Amazon Product Research in 2022 with Kevin King

Amazon Product Research in 2022 with Kevin King 00:00:23 Just a couple of seconds, all right, hello and welcome everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today, and today we have a very special guest with us, Kevin King. Thank you so much for joining us today, Kevin and Howard. You're always welcome. Thank you. Glad to be here. All right. Awesome. So, Kevin, we really don't need an introduction, but still, I would request you to tell a little bit about yourself, how you started your Amazon journey. I'm Howard's best student. He taught me everything I know. 00:01:24 I've been doing this for more than 20 years on Amazon. I started selling on Amazon in 2001. I've been selling e-commerce since before Google existed. So back in the 1990s, I started selling by email and e-commerce. Right now, I have four different Amazon companies that I'm either a partner or I own. I do the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, which is a big event-one time virtual and one time in person for large sellers. I also do a company called Product Savants with Steve Simonson where we help big sellers find new products and source them. And then I also do training. So for Helium 10, I do the training called the Freedom Ticket, which is a course for new people to teach them how to sell on Amazon. It's totally free. 00:02:13 If you have a Helium 10 membership, it doesn't matter what kind of membership you have-the cheapest one or the most expensive; you can get it for free. And then I do their advanced training called Helium 10 Elite, which is for the bigger sellers and some once-a-month training where we bring on some guests. I do some things every month. And then I speak at lots of events all over. I was at Howard's most recent event at the Castle in Paris; speaking at a lot of different events. So yeah, I do a lot of stuff in the Amazon and e-commerce space. Alright. Awesome. That's great. So Our today's topic like Amazon product research. So what would you like to add into this? Like, how do you do the product research? 00:03:00 Well, for me, product research there's a lot of different ways you can do product research. And the tools have gotten so good now. I wish these tools existed six or seven years ago. I would be a billionaire now if they existed six or seven years ago. But the tools are so good. You know, at one point, like four or five years ago, the tools were OK. And the big sellers, to get the data that they needed, to get the information they needed, they had to go to, like, find people in China that were willing to share secrets that worked for Amazon or something like that just to get this data. But now these tools are so good. Tools like Signalytics that the professor has, and others like Helium 10 that is so good. 00:03:39 If you know how to use these tools, you can really find great opportunities. I personally, I use a custom tool that we developed in conjunction with Helium 10, and in conjunction with a. Brand and young's data dive, those are the three that I primarily use for product research. I always start my product research with brand analytics, you know. Some people will use a software like Black Box or maybe they look around their house or they're looking at other websites or on Etsy or looking at the frequently bought together. Those are all good ways to get ideas. There's lots of ways to get ideas but for me I want to know what's already selling on Amazon because if something is not already selling, maybe I have a good idea for a product 00:04:22 and but nobody's selling it on Amazon I don't know if it's going to work maybe it will and maybe it won't but if I take the chance that it works then I, I have to spend more money usually because you have to educate people. More money on the PPC people don't know it are they even searching for this thing so that's where people sometimes will say they'll test a product they'll buy only 10, 10 or 50 units or 100 to kind of get an idea. To me, that's a total waste of time and not smart unless the product is brand new. You know, if I went to Guatemala and I found some carpenter that was making some sort of special hammock that nobody is selling on Amazon, nobody's ever seen because this hammock looks like a, I don't know, like a cocoon or I don't know, something crazy that there's nothing like it anywhere. 00:05:11 Then maybe I would buy a few to test it and see at the market. But if there's already a market on Amazon. I don't think you need to buy a small amount to test it because if you do that, all you're doing is showing all the other people that are using the tools, this is working, and they're just going to come and maybe be faster than you and get the product in. And by the time you get yours out, you have 100 competitors. So I start with where the demand is, and I use brand analytics. So what we do is if you're brand registered on Amazon, you can access brand analytics, which is data directly from Amazon. 00:05:44 Helium 10 or somebody else that's that's scraping it and making a an algorithm, it's straight from Amazon and it tells you the top keywords that everybody's searching for. So we download that every week right because you can do it every week or every month or every quarter, uh, and or you can look at it online. We download that data and it tells us a lot of good information if you've never seen it. It tells you what's called SFR or Search Frequency Rank, so it'll tell you what's the most popular keyword on Amazon right now. It might be iPhone case-is number one, number two might be I don't know hand sanitizer, whatever it is, I'll tell you one, two, three! 00:06:18 It ranks everything from one to about two million, uh, and the lower the the bigger the number the the less the the popularity it is on Amazon. But it also tells you what are the three aces that everybody is clicking on, so you know which of the three Aces are for every one of those. Keywords that are the most popular clicks, but to me it's not what's the most popular clicks because it's the what's the most popular conversion so it also tells you what are the three that are having the most popular the most conversions and to me that's where the real data is is because sometimes people do manipulations um it could be sellers that are doing add to carts or or some sort of manipulations to get all the clicks but to try to rank but it's the conversions that matter to me so i look for 00:07:02 the three that are converting and i look at those three products and i say what are these three products is there a way for me to compete And so I look at the 'I' I look at that keyword, I pull it up in X-ray, and then I look at X-ray at the results of that keyword. Let's say it was an iPhone case for example. I would never do an Apple case; I don't recommend anybody ever do an Apple case. But if it was an iPhone case, I would type in 'iPhone case' into the Chrome browser, uh, on Amazon. I would hit the X-ray extension of the extension that pops up and gives you the estimates of all the sales or you could use Jungle Scout if that's your preferred tool or there's other tools but I use Helium 10, and then it'll show you all the sales and I sort it by sales not by dollars but by actual units. 00:07:43 Sold from the highest to the lowest and then I take a look, and how many reviews do they have? You know if five or more of the top 10 have more than a thousand reviews, it's going to be very difficult to compete. If I look at the review ratio, the rate, how fast are they getting reviews or are they losing reviews? I look at how long have they been selling on Amazon. If most of the people have been selling on Amazon for more than two years, it's going to be hard for you to compete. There's a whole list of things that I look at there. And then if I see an opportunity, then I like it. I really like products where the pricing is not the same on page one. 00:08:20 So if you pull up iPhone case and everybody's selling their iPhone case for $10. 99, and maybe one's $11. 99, one's $9. 99, but they're basically all the same price, it's going to be very difficult to compete because everybody's competing on the price. And so unless you have really good sourcing and you can really compete on the price, it's going to be hard. And for most sellers, they don't have the budget to compete on price. They get killed. For products where there's a range of prices, one's $10. 99, one's $19. 99, one's $8. 99 that tells me if there’s a lot of price uh differences on the page one results on Amazon, that’s a good thing for me, that means okay now I can find an opportunity maybe I can sell for $14. 00:09:01 99 because I make mine better or it has an extra feature or it has something I don’t have to worry about always being the lowest price; I can compete differently so that's important to me. Also, back on brand analytics, I look at the conversion rates. Remember, I told you it gives you the three ASINs that have the most conversion rates. Conversion rates means someone clicks it and they buy it; it's like a percentage. It means if I search iPhone case and it has a conversion rate of 10%, that means one out of every 10 people that search for iPhone case bought that ASIN. It tells you this in brand analytics for the top three. I combine those three together. 00:09:38 And what I like to do is I like to look for the the total of those three together is either really high or it's low. So, like, below 35 percent or above 80 percent. If it's above 80 percent, that tells you one of two things: it tells you that either there's maybe a patent on the product and whoever's selling that product is able to kick everybody else off because there's a patent or some sort of IP, or it tells you that there's one guy that's just crushing it. And maybe he needs some competition and maybe I can come in and I can steal some of his 80% and maybe take 30% of it or whatever. Or on the flip side, if it's 35% or less, when you add these three together, that tells me that the top three guys have 35% of the sales. 00:10:20 And then that means 65%. So, 35% plus 65% is 100%. So, 65% is people in spot number four on, down. And so then I look at the competitive nature of it. And if the competitive nature of it looks really good, then I'm like, I can take out of the 60, even if I don't rank in the top, if I could just get to the spot number four, I can take a significant portion of that 65%. And so that's where I look for those types of opportunities. And that tells me there's a window where I can come in. If I can differentiate the product, if I can sell it for a good price, create a good listing and all the other good things that you have to do on Amazon. 00:10:54 So those are some of the things that I look at and then I even take it further. On Helium 10, if you're an elite member, it's only for the top-tier people. But there's a special tool where you can download and import all the keywords that you've found, and it will tell you the estimated sales for every keyword. I think Howard maybe single linux has something similar, but it'll tell you like, 'Okay, this keyword gets six thousand sales per month, not searches but sales.' But then what I do is I compare it to the searches so if it gets six thousand sales per month and has sixty thousand searches, that's a 10% ratio. So when you compare the sales to the searches, that means it's a 10%. 00:11:31 But maybe another product only gets 4,000 searches a month, but it has 1,000 sales from those 4,000 searches. That's a 25% ratio. That tells me that product, that keyword might be a better keyword, especially if it's a lower volume search volume. It might be an easier keyword to rank on and go for. So I look for those kinds of things. So when you start off your product, you're not going to try to get this big keyword. Go for the lower keywords and work your way up to the big ones. Everybody always has big dollar signs in their eyes and they go after the big keywords. That's not the way to do it unless you have a lot of money or a lot of patience, one of the two. 00:12:08 So go after the small ones and work your way up. And then there's a tool called DataDive that's really good. I think it's DataDive. Tools is the address that Brandon Young, a big seller that I've known for like four or five years, he's created this tool that goes on top of X-ray so when you run the X-ray, you hit a little button on when you have his his extension installed and it takes it to his tool, and they analyze all the information about two minutes. He analyzes all the competition; he'll tell you how many people are good at Amazon and how many people are not so I use that. If I, if I'm doing an iPhone case, for example, I would never do an iPhone case but if I was, I would do the iPhone case, and I would pick the 10 best sellers. 00:12:51 I would run it through his tool, and he's going to come back and see; he's going to tell you seven of these ten guys they don't, they're not good at Amazon; they're missing a lot of keywords, their listing is not good. He runs it through a big criteria-two of them maybe are okay, and one. Of them is excellent, but sometimes you do that and it's like eight of them, eight out of the ten are excellent, that means holy cow, there's this, this, the competition here is going to be really tough, so I don't use that too, I don't use go after that that product. So those, I mean, this is a big overview of how I do it, but that's how I personally do it and what we look for. 00:13:26 And then we have to source it. So if we find a good opportunity based on the keywords, I like to see that there's multiple keywords. So that's called the root. So if you have the root, like if it's hand sanitizer, for example, well, the root word might be hand sanitizer. Or it might be just sanitizer, but in this case, hand sanitizer. Then you have hand sanitizer gel, hand sanitizer gallon, hand sanitizer wipes. All these different words. Often, the more of those you have, the better. Because then you can rank for root words, and those root words help you rank for the longer tail words. So that's an important criteria in product selection, too. Let's say we've gone through all this criteria and we found an awesome product. 00:14:03 Then what we do next is we have to source it. So we go to the sourcing. In most cases, we start in China. Sometimes we go to Pakistan, sometimes to Latin America, sometimes the U. S. It depends. But most times it starts in China and we go and we try to find the factory. And then once we find a factory that can do the product the way we want, we get the pricing. And then we have to look at a lot of people stop there. OK, I can I look on Alibaba and this product, this product is four dollars and I can sell it for $15, okay, I'm good. There's $11 profit there. No, there's not. I see this mistake over and over with people that don't do the math. 00:14:38 If you're not good at math and you're trying to sell on Amazon, don't sell on Amazon. Or partner with somebody that's good at math. It's so critical to know your math and know your numbers because that product is $4 in China from the factory. One, you may have it, is it Xbox or is it FOB? You could have an extra cost depending on there just to get it to the ship or to the airplane. And then you have duties and taxes. If you bring it into the U. S., you might have 25 percent Trump. It's called the nickname is Trump tariff. This is a tariff that the president or ex-president put on China for almost everything coming in. Some medical things and some things don't qualify. 00:15:13 But then you have a duty. So it might add as much as zero percent to as much as 50 percent to that four-dollar price. So maybe your price is really six dollars. And then you have the shipping cost and then you have duties, I mean, import fees, and that four-dollar product might turn into a nine-dollar product by the time it gets to the Amazon warehouse when you pay all the shipping costs. You've got to know all that stuff, and then if you're trying to sell it for $14. 99, you're never going to make any money because Amazon's going to take 15% of that $14. 99 so they're going to take $2. 25 yeah that's right and then they're going to also take a fulfillment fee depending on how much it weighs so but and then maybe you got to do ppc so at the end of the day you're not making any money 00:15:53 Maybe you're making a little bit of Amazon's depositing some money to your account and you're like, ah, I got some money coming in. But when you do the math and you've figured everything out, you're not making any money. And that's a very common problem that people have. And then the other thing I look at is you need two and a half times, you need at least two and a half times your initial product cost to launch a product. So if you're starting in this and you're in Pakistan, you've been able to. Get a thousand US dollars together to launch on Amazon, that's all the money that you have, and you're going to start to try to launch a product. 00:16:28 You need to find a product that you divide that by two and a half, so that's gonna be four hundred dollars because four hundred times two and a half is a thousand. So you need to find something that you could get into Amazon into the Amazon warehouse for four hundred dollars. If you spend more than that, you're gonna your chances of success are extremely low. Because what's going to happen? Let's say that you succeed; let's say your product is a big hit and it starts to sell well. Then you're going to need to order more, and you're not going to have the money if you spent 800 of your thousand dollars to get your 00:17:00 product. into amazon you don't have any money for ppc you don't have any money maybe for the software if you're using a software tool you don't have any money to launch it or to do some influencer things or whatever you might need to do but let's say you don't need to do any of that you don't need to do any pc you just put it on amazon you think people will find it because it's so good and so niche you still need to place an order with the factory to get the next one coming that's going to take the factory's going to take a month maybe more 45 days then it's got to come 00:17:26 on an airplane or a ship so it's some more time so it might be anywhere from two months to four months before you get more in so if you only order you sell through those first ones really fast you're going to be out of stock on amazon for a month two months three months and which means when you come back into stock you're basically starting over again because amazon is all about what have you done for me lately you lose the honeymoon period i mean there's ways to reset that but you lose the honeymoon period you lose everything and so you're just shooting yourself in the foot and that's why a lot of people 00:17:55 give up like this amazon thing doesn't work it's because they're doing it all wrong and they don't think it all the way through with all the math all the numbers so the reason for the two and a half so four hundred dollars if you only have a thousand dollars to start with get your product for 400 bucks landed that means if you're buying a thousand of these it has to be a really cheap product or if you're buying a hundred has to be you know no more than four dollars and that's not the factory price the factory price might be two dollars but all the shipping everything because amazon's not going to pay you right away they're going to hold your money in most cases for two two to four weeks because there's a there's a they have to Ship it out there's a they don't it doesn't go into your account until 10 days at least seven to ten days until after the customers got it, 00:18:37 just to make sure they don't return it and then it goes into your account balance to be able to withdraw. And so there's a cycle there. You're not going to have the money to pay the factory, so that's why you need that extra 600 there if you're successful to pay the factory. So that's things things like that people don't think about, um, and that's what hurts them, and that's why a lot of people fail. Um, I could talk about this for a long time, but that's to give you 15 minutes not anybody asking a question. So, that's but that's, yeah, that's a ton of information. Howard, you would like to add something here? Sorry, I was on mute. So, what kind of price range of a product or selling price would you recommend the audience here? 00:19:20 Well, for me personally, I don't do anything less than $20 because it's not worth my time. For me, I'm indifferent. I'm experienced. We have money. We have resources. So, for me. Anything that has to sell for less than twenty dollars, I usually don't. I'm not gonna say I never don't touch it, but it's rare that I touch anything less than twenty dollars and I I need to. Personally, I want products that I can make a profit of at least ten thousand dollars a month on. Uh, so if I can't make ten thousand dollars a month on the product, it's not worth my time. But for a lot of the audience here, that would be life-changing for them. So, so um, the price point that you're looking at but it depends on your budget. 00:19:57 Uh, it all depends on the budget. So like if you only have a thousand dollars and like I just said you can only spend four hundred dollars on your product and you're only gonna buy a hundred units that means you can it's say it takes 90 days uh for your product to get made to get shipped and you're selling that means you can only sell three a day, so if You don’t if you’re selling three units a day, if you sell more than that, you’re gonna run out of stock before you have more come in because you don’t have enough money, so you need to find something that has low volume start there. You can work your way up. You can add more products later or work your way up. 00:20:28 But if it’s selling three units a day at $400, that basically is about a $2, $2 . 50 cost at the factory at the maximum. And so what I like to see is I like to see at least a 5x. So to answer the question, you’ve got to look at the numbers. So I can’t just say, well, I like products that are $15 or less. It depends on how much money you have. So if you only have $1,000, like in this example, so only $400 is going to go to your product. Maybe you're going to have some shipping costs of $100, $200. So that means your product cost needs to be a maximum of $2 at the factory. 00:21:06 And then you're getting 100 of them. Once you add the shipping cost in and the taxes, your unit cost is $4 each. You order 100 products for $400, including all the fees. I want to see you sell that for at least $19. 95, five times that price. Worst case is 3 1⁄2. Worst case is 3 1⁄2. Now, if you get into really expensive products, you're selling something that costs $500, you don't have to buy it for like $100. You can work with those. You have different margins. But when you're selling anything under $100 retail price, you need between a 3 1⁄2 and 5X minimum multiple. One of my products we sell, it's a calendar. It's a wall calendar. 00:21:44 You hang on the wall. We make them in Korea, and they print them in Korea for us. It's cheaper than printing them in the U. S. My landed cost, which means the cost to make them, the cost to put them on the boat, to cost all the duties, everything, is $1. 60. So it's $1. 60, and we sell it for $19. 95. So you can see that's way more than even a five times markup. That product is super profitable. So if someone comes in and starts spending more money on PPC than me, or they start, uh, selling theirs for $14. 95 and they're killing me because everybody wants theirs because it's cheaper, I can lower mine to $14. 95, no problem. 00:22:21 I still have a lot of margin to make a profit if... and so if I need to spend more on my PPC, no problem, I have the margin, so that's very important because if you're successful, people are going to try to copy you and they're going to try to come in on your coattails. If you're using a tool like Blackbox on Amazon or some of the other tools out there that spit out product ideas, you have to remember there's thousands of other people seeing those same things so when you see something that looks good, um by the time you if time you get it to the market maybe a hundred other people also saw the same thing you did, uh using tools or whatever and so you gotta be ready for that. 00:22:58 So, that's why you need those good margins. It's a mistake I used to see students in the Freedom Ticket they said 'I just can't make any money at this', I'm like, well, how much are you selling your product for? $11. 99, so what's your what's your cost from the factory, uh, it's like five dollars, uh, so I have a six dollar profit, no you don't, um, what's your Amazon fees, what's your shipping fees which and by the time it's end of the day they're not making anything yeah there's money coming into their accounts because Amazon has taken $11. 99 minus their 15% minus the fulfillment fee so they're paying them six dollars or something for every one of them so there's money coming into their account so they think they're making money but by the time they pay the factory and the shipping and everything uh, they're not making any money They don't have any money left over at the end of the day to put into their pocket. 00:23:43 And so that's difficult. And another thing is, for new people, it's to remember that maybe your first order is not going to be profitable. So if you're thinking, 'oh, my gosh, I need to buy some food or I need to pay for my family's rent or something in three months, I'm going to sell something on Amazon and take some money', it's probably not going to happen. Maybe sometimes you hit the lottery and you win. uh and it happens but it's rare it usually takes six months to a year uh sometimes longer but six months to a year before you can start taking some profits because if you're successful you're gonna have to take 00:24:16 the profits and you have to buy more inventory so maybe you bought a hundred the first time but you're about a cold account i was selling three a day but i could sell six of these a day uh you know it's getting good reviews everything's going well so i need to place an order now for 800 from the factory instead of 400 you that's going to come out of your profits you're not going to be if you start putting that in your pocket you're not going to be able to grow your business and to make actually start making real money and make it making good money so you have to keep that in mind too so don't think this is an overnight get rich um save your life thing it takes some time and sometimes you you lose you know sometimes you do a product and it just doesn't work But that doesn't mean Amazon doesn't work. 00:24:56 I see a lot of people who try one product like I lost a thousand dollars-uh, what's forget this? I'm going to go sell on Shopify, or what's the next course I sell on Facebook that I can take that's going to make me money? No, Amazon works if you do it right, and you have patience, and you know your numbers. So if you do it the first time and you don't succeed, consider that like going to school. You're going to learn a lot. You're going to learn all the mistakes you made, and you're going to learn that, okay, let me regroup here, and let me try again. I've seen people who lost on their first two products. And they are so disappointed. They lost like $10,000. And it's like, there's my life savings. 00:25:32 I borrowed some money from my mom. You know, I don't know how I'm going to pay her back. You know, my wife is really sad with me. She's like, get a real job. Quit doing this crazy stuff. And then on the third product, they learned from each of the two. And the third product, boom, they did everything right. They fixed all their mistakes. And now, you know, the guy just sold his business for $3 million. So, I mean, so, you know, this is like a 21-year-old guy. um it you it can be done so um stay with it and and and learn but and try to minimize your mistakes uh it can be painful sometimes it can hurt uh but it's a it's a great opportunity um i remember um i remember there uh for any of the helium 10 uh members you can actually subscribe for uh the freedom ticket right it's free like you said kevin yeah there is a 00:26:24 tool i think he's teaching about like launching and how much you need to uh allocate for launches and everything like that correct i teach that yeah so so that's a really good thing to budget how much you uh you have into it uh zeechan i wanted to ask you uh in pakistan what is the normal uh launch how much people are using to like initiate the first Launch like do they have like a ten thousand dollar uh like uh set aside for the long for for new product launches or or what is the norm in Pakistan, yeah so here in Pakistan uh mostly people start with the 15, 000 to 20, 000 in the U. S. and like 10,000 to 12,000 for the UK and Germany. 00:27:12 And for rest of the markets, which are much smaller, like the Canada, the Mexico, the UAE or the KSA, they start with like $5,000. So this is the minimum they are doing here. But for the US mainly, they know it's a capital-intensive market. So they come up with at least $15,000. That's good. That's good. That's good. I think I talked to Kevin last time. I said, hey, Kevin, what do you think is a good amount set aside for doing Amazon launching? And then I think Kevin says like $25,000 or something like that. Is that what you said? No, it depends on the product. No, $25,000, maybe, maybe more than that. But it depends on the product and the competitive nature and what it takes to get to the top of page one on anything. 00:28:07 On a fifteen-thousand-dollar budget, uh, you should be doing a product that's uh, you should be spending about six-seven thousand dollars uh, probably about six hours, yeah, six thousand dollars actually, that's two and a half six thousand dollars on your initial inventory uh, it depends on the product cost on that, it depends on how much how many you got to give away or promote or how many you guys sell to get into those top positions. This would be determined by the launch cost, it's a product cost plus the any if you're paying a service or you're paying influencers or whatever, whatever that cost would would be but it can be um, it can be significant uh, depending on the competitive and some products it may be nothing um, because there's just no no competition uh, or it's a deep there's a lot of deep keywords. 00:28:50 But for a product for if you're six thousand dollars on your product I would expect to spend Probably at least half of that or more on on the launch, uh, six thousand. 50% of that or more on the launch. So, six thousand plus three thousand minimum on the launch. It could be a lot more. If you're selling iPhone cases or hand sanitizer or something crazy, it's going to be a heck of a lot more than that. So, mostly the mistake people are doing over here is that they are selecting the product with a very low price, like the $5 or $6 price range. This is the major mistake I have seen in Pakistan, people are doing. And another thing is they calculate the profitability in terms of percentage, like the $6, the 25% of $6 is like nothing. 00:29:45 They just ignored the percentage, profit percentage in terms of dollars. So that is the biggest mistake people are doing here. biggest mistake they are doing here is like they do not differentiate the product they just sell the just copy paste copy paste it just uh they uh the source the same product and just launch it so this one is the second biggest mistake people are doing here in pakistan those are big mistakes uh you have you you have to differentiate yeah you have to differentiate it's not just put a free pdf with it You got to, you know, what I look for is if on page one, everybody's selling a round one, the product will say a round thing. I look for the square one, you know, something that when you're looking on the page, oh, your eye stops. 00:30:35 That one's different. You know, take your product. If you're thinking about doing something and take a screenshot of page one and results of the keywords that you're going after and take your product and Photoshop it in there like in the second or third line and then go to something like PickFu. Uh, or you can ask your friends even if you don't want to spend money on picking food and say which which ones of these catches your eye first and second and third. If your product is not in one of the first, first, second, or third that it catches their eye, you need to change what you're doing because you're not going to succeed. Yeah, I agree, um, you know like Amazon raises prices every so often, like two times a year, three times a year, so with that kind of margin being like you're looking at percentage, it's not going to work right. 00:31:22 So you need to make sure that uh, you have something like a higher uh, maybe profit as well as the dollar amount of profit right, so yeah, the dollar amount profit is more important than the actual percentage um, so like you said, six dollars and the 25 that's a dollar and 25 cents profit, you have no margin there. What if you need to spend? 50 cents on ppc all of a sudden because all the your product is not differentiated the same as everybody else and you just outbid each other ppc you have no no place to work but if you had a margin of ten dollars and maybe your competition uh you have margin 00:31:58 ten dollars and if it costs you 50 cents or even a dollar more ppc okay it cuts out your profits a little bit but you're still fine you're still going to be okay and that's a big mistake a lot of a lot of people make to me i always say the money on amazon is not made in the selling it's made in the sourcing it's made in the source so if you know people that just go to alibaba and just accept The price they get off of Alibaba, maybe maybe they do a little bit of negotiation. Huge mistake, huge mistake. Another thing I look at is how many sellers are from China, and this is not anything against Chinese people; it's just that I look at you know tools like Helium 10 will tell you this: how many, how many of the sellers on page one are from China? 00:32:35 There's other extensions you can put in to Chrome browser that put little flags. But if more than 50 of the sellers are Chinese-based that are on page one, I usually don't launch that product. Because those guys have a competitive advantage over me. Maybe it's the factory. I always ask my factories, 'Do you sell on Amazon?' If they say yes, we sell some of this. I say, 'I'm sorry, I'm not going to work with you.' But if over 50% of the sellers are based in China that are selling on the keyword, you're going to have a tough time unless you completely differentiate, unless you can make it like made in the USA because people will like it because it's made in the USA. 00:33:14 Made in Europe or whatever, and so there's a reason that people will buy it over something made in China. That would be the only time I might consider that, but those guys have a huge advantage-they're local, they speak the language, they negotiate hard, they're hustlers, they compete hard, they're super competitive. So to me, that's a big warning sign. Um, so you got to be careful with that. So I always say, the money is made in the sourcing not in the selling. So you've got to find... I know Howard has good access to a really good sourcing person, I don't know if he shares that here or not, but she's really good, um, and the people that do stuff with him. 00:33:49 But you gotta you gotta get that price right because if you're buying your iPhone case for a dollar and your competition is having to spend a dollar seventy five instantly, you have an advantage for it, so you've got to... And sometimes you can. Have an advantage. Maybe if you're selling, like you said, you know, they're just selling the same thing as everybody else. You can have an advantage in the way you package it. So look at the sizing. Maybe everybody else is sizing it 10 inches by five inches by two inches. But if you look at the numbers on Amazon, like, look, if I make this 9. 75 inches, the box by five inches by two inches, it goes from a large standard size to a standard size or something like that. 00:34:30 It knocks the category down so that fulfillment fees are now $2 less. You instantly just made money. That's done in the sourcing where you figure out how to get this package smaller? Maybe the product, can we take it apart? It comes assembled, but is there a way to take it apart and put it into a smaller box or get it lighter or something so that you can even save money on the Amazon fees where your competition isn't doing that. They're not thinking to do that. They're just taking the product directly from the factory as it is. So, there's lots of ways you can do that. That's why I mean the money is made in the sourcing. And a lot of people kind of overlook that. Yeah. 00:35:05 If anyone needs sourcing, you can contact us and we can see what we can do. it's true because in china a lot of uh the people uh the factory and the buyers i mean the buyers which is the sellers right for amazon sellers they actually like go and talk to them and drink with them and socialize with them with the same language you know so there's like this really uh and you're and they see them often so it's hard to say no when trying to get negotiating a better price so that's that's why um it's they usually get like 20 30 cheaper than what normal people usually get when if they're like uh you know from like the us or or not and the same thing with the logistics as well they have a really good uh really good connections with uh logistics and suppliers yeah They have a big advantage, major advantage, so it's hard to compete against that. 00:36:00 So, that's why I when I'm sourcing products, I steer away from that if that's the dominant factor. Zeeshan, can you look into the notes, see if anyone has questions so we can kind of – He's got one on the screen. Yeah. He says, on average, to reach $10,000 U. S., how much do you spend and how much time do you take to reach that? Do you mean $10,000 per month in sales or profit? Profit. He means profit. I can't answer that question with a nice little answer because it depends on the product you're selling, how competitive the niche is. I could make $10,000 in two days on some products on Amazon. Others take months. That's a difficult question to give you an answer on because there's a lot of factors. What's the selling price? What's the margin? What's the competition? What are the reviews like? How much money did you have to launch it? Are you slow launching it, fast launching it? There's a lot of variables in that. 00:37:07 Okay. So do you prefer a launch of five variations at once at a low price or do you instead prefer one single product at a mid-price range more than $20? I would go with a single product. I don't like to do a lot of variations at the beginning. Sometimes I might do, if you have clothing or something that's a size, you might have to do some sizes. But if you're doing something that's colors, i might do one or two colors but you don't really know what colors i mean you can use the tools like helium 10 to get an idea of what colors are selling best but you really don't know so and 00:37:39 i'd rather what if the product doesn't work i don't want to have five extra products uh so i usually launch with one maybe two and if it works then i'll start adding to it uh adding any additional variations but i usually don't launch unless it makes sense you know like clothing would make sense or like a few other things would make sense but most things don't make sense to do variations when you launch. So the ranking strategy that I'm using now, it's getting much more difficult. You know, it used to be the big ranking strategy was most recently up until last year was search, find, buy, where you basically, you do it yourself through ManyChat or Facebook, or you have a company that helps you with the ranking and you, they have a list of people that will go buy the product at full price and then you reimburse them the entire money. 00:38:31 Plus you pay the company a little bit of fee. There's still some companies that do that. It hasn’t gone away, but it’s much less than it used to be. And Amazon's really cracking down on that. So you have to be extremely careful if you do that. They call rebates. Some people call them rebates. Some people call them SFB or search, find, buy. I think that's going to continue to get less and less and less. You need an audience to launch on Amazon is what you really need. You need an audience of passionate people. In the past, people would say, go build an audience on Facebook. Before you launch your product, spend three months or six months. 00:39:10 If you're selling a dog product, start posting dog pictures on Facebook and get people to follow you and to come into your group and do that kind of thing. That's great. Maybe you'll get 1,000 people that follow you or 1,000 people in your group, but those aren't buyers. You have to remember psychology here. Those aren't buyers. 10 of them or 20 of them are going to buy your product, but that's not enough to launch a business-those are people that are like dogs, it doesn't mean they like your product. You need people that will actually spend money on your item, so that means either going out to other people who already have that, that spend money... or partnering with influencers. 00:39:41 But what I'm working on now and something I'll be talking about at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit and also Heat Map has a big event in September in the US-I know most of you can't come to that, but uh they're doing a big event, but I'm doing stuff with NFTs... so we're doing uh building communities with... with in the crypto world uh around NFTs that also relate to products, so we have an audience of people that spend money on the MFT, so I know they spend money and they're passionate about the subjects that we're we're building the audience around. And then I can easily leverage that into launching products on Amazon by because when they Buy the NFTs, there's some gaming system, some gamification to it, and they get points and rewards, and they can redeem those for products on Amazon, then they can come and buy the product on Amazon, which helps launch it and creates this whole cycle. 00:40:30 And then people that buy the product on Amazon see it in the insert about this NFT and like what is this? I never heard of this! I don't know... They go to the website, it gets them into the game, into the system, so it's it's really new, it's advanced, so it's not something that the average person can use, but that That type of thing is where this is going to get to in the next couple years. We're one of the first to do it. We'll be doing it this fall. But I'll be talking about it at those two events. We're in the final planning stages right now of everything. But that's what it's going to take. It's going to become harder to launch. And so, though, we're not on the popular products. 00:41:11 Amazon has gotten so big. There's so many people searching there. You can do good money on things that you don't need to spend a lot to launch on. Like for my calendars, for example, that I do every year, it's seasonal. So, from about November until January is when people buy them because they buy calendars for the next year, usually Christmas presents or something at the end of the year. They're getting ready for the next year. Those particular products, I don't have to do any launch. I do zero PPC. I have a customer base of about quite a few people. Then I go to about 100 of them. I say, would you just go buy it? I don't give them rebates, I don't give them any extra bonus; I just say, you can buy it from me directly from my Shopify site for $19. 00:41:52 95 plus a shipping charge of 20 bucks of 10 more dollars so 30 or why not just go buy it on Amazon for $19? 95 use this link, uh, you know, I give them the, I give them the, uh, the canonical URL and they go and they buy it and that's usually enough to to get it to go and I start early enough because it's seasonal. The big sales come in the middle of November till the first part of January. So, I get that in stock in like August. And so, I started selling in August. So, in August, to get to the top of page one for the keywords, I only need like one sell a day. There's nobody searching for it in August. 00:42:27 So, if I can just get one sell a day at the top of the keywords. And then when people start searching more in September and more in October and more in November, I just kind of, it's like riding a wave in the ocean. You just kind of ride that wave as it goes up. And so that's that's. How we launched that particular product. Other products without the NFT stuff, we're doing a lot of heavy PPC. We lower the price. And so I know if my price is $19. 95, I might make my price $4. 99. And then I run a lot of PPC. And because the reason for that is if everybody else is $19. 95. and they have 100 reviews or 1,000 reviews, and here you are at $19. 00:43:08 99, and you have one review or no reviews or just a few, they don't trust you. But if your price is so ridiculously low and your listing is really good, they're like, what the heck, I'll take a chance for $5. I could always return it to Amazon, throw it away if it doesn't work. So I have a really low price. They just can't say no. But do I spend a lot of money on that? Heck yeah. I mean, I'm losing money on every one of those I sell because it's below my cost. I had to pay Amazon their fees. I'm spending a tremendous amount on Amazon ads. At the same time, I'm doing buying reviews. So everything goes into the buying program to try to get a bunch of reviews there. 00:43:45 So to get those first initial reviews, I like to get up to 20 or more before you can really start wrapping things up. So that's kind of how I launch stuff right now. All right, so um, I believe this question is for you, um, well if you contact us, we can probably uh, connect you to one of our sourcers and they'll go out there to the factories or uh, to see how they can negotiate better prices. It's really hard for people to just go online and never seen that the the factory or the sales rep and try to get the best price. There's so that we're on the ground in China being able to help you uh, on your behalf, to negotiate prices mainly and making sure that QC and logistics side is, that you're getting the best price for everything all right Yeah, competing products do matter. 00:44:54 Want new product selection? Absolutely. Competition, you have to analyze the competition. How good are they at Amazon? And how good are they means how good is their listing? How good is their photos? Are they missing a lot of keywords? That's what tools like Datadog, they'll tell you. They'll tell you these top competitors. They'll give you a percent. This guy is, of all the keywords that are relevant for your product, they'll say this guy is ranking on page one for 32% of them. This guy is ranking on page one for 95% of them. And so that tells you how good they are on the listing, how good they are on Amazon. Absolutely, you have to look at competing products, not only what the product is and how it looks and the price and the quality and the reviews, but also how good is the seller because that's your competition is the seller. 00:45:38 So this is the big question. It says, I won't go into products that have more than 50% Chinese sellers. Currently, they're working on a product with some really good stats. The main brand is doing over $500,000 in monthly revenue. Congratulations. All the other sellers are new with less than 100 reviews and they're doing good revenue too. So we can do such products. We do a bit design change and follow our own design pattern and we can achieve 40% gross margins with competitive prices. Yeah, I don't know. I'd have to take a look at that, but I don't know what your question is. Maybe you're saying that you're doing well despite there being a lot of Chinese sellers. Maybe that's what you're saying, Abraham. I'm not sure what your question is on that. 00:46:34 Okay, Abraham, if you can just elaborate a bit again so we can take that question again. Yeah, I got the idea, the situation, but what's the question? I think it's trying to prove that 50 percent of chinese sellers are still able to you know products like those can still be able to get into niche the niche but i mean yes you could there's always a percentage of probability but you still that's a little harder right you want to see if there's like less of a competition in order to get into it for a higher success rate yeah i'm not saying it can't be done um but but it's it's very difficult for most people if you're first Maybe you were one of the first ones, and now there's a bunch of Chinese sellers that come after you. 00:47:20 That's different. There's already Chinese sellers selling there, and a bunch of them, when you started that, that would make it much harder. But if you were one of the very first ones, and now there's a bunch of Chinese sellers that are basically copying you, and like you said, they all have under 100 reviews, that I'm not too worried about. You have a big head start. What would be the minimum profit and dollar value that should be considered for products to launch? I can't answer that. There's not a one answer for that. That's like saying, which girl is the prettiest? You know, everybody's going to have a different answer of which girl is the prettiest in the room. There's so many variables in that. I can't tell you that. 00:48:01 Is it possible, let's do a live demo screen, how you decide your marketing budget after seeing a good product? I can't do that today. I only have about six more minutes or so here. Yeah, maybe another time we could do that all right, perfect, so guys uh, like so the last uh thing from my side uh let's wrap up so I would like to ask uh, we are doing this for every year, every of our session, the what is the fun fact happened to you from Amazon? What is the funniest thing happened to you in your career from Amazon, really that's okay. So in 2020, we decided to launch some hand sanitizers. You know, the COVID came and everybody was doing hand sanitizers. And I was like, I'm not going to do hand sanitizers. 00:48:50 That's like doing iPhone cases. It's like crazy, you know, or hoverboards or something crazy. Everybody's going to be doing it. But my partners, I had three partners and they said, 'We have the money.' Kevin, you know how to do the Amazon. We have the money. Don't worry. I'm like. Okay, you know we could lose all this money because it's gonna be very competitive and I don't worry, let's do it. But okay, if we're gonna do it, we're gonna do it, right? We're gonna do a proper branding.' We're going to do proper everything We're not just going to find some bottles, say hand sanitizer with a cross and stick it out there on Amazon. We're going to like create costumes for the characters, you know, kind of have a brand, you know, with a costume, and do all this crazy stuff and real branding. 00:49:28 We had a jingle, like we wrote us a radio advertising song, and everything, talking about washing your hands, and we did everything right. We launched the product on Amazon, and was crushing it. And this was in uh, we launched it in June of 2020, so two years ago. We're selling 40 to 50, 000 a day, just one skew, it was going crazy. Well, Amazon at that time was freaking out about all the people selling hand sanitizers, so if you had the word 'hand sanitizer' in your listing, they would uh, you know, sometimes turn it off, and we'd be in the middle of a launch. We were even using Howard's company, one time, to help. US with some of the launching and right in the middle of it, boom! 00:50:03 The listing was dog pictures, uh, you know it's like we just wasted all this money, uh, getting ranking and spending money and, uh, that happened to us like nine times. But we even had someone at Amazon, we were authorized at Amazon, we were in the covet store, we we had I had a guy at Amazon not some seller support but like one of the top guys, I had his home cell phone number, I could call him and say, 'Dude, that our product just went down again.' And he's like, 'Ah,' and he would escalate it up. You know, I have to deal with seller support. That's how we were tight. He's like, you guys are doing this right. You're like the model company that we want selling on Amazon. 00:50:37 But still the algorithm just kept knocking us down, knocking us down just because we had the word 'sanitizing' there. And we're like, can't you just flip a switch that says we're approved? We've gone through this so many times. They said, no, there's no switch on Amazon that does that, unfortunately. So after, we sold about $2 million worth of stuff in about three months. And then we got a little bit big eyes. We're like, shoot, man, we could sell a lot more. So we placed some big orders and we switched it from China to Vietnam. And so, we could save on taxes and different things and not say it's made in China because people were freaking out. We had a big order coming in and then Amazon shuts everything down again in like November of 2020. 00:51:19 At that point, we couldn't get it back. We were down for a couple of weeks. And when we tried to relaunch, it's just-we lost all the momentum, all the honeymoon period. Everything was just it just became a disaster. So we just said, 'The heck with it.' You know what? We're just going to liquidate this stuff out, sell it for 10 cents on the dollar that we we spent on. Just get rid of it. Wash your hands and move on to the next project. We're going to lose the money. We couldn't liquidate it. Nobody would. No one would buy it. You know it cost us a dollar to make it. We'll give it to you for 10 cents, just come and get it. Like no, we don't want it; there's so much of this everywhere. 00:51:51 We have all enough, so we ended up having to give it away. So, at the end of the day, we had 460 pallets of this stuff sitting in a warehouse in Washington state, and we put an ad out in the local newspaper. And this Korean church a big church of all these Korean people, I guess passed the word around and they came to the warehouse one day, like on Saturday, everybody with their cars and their SUVs, you know, their trunk open, their back doors, and they're just throwing the stuff in their car, just filling it in. We just gave it away for free. We're like, 'Thank God, we're finished with this.' It's done. Uh, we lost a million dollars between all the partners, uh, you know, I ended up losing about a hundred and something – I had to put a little bit of money in, even though they said they put all the money; some money came from my pocket too. 00:52:33 We lost about a million dollars on this whole project because we had to give away all this inventory that we paid for, so that happened in early 2021. In February this year, I was doing my Billion Dollar Seller Summit online, a virtual one. And there's a prize for the winner. Howard knows this. We give a cash prize. He does it at his events, too, for who is the best speaker. And I like to show the money on the screen. I like to show, look, all right, here's $5,000. Somebody is going to win this money. Look, boom, boom, boom, boom. It's real. It's right here. So, I had to go to the bank to get the money my local bank here in Austin; I live three and a half hours playing right away from where the warehouse was in Washington, where we gave all the stuff away. 00:53:16 I'm in the bank, I'm touching money, and I'm like, 'I better just clean my hands'; I don't know, the money's maybe dirty, who's touched this? I reach up to the counter at the bank, you know, I'm waiting for the person to give me the money and to clean my hands and like wait a second; that bottle looks familiar. I turn it around, And it's the newest version, the ones that we gave away for free, you know, to get liquidated. And then I started, I was like, 'That's mine.' And the bank teller guy's like, 'What are you talking about?' I was like, 'That's my company.' He's like, 'Yeah, yeah, right, dude. Yeah, of course.' And I was like, 'No, that's ours.' And I started looking around the bank. 00:53:53 And the bank has different, you know, different windows. And every single window has our hand sanitizer. And then I look behind me, all the officers sitting there that make the loans and everything, they have it on their desk. I'm like, holy cow. Someone took this free stuff that we lost our shirts on and then turned around and sold it to this bank, you know, 2,000 miles away. And here it is in my local bank. What's the odds of that happening? And I'm taking the money from the account that we lost all the money from. So I was like, I almost want to tell him, Hey, you owe me some money for this stuff. But That's probably the most interesting story. It was a big, like, knife to the heart. 00:54:34 All right. Okay, so I think time is up. And, like, thank you so much, Kevin, for joining us today and giving us your valuable time. And, Howard, would you like to have some closing notes here? Just for the fun of it, you know, like the first time I met Kevin was like 2018. My first mastermind in the US, I think it was in Las Vegas. And then all of a sudden he was saying that there's rats in the mansion, you know, because I hold my mastermind in mansions. Back in the days now, the castles are right, but uh, and then he says, 'Rats! What I spend a lot of money on this place, and this is this rat!' And then he's like playing around, and so like, 'Oh look at the cookie; there's a a rat bit a part of the cookie.' So you know. 00:55:26 Then, and I say okay. And then all of a sudden, um... Fast-forwarded to like 2020 or 2019 or something like that. He's like, 'I went to one of his Mastermind, right? A Billion Dollar Seller Summit.' And then all of a sudden, he put me into a ghost room, a room that there's ghosts in there; known to have ghosts in there. People died in there. I'm like, 'Good thing that I had my friend, David, the Chinese seller.' That room that he has actually is 710, which is my birthday, right? So he gave me his room and he took my room. And then he got scared when there's all these weird stuff happening in his room. So it was kind of like pretty. Kevin is a funny guy. 00:56:18 Even today, I don't think he admits that he did that on purpose. But I have a feeling it is. Planned right, Kevin? No, that was pure coincidence that hotel someone didn't get murdered in that room; it's it's on a ghost tour so they actually lead the tourists around on ghost tours and that's one of the rooms they show them. And so the power was supposed to have that room, and then he traded uh with uh his friends who's also from China, doesn't speak very good English. One night, he was in the room, and we're all sitting in the lobby of the hotel, and we see him running down the stairs like freaking out going to the desk and almost like, 'You've got to change my room.' You've got to change my room. 00:56:58 And we got up to see what the problem was to try to help him. He's like, 'I just saw a ghost.' The ghost just came. They were talking to me, but thank God that they don't understand Chinese. They don't speak Chinese. Because I don't know what they were saying. And they were saying, so he was freaked out. It was funny. It was funny. Thank you for coming on, Kevin. No problem, man. Take care. Good luck in your Amazon venture. Keep at it. It's a good business to be in if you do it right and have some patience and the best of success to everybody and their families. All right. Thank you. Thank you guys for joining us today. And this session has a ton of information. So I would request all of you to share to let other people know as well. uh so other people can learn from it and uh correct their mistakes thank you thank you howard thank you guys take care bye