Amazon Q&A - Talkin' Shop: October 2020 | Kevin King | Ep. 45 | Lunch with Norm

Amazon Q&A - Talkin' Shop: October 2020 | Kevin King | Ep. 45 | Lunch with Norm Hey everyone, it's Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy, here, and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the rise of the micro-brands. Okay, well we're broadcasting to you live on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. If you're watching this replay on my personal page, just well, first of all, if you're watching this replay at all, skip ahead. But if you are watching this on my profile page, then why don't you head over to the Norm Ferrar aka The Beard Guy page and you'll be able to see whole episodes, videos, and other content? So Kelsey, where are you? Hello, hello! You had me nervous, Kelse. I forgot that I was the one in charge of clicking the go live button, so uh, kept you in suspense. I was just looking; I didn't know if people were just looking at me at a blank stare for the last you know minute or so, but wow, that's your job; you just press that button right? Yeah, okay, good, good! So what's up? Alright, so everyone, you know the drill: like us on social media-Facebook, Instagram, YouTube-hit those like buttons as Norman Ferrar says, smash them! Um, so everything that we stream here goes directly to YouTube as well. So if you miss it and you're watching this as a replay, you can go to YouTube to find it. And it looks like we got Nathan Clark here. Say, Norm! Hey! All right, and we know that Dr. Kaz is going to be joining us too. sent us. This is a live Q&A. So if you guys have any questions at all, put them in the comment section and we'll add you to the list. We've already got lots of questions. So just be patient and we'll try and get to them as quickly as we can. Yeah, we're talking anything Amazon today or anything e-com. So just throw your questions over in the comment box. And even after this, we'll get to it for sure. All right. And we've got another. Giz120256, greetings, hello, welcome to the show. And yeah, and if you're watching this right now, please like and share it. Gets the word out for us and we really appreciate it. And I think that's it for me. Okay, then get off the screen. There you go. Anyways, I have a special guest today. He's a good friend of mine. He's been He's got quite the past. And if you ever want to hear his details about his past, you got to check out. I know this guy where he like you'll hear about the tiger story. You'll hear about a bunch of different stuff. Michael Jordan and a bunch of things. Let's put it that way. It's one of our most popular podcasts. And anyways, check it out. He's been featured. in Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. And that's covered in that podcast. Entertainment Tonight, a bunch of national TV shows. He's also been on in USA Today and in the Wall Street Journal. So my buddy, Kevin King, he knows everything about Amazon. He knows a lot about e-com, Amazon, just running business in general. He is a serial entrepreneur. So if you have any questions, throw them over into the comment box, and we will get to them. So sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee, and enjoy the show. And where is Mr. King? Hey! What's up, Norm? I'm good. How are you, man? I am doing great. How's it up there in the great white north? It's getting cold. Is it? It's getting cold. How is it in Austin? It's about 90 degrees and sunny. One of these days, invite me down there. Fahrenheit. What's that? Celsius. 35? Celsius would be, yeah, temperature of Mars or something. All right, sir. So, hey, why don't you tell everybody a little bit about what you're doing right now? How you're beating COVID. How about being COVID? I'm working. I mean, now that we can't do all these conferences and see each other. Actually, yesterday I was sitting there talking to my wife. She's like, you know what? I wish there was an Amazon conference right now because I'd really like to get out of here and go have some beers and shoot the shit with some people. But in this meantime, I've been keeping busy. I've launched a couple of new companies. It's quarter four. One of my businesses is a seasonal business, so that's ramping up right now. Got my hands full with two new Amazon businesses on top of that, plus the Product Savants, and working on a virtual billion-dollar seller summit that'll be announced soon. Oh, very good. Those are, hey, you know, if you've never been to one of Kevin's summits, you got to check it out. The average person attending the summit, and you don't have to be that average person, but what's the dollar range? Two or three million? No, I think the first one, I have to go back and look exactly. So I may have this off a little bit, but I think the first one was like around four, $3. 5 to $4 million a year on Amazon. And the last one was six or seven, I think. I'd have to go back and double-check. But yeah, it's a very high-level group of Amazon sellers. But the nice thing about that too is that there's a nice cross-section. So you've got those high-level people, not only on Amazon, but right across e-com. Anyone in e-com could learn something from that conference. So I've been to it. I go to a lot of events, and you know how to put it on right. Right from the first Illuminati conference that we met at. That's right. That was done. I mean, you know how to throw an event. You've been to them all. You went to both Illuminati's, right? Oh yeah. Yeah. And then you've been, I guess you are. Yeah. What Kevin does, I gotta do. Hey, first, I guess one of the things I wanted to talk about today, cause when you come on, you're coming on every month. We just, we talk about what's kind of current, what's going on in Amazon. And you know, we have, we do have three different types of people on here for first Amazon. And then just, online sellers, but the beginner, the intermediate, and the advanced. And so I'm trying to just, you know, for the beginner right now, do you have any advice for them? For a straight-up beginner, I mean, absorb as much information as you can. Listen to as many podcasts as you can. Choose a course that you resonate with and learn as much as you can, and make sure that you are going into this with the right funding. Whatever your budget is, people always say, 'How much do I need to start?' You can start with any amount. It's just a matter of the product that you choose and how fast you actually want to grow.' I recommend most people start with about $5,000 to $20,000 at a minimum, but you really need to make sure that you pick a product that you're going to be able to stay in stock on and not spend all that money on that product. That's where a lot of people make mistakes. You got to really focus on that first product selection and don't let it tie you up. Don't procrastinate for six months. Well, I just can't find the right product. There's plenty of opportunities out there and don't necessarily shoot for the stars from the beginning. Start slow and build yourself up. Right. Yeah, I had an experience, not a positive experience, but I had a client of mine that just would not get the proper capital together. And it killed him in the end. He couldn't do any marketing. He couldn't fund his inventory, but he had enough to buy his inventory. And that was my biggest fear that he didn't have that two or three times his cost of goods built in for any type of marketing or promotion whatsoever. So he shot himself in the foot right from the beginning. Yeah, that's what I tell people. If you have $10,000 that you're going to be starting this with, you should not spend more than $4,000 on your initial inventory. You need a minimum of two and a half times whatever your initial inventory cost. And so that's where a lot of people make a mistake. They say, 'I've got $10,000.' They'll source something. Maybe it costs them $7,000 or $8,000. And then they are stuck because they can't rebuy the inventory. If they're successful, they can't spend on advertising. They can't do all the other things they need to do. So you got to take whatever your budget is and divide it by at least 2. 5 or more. I mean, more is even better. But so in this case, if it's $4,000, if you have 10 grand, that's landing costs. That's what shipping and everything, $4,000 is what you should spend. So then you got to find a product that what can I sell that I can buy enough of for $4,000. And so, depending on the products, that might be something where you're, if it's a $20 item, you're buying 20 of them. I mean, I'm sorry, 200 of them. If it's a dollar item, then you have a lot more flexibility. So it just depends. And then you have to then use that data to go after a product and do your product research. Right. Yeah. We had Tim Francis on, uh, just this week. And he was talking about knowing your numbers and profit first. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it is so important. And that's, uh, we talk about going out and, uh, these, a lot of these free courses where guys are standing in front of a Lamborghini waving dollars. Well, Kevin and I have nothing to sell here. This is information that we're giving you. And it's, it's so important. Like there's, I have nothing like. If you're on your last dollar, we're telling you not to go into the market. Don't get involved with Amazon. And again, nothing to sell. If you don't have the proper capitalization, you've got to explore this because there's so many people that have great products, great ideas, but it's just not for them right now. Yeah. And Amazon's, I mean, you'll hear stories of people that start with a few hundred bucks or 500 or a thousand and they'll show you they're doing a million dollars in sales or something. And those, those are rare cases do exist there, but that's the exception to the rule and not the, not the rule. And usually, there's a lot more to the story. They might've started with a thousand bucks or put something on a credit card, but a month later, their supplier gave them really good terms, which is unusual for a new person or they, They got a loan from their rich uncle or something. There's something else to the story in most cases. Yeah, or they took Freedom Ticket. Well, if they took Freedom Ticket, they would have known what to do. That's right. Exactly. So, okay, now let's move on to the intermediate. What are some things that are happening right now that the intermediate seller should know? So about intermediate, do you mean someone that's already up and selling-they're selling, they're there, you know, there's they've already either paid their Amazon tax, you know, and now they're ready for fourth quarter so an intermediate seller probably should be uh looking to to grow. I mean, and that's in that stage you're going to be looking at opportunities to grow. How can you extend out what you've already done? What variations can you add or looking at your brand analytics data to see what people are often buying with yours and seeing like, maybe this should be my next product because 7% of the people that are buying my hammer are buying a screwdriver. So my next product should be, I should take a look at screwdrivers and see if there's a good opportunity there. Expanding out that brand. And then, perhaps at the intermediate level, depending on where you're at, you might be taking a look at beefing up your social media a little bit and trying to grow a little bit of an audience and that kind of thing. Potentially, even if you've optimized, depending on the stage you're at intermediate, if you've optimized Amazon, potentially take a look at opening up in other Amazon markets. I would recommend, you know, if you're selling in the United States to go and open up Amazon Canada before I would go to Walmart for example in the US because you already know the system, you already know how it works, you've already [you] already know Amazon. To be honest, Amazon Canada is probably going to make you more money even though it's a much smaller market than Walmart in the US in most cases, so it's uh I'd start looking at some of that kind of stuff. Okay. All right. Very good. One of the other things that you might want to take a look at too, we've talked about it quite a bit, but for that external traffic or just stealing some traffic from your competitors is going to post. And I know you're a big fan of post as well. Yeah. The Amazon post is, is that's what you're talking about, right? Amazon post. Yeah. Yeah. Amazon post is good. Yeah. It's. It's hard to know right now exactly what kind of sales you're generating from it or what's happening there, but it's a great free tool to use on Amazon to get some extra eyeballs on your product. Yeah, and I like the – There's two things that I really like. Well, there's actually four things that they've given as new with the scheduling, with the multi-image. But I like the ability now to have those five extra columns where they don't tell you the sales data, but they do tell you the click rate through the related post, the brand post. So you kind of get a feel for what's going on. And the other part, I don't know if you've been checking this out, but. I think Amazon's really trying to build a true community because I see this on Amazon Live. Now they've added the follow button only. I think it's only to your brand feed. So you can build up that follow, like people that will follow your product. And you can also drive traffic from Facebook now over to your own brand feed page, which has the follow button, which is kind of cool. So anyways, I'm kind of playing around with that. I haven't been playing around. Well, not that I haven't, but I've done a little bit of Facebook Live. Carlos has been on Carlos Alvarez and he has a really, he had some great suggestions for Facebook Live. Are you using Facebook? Facebook Live. Not Facebook Live. Amazon Live. No, I haven't tested that yet. I have not tested Amazon Live. It's kind of like doing an infomercial, isn't it? There's some really cool things that you can do with it, Kev. One of the things is you could just do a regular podcast, and then you can take that podcast and repurpose it. So we do that with this podcast. Um, we'll take it, we'll split it up 10, 20 times, put it in social media. You can do that with, uh, Amazon Live and you can, you can create a podcast. Actually, like, let's just take a knife. I always use a knife. Okay. But you can create, uh, a cooking show with a knife using chefs. They videotape it. They give it to you. You upload it or they can do it live. And you can create this really cool following with it. And you can also take all that information and repurpose it and upload it. Or this is another thing that we're doing. And this is with brand influencers and brand ambassadors. And that's getting them to do all the content for us. So for Amazon Post, we're getting people to just give us basically influencers that give us their images basically for free. And then videos that we can upload to Amazon Live. Now, we haven't done that too much. We are going to be experimenting with it right now in Q4. But I think it's going to be something pretty cool. What do you think about that? I think that's cool. I mean, I've heard a lot of good things about Amazon Live. I just haven't had a chance to. to delve into it yet. But I think that strategy of cutting stuff up or having that prerecorded could be, could be really good. Yeah. Interesting. Carlos and Carlos, he knows his stuff. Oh, Carlos. Yeah. I'll never tell it to him that to his face. What about the advanced seller? The advanced seller? I mean, I would say the advanced seller should be looking to, to cut costs, to really get the profit as high as they can, cut all the extra fats in the company, whether that's employees or VAs or software tools that they hardly ever use, and be looking to see how they can position themselves to sell. Right. I think that's the number one thing an advanced seller could be doing. Or maybe they don't want to sell, but I don't know why you wouldn't want to. I mean, some people, I guess, are really tied to their business, but the money is when you sell. So even if you've got really good cash flow right now, the money is still when you sell. So anybody that's not looking, I mean, someone that's an advanced seller that's been doing this, you know, has an account for five, six, seven years and is not looking to sell, tells me that this person may be full of shit, that they're really not making any money or they're not as good as what they pretend to be. They're one of these guys that drives a nice car but has no furniture in the house or something like that. Or it could be some people; they want to leave this to their family or something, but I still say that's a mistake. There's so many people buying Amazon businesses right now. I just talked to another company this week that hasn't come out public yet. Most people have heard of Thrasio or some of those guys that are buying a lot of businesses, but these guys have $175 million; and their initial fund to start buying businesses. And there's more of these coming. And so to not take advantage of that and gain the leverage that gets you; and if you want to do this, just do it again, you know, take that, take that big payday and go and start another Amazon business and flip it. You know, my friend David, you know him from a billion dollar seller summit, and Leah, you know, that they're on their second, I think they just are about to complete or just recently completed their second flip. And then they're going to go on to their third. They got $4 million for their first one. I think they're approaching eight figures for the next one. And then they'll do it again. And that's where an advanced seller should be, in my opinion, looking. Sell it or I mean in some cases maybe you want to even go buy other than that seller may say well if I'm I'm doing okay now but maybe I've got a little bit of extra cash so maybe I can even get my multiple higher by going and buying some other Amazon businesses let me go buy three or four other guys put them into my portfolio and then sell it um it's just the opportunity is huge right now and people should be taking advantage of that that a lot of people aren't yeah and you've got to be to take advantage of a really great multiple You've got to be on the incline. You can't wait until it starts to come down. Yeah, you don't want to wait too late or wait until Amazon Chase, the algorithm, or some competitor comes in and knocks off your best seller, and then it's too late. Yeah. So just give a couple of shout-outs here. So, hey, Nathan, how's it going? Faye, give 120256. Ricardo. Hey, Frank Sell. Hey, Frank was on I Know This Guy, and he has a great story as well and a great brand. Yelchin, nice to see you back, sir. Okay, let me see. Let's go on. Frank is saying, what's the advantage of selling versus continuing a profitable business? A lot of people ask that question. Why would I sell if I'm making money? It's because you may be making money on paper, but you're probably constantly having to reinvest a lot of those profits. Unless you did profit first and you're taking it out up front. You're having to reinvest a lot of that stuff. Why not take a big payday? I mean, you can get a multiple of, you know, if you're making $100,000 a month in profit, you could get $3 million in cash right now probably in your pocket instead of $100,000. To get to that $3 million would take you 30 months. That's your current runway of $100,000 a month. Well, with $3 million, you could come back and start another company, maybe put $2 million or $2. 5 million of that away, or take a nice vacation or buy something or whatever you want to do with it. Take $500,000 and start again in that 30-month period instead of being at $300,000. Instead of being at the $3 million, now you've got $3 million in your pocket. Plus, even if you get to the same level of $100,000 again, now you've got another $3 million. You've doubled your money. It's foolish to not sell in today, in my opinion, to not be looking to sell in today's market. Right. Unless you're trying to build it as a legacy for your family. But yeah, for me, I would be looking at selling whenever I could. It's nice to flip. And a lot of people, they don't sell because, honestly, it may be a little embarrassing to them. They're not doing as well as they think they should be or they're not doing that great. There's a lot of people that are selling on Amazon. The only people making money is Amazon. Or they're eking out a small living and they're able to pay their bills, but they have a job, not a business. You know, just to address that, a lot of people that might be doing really poorly or just breaking even on Amazon, if you were to go back and just recheck what you're doing, the numbers, where you can cut costs, where you need to spend money and not where you have to, or spend the right money, not the bad money, you'll start to see that the profit will start to come in line. If you've got everything and if you've got the sales, people like your product, there's got to be some reason why you're not making money. Maybe you're not selling it high enough. Maybe it's just a few tweaks in the packaging so you can bring the cost up a bit. Maybe it's just really poor PPC. But all of these things you take into consideration and just look at them one at a time, like on the weekend, just go through it. It doesn't take a lot to clean up your account. Kevin, if you have a clean account that's making some money, the money that you can make on Amazon selling your business, it's going to be the most that you make on Amazon. Yeah. That's the day that you make your money is when you sell your business, period. I think our friend Scott Dietz says that's when you make about 60%, 70% of the profit you're ever going to make in your business comes on the day you sell. And so, I mean, as Yaro was saying there, how would you define the best moment to sell? You need to sell when you're on the rise. And I don't know that there's a best moment. Is this month or three months from now the best? You just definitely need to be on the rise. And I would be, if you think you can ride it out another, that's something that like Scott Dietz at Northbound Group, actually, they can help you determine when is that best time to sell by going through some. Advanced spreadsheets that say if we add these three products and we do this, this, and this, and we cut our PPC cost over the next six months by this, then at this point in month nine is a perfect time to sell. They can they can forecast all that for you based on what you're doing right now and what's you're projected to do, and they can determine when is that optimal time. It's hard to say here's the exact formula it's a complicated spreadsheet that that can tell you that, and people like Scott I'm not trying to give him a plug or something but that's what he does at the Northbound Group. He helped one of my friends exit for eight figures. And it took them about a year from the time they decided to sell to actually go onto the market, and then they sold. And in that year, they did all the things they needed to do to optimize it to make it more attractive to really get the most value out of the sale. Well, I know one thing I don't know about you: when I start praying, it's too late. Yep, yep. Please come back. Please, sales. Okay, so Kelsey, can we get into some questions? For sure. We have tons. And just a little heads up, we just hit our highest viewer counter in the history of the show today. So we've gone up to 32. All right. That's awesome, guys. Thank you, everyone, for watching right now. That's awesome. So let's start with this one. I'll try and change up the viewers asking the question so it's not just one person. But over the years, I heard Mr. King say he has several seller accounts. How does one go about doing this exactly? You open them up. In the past, you would have to get permission. Amazon was very strict about having one guy be an associate or having multiple accounts. And you would have to actually send in a little letter and get like an official permission, and you can still do that if you want to be completely safe, but uh, last late last year at some point last year, Amazon said no, we don't require that anymore as long as you have a valid reason for doing it. You can go ahead and do it. So a valid reason for doing it would be that you have maybe a different partner, say like in my case, I log into uh five different five, yeah, five different Amazon accounts and I just can just switch back and forth and but each one of those accounts sells completely different products so I don't have two accounts selling, you know, in the baby category. And if you if you had that that could Amazon could see that as a conflict of interest. So as long as they're in different categories and it's different products, and that's typically going to be okay. You need to make sure you have a different EIN number, a different bank account, ideally even in a different bank, not even the same bank and different ownership. It doesn't have to be different ownership. I can own multiple businesses, but it's better if maybe you're a partner with your spouse or you get some other partners that are investors or something. There's some reason like that. That's the cleanest, but if it is your own, you can own multiple businesses. You can set that up just for accounting reasons. If they ever ask you, look, I'm. I got a baby category and an automotive, and to keep the books clean, I need to have separate seller accounts. So it's not a problem. I've never had an issue where one of them got frozen or Amazon said anything to me. Just as long as you go by their rules and go by the book, you should be totally fine. Hey, Kev, one of the things that you have to be careful of, and some people – Always want to game the system. So if you're trying to box in the product, so you have the highest or the highest middle low or highest low price, and you're doing that for that reason, Amazon will shut you down. You're taking an unfair competitive advantage. That's what I meant. You shouldn't be in the same. You should not open multiple accounts to sell the same stuff. Right. Yep. You should not do that. It used to be a pain in the butt, but yeah, now, like you said, it's, it's pretty similar as long as you're not trying to game the system and they'll catch you. Yeah. They'll catch you. They're pretty sharp at that. Yeah. Anything else goes? I'm sure there's a few. Oh, and thank you. She says, thanks again for the Amazon Facebook Live. I mean, I see Yalchin says he uses three VPSs for three Amazon accounts. Yalchin, that's not necessary. I mean, I know, we know, Norm and I know a guy that has like six different computers and each one is for a different Amazon account. And he's very careful to log in just exactly. That's someone that's trying to beat the system or they're doing something you shouldn't be. If you're upfront and legit, there's no problem. You don't need a VPN or a VPS at all. And this thing where people are always, well, don't log in from a different Wi-Fi. If you're at a hotel or you're at your buddy's house, that's bullshit. I've logged in from hundreds of hotels around the world in 20, 30 different countries to my Amazon account. It's not an issue. And so as long as you're not doing anything you shouldn't be doing, don't worry about it. Okay, and going back to Faye, thank you very much, Faye. Yeah, and I see that I think Frank shared the video. So thanks, Frank. And let's do this question from Nathan Clark. Do you think reviews that are removed by Amazon are counted as an actual review, or after they delete it, they don't count it against you? I don't know specifically on that, but my hunch would be if they delete it, it's deleted. I don't know what you mean they counted against you. I don't believe – you know what? I don't know for sure if it stays in your overall score. I've never tested that. I mean, that would be kind of hard to know unless you just had like five reviews and you were a 5-star and they – or you're a 4. 8-star and they deleted one of your 5-stars. You went to 4. 6 or you stayed at 4. 8. That's how you would have to test that. But I think if they delete it, they delete it. And let's do one from Giz. What is your opinion of add-to-cart strategies to initially position an ASIN prior to a full-on launch or to augment other ranking strategies, aggressive PPC, and/ or rebates? I wouldn't do it. I would be very, very careful about trying to game the system. I mean, there's people that do add-to-carts or they give coupon codes that they know won't work. They'll do spin the wheel and someone will go and enter a coupon code and you know it's not going to work. It's just so you get the add-to-cart. But if you don't know the exact percentage, Amazon knows that every category and every type of product has a certain percentage that add to cart that never buy. And if you're outside of that range, Amazon is going to flag you. And so your product might be 20% of people that add to cart never buy, but another category might be 42%. And if you get out of that range, it's going to look very suspicious to Amazon. If they got some reason to take a look or the algorithm does, they could catch you. So I'd be very careful. Yeah, I don't know if it was DEMA, but somebody we were talking to recently, even when you're going and buying rebates and you think that there's no footprint, well, They're definitely could be a footprint depending on who and what you're using um because it's just not natural like you were just talking about somebody that's going and just buying a product like that in two seconds um you know not checking around not going to a competitor's site to look around it's just not natural all of a sudden I'm buying, I'm buying, I'm buying and well that yeah the rebate thing that that's where people are going if you're on Amazon, if you look at the URL code they know if you type in uh uh hammer and up at the top it's gonna change the code the URL is gonna change a little bit there's a bunch of other stuff in there one of those is the page number uh and so if Amazon starts seeing that rebate that everybody is is going straight to page five uh you know skipping over page two, three, four they're not scrolling to page two, three, four they're going straight to five and they see a pattern of that because someone did a search find buy and said look for us on page five after you search for this word, Amazon sees that pattern and they're like, this is not natural. People don't just go and then actually buy it. The buy rate plus the fact that they're skipping is not natural and they can penalize you for that. So that's why a lot of these rebate services say you really need to be on page one or two before you actually even do the rebate. So it looks more natural. Or someone will say, 'The top five pages,' but then people need to scroll through each page to find you one by one. But even then they know. So it's always best on rebates to be on page one or two to really minimize that footprint. Absolutely. And it's like SEO or search social media. There's so many people that say that they're rebate experts. You get these all the time in your email box, right? And they're not rebate offers or search find buy works; they're just somebody who oh hey look I opened up a mini chat account I'm an expert hey I have an iPhone I'm a photographer it doesn't work that way you have to go to a reputable company that understands how the system works and you don't part of this is yes, I, I do use rebates um I make sure that I, I do it properly and I also want to make sure that that person has value; so they're getting something. They're getting something of value. They're getting a product that I hope they're going to come back and buy again if it's recurring. But there are systems out there now when you're using influencers and you're using brand ambassadors that you won't have to use rebates to have a profitable launch or use minimal amounts. And Kevin, I've got to talk to you after the podcast about some of these, because I don't know if you're using any of the techniques and we can't just get into it in this podcast. But imagine being profitable on a launch, all white hat, using people who love your product. That's the way to have a, you know, launch a product now. That's great. That's a good way. The problem I have with influencer marketing is I think it's a great supplement, but I think it's difficult to rely on it solely for launch. I think it should be part of your strategy mixed in with a bunch of other stuff. But if you're not in a non-competitive niche, I think influencer marketing can be a great way to launch, even maybe on its own. But if you're in a competitive niche where you need to sell. 20, 30, 50 a day or 100 a day doing it solely off of the influencer side is going to be next to impossible in most cases um so it's a great supplement but back on that search fi I mean on the rebates even some of the reputable companies still have issues I mean I just recently launched a product and we did a rebate cam with rebates with a pretty well-known company um and we had a huge fraud rate um we had a whole fraud ring this item was a 70 item so we had a fraud ring that actually was buying, buying the item they were they were using the pattern after we saw the pattern after that, after this happened they're almost all Indian names like from the country India um and what they were doing is they were using real people, so they had some database of you know of of Indians and And I'm not knocking Indians. That just happened to be that we saw the pattern. They had some database of Indian Amazon buyers. They were ordering for those people, having it shipped to these individual houses. But before it would actually get there, they would take the tracking number from UPS and actually redirect it. So they'd get the tracking number and say, 'Please redirect it to the closest UPS store.' I'm going to go pick it up. That way, the person that actually... They were shipping it to who actually didn't order it, never even knew about the scam. It just got automatically sent to the local UPS store. At the UPS store, they never picked it up. And so it gets sent back. But in the meantime, the person has gotten their rebate. So they've gotten their $70 back from the service. When it comes back to Amazon, it goes back into Amazon, shows it as an undeliverable item. And Amazon refunds them again $70. So these people just made a clear profit on every single item. And it's a pretty big scam ring. So you got to be careful even with the most reputable and that can come back and hurt you. You know, I'll probably never use this company again. I don't want to name them. But that can come back and hurt me when all of a sudden Amazon sees, hey, what's all these returns going on here? This is not normal. So you just got to be careful with who you use and who you associate out there. There's a lot of scams out there. As some of you may have seen a week and a half ago, there's a big article that came out about some people that are well-known in the space that if convicted of everything that they're charged, may be going to jail. And I think that's just the tip of the iceberg. And we heard about this a long time ago that Amazon was going after these types of people. Well, this wasn't even Amazon that went after him. It's the FBI. Amazon was involved, but this is at the next level. This is the FBI. And if anybody hasn't taken a look at that case, I mean, if you go and read the actual indictment, there's about a 30, 40-page indictment. It's fascinating. They were delivering suitcases of cash in Ubers. Uh, and all kinds it's it's just like you can't make this stuff up, yeah it's. And it goes into very, very detail of everything that they are doing to manipulate the system and go after competitors. All the accusations, I guess uh and um, there's a lot of bad players out there but um, and so you got to be very careful. So I recommend everybody go by the terms of service and short-term hacks or cool little tricks are cool. But just be careful relying on that stuff. Put out a good product and do good marketing. Yeah, one of the other just quick tips. We saw this happen and we've stopped using this technique. But on a couple of platforms, there was a course that came out. There's a course on YouTube, how to scam the system of rebates. And it was showing just, you know, all these people, well. People taking the course would open up hundreds of Gmail accounts, buy the product, get it for free, and then basically become your competitor. And we got around these types of sales by just putting it at 95% instead of 100% or 90%, because these people didn't want to pay anything. They didn't want to pay a nickel. They wanted it for free. So, we secured some of the product. We switched off of certain platforms now because of it. But anyways, you have to be careful, like Kevin says. All right, Kels, we've got tons of questions. Kevin, what's your time like? I've got another 20, 25 minutes. Okay, perfect. All right, so we'll have one from Tony, who's actually going to be a guest next Friday, talking about local manufacturers and importers. But he says, hi, guys, another great podcast. Kevin, are you also facing logistical delays in products coming out of China these days? Not too much. I mean, we had some delays back in April and May, but as of right now, not logistical. I mean, we might have a factory delay or something, you know, it's more on our side or because we did an inspection and something's got to change. But as far as logistical, no. Logistical delays getting into Amazon, yes. But not coming really out of China. Unless you're doing some PPE or something like that, you should be okay with that. Okay. And we have one from John Sims. Are you staying solely FBA this Q4 or do you have a MF option in place? Talk about your Q4 strategy to maximize sales. No, I think if this quarter four, if you don't have FBM, which is MF, merchant fulfilled, for those of you that don't know what that is, it's the same as FBM. If you don't have that set up with FBA, I think you're making a big mistake. Because this quarter, I think it's going to be a disaster. We'll see on Prime Day what happens here in a couple weeks. But I think we have all the ingredients for a disaster right now from a seller's point of view. Amazon's going to be fine. But from a seller's point of view, I think we have all the ingredients for a disaster. Because you have increased demand just because of COVID and products. E-commerce is up 30 to 50% or whatever on Amazon. So you're going to have that. You have Quarter Four, you have Prime Day, you have Amazon busting at the seams. You have all the limits on how much you can ship in, whether you're a new product or even an existing product. You have massive delays at both FBM, at FBM, you know, if you're using a third party fulfillment company, you know, I know there's one in like Michigan that does a lot of stuff. And I talked to them a month or so ago. They said, 'Yeah, we can we can take you take you on if you want because I was looking at it for my freedom ticket course of somebody to maybe recommend and I like but we'll be honest with you. It takes us two weeks to get something checked into our warehouse so the UPS trailer drops it off and sits over here, and by the time we open up your boxes and sort it takes us another two weeks, so that everybody's backed up. And so that's going to affect everybody. It won't affect Amazon because they'll sell whatever. They don't care. They don't care if they're selling your hammer or the next guy's hammer. They're selling a hammer. They make money either way. But from a seller's point of view, it's going to be interesting. And these rules of the shipping in 200 for a new product, I don't think those are going to go away. I think this is here to stay. I think they may modify it. It may raise to 500. There may be some other algorithm based on your past history or past sales or something where that. That gets some sort of adjustment but I don't think that's going to go away because Amazon's really trying not to be a warehouse, but be a fulfillment center and you have a lot of people that have been using Amazon as a warehouse, you know they take a course or watch a YouTube video, send a thousand other other widgets into Amazon and sell 16 of them um and Amazon's stuck with the rest of that stuff just sitting there taking up space and and they're tired of that um so um there's there's some challenges for sure yeah and On that note, you want to make sure that by October 15th, before October 15th, You've checked your inventory because long-term fees are coming out again October the 15th. And for some people, it might not even make sense having that inventory in the Amazon warehouses. So, Kevin, when you're setting up your product, like if you have a let's say you have a warehouse that's in Kentucky or if you have outside of the COVID areas. So outside of California. I try not to ship anything into California because it's a nightmare for me. I have stuff. I told you about this before. I messaged you and I just said, hey, I got a big problem. I'm waiting. This is the third month for a container to get received into Amazon. Three months. I've never heard that. I mean, I heard of that. Like I've heard of three weeks, four weeks, but this is month three and there's nothing we can do to get them to receive this thing. Yeah. And you're paying storage and drayage fees and stuff while, while it's sitting there for those three months. Yeah. I've had, I had stuff that shipped in June. I had some stuff I shipped. One of the containers/ pallets shipped June 16th from Washington. They shipped over. We have a 3PL in the Seattle area. Shipped out of Washington and uh Virginia, Mississippi, and uh Arizona, I think, and all of them took at least three weeks to get checked in, uh the Virginia one took uh nearly two months, and then I had another shipment after that and it took it, it took forever as well. And so we switched from shipping by by pallet or in your case you have a container to actually UPS Ground because UPS Ground is getting checked in significantly faster than anything that's palletized right now. And so we have some products where I cannot use Amazon's UPS rates. Amazon has a really low shipping rate if you use them. But some of these products are in the hazmat category, so you're not allowed to use Amazon's shipping. So we have to put it on our dime. So I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but what we did is we set up a service called Ground with Freight Pricing. Are you familiar with that, Norm? Yeah, yeah, you've told me about that. I owe you a Kobe beef lunch for that. So we set up with that, and that's really saved us a lot of money and solved the problem of getting stuff checked in much, much quicker. I'm not seeing delays of more than two or three days on that. Yeah. Like you said, it's very quick to get set up. We have mentioned it on the last podcast. I started doing that about a month before we were on the last podcast, Kevin. And it's not only saved a ton. You're right. It's very quick. You get a product and you’re not seeing a month delay. Right. So, okay, let’s go on to the next. Yelchin, I’m trying to get VAT in Germany and France, but VAT agency says it takes five to seven months. Do you guys know how to get short time, not five to seven months? Thanks. Yeah, I don’t know enough about the VAT stuff from Germany and France to give you good advice on that one, Yelchin. I’m sorry, I don’t know. Norm, do you know anything on that? No, but we’re going to post the company. That knows everything about that. Simply that? No, I want to say Astium. But anyways, company’s fantastic. I wish they had a simpler name to remember, but I'll make sure that we post it after the podcast. Okay, Yelchin? Alright. And we got Kapil. How do you suggest we launch new products with a 200-unit limit on new ASINs? So it depends on the product. There's a couple different ways you could do that. One is you're going to have to have FBM. So you can send in your 200 as soon as you sell through FBA to have the listing just automatically switch over. I think we've talked about that, how to do that on a previous podcast with Norm. The easiest way to do that is what's automatic and have that shift over to FBM and then ship in your next, you know, while you're waiting for the next ones to get checked in. go seesaw back and forth um the other way you can do that is if your product is not a top seller you might be able to get away with it you know if you're only selling five units a day or something you might be able to uh manage under that 200 limit or if it's a big seller you're gonna have to change your strategy and go after the eat the lower line keywords not the big keywords go after keywords that you know have a thousand searches a month or something or 500 searches a month and try to capture a bunch of sales off of that And just build up slower rather than going after the intermediate or big keywords in the beginning. And it's just going to take you longer to reach your full potential. But that's one way. Those are basically the two main ways to get around that. Right. Have you been one of the things that we were going to be playing with rebates? So, we have a product right now. That's just getting into Amazon, I hope we get it uh you know received within the next couple of days and we got stuck with that 200 limit. We've done the FBM like you've said um but we were going to hit it with rebates and we're going to do the full launch, we're going to drive some traffic over using like we've already got it set up with posts and everything, so it's all set up. Now we wanted to get traffic and we're hoping that this is a great product that with the rebates that we put in, we'll get the organic sales and we'll be monitoring it very closely. And as soon as we have 50 units, we'll be sending out another 50 units, even though it may cost us a lot more in freight. We just want to have the product constantly in motion. And if we're not. If it does get stuck, the unfortunate part about it, we've got, here's another, it sounds like it's an Amazon nightmare show, but it's not. Amazon is great, but this is another instance that happened, that we are allowed to have 5,000 units of something at one point. We've sent it in, but Amazon has lost it. But we can't replace the 5,000 units until they find it. Have you ever experienced that, Kev? Yeah, uh, yeah, with the new rules, I haven't had, yeah, I had some stuff, uh, I had $3, 000 uh that got checked in but then lost, uh, in August, yeah, and I opened up, you know, you have to wait the 30 days and you have to wait for this and then open up a case for them to go look for it at one point I was like, cool, I'll get $60,000, they'll pay me for these, you know, as if I sold them, you know, they take at less their discount but then they they actually mysteriously suddenly found them. But during that whole time, I could not ship in more because of these new rules. I mean, one thing you can do on a new launch too, I have not tried this, but I'm just thinking out loud here, is with that 200 limit, go do a rebate and try to do 200 in a day or in two days. Just do some big, huge blast. On some lower-level keyword just to get that initial going and then at the system within a week, it's going to see that you sold 200 in a day or two, and it's gonna it's gonna project out over three months because the inventory is they're projecting a three-month span. And actually, then may come back and say now you can ship 700 in right or 800 in or something, and then immediately when it does that, don't wait a week because the algorithm will keep it'll just downward go. Ship those 800 in, and then you can maybe start your true launch. So, it's kind of like you have a false start and then you kick it into gear. Yeah, that's a great point. And that was what I was trying to explain on a smaller scale with this new client. Oh, okay. We got a few more. We have only eight minutes left approximately. So everyone watching, if we don't get to your question time, I don't know if we can answer them in the comments maybe afterwards or something like that or wait until the next lunch with Kevin. Or you can beg Kevin to stay on a little longer. But we got – I'll jump right into another one. Let's see. All right. I am launching products only on FBM due to FBA warehouse delays, but cannot get the buy box. Any tips on getting the buy box from Dr. Kais? I don't know why you're not – if you're the only seller. On that product, if it's your own private label product and you can't get the buy box, that would mean maybe your pricing bands are off. That would be the first place I would look: is your pricing bands are either too low or too high. You can adjust that. Just go into Seller Central and the column on your inventory tab, there's some There's a settings for your columns like you can turn your and you hit that button and you can turn on and off columns that show up in that report. And one of those two of those columns are lowest price and highest price. If you go in and turn those columns on, they're off by default. Turn those columns on and it'll show up there with your BSR and your ASIN and your IF and SKU and all that stuff in those in the FBA inventory report. And set that price to something that's much lower than what you think you're going to sell it for and much higher. That will change your pricing bands that are set by default. And then any pricing you do, you're not going to get warnings. You're not going to get error messages. And it should help you get that buy box. That would be the first place that I would go and check if you're having that problem. Very good. From Kyle, our IPA score has been reducing steadily by two points for the past couple of months with no explanation or change, although we've tried many different things. This week we hit 500. Any insight on what really impacts the IPA score? Yeah, the IPA score, I forget all the things, but it's how quick you're moving your inventory, how fast you get rid of when Amazon sends you out those warnings that, hey, you've got inventory you need to dispose of. How much of that sits around affects it uh your inventory turnover um how how well you're shipping stuff in you know if you're getting warnings that you're overweight or you didn't pack something right or you use packing peanuts uh or something like that uh all those things affect it um so most but the one that affects it the most is being overstocked in inventory um But you should be able to Google. There's a few more things on that. You should be able to Google IPA score Amazon factors, and someone has got a whole list for you there. Yeah, the main four, excess inventory, stranded inventory, sell-through, and then popular products, basically, that you're letting popular products go out of stock. And if you're checking out that, go into seller central go into inventory inventory planning and they've got a something new I don't know if you've checked it out but go into uh health so it'll be inventory health and you'll see all four there. And you can click through and get some really detailed information. So for your excess, you'll see that you're 91 to 180, 181 to 365, 365 plus. And if you see that you're anything over, especially in the 365, that's hurting you. That's really hurting you. And why is it there? Get it removed um with stranded you can just click the button up top there's a tab stranded and you can see if there's anything and with sell-through it's really cool because they tell you what to do, lower the price, um, create a deal, uh, need more traffic. So they, they are giving you a much better reporting when you, when you, um, work with your, uh, inventory health right now. But yeah, if you work, those are the, I think those are the four main ones, right? Those are the four main ones. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, um, that's, yeah, yeah. That's probably the best way to, to try to help manage that. I heard that UK at the end of the year will separate from EU markets of ship goods to UK and Amazon to fulfill the products to the other EU countries will no longer be available. So, is that possible to ship the goods to Spain and have the same benefit or do we need to get that for each country and send our inventory to each country? Yeah, the UK, the full divorce is coming at the end of this year unless they delay it to do the COVID stuff. But that's going to affect where people in the past would ship stuff in the UK and you could do cross-border fulfillment into Europe. I would, yeah, you could, you're going to have to change that to cover the rest of Europe besides the UK. You're going to have to have two separate warehouses. Basically, you have your UK inventory, and then you're going to have to have your Europe inventory. So whether that's in Spain or Germany or Italy or wherever, that's what you're going to have to do to separate those two, unless they offer some sort of program where they'll handle that for you. But it wouldn't surprise me if they do something like they have in the U. S., where we have the North American market, where it's Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. There may be some trade agreement that I'm not familiar with, exactly, between the UK and the EU where they have something along those lines um, but that's something I would check to see because that could uh affect as far as your VAT in each country. It's best to have a VAT in every country, but there's different rules at what point do you have to have that BAT in each of those countries depending on your your sales threshold so you'd have to check. I don't know what you're selling um, uh, Jessio um or what levels you're at, but depending on the levels depends on when you trigger that requirement for that, okay? And we just have a few more um, so first of all is the ground with freight pricing available in Canada too, or only for the USA, I don't know, I'd use it in The USA do you know uh norm if it's available in Canada too? No, mine's uh my account is strictly out of the US Okay. What is your feeling on Amazon Canada, Amazon Mexico? Are these marketplaces worth the extra effort? It depends on what you're selling. I think Amazon Canada is for most products. I'm finding that I sell about 5% of what I sell in the US, 5 to 7%. So Canada, I definitely think is worth it for most products. Mexico depends on the product. I'm doing some Mexico testing right now, but for every one product I sell in Mexico, I sell 10 in Canada. Mexico is definitely smaller, but I'm not translating my listings. I'm not doing anything. I just have the cross-border shipment set up for Mexico. For Canada, I actually ship the stuff into a warehouse in Brampton and Toronto area. Okay, great. With that, for me, I made a mistake in Canada with what I was selling. I was selling soap. And it just didn't make sense. You know, it was $10 soap. It ended up with the conversion like $14 soap. Then you're paying $7 . 95 to ship it out. The pick, pack, and ship charge was $7 . 95. So for one bar of soap, it ended up at like $20-some-odd. You've got to make sure you have the right product. Yeah, it's product dependent for sure. Okay, and I think we'll just do the last two, and then we'll call it a day for this. Okay, Q1 question. Let's assume that we have everything in place for Q4. I'm going to smash it. What is Q4 going to look like, and how should we forecast it? So what a lot of people think is that Q4 is great, and then just everything dies in Q1, and it's not the case. January is almost as good as February. In some categories, supplements or fitness, um, or anything around new year's resolutions it can actually be better but for most products, January is just as good as December. Um, so what I've, I've been doing this FBA for a long time and what I normally see is that up until about I don't know where Christmas falls this year but up until around the December 23rd, 22nd, 24th it's just like going balls to the wall and then suddenly just falls off a cliff uh for like two days and then right after Christmas it picks back up and it continues until mid to late January. And I think part of the reason of that is a lot of people get products as gifts on Amazon for, for Christmas and they're like, 'I didn't want this, why did they buy me these socks? I'm gonna send these back' and Amazon gives the customers remember anything bought from October 1st until January 31st can be or until Christmas can be returned until January. 31st. So even stuff that people weren't buying as gifts in October, a lot of them are returning. There's a lot of returns. There's a heavy dose of returns. And you need to factor that in on your product too. Expect your return rate to go way up. And so they're returning stuff they don't want or gifts they don't want and exchanging it for other things, which could be your product. Or a lot of people get gift cards. There's a heavy dose of gift cards that are bought on Amazon. And so they're redeeming those gift cards and they're buying products. So January, and a lot of people get year-end bonuses and other things. So January is a very, very good month. I typically don't see sales really start to fall off until mid-February. And then from mid-February, if there's not a COVID or a crisis like there was this year, if it's a normal year. Mid-February until you know, depending if you have seasonal Easter or Father's Day or Mother's Day or something, but it's up until the end of September, it's just kind of a ho-hum, you know. Summer can be good if you have summer-related products. And then October, like right now, it's like someone turns a switch; a lot of times, October all of a sudden things just start going back up, up, up, up. And I don't know if you touched on it, but they've got the new return rate as of October the 1st. So as of yesterday, you have until January the 31st to return. Yeah, they normally do that; they did that with COVID too; they extended the return period back in things that were bought in March and April, and I think May could be returned; and I forget what it was, but you had like three months to return something. Yeah. Last question from Sarah45her: When you restock, do you use the recommended replenishment quantity set by the seller, central or do you use your gut feeling? I use whatever fits most economically in a case. So, the restock, Amazon sometimes they'll tell you how much you should restock. They don't know what I'm doing. They don't know if I'm doing rebates or if I'm doing a promotion or I'm going to bump up on my ad. So, I take their recommended restock with a grain of salt. I do my own projections based on what I think I can do and what I'm doing. Very good. I think that's it for questions, Kels. Yeah, I've got to run. I've got another call in a few minutes. All right. Just checking here on my phone. We kept you a little long today. That's okay. All right. I enjoyed you on this. No problem. Hey, we love having you. So, yeah, thanks a lot for coming on to the podcast again. You're a regular guest, so I can't wait until you're on next month. And, again, if anybody has any questions, just throw them in the contact or comment section. And, Kevin, we're going to let you go. And thank you, sir, for coming on. I owe you a Kobe beef. Small Kobe beef. Small Kobe. No problem, man. For some of these tips. No problem. Take care, guys. All right, buddy. See you later. Okay, so I think that's it for this version of Lunch with Norm. There was a couple of other things that we were going to touch on too, but we'll get to it on next Monday. And if there are any. Updates you can always go over to uh the Facebook page Norm Ferrar aka The Beard Guy and we'll be posting them there because uh right now we're seeing increased updates from Amazon and we want you all to be aware of it not just Amazon but anything to do with online selling so I think that's it for today's show, Kelsey where are you? Yes, hello everyone welcome or uh thanks for watching everyone this is great um everyone John, Victor, Yelchin, Michelle, Nathan, everyone that joined. It was awesome. Dr. Cause, too. Yeah, and thanks for the engagement, everybody. This is what makes the podcast the podcast. And speaking of engagement, we're kind of thinking about opening a Facebook group, along with the page. So, this would be an area where we'll do something fun. Talk to the guests if there's any questions about anything that we talked about, we would put it there, upload the files and you guys can build a community inside of it too, maybe we'll do some giveaways and give out some prizes, but it's an idea that's out there, so if you are interested in something like that put in the comments and uh yeah, if we get a lot of engagement with it and then it will go ahead with it. Um, yeah, so Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Michelle says the group would be great, perfect um, if you haven't yet please like and share this uh, and if you haven't, if you like listening instead of watching, you don't like to see our faces, we understand but so you can listen on Apple Podcast and Spotify uh, all the contents there we have stuff everywhere uh yeah, I think that's about it. All right, so also, if you want to get outside this type of content, we have the newsletter which, like I always say, does not suck. It's constant content. So every Monday, you'll receive something with news about all sorts of different articles from the e-commerce world. So not just Amazon everywhere. So tune in, everybody, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. And that's it for today's episode. We'll see you all next Monday. One little thing just to answer the question quickly. Can we have a calendar for the next few topics so we can prepare questions ahead of time? If you go to the Facebook. com/NormanForOur, aka The Beard Guys or hyphen-lunch-with-norm-I, put out the calendar for right now; it's a week ahead. I try my best, It's dependent on a lot of things. But I can give a list of the names of the guests that are booked in advance, but we might not have topics sorted out. It's all logistics, but if you go to the event section, you'll see the the guests that are available that are coming up-usually at least a week ahead. If I'm really on the ball, I can get two weeks ahead. If he wants to get paid. All right. On that note. Okay, everybody. So thanks for watching and we will see you next Monday.