear. Speaker 1: No, we already have a lease in the mall, our warehouse. For us, this is really unique. We're in the mall. We're in the JCPenney. Speaker 2: Your warehouse is part of the mall property. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I'm there. Look, I mean, you're looking right across. That's not really a basketball hoop. We don't play basketball in the warehouse, but we do. But yeah, on the other side, you just can't see it because of the distance. There's the doors. So this is just wide open space, right? The floor tiling and carpets been peeled up. This is concrete floor, open wall ceilings. And then we also have the loading docks and the warehouse as well with a high ceiling in the back. But part of this is the six, seven sliding glass doors. That would open into the mall this mall is not what it used to be right back in the 70s and 80s when They had the roller rink and the you know, so but it was revitalized by a Bass Pro coming in here So Bass Pro came in built the only Bass Pro and up this whole area of upstate, New York And then smaller shops have opened in the mall along the way. But regardless, we have this warehouse, typically the glass doors that go into the mall have blackout curtains in front of them so nobody can see in here. So I went and talked to the mall and I said, look, I want to do a small retail. I don't want a huge overhead. I don't need any of that. Right. Hold on one second. I've got to snooze my computer. I was going to do an update. There we go. I actually went to the mall and said, what is the smallest storefront you have that we could rent or shop? I knew what I wanted to do was use our space right by here, but I didn't. We got talking with mall management and it ended up saying, hey, look, I've already got These glass doors, would you allow me to build a smaller area off of some of those doors? So what we did, and I really wish I could show the audience right now, but we really took nothing more than nice display cabinets we had, and we were fortunate, again, we had a lot of display shelves or cabinets, for lack of better words. So we literally, off the one entrance door, we built, by using display shelves and cabinets, we framed it in kind of, we built the room. And then we put the backdrop behind those so you don't have to see into the messy warehouse where they're, you know. So you can literally walk in from the mall and you walk into nine different display shelves we have up. And it looks like a little store. We're still not done yet. We've been working on it over the last several days here, really. I mean, when I say the last several days, literally the last three, four days. Putting the shelves up, getting kind of touched up with paint. Stocking with product in and placing orders one of those brands that had shut us off. I called them on Friday I think it was Just happened to get the owner on the phone call. It was just one of those random They never answer at this time. I mean, they never answer. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: I told him, I said, you know, here's what we're doing and I understand you didn't send us our last order because we did not have a brick and mortar and I guess the message didn't get to you through our distributor that we do have a brick and mortar. We're just updating it and we're revitalizing it. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: So he pretended he didn't know what I was talking about and he asked me to show him. I showed him what we were doing and I already have some of their products on one of the shelves. That went from there to saying, he literally cut the distributor out from there. He actually told me, he's like, just email me directly everything you want. You get 10% off and free shipping. Speaker 2: That's huge. If I'm understanding correctly, essentially you built Almost like a showroom, more or less, into the front of your warehouse, right? And you kind of corded it off from the rest of the warehouse, so it is a legitimate retail location that somebody could walk up to and buy something from there, no problem, right? Speaker 1: We are going to open the doors. I was actually trying to see if I could bring up a photo, but yeah, we literally just cordoned off a little area, and it's really cute. I'll have to be honest. Way better than I thought it would and we're still not 100% done and we feature, basically what I've done is, for a lack of better words, I'll show kind of a picture, I don't know how good it's gonna come up, but that's one of our shelf units and that's a brand that we represent on Amazon, right? So that's one of the shelves and that's like a hot sauce, barbecue sauce product line that we represent on Amazon. So I gave every brand their own, yeah, so here you go, there's the shelf units. Oops. Speaker 2: Yeah, now I can see. Speaker 1: Yeah, they're not, shelves aren't in, that's really what we did. We just put them together side by side, put a curtain around the back and yeah, I'm gonna open up, we're working on that schedule next. Speaker 2: Well, I mean, it's a great way to think outside the box to land some of these accounts, right? Because at the end of the day, a lot of these distributors, a lot of these brands just want to be able to check the box that you have some sort of retail location, right? They don't really care what it is as long as it's something. And that gives you the ability to truthfully say that you have that. And then obviously you have your e-commerce channels as well that you can monetize through, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then we've already started looking at taking over another section of that. We'll be separate. It's going to have a separate name from there. That'll be released in the next couple weeks, but we partnered with a wholesale supplier company. A good friend of ours, and we've partnered up to work together going forward this year. The second subset of this will be under their name, and we're going to have different liquidation clearance items, stuff like that that we need to get rid of, like returns, stuff like that. That's also going to check a void for some other large-scale accounts that we've been trying to open with them. That's looking good so far. So that's going to provide opportunity for bigger orders for the Wholesale Network as well. Speaker 2: Yeah. And so let's actually transition into that, right? Let's talk about your role within the Wholesale Network mastermind, what it is that you do, the types of opportunities you're working on, all that good stuff. So when we decided to have you come on and really take this role, we knew that you were the absolute best person for the job because you're like a magnet for opportunities. It's like we go to trade shows and somehow we lose Joe for 45 minutes and then we find him and he's like, oh, I just landed two awesome new accounts and this guy's sending me offers and this one's great. And it's like these opportunities just seem to fall into your lap and you do a really good job of connecting the dots and uncovering really good opportunities. So, what is your official title? I know we kind of joke about it, right? But it's something like Director of Group Procurement, right? Yeah. So, what does that mean and what exactly is it that you're doing inside the mastermind? Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, first of all, thank you for those compliments. It is funny how the stuff just, it does happen in it. I don't even know how I do half of what happens. It just happens. Just like when you and I talk New Year's Day or New Year's Eve Day, right? A cold call at 3.30 landed us an account today. The guy sent me 17 offers of products for the group. I mean, who knew, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, it's really like complete chance opportunities that just kind of fall into your lap sometimes. Speaker 1: I'll say this. I kind of relate it to the fact growing up, right? I had a hard time getting a girl to go out with me. So I just had to keep asking. Speaker 2: And I would ask. Speaker 1: You just throw enough, right? Crap against the wall, some of it sticks, and that's what it is, right, I guess. No, seriously. Title, I don't know what we ended up with, honestly. I think some of the guys and gals were saying DOD, the Director of Distribution was the title. Really, I'm the ringleader of a group now. I mean, we have a team. I mean, we have like a full team now. Speaker 2: Right, dedicated to these buys. Speaker 1: Dedicated to the buys. And not only the buys, the follow through with the shipping. And when stuff does inevitably sometimes go wrong, someone gets gated or restricted, right? We got a team of people there to support. So let's, you know, we can get there if you want, but we can back up to the buys and the groups. And, you know, it really started For me, at least in my head, I had been involved in an industry before all this where I saw, for lack of better words, buying groups and the power of buying groups. I think you and I and a handful of other more close friends at the time were at a trade show. And there was an opportunity to buy some product in large quantity, high value items. So this business as it evolves, at least for me, three years ago I was trying to go wide and not deep. A thousand dollars worth of product. Speaker 2: Right. Right. Speaker 1: And it doesn't change. And as far as my point of view in the world of e-commerce, I don't care if you're a new beginner, you're a veteran. It's always great to go wide than deep if you can. Right. But as you get more in a wholesale, typically you start to go sometimes. Sometimes you'll go deeper than wider because to get that opportunity. Well, that's what we really found. We could take three to four people. Come together with a brand or a distributor, still go very big in spend because, okay, I used to only be able to spend five grand on a PO, then I was at 30,000 a PO, and it still doesn't matter, right? If I could get three of us together with $30,000 POs, now we've got $90,000 to spend. And it just kind of in my head always was this group buy, group or you know, bulk or buying group, buying group. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: And we sat down at a trade show and talked to one of the vendors and they were happy to do stuff like that where they kind of worked with us and split stuff. And it just spiraled from there, right? Speaker 2: In a good way. Speaker 1: Yeah, no, in a really good way, right? Like where we have been able to really bring the community within the wholesale network together into these buys. And I mean, if you'd asked me like two years ago, I mean, even probably over just a year ago, really, or a year and a half ago, would we be spending tens of millions? No, I would have never guessed this. I would have never thought the fact that we'd be moving millions of dollars worth of product, which is crazy. Speaker 2: It is crazy to think about too. And you know, it's like we throw around these big numbers and you know, you think to yourself, it's like, well, is that actually the amount being processed here? And the answer is yes, right? So, I mean, I think there's one supplier in particular, like what's the total that we spent with them as a mastermind over the course, it was like over a seven month period, right? It wasn't even over the course of the whole year. What was like the subtotal there? Speaker 1: I'd say in that last seven to eight months are the group buying The group stuff that we would organize put together, I was told we're close to 10 million or a little over $10 million. And that's one supplier. Speaker 2: Right. And like a seven month period, essentially. Speaker 1: Right. And if you look at what we did as a totality, as a group, what's really neat about the group, one of the things I enjoy about what we do is, yeah, we organize these group bulk buys together. But our members and our community, the community folks are still buying on their own from these distributors, right? We help them get account. We literally... We help them fill out the paperwork to get their own account. This isn't a selfish thing by no means. We find these distributors, we help people within the community have their own accounts, and then when the deal is right, that's when we try to make it a big bulk purchase. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: You know, where we bought some kitchen equipment, supplies, appliances, tools, kitchen stuff. It was a mixed load, right? We've sold 34,000 items, 17 SKUs. Speaker 2: Four truckloads, 650K. Speaker 1: Four truckloads, 650K. Yeah. Right. That was just one. And we've done bigger deals. That was just a big one because of all the SKUs. Right. And you know, you think about that. We brought in four different truckloads. Members of the community had great warehouse and great personnel for 3PL and prep work in Indiana. So we used our community. So someone in our community then also got to do some prep work as there was prepping involved for truck. I mean, it took a month to get through all this stuff. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: And this product all sold well. And there's been reorders three times since then. Just to think that scale that we brought that together, that was eight total buyers on that one. And the numbers could easily sustain that. It was never a question of too many sellers on a skew or not. Speaker 2: And one thing that, and you know, not to toot our own horn here, but like being transparent about the process, right? Like one thing I think we do well is the kind of like the back end of all these deals, right? So much back and forth. Think about when you're organizing eight different buyers on what, 32 or 33 different SKUs, you said, four different truckloads of product all having to be processed in a 3PL in the middle of the country that, you know, luckily is being run by someone we trust. But that's just a lot of moving parts at the end of the day. And Joe does a really good job of facilitating that entire process A to Z. Obviously, not only Joe, both Kim and Nell on our team as well. I mean, we've got a whole team built out that handles these transactions at this point. But yeah, just, I mean, shout out to you and the team, Joe, for making that seamless. Speaker 1: There's days where I wonder what the heck we're doing because it is... Phone calls to midnight, especially dealing with folks on the West Coast or sometimes around the world. But overall, just what comes out of it, it's really cool. You know this, we've talked, I enjoy it. Speaker 2: I know, yeah. Speaker 1: It definitely is frustrating days, but what we've been able to bring together and build and what we've got coming, It just keeps evolving and the motion that we have going is just so cool to see. There's a lot of stuff out there. You're going to hear a lot on the internet, but I don't think there's anyone doing really what we do and how we're doing it. That's what I like is it's very unique. It's very personalized. It's pretty transparent. Speaker 2: Yeah, and I would agree. And one thing I'm most excited about, you just alluded to it a second ago, but it's the pipeline that we have. We have so many opportunities, so many good things in the pipeline. We've already got a lot of good stuff that is available now that we're currently doing, but I really think the next probably three to six months are going to be huge specifically for the buying side of the Wholesale Network Mastermind. We've had a lot of good opportunities come through, but I think a few things are going to play out here over the next few months that have the potential to be even bigger. And one of those in particular, we can talk A little more in detail now, if you want, is the opportunity with the very large tool buying group that we're buying from. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: Right. So why don't you kind of give us the rundown on that supplier? How do we get access? How do we find them? What kind of stuff did we buy from them and are we buying from them? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: What does that look like? Speaker 1: Yeah, I gotta be careful not to do too much here because this is one of those ones where you're like, Joe went to lunch and came back with a new account. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: So this is personal, right? This account was very personal. I know the people as dear friends. I mean, since childhood. But they own a local company in our hometown and they specialize in building supplies. I mean very large-scale commercial stuff. They don't really sell to the DIYer. They're mostly mainstream commercial to builders and stuff like that. So we've met numerous times. We've had beers and hung out in the summer on the lake and I always said, hey, what's your supply look like on this? We've talked, we've joked. And coming into the winter months, it allowed time to actually have a 15, 20 minute sit down. At work and talk about it and So we we did our first run where we looked at their supplies They reached out to their suppliers and said hey We're looking at buying in large quantities of things that we typically don't from you Would there be any issues with us, you know, and they told them straight up what we're doing, right? They said it's this is stuff that's gonna go for resale. It's gonna be here, but it's through a private community It's not just we're not Putting it out on the internet type, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's key. That's that's a big that's a big point for those brands right like and I love what you're saying at this point in the process like we're being as transparent as we possibly can be both with the bot with the Supplier that we're buying through and they're also being the same level of transparent with the sales reps from the brands, right? They're telling them exactly what they're gonna be doing. Hey, I When you see our purchasing behavior go from maybe the 10K a month that we usually spend with you guys, and one month we buy 250K worth of stuff, this is where it's going. Everybody's being super upfront, which I love. Speaker 1: We just did our first order with them. The products are due to arrive this week. As those products haven't even hit the market, I'm not going to say brand names, but they're power tools. We did the first order, one brand. I think three or four SKUs total. This was our first stab at it. I thought we were going to do around a $20,000 to $30,000 PO to see how the first one went. We were I think it was $91,000. It ended up being the first PO. Speaker 2: Yeah, it was just under $100,000 because I remember the demand being, I was like, these are good deals. And the demand was even, I mean, really even higher than we expected. Yep. Speaker 1: So we did the first order. They confirmed with their rep the order. We were even concerned they wouldn't be able to supply, you know, 600 of this one. I mean, they've never, I don't think they've ever spent more than $2,000 in any given month on this brand. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: So they reached out to their rep, and their rep, they definitely had some good laughs, and the rep verified the quantities would be of no issues. I've been waiting for the, I actually keep peeking at my email to see if he did respond. Nell sent a message over today to confirm dates, just so we make sure we can have, go pick it up. So this is new too, right? So I think you mentioned it. We are slowly been talking about this for a while last year, but finally made the transition starting in January. We are going to be starting to run 3PL services through here, just for the group only. We're not advertising to the public, so this isn't a plug to anything. Don't reach out. We're not taking customers. Maybe a couple of years, who knows, but really we're being able to bring that product directly in here, so we put on a full-time warehouse manager who has We're excited. So those products, for example, these tools, they're going to come right here. We're going to be able to prep them in-house. And the fact that we're not running this prep center as a business to the public, our margins are very low for us to run the shop here. So we're expecting to reduce the cost to our community. So this should be, I don't know, the first couple of months might be a little, you know, standard pricing, but I think once we get the irons ring up, we're going to save at least probably 10 to 20% for the internal to the community only for wholesale buys. Speaker 2: Yeah. A lot of additional perks are going to come there as well. And one thing I love about this particular supplier is, again, this was one specific promo with one specific brand, one time. There are, what, 100 plus brands that we have access to through this supplier, if not more, and multiple of which we're already working on and we've already uncovered some opportunities. I mean, this is the type of supplier that, I mean, realistically, we have the ability to spend half a million, a million, two million per month with collectively as a group, the same amount that we spend with the other supplier that we mentioned earlier. Speaker 1: I can add on to that too is as some other folks in that type of community have found out what we're doing, someone reached out to me yesterday and said, hey, why don't you give us a chance to bid you out on some stuff? Speaker 2: So you're saying you had another supplier reach out to you yesterday and ask, okay. So yeah, that's a, I mean, that's a huge, right? That's a benefit that comes from when you're, when you're buying in at scale like this and other suppliers get wind. I mean, I should, I had a guy DM me on LinkedIn today. He said, Hey Corey, I work with big, you know, big buying groups like yours. I sell these types of products. This is our website. Are you interested in setting up a call? Like we get, I get them out leads like that too. So yeah, it's a huge advantage. Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's where right now what we're focusing on for our group stuff this year is, in fact had a talk with the team today about this, is really standardizing how we send out, start really thinking if we're looking at buying this product here, some eyeglass lens cleaner, all right, I want that same, no matter what quote we do, I want it sent to three different suppliers, right? And before we've been kind of working with one supplier for maybe electronics. We've been working with one supplier for food products. We've been working, right? So, and that's great because that's how we started and we've, but as you do that, the network grows. And now for something like, I don't know, let's say some lens cleaner, we might have three potential suppliers for that. So we can bid them, not really saying bid them against each other. Because I'm not necessarily telling each one I'm putting them but we're gonna send it out saying hey, we're looking at 20,000 quoted. Yeah, exactly. And I just recently we sent a kind of a request out to the group saying hey, there's this brand XYZ brand send me your top three SKUs that you would be interested in buying at quantity And the quantities of these and give me three SKUs you're looking at my goal with this This is gonna go through the same tool folks, right? and I plan on formulating a list. They already buy a product of this brand name and they buy it in pallet loads, but it is a product we'll never sell in e-commerce. It's a commercial grade in size. It just doesn't sell well. But that same brand has, I think I looked them up on SmartScout the other day. I think they're doing like 3 million a month on Amazon or something, like the brand is, right? Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: So I want the community to tell me some SKUs they're interested in. We're going to formulate, I'm hoping, at least a $75,000 PO. Speaker 2: Opening PO for this one brand, you're saying? Speaker 1: For the brand, maybe 10 SKUs. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: Our guy, our connection, he's already buying one product all the time. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: This might afford him to get better pricing on that and also go to his rep. He's going to walk into his rep with, let's just say he always spends $20,000 a month with them. Well, now if we can help him get that to $70,000 a month. He's going to see better pricing most likely on his products. In return, we have access to better products for the community. Speaker 2: Absolutely. I mean, that's a win, win, win, win for us getting access to those products, win for him getting better pricing on the product he's already buying and win for the sales rep at the brand who just went from a commission on a 20 KPO to a commission on a 90 KPO, right? Potentially. And yeah, I mean, we could go on for days about all the opportunity we have. I mean, that's just, we've been talking about just the opportunity with one supplier for the past, like, 15 minutes. But, you know, I know my vision for this mastermind community, specifically this buying component, and I think this is your vision as well, is, I mean, I really see this as being a white glove service for wholesale, for serious wholesale sellers, right? Once you have capital to spend and they know exactly the types of products they want, the exact brands they want, and we can, like you said, go out and get quotes from four different suppliers on that same product and get you the best price, right? And then facilitate that transaction A to Z all the way from taking your order to handling the shipment, to getting it prepped, to getting it to FBA for you. And that is, I mean, that's what we're doing now. But the goal is to just further expand upon that and just make that even more seamless in the future. Speaker 1: Right. And I think that's something that, you know, maybe highlight a little more of what we're doing, too, is right. We're finding the product we're bringing in, but we've also been combining truckloads. And that's, to me, probably one of the. Speaker 2: Let's talk about getting an ROI on a membership. That is saving, no joke, certain people thousands of dollars already that have been in the group for a couple of months. So it's a huge, huge, huge cost savings. Speaker 1: It goes unnoticed a little bit. Some are untalked about, I think sometimes, very unspoken. We organize these truckloads and your freight cost per unit just bottoms. I mean, we're doing stuff, we've done stuff at 14 cents where SPD or LTL was like $3 to $4 a unit. Speaker 2: So let's dig into that, right? Because when people are hearing that, they might be thinking, what do you mean combining truckloads? What does that mean? Well, correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not trying to dumb down the explanation here, but just want to simplify it as much as possible. Essentially, you've got, what, let's say, you know, making up a number here. You've got five different community members that are buying a given product from a specific supplier. And normally, each of those five sellers would be sending their own individual shipment to the Amazon Fulfillment Center. But what you're able to do in certain cases is essentially combine their shipments into a single truckload, even though it's different sellers, their shipments can still go on the same truck, assuming that everybody has the same destination FC. So you're getting everybody onto the same truckload. And then that way, instead of paying $2 or $3 per unit in inbound shipping, as they would if they were sending it individually, Like you said, you've had some instances where it would have cost $3 a unit to send into FBA and we were able to combine shipments to get a freight cost of, what did you say, $0.14 per unit? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: We've had stuff that would have been over $12 and brought it down to $5 and $4. That's like a 50 plus percent savings on shipping, which is astronomical. Speaker 1: I don't mean to correct you, but I think I have to on this. It doesn't even have to be the same SKU and it doesn't have to be the same fulfillment centers. Really? I didn't know that. Yeah, so we've been able to take three or four people. Now the fulfillment centers have to be typically within the same quote unquote Amazon region. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: So we've had people that are going to... LAS-1 and ONT-8 and it's maybe three different SKUs. We're able to work with our rep and bring those all into one place. So we can merge ONT-8 into LAS-1 or LAS-1 and so sometimes that's just a savings alone just because we're going to, and then where it gets even trickier, right, and especially with some of these buys that we've done, sometimes it's not all the same SKUs. It's a handful of things this size, and then sometimes it's things this size, and they go to different centers, so now that would be super expensive for someone to do on their own. It doesn't work all the time, but I'd say we've got to be well over 75%. It's definitely way more than less where we've been able to pull these off. And get live unloads that it's just the value in that compounds. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. And you're talking about, I mean, again, you're talking about spending dollars per shipment, changing that down to pennies per shipment. And when you're not, sorry, not per shipment, but per unit, right. In some cases. And when you're shipping at scale, which in our case, a lot of these shipments are thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of units per shipment that equates to Like thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes per shipment. Like that's how significant the savings are in this case, right? Speaker 1: Yeah. So it's back in the pocket. Speaker 2: Yeah, it goes right back in the pocket. And as any wholesale seller knows, we operate on not the fattest margins, right? Also margins tend to be pretty thin. So if you can optimize your shipping costs and save money any way possible, especially if you're talking about cutting your shipping by 50% plus in some cases, That is a huge win and you should take advantage of that. Joe, are you planning on going to any trade shows anytime soon? Speaker 1: Yeah, I think, you know, outside the norms, the Amazon shows, right? Because we're going to do the Miami Seller Conference. We're doing, of course, Amazon United when it rolls around. Outside of that, yes, true trade shows for brand and distributor. Yeah, we are. I'd like to do four unique trade shows in 2025 that we've never been to. I think we're going to do one together, right? I think we're looking at a trade show in Pennsylvania. Yes. Speaker 2: Just a quick, I guess, sneak peek on that. No, you're fine. I think this should be airing probably in time, but I guess this will be specific to the Wholesale Network, so this will be a private meetup, but we're planning on doing a Wholesale Network meetup at, I think it's going to be at the Great American Outdoor Show. We're in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is I think February. Well, it's technically February 1st through 9th. It's a nine-day trade show. Speaker 1: That's crazy. Speaker 2: Yeah, but I think we're going on either the 1st or the 2nd. So we'll be doing a meetup for the community at that trade show. We'll be walking the trade show floor as a group. We'll be getting dinner. We'll be hanging out. So that'll be a lot of fun. So that's, at least for me, that's the one that I'll be attending next. And then I think Miami Seller Conference would be the next like event after that for me. Speaker 1: Yeah, I look at the conferences as not really, right, those are for- Not really a trade show. I kind of consider those shows, those are for me. Trade shows will be for the community. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 1: Right, because I get a lot out of the conferences and the seller get-togethers. I'm probably, I think I'm going to hit this ASD I think we did talk about that before. I think it's kind of a, it's going to be more low scale for ASD this time around. I'm going to go, I'm going to spend maybe two to two and a half days there. And the value here for us, you know, just has evolved over time. I still think it's an excellent trade show for people to go to and walk around, you know, be cautious. Speaker 2: And get experience too. Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great experience. Hands down, it's wonderful. I mean, just for knowing anybody can pay for a booth there. So sometimes, and I've seen it there, if it's too good to be true, and I hate to say it, it's probably too good to be true. Speaker 2: Yep, exactly. Speaker 1: But there's some great people you're going to meet there. I know we're gonna have some folks from the community there, so we'll do a kind of a meetup happy hour like we've done in the past just to kind of, you know, ad hoc meetup. And then I've been looking at some more of the power tool. I'll say gadgets, like in the world of tools and vehicle stuff, really looking at some of those odd niches that a lot of people don't focus on. Possibly going out for the sweets and. Speaker 2: snacks. Speaker 1: Yeah, that one. Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great one. I think it's usually in Chicago every year. Speaker 1: Yeah, there's one in Vegas, which I have a personal interest in it because of one of our exclusive candy lines is potentially they want to have a booth there. So I might just go out to see they're coming in from I'm outside of the country, so I'd like to maybe go say hi. Plus, again, distributors and brands. I think that's the one thing, too, to talk about going forward for this year is really hoping to make more direct brand relationships where we, as a community, can really help a brand grow and offer that as a value, not just like, not me, but the group, right? What can we do for that brand as a whole? Because we've got such a wide group of people within the community that have Experience in professional companies that some of them own, really building brands and listing optimization and PPC campaigns and you name it. So bringing brands to the table that we can work as a whole, I think there's going to be some really cool value to the brand for that and for all of us. Speaker 2: Right. And also buying opportunities with some of these brands as well, right? Like we talked, you mentioned that order that we did earlier, the 650K, four truckloads, 32,000 units or however many it was. I mean, we've had discussions about, so that deal we were able to purchase through a distributor, but we've talked about going directly to that brand and approaching that brand because we have the track record to say, hey, we bought one of your large closeout deals earlier this year through one of your authorized distributors. Let's have that conversation about buying directly from you guys. And the door I'm sure would be open. Speaker 1: Well, for example, that brand specifically, I know they use three different distributors because I've just been doing that digging for the last several months and there's a new distributor that we kind of touched base that we just opened up. With them, New Year's Eve and then today we got the first round. They deal with that brand themselves. Speaker 2: Nice. Speaker 1: Right? So that's, we start seeing that, that's, you know, you got more of an opportunity now to go direct. Because really, as we are, we have a distributorship that's part of the network. We can just open those accounts right through the distributorship and just bring just more value and hopefully some exclusive deals. And that's really where I think it's going to be great once we get a couple. We've had some of those. We've had those exclusives kind of, but it's always through a distributor. So now going direct is going to be awesome. Speaker 2: A hundred percent. And we've got such a big pipeline and so much in store and I'm really looking forward to it. So for those of you guys in the audience, guys, if you like what you heard on the podcast, if you want a chance to participate in some of these deals, then we are taking applications to join the Mastermind community inside the Wholesale Network for seven and eight figure wholesale sellers. So if that's you, and like I said, you like what you heard, then you can apply at the link in the description below if you're watching this on YouTube, or the URL is just wholesalenetwork.io. And again, this is for seven and eight figure wholesale sellers. So if that's you, we'd love to have you. And Joe, where can people find out more about you? Where can they go and connect with you? Speaker 1: Yeah, well, the joke, it started years ago and we've kept Jomazon alive. So at Jomazon or I think LinkedIn now is afka.jomazon. My original Jomazon account got shut down doing a RA video. I'm with music playing in the background in a store. Speaker 2: Copyrighted music. Yeah, that's crazy. Speaker 1: So now I'm AFK, Amazon and LinkedIn is just, I think it's just my name, Joe Saville on LinkedIn. But yeah, and then I'm always around in the community. So yeah, who thought, Corey, bumping into you on a sidewalk a few years ago, right? Speaker 2: I know. I know. It's been a fun ride and we've got a lot more in store. Thank you so much for your time, Joe. Guys, if you enjoyed this episode or if you enjoy the podcast as a whole, please take a quick second, leave a five-star review. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple, if you're watching on YouTube, please like the video and subscribe for more. We'll be back next week. Thank you so much. See you, Joe. See you, guys.