#449 - The Global Seller Blueprint: Tariffs, Logistics, Miles, & Winning Product Listings

#449 - The Global Seller Blueprint: Tariffs, Logistics, Miles, & Winning Product Listings with Antonio Bindi Kevin King: Hello, welcome to episode 449 of the AM-PM Podcast. This week I've got an eight-figure seller from Brazil that's selling in the US, selling all over Europe, doing quite well. So we talk about everything that's happening in the tariff world, happening about expansion, why you should consider expansion. As well as some opportunities you might be missing to actually travel the world for free through your Amazon sales and business. Enjoy this episode with Mr. Antonio Bindi. Unknown Speaker: Welcome to the AM-PM Podcast. We explore opportunities in e-commerce. We dream big and we discover what's working right now. Plus, this is the podcast where money never sleeps. Working around the clock in the AM and the PM. Are you ready for today's episode? I said are are you you ready ready? Let's do this. Let's do this Here's your host Kevin King Mr. Kevin King: Antonio Bindi, welcome to the ampm podcast. How you doing, man? Antonio Bindi: I'm doing great Kevin. Very nice to see you again. Kevin King: If most people don't realize that you're in Brazil, you're in Sao Paulo or Rio? Antonio Bindi: I'm in Rio. I live in Rio. I was born and raised in Rio. Kevin King: Born and raised in Rio. I was in Rio for Carnival in 2009. In 2010, I actually went to Rio for Carnival, which was my second or third time to Rio. I'd been there before just as a tourist going around, but that was a blast. I got robbed in a bloca. Antonio Bindi: You got the whole experience then. Kevin King: I got the entire experience. It's kind of funny. A short little story on that is I I was, back then I was doing a lot of travel. This is before I was doing the Amazon stuff and I was doing a lot of travel, spending a couple weeks every month traveling the world. I did that for seven years and I had met this girl in Colombia like the prior April of 2009 and we kind of hit it off a little bit and I was like, you know what, maybe I'll just invite her to Rio to come to Carnival with me. So I messaged her around Christmas time of 2009 like, hey, you want to go in February to Carnival? And she's like, hell yeah, so she comes and I end up marrying that girl and then divorcing from that girl. But we were in, we were in, that was, that was our first official, I guess you could say, date was in your backyard at carnival. But I remember I was in a bloca, bloca is these like big street Street mobs, I guess. You follow a band around these drummers and stuff and they go up and down the streets and you're following around drinking, shouting, singing. It's a lot of fun. They go all through different streets. I was in one of these blocas and I knew I was in Rio and Rio has a reputation for pickpocketing. So I had only taken my iPhone, probably like an iPhone 3 or something back at the time, and one credit card and I had them in opposite pockets. And we turned this corner in this bloca and there's this baby stroller sitting there on this corner and a little baby inside. We're dancing and jumping up and down and everything and someone's like, careful, careful, the baby, the baby, the baby. But that was long enough for someone to come up from, it was a distraction, it was an intentional distraction, someone to come up from behind, go into my pocket and take my phone. I've never felt, you know, the rest of that. They didn't get the credit card. They only went in one pocket. I've never felt so naked in my life for the next five days. I had no phone. It's like, it was weird. I love Rio. I want to come back for New Year's. New Year's is supposed to be pretty awesome too. Antonio Bindi: Rio is starting to have all these We have yearly huge concerts in Copacabana Beach. Last year, we had Madonna. Next week, it's going to be Lady Gaga and Beyoncé. The mayor is trying to bring back the event scene to Rio. Kevin King: That's awesome. Now, for those that don't know, your background is in dentistry, right? I mean, before you got into this Amazon gig, so walk me through how that happened. You went to school for dentistry, were practicing, had some offices, and then how did that segue into Amazon? Antonio Bindi: Well, it took 20 years for that to happen. I graduated in 2000, but around 2004, I started this small I'm a home-based e-com thing selling glow sticks in Brazil. No one sold glow sticks here in Brazil, so it's something I found online. Kevin King: These are those sticks that you wave above your head at parties and stuff, right? Antonio Bindi: Exactly. Bracelets, glasses, all those glow stuff that you could buy. I started importing that to Brazil early 2003-2004 and that moved into a new business. I mean, my first business that's still something I run on crowded identification. We sell wristbands and lanyards, badges, all kinds of stuff for events. The RFID bracelets, the one with cashless consumption, we developed it to a big retailer in Brazil. Kevin King: So you did that for the Lady Gaga concert? We're Lady Gaga. Antonio Bindi: We did it for Rock in Rio, for Lollapalooza, the big ones that happened here. Tomorrowland. We're the big guys in this segment in Brazil. It's like 20, 22 years old now. But it came from just playing around with these glow sticks and someone asking me, Hey, what can I find them? I said, well, buy it from me. And then I became, that was my first time selling something. And it just came naturally to me. 10 or 12 years into dentistry this business was thriving a lot more than my my practice and I just decided to move on to into full It's not even e-com anymore. It started as an e-com thing, but now we're this large company with the wristbands and badges. In 2018, I went to the States. My wife was going to study, and we stayed there for a full year. And that's when I started to watch videos, watch a lot of YouTube. I was a bit bored. So, these ads for this incredible way to make money online by selling stuff on Amazon popped up. Kevin King: So, like amazing.com and that kind of stuff back in those days? Was it amazing.com or something else? Antonio Bindi: No, no. It was something else. It was just like arbitrage. Some dude from his garage. And at some point, I was in Facebook groups. Someone referred me to Tom Wang. Who's responsible for his first meeting in Vancouver. Yeah. So that's the first event I went to that really hooked me up. And I very soon started my brand and just went from there. So I learned from I'm watching a lot of videos from courses, from taking your course, your Freedom Ticket and others, but no, I never took Amazing. We met at an amazing event in Las Vegas a few years ago. I think it was the last one they had. They hosted probably 2020 or 19, just before the. Kevin King: Yeah, it would have been somewhere around 2019, probably 2020, 2019. Yeah, I believe so. Antonio Bindi: That's when we met right after Tom Wang's and we've been learning the hell out of it from ever since and contributing and you know, I've spoken at events, spoken at your events in Puerto Rico. What I say is that by talking and you know, Trying to collaborate or to help people, I learned stuff that I didn't know I didn't know. Sometimes I have this like very strong opinion that if you do this with your listing and someone said, well, that doesn't work in my niche and then I learned something new. So very early on, I decided that by trying to Be very present in the groups, especially on Facebook. That helped me learn a lot. It really did. Kevin King: So how much time do you devote? I mean, you're doing eight figures now, right? Not counting the bracelet or the party stuff, but just on Amazon alone, you're doing eight figures. So there's a lot of eight figure sellers. I just met some at Prosper where we just saw each other last. They came up to my BDSS booth and like, what is this? Who are you guys? And which was like, cool, I'm in the right place. There's people that don't know who we are. Um, and then these guys were doing like 20 some odd million, 23 million, 25 million been selling since like 2016. And they had no, this was their first conference and they had no idea this, this whole world existed, uh, of, you know, what, what is, how much time do you devote to like participating in the groups or watching YouTube videos or keeping up? Cause you're running a multi-million dollar, you know, an eight figure brand. Plus you got your other company. How do you allocate that time and how do you allocate that importance? You kind of just said that's how you learn and keep on top of things, but how do you balance that? When actually doing what you've got to do to run the business? Antonio Bindi: My other business is mostly being ran now by my partner. We've been together since the very beginning. My business partner is here. And for the last five, four years has been running the whole thing. I'm in the background. We talk a lot, but I don't really participate in the day-to-day there anymore, just more strategic. Kevin King: That's the bracelets and party stuff or? Antonio Bindi: Okay. Uh, it's, it's like I said, it's a very mature 23 year old, uh, uh, uh, company that's already running on its own with a very good manager who knows all about the business. And, uh, there's no, no one I trust more than him and vice versa. Uh, it's been, Doing really well. We have these. When I started the business, when I started on Amazon, I also tried to bring some of that party stuff into Amazon, but that's like super saturated. We had issues with the account. So it's completely separate now. My Amazon stuff business has nothing to do with that business. He runs that and I'm fully dedicated to Amazon right now. It's something that I already have my systems. I have a team of 23 people here that are running my logistics, running the day-to-day. I have a very good COO who takes care of everything related to teams and operations. It's kind of my job to be up-to-date. It's my job to know what's going on, what's next, what are the challenges. I'm the one who is bringing the news every day of this is going on. Look what I just received at the BDSS group. Look what I just read on MDS and stuff like that. So that comes from my expertise and my knowledge is fundamental for the good working of the team and that's how I do it. Last year we I don't know if you missed me, but 2023 was a year that I really, really traveled. I probably went to 12 different events throughout the year. And I had a little bit of trip guilt because of my children and they were, you know, Daddy, you're always traveling. They were on vacations and I traveled with Agatha. We went to Croatia for vacation, but that was an MDS trip to Croatia. With, you know, it was a super yacht. It was awesome. But it was still work in a sense. So I kind of took 2023 to relax a little bit and just travel with the children. Kevin King: You mean 2024? 2024, yeah. Antonio Bindi: I chilled a little bit more. But this year I'm back. I went to Prosper. I really wanted to go to Europe. It was back-to-back with Prosper, plus all the challenges to go to Iceland. But yeah, anything next, I probably have a couple of events that I'll attend this year, for sure. And Nashville, I'll be there. Kevin King: Nashville is April 8th to 12th and the only other in-person event I have before that's Market Masters in November, which is my new event. I don't know if you had got access to the replays. If not, I'll take care of you on that. But for BDSS, We did a demo of what that is at the BDSS in Iceland and people that had not seen it, people that have been know it's like my premier event now. It's my top event and I'm switching the model up so you'll see it in Nashville next year, a lot more people. The price of the tickets are half for the top level ticket, half of what they've been. And then there's a ticket as low as $500 for Nashville. And we're going to put 500 to 1,000 people in there. Antonio Bindi: You're more local, so it's probably easier for people to get to Nashville. Kevin King: Yeah, that's one of the reasons we chose it. It's right on Broadway. It's right on the heart of Nashville where all the bars and restaurants are. Someone that doesn't want to stay in the Grand Hyatt because it's out of their budget. There's a Holiday Inn across the street and some cheaper options. It's all very carefully orchestrated and we're doing some really cool stuff that no one's ever done at a big event. When you take it from 130 people in Iceland to 500 to 1,000 people, it's a different animal. And you can lose some of that charm or some of that edge that we have. But we've got some pretty cool ideas that no one's ever seen at that size of event before that's going to be I think it's pretty cool. Antonio Bindi: You teased me on some AI stuff that you were doing with this more advanced GPT model. I'm really interested in checking that information out. I think from what we spoke during That Cigar in Vegas, there's some really good stuff going on that we're looking forward to take a look at. Kevin King: Yeah, there's some good stuff. So speaking back on the travel, I mean you're one of the masters when it comes to... I think you told me like I haven't paid for a trip, a hotel or an airfare for either business or my family in years because you're like the master of credit cards when it comes to like maximizing what you're spending anyway on Amazon, on PPC and other stuff and actually maximizing that and I think at one point you told me You got like, was it 6 million miles or you're capable of getting 6 million miles per year on just an Amex, a series of Amex cards or something like that? Antonio Bindi: Here's the deal. Amazon gives you 5, sorry, American Express Gold, the business American Express Gold will give you 4 miles, 4 points on a dollar. On advertising, on advertising spend or freight. So if you're using Uber freight, if you're using FedEx a lot, UPS, all of that can give you a Four times the points. I don't use UPS. I don't do any self-fulfilled, but if you're doing self-fulfilled with any of these major carriers, it's also good for that. So it's for a bunch of non-FBA sellers or mixed sellers. It's not only PPC. PPC is what I talk about because that's where my spend is, but it's also good for freight. So it gives you... Kevin King: Meta ads and Amazon PPC both. So if you're running meta ads or... Antonio Bindi: Google ads and any online advertising will be eligible for the 4X. Kevin King: Up to $150,000 in spend per car. So that's $600,000 per car because 150 times 4. And you said you can get 10 cards per business. Antonio Bindi: So if you have multiple LLCs, multiple partners, you can just go forever. When you apply, you need at least 90 days between applications. But if you do it consistently, if you have a partner, if you have a second LLC, you can just build all of these credit cards and make it infinite. I have friends who I've hooked up with American Express with this system and they're like up to 10 million miles. They don't fly coach anymore. It's like the whole family goes on trips. They travel even more than I am. I have friends like spending, 500,000 a month in PPC alone. And they said it's the best thing ever happened to them. It is to me as well. And the great thing about these American Express miles is that when you spend your miles there, Amex is actually buying a ticket from the airline, so you also get points with the airline. So it's a fully cash-paid ticket that Amex hands money to American Airlines or United or whatever, and you make points there. So not only I have these infinite miles that I'm making with American Express, I'm also building miles and status with the other airlines. Agatha and I, for anyone who hasn't realized that, yeah, Agatha is my wife and my business partner, but we were both executive platinum with American Airlines, get the suite lounges and upgrades. We've earned like eight free upgrades each for the last year. So it's been amazing. The children are flying with us all the time. We took a cruise. We went on the Icon of the Seas, the largest cruise. All paid with miles, 800,000 miles. Book it. Kevin King: Yeah. For a lot of people, 800,000 miles would be like a lifetime earnings of some of these people that play the mileage game. That would be like their dream. But for you, that's a month. Antonio Bindi: It did hurt my account. Unknown Speaker: It was a hit. Antonio Bindi: But it was also a completely free, money-free trip. I traveled. We got the tickets for Probably 250,000 miles for everyone, plus the cruise for another 100. I had like 3 billion miles in my account. We spent a million and went on a great free vacation. That's how I see it. Kevin King: Yeah. Do you have one of those rules where you actually, when you redeem the miles, you have to get certain cents per mile? Like when I redeem my miles, I want at least two and a half cents. Per mile on a redemption, otherwise, I just pay cash. If I go and I look at, say, I'm flying American from Rio to Dallas to come to the next VDSS or to Miami. I look at it and the price is, I don't know, $10,000 for a round trip for a business class ticket. That means that if I spend a hundred thousand miles to get that ticket, I'm paying a penny, a 10 cents per mile is the value. So that's a good value versus if it's I had to pay 500,000 miles for that same ticket. It's not nearly as good a value. Do you look at it like that or you don't really care? Antonio Bindi: Absolutely. It's completely straightforward with American Express. It's one cent per mile. That's what it is. So for a $1,000 ticket, you're going to spend 100,000 miles. Kevin King: But you can transfer those miles out of Amex too into Delta or into other airlines. Unknown Speaker: You could also do that. Antonio Bindi: For my use or the airlines that I can use, That didn't prove very efficient. I would rather spend them through American Express. American Express works like Expedia. It's basically an online travel agency. They're more valuable within American Express than they are if you transfer them because I remember transferring miles to Air France for a trip and the same flight would cost me like 80% more miles to Air France than they would by using American Express and I wouldn't get the miles with Air France. I wouldn't get the extra miles from purchasing the tickets from Air France. Kevin King: So I do sometimes I look at co-chairs like Avianca and Air France or Star Alliance, I think. So you sometimes you can book the exact same flight. It's an Avianca flight number, but it's actually on Air France Metal and you can get a discount or sometimes Amex will offer a 30 or 50 percent. They just did a hundred percent bonus transfer. So they double your points if you did a transfer by, you know, this would happen back in April. To certain programs within by a certain date, you get double the points, for example. So you can game it like that. Antonio Bindi: Yeah, that happens. I know that you could transfer. I'm not sure if you can transfer to Alaska, but I know that you can transfer to Hawaiian and then Hawaiian to Alaska. Kevin King: I've done that. So you can't go directly to Alaska. But you can go, since Hawaiian and Alaska are joining forces, now you can transfer to Hawaiian and then from Hawaiian you can transfer to Alaska. Antonio Bindi: You transfer the miles directly like you can with Greater Europe? Kevin King: I just did it to go to Taiwan. We're on Starlux Airlines, which is an Alaska partner. Antonio Bindi: Alaska is out of the way for me, but I know that if you have miles in Alaska, you can use American Airlines tickets for much fewer miles than you would with American Airlines directly. You have all these websites that will tell you, my miles are here. I want to do this trip. Unknown Speaker: What's the best way to... Antonio Bindi: I can't remember the name now, but I know there are some websites. Kevin King: There's PointsPath, there's PointsFinder, there's ExpertFlyer. There's quite a few. It's cool how a lot of people in our business don't take advantage of these kinds of things. They're not aware of them. have the wrong credit card or they're just putting on their debit card or something like that. But part of the reason you're at that level is how many Amazon marketplaces are you in? You're not just in the U.S. You're in quite a few, right? Antonio Bindi: We're across the whole of Europe and Canada and Mexico at this point. We just shut down a few stores in Europe because the volumes are so small that They weren't worth the time we spent with booking it. Like Poland or Sweden, we would have like one sale a week or maybe three sales a week. In the end, our effort, the juice wasn't worth the squeeze to keep those alive. So we would just shut them off. At this point, we're doing very well in UK and Germany. We have decent sales in France, but it's borderline unprofitable. There's, uh, storage and FBA fees in France are crazy high. Um, and we have decent sales in Italy, which is okay, but Spain, we have to keep it open just to, to, to make, uh, use of the penny you rates. Uh, so Spain and, uh, Netherlands, the ones that we, We accept to take the hit but it's mostly UK, Germany and Italy for us. Kevin King: The U.S. is by far the biggest for you, right? Antonio Bindi: U.S.? Kevin King: U.S. is the biggest of them all? Antonio Bindi: Oh, by far, by far. U.S. is more than 60% of the whole business. Kevin King: So how's this whole tariff thing that's been going on since early April and now we're in just about two months of it now here at the end of May. How's this going for you? What impacts and what changes have you had to make? Are you sending stuff to Canada and storing it? Antonio Bindi: We have been sending to Canada for the last couple years. We don't do any NARF anymore. I mean, we do it for Mexico a little bit, but we don't use Remote Fulfillment for Canada. We have our own FB inventory there, which works. Kevin King: You can store it in a 3PL in Canada and then go to Amazon? Antonio Bindi: We're moving out from that because we found out that the 3PL prices are okay, but freight charges to transfer the 3PL to Amazon are crazy high in Canada. This was costing us like six points in margin just in logistics. That's really, really high. At the end of last year, we discovered that having a 3PL and transporting to Amazon was like killing the profitability completely in Canada. We changed that. We're like shipping to smaller volumes. We changed our portfolio just to be like the best sellers over there. But we haven't made any purchasing changes as of now. In the States we have, we have some orders that were about to be shipped. We have two product launches that we fully paid to the supplier and said, listen, just keep that in your warehouse for the next Whatever the stakes. We're postponing a launch that's fully paid for just because we don't want to be hit. Kevin King: Are you set with good inventory levels in the States where you can ride this out for a little while before? Are you raising prices? Are you holding off on doing that until your competitors start raising prices? Or what's your strategy with the current inventory that you have sitting in? Antonio Bindi: So what we are holding back are launches so we're not being hit with any out of stock because it's a product that's not being sold yet. But with whatever we have in stock, we're pretty well stocked, especially with our main sellers. I know that we have to make a decision over the next couple of weeks whether we're boarding or not replenishment shipments. But I was kind of writing that out to see where it would go. Kevin King: Are you just going to ride this whole thing out, whether it takes a few more weeks, takes a few more months or a year, or are you looking at alternative sourcing? Antonio Bindi: Alternative sourcing isn't something that would be easily switchable to. We have potential factories in India that could make our product. Uh, not at the same speed, not in the same quality, uh, other issues that, uh, you know, we, we are, but only our product, uh, inspections weren't that good, but the factory inspections were, we would see some, uh, bad atmosphere, not bad atmosphere, but bad, um, Labor, labor conditions that we didn't agree with. Uh, so India was kind of cut off from, cut from our list and I don't really see. Kevin King: So you tried India or you just. Unknown Speaker: I've traveled to India. Antonio Bindi: I've spoken to, to, uh, to suppliers. I've, I've done factory inspections and product inspections and many of these won't, won't even, uh, They cater to my demand. They are unable to manufacture in the speed that I need. So it was a switch that we never even tried making. What we might do in the near future is I focus more on the international markets where they're profitable. Maybe the products that are sitting in China now, instead of launching them in the States, we're probably going to trickle them down to Canada or UK to sell them and maybe launch them elsewhere. The thing is, a launch, if I decide that today, this launch is going to happen in 60, 70 days just because of lead times. So we were kind of trying to see who will stop the sharing contest first. Kevin King: Yeah. Yeah. Cause you might decide and pull the trigger and say, okay, we're going to launch in the UK and Germany. Then halfway through that, the U S opens back up and you're like, well, that's where I needed this stuff actually as a priority. Now I've got this whole other thing going on. Antonio Bindi: Exactly. So when, We could do a hybrid of that. We have probably a couple of containers of the product sitting there. Maybe we could do that with half of it and send the other half. It's something that the team are discussing this week. What would be the best risk mitigating strategy from now on? Kevin King: How many SKUs are you handling right now? Antonio Bindi: We have 24, 25 product families or product types with more than 400 SKUs because of size and color. Listings, parent listings on Amazon in the States, we probably have 24, 26 maybe. Few of that in the other marketplaces. We don't carry the whole selection everywhere, just the best sellers. And also, we don't carry all the variations for the ones that we do sell. Some products that we... We sell home stuff for storage. And Americans are more into storage and the bigger the better than Europeans are. So there's also this kind of cultural differences that have us not We cross over with the whole portfolio. Kevin King: As most of your team, they're in Brazil. I see them walking back and forth in the background sometimes. Are you people in the Philippines or is it all Brazil-based team? Antonio Bindi: Everyone's Brazilian. I don't have any VAs. I'm very old school in the sense of remote work. I probably lose a lot of great opportunities with great people elsewhere. I also like the over-the-shoulder work. We're all sitting in the same room. It's like an open space. We're all hearing what everyone else is doing. So if someone's in inventory says something about this product that's not arriving, our PPC team hears that immediately and reacts immediately. We don't have this long processes for information to go through the company. Everyone sits together. We don't have a lot of Amazon talent in Brazil, people who know Amazon. The interactions in the office are very important for people to learn. I'm always bringing information sometimes. I once had the whole team sitting around the table watching BDSS online for like two whole days. Listen, this is going to cost us $1,500 per person if the whole team here is going to have it. A lot of us are going to learn at the same time. I mean, you know what happened right after that. We had this conversation about the I don't know if you remember, but I've traveled with my team a lot. I brought them to Prosper. I brought them to Capicom. Kevin King: I see your wife a lot, Agatha, but have I met any of your team guys? Unknown Speaker: Yes. Antonio Bindi: I remember this one party at Rooftop that Yael was, Fortunate was hosting in Vegas. I had the whole team there and they all wanted to shake your hand because... Kevin King: Okay. Antonio Bindi: Yeah, I have probably four or five of my team members over there and they love it. They fight for who's coming on the next trip. It's something that I use also as incentive. The good performers, the brilliant people. They're coming with me. I brought a couple to AMZInnovate last year. Probably going to do the same later this year. Even Amazon events. Amazon Unboxed, the PPC focused one. I brought my PPC team. All on American Express Miles. Kevin King: There you go. There you go. So isn't Amazon starting in Brazil though? I know they do books and some Kindle stuff, but isn't that one of their big... Antonio Bindi: It's pretty mature. Amazon's been selling merchant products for probably the last five, six years. It's very mature, great, great fulfillment, but they're not as big as MercadoLibre. MercadoLibre is still like the dominant marketplace in Brazil. It's a terrible interface to work with. I've tried selling on the Cadillac here and there's no advertising. It's just on and off. There's no keyword. There's no strategy. It's just... You just toggle it on and off. But fulfillment is great. It's super reliable. They have their own planes. They have their own vans. It really, really works. But Amazon is like the contender now against Macau Delivery. More rules on Amazon. They're more strict with who they approve. MercadoLibre has a lot of sellers with multiple accounts, hundreds of listings for the same product. It's kind of a jungle still. They have to do a lot of cleanup there to make it more friendly to the user and for sellers as well. Kevin King: So you're not selling on Amazon Brazil right now? Antonio Bindi: No, not at all. My business is fully abroad. Brazil is very complex with taxes. Kevin King: It's expensive. I mean, imports can be... I mean, you're talking about tariffs into the United States. Brazil is famous for a lot of high tariffs of products coming in. Antonio Bindi: Tariffs can build up to like 60% of the product cost, like without any retaliations or without any special schemes. But not only tariffs, but even your sales tax or corporate tax, everything is very... We say that if you try to Put the whole Brazilian tax code in a book, it would be like two stories high. It's really hard to navigate, especially if you're a foreigner or if you're a foreign company. You don't get access to special tax schemes that Brazilians have access to. So if you're a small company in Brazil, your overall tax is like 6%. Once you hit certain thresholds, you start paying more. But these lower tiers aren't even available for foreigners. If you have like a foreign partner or foreign entity involved, you don't even have access to those lower tiers. And what Brazilians do is what Brazilian scholars do, they'll just open Tens of companies under their parents' names, their neighbors, and just be this huge salad of LLCs, or the equivalent here, just to keep all of them under the thresholds and not pay taxes that a large company would pay. Kevin King: When you order something for yourself or your family, are you ordering on MercadoLibre or do you not do a lot of e-com ordering? Unknown Speaker: Not a lot. Antonio Bindi: I'm building the house. I won't go to the store for a circuit breaker. I'll just buy everything on MercadoLibre. It's cheaper. It's reliable. It's fast. I probably receive three or four packages. It's like Amazon for Americans. I believe it's good for me now. We're receiving three or four packages a day of dog pads or food, dog food. We even buy We have groceries from MercadoLibre. There are other services for that, but we'll buy everything from MercadoLibre. Kevin King: It's big all throughout Latin America. I'm familiar with it. It's big throughout Latin America. It's big in Mexico where you're selling on Amazon. It's big in Colombia. It's big all over South America. Antonio Bindi: They became the largest company in the whole of Latin America. The largest in Petrobras, the largest in all the mining companies, the number one. Kevin King: Yeah, they're huge and there's people in the States and Miami that help you actually if you want to get into MercadoLibre as a U.S. based company, they'll help you export stuff into there. I don't know anybody that's had huge success and done huge numbers with that but I know people have dabbled in it and either Stuck with it because it just adds a little bit extra revenue or they've said it's not worth the juice, not worth the squeeze and then they back out. Antonio Bindi: I've spoken to these providers. They're from Argentina, I believe. Kevin King: Uruguay, like Knock Knock is one. And there's Sky Postal and there's several. Antonio Bindi: But you're still doing Small shipments from the U.S. to Brazil and then they'll resell the products. I don't think it's sustainable. You're not going to do huge volumes with that. If you want to do huge volumes, you don't want to take that route because you're adding all these steps to your logistics and it just makes it a lot more expensive. You want to import from China or from wherever you're You're a supplier. What they do, which is good, is because you as an American, you can sell here. But as I said, you won't be able to have those access to that simplified tax scheme. What they'll do is they'll use their account. So you're not the seller. They are. And you're using their company. But it comes with a cost. It comes with margin losses. I don't know anyone, I haven't met anyone who has had huge success with that. I'm not really sure how they care for your, I have nothing bad to say about them. I really haven't used them, but I wonder how they're able to manage your listings as well as you would as a seller yourself. Kevin King: Yeah. Antonio Bindi: Plugging in as many sellers as they can and whatever sells sells. Kevin King: How's AI affecting what you're doing? Antonio Bindi: Mostly for, we've done some, some, um, uh, listing work with AI, um, tried to dabble with images, thought nothing great came out of it. Uh, I know Joe had, uh, Jola Medieva, uh, was at your event talking about AI and how she's using them to create UGC and listing images. I have to look into that a little further. Kevin King: She won best in our smart contest which replaced the hat contest. She won first place on that with a technique that you showed. Antonio Bindi: I sat with her over lunch on Prosper. I really wanted to take a better look. She has this great We have a newsletter that talks all about AI and how to do that. We tried that but not with huge success. We have so many listings that once you want to implement that, you have to do it across your whole catalog or at least the whole family. It's a lot of work. We do use it for listing or for titles. When Amazon came with the new rules that you couldn't have repetitions in your title, you had to clean up the whole thing. We used ChatGPT to create a custom GPT here and told Amazon what the rules were and come up with new titles for us. And we also use ChatGPT for some statistics. If we're looking into growth patterns or we're trying to find errors in our spreadsheets, I have three In my team, three people are data scientists. One's dedicated to inventory planning, the other one's with our financials, and the other one oversees it. So they're looking deeply into these signals and statistics and stuff that I can't even understand. I'm a dentist. I have no idea what they're talking about with their curves and their sines and cosines, but I trust that they know their stuff. Kevin King: So what, how do you see everything changing with, with optimization? I mean, with it's in the old way, you know, using data dive, like you said, and all the Helium 10 law, the keyword optimization, which is still valid today, but it's, it's shifting more to an AI based sentiment based. And it's going to change the game over the next, it's already starting to, but. It's going to start steamrolling, I think, a little bit faster over the next year to two years. How are you preparing for that? Antonio Bindi: I think we still need to understand really well what this sentiment-based, what Amazon means by that. Unknown Speaker: It makes a lot of sense. Antonio Bindi: But how do you translate that into actual wording in your listings or at wording in your titles? Does it mean that if my listing is a little bit more boring than someone who was more cheerful, uh, is that, is that, is that what's really selling? Does that help Amazon understand the product better or is it more specs? I really, um, I don't think AI is doing, still doing everything that they claim they do in terms of, uh, How they understand the customer and why they display. For example, what we know about keywords is that if you don't put those words on a listing, Amazon doesn't even know what you're selling. Amazon's not looking at the product. They're not analyzing what it is. It's just what you tell them it is. It's keywords and, you know, text. Maybe now with images, they can tell it a bit more. But how does that translate into better rankings is something that I'm yet to understand. Kevin King: Yeah, I think that where it's going is more intent-based versus sentiment. I mean, sentiment is more like A big building in New York City is the same thing as Empire State Building. That would be sentience and actually able to relate the two together versus intent-based and analyzing just rather than just keyword stuffing. Actually, you still need to get the keywords in there so that it helps with the intent, but it's more intent-based stuff. Just at the end of April, ChatGPT came out with product search. Which is the first step into this. You have Rufus, which is about 12% or so of searches are happening on Rufus right now. And people aren't typing in exact keyword phrases. They're typing in more usage cases or more. And I think you're going to start seeing more of that. It's a shift for the customer so that some of them are used to searching in a certain way. I think you're going to start seeing more of a shift. Right now, you've got to ride both lines. But I believe in the way Amazon is analyzing images now to actually put it into context. The example I always give is a beach umbrella. If you're selling a beach umbrella, you put all the keywords for beach umbrella in your listing. So that you hope you show up when someone's taking a trip to the beach and looking for a beach umbrella. But if none of your pictures show the umbrella on the beach, they only show someone walking in the rain while holding an umbrella, you're going to lose a lot of relevance. And you're going to show up further down in the search results because Amazon's going to assume, well, the pictures don't show this, the copies shows it, but the pictures don't represent this. So there's, there's that type of stuff, uh, where every little item in your photos could make a huge difference. If someone's typing in, I don't know, uh, uh, you got like water bottle, uh, and like the, the helium 10 water bottle you have there. Um, it says, yeah, there you go. Helium 10. Um, they're, they're, If that water ball is in a picture with a cooler and someone is typing in, I don't know, water cooler or beach accessories for my cooler, It's going to know because your water bottle was in a picture with a cooler to show that as a proper accessory and give it more weight than if you just had water cooler accessory in your keyword listings, for example. I mean, that's a really crude, rough example just off the top of my head, but that type of stuff I think is going to become more relevant. Antonio Bindi: This comes very naturally to me because of my product line. I understand that if you're selling bicycles, you probably don't have the same Same situation, but I sell storage stuff. I know a lot of people are looking for storage baskets, storage box, storage bin, but we naturally found out over the last years that people are looking for storage for something. So it's either storage for blankets, for towels, for toys, for whatever, or for my bedroom, for my pantry, for my Restaurant by bathroom. So we've always had these, not only in images, but our listings and our PPC. We're always catered to these themes that were related to the use or the place or what's going to be stored. And I use an example in one of my talks about there's this seller, they're selling these plastic boxes, storage boxes for toys. Naturally, toy storage will be the big thing that I will think of, but what they do is they have the same box can be used to store Hot Wheels and all those little cars. It can be used to store LOL dolls. It can be used to store Bakugans and whatever names toys that are out there. And what they have is, if you go into their product list, you'll see that they're selling the same box in different listings. But one listing has the main image, has the cars. The other image has the dolls. They realized brilliantly that people were looking for storage for Hot Wheels. And if they had the dolls on the main image, that wouldn't convert. And how many different listings would you have to have? They probably took the main keywords or the ones with the most searches and catered for that specific audience for the same exact product. And I've had this kind of success with one of my storage, big storage baskets that we used blankets on the main image. And on another variation, we would use the pillows. And on another variation, we would use toys. And our PPC was very directed. If someone's searching for basket for blankets, show this variation. If someone's looking for basket for toys, show this variation and so on. And we, it was, I mean, I think it helped Amazon understand also In the old format, in the old way of a keyword to product, to give relevancy to the best variation, the best converted to each theme or each use case that we were targeting on our keywords. Kevin King: Are you doing any outside of Amazon, any wholesale, like in the US, to a container store, to at home or any of the big... Storage or have all these kind of storage kind of stuff? Unknown Speaker: Nothing big. Antonio Bindi: Nothing account. No one that I know. I do have resellers for sure. I have a bunch of people who are buying like the same item over and over and over for years. We can't reach out to them. We're always trying to find out who they are and say, listen, buy straight from us and we'll give you the discount. Kevin King: They're doing this through Amazon, through like the business purchasing? Antonio Bindi: We have business pricing for all of our products. Even if it's like a cent lower than our regular, we always have the business pricing because if you're shopping on a business account, there's like a new, a separate, uh, sponsored brand, a sponsored products, uh, section that says, uh, products with a business price, but it's like more, more, um, uh, real estate for your listings. So we do have, uh, not aggressive at all, but we do have business pricing and we have these, uh, companies that will, uh, very certainly they're reselling. Kevin King: So where do you see the future of this going? I mean, you've been doing this, you said 2018 on Amazon primarily. You've grown it to eight figures. You're in all these marketplaces. Now you're dealing with Trump tariff headaches and all this stuff. Where do you see this going? Do you hope to make an exit? Do you hope to keep growing it and pass it down to your children? What's your goal here? Antonio Bindi: I think I missed the great exit bubble. I was at a point that I was growing ridiculously. That year, I think it was 2022 when everyone started, all the hype. Kevin King: Yeah, the peak was the end of 2021 and then 2022 was still good too. Yeah, the peak multiples are late 2021. Exactly. Antonio Bindi: So that was a point of, we were doubling our sales compared to prior year. I have this kind of greedy feeling that let me grow this a little bit more and then I'll sell. I think a lot of people went through that and just the whole extravaganza went away. I've been talking to Northbound for a long time now. We're not actively looking for a strategic buyer, but that's where I see it going. Uh, probably someone who's already in the space and just wants to immediately add, uh, this, uh, the, these marketplaces or this portfolio. Uh, but not, I don't see the. aggregated model being fit for my product or for my product line. There's not a lot of, you know, innovation. There's nothing super exciting about the product. The product is just another storage item. Which does that do really well in Amazon, but I don't see it as an attractive enterprise for the aggregators anymore. The ones that are left though. Kevin King: So you just said it's basically a commodity product in a way. What do you do to differentiate it or what do you do to set it apart? Are you right place right time and you have a moat of reviews? A big head start over anybody else that tries to come in. Antonio Bindi: We started well. There were very few competitors in the space, in the specific niche. Today it's like, it's more. But when we started, we were selling our product, our main product for like $39. Now we're struggling to sell them at $27. So the Chinese just floated in. We do have a solid Uh, rankings. We do have a very tight and efficient, uh, PPC strategy. Uh, it's been going for, you know, We went to different agencies and services, but I think now in-house, because we're very dedicated to our every keyword combination, we're looking very, very carefully. So it's very efficient. We have Probably the best media in our niche, our videos, our images. I think that does make a difference. We built a nicer brand around it than the most. Kevin King: Awesome. Well, Antonio, it's been a pleasure having you on the AM-PM Podcast here. I appreciate you coming on and sharing a little bit of your journey and some of what's going on in Antonio's world. Antonio Bindi: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Kevin. It's always a pleasure to chat, to be with you. Hope we could do this more this year. Kevin King: We'll have to do it privately over cigars next time we get together. That was fun in Puerto Rico, me, you and Norm until like four in the morning or something like that. That little lounge at BDSS in Puerto Rico, we didn't even know what's in the hotel until like two or three days into being there. We're like, holy cow. This is awesome. Well, cool, man. If people want to reach out or learn more about you, are you on LinkedIn? Are you on Facebook? Are you somewhere? Antonio Bindi: LinkedIn is the best place to reach out. I'm Antonio Bindi. Just hit me up there. I'm happy to connect and share. I'm always sharing something new or something exciting. I don't have a newsletter. I don't have a service. I'm just doing it for the fun, the thrill and to give back to the amazing community that taught me so much. Kevin King: Awesome. Thanks, Antonio. Antonio Bindi: Thank you, Kevin. Thanks for having me. Kevin King: Thanks again for joining us on the AM-PM Podcast this week. We're here every single Thursday with a brand new episode. We'll be back again next Thursday with another awesome episode. We should be talking about images and how to optimize those images and how AI is affecting everything when it comes to image creation for e-commerce and Amazon sellers. Until then, I hope you have a great rest of your week. I just want to leave you with some final words of wisdom. Don't be afraid to give up the good in order to get to the great. Don't be afraid to give up the good in order to get to the great. That's John Rockefeller. We'll see you again next week.