Expert’s Guide to Amazon Marketplace with Kevin King - Vendo Podcast Ep 46

Expert’s Guide to Amazon Marketplace with Kevin King - Vendo Podcast Ep 46 00:00:04 Welcome back to another episode of the Vendo Podcast. I'm joined today by none other than the Amazon mastermind himself, Mr. Kevin King. Kevin, welcome. Thanks. Glad to be here, man. Thanks for having me, Darren. Yeah, absolutely. Just appreciate you taking the time. I recently came off another billion-dollar Stellar Summit attendance that Kevin put together a couple years ago, but I'll let Kevin introduce himself. So, Kevin, please, for our audience, give a little bit of background. Yeah, sure. Yeah, the event, we just did the virtual billion-dollar seller summit just recently, and you were at the first in-person one a few years ago. So I do that. I also have been selling e-commerce since before Google existed. So back in the 90s, back before there was Google, back when it was AltaVista and Lycos. 00:00:56 I can't remember all the different search engines back then. They're kind of dating my age. Started selling on Amazon in 2001, doing the FBA model around 2015. I'm involved in a number of different Amazon businesses, some that I own, some I'm partners in. I also do training for new sellers, a course called the Freedom Ticket that I partnered with Helium 10, one of the big software companies in the space to do. And I do their advanced training called Helium 10 Elite, which is a monthly kind of little mastermind every month. There's three or four different speakers, and I do some ninja hacks. We're in the Billion Dollar Seller Summit, like you said, twice a year. And then also partners with Steve Simons and a company called Product Savants, where we help experienced sellers discover new opportunities. 00:01:41 Thanks, Kevin. Thanks for that. Yes, definitely. I would encourage everyone to check out, especially Helium 10. A lot of our clients use Helium 10. And I would say the mastermind group that you run, the Elite Training, is probably one of the most comprehensive courses out there. So definitely encourage our audience to check that out if they get a chance. What is your opinion today on Amazon in terms of, you know, is it saturated? Are people still able to be successful on the platform? What are your thoughts there? Yeah, I think it's better than ever. Is it easy like it used to be? Absolutely not. Is it saturated on some of the lower end, cheaper items? Yeah, it is. Very competitive and very saturated. 00:02:19 Are there a lot of people trying to jump into this because they see some course or they see some come across their Facebook and they think it's a field of dreams and they hear stories of people getting rich? And you don't have to work much. And all that's, I mean, some people do get rich, but you don't have to work much is not true. I mean, maybe in 2013 or 14, you could stick your logo on a spatula and go sit on the beach and actually make a lot of money. But those days are long gone. But if you've got a real brand and you're treating this as a real business, the opportunities are better than ever right now. 00:02:55 You can start small and just have a little side hustle, or you can get into this feet first with a lot of money. I think Amazon's moving more towards a branding space, and so a lot of their features and everything are more towards the branding. I think differentiation is critical. So the guys that are just going to Alibaba and finding a product and sticking their label on it, that's becoming harder. But if you've got a true product, a true original, a true innovation, I think there's tremendous opportunity. Is the big fish you know some of your clients and stuff you'll help them on Walmart and some of the other places and some people do 00:03:30 pretty well in Walmart but most people like to talk to are still struggling a little bit to get that footing uh so Amazon is still the big fish uh and and uh out there uh and it's as you can see by all the aggregators uh all the private equity money that's coming into this space right now a lot of people are taking it pretty pretty seriously um and it's gonna evolve but uh yeah The opportunity is, I think, better than ever on Amazon. What do you think about all those aggregators, like the Thrasios, Elevate Brand, Perch, you know, all those players? How do you think that's going to be? I don't know what they're doing. I think, you know, Thrasio actually knows what they're doing. 00:04:09 And there's several of the others that actually either know what they're doing or they're figuring it out. But I think a lot of them are going to fail. There's just too many of them. I think Marketplace Pulse has a list, and it's. 40 some odd on that list and there's more that aren't even on that list that keep popping up so everybody's seeing what Drasio's done, the amount of money that they've raised and everybody wants a piece of this pie which is good for a seller but selling because you can um should in theory be able to get more offers in a higher multiple right now but I think uh I think there's going to be a shakeout and consolidation among those guys, you know. 00:04:43 I was actually on the board of advisors for 101 Commerce which actually started about three years ago it's one of the first guys in the space they were the original Thrasio or that actually there's one person before them but they were one of the originals and and they could that when they got into it and uh Richard who ran that uh and organized that, they raised quite a bit of money, they bought a bunch of businesses. And they realize how hard it is to actually run these Amazon businesses. I mean, you guys know that's why clients come to you. This is not easy. And there's a lot of moving parts, a lot of different things you got to know from logistics to marketing to listings to dealing with Amazon BS. 00:05:21 So yeah, it's tough. So they're finding that out the hard way. And I don't think a lot of them are going to succeed. But ones like Horacio or they got a good team, they're figuring it out and they're kind of leading the way. Yeah, to your point, I mean, there's a lot that can go wrong on Amazon. What, you know, right now, because of a lot of the changes, right, with reviews and other things that Amazon's making, what do you think some of the top sellers are doing right and what are they doing wrong? Well, the top sellers. The thing to do right is stay away from a lot of the black hat stuff. Some of the top sellers are doing that still out of China, but that's not the way to really build a business built on a good foundation. 00:06:04 Those guys play by the rules, but play smart with your innovation, with your marketing. For example, they're trying to own the whole thing. They've got their own rebate club. They've got their own marketing team. They're doing all the SEO. very specific people and they're they're bringing in all these things under one roof, and able to consolidate on shipments, able to consolidate on manpower, and and knowledge they learned from one but uh so I mean it's still Amazon you know it's still its playground, it's not our sandbox you know and we're just a guest in their house and they can kick us out any time and that's always a risk at selling on Amazon so that's why a lot of people say that you got to diversify and get off but 00:06:49 for most people if their Amazon business goes down if they're in e-commerce and they're focused on like say Amazon and Walmart and a few others, their Amazon business goes down they're still screwed uh I mean because Walmart typically is a few percentages to maybe 30 or 40 percent for some people of their sales and you're still gonna have to make changes um so that's how dependent everybody is on Amazon right now uh and so Trying to stay just Stay on top of all their latest changes and the rules, and it's evolving quickly. And you can get caught still even doing all that you can get caught up in the algorithms. You know, You get the wrong word and you're listening, you get shut down, a good pesticide claim or You know have to fight or a custom one or two idiot customer says something stupid and it flags the algorithm and you gotta fight it so knowing how to deal with all that, it's critical in today's world and 00:07:38 having resources, people with experience or someone you can go to that can help you get that back up because Amazon's just grown so big it's not that they're deliberately trying to screw with everybody but they just grew so big it's just unwilling and hard to manage, yeah we we've started internally tracking certain keywords that are flagging past things on the list for our clients, to your point, you can bring your business down for days That's a real threat to those aggregators' business, especially as they have a higher percentage on Amazon. On the black hat side of things, it's something I don't hear you talk a lot about in terms of like hacks, right? You're known for the ninja hacks, white hat type of stuff. 00:08:19 I'm just curious, do you have any anecdotes about some black hat tactics our audience should be aware of or just story? Yeah, I mean, some of the black hat stuff, I mean, the big ones, merging listings, you know, fighting ad. A big one, this is mostly China. There's some other people do it, but it's heavily dominated by Chinese sellers. They'll find an old listing that maybe I was selling a pancake maker three years ago and I got it up to 600 reviews and it's four and a half stars. I just kind of abandoned the product and never deleted it off the Amazon system. They have ways to actually go and find those products, actually change the entire listing. and then merge it with their new blender or whatever. 00:08:58 And so most people don't look deep into the reviews. A lot of people only look at the first page or two of the reviews, the top-voted ones up. Or maybe the top, first page a negative and the first page a positive. And those guys have figured out ways to get reviews into those spots so it all says 'blender'. But if you go down deeper, it's all talking about 'pancake maker'. But most people, and a lot of people don't even read all the reviews. They just look at the star rating. And so if they can get that star rating. High enough by and enough reviews they they can launch a product and so a lot of them are doing that kind of thing, a lot of them will go in on the cheaper stuff uh because they figure you know something costs me a dollar and I can sell it for $12. 00:09:37 99 on Amazon. Let me open up 10 different accounts Seller Central accounts, and each one of them, I'll keep squeaky clean and put 10 units in it. And the other nine, you know, let's put 50 units in each one, and let's do all kinds of crazy ranking stuff. And who cares if eight of those nine or all nine of those go down? At least I got it ranked, got some reviews, and along the way, I'm working it to a squeaky clean one. And there's tactics like that. There's all kinds of stuff that's going on out there. Amazon's getting better at catching it and policing it, and they've made a bunch of changes, but it's pop a mole as soon as you knock. Find one, another one pops up. 00:10:18 Yeah, we deal with quite a bit of that in Click Farms and review upvoting and downvoting and all those funny seller tactics to your point. What about on the external side of things? Smaller price stuff because, you know, if an item costs you a buck or two and your account gets shut down, you don't care. You know, it won't be lost, but you'll find that on the higher-priced items. So that's why I tend to go things that have a cost of goods of 20 bucks and up. $15, $20 and up, typically you see less of that than you do on the lower price because it's higher risk if they're going to play those games that they could lose a lot more money in the inventory. 00:10:54 And so those are usually a little bit safer bets. Yeah, heavily commoditized things like fidget spinners and the trends and bets and everything like that. Race to the bottom. What about on the external traffic side of things? I know that's a big topic now, like Casey talked about that on a lot of podcasts. What's your thoughts on driving external back to Amazon, or are you still a big on Amazon PPC believer? I think people should focus on Amazon initially and maximize that before going outside. The only exception is for launch. When you're launching, if you don't have an audience, you don't have a list, if you don't have something that you can go to to help you get that initial launch, going to outside traffic is pretty critical. 00:11:36 And like with Casey, you know, he showed the billion-dollar seller something. Actually, it was a winning presentation. Showed how to do some Google to Amazon stuff. That was pretty incredible. And it could really give you a bump. And Amazon likes that outside traffic. And they like you paying to send it because they know that if someone clicks to come over, they might not buy your spatula, but they might go buy some. A toothbrush or something else you know and so they get that they're still a cell made and so Amazon wants those eyeballs constantly coming in so they kind of reward that kind of stuff and like Casey showed there's there's ways to actually get even um a double or triple reward for that uh if you do it in a certain way and so that that's I think is great uh for for those purposes for for launching uh and getting keyword rank but after that, 00:12:24 why would you might as well send that traffic to your own website if you're set up for your own fulfillment instead of paying Amazon a 15% fee? Unless it just doesn't make sense. In some cases, it may cost you more to use your own 3PL, including Amazon's fees and what you have to pay to ship it and just let Amazon know. So depending on your situation, it may be better to drive that traffic after launch, outside traffic to your own Shopify or drive it to Amazon at first. And then if you're on Walmart, drive it to Walmart, get that ranking. Then drive it to your home, um, you just gotta do the math sometimes it depends on your item, you know, sometimes it's like I said, sometimes it's cheaper to let Amazon mess with it all. 00:12:59 Yeah, and on the social media influencers' side of things, I'm seeing more and more of that, especially with Amazon leaning into posts and other things like that. So what was your take on social media and influencer marketing, traffic, and giveaways? I played with the animals on Post and you know we don't see much of a lift off of that in sales, I mean it's It's a little bit, but I don't think Post are like some great cure-all on Amazon, but the outside influencer stuff can be. You get like what Tim showed at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. Some of the titles he showed about using influencers on YouTube and some different places. I think that can be powerful and can drive it. I think you're going to start seeing more of a movement towards video on Amazon. 00:13:42 You already see it with videos showing up in listings and encouraging that and letting more people do it. But with Amazon Live, It's still kind of in its infancy right now, but I think a few years from now, there's going to be at least a section of Amazon that's almost like a QVC or like an infomercial type of thing. I think there's something coming there, and I think they may actually start taking some of that and even putting it on Prime as commercials. You're watching some show on Prime on your local TV station that's coming through Prime or whatever, and there's a 30-second ad there for for something that's sold on Amazon instead of, you know, for your local car dealership or whatever. 00:14:21 And you can just tell Alexa, 'Alexa, buy it' or tell your TV, 'buy it', add to cart or whatever right there. I think that's coming. But it's early right now. But I think we're going to see more and more of that. I mean, the traditional search and everything's not going to go away. I think it's still going to be dominant. But I think you're going to see video. Video slash TV, however you want to call it, being more of a bigger player, especially in some categories. Yeah, absolutely. What's your take on the international side of Amazon, right? The different marketplaces. It feels like they're launching a new international marketplace every day, Poland being one of the latest. Do you sell a lot internationally? I do Canada right now, and I'm set up in the UK. 00:15:03 I haven't actually sold over to the UK, but I've been set up for a couple of years there in a couple of my businesses. I'm getting ready to one of my companies later this year is going to be starting in the UK. We're not starting in the US, starting in the UK. I typically focus on the US and it keeps me pretty busy. And I go into Canada just because it's easy. But the UK, Germany, Japan are all, from the people that I know that are selling there, are all really good markets. Italy and France and Spain and Poland, Netherlands, Australia, some of these other ones are smaller. But they're growing. And so it just depends on, you know, if you want to, it's worth your time to go in there and the hassle right now, but those are growing. 00:15:44 They're never going to be what the U. S is. The one that has the biggest potential probably is if they come up with some way to do Asia, you know, besides, besides China, but all that whole Indonesia, you know, I know they're doing Singapore right now, but they can figure out a way to get Indonesia and Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, that whole region there outside of China, Asia. minus China, Japan; I think that could be huge, uh, as well as India, looks like it's, uh, gonna actually might be a, a good one, um, once they get some of the bugs and stuff logistics worked out, so yeah, there's tremendous opportunity internationally, tremendous, um, just for quite a few products, yeah, no, uh, and we have a lot of clients that do sell internationally, so interesting there, what you talked about diversification earlier, right off platform. 00:16:31 Do you do a lot of, like, Shopify or Walmart. com or other channels? Or, you know, how do you play off of Amazon, if at all? Yeah, I have. I've done some. I'm not doing Walmart right now. I did Walmart on two of my companies, and it just wasn't worth my time. I should probably revisit it. This was four years ago when it first started. I was one of the first thousand. You had to go through a big approval process and stuff to get in there. They looked at your Amazon seller feedback, and you had to have so many and certain score and all that kind of stuff. I have Shopify sites for everything, but the sales that come through there are minuscule. I don't really promote them. 00:17:07 They're more just for legitimacy or someone that wants to pay by PayPal, doesn't have a bad experience with Amazon or whatever. I do some stuff on one of my companies on eBay. It's a good audience for eBay is a great audience for one of my companies. But other than that, we do some retail on some of ours, but wholesale out to retail places. But it's not a major focus right now. I mean, I do have a brand coming later this year that is going to have probably a 40% to 50% wholesale out to retail focus on it. But it's a different type of product. And we already have the distribution and stuff in place for it. And that's a key component of building this brand. Got it. 00:17:51 And I love the case study you gave during the summer on the brand that you worked on with Steve. So that was really cool to see. I know you haven't shared the name yet publicly, but that was a really cool case study. Yeah, absolutely. Going back a stack, we were talking external traffic, but on Amazon organic versus PPC, are you seeing the shift happen where there's more ranking juice applied to PPC versus organic? I don't know if there's more ranking juice. I mean, it would make sense. I haven't seen it. A lot of people talk about that. I haven't seen hard evidence that there's more ranking juice. But I am seeing that PPC or paid, you know, paid ads on Amazon are becoming more and more important; they're taking up more and more real estate and they're becoming more important. 00:18:37 So it's an important thing that a lot of people have to factor into their cost structure and factor into, uh, to their process of actually getting discovered on Amazon. It used to be just a couple little ones at the top or the bottom; now it's they're all over the place. And I could see Amazon-it makes sense for them. Just like in a grocery store, people pay slotting fees. If you want some cereal on the end cap where everybody sees it, you've got to pay for it in concessions or slotting fees. Or you want to be in the flyer that goes out on Sunday flyer and show that your Fritos are on sale, you've got to pay a co-op fee. So I think Amazon is moving more to that direction, and why not? 00:19:20 It's free money for them. Uh, why should they give it away when they can charge for it and people are going to pay for that position? So I think you're going to see organic actually continue to go down, and at some point, if there's 24 listings on a page, maybe six or eight of them are organic and the rest are all paid positions. I can see that coming. Well, I, I know we employ chat bots and you know, you know giveaways and things, and some of our strategies. Uh, do you still employ some of those types of tactics? Or, uh, quickly kind of launch organic when I launch a new product? It's a heavy 00:19:55 dose of PPC on Amazon; it's also uh, uh, I use some of the uh, the search find the rank of the rebate services uh, and in conjunction with that, we do some uh, some main chat Facebook stuff, and I have not been doing the Google stuff um based on what Casey showed, I'm gonna start doing at the billion-dollar seller something; I'm gonna start doing some of that. Yeah, we've definitely started testing a lot of the external traffic. So I appreciate the heads-up from Casey there for sure. It definitely wouldn't be a conversation with Kevin King if I didn't have a couple of ninja hacks for our audience before I let you go. So maybe one or two, or anything that comes to top of mind that you want to share with the audience would be great. 00:20:33 Ninja hacks. Make sure. Wow, man, what's a good ninja hack that I could share? Man, I might have to bring a shot. What's a good one, uh, for the audience, um, I mean, like if you haven't had turned on the category listing report, you should actually have sent it to Amazon and have them turn on that category listing report. They'll turn on for a few days to a week or so; you can download that in your reports. It's kind of like a blueprint of your listing, and you can check that to see where you may have some fields that are not filled in, some of the sorting that's not filled in, uh, that could be a great one, uh, 00:21:11 and you can also make sure you're in the right uh note uh, in there because there's a little uh if it's all lowercase letters and all, and not uppercase letters um, that means that you, because Amazon did a big update on the relevant stuff, and they went and manually changed some of this stuff, and someone was scripted but they missed some things, so if you're not getting Some impressions on some of your PPC ads you're not showing up correctly on some keywords that you think you may, you may actually still have the old uh category uh I forget the exact name for it. I have to look at the category identifier. It might actually be in lowercase instead of uppercase. Uppercase means it's the new version. Lowercase means it's the old version. 00:21:50 And you can just open up a ticket and have that updated by Seller Support. And that can actually make a difference on some of your rankings. I think I might have actually shared that at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. I think it was one of the 50 ninja hacks that I shared there. Yeah, I think it was one of the 50 ninja hacks. I know you probably got that from the audience. We had over 100 hacks. We had a hack contest with a cash prize, and we had over 100 submitted. Unfortunately, a bunch of them came in after the deadline. We had a deadline so we could pick, because everybody can't present all these, but we wanted to pick 20 of them to present on stage. 00:22:29 There's a lot of good ones that came in after those 20 that got to go on stage. So everybody that submitted a hack actually got that got the entire list, and there's some really good stuff in there um but so, but that's only for billion-dollar sellers uh folks who've submitted a hack. So, that's the advantage of going to these types of events, you know, and getting out there whether it's virtual or whether it's in person once those start happening again. I highly recommend get out there and network um i mean a lot of people just keep their head down and just set their desk and read Facebook A Few blog posts and stuff that come in, but when you go out to these events and actually meet and talk with other people, That's when a lot of really cool stuff can be discovered and new partnerships can be made, and you can really alter your business dramatically in a positive way. 00:23:15 Yeah, it seems Clubhouse is really facilitating some virtual networking. I know you're on there; I know you've set up some meeting links and things, but are you finding that helpful to network more through Clubhouse? Clubhouse is more for me right now; I am doing it. It's more providing value; it's more of a 'for me' because a lot of Clubhouses I'm on like I have one here as soon as we finish uh this um I do every Tuesday with Bradley from here to 10. it's more of a question and answer type of thing just it's more for new people to help them out you know i don't know where it's going to go um but because you can't demonstrate you know there's one thing where you can see someone walk you through a hack or show you but everything has to be explained 00:23:56 by audio so that limits it some but yeah there's one that happens uh ron does one on i think he's doing one i think it's every other friday and that one's pretty high level so he doesn't actually take too many questions from the audience so you don't get the the people saying how much money do i need to sell on amazon but you can get a lot of really experienced people in there sharing a lot of really cool stuff so those yeah i'm seeing some really good value from that it's kind of like a substitute for the in-person stuff I know kind of It gives you that little fix until we can all hang out together again and sit around the bar and swap war stories. 00:24:30 Well, I can't wait to be in person again and look forward to the next $20. So tell me, buy your beer, obviously, at the trade show, things like that. Tell our audience, how can they get in touch with you? How can they reach you? Yeah, probably the best way is just follow me on Facebook. You know, if you just go to Facebook and look for Kevin King. Or you can go to amzmarketer. com. I think that automatically forwards to my Facebook page, amzmarketer. com. That's probably the best way. And I post there whenever something interesting is happening. Yeah, and the next Billion Dollar Seller Summit is going to happen in person, I believe, in September, right? Yeah, it's in September. Barring any pandemic issues, a few people might not be able to come internationally, but I think it's going to be fine for most of Europe and the U.S. Uh, but yeah, it's a middle September 16th to the 20th, uh, in Austin, awesome. Well, Kevin, thank you again, so much for your time, really appreciate you being on the Bendo podcast, so thanks, Kevin, and, uh, just for the rest of our audience: So remember, protect your brand, and sell more. All right, awesome, thanks bye.