Amazon Sellers | Holiday Season Failure or Success? | Kevin King

Holiday Season Failure or Success for Amazon Sellers? | Kevin King 00:00:05 Welcome to the Sellernomics podcast, sharing valuable tips and information in the Amazon and e-commerce space. Each week, we deliver the best interviews with some of the top Amazon personalities in the industry to help you grow your business. Today's episode is brought to you by Gatita, the global leader in FBA auditing and reimbursements. And now, here is your host, Rob Stanley. Hey, everyone. Rob Stanley here. We've got a great one today, our special holiday edition of Sellernomics. I've got two great people coming on the podcast. I've got Kevin King and Yoni Mazur coming on. We're going to be talking today about holiday season failure or success for Amazon sellers. That's a big topic and a lot to talk about. Let's get them into the room here. Hey, guys. How are you doing? 00:00:57 Good. How are you doing, Rob? What's going on, everybody? How are you doing, Yoni? You're good, Kevin. Nice to see you. Nice to see you, Rob. Yeah, yeah. So anybody who's listening in right now, feel free to post questions as you go. Or if you have any comments, we'd love to hear them. Hit that like and that thumbs up. But let's get it started. So, Kevin, let's go with the most immediate announcement I just heard yesterday. And this was kind of a very unusual one that Amazon decided to start building their own containers. And I was like, okay, that kind of makes sense. And I'm kind of thinking in my head, does that mean they may lead to actually doing their own shipping, like actual on a ship, Cargo ship is what I mean? 00:01:36 Obviously, they do their own shipping. What's your thoughts on that, Kevin? Yeah, they've been doing that since like 2017. It's called Dragon, the nickname of it's Dragon Boat. And it's primarily for Chinese-based sellers. So all the people that we compete against, they're helping them out since 2017. And they've been doing that, but they were just contracting with other shipping lines. And it was just, you know, whatever containers came in with those shipping lines. And they were coordinating that whole logistics, uh, but yeah, just earlier this year, they actually started making their own 53-foot containers, uh, which are a little bit the longer ones, uh, and uh, this has a big Amazon with a smile logo and everything on the side, and uh, they're bringing in entire shiploads of those, uh, they're renting out or leasing out some of these these ships, and bringing in complete ships. 00:02:24 I think uh, maybe what you saw there might have been one coming to the Port of Houston, I believe it was, that was offloading an entire ship of Amazon containers. They're smaller ships, so they can't contain, you know, the biggest container ships, I think, can take about 20,000 containers or so, 20-foot containers, the equivalent of 20,000. So if they're bigger, you know, you got to have that. But yeah, so they're bringing in on some smaller ships, 1,000, 2,000 container ships, some of their own stuff. And my understanding is that some of those containers are not going back to China. They're deliberately made to be 53 feet so they can then turn those containers into the backs that put them on trucks here and use them, uh, on trucking instead of buying the trucking trailers. 00:03:10 But then you see the big semis pool that 53 foot is a standard for the big size, uh, trucking rig here in the US, so they're just putting them on the road and then using them domestically, not even sitting on a lot of them back so I think it's pretty smart. I mean Amazon logistically has become what one of the biggest players out there, you know four or five years ago they were shipping everything through FedEx and UPS and and I remember even when, uh, probably about 2016-2017 all of a sudden I started getting deliveries on a Sunday from the US. I'm like, what the heck? What was doesn't work on Sundays? It was they were delivering, they contracted with Amazon to actually deliver uh packages and then UPS all of a sudden started, they didn't used to deliver on Saturdays. 00:03:53 Or FedEx didn't deliver on the weekend unless you paid, you know, a $10, $20, some sort of premium on the shipment specifically for those days. But now it's pretty standard seven days a week you're getting deliveries. And a lot of that's because of Amazon. And Amazon has now become one of the biggest logistics players. I think they ship more than FedEx now. Handle more logistics, ground logistics, and air logistics than FedEx. Not quite up to UPS, but they're approaching it. So it's huge. It's amazing how fast. That they've they've been able to do this, yeah what's amazing is that this in like five six years, FedEx is like what 70 years, 60 years, it's just unbelievable, yeah it's it's crazy uh I mean that's Amazon is is a brilliant logistics company, I mean from the the way they handle all this their warehouses and setting everything up to be able to handle all these shipments and it's it's amazing it's mind-boggling how whoever created this system uh it's pretty mind-boggling pretty smart people. 00:04:51 Kevin, do you feel with maybe trying to make some of these changes? I know you talk to the sellers, Yoni talks to the sellers, and he can chime in after this. Are you seeing that, I mean we were only talking like maybe a couple of months ago there was a lot of delays a lot of issues. Obviously some things happened in place with I think some of the ports like Long Beach started going to 24-7 if I'm not mistaken. Uh, but are you have you seen since some of those little changes like that have things picked up a little bit as far as getting product into the warehouses for sellers? Yeah, they went to 00:05:26 24/ 7 which helps some, and then they also implemented some fines and penalties and I think was a bigger motivator where uh they were offloading this stuff and getting them out-it's like 100 bucks a day or I don't know the exact amount; there's some fines that kind of lit a fire under some of these companies to get get their act together. But yeah, I mean, I personally we had a problem. We had a shipment sent over for one of my companies that came through Long Beach. It cleared through Long Beach back in early June, and they got put on a rail to Chicago because there are three PLs in St. Louis. So it got sent by rail to Chicago and arrived late June, early July to Chicago rail yard to get cleared out there. 00:06:06 We just got it Monday. Wow. Almost six months later, it was stuck in a Chicago rail yard. There's about 80, 000 containers stuck in the Chicago railroad yard, and there's a litany of excuses from 'we don't have people it's coveted issue, uh, you know, there's mechanical problems, whatever. There's a ton of problems. It complains, and we just got this, it killed our entire summer season. We had a product for the summer season on this, it killed it. So now we have it. We kept kind of almost written it off, and I'm hearing some other stuff is moving a little bit a little bit quicker, you know. If you recall last year, uh, there was like a shipping Armageddon, uh, with all kinds of delays with FedEx and UPS, and the US Post Office, especially. 00:06:53 You know, priority packages last Christmas were supposed to be two, three, four-day delivery, uh, they were taking a week to ten days, so two weeks sometimes just for them to get understaffed, and I remember, I do some drops here at the local uh post office in the back, you know, I go to the back where all the trucks and the everything are, and I remember last year is just a cluster f back there. I mean it was just a disaster, and this year it's, it seems to me they got their act together they figured out some problems and i think that's generally the case i mean yesterday we had the outage uh you know with a aws outage and that caused some some problems uh with amazon deliveries and with a bunch of other stuff too phone systems and all kinds of things but um I think it's much better that you have to get better prepared. 00:07:40 Yeah. Yoni, what have you seen on, you know, I know Yoni was, he covered a couple of trade shows prior to Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Were you hearing any buzz on anything regarding shipping like that, Yoni, or issues that were happening, or was it starting to get better? Yeah, there was stress all around. People were anxious about it, especially the one, you know, sourcing from overseas. Actually, the one that we're sourcing domestically, you know, if they're the supplements or food or snacks, actually, they're fine. They're, you know, U. S. manufacturing and sourcing is pretty stable. So they're in a good position. But yeah, a lot of stress. But the thing is, when Black Friday and Cyber Monday kind of kicked in, I tried to kind of ask around. 00:08:21 It seemed that the overwhelming majority of them were settled properly. Some of them mentioned that they wish they had more stock. And some of them were completely out of stock and basically took a big hit. But the overwhelming majority were fine. The anxiety, there was one stage. The actual results so far is that it's fine. But listen, this is only December 8th. We got, what, a week or two, two weeks before Christmas. So these next two weeks will be kind of a very interesting point to see, you know, when the race ends, so to speak, you know, if sellers had enough inventory and ammunition in their arsenal to get by and really maximize on sales. So we're in a very dramatic moment at this point. 00:09:01 I think you're seeing too, part of what's helping is I think the holidays are more evened out this year. It started a little bit earlier with people buying because they heard stories about shelves going to be empty and stuff like that. So they want to make sure they got what they really wanted. And then I'm seeing, at least in my sales, Black Friday wasn't a big spike. I heard some reports that it might have actually been down slightly a little bit. Yeah, it's the first time in history ever that Black Friday sales were actually lower than the previous year. Hold on. Here's a question, though. Here's a question. A lot of them started their Black Friday sales earlier, though. Yeah, that's what I mean. Everything's more evened out. 00:09:38 A lot of retailers are trying to space it out so it's not just jammed. This lap that, Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend was jammed at my condo place here. The mail room is just full of packages-I mean you can't even walk in there; there's so many packages! But um, and I know my mailman yesterday, I was talking to him, just a local guy, and he's like, 'Yeah, we've had to make three package runs today. Three guys had to come out just because we couldn't fit them all in the truck.' So but but they're handling it, uh. And I'm seeing that in my sales my sales you know actually, my sales are higher right now since Black Friday, uh, actually since Cyber Monday. 00:10:16 Every day the sales have gone up a little bit, slightly or been about the same, and they're higher all of those days are higher than Black Friday. That's why a lot of people were like, 'Hey, what's your tip for... What's your strategy for Black Friday? Are you doing something special?' You put some special graphics on your images; you're doing this; you're doing some sort of sale. Like I'm not doing anything; I'm not doing any sale; I'm not doing any promotion because every day is a Black Friday from here on out, or better uh. And so I didn't. Do anything even on my own websites where uh outside of Amazon, where consumers are buying directly. You know, in the past I would run Black Friday deals, I would send out an email sometimes. 00:10:53 I do five days of Black Friday, okay this day it's a 20% discount, order this day you get some sort of free gift, you order the next day it's just something-free shipping or whatever. I do all these things and this year I did nothing and sales are up 20-30%. Despite that, and wow, why give away that money and do those promotions if you don't need to, yeah? It's funny you mentioned that. So as a buyer, right, because I haven’t sold in a while, but as a buyer, I had a bunch of things bookmarked in my list and everything. And I was like, OK, I’m going to wait, wait till Cyber Monday, see if they go on sale or Black Friday. 00:11:23 I would say probably of the 10 things, only maybe three or four actually went on sale. Like everything else, the price stayed the same. It didn’t change. Probably because it was also like more brand name, higher end things. But I did notice even some of the non-brand name didn’t really change. They didn’t really do a discount. So that was interesting. Yeah, I think a part of that, just to butt in here, is that think about it. If so many sellers have struggled to source their products, why would they give it away? Especially with so much momentum. If it was just a regular year, you have endless supply, technically speaking, because you always bring up the factory and within a few weeks get a reload. And today it's not that simple. 00:12:00 That's why you got to be a bit more careful with your ammunition, right? Yeah. Supply and demand. I mean, and the prices are up. I think I just saw some other report that prices are up on Amazon. Someone did a study in 20, 25% in general. Inflation, baby. Inflation. Yeah. Inflation costs being passed along. I haven't felt that personally. Luckily, I'm somebody that doesn't pay close attention to price. I'm in the grocery store. If I wanted, I'd put it in my card. I'm not like, okay, this one's $1. 99, this one's $1. 87, let me put the $1. 87. I used to. I'll be honest with you. I used to. Throw it in. Yeah. Coming to America from another country, at the early years, it was like that. 00:12:39 Every little penny I was kind of very careful with. But over time, as I was able to develop a career and do business and thankfully financially be good, I value my time. That little time that takes me to think if it's a penny here or there. I can be out of the supermarket making money and, you know, the business world. So I'm very lucky and blessed to be in this country, you know? So, Kevin, you brought up the whole thing with, like, obviously prices going up on Amazon. Speculating ahead a little bit, let's talk a little bit about, you know, going back to the whole shipping with containers and everything. They just seem to keep going up. They keep going up. What's your feel? It's stabilized right now. Okay. It dropped slightly. 00:13:18 But the people I'm talking to, you know, like Steve Simonson and other people that are bringing in a lot more containers than I am, way more, you know, they seem to think it's going to stay high for a while. It may dip a little bit, but at least until 2023. And it may never go back to where it was. You know, if a container was two, three thousand bucks, you know, there's additional fees on top of that. So when someone says it is two to three thousand dollars to ship a container, you know, you've got paperwork fees and you've got duties and you've got other stuff. So it costs actually more than that actually to bring a container in once you factor in all the little costs. 00:13:53 But still, from $3,000 to $20,000, $25,000, $30,000 in some cases I've heard stories of, I think it's going to probably not likely to go under $10,000 anytime soon. It may go up and down. It may stay stable. But the feeling I'm getting from a lot of people is they expect it to remain. remain higher. Why would the shipment, if they can get it, why would it's the same thing we just talked about on Black Friday-why do a discount if you don't need to? And so they don't need to. Um, and so what's happening is big companies like Amazon; it's not just Amazon, you got uh Nike and um Cole's and Walmart, they're all chartering their own ships and stuff and doing their own containers to bypass some of this these problems as well. 00:14:37 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And so we're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, though, we're going to talk more about holiday season failures or successes for Amazon sellers. We'll touch on Walmart a little bit. I'd like to hear some opinions on that. We got some questions coming in. Keep those coming in right after this quick break. Today's episode is brought to you by Gatita, the global leader in FBA auditing and reimbursements. Get $400 in free FBA reimbursements at gatita. com/ sellernomics. Yeah, so be sure to head on over to gatita. com forward slash sellernomics. Get that $400 in free FBA reimbursements. So we do have a question, a couple of questions coming in. So Kevin, it says, thank you for the stream. 00:15:23 Took some advice back in the pandemic at ASGTG show. It's been good. I think they were supposed to say some things you are doing for ranking originally at launch. So it looked like maybe you had given some advice or something about some ranking. Yeah, maybe something back in the pre-pandemic. Oh, yeah. I spoke at ASGTG a few times back. So maybe I shared some strategies there that he's saying that worked. Nice. They asked, is there some other stuff that I'm doing with ranking? Right. Yeah, it's probably because of the whole, you know, crackdown on search, find, buy, and rebates, and how to, you know, you spike up the ranking. So he's asking organically if there's a basically what are you doing right now for ranking? If there's anything special you can share with us? 00:16:13 Yeah, I mean, as most of you know, the search, find, buy that most people are doing, it's been basically frowned upon and outlawed by Amazon. That doesn't mean people weren't still doing it. And they're adjusting the way they're doing it. I don't recommend that. You're going against the terms of service and you're just playing with fire. But there are people that are still doing it. They just made a few changes. I know a lot of software companies have taken away their ManyChat flows, their SearchFindBot flows that had some of those companies. So it's cleaning up a lot of stuff. But there's still a lot of ways to rank on Amazon. And the way that I'm recommending that most people do it is lowering the price. 00:16:54 so if the way i recommend is if your price is 20 bucks for your item uh come out with a dollar 99 299 something crazy low and then run heavy ppc top of search ppc uh and and do it that way yeah and because the reason for that and you don't need reviews people will take a gamble on something that's two or three bucks without reviews but they won't take a gamble it's 20 bucks uh so that they might take a gamble on so they're much more willing to try your product with zero reviews and then you just work your way up on the price the same strategy i did like in 2015 2016. Back then, there was you know, you could actually write and get people to buy your product and write a review, and as long as they posted a disclaimer and a whole different set of rules. 00:17:35 I remember it was October 3rd, 2016 when Amazon put the hammer down on the old rankings, but it's constantly evolving. But a low a lower price and then slowly raise it up over time, and you got to make sure you put your minimum and your maximum price settings in your account, otherwise you may lose the buy box as you're changing the price. But if you do that um, I think you can have great success and yeah, you're going to lose money on every single sale but if you're doing search find buy and doing rebates, you're paying fees and losing money anyway, it's just the cost of doing business uh, cost to get in the door. And I recommend most people don't start with the big keywords um. 00:18:09 Title density right now is something that a lot of people, Bradley at Helium 10 has talked about this on his podcast and done a couple blog posts on it. But title, it's a new feature that's in Helium 10. They'll tell you the title density. And what that basically means is how many people are using your exact keyword phrase that you're targeting in their title. So if my keyword is garlic pressed for Christmas. Let's say that's my keyword, four words, garlic press for Christmas. And how many people are using that exact phrase, garlic press for Christmas, in that exact order? Not just those words sprinkled in the title, but in exact order in their title that are showing up on page one. And it typically depends on the category. 00:18:54 Page one can be 24, 50, 40, 50, up to 60 products. So typically go about 60 deep. How many people are using that exact phrase in their title? And that's called title density. And the fewer that are doing that, I like to see less than six. The fewer they're doing that, the better the chance you have to rank on that page even from day one in some cases. Uh, the more people they're doing that, the more competitive it's going to be. So if you can find keywords that are have low search volume-300, 500, less than a thousand-and start there on your launch, and make sure you have in your title you have all the big keywords. Is there some keyword that has 50, 000 searches a month? 00:19:29 Make sure you have that in your title so you get a little bit of credit for it for every sale. But then target the ones that have 300, 500-those are much uh lower lying fruit that don't have a lot of competitors that have title density, that's just not so. You find the ones that those keywords are relevant to your product that don't have a lot of competing competitors with that keyword in the title. And a lot of times you can get to page one really quick and you're not going to make you know hundreds of sales and get rich overnight, but you can slowly build this up over two, three, four, five, six months to page one for almost everything if you do it right and start with those keywords and work your way up. 00:20:02 to the bigger keywords and the good thing about the smaller keywords they usually have a higher conversion rate so a keyword that has 20 000 searches a month maybe only a five percent of the people that search that keyword end up buying something off of that off of that search result they end up going around and going down different rabbit holes versus a keyword that's very targeted only 300 or 500 it's very niche and the keyword conversion the conversions and those can be 40 50 in some cases so you can still get a track up a lot of sales um by doing that you're not going to have the huge sales You know, 5% of 20 , 000 is a lot more than 40% of 300, but you can start there and build up. 00:20:42 And that's how I'm recommending most people launch. Yeah, no, that's good information. And, you know, one thing I do want to cover, but real quick, we got a quick shout out from Danon. Danon, I'll see you in a couple of days in Miami. Thanks for tuning in with Kevin and I. If you got any good questions, be sure to throw them up there. But Kevin, so I had Carrie Miller on from Helium 10 a couple of weeks ago, and she was showing me the Walmart tool. And one thing I kind of walked away from after, I mean, it was my first time kind of seeing it and being in depth with it. There's a lot of room. There's a lot of room to grow in the Walmart space. 00:21:16 Have you done anything with the Walmart yet? Or, you know, kind of what's your feel on that whole scenario? Yeah, I did something with Walmart in 2016, 2017 when they first started, but I'm not doing anything right now. Uh, back then I tried it and it just was a waste of time um for me, I mean some uh but now I you know like you said Carrie there's a lot of people that are having pretty good success there, I know some people are doing better on Walmart than they are on on Amazon. I just have not personally taken the time to actually go over and do it um you know Walmart's pretty picky on who they take so not just anybody can sign up, I mean I i'm invited but it's just understanding you know if you're listening out there it's not just you've got to typically have a track record on Amazon or somewhere else for them to take you. 00:22:02 But once they do, there's a lot of opportunity there. And it does seem to be growing. It's still pretty small compared to Amazon, but there are some niches over there that are wide open. And I think it's a different type of buyer. It's a different type of mentality. So you can't just take your Amazon listing and just throw it up on Walmart. You've got to modify it for that customer base and that avatar. But it's a great place to test. You know, I'm hearing stories of people that get into Walmart. com, their product does good. And the buyers in Arkansas are like, hey, these products are doing good. Let's have a talk and let's test them in the stores. So it's a great doorway to get into the stores. 00:22:42 And the stores, if you can get into all their stores, I mean, usually they start with a small test and they ramp it up. But that can be huge. That can be way bigger than anything you do online with Walmart. Absolutely. A question did come in. I'm just going to summarize. It was a little bit long. I think what they're trying to ask was prior to coming into Q4, what's your kind of thoughts on using either a micro-influencer or influencer around your product to maybe try to get some of that momentum going before you get into the Q4 timeframe? I think it's anytime, whether it's Q4 or anytime, influencers can be good and micro-influencers can be good. But the problem is probably 95% of the people that try to use influencers fail. 00:23:22 you know there's a lot of people that teach this hey you got to build an audience you got to have influencers have them promote your product most of it doesn't work because they don't do it right uh or they're targeting the wrong people or the people aren't passionate or are not behind the product so if you do it right it can have great success you know there's there's some people like on tick tock right now if i was doing if i this person looking at influencers and stuff i wouldn't be messing with facebook hardly at all um on that um i would be focusing on tick tock right now uh it's especially if your 00:23:51 product is aimed at someone that's under 34 or 35 years old i would be i would be really focusing on tick tock if it's if you if you're selling something as a cream for uh senior women tick tock's not your place that's the truth pinterest or uh some Some place like that maybe Instagram, uh, but more Pinterest probably, uh, would be your place, but make sure you talk to your target audience is in that that social media platform predominantly, but TikTok, uh, there's some people doing really, really good on TikTok, uh, with, with unboxings. And, and there's some, some, uh, influencers that are teaching, that are, I mean, they're promoting Amazon products there that are cleaning up. Yeah. Actually, Yoni, a question came in for you. 00:24:39 So, uh, actually somebody was asking about, and I think it was related back to the Walmart. Is Gatita going to eventually start doing refunds and reimbursements for Walmart? So, yeah, we do have our eyes on it. The thing is, compared to what's going on on FBA, it's, you know how they say a drop in the bucket? It's not even a drop in the ocean compared to volume. So there's not enough data for us to actually need to build anything. But we have our eyes on it. And as it snowballs and matures, we're definitely going to be in that realm to help out the sellers. There you go. One thing I would also be careful of and this is where you know if you're not using Gatita, you may want to consider using Gatita, it is right, you know. 00:25:16 I shipped in uh some products back in October, they're four seasonal products, um, and they they're wall calendars actually for one of my companies, and uh every single one of those has different measurements, uh. In Amazon, they the correct measurement, uh, is 12 inches by 12 inches by 0. 2 inches. And the correct fee, Amazon FBA fee, should be about $3. 50 roughly. Plus, it's a $20 item, so it's 15% commission on top of that. So I should be paying someone in the neighborhood of five, six bucks total out the door. All in, yeah. All in. Well, some of mine are, one of them is $7. One of them is $12. One of them is $9. They're all over the place. These guys can't measure. 00:26:01 And then something happened where they self-corrected one of them, but they still corrected it wrong. They took it from $11 to $8. So if you're not watching that, that's going to add up because some of these are selling a couple hundred units a day. So that's $500 a day per item right now that I'm losing. I use Gatita, so at some point here later this month, I'm going to say, go get them. I don't want to mess with it just right in a second because I don't want to screw something up during the holidays. I've had bad luck before where I filed a claim with Amazon in 2017. I was doing $15,000, $20,000 a day on these Apple Watch Docks that I developed and just doing gangbusters. 00:26:41 This is before Gattita existed or any of the other tools out there that do a similar thing. Someone posted on Facebook, hey, if you're here's how you can write to Amazon and get some money back if they if they screw up if they lose some stuff on your shipment or if they they mismeasure or whatever and I I had a shipment that came I shipped in 500 and Amazon said they only got 490. And so I was like, well I followed the steps and said hey you owe me for these 10 uh well Amazon what they did is they suspended the listing to do what's called a bin check. And I was like, what the heck's a bin check? And I go, 'We got to go check two different warehouses,' and you know, do a verification or some sort of audit. 00:27:17 So in the meantime, we can't have stuff moving around. I'm like, forget the 10; I don't care. Just put the listing back up. You can keep the money; I don't care. But that cost me. So ever since then, I've been gun shy. Like it's during the middle of the season right now. And if I go in and file a claim, say, hey, you messed this up. I'm afraid that someone's going to screw up in the computer when they're fixing the measurements, screw something else up. And so I'm like, I'm just going to wait. And then I'll tell Yanni and the guys, 'Hey, it's time.' Yeah. When everything is a good time, let us know. The good news is we can go back and it's not going forward. It's going backwards. 00:27:52 I actually have it on my calendar. October 5th, 90 days from October 5th is like January 2nd or whatever, whatever it is. A week before that. Great. Nice. There you go. I actually wanted to touch back on the influencer side, Kevin. So you said, you know, you got to find the right influencer. You know, it has to make sense if it's TikTok, Pinterest, stuff like that. But the strategy is to get like one or to get maybe a variety of them. Wait, wait. Don't answer that. We got to take a quick commercial break. Kevin's going to answer that right when we come back. Did you know that Amazon probably owes you money for FBA reimbursements? Get $400 in free FBA reimbursements at gatita. com/ sellernomics. All right. So go ahead, Yoni. 00:28:35 Yoni was asking more about the micro-influencers. And then I do want to kind of not wrap up, but we want to make sure to talk a little bit about going into Q1. Maybe some tips from Kevin, but go ahead, Yoni. What was your question again? Yeah, the question is on the strategy with influencers. Do you think the strategy should be just pick one or two, or you kind of create a variety of 10, 20 and keep engaging with them? Any thoughts on that? I would go after as many as you can. You know, that's one of the things someone asked about the launching. Uh, earlier, that's some of the things that some of these launch services, some of them are switching to kind of an influencer-type of program where if they had people that were buying on the search line, buying getting rebates before all, most of those people have social media accounts so a lot of those people aren't big influencers you know in the space. 00:29:17 So it doesn't always have to be a big influencer, it could be uh, your family, it could be your friends, it can be they have influence too, it's just like when you're going to a movie, you know, people say hey, you should go see the new Spider-Man movie, you take the recommendations of your friends, the same thing with products. So you can actually use your own network. And if they post it, say, hey, my buddy Kevin just launched his new garlic press. Check it out on Amazon if anybody needs one for Christmas. Yeah, you're probably not going to sell a whole lot off of them. They're not some big influencer that's going to sell 100 of them in a couple of days. 00:29:45 But if one or two people buy that, some of them zero will buy, but one or two, and you've got 50, 100 people that do that, that adds up. And it adds up, and Amazon loves it. From the traffic coming from social media. If you give them a canonical URL, you can help them with their rank. Or if you give them, if you're part of the attribution and you get that 10% back, there's so many things you can do there. It's just people are so used to this instant gratification. I want to launch and be on page one tomorrow. You've got to get out of that mindset. Yeah, that's definitely true. And so let's talk about a few tips for either a new seller. You know what? 00:30:23 I'm going to switch this up a little, Kevin. You know, I always like throw kind of curve balls at you. Kevin's done a lot of presentations, been to a lot of, let's say, where he's giving advice and telling people how to sell and everything. There's got to be a question that comes up all the time from either new sellers or even existing sellers. Maybe give us your top two questions. You always hear an answer for each of those. And I'm sure they're probably long ones, but go ahead, Kevin. Oh, yeah, probably the number one one is how much money do I need if I want to sell on Amazon? How much money does it take to start selling on Amazon? And the answer is it depends. 00:30:59 I mean, to do it right and a little bit quicker takes money. But you could start with people in Pakistan. There's a huge group of like 700,000, 800,000 people called enablers in Pakistan. A lot of them are VA. Some of them are Amazon sellers. They're starting with $500,000 or $1,000. Some of these guys. Some of them start a little bit more. And it's just what are they trying to do? If for a thousand dollars, you can get some really niche down product. You're going to sell a couple a day. It's not going to be some gangbuster runaway multimillion-dollar company really fast, but for them, that can be life-changing. You know, if they can make $500 profit a month off their Amazon business or a thousand dollars, that's huge. 00:31:34 I mean, because the average wage over there is three, 400 bucks a month. So they can make a thousand dollars a month in profit. That's life-changing for their family. For us, me and Yanni, that's a trip to the grocery store or something because we don't pay attention to the price. I got three kids. You better know it. That's right. That's not that much. So it depends on what your goals are. And so I think a lot of people get into this and they want more Instagramification. They want to quit their job that they're working now and do this, and be able to support themselves overnight. And that's difficult to do unless you come into it with a lot of money. And so the amount of money you need depends. 00:32:08 You can start small, I recommend five to twenty thousand. It would be or more would be ideal depending on what you're doing, but you can do it with less, so that's probably the number one question. The number two question is probably, 'Is this Amazon? Is Amazon selling on Amazon as it jumped the shark? Uh, what should we just be doing? Shopify should we be doing something else?' And the answer is no, just like Yoni just said. Walmart is a drop in the bucket compared to Amazon; Amazon is still the big guy in the room. 60, depending on who you listen to, 60-70% of e-commerce sales go through Amazon. Amazon is still the place to be. And is it competitive? Yes, in some categories extremely competitive. But is there a great opportunity there? 00:32:48 Yes, there's tremendous opportunity. It's only getting better; it doesn't mean it's getting easier, but it's it the opportunity is getting better if you approach it with the right mindset. And it's a true business opportunity. There's no better place in the world to launch a product than on Amazon. And then the probably the follow-up question to that would be, 'Well should we just have all our eggs on Amazon?' Should we be selling on Walmart and Shopify and all these other places? And the answer is eventually yes, but I would recommend not doing that too soon. Uh, don't focus on Amazon, master Amazon. Sometimes it's better to expand Amazon Canada from the US or Amazon Europe than it is to start a Shopify site because you already know the systems, you already know everything, and it depends on the traffic is already there on Amazon. 00:33:29 You're taking advantage of all these eyeballs that are already there. If you start something else, your own Shopify site, you're going to have to run Facebook ads. You're going to have to get the eyeballs there, and that's expensive. People complain that Amazon; I just saw some report, some media person was trying to make a story about Amazon screwing small business owners, taking 30% to 40% of the sales price, and that's just screwing people, and it's not fair. It's totally fair. Go try to do that on your own. On Shopify and see what you've got to pay for ads to get those leads, see what the conversion rate is-one or two percent instead of eight to ten percent, or you know Amazon is raising some fees next year, and you know that's just part of it, that's business, you know, and you gotta adapt with that. 00:34:14 I want to add on to that, Kevin, because something you just said right there, you know. Also, remember who's shipping that product for you as part of that scenario? Who is storing your product in the warehouse, even though you're paying some? If you had to go get your own warehouse, hire staff to ship everything and package it, and all that. Start thinking about what those fees cost. And Kevin knows I'm old school. I did 20 years of e-commerce when there was no Shopify, there was no Amazon. I had to have a warehouse staff, people to run Google ads, things like that. There's a lot more cost involved than people think. So realistically, your fees you're paying are up there, but they would be possibly even worse if you're doing it yourself. 00:34:56 And you can sell 500 units of something and test it at the scale of someone that's selling a million units. You can't do that on your own Shopify site. You get to pipe into this massive scale, this massive machine at a little small level that just would be impossible somewhere else. Yeah. So we're going to wrap up here real quick. I've got one more question that did come in for you, Kevin. Then I'll have Yoni also pop in and if he has any last few comments to add in. It is kind of early. We're not quite to Christmas yet. But a person was asking, 'Do you see like is this year better than last year' is kind of what they're asking. Have you seen that so far? 00:35:36 Does it look like your like sales are better this year than the previous year? Yes, for me personally, yes, I am up about 20-25% this year. And I expect that to continue. One thing is, you were asking a question earlier about the first quarter. Remember, the first quarter is still good on Amazon. A lot of people think, well, Christmas is here, Hanukkah is past, Christmas is here, that's it. No, January is really good. On Amazon, because not only do products that are New Year's resolutions, you know, fitness products and supplements and stuff, really well, but everything in general does well after Christmas because people get gift cards for Christmas, Amazon gift cards. They get cash bonuses from work. Yeah, they get bonuses from work. They got something as a gift that was bought on Amazon. 00:36:20 You know, Amazon allows you to return stuff until January 31st. It was bought from October 1st. So they got something as a gift. I don't want this. I'd rather have something else. So there's a lot of exchanges and they're exchanging some other seller's thing for your thing. uh so keep that in mind january can be a very very good month on amazon almost as good as december in some cases yeah go ahead johnny yeah i see here just to tweak uh the question here so in terms of impressions you see the uh you know for your in your case a drop of impressions but increase in uh conversion rate compared to last year um seeing a drop it uh no i'm not really seeing a drop in impressions now same amount of impressions conversion rates conversion rates actually Might be slightly lower, a point lower or something, probably right now than last year, year over year. 00:37:06 But there's more people looking. Got more eyeballs. So more eyeballs, even though the drop in conversion rate, the more eyeballs covers up for the drops. Overall, you're up 25%. Yeah, the 1% drop doesn't worry me. That's just fluctuations. All right. Yoni, any last tips for anybody on this holiday season or going into Q1? Yeah, just connecting what Kevin was saying. Amazon is an amazing testing ground and entry gate to the world of e-commerce. Focus your resources there. Be a student of the game. Keep on tweaking and keep your eyes and ears open to what's working, what's not working. It's hyper dynamic. And that's it. Wishing everybody a successful end of the year. An amazing start for 2022. That's it. Hard work forever pays. So, you know, keep it up. 00:37:54 Kevin, go ahead. If you have any last things you want to, you know, advice you want to give or anything you'd like to plug, we're more than happy to do that. I'm just saying good selling out there and good luck, everybody. Hope you have a great holiday season. Be safe and take a little time for yourself and enjoy it. Don't just work. Yeah, I'm going to give, I do have to give Kevin a little plug. So Billion Dollar Seller Summit, never been to it. My first time was this year. Had an amazing time, amazing information. Let me tell you, and I can't even talk about it. I promised I would. Kevin, we won't even talk about it. But let me tell you, a lot of people will say a lot of stuff's recycled and things like that. 00:38:34 Kevin, make sure everything's fresh, new. So if you're a seller that's looking for a show, and not that there's not other amazing ones out there, don't get me wrong, but I had a chance to go to Kevin's Billion Dollar Seller Summit, and it was absolutely incredible. There's two of them coming up next year. There's two of them coming up. Keep your mind. The one is virtual. I believe it's in February. Or March. And February. February. And the physical one in Austin, Texas, which I love, is going to be in August. August. Yep. And Katita's a sponsor. So thank you guys for support, all your support. You've been there since the very first one. Yeah, absolutely. But it was an amazing event. If you get a chance to go, it's well worth it and some great information. 00:39:11 Kevin, thanks again for coming on this holiday special edition of Cellonomics Podcast. I will be getting Kevin on next year, just me and him, and we'll be talking about tips and all kinds of facts. And we'll probably go old school again like we did before because some of those old school things still work. That's the cool thing. Well, thanks again, Kevin and Yodi, for being on. I do appreciate it. And y'all have a good day. Take care, everybody. Bye. Thanks for joining us this week on the Sellernomics podcast. Special thanks to our sponsor, Gatita. Did you know that Amazon probably owes you money for FBA reimbursements? Get $400 in free FBA reimbursements at gatita. com slash sellernomics. Be sure to join us again next week for more great tips on how to grow your business. Thanks again for listening.