Kevin King's Amazon FBA Advice 2021 | Ep. 72

Kevin King's Amazon FBA Advice 2021 | Ep. 72 Hey everybody, it's Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy, here, and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, The Rise of the Micro Brands. All right, so today's episode, we bring back my buddy Kevin King. And as I think, if you've ever seen any of the other episodes, Here's Kevin, the dog, Cigar buddy. Kevin's a cigar buddy. So anyways, Kevin's going to be on. We're going to be talking about anything Amazon. If you want to be on the podcast live and ask Kevin yourself a question, just let us know in the comment box. We're trying to do this a little bit differently now. So if you'd like to come on, ask. We'll send you over the link. You can come on and ask. If not, if you're shy, just put it over in the comment section and we'll get to those questions right away. But before we do that, I just want to let you know, there's a lot of people that don't know a lot about Kevin. And it is, he's got an incredible life. If you ever want to hear more about this life, check out the podcast on I Know This Guy, and you'll be blown away. Kevin's been featured on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous Entertainment Tonight. He's been featured in USA Today, Wall Street Journal. And he's just a really cool guy. So anyways, Kelsey, where are you? Hello, hello. How are you, sir? I'm fantastic. Can I call you sir, yeah, yeah, you've been doing it for uh, for quite a while now, oh I just realized I'm doing that, sir, it's usually called Squire, yeah, I remember a a friend of ours used to always call you Squire, yes, yes, and I loved it. Okay, so what are we doing? Okay, so you guys know the drill uh, like and follow uh, the podcast, you can if you're watching on Facebook give us a like and share um, YouTube this thumbs up um, it looks like we already have tons of people joining us, Dr. Cause uh, Victor Dalvin uh, let's see Mark Angie and we got a Facebook user, I'll try and figure out who that is uh, Henrietta all right very good, so welcome everyone uh. Yeah, so this is a place where you can throw your questions over, put them in the comments. If you do have a question that you really want to ask in person, just say 'Let's say', hashtag Ask Kevin, and I can send you the link to the StreamYard, and you can ask in person. So you can be on the show part of us. But if you do do that, please have a working earphones and webcam too. So yeah, we are on a podcast too. So you can search us and find us on Apple and Spotify too. And I think that's about it. We've got a Facebook community. So go ahead. It's Lunch with Norm, Amazon, FBA, and e-commerce collective. And yeah, that's it for me. And it looks like we got Leonard, Alan. Marina's back. Simon's back. Rad. Angie. Yes. Thanks for joining again. Justin, okay, fantastic. Looks like we've got a good turnout already. And we're three minutes in. That's awesome. All right. Well, start liking. Smashing. Kel, you forgot your job. Smash the like button, ring the bell. Yep, subscribe there. I'm going to interrupt you one more time. Also, let us know how it's your – I should change the name. I'll change the name one time. Yeah. Yes, for the question to start off, how is your Black Friday, Cyber Monday? Put it over in the comment sections. Welcome, Tom. Welcome to the show. And yeah, let us know how your Cyber Monday and Black Friday was. Okay, so we are broadcasting to you live on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. If you're watching the replay, you can just skip ahead, all this stuff. If you're watching on my personal Facebook page, you can always skip over to the official fan page, Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guide, and you'll see the whole episode, highlights, and video content that Kelsey's been posting. But now, like Kelsey said, throw your questions over into the comments section. Sit back, relax. Grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show. Where is my buddy? There he is. Hey, what's up, man? Here's my other buddy. Oh, hey, my proxy, right? Yeah, that's right. That's right. I hope it's a good cigar, though. Of course, it's a good cigar. Only good cigars. And Kobe beef. The dog wouldn't eat Kobe beef, so I gave him a cigar. The dog wouldn't eat Kobe beef? No, not this one. What kind of dog is that? I've never seen a dog that won't eat Kobe. Yeah, leave me. How are you? I'm good, man. How are you doing? How's the frozen tundra of Canada? Can you just invite me down there? I'll go. I'll break quarantine. It's that time where it's really damp, dreary. There's snow on the ground. Plus I can't do anything like usually; I have the excuse I could go and travel, but now I gotta sit down and I can't travel anywhere, so maybe next summer, maybe next summer. Maybe I've been hearing some wild stuff. I know we talk about Kovac quite a bit, but um, like the impact that's going to be happening even with these vaccines that are going to be rolling out, but how bad it's going to affect. I was talking to a friend of mine who's in politics here in Canada, and he was giving us some stats yesterday that the amount of businesses that will be closing over the next couple of months is staggering. You know, it's yeah. So anyways, you know, for us in the e-comm world, we're lucky right now. I mean as long as the economics keep on our side, um it's an easy way to learn how to make money, um as long as you put your mind to it; but yeah, my sales are up for me, it's about 40 this year year over year, um so definitely, definitely ecom is is the place to be and yeah, we're lucky uh that's what we're in that space and not really affected too much by this, other than maybe some delivery delays and uh Amazon not allowing us to ship some stuff in or something. But other than that, yeah, this is definitely the right place, right time. Hey, just in case people don't know who you are, can you just let people know a little bit about yourself? Sure, yeah. So I've been – my name is Kevin King. I live in Austin, Texas. I'm married. I have two dogs. I love cigars and Kobe beef. No, but so I've been an entrepreneur my entire life. I've only worked two jobs in my entire life. McDonald's and pizza delivery is the only thing I ever did. So for the last 30 some odd years, I've been my own boss. I've had ups and downs, everything from a bankruptcy to multimillion-dollar companies. I've been selling on Amazon for over 20 years as an FBA seller since 2015. I have five different Amazon accounts on either owner and partners in with different lines that are all active. I also host a billion dollar seller summit, which is we were doing it twice a year. It's a five thousand dollar ticket summit for high level Amazon sellers. Average in the room is like eight, nine million a year. Norm has been has been. And I also partners with Steve Simonson and Product Savants, which we help advanced sellers discover new product opportunities. And also, I'm the lead trainer for Helium 10 Elite and the creator of the Freedom Ticket, which is Helium 10 offers for anybody that has a Helium 10 subscription, which was actually just voted the best training course for Amazon sellers in Danny's seller poll. Very good. Yeah. And you know that Billion Dollar Seller Summit is one of, if not the best event out there. When I went last year, just meeting the caliber of people that I did, the speakers-everybody was just networking. The speakers didn't go hide in a back room; they were just networking with everybody. So it was a really great event. So yeah, I can't wait until we can do this again in person. It looks like August. August is probably going to be – August or September is when we're pushing the next one, too. We're going to do a virtual one, I think, in February, and then there will be a next live one. I was going to do it in May, but I don't think everything is going to be quite back to normal enough for people to travel. So, I think by August or September, a lot more people are going to be traveling and going out. Very good. Okay, so why don't we just dig into what – you know, we usually talk about what's going on in the month uh, what was or how have you heard? What have you heard about Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales overall um for me they were nothing special. I mean, I know some people were posting. I didn't see a lot of activity actually on Facebook. Normally, a lot of people are like, how's everybody's sales? And people are bragging. And I saw a couple of people that are in the toy category. I think Brandon Young was one. He is posting. But some of that was just to promote his course. But it looks like he did pretty good with some toy stuff. But to me, I sold more yesterday than I did on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. So they are both decent days, but it's not some 3X or 5X or 10X a normal day. What I'm seeing and have been seeing is that it looks like the sales are more evened out. People started shopping earlier because they're sitting at home. It's not this Black Friday or Cyber Monday. A lot of times, that's when people are off work or they have an opportunity to be at home in front of their computer. And so they're ordering. But since a lot of people are working from home or not working, they've been buying-started buying earlier and seems to be more evened out. I think you're going to see a continual upsling for the next couple of weeks, I think. But those are just marketing ploys, you know, basically Silent Monday. And it's, it's, it's really the media likes to run with and think that these are huge days when in fact they're usually not the best days on Amazon. Yeah. We, we experienced the exact same thing. We represent about 20 different brands. I've got my own brands. And we saw some increase. Some were the same. But nothing explosive like we would see a year or two ago. And people that I've talked to, it would be interesting to hear. We asked a question in the comments, you know, how our listeners' sales are. We'll get to that in a second. You're right. I think it's an overall experience now because so many people are selling. And this is a really great way to take advantage of it, too. So we talked about, look, do a pre-sell. If everybody's going to be buying on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and your slows, your sales, my sales at least, were slower coming up to Black Friday, Cyber Monday, because everybody wanted to see what was happening. But if you could do a pre-sale for next year or for the next holiday, do a pre-sale either letting people know what's happening on Amazon through Facebook or wherever, or do an incredible sale pre-Black Friday. So, I mean, these are some things that we've done. We've also, I don't know about you, Kevin, but on the website, just been adding just different packages together or creating one of the things that we're doing right now with all the listings, putting the products under a Christmas tree, in a stocking. With a bow and that's either on your A+ pages or within your um uh with within your slide deck so people are already getting that kind of holiday gift idea, any thoughts on that um yeah I know a lot of people do that I've I've never done that um but if you have something that's highly giftable I think that makes sense where people are deciding uh I need to buy my I don't know what to buy for my dad, so I type in gifts for dad. If you're ranking on gifts for dad, doing something like that I think could definitely benefit. It's a subtle message like, hey, this is a gift. People know they're looking for a gift, but it's a subtle message. If I'm selling something that's not truly giftable, I think it's a waste of time to do that. Or something that's not in one of those general categories. It's very specific. I don't know that it could, I guess, make it stand out. You're technically violating the terms of service if you do it on your first image, but it could make it stand out with a little Santa Claus or a gift bow there. And if you can get away with that, I'm not going to say it's going to hurt, but I'm not a huge fan of doing that. Right. For me personally. And on your A-plus pages and doing that, then you got A-plus pages right now or EBC. It takes, for me at least, it takes about a week. Every time I touch it to get approved between six and 10 days. And so you got to get ahead of that. So if you have this idea to go do it now, just understand that it's probably not going to be live until sometime in mid-December. And then you got to change it back. And I find that on a couple of my product lines, every time I change the page, I run the risk of it getting suspended or an EPA claim or going to Amazon jail. So I don't like to touch my listings a whole lot. After the first two, three weeks, yeah, and also every time you update the listings, and doing that I mean if you're just updating the image but still it refreshes and it goes through the I've noticed that every time you update your listing if you just go into seller central and go into your inventory tab and just update the price where you're not actually touching the listing, you're doing it in that you know that column format I think that's fine, but every time you update the listing, whatever new filters Amazon's applied to look for stuff uh whatever it goes through like a little vetting internal AI vetting process and I just don't, and then I think it it also forces a re-index which could be good or it could be bad so I just after the first few weeks I really don't try to touch my listings. Too much, yeah. When you touched on that one of the things that we I made this mistake when I was new on Amazon, reid my whole listing titles bullets everything, worst mistake I ever did, and I could never get the products, and I did it all at once for a bunch of products that I had launched and they were doing really well. And then I did this because some guru told me to go do this, and it just blew up. I could never get the ranking back, and also it fell off. You remember the incentivize reviews? I had a ton of them, and they all got removed at that point too. But yeah, the sales just collapsed. So one of the tips is if you are gonna go in and do this, make sure You make notes so even on Helium 10, you can go into the note on the date so you can time stamp it and say that you made a title change. This is what you did-run it for a week or two, make sure that you're watching your keyword um uh your your keyword research and make sure that it's not dropping. And if it does don't have a panic attack um wait for a couple of days and you'll see it, you know pop up or change. But if you're going to change the whole title and the bullets, it could be a disaster. I mean, sometimes it works in your favor, especially if you're having trouble selling and you're just kind of stuck and you need to do a refresh. It's not going to really hurt. But if you're already doing very well and you go in and change it, there is a risk that it could derail you. I just don't like taking that risk unnecessarily. And we have, and this is kind of risky as well. So we're in the holiday season. I've got a product that's an eight-figure product, it's a brand that I represent and um everything is against TOS like the image is against TOS. I've told that my client we can't do it, I want to replace the image but because the sales are so high um they won't, they won't allow me to go in and change. But like they're doing like Over $200,000 a week in sales. Do I want to play with that listing? I know it's going to get suspended one of these days. And I would not touch that listing unless there's some legal reason. And if the images are against TOS, it's not going to suspend the account. At some point, if Amazon clues into that, they're going to suspend that one listing or they're just going to make the pictures disappear and give you a warning to go in and update it and change it out. But a listing doing $200,000 a week, I would not touch it with a 10-foot pole. Yeah, over. It does well over $200,000. Yeah, I would not touch that. Yeah, and so the other thing that's been crazy, have you been affected, I have, with the uppercase bullets? No, I haven't. I've heard some people said that. I actually got a message from someone on Freedom Ticket saying, hey, your Freedom Ticket's out of date. You know, you can't use uppercase letters in your bullets anymore. And, you know, I'm still doing it. I just created listings last week that have the first five or six words, uppercase bullets. No problem. But I've heard a couple other people said that Amazon is now taking action against that. So what have you seen? I've had a couple of clients and myself get immediate suspensions. So the listing's down. Like one of my listings is down right now, waiting to get back on. I've had Vandana, you know Vandana, she's gone through and gone to everybody's listings and changed it just from uppercase to title, lowercase or titles, sentence type, title case. Because the people that this happened to, we've all been suspended. Not your account, but the product. The product. But usually if that was something minor, like that's a minor thing, something minor like that happens. Usually if you just go and change it and re-update it within 15 or 30 minutes, it's back. Yep. But that's not the case. It's not happening. It’s having to go through a manual review. Yeah, so what we’ve said uh to all of our clients is that uh look let’s just get it down like there’s no reason especially right now to just wait for a suspension uh it might not happen it’s kind of like you know those primary images there’s so many that are not ToS compliant but they’re there this is a little bit different because we’ve experienced the suspension and We’ve had to apply to get the account relisted. Same thing with the clients. And it’s taken a week. Over capital letters. Over capital letters. How many were in there? The whole bullet one capital, right? No, no, no. The way that we do a lot of our bullets is we do the first three or four, the first part. Oh, con. Oh okay Connie denied me a coffee so anyway, anyways it's usually the first three or four words that are all caps then we either have a colon or space-hyphen-space and then somewhere if there's a word that needs to be emphasized that will be also in upper caps not all the time but sometimes and um yeah I don't know if it's a glitch in the system I don't know like I'm I'm agreeing 100 usually if it's a small um thing like this uppercase it's usually a suppression and you just go and you change it and everything's back to normal yeah that that's I don't know. That just seems like they're taking extreme actions for something petty and minor. I don't know why. I can see why. If you updated it, it should go back live. They can tell instantly on that. There may be something else on those listings that's, like I just said, that some other filter AI that's looking at something else on the listing that it's going through that could be causing it. Henry out of 10. Same thing. Andy Slayman, same thing. Deactivated for two weeks. Wow. Yeah, I know I see a lot of people, the new little trend seems to be brackets, putting what used to be in capitals inside brackets. An open bracket, like the letter C, and then everything, whatever you want to emphasize in another bracket, close bracket, and then the rest of the bullet point. I've been seeing a lot of that lately in place of the capital letters. It kind of sets that little phrase apart. Yeah, yeah. And the other thing too, I don't know what you think about this, but going into December, January, just taking a look at your bullets and restructuring and re-optimizing for mobile. Yeah. So one of the things that we found is, one of the stats I've heard is that there's well over 60% of people search your phone for the product, but higher, it's 60% plus. Buy when they get back on their desktop. 70-80% are starting on a mobile device. Some people just aren't comfortable buying. They don't have to go and whip out their credit card. This is for Amazon. You don't have to whip out your credit card. I'm the same way. If it's on Amazon and I'm using the Amazon app, I'll buy it right on the mobile device. Usually another website or I get a Facebook ad, something comes through my Facebook scroll and I'm like, oh, that looks interesting. I usually just copy the link and email it to myself and check it later on my desktop. That's just me because then I can just surf easier and search the site easier. And then if I want to buy it, I'll buy it there. But that seems to be the case with a lot of people. They kill time, add stuff to their cart on mobile, but they end up buying it sitting in front of a desktop. Right laptop, desktop, or even a bigger device-what are your plans for December? Anything that you can add about you know maybe if you're not doing you can get some immediate results if you go in right now and change something. Get some immediate results uh if you go in and change something. Um, your images are the number one thing that a lot of people I mean you can get the fastest results on Sessions. Stay in the same. Increasing sessions would be adjusting your title or something. But the thing that I'm looking this month, more so than changing your listing, is I think on December 16th, Amazon's making some sort of announcement about this inventory restriction of 200. So, the latest update of what's going to happen with that is coming. And I'm very interested to see what they say. My gut feeling is this is going to continue, but with some adjustments where they're going to make some sort of modifications to it. Who knows? Maybe they'll say come January, this is going away. But I think this 200 is going to be here to stay. But they may put something where if you've been selling for a certain amount of time, it's increased. There may be something where it's not so tight and rigid. I'm very curious to see what that is. Another thing that's happening out there right now, too, is with the increase in sales. I think Marketplace Pulse just put this out just a few days ago, a study about this. But with the increase in sales on Amazon, Amazon's up 30%, 40% this year. But the number of sellers is not up 30% or 40%. So Marketplace Pulse, go check it out on their website. They did a pretty interesting little study saying that the opportunity has actually even gotten better now for Amazon sellers because sales are higher. And there's less sellers percentage-wise. So in the past, usually as Amazon sales increased, the number of sellers increased. But right now, it's disproportionate. It's not in sync. So the number of sellers is growing at a much smaller rate than Amazon sales. So that's a really good thing for both older sellers and newer sellers. And what it's also doing is it's increasing the depth of some of the niches. So some of these really small niches that might be, you know, left-handed spatulas for one-eyed people or something. I'm making this up. You know, something crazy where you're selling one a week, maybe now selling three or four a week, you know, or something like that. So there's a lot of freaking opportunity that's happening right now because despite the number of courses and everybody that's saying, you know, the people that are out of work that are looking for new opportunities and maybe starting Amazon, it's not keeping up with the sales. that's a good thing for all of us as well. Right. And not only Amazon, but e-com in general. Yeah. I've seen a large increase, just people looking for deals on e-com sites rather than Amazon. Although I have no stats on this, but I'm sure they go over to the website, then go over to Amazon, you know, to check it out. And most people start on Amazon, but if they can't find this, there's things that I buy a lot of e-commerce. We spend probably, five to ten thousand dollars a month on buying stuff everything for the house you know from that's just just for your wife yeah it's just for the wife no but i mean from groceries to whatever you know it's we spend a lot i usually start on amazon but there's a lot of times where you can't there's some specialty stuff you can't find on amazon or i look on amazon i'm like this is all chinese junk i'm not buying any of this or i want something a little bit more unique and so i have to i have to go off amazon uh to find that on more specialty type of sites so those those guys are doing better well too we have a pet product that again represent that does better 10 times better off of their website and probably has 10 or 20 percent no sorry about a hundred percent increase on chewy So Chewy's brought it on. Chewy's pushing it. And then off of the website, it's selling. It's killing it. And Amazon is doing okay. But anyways, it's not the end-all, what is it, end-all to be-all or whatever it is. End-all be-all. Yeah. A lot of times I'll see something on Amazon too that's, you know, if it's a wholesale type of product, someone's selling, say I'm looking for Arequipa. It's like a caramel sauce. And I'll see someone selling on Amazon for $8. 95. And I'm like, this is a third-party seller that's just going down to his local grocery store and buying it for $1. 99 and reselling it for $8. 95. So in that case, that's a local grocery item. It's a little bit different. But if it's something that's like a beauty product or a cream or something, I'll often go and just type. Take the title from Amazon, search it on Google, and find the original site and actually order it there and save a lot of money. It's just weeding out the arbitrage and can often save a lot of money too. So we've talked about the IPI restrictions. So, we think that, and I agree with you, there's going to be this announcement. I'm thinking that they're here to stay at least for the next quarter. Because Amazon said in the past the reason why they put this into place was to get rid of inventory so that they could make way for the products that were affecting Covet so they wouldn't have these huge delays. I'm thinking that Covet's climbing, uh, it's probably gonna yeah we're probably going to be sticking to that 200, 200 units for a new product. And that applies to even PPE stuff. I mean, Amazon comes out publicly and says, well, we're making room for essential goods. That's BS because one of my brands, I have PPE and I'm limited to 200 on every new item. Yep. Good old Amazon. But the other thing that I was, and you have to be really careful about this. So we have a product that we couldn't use your tip. Ship UPS ground with freight services. That is a great tip. We use it for everything, but there's certain products you can't ship that way. Liquid, like liquid in bottles. This product was like a non-spirited alcohol or a non-alcoholic spirit. Couldn't ship it. It had to be by pallet. Well, what happens? It sat there for three and a half weeks. We got it. The campaign, it took off. It was killing it. It went from 200 to 300, 500, 750 units, then 300. And we switched it over to FBM. We did all free shipping. But Amazon waited and waited and waited. And so we only got it on. Now we're back. Well, it's 200 and some odd units. We shipped 744, but they won't receive them so they're actually storing the 744 saying that they can't go into inventory because our IPi or our our restrictions now we're only allowed under 300 units, so they're only taking it and putting it in as required. Yeah I'm wondering what they're doing with that; I see that with one of my accounts too. Or they'll say it's received but it sits there and receiving for three weeks. So I'm like, does it come in? They dump the trailer and they dump it in another trailer in the parking lot. And there's like these, you know, these, these, what are those little, those little boxes, you know, little temporary boxes out in the basically containers out in the parking lot where they just keep it. And then when it starts running low, some guy goes out there and digs around and finds it and brings it in. I don't, I have another friend who's in the beauty space. They send in some pallets of stuff and it's taken about a month to get checked in. And three or four times, the freight companies had an appointment. They go to show up to Amazon to drop it off because Amazon says, 'come on this day between these hours.' The driver sits there and Amazon never gets to the driver. And the driver has to go back and take it back to the warehouse. And every time that happens, they're getting charged a waiting fee and a non-delivery fee. And it's adding up significantly. And there's nothing they can do about it. You know, I was on Seller Sessions and Brandon Young was on, and I was saying I had this problem. He came up and he said he had two solutions for it. The first solution was if you're shipping out LTL, change it, order a full truck. So you pay more for the truck, but it gets received almost immediately. And then the second thing was order a pickup-direct. So you order a pickup, the trucking company books the appointment. And for us, like with Alpha Lobby, he's an hour away from EVP1, which is in Hazelwood, Pennsylvania. So just pick up the phone, get the driver to book an appointment, and then you can get scheduled in within a few days. So those are two other options that you can do depending on you know how I mean I'm not going to do that with plastic shoe stretches for an order of full truck for a few boxes but like with my product I wish I would have known about that prior because that's what I would have done is just order the whole bloody truck yeah so just you know oh hey my old army buddy hey Dave okay so Kelsey do we have questions yes we got lots of questions I thought we would at least one So before we get to that should we talk about the little surprise package we have Yeah Just so we can get some entrance in So yeah Kevin do you want to explain It's a surprise package correct Sure What I'm going to do today for two of you, actually, I'm going to give this away to two people. You know, most people don't know everything that I sell. But I'm going to actually give away a package worth about $300 of multiple products from one of my brands. As long as you live in the United States. Unfortunately, I'm sorry. Since I'm in the U. S., I can only ship it in the U. S. And that's not just because I won't ship international. There's actually some restrictions on shipping international on this. So it's a product. It's one of my brands that we created from scratch, China or something. Uh, and I'll ship you in a complete package of about eight different products, seven, eight different products. Um, along with a cool, some cool little, uh, swag that, especially if you have kids that they'll love it as well, uh, or women love it too. Uh, so you'll get a nice little package of, uh, some cool stuff. Oh, that sounds great. So how you'll know, you'll know, I'm not going to say the name of it right here. Um, but, um, you, you'll know one of my product lines when, when you, you see it, you'll be one of the few people. that knows it. So how do people enter, Kels? So I'm thinking because we've got a large audience, we can do take two people in the comments. And then once that happens, once you take two people, you'll go into our little wheel spinner to be entered into the contest. So what do they have to do? All they have to do is take two people in the comments. Tag, take or tag? Tag. Oh, tag. Okay. How do you, so we've had this problem before where people don't know how to tag. Yes. So all you have to do for people that want it, you hit the @ symbol and then you write the name of a person and it should auto fill into the person's name and hit enter. So you just need to take two people and you'll be entered in. We've got a wheel spinner, so it's all fair. But yeah, it's super easy at. And you have to be a U. S. A resident for this contest, okay. And yeah, so just for an example, Dr. Cause right here, let's take two people. So he is going into the draw, so yes, Henrietta only U. S residents. Yeah, there's issues getting this product across the board. Norm knows what, Norm and Kelsey know what it is. Like, there's issues shipping this, and it's a good product to have right now. Um, for the holiday season and for what's happening uh in the world right now it'll be very useful to anybody, it's not it's not something if you're a guy this is it's not something that uh it's not a women's product it's not a men's product it's a unisex product so no matter who you are uh literally this is something the entire world anybody in the entire world could use right and by the way just to make this uber easy and if you don't know how to tag just put hashtag I want it and then that'll be the other way of letting us know that you want it but I know this product you guys are going to love it and Kevin's been really generous he's going to do this for two people so that's awesome okay so uh question time yep okay yeah let's dive into these so Because there are a lot of questions, I'm going to go through each person one time. So one question per person. And then if we have time, we'll go back through any people that have double questions. For Simon, I get a heap of emails from Amazon every day suggesting keywords and daily budgets. Are these suggestions helpful to me or more beneficial to Amazon's profits? My suggestion is ignore them. Ignore them. Don't listen to them. The daily budgets, the daily, you should sell this, you should sell that. I find most of that stuff utterly useless. Yeah. Okay. All right, Don, Mr. King, you're the man. Question, I am in the baby niche, and I am having a difficult time getting product insurance. Any advice? Yeah, some of those categories, depending on what you have, I don't know. I'm sure you're talking about product liability, not general liability. You should be able to get general liability fairly easily. And then the difference for those of you that don't know, a lot of people don't know this. General liability is usually for most Amazon sellers, somewhere in the range of five to $800 a year, somewhere around that, depending on the insurance broker. General liability usually have to have a million or $2 million policy. Amazon technically requires it. It's in the contract you didn't read when you signed up for Seller Central that you have to have it. and usually the rules say, unless they've changed it recently, I haven't gone back and looked at in a year so it could have changed but it was if you sold over ten thousand dollars a month for three months in a row, you were required to have insurance, and that's something I think you're going to see Amazon probably start to enforce in the next year or so, like I think a lot of people are going to get suspended if they don't have it, but to get that general liability covers you for problems with you know You know, if the UPS guy trips when he's delivering your package and sues you or sues Amazon, it covers that. It covers more general warehousing, shipping type of things. But it doesn't cover if someone uses your product. And, you know, if someone puts your facial cream on their face and their face all of a sudden the skin starts falling off and they sue you, general liability would not cover that. That's where you need product liability. Or in the case of these baby products. If a baby swallows something and chokes or something, you would need product liability. So product liability is based on it costing a lot more. It's based on your sales. And if you don't have sales, you have to give an estimate. And then it gets audited every year. And they look at your numbers and they adjust it. But it's based on a risk profile of where you're selling and what it is. And so that can cost anywhere from $600 to $1,000 all the way up to we have one right now that's like $20,000 a year to cover. to cover us. So if you're having trouble, I would recommend you reach out to Ashlyn Hadden, A-S-H-L-I-N-H-A-D-D-E-N, insurance. She specializes in e-commerce insurance and she has some resources that the average insurance guy might not have or might not understand for e-commerce and see if she can help you out. Kevin, can you give Kelsey that information after the call? Yeah. Perfect. Okay. Perfect. Let's see. Okay. She, in fact, is actually able to get us on one of my products. It's a high-risk product. The original quote came back at like $19,000 for the year, and she was able to get that down to like $8,000 by some negotiation and without me losing any of the benefits of the policy or changing the policy. And so she's good, and she knows this e-com business backwards and forwards. Is that for women posing with tigers for your calendar sheets? No, it's for something else. Okay, okay. Just wanted to ask. And you'd be surprised. We get emails now on this product line. I've had three so far since – probably about July where people say they use this product and now their husband has had this issue or their wife has had this issue or they had to rush to the emergency room for this issue and luckily when I get those through Amazon Seller Central or through my own website, I ignore them because I don't want to, I don't want to send something back. Oh, I'm so sorry that happened; we take care of our product. I actually totally ignore them because I don't know if they're just people phishing to see if I will say something because anything you say in an email can be used against you in court. So if those people actually did decide to pursue something, I want to be careful. Like, no, I never got that email. I didn’t know this happened because even if I just acknowledge and say, I’m so sorry that happened. Would you like a refund or whatever? That’s can be used against you. So be careful out there. If you don't have insurance, anybody that's making some sort of claim that could be. End up in uh taking you to court over be careful very careful on how you respond if you respond in some cases you need to respond you know if someone says this but be careful uh on that whether you have insurance or not okay great uh all right from Alan on the subject of delivery delay Kevin, how do you handle replying to the emails received through Seller Central? Well, you have to answer those within 24 hours or Amazon will ping your account for being late. So I don't get too many of those unless I personally answer them on all my accounts. I don't have a VA doing it. But I can tell you I get one or two a day on all the accounts. The only time I get more is we did have a problem this summer where we had one of our products was leaking. So people were receiving a wet box in the mail from Amazon. Got to be pretty hairy where I was getting 50 to 100 a day, uh, we're having to ship out replacements and stuff, but other than that it's it's very minimal. I try to cover that stuff in the bullet points, I'll go in you know, that's one of the things that you know as far as adjusting listing if I start seeing a pattern of people asking questions like that I go in and I have someone either if it's within the first few weeks of the product I will go ahead and update the bullet points or a picture to clarify that, like uh, Just to take those away. Or I'll have someone ask that question down the questions and answers and answer it there to try to reduce that. But I get very little. Okay. Let's see. From Leonard. What did you do for capital as your Amazon business was growing? I work on Amazon full-time, but capital is limiting me expanding as quickly as I would like. Cash flow is probably the number one killer, whether you're selling on Amazon or any business in the world, whether you have a restaurant or whatever. Cash flow is what puts about 80% to 90% of most businesses out of business. And so for capital, that's a tricky question. I've done it multiple ways. In one of my businesses, I have partners that have put in money, so they have equity. So you could go to someone and give them equity, give them 5% or 10% of your business or whatever you need to do to get. to get that money, or you can go and get loans. My number one preference is to get a loan, even if it's at a really high interest rate. But even if I have a loan that's at, say, 20% interest, which is pretty high, that interest rate's better than giving someone 50% of the business. Because in the end, I'm hoping to sell my business. And if I'm planning to sell my business for a million dollars, and someone just gave me $100,000 in capital, and I gave them even 20% of the business, that's $200,000 they just made. Made versus if they just gave me a loan on that $100,000 at 20% interest, I'll pay them back $120,000 and I pocket $180,000 more when I sell it. So you have to look at those situations. But there's companies out there, once you've been selling for a year on Amazon, Amazon will start to, if you meet certain criteria, will start to offer you some loans. But you have to have a professional account for a year. Other than that, there's seller's funding. Helium 10 also has Alta. That takes a look. You need to be selling for three to six months on most of those and have a history. They take a look at your history. There's AccruMe, which you can take a look at. They take a look at your business and they kind of partner with you on certain products. So you don't have to pay them back. They just get a percentage of what you sell. Then, there's also sites like Blue Vine, Cabbage. On deck, there's a ton of those that you can get short-term $10,000, $20,000 loans if you have a credit score above – if you're a U. S. citizen and have a credit score above 600 and meet some other criteria. So, there's a number of sources. There's the mafia. Well, you've done that before. I've done the mafia loans in the past. They're the cash advance type of deal, guys. There's tons of options out there, but the best one is friends or family. If you can get friends or family to give you a short-term loan, don't ever take money from someone that if they lost the money, it would change their life. And don't ever do that to yourself. Don't ever, oh, let me just take a mortgage out of my house or something. And if you lost your house, be very careful on those kinds of things. Never take money from someone that can't afford to lose it. Another thing when we're talking about this is, remember, if you are going in with two feet and your product takes off, you have to refund or you have to capitalize or invest in inventory, right? So sometimes, and Kevin knows the one company that this happened to, their product took off and it was a home run. They bought their inventory. They got it back into Amazon. It took off. And the guy ended up just, he couldn't, he just sold his inventory off because he had no more capital. So it killed him. I mean, one thing you can do too is if you're, you can go to your supplier and you can tell the supplier, look, you know, I appreciate the business and look what we're doing. You know, we ordered a thousand from you. Now we're ordering 3,000. Man, if I could just order 10,000 of these things, we could both make a lot more money. And try to negotiate with your supplier to either let them give you terms or maybe not be full 100% terms. It might be, okay, you can pay us 30% down and the other 70% pay us in three months or whatever. Anything you can get can help. So that's another place. You're not going to get that on your first order. But if you've been ordering a couple, then they can see it and you can make them projections. And show them, look this is the projection we're on, look this is what the other 10 guys, you know, here's the helium 10 snapshot of my competition, look how much, you know, we're looking at what they're doing compared to me, help me out here and let's both make more money, and sometimes that can work as well. Alright, Kelse, okay, sorry I'm just adding all the names into the contest, uh, okay, we had one from Dr. Kaz. Hey, Kevin, if one is going to stop out, do you recommend increasing the product price to slow sales? If not, why? Only do that if you're a moron or if you're stupid. So many people. Dr. Cause, you're not stupid. So don't do that. That's an old wives' tale that gets spread around Facebook. It's the absolute worst advice in the history of advice on Amazon. Don't do that. You want to go out. On a bang, if anything, lower your freaking price. I mean, if you're gonna don't, I'm not saying lower your price but if you're gonna do something with your price, lower the price so you go out with a bang. You don't want to slow sales; that's that that's that's a killer in the algorithm, a killer in your ranking, and when you come back in the stock, it's just going to hurt you even more. So, do not do that. Yeah, don't. Same thing with PPC like you know, like Kevin says, you want to have momentum going out there. There are so many people I've heard so many people on podcasts say, 'Oh yeah, raise your price and it it's absolutely the wrong advice. That's like saying if I'm gonna um I'm in playing a sport, playing a football game; we're gonna purposely lose uh so that we can come back and play next year or something. It's it's stupid, yeah, okay. Um, we had one about the bullet points, I believe. This came in when you were talking about the uppercase. What about the brand names in the beginning of the listing title? I've heard Amazon is getting more strict on that. Yeah, that's technically been the rule all along, that there's a certain format, they want the titles, they want brand name, part, I forget exactly, it's brand name, part number, model number, so yeah, it's best to put the brand name at the beginning of it. I used to say don't do that. And if you can get away with not putting your brand name in there, try it because it's valuable space. They have a field for brand name. If someone’s typing in your brand, they’re going to find you because it says your brand name right underneath it. So if you can get away without doing that, I would recommend you not put it there. But if you cannot get away with Amazon forcing your hand on that, then, yeah, you’re going to have to put that in the beginning of the title. And that’s why you want to have a fairly short brand name because it takes up a lot of space. You don’t want a brand that’s Pastries by Kevin in Austin or something. Something very long, it just takes up too much space. You want short, succinct brand names. That's why you see a lot of these brand names on Amazon if you're ever searching as a buyer. And they're just like weird names. They're like X27 13 or whatever. These are all Chinese sellers. All these weird, strange names that don't make any sense. They're really short, usually five, six characters. That's for two reasons. One, so that when Amazon enforces, it doesn't take up a lot of your valuable character space for indexing, but also those are easy to get trademarks on because no one creates these random weird stuff except most of these Chinese sellers so they can get quick trademarks for brand registry without any friction. Yeah, good point. Okay let me see uh Marina is next oh hold it one sec one of the one of the things that we've done uh if your brand name lets say it's uh X Y F G whatever you said if that's the if that's what your brand registered under so it shows brand X Y F G as long as it's the same I don't usually put it in front and unless Amazon forces the issue if they like on a flat file or whatever they force the issue then I'll do it but typically if I found that my my product like let's say wildlife if it's brand wildlife and the I don't typically put wildlife in front of the the title I think that's what I'm trying to say, but I don't usually get the four. Like I do know people that have a brand name and then they have another name that they put in front and that doesn't work. But if it's, as long as it's the same, so Anchor sold by or not sold by, so sold by could be Flat World Network, but your brand registry is Anchor. And then, when you put your brand in front, uh, it would be Anchor at, but as long as it shows Anchor below, then it should be fine, am I making sense, Kevin? It sounds like you've been drinking; I have been, but that's something in that coffee. No, that didn't make all okay. So when you have, when you take a look at your listing, so if you take a look at any Amazon listing and you go and you see the brand name underneath it. Okay, so you've got, let's just use Anchor because Anchor is easy. So Anchor is the brand name. You see that on the product. If you put Anchor speakers, like in front, you don't have to do that because the brand registry is already showing Anchor. Okay. So I. 99% of my listings, 100% of my listings, I usually get away with not doing it because it's the name of the brand registry. Okay. Yeah. That's what I was similar to what I was just saying, that that shows up anyway, right below it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I see what you're saying now. Okay. That makes sense. Not that bad. Not that bad. You sobered up really well. Yeah, there we go. Kevin gave me a nudge here. Kevin, the dog, that is. Okay. Marina, one of my listings has had one unit stranded and I'm not able to remove it and not able to ship it in new inventory. I refreshed the listing, created new SKUs, opened several cases that keep saying I don't have this ASIN in my inventory and there's still no solution. Any advice how to solve it? So there's two things here. On that one that's stranded and you can't remove it, yeah, I see that sometimes too. I think that's just a glitch or that's something that's in some sort of reserve status or there's something where one part of Amazon's system is not talking to the other part. So I usually just ignore those. I'll get emails that say, hey, you need to remove this. You've got seven days or whatever. Y'all take care of it. I've tried. It doesn't work. So I basically usually ignore those. But that should not prevent you from being able to ship in new inventory. I've never seen where you're having one stranded unit is not allowing you to ship in additional inventory. Have you ever seen that, Norm? What was that? Where having something stranded is preventing you from being able to send in additional inventory. I haven't seen that. I've never seen that either. So that one, that should not affect you. Well, actually, on stranded what you can actually yeah, that shouldn't but if it is I mean on that stranded one, what you what you might be sometimes on the stranded if you try to reactivate it um so stranded could be for a number of reasons it could be because Amazon's misplaced it because you deleted the listing in the past and something got returned by a customer that's usually what stranded is or your FNSKU fell off uh the label fell off or something like that uh and if Amazon's telling you it doesn't basically exist um and you can't remove it uh that's one that like I would just leave I think I have one that says stranded for like the last three years in one of my accounts uh but I don't I've never seen it where it doesn't allow you to ship a new inventory now if That shouldn't have any bearing on it. Yeah, unless it's because she's trying to ship in the same inventory with the same FNSKU and the same ASIN, and it's because one is stranded. It's not allowed. That could happen. Yeah, that's a good one. You might try escalating that from Seller Central, and the next time you call, ask for the catalog team. And ask to get redirected to the catalog team, call during the daytime in the U.S. So hopefully, you get someone in South Dakota or Costa Rica. If that doesn't work, call in and just start speaking Spanish and they should route you to Costa Rica. And those people have a Costa Rica or South Dakota, which is a catalog team. They have a little bit more of a clue of what to do than the guys in India that you probably are getting when you're just talking to normal seller central. That's where I would. They can look into your account and see exactly what's causing that a lot better. And talk to someone. Don't just do it via opening a ticket. And Amazon's making it harder for you to talk to people now. You've got to jump through some hoops. Sometimes they just keep redirecting you in these circles to fill out a form because they're trying to reduce the amount of talking they have to do. But there's ways to actually get to be able to talk to someone. Another way you can do it is go in and say you have a tax issue and open a ticket under the tax issue settings. And that will go to the people in the tax department. And they're going to get that and they go, what the heck? This is not a tax issue. This is not for us. They will often forward that to the right department and it'll go straight to the top, you know, to a manager at that department to assign it. And sometimes that can be effective at getting results. It's a little workaround hack. Yeah, I've heard of that working. Okay. We are just about hitting the hour mark. So, Kevin, how are you for time? I'm good. Okay. We can go another 10 minutes or so. Okay. Irina, I have sold on eBay some two to three years, but not recently. Never sold on Amazon. I just resell my own things. Our friends use clothes, shoes, books, small items. Which platform is better for me profit-wise? Well, for selling used items and eBay is going to be definitely better for what you're selling there if you're selling I mean used books actually Amazon might be better than eBay on the books uh some small items if it has a if it's a brand name item and it has the option that says uh sell yours if you're looking at the listing page on Amazon a little button on the right hand side says have one to sell or sell yours those that can work but um books are probably better on Amazon, but the clothes and shoes I would think are going to be better to uh to sell on eBay. Okay. Uh, from Rad, uh, hello, Amazon King. How about Amazon live? Is it a way to sell the products in the future? I have not used it yet, but I know Norm, uh, has talked about it on some of his podcasts and he's got interviewed some people that are having some good success with that. But, uh, I do think it, is it the way of the future? Um, I don't know if it's the way of the future. It'll be one, one of the channels of methods of selling in the future, it's um but I have not personally experienced it but I know a couple people that have tried it and uh some are having great success some are like yeah it's okay. So, one of the things, like I think it's going to be all about a community, yesterday, uh Emma, yeah, you know Emma Tibber, she was talking about I had no idea but there's a beta program on about brand story actually a page that you would create your brand story, okay, great! Well, all this is doing is exactly like Amazon's been talking about; they want to build a community around your brand so micro-brands, you know now can have a voice. How does that start? It started with uh posts, you know continually using posts then um so that's the image side on the video side, Amazon Live, and it's so bloody easy to do! If you've noticed that they've started to get you; they started to show you how many followers you have, so now driving uh traffic over from Facebook or wherever you want to drive traffic to, to get people to watch your Amazon Live or to your brand feed, helps build these followers. So I think building a brand community. Is definitely something to definitely think about. I would be doing it, especially Amazon Live. It's so easy just to pop up your camera and start talking about your product or getting influencers to do it. They're a dime a dozen. Okay. From Victor, what is your take on dealing with the California Proposition 65 lawyer extortion scheme? I'm not familiar with what you're referring to there, Giz. I know what California Proposition 65 is. It's some special rules that govern a whole number of products that take it beyond what just the federal government does. But the lawyer extortion scheme, I'm not familiar with. Victor, if you wanted to expand on that, that would be great. Okay. From Henrietta, Kevin, do you sell mostly on Amazon. com? What is the percentage of your business on Amazon as a whole? 95% on Amazon, 5% elsewhere. I do sell Amazon US, Amazon Canada. I'm about to start selling Amazon Europe in the UK and Germany. But Canada right now, one of my – I don't sell, all my products aren’t in Canada. A couple of my accounts are. It's about 10% of my US sales. So those two, I mean, I have Shopify sites. We've tried the Facebook storefront stuff. We've tried some of that. That's just pretty meaningless compared to what you can do on Amazon. So I focus primarily on Amazon. And some people say that's scary. You have all your eggs in one basket. It can be. But it's also where, where the money is; so I'm curious about your Amazon Canada account ( dot ca). Uh, what kind of price point are you going in? I've i i have beauty products that I've tried to sell in Canada and because of the shipping and the FBA fees here they've they just were too expensive. I have a product that's $19. 95 in the U. S., and I sell it for $27. 95 in Canada; I think it's about 20% the exchange right now is about 25% difference, Canadian dollars about 25% more. So what was 20 bucks in the U. S. is 25 in Canada and Canadian dollars. So I jacked that up a little bit more just to cover my inbound freight. And I'm, I'm not having a problem. That makes sense. I was selling, I was dumb, but a $14 item, $7 and 95 cents for picking and handling. Wow. Ship pick pack ship. Yeah. From Amazon Canada. Yeah, so who's going to buy a $14 item at $7 . 95? Yeah. And I have the margins in these. My landing costs into the U. S. is $1. 50. So there's enough margin there to absorb some of that. Yeah. Okay, next question. Victor's asking if you should mic up. Oh, yeah, sure. Mic up, Victor. Yeah, so, Victor, I'm going to send you. A link on Facebook through Norm. And yeah, just come on and join the show whenever you'd like. And let's see, we have just a couple more. Fahad, people facing a lock 32 issue. Keywords are seen dropping down to ranks around 32 and not improving at all. Do you have any advice on that? What is triggering this if you have any insight? I never heard of something called lock 32. I don't know if that's something that some guru made up or if that's a real term. I'm not sure what that is. But yeah, there is a lot of keyword movement sometimes. Amazon's adjusting the algorithm. As you get into more sales history or maybe you get some bad reviews or your seller performance rating has gone down or seller feedback rating has gone down, there's a number of factors that influence that. And I've seen that on a few of my products where we were ranking really well on page one, then all of a sudden we just died, went down to page five for almost no explainable reason. It's something to do with the algorithm, and Amazon has their reasons for doing it, but I don't have an exact answer on why. Do you know more on that, Norm? I'm with you. Algorithms can – it might knock you out; it might not. You might not be indexed so one of the things if you drop immediately check your index and go to Helium 10 and use their indexing tool to see if that's an issue, but other than that I have no idea. The only thing I would advise is that if you were ranking and it wasn't in the title, let's say it's something that was either in your bullets or in your back-end to play around. So if it was in your bullets, move it over maybe to your search terms or search terms into title. That would be the only advice I could give you. Okay. And we got two more. Actually, Victor is joining us. All right. Hello. Oh, there's the man. Hey, how you doing? How you doing, guys? I like your beard. Yeah, I got a long way to go to catch up with you. So what was the lawyer extortion question? Okay, I just learned about this last week from Brandon Young. So again, a source I trust. He's saying that California lawyers are ordering your product and checking for existence of the Proposition 65 warning label. And if they believe that the product should have it and you don't, then they send you a letter saying we're going to report you to Amazon. And, you know, but you can avoid us doing that by retaining us. And it's like a $50,000 retainer. If you attempt to, you know, to fight it, apparently the cost for fighting it is like 100K. So most people just pay up. And so obviously it's like, you know, not something I wanted to deal with. And so I started to, you know, analyze all of our materials and the finishes we use on our products to see if any of them are on that really long Prop 65 list. Luckily for us, none are. I still don’t know if we could get you know snagged by this but apparently you know certain plastics that are commonly used need the morning label and a lot of electronics yeah yeah I have to have it yeah yeah um that sounds very similar to what's happening in what's happened in Germany where in Germany it's required by law to include an invoice uh and with with your each shipment or to actually email an invoice separately um and there's some people some international sellers that didn't know know about this it has to be like a PDF kind of invoice thing and so there's lawyers in Germany that were doing the same thing where they would order um order stuff and if you didn’t include the invoice they would come after you uh and say you know this it’s a fine of this a much you know we report you to the EU or you can pay us um that sounds very similar to that. It doesn’t surprise me that some attorneys would do that. So to answer your question on how do you avoid that, you do what you did. You've got to double-check all your materials and make sure you're in full compliance with it. And maybe even reach out to someone that, you know, one of these product testing labs that knows that stuff so you don't have to sit there and research it. They know it and say, this is what I'm selling. Am I in compliance? Is there anything about Prop 65 that I need to do? Or if you want to cover your ass, if you don't know, just put the freaking label on there. Just say this is a simple little warning that you can add to your product. I had to add that. I was selling an Apple Watch charging dock for a few years, and I had to have that on my box. It was a simple little warning. Yeah. It's one thing if you're selling a garden rake where that warning label doesn't mean much. It's another thing if it's a kitchen item. Yeah, and, you know, the customer sees, you know, this may cause birth defects or cancer. Oh, yeah. It's going right back in the box on Amazon. Yeah, exactly. But, yeah, I think the thing is to do, you did the right thing, checking all your stuff. And if that's something that you're not comfortable doing, reach out to one of the testing labs and ask them to check it for you. It was a roaring pain in the neck. In a guest appearance, yeah he's so unhappy right now because he has the cone of shame it's you know um he hurt his paw and so uh again cat problems hey no thank you victor thanks victor so let's do this let's write an article let's do some research let's post in the lunch with norm um blog area uh so we'll see if our team can put something together for everybody so they can go and see at least the list and see what victor was talking about um yeah we'll we'll get this up for in the next week or two for you okay great and two more questions we got uh nathan kevin do you like bags like backpacks diaper bags like uh etc are Are good products to sell or do you stay away from bags? Those are pretty saturated, Nathan. Backpacks and diaper bags, unless you've got some really unique feature or unique angle on it, those would be pretty difficult because there's a lot of stuff in those categories that have tens of thousands of reviews. So to compete against them is pretty hard. Not that you can't do it, but it needs to be highly, highly differentiated to have a chance. Right. And understand you're going to take a lot of money to get ranked. Okay, and last one from Angie. Hi, Kevin. Currently taking Freedom Ticket courses now. Once I complete the course, what should I do next? I think I'm going to need a little more experience on how to work the Helium 10 tool. What should I do about that? Well, Helium 10 has a lot of training that's for free. So on each of their tools, I think there's a little button. It's called like learn more or pro training or pro tips or pro something like that, that mostly Bradley has done. So you could go through all those to, to learn about the tools. But once you've completed the course, you should be ready to start launching. I mean, if you want to get some more experience on the Helium 10 tools, that would be great. And by watching all those videos, but at that point you should be start ready to start doing your product research and contact in factories. And hopefully. Executing, I mean, it's one thing to go through a course and learn, but you got to execute; you got to take some action. Um, don't feel like you don't don't ever feel like well I need to learn more. I just did this one whether it's Freedom Ticket or anything else, I need; I took this one course, and man, I just I need to go take another course, another course, I feel like I need. I'm missing something; just learn enough to get started and understand you're going to make a few mistakes along the way, but that's just you got to learn to to walk before you can run. Uh, so uh, just start doing; start taking some action. Okay, and oh once back in Yarrow, what do you think about toy market worth again now? Um, well, toy market is can be a a good market; it's highly seasonal for some toys. You know this time of year is when most of it's happening. You also have to remember like as far as selling on Amazon to sell toys, you have to have been selling uh prior to like September 1st or something. So you can't just jump in and start selling toys right away; you have to have had an existing account. Amazon has some, I forget the exact rules, but there's some specific rules about selling toys during the fourth quarter where you have to have been selling on Amazon as a professional seller for a while. You have to have a certain number of sales and rankings and stuff to be able to sell toys, but the toys market can be good. But it's also um pretty competitive and there because you're competing at some really big well-established brands yeah and certification yeah and then that's one that's you got to make sure everything is totally above board and certified never take your chinese factories word that they have the certificates you're going to have to do your own independent testing okay so i think we've got everyone at least once i saw one there for the editorials oh yeah uh how to get on editorial recommendations okay i think i can handle that one kev um so that one it's not something usually an individual can do um you need to go to a service that uh like i for us for example at pr reach we have a public relations department so the public relations department is is going out to a bunch of magazines and that because we're reaching out to these different magazines some of them are on this Amazon editorial list and for the most part again you can go to a PR firm or there are companies out there that specialize in this but it would be the same thing what is it HBW is one of the companies yeah HBW. They do it for a fee and then a percentage of the revenue that you generate. Yeah. Like I know for us, it's free. You can, you could just contact Shane and until it gets published, then there is a fee associated with it but um yeah. You don't pay anything until... There are certain companies that have that have agreements with Amazon to provide that content, and so that's what Norm is saying is that PR Reach can help you reach out to those companies that have have those and that's not a guarantee that you'll get in there, there's certain products, there's certain criteria that those companies look for. They may already have an editorial feature, may already exist, and it's too late to get in there. So, there's a number of criteria on it, but it can definitely, if you can get into one of those, it can help your sales a lot, 10 to 30%. Yeah. Yeah, so I think that's it. Yeah, we're at uh 115 right now, so I think it should be timed for the wheel one sec before we do that. Kevin is there anything this is the December Q&A is there anything any tip that you can give any Amazon seller or ecom seller going into December January um Any tip? Well, make sure if you haven't placed your orders yet for what you're going to need after the holidays, do it today. Because remember, there's Chinese New Year coming up and everything's going to close down for a while. And so if you're needing something before the end of, even if you're probably too late to get it before the end of January, in many cases, unless you're flying it over. But you might be able to ship it. If you order today, they might be able to ship it before they close down. Otherwise, you're looking at March or April for having your inventory in. So keep that in mind. That's a pretty important thing around this time of year, a lot of people forget about. And sales don't drop after Christmas. If this is your first year, don't think that, well, come December 23rd, 24th, that's it. Season's over. January is a very big month on Amazon because people are returning a lot of stuff they got for Christmas. Remember, Amazon has all these anything that was bought from October 1st onward through Christmas can be returned until January 31st. And so there's going to be a lot of people returning stuff to Amazon, either gifts or just things they haven't gotten around to returning that they bought for themselves. And they're going to have a credit on Amazon and they're going to be looking for something else to buy. It's not just fitness stuff and New Year's resolution stuff that sells in January. There's a lot of people get gift cards, too, for Christmas. January is a very good month on Amazon. So make sure you have your inventory and your ads and your listings and everything optimized to continue this. You're not going to see a fall off really until February. That's interesting because Afolabi was on here on Monday. He said the exact same thing. Oh, really? I didn't see that. If you're not ordering right now for Chinese New Year, you're going to lose out. Yep. Yep. So thank you, sir. All right. Now let's get to the big draw. Okay, so I just need to share my screen. Wheel of names. Okay, so if you guys have entered, everyone here, you should be US residents. So if you're not, then you won't get it. And yeah, we'll have to find someone else. But okay, so here we go. We got lots of names. Tons of names. And let's see. All right, so three, two, one. Believe there's two giveaways so the first winner is Peter all right, Peter. Okay, so we'll just need to get that info so Kelsey's going to provide you uh with an email and you can send it over to him okay, and there's two right, get your shipping address, yeah, ideally a street address not a PO box, right okay, so here's Peter, huh, um, okay, so there's two, right, Kevin, yeah, two, one more winner, all right, here we go, three, two, one, Alan, Allen, congratulations, Alan. All right, so two winners. They're going to be sent over to hopefully your street address, not a PO box, and just get Kelsey that information. Yeah, he'll get that to me, and I'll get this out today or Monday, the latest. It'll be on its way to you. Well, sir. Great. That's it for this month. That's it. We're done. Man, that went fast. That's too much fun. We should just sit here all day. I know. Next time, let's order Kobe beef. That's right. Order Kobe beef, smoke some cigars. All set. And have a Coke Zero, and we'll be good. Hey, I got the Coke Zero. I'm missing the other two. But you know what? Thank you so much. It's always great having you on and talking with you. Again, I wish we could meet up and do something, but that'll be in the new year, I think. It's coming next year. It's coming next year. Yeah. We have a lot of catching up to do. We do. All right, Kevin. Well, thanks a lot for coming on and we will see you next month. Yeah. Everybody have a great holiday season and enjoy and have a happy new year. And the same to Kelsey and Norm, both of you guys too. And to you and everybody in Austin. All right. Appreciate it, man. See you later. All right. Take care. Okay, everybody. So that's the end of the episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Victor was the first person to come on to the show and ask a question. We're going to try to do a lot more of that from next week on. So hopefully we have at least one person a week that can come on or two. And also, let's see, if you haven't joined the Facebook group yet, please reach out and join the group. We also have a newsletter that doesn't suck. It comes out on Mondays. If you'd like to get subscribed to it, just go into Lunch with Norm or normferrar. com and you'll see the subscribe to email or subscribe to newsletter. So it's pretty straightforward. Anyways, we haven't had any complaints. So I guess that's good about the newsletter. We're trying just to provide really great content that's Amazon and online seller based. So Kelsey, yes. Okay. So yeah, thank you for joining everyone. I think this was our biggest episode yet. I believe I saw 46 viewers like at the same time watching the show. So that's amazing. And hello, Renee, you just missed the episode, catching the tail end, but the full replay is on YouTube as well. Yeah, so we have our Facebook group uh, it's right here, scrolling across, lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and E-commerce Collective, so if you ever have any questions for Norm or the guests, just want to meet the other people in the comments, um, a ton of these people are from uh came from the Facebook group or Facebook page over to the uh Facebook group or YouTube and they're all kind of merging into this Facebook group, so you'll see lots of familiar names there um, and most of the podcast guests are there too yeah yeah so it's a great place to meet everyone and we throw different surveys and polls and Amazon questions or online seller questions um yeah so boost man thank you guys thanks Simon thanks for Hod Okay. Yeah. And we are a podcast too, Lunch with Norm podcast. So if you enjoy listening to us, you can find us on Apple, Spotify, anywhere you listen to your podcast, you can find us. But I believe that's it. Do you want to talk about next week's guest? Which there is also a giveaway. Oh, there is? Yes. Oh, perfect. So it's Ryan Rigney. That's next Monday, right? Yes. Oh, actually, we have four days. Next week too. Okay. So let's go through them. So I know Ryan's on Monday. Yes. And, uh, don't miss that one. That's going to be a great, really great episode as well. Yep. So Ryan Rigney is going to be talking about, uh, building brands. Um, and then we have a special episode on Tuesday. Um, so we are on four days a week, uh, this week or next week. Mike Cigar is the 12 Days of Nuggets, I believe, yep, and we have let's see how good is my memory Vic from Helium 10 right, talking about uh some holiday PPC tips, and we have Brenda Mendez um, and she uh is going to tell her story how she was able to build a nine-figure store um, she's got a great story um, and yeah, very good big lineup. So we've got lots going on next week. And just quickly with Mike's on Tuesday, this is also for a great cause. I don't know if you've been seeing this, but he's got a ton of really great Amazon and online sellers just giving out nuggets starting on the 7th. And this is for a charity that he works with called Operation Underground Railroad, which is to help prevent human trafficking. So check it out. I mean, donate if you can. He'll be on. He'll be talking about a bunch of different things. But anyways, looking forward to four sessions next week. And that's it for today's show. So what are you doing? And then one last thing. So four episodes this week, and there's going to be a secret episode only available on the Facebook group two weeks from now on the 15th, I believe. So you have to be watching. It's a prerecorded one, but there is a prize as well attached to that. But it's a secret episode. Only Facebook group members can watch it. So, you should join. Now are you going to interrupt? No, you have the floor; you pass me the flame, okay. So, tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at Eastern Standard Time at noon, and I think that's it for the day unless Kelsey has anything last to say. Going once, going twice, three times gone! All right, thanks for watching, and enjoy your day. Oh, I messed up! Yeah, where's this? And here's this-Kelsey, you got one!