Kevin King Talks Clubhouse, Amazon Live, and Amazon FBA 2021 | Ep. 90

Kevin King Talks Clubhouse, Amazon Live, and Amazon FBA 2021 | Ep. 90 Hey everybody, it's Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy here, and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, The Rise of the Micro Brands. Okay, today, all right, my buddy, Kevin King, the king of everything, the king of Amazon, is on our podcast today. We're going to just be kind of going over things that are happening, things that you might be aware of happening in January, February, insights into some new changes in Amazon. So stay tuned. This is going to be a good one. But before that, where is Kelsey? Hello. Happy Friday. And to you, sir. Thank you. So we've got some big things. Happening right now, um, but first, Marcia's here, welcome Marcia, hey Marcia, I'm free this weekend, yes, um, so let's start uh, Patreon, we just opened up a brand new Patreon account, um, so if you ever want to give back to the podcast, of course watching the podcast, liking the podcast is anything and more that we can ask for, um, but if you want to buy us like a monthly cup of coffee, um, that's an option in the Patreon account that you can go to. So I'll put the link in the bio. So if it's anything, if you guys want to donate, I think we have like $3, feel free to do that. That'd be awesome. But also smash that like button and share the video. That is also fantastic if you guys can do that. Let's see. Next, we've got our AirPod contest. Our AirPod contest is ending on Thursday of next week. So if you haven't yet, this is for U. S. residents only. Kelsey. But we'll throw in that. Yes. It's an AirPod Pro. AirPod Pro. Yes. So I'm going to put the links in the description for you guys. So all you need to do is press the link. Sign up with your email. And if you want more entries, you can just follow us on different platforms. But the link will tell you everything you need to do. And we got Marat. We got Rad joining us. Marina, Simon, Tom, Fatiha. Facebook user. I'll find out who you are. I think it's Yaro probably. Fatiha. We have another one. Hey, mentors. Hello. Welcome, everyone. Already over 20 people watching-that's awesome! So um, let's kind of just jump into it, okay? Very good. So before we do that, just very quickly, got questions? Just throw them over in the comment area. Also, if you're watching this on a replay, you can skip ahead. You can miss all this housekeeping sort of stuff and just get right into the content. If you're watching this on my profile, head over to Norm Farrar, Lunch with Norm, and you can watch the full episode as well as highlights that Kelsey puts together and tons of other content. Yeah, join the group. What's that? Yeah, join the group. On the page just go over the group we've got a great community there, um so you can watch the videos there too, so again I'll put that in the comments perfect. So, with that being said, sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show. There he is, hey how are you, sir? Good, how are you doing? Norm, I am doing awesome, thank you, and I gotta tell you, like right off the bat, you sent me a little goodie package the other day with some of your product. Yeah, yeah, I got it, thank you! Alright, you know how to brand, oh I, I you know what? Like I, I asked Connie so Connie, like this 55-pound weight, you know, and I had to help her, you know, pick it up but anyway, um we looked at some of the products that you had, and I'm not going to tell the brand, but unbelievable, unbelievable! The added value, the products that you have, the breadth of the products that you're working with. It's crazy! I was really impressed with what you guys put together. I appreciate that. You have to. It's in the PPE space. When you're dealing with PPE, everything looks the same. It's not masks or anything like that. I don't want to say exactly what we're doing. You have to brand. You have to differentiate when all the products are very, very similar. The only way is either with product quality or with marketing. All business comes down to two things. It's either innovation or marketing. That's really the two foundations of any business. If you're not focused on those, then your chances of success go way down. There were some products that you would pop things into these containers to carry around. You had to pay probably some pretty heavy mold charges for that, didn't you? For the little holders? Yeah, yeah. No, it wasn't too bad. No, it wasn't too bad. Those were the little silicone holders, you're talking about? Yeah. Yeah, no, those weren't too bad. And then the little toys that we did. Yeah. Yeah. It wasn’t as bad as you might think. Kelsey’s got all the toys. He sleeps with them now. So, okay. So let's stay on that for one second. Sure. So you’ve got this PPE product that you sent over. You’ve got sort of more of an industrial or, you know, this jumbo size thing. You’ve got these other everything. Everything that you created was perfect for the brand. It stayed. It was all PPE and it can even be expanded. One of the things that stood apart is the holder, the toys. And I know I know that you have a mascot. And, that could be Kelsey now too, but you've got you've got a mascot that goes around and hands out all your product um I don't think you can do that in California right now but it was you sent me over some YouTube videos and it was crazy I didn't know you were doing all these toys and stuff like that but talk about your brand as soon as Connie saw them she goes oh this is so cool and you know that's why you're a king and i'm a squire I mean, one of the things we do here is we do a lot of influencer marketing with it. So we use those those toys and those promotional items to help with that. One of the things we do is we do appreciation boxes for nurses. So we'll actually send we have someone that works on that for us and they'll get a hold of nurses that are also Instagram influencers. And we will send them a big box and special custom box that has a whole bunch of different products in it. And as well as, uh, some of those toys and holders and things, and so it'll show up in a hospital, um or a nursery, or you know, a medical office somewhere, um, and you know they take pictures of it with all the doctors holding it, and then all those little holders, everybody wants one, so they put it on their key chain or whatever. So it's just, it's just building the brand, I mean, we're competing against some pretty hefty well-known brands in that space, you know, and um, and so we have to stand out somehow. I mean, it's, it's working. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a grind. Um, and it's, you know, it's selling on Amazon or something is difficult because the algorithm is brand agnostic. It doesn't really care. Um, but we, it's, it's building and it, I mean, it's done well enough that we've had some ups and downs on Amazon with it because of algorithm issues and just approval issues and stuff. And, uh, but the, the, The branding itself is making a difference because there's a company in South Korea right now that wants to take the entire line and do it themselves. They're like, this is great branding. We love this. We even have a jingle. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the jingle. Sing it. It’s all right. I can’t sing it. But they want to take the entire thing. We have another big product that’s probably going to be starting in Europe first and then expanding to the U. S. on the same line that’s very unique in the space. That’s because of the branding. So, the branding is opening a lot of doors. Besides helping to set the product apart, it’s also opening a lot of doors for us to other opportunities that probably otherwise, if it was just more of a generic or just a simple type of product. Do you have an e-com website? Are you just driving it all from Amazon? All your traffic is coming from Amazon, or do you drive it over to an e-com site? We have an e-com site also. It's a very small percentage. Facebook does not allow advertising for PPE type of stuff, and Google is very strict on it. You'll see some sneak through sometimes from people, but it's prohibited. We actually had our Facebook account banned for life after $18 ad spend. And the spin was just to drive traffic to a blog post. This was back like in April, May of last year. There was a blog post about here's the proper way to hand sanitize your hands. It was just a simple PSA kind of thing. And Facebook immediately suspended the account just for a blog post. It wasn't provisioning the product. It wasn't going to our store or anything. And said, you're not allowed to do this. And then we appealed it. And they said, no, sorry, you're banned for life. This is – So it's BS. Facebook can take and shove it, but it's ridiculous. But that's what you're up against a lot of times. So you get kicked between the legs several times. You still continue to carry on. Are you looking at other social media platforms like possibly TikTok or Pinterest or platforms like that to drive traffic? Yeah, we've looked at at some of those, uh, as well, uh, the one that's working the most is Instagram. Um, actually with with these influencers they're able to post stuff and we've done some contests and things. It's still, uh, I mean we ran a press release with you guys, you know, to get some, some backlinks and some credibility. Um, it's it's uh it's slow but it'll be okay, uh, I mean we got some big retailers that are interested, uh, so um, we'll see what happens there. Um, but yeah, it's it's a it's fun, yeah. One of the things that we've done with, um, and I've I think I've told you about this, but this, uh, high-end knife, uh, products that we have and we've done similar stuff when you have the knife, you need other types of You know, uh, knife utensils pairing knife chef knife butchers and all this other stuff, but what can you provide that added value service? So there's all sorts of different things that we can do. But for us, we'll send out a bunch of knives to high-end chefs and just ask them to give us recipes or video themselves, you know, cooking. And you know that works incredibly well for engagement. Then uh, like thinking just like you, it's kind of trying to think outside the box-how can we get viral? How can we get people to spread the word? Go to a culinary school. Give them the knives and just say, 'Hey, this is on one condition.' Just at graduation, just show us a picture with you and the knife. It works great. So, you know, there's so many ways that we can go out there. And, you know, because this is January/ February, you know, ask us anything. Bigger things that I'm seeing happen, I don't know about you, Kevin, but that whole Amazon community going from posts to live building followers, so building an actual community and this new thing that's happening with the brand story that Amazon. I think it's still in beta, but once it comes out, they actually have pages that you can build out your brand story and tell people about your product. So, you want it to start there, like you know what? Do you see happening, what are you doing uh to build your social media presence on Amazon? It's tough with PPE isn't it? Yeah, it's a little tougher, but we were running Amazon posts um and we're still running some Amazon post stuff. Um, the brand store I do have access to the beta there and I... I have not done anything with that; it's only like a was like one picture and a little paragraph. It's uh, From what I saw, at least, it wasn't a whole lot of anything. So I was like, eh, I don't know. I'm not seeing that right now. I mean, I think for the right product, that would be good. Or maybe once they flush it out a little bit. I haven't messed with that. Amazon Lives, we're probably going to start doing something. I was just listening yesterday. One of the things, as you know, in the last couple of weeks, it seems like everybody and their brother is on Clubhouse now. I was going to get to that. That other app. We'll talk about that in a minute. There was someone on there yesterday. I think Leron was actually hosting somebody. A guy pops in talking all about Amazon Live. He has a company that specializes in getting people on Amazon Live. He was talking about some of the numbers and some of what's happening. It's still pretty early. There's a few people that might be doing well. It depends on your product line. Um, but I think that has potential, uh, there, uh, if nothing else for brand awareness, um, and top-of-funnel type of stuff. Um, and they're talking about some interesting techniques where if you actually, uh, I think Leron was talking about it or what, some of the things that he's going to be doing is with Amazon, not just going on and showing his product. And then it just shows up on his product pages, which you might not have a lot of traffic to, but actually doing comparisons. But so if your product is, uh, you have your brand new knife set. um you go and you find the top selling knife sets on amazon that are you know already selling 100 or 200 a day they're getting a lot more sessions uh you feature those in the live video and compare yours to theirs and you can go up to i think it's seven products or something like that i may have that number wrong and a single video listed below um and so then you get you have them compare yours to theirs and then you show up on all their pages and yeah the They might buy the competition over you, but there's affiliate commissions, and there's a whole way to actually maybe gamify or make this work. And so I need to take a deeper dive into not only for maybe PPE, but also for some of our other – I have several other brands as well, different accounts, and take a look at some of that. Yeah, Carlos Alvarez came on. I don't know which podcast it was, it was one of the earlier ones talking about Amazon Live, some great tips over there and you know as you build your followers, so there's not you I mean you can't like and you can't comment right now like on posts it's you know it's that's I don't know when that's going to start. I'm sure it's going to start but when you do when you go live it notifies everybody or if you have a product really it notifies her like it's just free, you know people get notifications and all right and I don't know what the landscape's going to look like, I don't know if people just turn off all notifications just like when you get all these bloody emails from Amazon yeah you know it can end up hurting because nobody's responding unless it's very unique but uh yeah I I think that you can create a whole program in fact one of our clients they go on um every week they bring on one of their top influencers so we, we'll grab them an influencer it's in the pet niche by the way, Kev, uh so they go in, they talk so the person sitting with their dog and the other Person is the influencer talking about, you know, just dogs in general, the breed. It goes live and it goes live for about 15 to 20 minutes. People can ask and they also do a series of pre-records and we haven't done this yet, we're planning on it. I was going to talk to Carlos about it, but just getting a ton of influencers because we're going out there, we're grabbing these influencers that are giving us these videos and just uploading them now. It's Carlos always says it's better to be live, but if you can do that, great. And I'll give you another so this is a nugget for February, okay? For January, February, if you are not if you have not. Looked onto Google and went to shop loop or shop loop shop, check it out, um we talked about it briefly a couple episodes back but that is the ability for you as a brand to build your own shoppers what is it called the shopping network so you build your own your very own influencer network on Google. And they promote the heck out of it. So I don't know if you're using anything like that, but that's a really cool one. No, I'm not familiar with Loop Shop. I'm going to have to check that out. Yeah, it's a Google-based program. And, I mean, it's awesome. You can get influencers on it. They allow you to go out. It's very similar to Amazon Live. Hmm. Yeah. All right. So with the video, while we're speaking on the video, now. Well, on Amazon with the questions and answers section, you can actually answer with a video. So you can post. Someone says, you know, is this made in China or how does this product, how sharp are these knives or whatever? You can actually go on and answer that as a video response. I don't know if you've seen that or not. I haven't seen that. Yeah, that's right there in the question and answer section around the listing. When you hit reply or answer, there's an option there. Maybe it's in beta. It's on me. Maybe it's not for everybody, but it says reply by video or something to that effect, and you actually film a video or upload a video right there. I'll have to check that out. Yeah, that is cool. So you could actually get more videos on your listing just by having people ask questions. Uh, answer them and you know hold the product up and show it or whatever, um, that I think that has some potential there, um, as well, yeah, you know. If I'm thinking about this correctly, you can go and ask like it's not against terms of service to ask people to go and ask you questions about the features benefits whatever you want to showcase; they'll ask what a great way of like it's like a press release, you spin that content any way you want right. Yeah, it's a brand new feature. Oh, I got to check that out. I just saw it last week on there. And I have not seen on any competitors listings or anything anybody actually using it yet. But I'm sure some people are starting to, or maybe some people are too shy to do that. But I think there's some opportunity there. I'm sure there's probably a set of rules, you know, what you can and can't say. So they probably it probably gets I'm sure someone at Amazon takes a look at before it's approved. It's probably not instant, so they want to make sure that you're actually answering the question and not just doing some sort of ad. Yeah, but you can work those kinds of things in, though, for sure. Oh, that's very good. Hey, I – Kelsey! If anybody is interested, I know last time after Kevin got off, there was a ton of questions, but if anybody's interested in coming on live and asking us a question, um just let Kelsey know and we'll, we'll bring on a person uh to ask us a question live all right. So um, during I think it was in December, I got a bunch of panic messages saying, 'Oh, sellers are no longer allowed to respond to reviews Yeah, they took that away and now they're putting it back. You see the did you see that in in your seller dashboard? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, they took that away which was kind of odd. I mean, a lot of people to be honest, I mean it used to be more prominent, to where you could put a comment there and you know. Someone gave you a bad review. You could kind of just say, 'you know' answer them. I think some people might have abused it, started yelling at the customer or something like that. So that's maybe why they took it away. But you could politely say, put some sort of customer service thing in there. And I used to do that on all the bad reviews. And it was pretty prominent. And then they changed it where you actually don't see the comment as easily. You had to click a button and go to it. And so I think it lost some of its effectiveness. And then they took it away. And now I think they're putting it back. But I haven't, I don't know in what state they're putting it back in, if it's the hidden way again or if it's more prominent. I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean, if people were hiding and they didn't, if they were afraid to respond, you know, that was too bad because it was a way not only for. The way to get back to the person and just say 'hey', look at you know, if you don't like our soap scent, if you don't like Dead Sea mud, uh, you know, try this one, you know, just just contact us and we'll, we'll make sure that we take care of it, and it's not so much for that person they may never come back and see the comment but it's for everybody else that looks at that negative comment showing that you're actually trying to take care of the customer, yeah that's what I would use it a lot, someone was complaining about something, I would post. So sorry to hear that you had a problem or you didn't like it. We'd be more than happy to replace it or give you a full refund. Please contact us right away. We stand behind our products, that type of thing. I think it goes a long way when a customer, if they have any doubts, if you have mixed reviews and you start to see a lot of good reviews and then here's a few bad ones, it can create some doubt. You're like, I don't know, maybe I'm going to have the good experience or maybe I'm going to have this bad experience. Responding, it shows that you care and you pay attention. It's just like if I'm booking a hotel somewhere and I look at the comments for a hotel and I see a lot of good reviews and good pictures, but then I see some bad reviews saying the place was dirty or there were bugs everywhere or whatever. If I see that the management is responding to every single one of those, that actually gives me confidence that they actually pay attention. They're actually on top of their customer service and they actually care, and they'll make me more likely to choose that place. Right, yeah, and from what I've, I've talked to other people and I've talked to even people that have bought our product and just a sort of an exit survey, right. They bought our product now we want to find out, you know, how the service was, how they like their customer experience on the website, and anyways Amazon gets slipped in there, this is from our ecom site but we asked them, you know, how important are the reviews. And we've heard that when we see one stars, we don't really take that into consideration. And what a lot of people have said is it's your three stars and up that we're looking at. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? And it's also true. People are also doubtful if you have all five stars. Oh, yeah. If you don't have a negative, it actually makes people wonder as well. You don't want your first review when you're launching a new product to be negative. That can really hurt you. But over time, you want a balance there. I don't know what the exact balance is. There's probably some statistic on it. But you want probably like an 80-20, 80% good and 20% bad or something. And you don't want the really bad ones that just tear you a new hole. But if you don't have some bad ones, then people also doubt. Yeah. And take a look at the questions too because sometimes the questions that are asked aren't really a question; it's a statement about how horrible your product is, so it shouldn't be there. Yeah, I don't know if you've seen that; I don't know, it's maybe it's just my products. I think my products are pretty good. Uh, all right, so do we have any questions? Kelz, yeah. A couple coming in. We had one asking about Clubhouse, in your opinion on it. Clubhouse right now is, if you're not in Clubhouse, I think you're missing out. For those of you that don't know, Clubhouse is a it's been around almost a year or so. It's still in beta technically. So, you have to have an invitation to get on it. A little over a million people on it right now. But I think it's going to blow up into the hundreds of millions of people. It's the app is an audio-only app. So, there's no texting. There's no video. There's no comments. It's basically like an interactive podcast or it's almost like going to from what I'm in. And there are different rooms on there. So, every room is a different subject. So. people can start clubs; um, and each one is different so I was listening to one uh the other night that was it was a bunch of women, uh, I just stumbled across it as a bunch of women talking about how they uh how they get taken care of uh by men uh, and so it was basically a lot of gold diggers and like here's all the tricks you got to have this bag here's how to get this bag, you want this purse or you got to go to this this restaurant or this club, this is how you meet them, this is how you do everything; so there's rooms like that then there's rooms like on e-commerce where some of the biggest brands uh in our biggest names in the world in e-commerce are on there just sharing nuggets one after another. Totally for free, so you can go into one. It's all about Amazon or one, it's all about social media or all one, it's all about YouTube and people that are crushing it out there are just offering it's all like 'Ask me Anything' there's contests going on like Shark Tank-type of contests where Damon Johns is on there, you know, and people are pitching their their deals. There's It's hard to describe. It's AI-based, so what you see is based on who you follow. But right now, a lot of movers and shakers. Last night, I was on there, and all of a sudden, Howie Mandel shows up. And I think his publicist must have said, 'hey, you need to get on this platform.' Howie Mandel shows up, and the founder of Clubhouse actually comes on and introduces him. And so I'm listening to this whole thing, and Howie's like, 'oh, how's this work?' And this is kind of cool. I've got to play with this. And it's just – um, it's addictive, but I think it's the next hot social media thing, so from a marketing point of view, uh, I would, uh, with one of our brands, our eco-friendly brand, we're starting a club on there about around eco-friendly and dog-based stuff to start building an audience. Now is the time to do it or from just a point of view of someone that's uh in e-commerce, whether just to learn um, you know, last night, uh, there was someone that came on, uh, like I said, about with Amazon Live, you know, and it was talking stuff. I was taking notes, you know, learning stuff, and it's interactive. So the audience asks questions back, and you just never know who's going to show up. So if you're not in Clubhouse right now, I think you, there's been a big migration over the, about the last three weeks. I've seen a lot of like the Amazon community is kind of going over there. You have to have an invitation to get in. So, you got to know someone that's got an invitation to get in. You can earn additional invitations by, by speaking and stuff. But if you don't have an invitation or don't know anybody, there's a workaround that might work for you. I don't know if they've closed this or not, but if you don't, it's for the iPhone only. So you've got to have an iPad or an iPhone. So it doesn't work on Android right now. So you're going to have to have that. And there's a bunch of people out here that have gone and bought an iPhone just so they can get on. I know a guy, yeah. That's a podcast, isn't it? It is a great podcast. And so, there's a workaround where if you just download the app, set up your username and your account and connect to your contacts. If any of your contacts happen to be on there, then it will, I don't know exactly how it works. It seems to be random. It randomly pings one or more of them and says, 'Hey, Kevin just joined Clubhouse. Would you like to let him in?' And hopefully it pings a friend of yours or someone you know that will let you in. And so that's a workaround. My brother did that, and he said two of his contacts were already on Clubhouse, and one of them was me. One of them was an ex-girlfriend that he hadn't talked to in a year, and so it pinged her. So he's like, 'I guess she's probably not going to accept me in.' So I had to actually use one of my invites to let him in. But that's a workaround if you want to try that and see if that will work for you. But, yeah, I think anybody – Everybody needs to get on there now is the time before it's too big. You know what, Kevin? Yeah. Two weeks ago, maybe a little longer than that, Isabella, Paul Barron, and one other, oh, Rich Goldstein, were the only Amazon sellers on Clubhouse. And I had to buy my invite. I bought it for $40. So I just said, I went on to Reddit, and I bought an invite. So I paid $40. They're probably a lot cheaper now, but I ended up paying for it. Yeah, Paul is the one that told me about it right before Christmas. He's like, Kevin, you got to get in here, man. I was like, yeah, I read about that. Yeah. And I looked at it, and I started playing with it. It's addictive. And so you can spend a lot of time in there, but someone like Rich, you know, he went on right around Christmas time. So, you know, two, three weeks ago, and now he's already up to like 13,000 to 15,000 followers for his, his patent business and stuff. And he, yesterday he hosted an AMA on, on patents. You know, he had people coming in and asking all kinds of questions about trademarks and patents. And it was some really good information. I mean, and the thing is, you know, you can get on a podcast, podcasts are great. But it's usually edited or it's one person. You're interviewing one person. It's their story. It can be still great, but the beauty about Clubhouse is it's kind of like being in a conference, and you've got a panel on the stage of seven or eight people, and the questions are bouncing around, and you never know where it's going to go. It's not recorded, so there's a lot of FOMO right now on it. Yeah, I agree that this – It's going to explode. And the way that they're doing it, their marketing behind this, only allowing so many people and then introducing like higher-end people like Damon Johns or Howie Mandel. That's just going to get the buzz. They're going to create the buzz and it's going to explode. Yeah, it's going to explode for sure. Yeah, so probably a good time to just check it out get to know the ins and outs because it is a little bit different, you know, just the way that you have to log in, finding a room that's where I think is going to be tough because right now there's only so many rooms and you're, you know, it's easy to find something that you're interested interested in um but wait till this thing starts to have a hundred thousand or a million rooms at a time, you know, or clubs, it'll be a little bit tougher but it's so cool being at the beginning of a new social media platform like just think of this with clubhouse or with Facebook at the beginning, right? Yeah, just imagine the influence, you know, and the people. The more you speak by the way, and this is so cool because you know we always talk, everybody that comes on the podcast, especially Kevin, he gives his stuff away like he, he wants to share, I we share information; you go on to clubhouse and you start sharing information; you basically get paid back by you could get some invites but you get followers and it's these are real people who want to make sure that you know they follow you and they start liking. You and I don’t know, I haven't thought of the monetization yet. But you know what I found is that the people who follow me on Clubhouse instantly go over to Instagram and start following. Yeah, they follow there. And then there’s a lot of networking going on. I'm seeing a lot of people, connections made. I was on one yesterday just listening while I was doing something else. And it was the founder of Podcast Magazine. You know, there's podcast magazine, he was, he has a room, and so all these people like yourself that own podcasts were in there getting tips and tricks on how to market the podcast and monetize it and do all this kind of stuff, and this one fellow, I don't know who he was, comes in all of a sudden. The owner the podcast magazine guy just starts freaking out and he's like, 'Oh my god, uh, I'm just going to call him Johnny.' Johnny, you're here. We've been trying to get a hold of you for like six months. We want to do a story on you. It's amazing the stuff that you're doing with your podcast and the way you're doing this and that. Connect with me right now. Here's my email address. And that guy came on and he started delivering just value right there. It's just the networking and the people that are popping in. It's pretty incredible. And now's the time, like you said, it could, when it's, once it grows, it may lose, it may be a little bit more difficult, but it's based on, so if someone you follow is speaking, it notifies you. So like if, you know, Norm's up on the speaking panel, because there's like a, it's like a little panel of speakers. I'll get a notice, say, hey, Norm is speaking in this room about Amazon FBA or whatever. And then I can just click a little button and it takes me right to the room where I can listen. And so. In the algorithm, what you see is based on who you follow. You can set some interest, but then it kind of figures out what you like and it only shows you uh things that you that you would most likely be interested in, so it's pretty fascinating and highly recommended. Look who's here! Hi Kevin, hey how are you? There you saw the coffee mug, so uh yeah, so definitely like check out Clubhouse um, you just go to your iPhone app and download it. There it can be tricky like if you go and try to search it on Google, you'll find a Clubhouse but it's a project management tool. So sign up for that if you want. All right any other questions, Kelse, before we move on? Yeah, we got tons uh, so it's it's up to you how many questions you'd like um, but Jeffrey Anderson, when you first start your brand, How important is it to have an off-Amazon landing page website right away? I think it's critically important. I don't think that when you first start your brand, if Amazon is your main focus, you don't need to go out and start doing all kinds of ads to drive traffic to it necessarily. In the beginning, I would focus mostly on Amazon, but you do need a brand site. Whatever your brand is, you need that . com. Ideally . com, not . net or . co or ideally . com. And it could be a Shopify page. It could be just a one-page WordPress site. It could be whatever. But yeah, you do need something set up, at least something basic when you start. And it's not required, but it's going to help you a lot because a lot of people that don't know you, they might just Google you and see what comes up and see if you're legit. And then for some of the branding stuff on Amazon, you're going to need that. I like to add to that too. So if you've got a brand and you're doing a new product launch, what you want to make sure is pre-launch that you try to get, if you're doing your brand page, so maybe you have a landing page, you throw content on it. So, you know, get ready for the launch because if people are looking at your product, you're nobody. You're not even a micro-brand. You're way down there. You don't have any reviews. So people want. and need to have authority and trust before they make the sale so have your social media out there even if it's one platform if it's facebook or instagram concentrate on that and make sure that it's quality your website quality if you're doing press release let people know that there's going to be a product launch and then do your product launch and make sure you think about it a week or two or have stuff laid out a week or two before your product launch so people can get to the content to make sure that you're real all right next question okay next question let me see i think it was from rad yes uh can we put the video after the primary picture on the listing No, on your listing on Amazon, the video usually goes in the seventh spot. If you upload a video, it will usually go in the seventh spot. Amazon, as of right now, doesn't allow you to pick the location for it. I wonder if that's going to change. Okay. And from Barb, should I respond to good reviews too? I see some sellers do, but that seems like a lot of extra work. Yeah, that's, I mean. Yeah, you can. I mean, it does show that you care if you're responding to good reviews. You know, you can always give them a thank you. That shows that you appreciate that. And that might encourage somebody else to actually leave a good review for a public acknowledgement or something. So I don't think it hurts. It can be a lot of extra work. But I don't think it hurts. You know, one of the things that we have our VAs do. Is we work well if we're working with a brand, we'll ask the brand to give us all their positive and negative [what's] anything that can come up, and we create a whole list of canned responses. Now, the VA doesn't just press a button and it's a canned response, but what we do is tell them to customize it. And so, but they know that these are the positive, these are the negative, and it's very easy for them to at least not have to think too much and respond. And that cuts down a ton of time. Okay. Just give me a second. Alright. We just did that one. You got one job, Kels. One job. What would you say is your specialty in the Amazon process from finding and developing a product to the point it reaches a customer? What would you say it's your specialty? What our specialty is? Is that what the question is? I think just generally, what would you say is your specialty as an Amazon seller? I have several. I'm very good at finding products. I'm very good at the branding and marketing. If I had to pick one, it would be branding and marketing. Everything related under that umbrella. Knowing you, I would probably say one of the best things that you do is your competitive analysis and data research. Yeah, that's the marketing. That would be branding and marketing. Because I think by far, you are one of the top people that do that. You blow me away with the amount of research that you do. I do a little bit, yeah. A little bit. Okay, next from Tony. Can I have your predictions on the FBA business in general in 2021? I think there's no better time to be selling on Amazon than right now. I mean, like I say, you probably sound like a broken record on this. It was a lot easier five years ago to make money, and to just throw something up on Amazon. But the amount of eyeballs, the amount of traffic, and the amount of tools. Options, just knowing that Amazon is adding features that Amazon's adding that you can take advantage of is incredible. And to be able to just to be able to compete on an equal scale with the biggest brands in the world to some degree with that many eyeballs is unprecedented in the history of business. So as long as you have a good product and you're able to differentiate it, and you can find a little a little hole for you to squeeze into, uh, to launch that product, uh, and start building some demand, there's nothing better. And I think it's going to continue to grow um even after the uh pandemic subsides, um, it's going to continue to be stronger and stronger and stronger. And the beautiful thing about it is once you master one market, whether you're starting in the US or Europe or whatever, you can easily duplicate, uh, you easily go duplicate into other markets. You know, going to if you're starting the US going to Canada then going to Japan and going to Europe and going Australia, yeah there's some differences, some products might not trans translate well to other markets, some nuances. But you understand the system, you understand the way it works and it's um, it's like once you have a McDonald's franchise, um, you know, you can open them all over the world and it's kind of the same thing with Amazon, once you get a good product as long as it's relevant to that that section of the world, um, you can just expand, it's great, um, so that's my prediction, okay, uh, we had someone ask who is rich, I replied to them, rich Goldstein, um, would you like to add any more to that what exactly rich Goldstein does, yeah, rich is a someone that's well known in the Amazon space for he helps one of his specialties is helping e-commerce sellers. With patents and trademarks, I think it's Goldstein Law. It's up in the New Jersey area. But that's who that is. He's pretty active in the community. All right. From Andres. My FBA listing went out of stock today, and my FBM condition took over the listing. The FBA listing is still shown in the sub menu, though, and some sales have happened. Should I suppress this FBA SKU? No, I wouldn't suppress it. If it's so, the FBA listing is still showing. Yeah. And then maybe on the rights where it's like also available from these sellers. That may be because you have stuff on the way in. So maybe there's stock coming in in a week or something. So it's going to still show there or it may still show there as out of stock. But if someone wants to order it there and wait, let them wait. I don't see any harm. I would not suppress it. As long as it's inbound. Yeah. Yeah. That's the only way it'll show though, right, Kevin? The only way that I know of that it could still be showing up over there. You get something coming inbound or you get something in transfer. Maybe you're showing zero stock on Amazon, but there's an inter-warehouse transfer going on where it says 'come in transit' or 'reserved' or something. That could keep it alive as well. Okay, great. And we have one from Tony. Let's see. Hey, guys. How are you, Kevin? How have you been? Able to see any sizable increase on Walmart compared to Amazon? I'm not focusing much on Walmart anymore. I used to sell on there and gave it a try, but I'm not doing much on Walmart right now. I know some people that are saying it's picking up, and there's a few friends that are selling there saying they're seeing things a little bit better, but I'm not trying it. I've tried forever to get somebody from walmart . com to come on and never been lucky. What I have heard recently is all of a sudden I'm talking to a chair, but that's okay. Kelsey, perfect timing. Anyways, they are becoming more selective. They are suppressing clients or accounts. They're getting tougher, just like Amazon. Um, you know how they've evolved? Walmart's doing the same, so I want to get Walmart on so we can get the real picture and, you know, we'll continue to try to get a representative from Etsy, Walmart, eBay, all that you know, on the show. Thank you, Kevin, for being back on the chair, yes. Sorry about that; my dog was about to jump off of something and I had to like make sure she didn't jump. Little dogs, and I'll hurt her back. Oh, do you have the two dogs there? No, I just have one, one dog with me right now. Oh, and yes, for those watching, if you know anyone who needs some help right now with Amazon or e-commerce, You can take them in the comments And let them watch the episode too and they can maybe ask their question. So all you need to do to take is just put the at symbol and then the person's name and yeah, so Next, Marat, what do you recommend for product launches, SFB plus ManyChat or any other? For on Amazon stuff, you need to do PPC, heavy dose of PPC and SFB. And then you could, if you want to do some ManyChat, you can. I don't for a launch. Some people prefer to do that. There's other things like issuing press releases and some other little things that you can do. Press releases, in my experience, typically aren't going to drive much traffic for a launch. Correct. They're good for back-end stuff. They're good for backlinks. They're good for credibility. But a press release is not all of a sudden going to – I mean, there are exceptions to that, but it's not something you can count on. Really, the only things you can truly count on are doing search find buys. That's number one because there is a definitive number on that. If you say you want 100, these services will get you 100 buys. And then ads on Amazon are the two that I focus on. I've dabbled in many trying to send traffic from influencers and stuff. Most of that is not going to do anything for a launch. So I would not really focus too much on that. I mean, again, there are exceptions. Some people have good luck there. But in my experience, it's not worth the effort for most people. Focus on those two things on Amazon. You could also, I like working a ton with posts. I and you can actually see you'll never get the sales from the the reports but you can definitely if you're on your competitor's site especially if there's not a lot there's some sites now like if you're in the baby niche maybe you'll there's a lot of competition but being able to drive posts get it onto the competition get that you can see I got if you get 200 ,000 impressions we had that on one post it's never happened a second time but we had 200 ,000 impressions And we had, I think it was, I don't know how many thousand clicks. Well, if it takes five times for a person to click to get a sale, they're motivated. And so you will actually see the conversion rate go up from the time that you're launching. Let's say you're at 15%. You might be at 23% after your posts start to populate. The other thing, Kevin, you got to talk to Paul Barron. Okay. Chat agency. So, and I have to say, there's a complete transparency. I saw what he was doing and I got involved with him, but he has got a system now. He was on; I don't think he's ever gone through it with us though, but he's got a system where as long as you've got 40% built in for profit, you will launch profitably. Launch profitably. And the more you launch, the more profit you make while building influencers and brand ambassadors. So he got, over the period of a year, between $500 to $1 million worth of influencer and free traffic from these influencers that he's built using this patent-pending process that he came up with. Cool. So, yeah, I know you're going to shrug your head. Prove it. I know what you're saying right now. Research, analytics. I'll get it to you. I'm data driven, that's for sure. As my wife says, if you want to change my mind, show me the data. Yeah. Or convince me with a Kobe steak. That's right. That'll do it too. Okay, from Tony, do you think it's better to expand to another Amazon market like the EU, Australia, or to expand to sell to another platform like Walmart, Etsy, but on the same market? Hands down, I would recommend you expand to another Amazon market. If you're selling in the US, go to Canada first. Canada can add 5% to 15% to your bottom line, which is more than Walmart or someone else in most cases, and the effort's far less. So I would build out Amazon as much as you're comfortable with, especially at least at a bare minimum. If you're selling in the U. S., go to Canada. If you're nervous to go to Europe or something, you could hold that off if you want to, but at least go to Canada and see how that works for you and then decide if you want to go into Walmart or something else. A lot of these guys that are buying Amazon businesses now, if that's one of your goals, one of the things people always say, don't have all your eggs in one basket. There's some truth to that, but Amazon is the basket. Everybody else is not much. So you can put 10 times the effort into building out your Walmart store, your own Shopify store for far less return than if you took that same energy and put that into Amazon and expanding into another market. Yeah, if your Amazon account gets suspended, you're like, well, what am I doing? I'm dead. I have no sales. I need to have a Shopify as a backup. But honestly, if your Amazon account gets suspended, your Shopify site's not going to pay your bills. You're going to be stuck with a lot of inventory. You're going to be stuck with a lot of costs. Unless you can grow that to 20%, 30% of your business or more, it's not going to make much of a difference. And to do that takes a lot of efforts, a whole different business model, a whole different mindset. And there's nothing wrong with doing it at all. But in the beginning, if you're just starting, you really need to, in my opinion, focus on Amazon and maximizing. And like I said, these guys that are buying these businesses now, a lot of them don't care if you're off Amazon or not. If someone's buying you as a brand and you're doing an entire brand play, it will help. But the Thrasios and all these guys that are coming in, they only care about the Amazon side. I heard one of the guys say on one of the podcasts, if you have a Walmart store that's actually something that we're going to discount because we don't want to mess with it. We're not going to pay you extra for it. So that's my opinion. Some people will disagree with that and say you need to really expand and diversify, but I don't think so. Coming into Canada, you have to be careful about one thing. I learned the lesson. Wrong product. If you're not at a higher price point, don't bother because the um the freight costs will kill you or the uh pick-pack fees they're very expensive up here so if you have a 25-product and 25-product you're probably okay but um yeah just keep that in mind make sure you get all the fulfillment charges and if you are doing um any FBM if you've got a 3PL up here in Canada just make sure the freight charges are crazy you know what, Kevin I sent out a bar of soap the other day, okay, in Ontario so I live in Toronto, okay, this place was about six to eight hours away one bar of soap cost me 23 bucks wow that's about what about 15 American $ 15 us no it's about a buck 50 just joking, okay It's crazy. It really is. But anyways, yeah, just have the right price point. The higher price point, the better in Canada. Yeah, I agree with that. You do have to build in that margin there. There is a program, too, where you can actually Amazon will do cross-border for you. You can set up and you can just store it in the U. S. And if you want to just dabble in and test it, Amazon will ship it across for you for an extra fee and handle that. Yeah. How do they set that up? They just go into settings and set up the global. Yes, the global shipping setting and settings. And then you answer some questions and what products you want to do and the price points and stuff. And then it's it's pretty straightforward. Yeah. OK, next. Kev, what's your cutoff? I'm good right now. OK. Good, okay, uh, so myself has a question. Hi guys, would you still push PPC hard if your niche was underperforming due to COVID? Uh, sales drop is circa 70 percent. No, if you're if you're affected by covet, if you're like in the travel industry or one of the ones that was affected by COVID, I'd be cautious about what I'm doing. Um, I mean, on one side, you could say, well, if you think things are going to rebound, if you think people are going to start traveling again, and you're selling, I don't know, luggage or passport protectors or something, and you think it's going to rebound again, you could get positioning now if you want to. I mean, maybe now is actually a good time where people have backed off on advertising passport protectors and travel stuff where you might be able to go in. And instead of having to launch and give away 100, you might be able to launch and get positioning on page one for keywords by doing only 10 units because the sales across the board are down. And then just sit and wait and hope to ride the wave once it picks back up. That could be a possible strategy for some people that if you're in that niche, just don't overspend because you don't know what's really going to happen. And it could be throwing good money after bad. And it's great to see Sylvia on the podcast, by the way. You know, we both know Sylvia and we know her products. Just a question. I would have thought that your products, your category would have taken off. It's something that people would use. Being locked up is kind of like the spa experience. So people are going to, they want that type of spa-like experience. I'm not going to mention the brand or anything like that, but I would have thought that PPC would have been the least of your worries or drops in sales. I thought you would have gone through the roof. Anyways, if you do respond, Sylvia, it'd be interesting to hear back. Okay. And a couple of people were mentioning NARF, the North American. We just talked about the global settings there we can ship. OK, let's see, David, I've been selling on Amazon since June and I'm learning so much about this business, but find I'm getting overwhelmed by the amount of info. Can you recommend a way to balance all the strategies and info out? Yeah, there can be an overwhelming amount of people. There's a lot of podcasts, a lot of Facebook groups, a lot of blogs, a lot of software companies. You just got to pick a couple that resonate with you and stick with them. I try to keep up with a lot of it, and it becomes too much for me. Just to keep my hand on it with the emails that I'm getting from all the different software companies, and all the different things, and all the different ways you can all the different little shiny objects that you can do to what you need to do. Amazon Live, oh no, you need to do Amazon Post. Oh, you know, you need to do ManyChat. Oh, no, you need to do this! Just pick a couple that that that and focus on those, and don't worry about all the others at least right now. And if what the one ones that you pick and focus on, and it's not working for you, move on to you know, one of the other ones, and see if that works for you. But yeah, I agree with you. It can get overwhelming and running an Amazon business, a lot of these webinars and stuff paint it to be this little picture of it's super easy and all you got to do is pick a product, put it on Amazon, go sit on the beach and listen to your phone ding every time a sale is made. It's not true in most cases. I mean, running an Amazon business, there's a lot of moving parts and you got to know a lot of different things. I mean, can you put one on autopilot? It depends on your team. It's going to require teams or partners or something to be able to do that. Don't let it overwhelm you, uh just keep your head down, keep learning and, uh, um stick with it okay Simon, uh can you give a quick overview of your SFB strategy please yeah so I'll take a look at like it depends on the product but like on we just launched some products in December and so because I don't have a review it's a very competitive product so um this would be you can go much harder if you have a non-competitive product but since it's a very competitive product it's in the PPE space to be um we actually instead of targeting um the top uh keywords uh the most searched for keywords uh and we went for the mid-range so we went for keywords that are more in the in the mid-range level of search volume and we're targeting Those with a search find buy and that way we can try to get a little bit of rank. We don't have to give away as much. I have some tools like I use a tool from TryOn Turku, um, it's a private uh he has a private Mastermind group and he has some some custom tools that that take the brand analytics data and actually do some complicated math formulas where you can actually figure out exactly how many uh sales are made per keyword. Um, so I can I can use his data, his tool. It's not a public tool, but it will say, this is the estimate: you know, this keyword uh last month it's estimated it sold uh, you know, 127 sales came off of this keyword last month. So, then I'll divide that uh by by 30 so that means it's basically around four per day uh give or take and so if I'm going to do a launch for 10 a search find buy for 10 days I need to do about 40 units on that particular keyword So I'll say okay 40 units We've got to do search find buys four per day I usually vary that So if it's 40 I don't want it to be four per day for 10 days I'll say do five then three then six then two Make it look a little bit more not so steady because that can look a little suspicious And then I'll turn on ads on Amazon And the ACoS is going to be through the roof a little bit because you don't have reviews. You don't have any momentum yet. And I'll even tell the search find buy people, click on the ads. You know if you they see the ad go ahead and click it. I'll pay the money because that tells the advertising algorithm that, hey, these ads are working; we need to show these ads more, so it kind of creates this flywheel. Once we get ranked on that, you know, at the same time I'm doing a binary I turn on buying reviews and I turn on the early review program. And so after about a month or so, hopefully, you're starting to get some actually real reviews; you get up to 15-20 reviews. And then I come back and do another search, find buy uh, and this time target the the bigger keywords now that I have some good reviews and I'm going to convert a little bit better, and the search find buy will get me organically ranked, and the chances of sticking it are better; so that's kind of the process in a nutshell. Hey, Brianna. Is it better to launch with your target price and offer a coupon for a discount or launch with a lower price and then start increasing it? That's something you'd have to test. It's probably better to start with a lower price and then raise it than to start with a higher price and offer a QCon. And the reason I would say that is, a lot of people don't use the coupon. They don't recognize the coupons there or they don't see it. It's amazing how many people actually, even with a little orange, you know, clip it. I miss it a lot of times when I'm ordering something. And so I would probably start at the lower price and go up. But I mean, it's something you could test, but that's what I would do. I think that the coupon stuff is more, it's typically going to work better once you're established. Okay. Oleg, I have left 300 more units of my product to sell and I'm planning to sell them out and I'll no longer sell once they're gone. Should I remove all the content and pictures before deleting it? Usually deleting it will take care of that. I mean, just deleting them off your listing is not going to delete them off the Amazon servers. I mean, they're still out there. So if it makes you feel more comfortable, do that. But I don't know that that's really necessary. I'm just deleting the listing. We'll usually take care of that if you're worried about someone using technically Amazon-Amazon Terms of service they own your pictures and content they can they can continue using in the future if they want to three marketplace. Yeah, and in terms of time, are you still okay Kevin? Yeah. Okay, great. This is from Dr. Cause. Hey, Kevin, is populating many videos on a listing a good idea to saturate bottom video bar so competitors don't infiltrate? Yeah, I do that. On some of our PPE stuff, I think I have like four or five videos. I wouldn't go crazy spending a lot of money getting all these videos made to do that, but if you have the content or you can do it easily with slideshow videos of your pictures or something like that, Yeah, I think that would be, it's a good defensive measure. I mean, is it going to make a huge difference at the end of the day? Probably not a huge difference, but it's a good defensive measure for sure. I got a, you like to add to that. So one of the things we do is couple of different things. So we'll hire like Rob Burns. He'll just do this video and we'll cut it up and it'll be 30-second or 31-minute spots on how to. Best video, it looks like they're actually tutorials or draws your attention because the thumbnails are all slightly different but they all know it's your brand. The other thing that we do is that we'll create a comparison so we don't ram anybody but we'll bring in a few different products, we'll talk about the products and we'll just have a you know bully stick comparison by the way Kevin Mine always wins of course, just you know, just thinking about it anyway. Uh, you do that and then you can put because you're talking about the other the other brands too, you pop it into theirs, you know, you're always talking about the pros and the cons but yours always squeaks out it's just another way of you know people spinning content and you win. But I really do love the ability to go and see everything consistent because what does that tell you? It's consistent with the brand. And it's not expensive if you plan out and script it properly. That's a good point, okay from you. If a product is brand registered in the US, when launching the same brand in the UK, do you need to brand register this product in the UK? You should be able to use your brand registry from the U. S. and transfer that over, or at least your trademark and transfer that over. From a legal point of view, you probably want to get a trademark in the U. K. if you have any kind of actual legal issues or infringement issues. But from an Amazon brand registry point of view, once you're brand registered in one, you can pretty quickly get brand registered in the rest. Okay. From Anna. Hi, Kevin. Thank you for your honest responses. I have a question. I found a product in a niche that is a high sale price between $100 to $150 and a landing cost around $25. The problem is on the first page, there are two brands with 10 listings. Is it wise to enter and hope to take from those brands? That's going to be difficult. If two brands, so I think you're saying two brands have 10 of the listings on page one. That means they're dominating it. So is there a spot where you can squeeze in? Perhaps. As long as you're completely differentiated, as long as you're fixing a problem that people are complaining about with those two, you might be able to. But that's a pretty dominant. It's tough. That's going to be tough. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I'd have to know a little bit more and have to look at that specific case study. But, yeah, that could be a little bit tough. I mean, you have a good margin there, $25 and being able to sell it for $100 to $150. That's good, but it might be a little bit tough. Now, in that case, though, you might want to – we have products that we sell for the most part off Shopify. So, you know, we've talked about Amazon, but when you have something that big, you could probably – I don't know. I don’t know the niche; I don’t know the sales volume, but you could probably drive some pretty decent traffic over to a Shopify store. I know Amazon’s the spot, but if it's dominated by one or two brands, you could try it there, but you might want to try it outside of Amazon and drive it to Shopify or you know put it on a different platform altogether. You'll miss out on the Amazon sales, but I don’t think you’ll get much unless you really spend some money, Okay. Man, there’s a name from the past all the way from South Africa. Oh, nice. My product needs Amazon compliance approval. The product doesn’t have all the certification in place and I’ve submitted it all, but Amazon has now come back four times with the directions for reasons I do not agree. Is there some email where I can actually communicate with someone to clarify and solve the perceived issue? Yeah, that's a tough one. Amazon is tightening it up more and more and more for sellers' ability to be able to speak with stuff. You used to be able to use the tax option and send something to the tax thing and bypass some of their filters. And now even I tried that the other day and it came back and the AI is reading it. So unfortunately, unless you have an account rep at Amazon, it's going to be difficult. The only thing is you can just keep trying. Yeah. The only thing is to keep trying. I don't have a solution for you unless you have an account rep. I mean, that's where I went when we've had issues with some of our stuff, I have an account rep and they're able to accelerate or prioritize stuff or move stuff along a little bit. But even some of their, over the last six months, they've taken away some of their ability to do things. And the problem is not that Amazon doesn't care, doesn't want to. It's just become such a behemoth, and it's just so big. There's just only so many people and so much they can do. So that's why they're trying to automate as much as possible. But I know that sucks, man, but I don't have a great, like, here's a magic email address presenter for you. But I know Heinrich. He's got great sales volume. I don't know in these products. You might want to reach out to a person like Chris McCabe, maybe he could help you out; you're going to pay, but you know, we'll give it a shot, it's worth it if it is, yeah, that would be my suggestions; maybe one of these guys that deals with account suspensions and things like that, maybe they have a so they can get in front of somebody um because probably I mean, you're all all you need is to get in front of the right person, and then it'll It'll go. But I can tell you from experience that we've done that with some of our PPE because PPE is a restricted product. And so if you just go and throw a, let's say, a hand sanitizer up on Amazon, you might last for a little while. But the algorithm comes and says, oh, you're selling a restricted product and it suspends you. And then you got to go through this approval process. And, you know, for our PPE stuff, we've had a problem with some of our products where something similar has happened. It's gotten restricted by the algorithm, even though we were approved for the COVID store, we've been approved by Amazon Legal. We have a whole chain of documents from inside Amazon, not from Seller Central, but from like account reps and high ups that everything we're doing is okay. The algorithm still takes us down with regularity. And I'm like, can't they just flip a switch that says we're okay and quit messing with us? And he's like, no, there's no way to do it. It's just the way the system is built. Let's say that you're in wholesale. So let's get out of the seller private label if you're selling PPE and wholesale, and you're I don't know tied or whatever you have to have approval to sell that in that category, but you don't need to add any certification because the wholesaler or sorry the product itself the company who manufactured would have already had to add the certification is that correct? I don't know about that because they don't have an account and they're selling. Yeah, there's a lot of gray issues around that. Like, well, why can these guys do it? And we can't because we're doing the same thing. That would be tough. Yeah, it's because I don't think Ty, you know, Procter & Gamble, I think owns Ty. I don't know. Maybe they do, but I don't think Procter & Gamble has an Amazon seller account. Uh, where they've gone through the approvals for all that, some of that just may be assumed or grandfathered in, you know these big brands. Uh, Amazon's oh, they're okay, um, they're they're a big brand, they're everywhere, I don't know exactly how that works but yeah there's there's some logic there that doesn't flow okay kills all right. Um, let's see from Murat as a non-US resident how can we get utility bill for an LLC for Amazon seller verification? Oh just write Kevin just yeah he'll give you his utility bill um they used to I don't know if they're still doing this uh they used to take uh like a cell phone bill as a utility bill um but like so if you need an LL uh if you need a US-based utility bill um that's going to be a little bit difficult, but usually the if you're in one of the approved countries I mean if you're um you should be able to give A proof of who you are with uh a local utility bill, uh, and if you don't have, if you know, if you're living with some roommates and you don't have a uh utilities in your name the energy the electricity or the water or whatever it's not in your name but you probably have a cell phone in your name that in the past that's worked for people um that's um that's how I would do it. Did I ever tell you how I had to get approval in Japan? No. So I tried to get in there. So I had somebody actually who worked at Google, was my rep, who was helping me sell my products in Japan. So anyways, the guy was great. Got denied, denied, denied, denied. Anyways, at the end of the day, I am not kidding you. I'll, I'll show you the receipt he had to go out; he had Amazon told him to buy a toothbrush or toothpaste and send the receipt, he had to buy something; he went to the store showing that he was local to get approval as soon as we sent it in, we got approval. Yeah, that's Japan; you have to have a local agent, that's a different yeah, that's correct; that's the rules where you, you have to have a local, a local agent um but like On that utility bill one, there's probably a way to get a utility bill in the U. S., but I'd have to think about that one, how you would gamify that one. White hat, Kevin. All right, we're winding down. We just have a few more coming in and so this one's from Jim: 'We're having horrible issues with Amazon switching our product type attribute. We have some parent listings with five to six different product types, and it's causing havoc with variations. Uh, then when we try to fix we get uh catalog conflict errors versus uh files... f-files! Any ideas? Um, I don't have any ideas on that one. Um, We've been seeing that too. I was talking to Vandana, who kind of is my right arm when it comes to listing flat files. And we saw this just the other day, the exact same thing.' And we've been trying to see what we could do to fix that. I don't have an answer for that. I'm sorry. But yeah, I've seen it. It's happening right now. The other thing that really sucks is the virtual bundles. So, we had it set up where we had taken products and created these virtual bundles, everything with a virtual bundle right now is standalone, have you seen that? Um, with the virtual bundle standalone, yeah, yeah, yeah, uh-huh, yeah. So that kind of sucks because you know if I want to sell a seat cushion and a lumbar cushion it's a standalone product rather than tucking it under as a variation, yeah, yeah, it has to be FBA too for all those virtual bundles too, you can't do it with FDM, yeah, and you get clocked with individual fees as if you sold the products individually, okay, kills. Yeah, we're getting there, Kelsey, where'd you go? He's got one job, one one one bloody job, okay. How about we just read the question which is really bad because I have horrible eyesight? Okay, Oleg, what is the best way to change your address in Seller Central if you are moving to another rental place? First, I would not use your personal address. I would get a UPS store or something or a virtual address. There's virtual mailboxes you can get in Miami or New York or L. A. and stuff, and just have. Have that as your address. That way, if you do move, it stays the same. And, you know, if you need to ship stuff to that address, you might need something more local, but you can use like a UPS store for that. I would not be putting your personal house or apartment or something on Amazon. Okay. And let's see. Oh, Simon, did I say Amazon support sucks? Yeah. Okay. I'm back. So we have the question, does Amazon FBA still the best opportunity for the newbies in 2021? Yeah, we kind of answered that question earlier. Yeah. It is. It is. Yeah. Okay. And I think that's it for the questions. Yeah. Jim had a comment though. He says we do a ton of virtual bundles FBM. Okay. Yeah, because when I tried to set them up, it was only showing me the FBA products as eligible. That's interesting. I'll have to go take a look at that because I would like to do them FBM for sure. Have you done that? Have you done any FBM virtual? All I've done, like when I do FBM, is when I set up three-pack, five-pack, and I convert those. So I'll do a manual. A manual fulfillment order and get them to pick five of the single packs that are FBA so it is it shows FBm but I'll get them to pick it now That's not virtual bundles by the way, but no, I haven't sent any virtual bundles. FBm, I'm gonna have to go look at that because that's what last week and it was only showing me options for FBA items, but um, that's interesting Yeah, that's interesting Yeah. Jass is asking if there's any backlog on product savants He submitted an application prior to December and hasn't heard back. You submitted an application? I don't know what that means Did you buy something or did you submit it to get into the queue The best thing to do on that, yeah, there is more demand than supply on product savants. Uh, so but you might just send an email over there uh to uh the email addresses or the contact there and uh, Melissa or Steve or someone will get back to you. I don't handle the uh all all that I just I'm on the uh finding the product side uh, but they can tell you exactly what's what's happening or where you're at on everything. And again, we can go as long as you want, Kevin. How about we take what's here right now? I think there's three or four questions, and then we'll cut it off after that. Okay. All right. So, Simon, do you have a view on how the new administration will impact Amazon's behavior over the next four years? Yeah, it's going to be interesting to see. I don't know about their behavior, but I think there's chances of Amazon getting split up. I think they may have to spin off some of their different divisions. So the Amazon, as we know it, the product side might be one thing, and then they'll have to split into a separate company. The hosting, Amazon Web Services might have to split off into its own little company or something along those lines. But I don't think you're going to see great impact as an Amazon seller on what we're doing with it. You know, people are always saying it's becoming a manipulator. It's too big. It's too controlling. But, you know, people said the same thing when Walmart started expanding and picking off small businesses. You just have to adapt. And in today's world with you know the move towards e-commerce especially accelerated by the pandemic I don't see it I don't see that changing anytime soon. Okay and two more questions left Vernon if I want to launch multiple brands should I open different accounts with different addresses or should I have all under my old account You can do it either way Some people it depends on your goals I mean it's easier down the road if you're going to sell one of these brands that if it's in its own account it's separate accounting You know you have separate books separate everything So if that's your goal it's easier. Just be careful, you know, when you have multiple accounts, Amazon can't like that. And you're allowed to do it as long as it's completely different tax ID, completely different companies, completely different product lines. But just don't get into any gray areas there. Or you could put them all. I've done it both ways. I mean, like right now I have my original account that I started with FBA has five or six brands in it. And then I have other brands with other partners. It's a completely separate account. So I log into like five or six different Amazon seller accounts almost every day. And some of them just have one single brand in it. And then, like I said, my original has like five different brands in it. So either way is fine. It's more of an accounting type of issue than anything else. Yeah, Joe Valli was on Wednesday. And he was, he gets really into uh, he digs into that uh, he recommends the same thing if your exit strategy is to sell; keep them separate um, because you don't want your books or your finances or they'll just get all mixed up; it's so much easier if you have separate books but if you have no idea or if you're just, you know trying this out, yeah, throw a, I'm the same way as you, Kevin. But if I know something is, you know, high sales volume, this thing's going to rock. I have an 18 to 24 month period and I know I'm going to sell this thing. I'll typically create a new company. Okay. And our last question for today. Again, if you guys have a question that wasn't answered, just go over to the Facebook group and you can post it there and we will have someone from the community answer them. But our last question from Dr. Kaz, hey, Kevin, any advantages in uploading videos to listings as a buyer? As a buyer for your own, for someone else's products are, I mean, videos on reviews are actually can help. So if you can get people who upload a video when they write a review, that's definitely helpful. Buyers are able to upload videos into the answer question. Spot that we talked about earlier the and they also can upload videos to video shorts that they if they know how to do it I Don't see any disadvantage to it unless they're disparaging you. Okay, and I guess we'll start winding down now, so I think Kevin knows awesome. You answered quite a bit. No, that's great, Kev. Like, like usual, thanks a lot for, you know, coming on this month again and just, you know, just dropping nuggets. You know what? We're going to change that word this year. I have always hated the word 'dropping a nugget' or whatever. We'll change that for the next show. Alright. Something very, very Canadian. Yeah, very Canadian; it will do that if you just stick around for a sec, um, after the show uh I gotta talk to you about a couple things but anyways thank you sir, I appreciate you coming on for an hour and a half again all right everybody so thanks, uh, again for, uh, being on the podcast listening to the podcast Kevin's amazing like usual um Kelsey you got anything to say? Yes. So if I know we got a bunch of new people watching today. So if you're new to here, you can just go over to the Facebook group. It's Lunch with Norm, Amazon, FBA and e-commerce collective. That's where I would say the majority of people watch from. And it's a place where you can ask your own questions, give your advice, any tips and kind of learn a bit more about the people that are watching. And actually, we have a special Beard Nation episode on Friday featuring five of our Beard Nation guests. That'll be fun. So they're going to be part of the show. We're going to kind of do like a five-interview-style-episode. So each member gets 10 minutes to talk, having a little conversation talking about a bit about their business. So it's going to be a lot of fun. I'm pretty excited about it. And I think you guys will recognize all of the users too. We got a good group. So, yes, thank you guys. We also have a Patreon as well that we just started. So, if you guys want to buy us a cup of coffee, there's an option to do that. And we've got some great ideas on some really cool content we'll be putting in there. I think we're going to call it. Kelsey, deep inside the sandwich and it's gonna be just basically a 15 to 20 minute interview on people, uh interesting people, a day-to-day what they do as ecom entrepreneurs. I got to talk to Kevin about that right after this, but you know it's so interesting to see what the daily routines are, you know how do you, you know when you wake up, what do you do, what do you do in the evening and uh anyways we're gonna be providing that to you um as an extra bonus on Patreon so that would be like gated uh gated content so you'd have to um either I'm not sure which two-tier we put it in but uh it's just a little something extra for those people that do donate um and yeah let's see our AirPod contest too if you're a US resident or if you have a US address that'll work too um but we're doing that, the giveaway goes till Thursday And it's going to be announced. The winner is going to be announced on the Friday during our fan episode too. So we got lots of crazy things happening. We're even thinking about doing a monthly contest in our Facebook group. But yeah, so lots of stuff. So thank you guys again for watching. I think we had our highest watched episode today too. 90 episodes in and it did not suck. Thank you, Simon. Thank you so much, Simon. Oh, alright, guys. So tune in Monday. We're going to be talking to this is, this is going to be an interesting one. Truist Ryan McKenzie, and he's going to be talking to us about how he went from a hundred or zero to a hundred thousand paid and active subscribers in less than 20 months. So just building up, you know, a following to get, we gotta talk to him about that. Anyways, that'll be Monday. And again, our fan episodes on Friday, so I'm looking forward to it. So tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Friday, noon Eastern Standard Time. Thank you so much for being part of the community and enjoy the rest of your day.