Kevin King Amazon Seller Tips | Ep. 12

Kevin King Amazon Seller Tips | Ep. 12 00:00:00 It’s got me something for Father’s Day. What? Ah! That’s cool. That’s cool. That’s cool. So, in case if you didn’t know, that was me on the mug. I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell. I think the beer gave it away. Yeah, I think so. So, Kevin, you’ve got so much going on right now. Why don’t you just tell us a little bit about what’s going on in your life? I mean, you’re handling a ton of different projects right now, aren’t you? Yeah, I’ve got eight businesses that I run, and a couple of them are not active right now. One of them is a seasonal business. It’s only active in the fall. It deals with calendars, so that pretty much kicks in. 00:00:45 I mean, we've already had to order. We print those in South Korea, and they're already on the way. The work on that doesn't really start until October, October or January. So that one's kind of silent. And then the Billion Dollar Seller Summit that I do, which is the high-end event for big sellers, obviously there's no events going on right now. So that one's fairly calm. But then I've got the trainings that I do with Helium 10, with Freedom Tickets, and with Helium 10 Elite. And then I have several Amazon businesses, selling on Amazon, and then I do Product Savants with Steve Simonson, where we help advanced sellers. You've got to be an advanced seller, not a new seller, but we help you with your products and sourcing and stuff. 00:01:33 And so that's keeping me busy. But one of them in particular right now is blowing up. We launched it in early June, and it's gone from zero to – a mid-five figures per day already. Uh, and that's real sales. That's not a giveaway or promotional sales. That's, that's real, real sales. And, uh, as we continue to, uh, get more organic position, uh, it's every day setting a new record. So, uh, that's keeping us on our toes; thousand plus orders a day. Wow. Now I just noticed that, um, Victor said that my volume is low. Can anybody else tell me if my volume is normal? They're saying that Kevin's is fine. This is a new platform that we're using today, and it's supposed to be fairly seamless. Yours is a little low. 00:02:25 Kelsey's sounds really good. Yeah, mine's okay. Yours sounds like you're a little bit far from the mic. It's not bad. Well, I'm turning it up. How's that? There we go. That's perfect. Thank you, Victor. That's a little too much. Oh, okay. Thank you, Victor. All right. Okay. So anyways, Kevin, yeah, you've got, like you said, tons going on. And one of the things I wanted to know about what you're doing right now. So you've got a product that you just launched. You pre-sold the product. And I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about how you did that. How you did that. Most people don't know that you can pre-sell a product. Yeah, it kind of surprised me. It seems just natural for me. 00:03:12 It's something I've been doing for a while, but I mentioned this on the Helium 10 Elite a few weeks ago in the training, and people just started asking all kinds of questions. I was like, holy cow, does nobody actually realize this? And I guess they don't. But, yeah, we have a product. It's the one that's doing mid-five figures a day. Right now and we launched it June 3rd so uh today, I guess it's the 30th day it's been launched. We're not FBA; we've we shipped into FBA on June 17th, but hasn't been checked in yet and we've been told by our freight company that June 10th or June 12th are the first check-in dates for a couple of the warehouses. Uh, so it's taken a long time to get it checked in. 00:03:54 So under normal circumstances, we wouldn't be selling right now. We would be waiting for that check-in, waiting for Amazon to populate it out and to go FBA. But I was like, no, we're going to miss too much of an opportunity if we do that. So we set up the listings as FBM. You've got to make sure if you do this, though, that you can actually fulfill it, FBM. So we have a good third-party distribution company that can handle this for us, and we kind of figured we might be doing some volume. We turned it live on June 3rd as FBM, and just started running ads, PPC. No other gamesmanship or anything. We did a couple little promotions on Facebook just to get the initial thing going, but it's pretty much been driven by PPC, and it's heavy PPC. 00:04:44 So I'm not worried about the A cost. I mean, if it goes over 100%, we kind of modify it, but we figured we'd be having some 70%, 80%, 90% A cost. Most of them, though, are in the – I think our average right now is about 25% on this product, which is pretty good considering it has no reviews. It's FBM. The delivery date that we set up on June 3rd was a June 25th release. So we said we put it – you can do a future date on Amazon. So we said it's going to be coming out on June 25th. So on June 3rd, you would think someone would go on there, and they go to click on it. Maybe they see our ad, and they're like, this looks interesting. 00:05:21 They click on it. They're like, oh, wait a second. This is not FBA. It's FBM. There's no review, so how do I even trust the product? And it says I'm going to get it in July because it says it's released on the 25th, and then a few days, Amazon cushions it for shipping after that. Screw this. I'm going to go find something else. And this is a super competitive product. This is not like we're the only one. There's lots of other choices, lots and lots of other choices. And it just started growing and growing and growing. Our PPC kept converting. We studied it, made a few modifications. And within basically three weeks, we hit a mid five figures a day. So right now we're on a run rate of about $18 million a year on this. 00:06:06 There's three main SKUs that we launched. So it's not one SKU. And it looks like it's going to do pretty good. And once we get FBA, I think that's going to completely change it again. So on that June 25th date, we shipped. We had a lot of back orders, obviously. And those all went out through our third-party fulfillments. And they're continuing to right now until we get into FBA. But what we did is we actually then went in and set up a separate listing. Not starting from scratch, you just go into the FBM listing, and you go under the settings, and you say 'add a condition'. And we added a condition, and the conditions-there's used, and you know, all new, used, used like new, whatever. That's not the one you want to do. 00:06:51 There's another one there that says Amazon FBA. I forget the exact wording, but it's basically you can choose if you want to make it FBA. And then we chose that option, and then the only thing you've got to do is enter a SKU. No ASIN, no descriptions, no nothing. You just enter a SKU. And so we set up a separate SKU. So if the first one was a SKU was like 123-FBM, this one was 123-FBA, for example, that's the name of the SKU. It's the only thing. And hit it. Hit the button and then boom, up comes another listing. They're tied together, the same ACE and the same everything. And that one just shows as inactive until it gets checked in at Amazon. 00:07:32 As soon as it gets checked in at Amazon, it's going to be, it will basically take over the FBM listing. So all the reviews, all the sales history, all the keyword associations, everything is there that we've been doing four to five weeks before we came in. And so as soon as we hit FBA, We think the sales will probably 2 to 5x. It's going to be interesting to see on this particular product. In the past, that's what I've seen. Just by the fact that you're FBA and people can get it in a few days instead of a few weeks. And now there's reviews. So, you know, now when it becomes FBA, it's got 13 reviews because we use the early reviewer program from Amazon to do that. 00:08:16 You know, we couldn't use Vine because it's not in; an FBA has to be used for Vine. And so, yeah, that's what's happening. And I'm launching another company with some other partners in August, and we're going to be doing the exact same thing again. If you're going to do this, you've got to make sure that you can fulfill; because if you miss that date, if you put June 25th like we did, and for some reason you have delays and you don't ship this to the 28th of June or something, Amazon is going to suspend your account; they're going to probably shoot you a warning first. You're going to have to issue a POA, and if they accept that POA and you get caught up and ship it, then you're okay. 00:08:57 So there's a risk there. You've got to make sure so it can't blow up in your face. So we actually cushioned it on that 25th date. Our real date was like the 17th, so we cushioned it to give us some time. But that's how we did this launch, and it's working exceptionally well. Well, one of the things, I know the brand, and we're not going to talk about it here, but you probably don't even care if we do. But one of the things that you've done, and this is consistent with every listing that I've seen of yours, it's about the brand. You've built a brand. And I've seen the videos that you've done for it. They're not cheap videos. The quality of the brand, everything that you have about this product is high quality. 00:09:45 And both of us preach that all the time, right? You can't go in and expect to build an $18 million business with some Fiverr logo. Yeah, that's right. The idea to this came to us in mid-March to do this product. It's not just me. There are some other people and some other partners involved. We did start with a little bit of money-we started with $5,000 and did something. We started with a chunk of change. But we were entering into the most competitive space on Amazon. I mean, there's almost nothing more competitive than this space. And so when we looked at it, and this product, to differentiate it, the product itself is pretty much very similar no matter who you buy it from. And so we had, like, how can we differentiate this? 00:10:38 So we did that with branding. And so we, in a three-month period, basically, we did what would normally take probably a couple years in a whole branding, you know, a traditional corporate company where we have, you know, it's a really good logo. We have two different levels on the logo. We have a custom song. We actually have a jingle that was written. My wife is Colombian, and she knows some music producers in Colombia. So we have a music jingle that pushes the product that was done in both English and Spanish. So we're going after the English and Spanish market. We have five different videos that we did. One of them is a PSA video. We pulled out every stop. We did press releases with your company. We're doing Amazon posts. 00:11:24 We have an Amazon storefront. We have all the A-plus content. went to Germany to get our trademark so we could get brand registry. We got all the features of that. The listings are completely fully, I think Helium 10, you know if you use their plug-in and it gives you a little score-they're 10 out of 10. One of them, I think is nine point something out of ten right now because it it doesn't have a uh what is the 10 reviews or whatever it is that they have that as a factor in the in the score. Um, and then so we've done everything on that side and uh, high-end professional photos with different models and different situations. 00:12:06 And as the first reviews and our first comments are coming in from customers, we see what they're like; three or four people are asking the same question, like, does this product have X in it? And we're like, 'we say that in the listing', but I guess people are missing it. So we went in and we changed one of the images to illustrate that this product has X or is made of X, and put that as an image. And overnight, the conversions went up. Obviously, a lot of people had that. So we were constantly monitoring it. And yeah, it's a full-on brand. We didn't go into this to let's get rich quick. We looked at this, could this be another fidget spinner or hoverboard? 00:12:48 And we're like, no, we're going to do this to build a brand and sell this hopefully within a year or so to a very large company. So that money that I just said, it's just Amazon. We also have our own website that's starting to ramp up now. It's nowhere near what Amazon's doing, but the Shopify site, and then we also have retail distribution. So we have a $200 million distributor that's already pre-sold quite a bit. Be in stores and all over the place, uh, within the next month or two as well. And then, so, yeah. So before you got into this, um, how much competitive research did you do? Um, we, uh, the idea came to me from, um, I have some partners in another business in Hong Kong. 00:13:35 They came to me and said, 'Hey, we should do this.' We have a source, uh, in India for this. Uh, we took a, I took a look at my initial reaction was, 'Now, I don't, I don't know. I don't know, man.' That's super competitive. I don't know. I just don't know about this. And then I spent a day. I used Helium 10, used some tools from like Tryon Turku and some others and did some research. I was like, holy cow, maybe we can actually do something here. If we're going to do it, we got to do it right. So how much money can we scrape together? Everybody empty out their pockets and see how many coins they have. Let's put them in a jar and see what we got. 00:14:12 We had enough, and we're like, all right, let's do this, and let's do this right. And then we partnered up with another person that you guys know, and you know well, Norm, too, here in the U. S. That his reaction at some point will come. We're going to tell the whole case story. I won't be so vague about it. We're just not quite ready yet, but we'll make this public probably in the next month or so, totally transparent. was talking to him and he was like, 'Yeah, good luck with that, uh, that's uh, good luck.' And then about a week later, he came back and said, 'You know what? Actually, maybe there's a way that we could, uh, we could work together on this and get involved and so, uh, they got involved as well and, uh, that's that's added quite a bit to the, uh, the whole mix and, uh, it's just exploding. 00:14:58 We're actually the biggest problem right now is we're having to temper the sales; we've raised the price twice already, hasn't slowed anything down. Our supply chain can't keep up. So that's where we're actually in the trajectory we're going. We're worried about that. So one of the things that just came up, we got a question here. I think, oh, very good, Kelsey. We're learning StreamYard. A question came up: Is it true that Kevin has no VAs and he's up at four in the morning every day? Yeah, pretty much. I haven't had my breakfast yet; it's a little after 12 Eastern time right now. I'm usually, yeah, I'm a late-night person. I do my best work at night, so I'm usually up until 3 or 4 a. m., and waking up around 11, 12 o'clock. 00:15:49 I get my eight hours of sleep. I make sure to get that. But, yeah, I do work late. As far as VAs, we do have one U. S.-based one that's doing our social media, like our Amazon posts and our e-commerce. A couple of our Facebook and Instagram things. But other than that, yeah, there's no VAs. There's nobody answering customer service emails but me right now. Because I want to know. By being on those right now, I'm seeing the problems. I can nip them in the bud really fast. And right now when you're launching, that's super important. Someone's upset or doesn't understand something, to answer them within 30 minutes if you can so that they don't have time to stew and go write a bad review. Right. 00:16:36 Yeah, but prior to this new launch, you had no VAs. You were doing everything yourself, weren’t you? Yeah, I’ve never hired a VA. I mean, I don’t do everything. I mean, I hire out. I use Upwork if I need a project done. I’m not sitting here editing my videos or taking my own pictures, but I will do the final editing. I mean, I know Adobe Illustrator. I know Photoshop. I know a lot of those tools. The bells and whistles on those, but I can do the final stuff. I write a lot of the copy. I write all the copy. I write all the commercials, the videos, and stuff. So you're a one-man band. You do it all. You're head coach and cheerleader. 00:17:21 Yeah, but this one may actually – there's other people involved. I mean, I've got partners, so they're doing some things too. So it's not just – But all the day in, day out stuff, yeah, I pretty much handle it. So for the new person coming into Amazon, so just getting into it, they've left their job, they're starting to get into Amazon. What do you have to say to those people? What can they do? What are the top two or three things that they can do to get into the platform? Well, the number one thing is you just need to absorb information. You need to learn as much as you can as fast as you can. Some people like to go to YouTube for that, and there's some good stuff on YouTube, but you've got to be careful. 00:18:06 Some of it's dated. Some of it is from people that don't know what they're doing. Or you've got to take a course like the Freedom Ticket, for example, or Brandon Young has a good little thing, and there's some other ones out there. Take one of those and then just don't expect if you just quit your job or got laid off that this is going to save your ass because, to really make money on Amazon, you've got to put some money in and you've got to wait. Like this company that we're doing that we've just been talking about, um I'm not taking there's no salary and we're not taking a disbursement until probably January of next year, so I'm basically working for free uh on this for the for eight months, eight nine months, and so but that gives us the time nobody's taking any money um so everyone it's all getting rolled back in uh and that's how you were going to grow it and we'll get our payday later. 00:19:00 So it'll probably be a really big payday, but that's that's how you have to, we how we approach it. Uh it's not a survival type of thing if you're looking at it from a survival It's a little bit harder, I mean it's not too hard to start on Amazon with $4,000 or $5,000 and actually make a profit, but it's going to be small profits. You're talking $500,000 a month you might be able to take out for yourself. If that's good enough for you, then that's great. For a lot of people, that's not enough to live on. It takes time. Don't get too ahead of yourself on paying yourself. That's the number one thing. The second is make sure you know your numbers. 00:19:42 I mean, you've got to really know your numbers. There's too many gurus out there that'll show you in a webinar, 'Here's how much profit you can make.' I mean, there's one guy right now, he's got a huge audience out there. Um, and a hundred thousand plus, I think in his Facebook group, and he sells a course and he'll show you, look, I can source this product for $2 on Alibaba and sell it for 20, $18 of profit on each one. And that's just flat out wrong. Um, it's about $3 profit on each one. So, you've got to know your numbers. That's another – and then differentiate your products. I mean, you don't have to create a complete brand from the beginning. Not everybody can do what we just did. 00:20:21 I mean, it does take some money and some skill set that most people may not have initially, but that's okay. But differentiate your products. I mean, you just don't go find something on Alibaba and stick your logo on it and think you're differentiated or add a – PDF book to it. You've got to really differentiate your product and make people feel like this is why they should buy you. They want to identify with what you're doing. So you were talking about Alibaba. Do you source on Alibaba? No. Any reasons why not? I have sourcing people that do it for me. So I can get much better pricing and much better deals. Right. And find the factories that are not on Alibaba. I mean, to be on Alibaba, these companies have to pay. 00:21:15 And so there's a lot of companies out there that if they're – my philosophy is, Alibaba isn't bad. I'm not knocking Alibaba. I did source from Alibaba in the beginning when I first started doing FBA five years ago. I got some stuff off Alibaba or Global Sources is another one. But now – I don't like to go there because that's where everybody's going. So, to find those differentiated products is hard. And typically, the best factories are not on Alibaba because they're busy enough. They don't need to pay to go on Alibaba to get a bunch of people emailing them saying, 'Can you do an MOQ of 200 for me?' Right. They don't have time for that shit. Sorry, they don't have time for that stuff. They're not on there. 00:22:00 And that's some of the better factories. And so that's why I don't really use Alibaba. I go outside of that. I mean, I'll use Alibaba to spot check something. I'm like, 'Ah, this is a cool idea.' Kind of what's the going rate in the market. And Alibaba, the prices on there are wrong anyway. But at least I have a baseline idea. Okay, this roughly costs five bucks or something. Right. So I just wanted to give a shout out to Frank Sell and Victor. Guys, thanks for listening. By the way, I don't know if you know Frank. He's got a podcast called Home of the Hustle. It's great. And he's got some really great beard oil. Just letting you know. But, all right, we've got another question here. 00:22:42 So is there a quick way to get a VAT in Germany and France? I've talked to companies, and they've said it takes five months. Yeah, I'm not sure on that because I – don't sell in Germany and France. I had a VAT set up in England, and that took me about a couple days, maybe, with simply VAT. But I'm not familiar with Germany and France. I don't know that. Do you know that, Norm? You know what? I can put, who's this for? I can put you in touch with somebody that can give you that answer. So now I've got another question, just my own. Kev, so if somebody's getting involved in Amazon, I get this question all the time: How much money do I need to put in? 00:23:31 So if I'm investing in, let's say it's $5,000 worth of inventory, is there a magical number that you would give them to say you need this much to really get in, to be properly capitalized? So if it's $5,000 worth of inventory, I mean, there are a number of factors that can change this, but at a bare minimum, two and a half times that. At the bare absolute bottom line, Robin Peter to pay Paul minimum, you need $12,500. Right. And probably more. I would feel more comfortable with $15,000 or $20,000 on that to make sure that you're properly capitalized. Now, can you do it with only $5,000? See, the problem is if you have $7,000 and you dump $5,000 in inventory, you have $2,000 left. 00:24:17 How are you going to run your PPC? How are you going to order if you're successful? How are you going to place another order with the factory and place it as a deposit? How are you going to do all the things that you need to do? You're not. And so you're going to be one of the people that's on Facebook saying, 'ah, this whole Amazon thing is a scam. It doesn't work. It's oversaturated, blah, blah, blah.' It's just you're not doing it right. Yeah, Victor was saying, isn't there a new program on Helium 10 to help with VAT? Not that I'm aware of. I mean, they have the Profitability Tool, which just kind of gives you a snapshot. It's not an accounting program. It gives you a snapshot. 00:24:53 And then they have some partnerships with Sellers Funding now that will help you get money and pay your suppliers and stuff, and it will help you also pay your VAT. But I'm not sure if they actually help you register or not for that. Okay. It just got launched a couple days ago, so I don't know all the details on that. Yeah, I gotta check into that too. I just heard about that yesterday. All right, so Tim Fry has a question. What's the best way to get featured on the On-Site Associates program on Amazon's search results? I don't know. Do you know that one? I'm not familiar with On-Site. No, I was hoping you would. I thought you knew everything. No, that's fairly new. I haven't had time to look into that one yet. 00:25:45 Now, I've been asked this, and I have not been able to find anybody that knew how to do this. And I'm just thinking that you have to work with public relations to do it. But Editor's Choice, have you been successful with getting on Editor's Choice? And if so, how? No, but I think they have some partnerships with a couple of the big review companies and big review sites that are providing a lot of that, and then some of their Vine people, I think. I'm sure there's a way that you can do it, a backdoor way, but I haven't looked into that. I've noticed that's starting to come up now more and more, but a lot of those reviews, they look like if you go to Google. And search for some of them. 00:26:31 There's those, what's it, bestreviews . com or something like that. That's kind of like a consumer's reports of the internet. That may not be the exact domain. It's something like that. It's not someone gaming the system saying these are the 10 best knives of 2020, which is really just an affiliate page just to send traffic to. It's really not the top 10. Theirs is number one or number two. The rest of them are all affiliate links they just grabbed out of the air. It's legit. So I think they're partnering with some of those. But to be honest, I haven't taken a deep dive yet. But that's a good one to take a look at. I know. This is what we're doing. I wouldn't count on all that, though. 00:27:16 Just put out a good product, and you'll get really good reviews, and you can rise to the top. Right. So one of the things that we're doing with it, if we do see it, We're tracking to see who they're on, like if it's Better Homes Improvement or whatever it is. We'll work with a public relations company and we'll see if we can get and target those companies that are being used by Amazon. Now, I have no proof right now that it will work, but we're just starting, Shane and I are just starting to do this and just starting to target the bigger companies, the bigger magazines, the trade magazines, and seeing if we can get some pickups that way. I don't know if it's going to work, and I'll let you know if it does for us. 00:28:06 I mean, the one thing that's working, You've talked about it, and I think you just did a presentation on it, and You gave me a few tips and stuff too when We started Amazon Posts. Oh, yeah. If You're not doing that, if You're not doing Amazon Posts, You're missing out. Yeah, we're posting. We started a couple weeks ago, and we've had some posts, 10,000, 15,000 already. I know You've had some. Way higher than that, the bad thing is it's totally; I mean the good thing is it's totally free. So we go in there, we post a couple pictures a day. We've been testing different types of pictures-pictures of people smiling, pictures of people smiling pictures people product uh, different things to try to see if we can find a pattern of uh what's working. 00:28:42 Um, I mean, we could go use Picfu or something else like that, but don't point this is free on Amazon, might as well just use them. And then one thing I have, I don't know if you've noticed this, Norm, or not, but we had one post that skyrocketed. So if you're not familiar with Amazon Post, it's post. amazon. com. As long as you're brand registered, you can actually go and sign up there, and it's totally free. It's in beta right now. And you post-basically think of it as Instagram for Amazon. But Instagram with a buy button on the bottom to buy your product. So you post a picture, and they have some rules of what you can and can't post. You write a little caption, and then you link a product to it. 00:29:20 You link one of your products to it. So then what Amazon does is there's some people that are in the feed for this, but I can't believe it's too many people. Most people probably don't even know that there's a feed for it. Most people, though, are seeing it when you're on the mobile, either on the mobile app or on your mobile phone. They're seeing it down the bottom of other people's pages. So if I'm selling a steak knife, my post of my steak knife with a link to my steak knife is showing up on the bottom of my competitors' pages. And people, if I've got a good picture there and a good caption, it looks interesting, and people are clicking it. I mean, we're getting engagement rates of between 2% and 15% that are clicking this. 00:30:00 So if I get this gets shown 1,000 times for free on my competitors' listings, I'm getting at a minimum 20 clicks to my listing, and in some cases, 150. Now, Amazon doesn't provide you, at this point, with data with how many of those clicks actually convert to sales. I think they know, and they will, but probably once this comes out of beta and they actually start charging for it or something, they want to justify that they can charge for it, so they're not telling us that information. But I've got to believe that if I get 20 clicks, if I just compare it to my PPC, if my PPC is converting at say 10%, that's got to be two sales. I mean, it's just got to be at least two sales off of that. 00:30:44 Maybe more because these are the people that scrolled all the way down the page and actually were looking at the stuff more. So it's free money. And if you're not doing it, it's crazy. But one of the things that we just noticed recently, I don't know if you noticed this, is we had a post that went crazy. And it just went, you know, if they normally have, you know, 2,000 views, this one had 20,000 or something. I'm like, what the heck happened with this one? I started analyzing it. Is it the picture? It's like, no, the picture is just not that great. I mean, it's okay, but it's not like, oh, my God, it's amazing. And the description, it's like, just okay. But I started looking at the description. 00:31:23 And I noticed we had some stuff in exact match order in there, some keywords, an exact match order that's where it was repeated twice. And so I'm wondering if because Amazon assigns where they show this and normally they pick a couple two to three categories. So they know that you're based on your relevance, that you're in the dog niche or you're in the nice niche or whatever. So they'll show you a nice and and cut or whatever the categories are, three or four different little subcategories. But I'm wondering if that keyword that was in there actually triggered it to actually show up when people were searching for that keyword, specific keyword. Because I looked at all of our other posts, and all of our other posts were just more generic. 00:32:03 They're more like what you would see on Instagram. We didn't insert special keywords in phrase order. And so we're testing that right now. But if this turns out to be true, then we're changing the way we're doing our posts. That's crazy. Because yesterday, that was one of the questions on Howard's webinar. Somebody came back and said, yeah, can you rank with keywords? And I just said, hey, I don't know. I have no idea if you can, but why not? Exactly like you said, if you can put the exact match in there. I don't have that. But if you've seen some proof in that, that's great. It's not proof. It's a theory right now. Right. We're testing it. I just noticed it two days ago. So we're testing. 00:32:51 And I gave my girl that's doing that, here's a list of keywords. Let's sprinkle these in the next few days and let's see what happens. So I just noticed, Victor. Puts another comment in, the VAT and GST service, an easier way to pay taxes from registration and report filing to easy payments. Let ALTA handle the complicated tax process. So thank you, Victor. I'll have to check that out too. And oh, Tim Fry asks, is there a PPC management company that you'd recommend? Well, I'm a little biased on it, but. Who do you recommend, Norm? Geez, I don't know. Tim, contact me after. So, yeah, all right. So let's move on. I mean, time's flying. I mean, it always does when we sit down and talk. 00:33:51 But let's see, if you can go back in time, would there be anything that you would do differently for Amazon specifically? For Amazon specifically? Yeah, I mean, when I first started, I launched five products FBA when I first started FBA. I mean, I've been selling on Amazon for 27 years. It's 1993, no, 2001, sorry, whatever that is, 19 years. And when I started, I started with FBA. I started with five products, five different brands. And I don't regret that, but what I did is I put. One of those brands took the bulk of the money. One of those brands, because we created a brand new, I watched Charging Dock. I created a brand new product from scratch. It was $30,000 in molding and $3,000 MOQ and $25 per unit to buy it. 00:34:48 We were selling the heck out of them, selling $15,000 a day. Christmas 2015, it was a good product. But I was undercapitalized to really make that thing go like it needs to go. And so I couldn't keep up. And so I ended up not able to maintain that product. So I wish I would have taken, let's say we started with $100,000 and I dumped $60,000 of it into that product and $40,000 into the other four. I wish I would have spread that out more evenly. I could have had a better success. So that's, that's one of my biggest regrets. And then also when I first started, I took a little; I was paying myself a little bit and I had some other stuff going on, but I was paying myself and I wish I hadn't done that. 00:35:35 That, that hindered it, hindered the growth as well on that initial company. Okay. And then the other thing that I did is because of this problem with this Base Camp, that's the name of it, charging dock. I ended up going out because I couldn't keep up. I didn't have the capital. I ended up taking some; I call them mafia loans, sites like On Deck and Cabbage and those kinds of guys that charge you through the nose. I ended up taking some of those loans. I had the margins, but those loans – you can start stacking them. Then you're taking one loan to pay off the other loan while you do your inventory because you're waiting on your inventory because it's late. You just get into a big circle jerk there. 00:36:20 I don't do any of that stuff anymore. All that stuff's gone in the past, but that hurt me as well. It comes down to being properly capitalized again. Yeah, it is. So if you had a crystal ball, what's happening with Amazon? What do you think? Amazon, I think a couple things. I think from the consumer side, it's blowing up, and it's going to continue its juggernaut. I think quarter four this year is going to be amazing. You know, now with the resurgence of, well, it never went away. There's a lot of people here in the States that say we're on a second wave of COVID right now. No, we're on the first wave. It just never went away. 00:37:02 The big problem, I truly believe, you know, I follow this pretty closely, both the conspiracy people and the nonbelievers and the people who are really following the science and everything in between. I really believe that this fall is going to be a disaster in the United States with COVID. I think as soon as the flu season starts, October, November, December, I think you're going to see people falling like flies. What's happening right now is not good, and it's going to get a lot, lot worse. I mean, this one might get under control by August or September, but it's going to come right back. And I think if you look at the Spanish flu, 1918, the same thing happened. In the spring, it got bad. In the summer, people started letting their guard down a little bit. 00:37:49 The weather, that one's a little bit different. But the weather kind of tempered it a little bit. And the fall, all bloody hell broke loose. And I think that's what's going to happen here. So I think from an Amazon point of view, as a seller, be ready. Because I think it's going to go crazy. Also, Amazon, on the other side, Amazon is actually starting to crack down. More and more. They're under more and more government scrutiny for things, so they're starting to really crack down. I just saw yesterday someone posted that they've been talking to a lot of other big sellers, and Amazon is now doing a lot of test buys on products. They started in early June, and they've done literally tens of thousands of test buys with addresses you wouldn't know. 00:38:38 It's not going to say at Amazon. com or ship it to Seattle. Drop boxes around the country to actually send these to, which there are whole companies that do this where you can send, they're basically fake names and they send it like UPS stores and you would never know who it is. Mailing companies do this. If I rent my mailing list, I can see the list with like 20 of these around the country. That way I know who's using my list and if they're misusing it or if I only license it for one time, you'll know if they used it again. Amazon's doing something similar. And doing test buys, and they're looking at your inserts, and they're following the entire flows. They're actually signing up for your ManyChat flows, for all these flows. 00:39:22 So if you're doing anything that's not above board on any of that, I would immediately stop because you're probably going to see a wave of suspensions. And it's a good thing. It needs to happen. But if you've got those kinds of inserts out there and you've got product at Amazon right now, you need to keep a close eye. I don't know which, I mean, other than pulling the product back and taking that out, which may not be practical, you need to cross your fingers and hope you're not on the radar right now. You nailed it. I saw that today. They're buying, they're checking the inserts, and they're checking the emails that come in and seeing how you're responding. I mean, they have a whole new team that they just, what was that? 00:40:09 They just have a whole new department they set up to deal with this type of thing. They're getting serious. We'll see. Anchor is one of the worst violators of this out there, and Anchor is one of the biggest sellers on Amazon. So it'll be interesting to see if this is equally applied or if there's exemptions. But, yeah, I would be very, very careful. There's nothing wrong with an insert. There's nothing wrong with putting your website address on an insert. But just what you're doing with that insert, you need to be extremely careful. If there's any hints of you're giving away a free product for a review or trying to manipulate or do anything, watch out. Yeah. And again, there's really no need. If you've got a good product, the customer experience is overall positive. 00:40:58 Then why? Why do you jeopardize it? You'll get that 4% to 7% review rate, maybe a little bit higher, but it comes naturally. You don't really have to go out and force people or get people, oh, if you liked my product, click here. If you didn't, click here. I mean, you're just asking for trouble. Yeah, I mean, I have a collection. Me and my wife order a lot off of Amazon just for personal stuff. Some days we get five, six packages. We probably get 20, 30 packages a week from Amazon just for our own personal things that we buy. And every time she's going through the packages, taking her stuff out and throwing away everything, I'm like, 'Wait, wait, wait, let me see the insert.' I want to see what all the inserts are doing. 00:41:39 And so I have a whole collection of them. I have a swap file of inserts here. And I'm looking at some of these and going, 'Holy cow.' These people, as soon as Amazon knows what you're doing, you're DOA. So, Kelsey, was there any other questions that came in? Nope. That's it for now. But if there are any, just put them in the comments. And I think Norm will get back to you. Yeah. It's nice that you call me Norm. Papa. Remember, after the call, it's back to dad. Okay. So, Kevin. It's been great having you on. I know I took a little bit extra time here, but you had some really great information. I don't know if there's any last words or any last thoughts that you'd like to say, but go for it. 00:42:33 No, I just want to say it's been a pleasure knowing you, Norm, and I look forward to hanging out with you again at the next time we can actually get together somewhere. It's always fun smoking cigars and eating Kobe beef and drinking Coke Zeros. And my gut always hurts from laughing, not from eating. Both. All right, everybody. Well, thank you for listening to Lunch with Norm and my special guest, Kevin King. Like Kel said, if you do have any other questions or comments, please post them. And Kelsey, what's that thing I'm supposed to do again? Follow us on Instagram, Facebook. We've got TikTok. That's exciting. We've got two videos up there. Yeah, one's with Kevin. YouTube channel. And also our Norman Farrar's podcast, I Know This Guy. We have some great guests. So, yeah. All right. Just find us everywhere. There we go. Alright, everybody. Well, thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next Thursday. Take care.