Selling on Amazon FBA in 2022? Kevin King Talks Prime Day 2022, Inventory, ToS & More! Ep. 294

Selling on Amazon FBA in 2022? Kevin King Talks Prime Day 2022, Inventory, ToS & More! Ep. 294 00:00:01 Hey everyone, it's Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy here, and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the Amazon FBA and e-commerce podcast. In today's episode, I'm going to be talking shop to my buddy Kevin King about Amazon FBA and any e-commerce questions that come up. So as I mentioned, we're going to be talking about news, tips, updates, anything that We go down any rabbit hole. You know, when Kevin's on, we just talk about anything. Anyways, thank you for tuning in to the Lunch with Norm podcast, the Amazon FBA and e-commerce podcast. 00:00:49 As mentioned today, we're going to be talking a talking shop about Amazon FBA and our guest mentor sellers collectively doing over half a billion US dollars per year on Amazon, amazon. com in the Freedom Ticket and in the Helium 10 Elite Masterminds. He is also recognized for his incredible Billion Dollar Seller Summit and is a regular on this podcast. And I'm talking about Kevin King. So we'll be getting to him in a second. But first, a message from our sponsor. A big thank you to our sponsor, Startup Club, the largest club on Clubhouse with over 790,000 members and growing. They're one of the world's largest communities supporting the startup ecosystem from founders to those wishing to work for a startup and everything in between. You can find them at www. 00:01:47 startup. club for blogs, recordings, and a calendar of upcoming shows and on the Clubhouse app. Just search Startup Club for daily shows 24-7. You can also now listen to their show, the Serial Entrepreneur Club podcast on Apple and Spotify too. Stop by to connect, learn, and grow together. All right, where is, not the man, the boy. The boy, the myth. Yeah, that's it. You're there. Here I am. Hello. The boy, the myth, the blunder. Got a nice ring to it. I thought so. I'll get a t-shirt for you on your birthday. Perfect. Oh, I get a present this year? Well, yeah, you do. Not just a slap across the head. It's a good year. Yeah, blow out your cupcake. Your candle. Oh boy. All right. Well, welcome everyone. Welcome DK, Kim and Rad. 00:02:49 It's nice to see you guys. Happy Friday. Welcome to today's show. This is one of the great episodes of Kevin King. He's been on, I think, gotta be at least double digits. Yeah. Yeah, so many. Anyways, it's always great to have Kevin on. We're going to be talking shop with him, asking any Amazon FBA e-commerce questions. So if you do have questions, feel free to put them over into the comment section. And don't forget to smash those like buttons. Give us a thumbs up. You YouTubers out there, if you could hit that subscribe button down below and ring that bell. Make sure you get all those notifications when we do go live. Because sometimes we like to spring it on you and maybe go live out of nowhere. 00:03:34 So if you want to hit that button, that'd be great. Also, let me see if you are not part of our community; make sure you join that-the Lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and e-commerce collective. That's where all the fun stuff happens. We asked trivia, we got polls, questions-you can ask your questions about selling on Amazon and econ. It's a great place to meet everyone, the people that you see in the comments, the regulars here, they're pretty much all part of the community there, and Yeah, it's a great place to meet some other sellers, and you can just relate and have some fun. And I think that's about it. Okay. All right. Like Kelsey said, if you have any questions or comments, just throw them over into the comment area. 00:04:17 We usually get pretty loaded with questions when Kevin's on. So if you're thinking of anything, thinking of anything about your Amazon, off Amazon, anything you can think about, just throw them in the comment section. So sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee, enjoy this episode, and welcome Mr. King. Hold on, man. I'm typing my comments here to ask you. Okay, that's good. At least you listened. What's up, Norm? Good to see you, man. Me too. Long time no see. Did you today? Did you? Is this official? Oh, my gosh. How could you do that? My wife was drinking out of it the other day. It's in the dishwasher. She did some green tea or something. I'm like, I can't. You're making excuses. I wash that really good because I don't do that green juice. 00:05:08 Not green tea. Green juice. I'll send you a second one. There you go. So what's up with Mr. King lately? Oh, man. Working like a chicken with its head cut off. Chicken with its head cut off. Running around like crazy. You got a lot going on, don't you? I do. I have a lot going on. Wow. So one thing I want to mention, and we'll talk about it at the end as well, BDSS is coming up in August. It is. I don't know if you have a link or if you have anything that you can provide to the podcast. We didn't talk about this beforehand. But if you do have a link or just go over to Billion Dollar Seller Summit, if you want to go to one of the best events there is out there for Amazon sellers and probably one of the higher level ones. 00:05:58 Oh, what does Kevin have in his hand? Billion dollars. I sent one of these to you, Norm. It probably hasn't made its way to the Great White North yet. But you should be getting one of these billion-dollar bills. So I can say I'm a billionaire. That's right. I think Howard Tye just posted he's a billionaire now. It's real money. It's from Zimbabwe. Howard posted, because I sent these out as a little promotional thing for a billionaire seller summit to all the past attendees and stuff. So you should be getting one soon. But he got one. He posted it last night. It's someone actually from Zimbabwe. I guess follows him and posted and said, hey, that's like our currency, our old currency. He's like, what will it buy me? 00:06:43 And he's like, not much now. Not even a loaf of bread. Sounds like the Canadian dollar. Alright. So, we got a bunch of listeners on. Like I said earlier, just make sure that you throw over some questions because we will be getting a lot. Where do you want to start? Uh, you want to get into what's currently happening on Amazon any changes um I don't sure we can do whatever okay or we could talk about Prime Day um sure um yeah Prime Day's coming up and uh they haven't announced the date yet but everybody's speculating July right Yeah, I think we know it's in July, but they've got a bunch of different cutoff dates. If you want to put any deals in or anything like that, your inventory cutoff, I forget what they said it was. 00:07:37 Inventory cutoff was June something, wasn't it? Yeah, to be honest with you, you know what? I've been selling on Amazon as FBA since 2015. I participated in one Prime Day, and I think that was the 2016 one. Ever since then, I don't do nothing. I don't do anything for it because it's just, you know, a lot of people, you know, they build a whole marketing plan around and do a whole thing and they see big spikes. But for me, you know, there's too much risk in it for me because you never know what's, you know, even if you get a deal, you don't know if those deals are going to go. You can send in, you know, 50,000 extra units and you may blast through them all. 00:08:15 And, you know, you have a really good day. But on the same token, you may sell 200 of them. Uh, it's all so I've always been, I have no control over what happens even if I have promotions running, Prime Day, and so I just ride the coattails, you know. The traffic is up with everybody, um, and so across the board, you should see it depending on what you're selling, and you should see a big, decent spike, just because so many more people are there buying, and that's basically all I do, I don't do any other strategy, uh, you know. I know a lot of people prepare for like three months for this and it's a big deal. But for me, to be honest, Prime Day is no big deal. 00:08:52 It's a marketing gimmick. And I do better during the holidays. Every day is a Prime Day for me from late November to mid to late December. And almost all those days are just as good as any kind of Prime Day effort I could do. So I'm like, what's the point of spending all this time to make an extra five or ten grand? It's just not worth it. That's my philosophy. Other people are going to totally disagree with me and say I'm a fool. But that's just my philosophy on it. Yeah, it's interesting because Tim, Tim Jordan, a friend of ours, he says exactly the same thing. And I go right along those lines as well. People are there ready to buy. And you can keep, and Tim's adamant about that. 00:09:44 He won't budge on a price at all. He'll just keep the same price. Let it roll out. People will come and buy the product. You'll see a little bit of a bump during the day. But for everybody, especially if you're new, this is a time where Amazon makes a ton of money. And matter of fact, the stat, I believe, was last year's Prime Day. The winner in last year's Prime Day was Amazon. Their products made, they had a bump of 68%. Now, if I go back and I take a look or talk to other Amazon sellers, I would believe the majority of them did not. Or if they did, they had to drop their pants. So a lot of people make the mistake in over bidding or bidding throughout the day. 00:10:31 Our philosophy is really simple. We start out with a very, very low bid up to a mid-tier bid. And then at the end of the day, towards the end of the day, we're hoping our Our competition has sold out, so we'll go back up to a regular bid. And then that way, we're making money. We're not dropping our price. And one of the things that we're doing is we do a pre-prime date. So we started doing this a few years ago where a couple of weeks beforehand, we'd lead our list. So if you're gathering your list over on your e-com site, you send out a mailer to them and just saying 'we're doing a pre-prime date', pre-launch Prime Day, where we're giving away and you can say even a better price. 00:11:17 And that way you can get some sales without having to get into the PPC and driving your profit down. But you can get a lot of sales that way just on pre. So that's something that we do. And I don't know if you do anything outside of that as well, any form of outside marketing to drive traffic. Not for Prime Day, no. I mean, that's a good idea, what you just said, especially if you've got lightning deals or something. Priming the pump, no pun intended there, before the lightning deals go can actually help you boost your ranking on your lightning deal from the dredges to a reasonable top of page one, two, three, four of the lightning deals or something. That can definitely help. And if that's what your strategy is, I would recommend you do. 00:12:04 But I don't do any of that stuff. I mean, people do like deals. People do like sales around events. That's why there's always a President's Day sale. This weekend in the U. S., there's Memorial Day sales going on everywhere. Those marketing around events, you know, Easter sales, is the psychology of humans. That makes sense. But Prime Day is just another one of those events. And for me, you know, in my other business, when I was going direct-to-consumer a lot, I would run these sales. But then people just wait for the sales. yeah and so you can depends on you know apple you're never going to see running uh uh apple day sales uh if they do it's some ridiculously small amount five percent discount apple never discounts their stuff um and that's that's the branding so it depends on what your branding is but if you condition people to always buy that there's a really good uh the wizard of ads if you've ever read uh you can google this on uh on 00:13:01 i'm not googled it look it up on amazon the wizards of that wizards wizard of ads books there's like three of them uh and they came out about 20 years ago and the guy he has here you've probably been out to it i think here norm in austin he has a big academy out in the countryside has a big castle that he built because he's a wizard and he brings in all these top marketing people and that's one of the things that they really talk about is like look um if you condition people to buy on sales they're only going to buy on sales and you you could be leaving a lot of money 00:13:30 on the table and so if that's your strategy that's Fine, but so for me when I've always done deals in the past where it's a Memorial Day and that trust me, I've done emails to my list saying it's Memorial Day, it's President's Day or it's July 4th weekend, we have a big sale going on, but I'm, I'm not selling my top stuff, I'm getting rid of crap, uh you know, so that this kind of stuff is stuff I don't want anymore, but if it's something that's continually selling, it's not going on sale um at all. The only thing I might do on something like that is say, uh, you know, buy this thing at regular price and because it's President's Day, I'll give you a free gift, and like, free gift, it's one of my products. 00:14:09 i'm overstocked i'm just trying to dump dump yeah just to motivate them to get off the but they still pay the full price for that item uh and i have a product that we've been selling for 12 12 years now direct to consumer uh we don't sell them on amazon novice it's it's a hard drive uh with a lot of data and stuff on it and we sell that thing for uh 200 and 349 and i'll never discount that um because it's been selling for 349 i'll use this stuff for a little bit more but for 349 basically for 12 years and but the only thing i'll do is i'll if i got an extra something else that they would want uh that i've got i'm overstocked on it's just taking Up space or it's about to expire, I might say, okay, you get this free. 00:14:51 If you buy it, it's still the full price. But that's the extent of it. And so you've got to be careful with all this and look at the long-term effects, not just immediate cash flow or immediate. Don't get caught up in the hysteria. I think I told you this. I used to work with a bracelet company, a fairly well-known bracelet company. And they did a blast for Prime Day, they had 700 and some odd thousand in sales. They lost money. Yeah. I believe they're a bit of it. It was crazy. It sounds good. Amazon does it to drive Prime memberships. They get a lot of extra people on Prime memberships. Like you said, they sell a lot of their own stuff. They don't care if they sell 68% bump or whatever you said. 00:15:44 They don't care because they're making money. Even if they sell Alexa or one of their devices at a break-even or a discount, they're still making money off the ads and all the other stuff down the road. So what do they care? They just get people involved in the hype and hysteria, and they get one in their house. It's good marketing. For me, Prime Day, I don't pay much attention to it. I've never bought on Prime Day as a customer ever. No? Never not as a customer um and I mean I buy a lot on Amazon but probably it doesn't motivate me to go and buy anything because it just doesn't um if I want something I just buy it when I need it not not save up for Prime Day and let me save five percent and not have this have the i want for two months or whatever because I'm waiting for Prime Day right. 00:16:36 One of the other things that I think we should talk about, and you touched on it, was discounting, heavy discounting. Now, this isn't just for Prime Day, but I find a lot of the times, and I noticed I did this sometimes as well, but when you want to give away either quantity, so you're looking at that coupon stack, or it could be just driving people over to your website to buy multiple quantities of anything. You give away the farm. So for us, we have a one-pack, three-pack, five-pack. And the most we're giving away, actually, we have a bigger quantity as well in the B2B, which is 25, 50, and 100. But instead of going 10% off, 15% off, 25% off, it makes no sense. 00:17:29 And what we try to do is we'll take a couple of points off. If you want three-pack, it's at 3%. If you want the five-pack, it might be 5%. If you want the next one, it's 7%. You'll never see us giving away 10% or 15% because it eats away too much at the profit. So I wanted to see what your thoughts were on discounting. I agree with you. Ironically, it's interesting that you're saying that because on that business discount, you have, what, five tiers? Or you can do the little five tiers on the business discounts on Amazon? And I do the same. It's like 2% or 2. 5%, 4%, 6%. I think the top is if you ordered the maximum, the 100 or whatever the biggest package is, might be 10%. 00:18:18 Yeah. But that's it. And a lot of times when I'm doing it, if it's not in the business pricing, for the business customers that's just uh on the listing you know you got one pack three pack five pack like you said the difference in the price on most of those is my fulfillment cost because if you know if you look at a one pack let's say the Amazon the 15 in most cases is wash but let's say the fulfillment cost is uh four dollars and twenty cents a unit uh and for for the one pack but for the two pack I'm sorry for the three pack it's uh six dollars and eighty cents a unit because it's a little bit extra weight or whatever. 00:18:52 So the difference there is if they would have bought three, you know, four 20 times three is $60. And then I'm paying $6. 80 or whatever I just said. So that's like a $6 discount. So that would be the maximum I would go. So I'm still making the same money. I'm just getting them to spend more maximum discount. So at the end of the day, my books are not being messed up or I'm not really giving away, um, uh, you know, really not really taking money out of my pocket. If you could say so, so to speak. So that would be the maximum. It's a lot of times I go below that, but that's how I figure out what those, what those would be for the one, three, five, 10 pack. 00:19:26 It's not just some made up number. Oh, let me give them 10%. Let me give them. Yeah, it's only 10%. Actually do the math. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. 25%. What the heck? So, so the other thing, I don't know if the listeners know this, but check it out for yourself on those coupon stacks. See how many people actually apply the coupon. I find that it's different than the digital, but on the coupon stack, so many people forget to add the coupon code and they get it at the regular price. If it's a coupon, we got to enter a code. Yeah, that's way down. Even the clickable ones, you know, that people love you, Adam, they never, they never redeem them. That's because they didn't probably check out. 00:20:12 But even me as a shopper, I miss that all the time. Yeah. I know some people, they really zero in on it. Some people are like, when they're shopping, they're very cost conscious and they're very cost. Oh, Connie. They're looking for that. But to be honest, there's a lot of times where I'll buy something personally on Amazon and I'm in the cart and then I'm like, 'Is this really the one I want?' Because you'll see, you know, down at the bottom, similar items. I might get distracted. I'm like, 'Oh, let me check this one.' And then I'll go back to the one, compare it to the one I have. And I'm like, 'Oh, shoot, there's a coupon there.' So I got to go delete it from the cart and then add it back in with the coupon clip. 00:20:46 I miss them all the time. My wife is Hawkeye when it comes to that. Yeah. That's a big motivator for women, especially. I mean, so definitely do it for you, but it's; I'm just saying for me, I don't know. Maybe I'm; I'm the exception. I think a lot of people are like that. And also with the digital coupons. So digital coupons are a little bit different. There's more people will click on it. It's in your face. But there's still, again, going to sellers, you have to keep in mind, if you're going to give 5% or 10% off, I think the last stat I heard, and this was few months back, but 66% of the people actually use the discount. So you're not giving that full discount away to everybody. 00:21:40 You've got that third that are not going to apply it, which I found; I always apply it. I can see it. I'll click on it. It's the first thing I do. But yeah, you can use that as a calculation that you know that you're going to be making a little bit extra. It's just a bit more motivation to keep your price in a specific area. I mean, I use coupons when I'm launching, when I don't have a lot of reviews. Or if the reviews are, you know, if I launch a product and maybe it's averaging a four star, 4. 2, then I'll use coupons. But if I'm a 4. 5 or above, I don't, except for launch, I really don't use coupons. I don't find it necessary. 00:22:24 And then the only other time I mind is sometimes at Christmas time, I raise my prices. I got an item that's $19. 95. During the Christmas season, I might put it at $24. 95. And then I might put a $5 coupon on it so that it reverts back to $19. 95. And just to get those people that, like you said, that are like Connie, that are Hawkeye, and they're looking for it. Because the rationale of that is if everybody else is at $19. 95. And I'm at $24. 95. Well, most people are going, well, this guy's the more expensive one. I'm going to buy the $19. 95. But wait a minute. Why is he more expensive? Maybe it's a better quality. Maybe there's something to it. 00:23:01 But, oh, here's a $5 coupon. So it's going to be equal to all these other people. So psychologically, it kind of tricks them. And they're like, 'I'm getting a better deal. I'm getting a better quality at the same price.' So that's another time I might use it if I need to do some marketing like that. Yeah. 100% exactly what I do is I try to bring it down. We talk about three tiers of pricing: lowest tier, the product cannibalization, the mid or the average tier, and then the higher tier. And we always play around with 'you've got a high price.' This is on a launch or if we're just trying to, like you said, increase reviews or just get some more sales velocity. 00:23:41 But we'll bring it down just to where that second tier is. And then, like you said, people are looking at it and they're saying, wow, I can get this quality of product for a much higher perceived value. And they do it. They'll buy it. So that's a great tip, Kevin. All right, now the other part to this, do you do anything, do you segment your lists? First of all, do you drive traffic over to a website? It depends. I mean, it depends on what I'm doing. It depends on the product. Yeah, I do drive traffic to my own websites. I have a Shopify site for some of my brands. I have one called Click Cart Pro for another old brand. It's not even on Shopify, but yeah, I do drive traffic in some cases. 00:24:31 um just depends like for my calendar business we drive traffic to our own website because on our own website we charge 19 . 95 for one of the calendars plus 9 . 95 shipping if it's in the us yeah we still charge shipping and people pay it uh you know we get the occasional uh fu you know i'm not paying 10 bucks shipping you know um i might go buy it on amazon then um because we sell it on amazon too for 19 . 95, but we still have a lot of people who will pay that 995 shipping and it costs me about $5. 60 or so to actually ship that out first-class 00:25:03 mail, and so I actually make a a little bit extra money, plus I own the customer-we'll take that list and we'll use it to launch on Amazon, so I'll segment that list and um sometimes you know it's a list of 16, 000 buyers on buyers not like people who signed up for an email but people have bought in the last um some point in the last 20 years and then every year I do a couple things on it-I do an NCOA here in the US so that's called National Change of Address, I use a company called Melissa Data and you can take them and they can append the email addresses to it; they can append phone numbers but they also uh they do this for Canada too that's why we have a bunch of Canadian uh people as well but they they will update the address so if you Move, you go and you fill out one of those forms for the Post Office that you move. 00:25:49 It goes into a big database, and they will update the address. So if, Norm, if you move from one house to another, I'm going to get your new address if you filled out one of those forms. And it updates my database so that everything is clean. And it standardizes it so that, you know, some people put apartment numbers, some people put the number sign, some people put units. It standardizes what the Post Office wants as the four-digit code. And then I segment that based on buying habits. So if they haven't, since it's a seasonal product, it's once a year. I do, basically, if you've bought in the last three years, you're still hot. If it's been five years since you bought, you're not so hot. You know, you might have been a one-off thing. 00:26:29 Maybe you died. This list, this cleaning will actually tell you who died. You take them off your list. And so then we, I segment it that way. Sometimes this is called 30-day hot list. If you're selling our 90-day hot lists. Those are the best buyers, the people who bought from me most recently. And if you're selling something that's not seasonal, it's 30 or 90 days. But since mine is seasonal, I do three years. So I segment that list. And then I segment multi-buyers. So I take in there who's spent by the dollar about. So who's spent over $100? Who's spent $50 to $100? Who's bought certain types of products? So it's all segmented. 00:27:07 and i do the same thing on amazon when i download all my customer data on amazon if it's fbm you can get the addresses as long as you do it within 30 days typically you know through ship station or something or you can still use tax jar for all your fba orders too there's some back door loopholes that you can get all the customer data i download all that and then i i match it up based on multi whether they bought them once whether they bought twice three times you know how many frequency of buys and how much they've spent and they get segmented and then also if there's people on my list that 00:27:41 just only filled out a warranty card or they only you know if i was doing some discount they hit a landing page and and they had to enter their email address for a discount that's a separate they're separate they're not all pulled together now sometimes i'll mail the whole thing but they're all segmented uh and then i do the same thing for the billion dollar seller so you probably get emails from me from the billion dollar seller summit i have 17 different lists for The billion-dollar seller summit There's an attendees list, a sponsors list, a speakers list. Who clicked on the last download list? All segment. And sometimes I'll just send the whole, I'll click them all. Other times I'm like, let me only target the people who clicked to download the last slides. 00:28:22 So yes, if you're not segmenting, you're making a huge mistake. Sorry, that was a long answer. But that's to give you the idea there. Hey, Connie, how you doing? Every time you're on, she has to make the puppies. Awesome. Okay. All right. She can't hear, but anyways, that was crazy. She's crazy, but now she's out of the room. But, okay, yeah, that's something that we do, too, with our Shopify sites is, depending on the site, but we try to segment the list. And we do it a little, you probably do it, too. This is just a different way for us is that if somebody's bought off a discount, they're on that list. If somebody's bought full price, they're on that list. I have those lists, too. Yeah, and then that way. 00:29:28 The level of discount, too. A 20% discount is a different list than an 80% discount list. It's a different buyer. Right. Absolutely. So this way, you know what you need to or how you need to discount or approach them. So I think that's important. We’re going to go into just the commercial in a second. And then I want to come back and talk a little bit about customer personas. But anyways. Uh, for everybody listening, if you’ve got questions, I know they’re starting to stack up already. We’re going to probably get into those. Uh, so we don’t miss out on any very quickly, but we do have a giveaway today. Um, Kevin’s giving away one week of time, fly down to us and stay with them. 00:30:11 And, uh, yep. Thank you, Kevin. Very generous gift. And then we’re also giving away. The giveaway today is one of two things. You can get the Tariff Buddy from Atholabi Honi Worldwide, which has a value of $2. 95, or you can get a free month's pallet. You can have your fulfillment done over at Honu for a full month. So, you can pick either one. So that's #WheelOfKelsey and tag two people and you get a second entry. We're also going to throw in, if you're in North America, one of our Lunch with Norm mugs and M&M's. All right. Also, do you want to like the inventory management is also an option for a month. Yeah, sure. So there's three then. There's three options. 00:31:04 And that inventory management service that's been created is incredible. Everybody loves what Alpha Lobby is doing with that. So, okay. We can go to a commercial now, Kaus, or are you going to interrupt me? I'm going to interrupt you just quickly. We are sharing from Norm's personal Facebook. So if you'll notice, if you're posting in the Norm's personal Facebook stream right now. We're not able to pull those comments up. So I've just posted this question separately, but that's the reason why you won't see your comments. I just want to throw that out there to the listeners, but everything else is good. So make sure you enter today's hashtag #wheelofKelsey and we'll jump to a commercial. The Legion is your go-to community where you can learn. Grow, and build your Amazon and e-commerce business. 00:31:54 As you know, being an entrepreneur can be lonely. Now you can share struggles, build a network, and celebrate your successes. And guess what? Our community is free. All you have to do is head over to our Facebook group to join. You can also watch us on our YouTube channel at Private Label Legion so you can stay up to date with tips, strategies, and advice from other experts in the industry. Okay, remember one thing: To get all this great information, follow us, subscribe, and ring that bell so you can get automatic notifications. Okay, we're back. Kevin, do you bother or do you spend a lot of time figuring out your audience or your personas? Yeah, especially when I'm starting a new brand. We do. We actually give them names. 00:32:44 Like we'll say there's Mike and there's Susan and there's Tom. Yep. But yeah, we do. When we start a brand new brand, we do create like a little persona and we actually give them a day, basically like creating a character in a comic book almost. Sometimes we even sketch them out how they look, what they're doing, what their hobbies are. Yep. Yeah. I did on a brand new brand. I do do that. And then that way we know this is what we're targeting. And we'll say it in the marketing target. Susan, you know or Target Tom, or whatever um, and yeah we have that in mind I even have that in mind sometimes when I'm writing stuff um for you know let's say like this calendar business that I always talk about. 00:33:27 Someone I usually give an example I'll talk about everything I do but that one and I will have the customer in mind. I know you know, like I've said in the past we still have people that that send checks and money orders in the mail, you know it's not just an internet world. We get six figures and checks and money orders uh in in the envelopes. You have to think in the mind who is that customer um and that customer is you know usually like a 65-year-old, 75-year-old, or 70-year-old guy that's beautiful I think you're a day or two older than me okay 00:34:14 I don't mean this as a put-down or anything, but it's a 65, 70-year-old single guy who maybe has probably never been married, or if he was, it was a long time ago, and lives in a trailer park and drives a beat-up old Chevy and whatever. And that's the guy that's sending us a money order that's going down to the local 7-Eleven and getting a $22 money order and sending it to us. uh so i have to market to that guy what's gonna right you know he's probably got a couple packs of cigarettes uh you know next to his table coffee table and uh it stains on the rug but that's who i'm marketing to and so you got to know that and if you know that then you psychologically target him in your marketing and appeal to him and then i may have another customer who is an executive you know lives in uh lives on wall street uh and but it has a has a 00:35:08 a garage you know out in the in the hamptons or somewhere where he likes to take her with cars on the weekend and likes to hang uh you know calendars on the wall in his garage or whatever so i have to target that guy and we target them differently uh janelle page was on recently and she was talking about if you if your brand goes out to everybody it'll go out to nobody it's true you know you're not selling to anybody somebody if i send out a a direct mail piece or an email you know you and i just sent out and sent out an email the other day uh earlier this week for 00:35:42 the event we're doing around the f1 and you know we have a joke about someone responded and they said something and uh one of these emails it's kind of a kind of offensive in one way but also and like if i didn't get that that means i didn't i didn't do a good enough job if i don't you know what this person says kind of ridiculous and the response and kind of like a kind of being an a-hole uh but It's it's if you don't if you don't agitate somebody or isolate some people then you haven't actually done good marketing right right if everybody likes you or everybody if you're trying to be politically correct or trying to just appease everybody you failed, just like what you said Janelle said so yeah I actually use that as a gauge. 00:36:24 If I don't get someone that says your copy sucks or this price is ridiculous do I get this this and this with it, I get this account with diamond earrings and you know or whatever at this something crazy, you know, our guy said something different, but something crazy that I'm like, I didn't do my job. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, one of the ways to learn this, you can go out and you can find and do your own research, you know, check out Instagram, check out Facebook, go to YouTube, find out who your audience is. But you can also go to sparktoro. com and they have a way to look at your competitors and within a very quick period of time, see who their influencers are and their followers are and get a better idea of who they are. 00:37:12 Stephen Black, I've mentioned his name a few times recently, but he goes one step further and he'll go into Facebook groups and he'll just kind of hang there, just listen to the Facebook group and see what they're saying, how they're saying it, and builds his persona around that. And also, like you'll get the lingo a lot of the times that you and you can use this. He shows examples about this in his presentation I last saw. But certain keywords that don't show up typically in Amazon, except for that specific group. It might be some surfing lingo or scuba lingo or whatever. And it's really cool. I really I wasn't doing that before. But after listening to Stephen, as part of some of the things that we just do, we just hang out in Facebook groups and then we'll start to comment back and forth. 00:38:07 So, anyways, personas are so bloody important. And like just going down, talking a bit more about the persona and the importance of it. Like you said, if you're in an elevator, you should be able to know whether that's a Sioux. Or, a bob, and if that person starts talking to you and they want to know a little bit about your product, you should be able to pitch them yeah, and that elevator thing too is it, I mean I do this, and some people might say it's discriminatory or something, but um I think if I do it because of some I'm a marketer, but I change the way I speak depending on the audience, so I'm in an elevator and it's a bunch of brothers from you know gangbangers type of guys or whatever in there 00:38:51 and they they say something to me I'm going to answer them in a different way you know in a different tone of voice I'm going to speak more like you said their words uh you know if they say how are you I'm not going to say I'm doing very very good today thank you so much I'm going to say you know I'm going to say something that's more more street uh you know to answer that question how are you doing today man I'm rocking or whatever whatever it might be you know that's probably a bad example but I'm gonna say something that's If I'm in a crowd where it's mostly I'm in Latin America, I'm going to typically be a little bit different versus if I'm in Asia or if I'm in a crowd at a really nice restaurant or something. 00:39:30 I do change. And the way the language I use and the way I act, I adapt more to more accommodate and fit in to those situations, you got to do that in your marketing, too. And because it endears people to you. If they think you're one of them, then they're going to trust you more, they're going to buy more, and they're going to be willing to follow you more. But if you don't do that, they're like, oh, that guy, he lives in a penthouse and drives a Lamborghini or whatever. So, you've got to do that in your marketing too. Right. I remember I was in Hawaii and there were a few guys, surfers. And I was going to go out not to surf, probably to kick back and watch. 00:40:18 You know, every time I go in the water, Greenpeace comes out. So anyways, I said to them, oh, hold on. I just got to slip my bathing suit on. The guy comes back to me and he says, 'If you ever say that again, you'll never come out with us' and get slapped on your board shorts. So anyways, you have to know the crowd you're around, so it is important. I mean, we're doing a product right now that's around sustainability. One of my big projects is, you know, I've talked about it, but we're really ramping it up and doing some NFT stuff. And one of the people that we're bringing on as an advisor, she's a big-time lawyer, and she's worked with the United Nations and a lot of countries on their sustainability efforts and stuff. 00:41:01 And she's coming on as an advisor. probably going to give up a role at columbia university teaching role this fall to actually come on and spend like 10 hours a week uh on uh doing some stuff with us because she's so excited about it but she read through we did a white paper and so it's like a basically kind of like a summarized business plan in a way and we did this big white paper it's 30 pages or something she read through it she's like look you gotta if you want to appeal to these these big corporations and these big countries and get them involved behind what you're doing you need to change some of these words 00:41:33 you're using the word um you know this word uh sustainability you need to use accountability you need to use this change a few of these words and look what doors oh start to open so back on the your wording and what you're saying knowing the audience and knowing the language of that audience is critical uh to get and same thing on your copy on amazon and if you you got to know that avatar and write your copy to that avatar if you're just writing standard bullet points or proper email you know people always say This is not proper English. Put your punctuation here. You shouldn't put the adverb here. To hell with all that shit. In marketing, none of that matters. Proper English goes out. What you learn in school should be ignored in marketing. 00:42:17 You need to write to convey, to communicate, and to communicate in a way that that audience is going to understand and appreciates and endears themselves to it. If you want to learn more about it, there's lots of books out there. One of the things, we have just a membership over at Digital Marketer, and they have a lot of labs and courses that you can take around this, just how to become a better marketer. It's very inexpensive, but if you're looking at just going through, they do have certification programs, but just taking a course to brush up on it, the questions to ask. it's all there. So just go to digital marketer. I think it's digital marketer . com and you can enroll and, you know, just check out what they have to say. 00:42:59 I think I like 10 or 15 different things, you know, Facebook, social media marketing or email marketing or, and then you can get a, you can have your employees do it and they get a, they take a little test or something at the end and they, they actually mail you a certificate in the mail. Like it looks like a diploma from a high school or college in the mail. Yeah, they do a good job over there. They're in Austin, I think. Yeah, they're in Austin. It's cheap, too. It's not expensive. Yeah. So I think we should get to the questions. We've got eight of them so far, and there'll probably be more coming in. All right. Yes. And don't forget to enter the hashtag WeLoveKelsey today. 00:43:35 So if you are the winner, you get your choice of one of three Honey Worldwide services to choose from. And it could be a tariff terminator, a free pallet of storage for a year or the inventory management program for a month. So that's # WeLoveKelsey to enter. And we'll do the giveaway at the end of the show, so let's jump into some questions. The first one is actually going I'm going to have to share my screen for this one um this was found um on an Amazon listing and Rad is asking if this is appropriate which I have a feeling it's not but it's to ask for a text message so for those audio listeners, it's a picture in the slide deck for their Amazon listing, and it says, 'Ask us anything about this product, text' and then it has a number that I blanked out to chat directly with an expert. 00:44:28 100% against TOS. 100%. They just haven't been caught yet. If that's your competitor, just send an email to report-abuse at amazon . com, report-abuse at amazon . com with that ASIN, and that'll probably get taken down. Okay, great. All right, so let's move into another question from coolhand99. Going forward with e-commerce in today's crazy economy, are certain products such as necessary life products and or consumables stand to weather the financial storm better than any other types, product types? I don't know about that. I mean, you could say like standard stuff and necessary life products and consumables. Luxury brands right now are crushing it. Yeah, you know luxury brands, you know the Louis Vuittons and the Porsches and the high-jays that they're crushing it right now. 00:45:22 They've had some of the best couple years even with the inflation going on right now. Uh, so it depends; it goes back to your avatar, um, you know who you're marketing to. Um, I think the media makes a lot more there is inflation right now and it's it sucks and it is affecting some people. But I think the media makes a bigger deal out of it because it everything is rising. So you know when a couple years ago everybody's bitching here in the US at least about uh wages need to go up and all the McDonald's people are complaining that we're making eight bucks an hour; we should be making 15. we need a 00:45:55 livable wage but what they forget is it's economics if you raise the wage to 15 bucks everything else goes up too right um and they don't think about that they think oh i'm gonna make i'm gonna be making twice the money now i can pay my bills but no when you're paying when the guy has the mcdonald's owner has to pay you 15 an hour he's got to charge more for the hamburgers um yeah you know he might he might eat a little bit of that he might so but so that's everything is going in steps some things are not synced yet and it's causing some uh some problems for some people especially on the lower end of the uh of the food chain um but it's um it's e-commerce is not going anywhere you know amazon is you know it's all this media like oh amazon is uh uh the last quarter is their worst one ever and e-commerce is is dead and it's not good anymore and That's all BS. 00:46:44 It's just not growing as fast as it did. They had a big bump during COVID, and they probably overbuilt some of their warehouses. I know they just had one here in Austin. They had three huge ones here in Austin, a 4 million square foot one, another 2 million square foot one, and they're about to do another one, and they just put that one on hold. And now they're doing their excess. Amazon was smart, though. They got this excess capacity. Let's fulfill orders for Shopify guys and stuff. It's a really brilliant move. This e-commerce is not dead. People are still going to be buying stuff. So whether it's a necessary life product or consumable or a luxury good, you just got to know your market and there's still plenty of opportunity out there. 00:47:25 Yeah. You know, the, we talked about this recently, but the pet product that you hear me talk about, right. That's a high, high, high end pet product. And it just is honest for me, It's on track on Amazon for double the sales from last year. And you would think that, okay, things are tight. But the guys or the people with money are going to constantly be buying. And what I'm saying, I don't know about you, but the lower-end cannibals, product cannibalization where they make lots of sales volume but no profit, those guys are going to hurt. Yeah, I agree. They're going to hurt. The mid-tier? You're going to lose probably 10. This is just a prediction. Maybe 10 to 20% of your sales velocity, the high perceived value people, nothing. 00:48:23 They shouldn't. They, I would not worry about that at all. If you continue to be highly valuable, you have high perceived value and you can solve people's pain points. I would think people will pay for what they want. Yeah. You look at like travel right now, travel. It's through the roof on costs. You know, the airline fees are crazy. I mean, I just booked economy tickets a couple weeks ago to go to New York in June. And in the past, on JetBlue or something like that, it would have been $350 round trip from Austin to New York. Now it was $820 round trip. But I need to go to New York, and I'll pay it. Hotel prices are up. You know, everything's up. They're still full. The planes are still full. 00:49:06 The hotels are full. People will make choices. So they may say, well, I'm going to take this trip instead of buying this new vacuum cleaner. But if your vacuum cleaner is cool enough, if it's the new Dyson, that's a thousand-dollar vacuum cleaner, which I happen to have one that has a laser on the end, you know, and it shows you when you're when you're. Vacuuming on like a hardwood floor, everything that you missed, pretty freaking amazing, it's like a game; I'm like, I like vacuuming, I mean my wife's like this is made for men because it's like a like a like a video game with this laser that shines out on the bottom, um and I'll buy that because I want that, but someone else might say no, I'm gonna take the trip instead of buying that; but if you have things that are compelling people will buy it. 00:49:50 The life necessities back on that question and that, um, the consumables that depends, but the life necessities, people are still going to buy. They may be looking for more deals. And like Norm said, on that lower end, it is going to be tougher. People will still buy it, but it's so much competition and so much little differentiation that it will be tougher for people to make money on it. Right. Okay, next question. Okay, the next question is from Dave. Do you both think putting your own customized box package together for wholesale products is a great way to set yourself apart from other wholesale listings? I'm always a big proponent. I think Norm, for the most part, is too, of doing customized packaging, whether that's for direct-to-consumer or for wholesale. I mean, yeah. 00:50:42 If there's any chance it's going on a store shelf somewhere, when you're talking about wholesale, you know if you're wholesaling to a even if you're wholesaling to a school, you know even when we were doing like hand sanitizers and we're wholesaling to the school it's not going on store shelves where the packaging might matter it's going into a janitor's closet it's still marketing uh and still when they take that that bag of wipes out and they put it on a desk somewhere I have QR codes and everything on there for people to scan and have cool stuff so that even people are passing by just taking a wipe out like oh what is that, so Packaging, customized packaging is critical for everything I do. I will never just put something in a plain brown box. 00:51:25 Right. I feel exactly the same. Oh, by the way, on the germ shark note, I was going to play a mean trick on you. I forgot. I couldn't get the bottles. When we were in Paris recently, I was going to ask them to put the Gerber Shark stuff all over the place. You would have got me if you did that. Oh, man. All right, Kel's next question. All right, this one is from Christine. I have a more premium brand that I'd like to sell outside of Amazon as well. The listed price will be 30% to 50% higher than the other Amazon products. Most on Amazon are $18 to $25, and we plan to sell for around $39. There are two other brands that are selling for 45 to 48. 00:52:15 Do you think this is a brand that should sell on Amazon at the start or only once we build up our brand awareness and marketing? So the answer to that is on the keywords that you're targeting for this product on Amazon, what is everybody else selling for? So if you've identified, let's say your top, I'm sure you've identified a lot of keywords, but let's say the top 10, these are like the main keywords that you really want to rank on page one for on Amazon. What are the price that everybody else is selling at on that? If everybody else is, if you look at page one listing for each of these keywords and everybody's at the, what'd you say here? The 18, everybody's selling for $19 . 00:52:54 95 and there's not a single person on that page that's at $45 or $48, then you're going to have a really hard time ranking on page one of Amazon for that keyword. If I like to see when I'm looking at keywords, if I'm going to price higher, I like to see that there's two or three or four people at least on page one. There's a lot of price jumping, um, you know. I've had this problem with, uh, I've had this problem with makeup brushes in the past where I've seen some makeup brushes, I had a premium set, I was trying to sell for a premium price, I could get to page one with a launch, uh, you know, doing a big promotional launch and get to page one. 00:53:27 But would never stay because my price was people that were buying buying based on that keyword buying based on the price, and I couldn't, I just couldn't stay. So that's the thing to look at for Amazon; I think is still, no matter what you're selling, you need to be on Amazon so whether, um, whether you can get on page one for these keywords or not, you still should throw your product up on Amazon because a lot of people even if you're selling on your own Shopify site or direct to consumer, there's a lot of people that will see your Facebook ad or they'll see your email or whatever and they'll go look to see if it's on Amazon, uh, before they buy it from you, because they're like, 'Oh, my credit cards already saved on Amazon. 00:54:03 I know having a day or two if I have a problem, I'm not gonna' Have to jump through hoops to get my money back. So they will go check it on Amazon. So definitely, no matter what, you should be on Amazon. But whether you put a lot of effort into ranking there initially or not depends on the keyword, the price range on each of the top keywords that you're looking for. And so what you're looking for is a bunch of different prices. You said there's a couple that are 45 to 48. That's a good thing. But check all those keywords. Yeah. And just to add to that, Tim Jordan and Bradley Sutton did a project X and they found a saturated market with, uh, I think egg holders. Okay. 00:54:46 Uh, and they found a niche, a sweet spot that wasn't tapped into, and they created a wooden egg holder and they brought it out to the market. Now, if you can find those two higher-priced or the, the two higher-priced ASINs and you can find any sort of custom niche that you can target with them, see what the sales volume is, and you might be able to carve a place out there as well, okay, uh, moving on to our next question. This is from Samuel: Should we start getting stock for Christmas? How much did you guys pay for a container per cubic meter/ slash kilograms in your last import? It depends on where it's coming from and depending on what port. There's a lot of variables to that. 00:55:35 It depends on if it's a 20-foot container or a 20-foot HQ, a 40-foot, a 40-foot HQ. It depends. But per cubic meter or kilogram, I'd have to look that up. I don't have that number off the top of my head. But it was about, I think, about $12,000, $13,000 for the last container I brought in. For the 20-foot? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, 40 foot are still going well over 20, at least from what I've last seen. But I can get some specific numbers from Alpha Lobby, but they're still pretty high. It's come down, but yeah, it's still pretty high. As far as stock, to answer your first part of your question, saying the stock for Christmas, yeah, you should be, yeah, it depends on your manufacturing time and your transit time. 00:56:24 But yeah, I would definitely be; you want to pretty much have your Christmas stuff here. By September at the latest yeah, to allow for any so if you're, if your factory is 45 days to make it, it's going to take 30 days on the water plus allow for some delays and because of everything that's happening in China but we that's um, you need to be ordering now. But the one thing I think that a lot of people aren't thinking about is the lockdown, you know, Shanghai has been in a lockdown for over a month, I have people in Shanghai that do some stuff for us and guys haven't been able to leave their house basically for a month. It's like being in jail. And we haven't started to feel the true repercussions of that yet. 00:57:04 Shanghai, some parts of Beijing, some parts of Ningbo, it's going to affect some stuff this fall. These factories and ports, a lot of places have been closed for a month or more. And you're going to start feeling that as they start to try to catch up this fall. There's going to be some serious delays and serious problems. Yeah, 100% agreed. And if you can, we talk about this quite a bit. Can you find a different country to work in? Can you go over, like if it's cosmetics, maybe over to Korea or, you know, do something over in India or even over here? Let's say you're doing some supplements or something like that. Wood, wood products, digital printing. Yeah, North America, there's a lot of opportunity over here. Afa Labi was spending it. 00:57:55 That's my partner over at Honu. He was starting to spend a lot of time doing sourcing here in North America. And I thought prices would be way too expensive. And he's found all sorts of ways, either by changing materials or just product innovation to keep things in line. Now, some things will not be in line, but some things are perfectly in line. And if he doesn't get them here, he gets them in Latin America. So there's a lot of different opportunities that you can work with outside of China. And you're going to a show soon about that, right? Sourcing in Mexico. Oh, my gosh. Yes. Next week, we have an event called, yeah, the sourcing. What's it called, Kevin? The Mexico sourcing trip. And just themexicotrip . com. 00:58:51 If you're interested in going, by the way, the Mexico sourcing side is pretty much over. I mean, you could try to get in, but our mastermind in Cancun. Is still available, and I believe there is a 500 discount um if you type in 'Norm 500' -I think that's what it is. By the way, thank you Kevin. All right, our next question is from Claudia, this is uh, there are two parts to this um, it says we are within days of ordering a mold for our product from a Mexican company. What advice can you offer us to make sure we don't do something wrong and make a big mistake regarding mold production? Is there something we should ask or do specific uh to molds? Thanks a lot. 00:59:36 Have you done any 3D first thing before you do a mold? Have you done a 3D print of your product, so before you do that mold and have those molds made, you need to have a do 3D printing; there's, you know, special printers. That print print out like resin and stuff, and it can make a copy of what you're what you're doing. Um, either your factory can do that or you might you can find people all over the US that can do this for you. Um, there's companies; any big city will have someone that can do 3D printing for you. It's inexpensive, relatively inexpensive, and you need to make prototype and check everything so if you haven't done that uh before you've done that mold I would definitely, I would definitely do that because that could you could make the mold and realize, oh my gosh, we didn't leave enough space for this cord or whatever it would be. 01:00:25 And even though on paper it looks good, and you've done your measurements, and your spec diagrams, and your CADs, and everything; still, you've got to make a 3D print of it. And 3D printing basically is kind of like a prototype. It may not work, but it's a prototype you can hold in your hand and look at with your eyes and test. One other, just quick points when you're doing when you're having your molds done try to put it with your mold or with your logo or name inside the mold and also be very specific. I've seen, I not so much in Mexico but um there have been cases where the manufacturer because you've come to them for help uh ends up owning the mold so you want to be very clear that this is your mold and that you are the rightful owner of it and it's not a shared mold yeah that's that's that's a good point. 01:01:25 Make sure you're covered legally on that, that this is yours. And if you ask for it to be backed or to be sent to another factory, I've had that problem with the mold, I did in China, it's my product, we had the mold made, we paid for the mold and uh at some point we want to try another factory um and we asked them can you send this and like oh we can't find it, it's you know it's buried somewhere, you know take us a few days to go dig in the warehouse, like come on uh you know they're very heavy. They just they did every excuse in the book to not release that and then finally at the end they said, well if you want to release it it's a fee uh, you know we'll sit there but it's a $20, 000 fee uh so you know. 01:02:03 But I didn't clarify all up front, get legal stuff to say We own this. This is ours. We have the right to withdraw it or remove it or use it in any way we see fit. I didn't actually do that. I got a question for you on that point. Did you have or would you have now put it into a contract out of China? If it's a big product, a big thing like this was, yeah, I would. I would have a Chinese language contract done. Okay. All right. Next. Okay. Next one is from Forensic Detectors. Hey, haven't seen you in a long time. All right. What's up, homie? What's your opinion on the Amazon small business badge? It looks nice, but do you think it may backfire? 01:02:51 People think you're too small and may not be a positive to some people. No, I don't think it's going to backfire. I think there's a lot of people like to support small businesses. They want to support the small person. You know, there may be some people, yeah, I just don't see it as backfiring. If the product looks good and the listing looks good and you have that badge, I think it's a plus. You know, people are like, oh, I'd rather buy from this guy. You know, I want to support him rather than some big, huge conglomerate. Right. So, yeah, no, I don't think it will backfire. And I don't think people are going to think, oh, you're small. No, I think it could be a good thing. Okay. 01:03:32 The next one has three points to it, so I'll just finish this. This is from Peter. I have a product with a relatively large package, which has recently been continuously, due to the following reasons, delivered late by carrier, order not received, shipping address undeliverable problems, which seriously affected our customer's experience and our business. I opened a case, but the customer said that it can only be inquired after 60 days. Can you tell me why? Yeah, Amazon, there's 60 days because when stuff like that's undeliverable or it just floats around in the system for a while, so they want to let it kind of work its way out. There are undeliverable, you would think that people on Amazon would actually know their damn address, but it's amazing how many people type in bad addresses of their own house or maybe they're ordering for a friend, they type it in. 01:04:26 So undeliverable is actually more common than what you might think. You're not going to get penalized for that. It sucks because it's coming back and you're going to get maybe a restocking fee and maybe the item's damaged. I just build that into my cost structure. When I'm doing my cost, if my manufacturing cost is $5, I usually add about 10% to 20% to that for just waste and damage and returns that I have to throw away. I consider my cost $6, not $5, just to account for that. If you're in clothing or something else, it might be even higher. So the undeliverable part, it's not going to hurt your metrics. It's going to show up in the voice of the customer or whatever in there. 01:05:08 Now, if they're exchanging it all the time because of a sizing issue and it's not clothing, that can hurt your metrics. If it's clothing, you have to really get a high return rate before it affects you because they know people buy two or three or something, try one on, see which one looks best or which one fits, send the other ones back. It's a common thing. But don't let that undeliverable, or what was the other two reasons? It was undeliverable and what was the other one he said? Delivered late by carrier, order not received. Delivered late by carrier also is an order received. It's not your fault if it's Amazon, if it's Amazon shipping it. Now, if it's you shipping it, the order not received is a problem, but delivered late by carrier is also something that's, as long as you shipped it within the timeframe that you promised on Amazon. 01:05:58 It's not something that's going to penalize you. Just that the order never arrived could, even though it may not be your fault. Right. And if it's in feedback, you could get that removed immediately if it was a FBM or FBA issue. Okay. There's still lots of questions. I don't know how you guys are for time. Kevin, how's your time? I'll probably have like maybe five minutes tops. Okay. Meeting at coming up. All right. This is from Stan. Is it against TOS to offer a free product when selling your Amazon product? The free offer is specified in one of the bullet points of the listing but needs to be claimed outside of Amazon post-purchase with the customer filling out a form directed from a product insert. 01:06:48 Strategy is taught post-purchase pro and used by hundreds of their clients. Yeah, this is a gray area on this one. I know exactly what you're talking about there. It can be okay, and it cannot be okay. It depends on the wording and how you're doing it. So to give you the advice on this, I'd have to say on a case-by-case basis, I know that's a strategy of those guys, and it can be a good strategy if done properly. But there is a gray area there. That you've got to be careful with. Right. Okay, from Red Beard. Oh, and the guys from Post Purchase Pro are going to be on Monday, so we can ask some questions. Yeah, they're smart guys. I mean, they're smart guys. Okay, from Red Beard. 01:07:40 What's the best way to start my first list? I've heard someone mention before launch with reviews. How do you do that? It's going to be two separate questions, actually. Yeah, you need to get reviews. I mean, if you don't have a list, the Vine program is the best way to do that. Amazon Vine program. There's no guarantees on that. You can get up to, I think it's 60 now, actually. Is it 60 now? I think so. Unless I'm mistaken. But is it 60? I've heard something about it. I haven't checked. I haven't launched a product in a couple months. But 30. You can get at least 30. I may have changed it. But there's no guarantee that those are going to get claimed. 01:08:25 You can say, 'I'm going to give away, let's call it 30 products.' And depending on your product, if it's not cool or not something that those buying reviewers want, you only have six of them claimed. Other times you might have all 30 claimed, but at least it's worth a shot and go with the buying review if you don't have your own list. If you have your own list, that takes time to build. You have to build an audience. Either through social media or through some other methods, which it takes a long time. And just building up a Facebook group and you get 500 followers in a Facebook group is not a list. You don't own that. Facebook owns that. You post in that group about your new product, probably only 50 of the people are ever going to see it. 01:09:08 Maybe 100 of those 500 will ever even see the post. And out of those, how many of them are actually really buyers? Yeah, you may be selling a pet product and they love their dog. But that doesn't mean they're a buyer of your product, so it's difficult um and and the new Freedom Ticket next year I'm going to be doing a whole section on that because it's becoming more and more important on Amazon now there's companies that you can go to that will have those and our friend Isabella is doing something uh in in that space and there's companies that will help you introduce you to audiences but the best way is to try to find someone that already has a list and partner with them which is a lot of times like an influencer or somebody that that already has a trusted audience and a huge list that will buy what they say. 01:09:52 But that's a whole discussion we could spend days on. I'm just, I go back to the simple insert. I'll drive people over. I saw a list without before he launched. So he doesn't. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. Missed that. He's talking about having something to launch with. Yeah. All right. You got time for one more? Sure. All right, unless you guys want to talk about the F1 before we leave. Yeah, we can do another question. Okay, one more question. Hi, guys. I'm doing a design differentiated product based on a niche. I did a PickFu poll, top Amazon seller pick versus my product, and only 20% of folks selected mine. It's a very competitive market. Is this a warning sign or a positive thing that 20% actually like my niche product? 01:10:42 Yeah, I would try it. If it's a competitive niche and there's depth in that, if the top 10 people are all crushing it and you're able to capture 20% of what that top guy is doing, that's not a bad start. For me, if 80% of people pick the other one, I would be making changes to my product. I would be like, what do I need to do? I'd be reading those comments that they put and coming back and trying to beat that. I'd try to get that to 50-50 or better. That would be my goal, and keep reiterating the picture or reiterating something and reading what they're saying and trying. You have to try five or ten different times before you finally find the right magic formula. I think you nailed it. 01:11:27 Typically, you would try to be higher, but in the competitive field, see what all the market share adds up to. You'll be able to see it when you do your research with a tool like Helium 10. It could be okay, just depending if there's 10 people that are 10% each and you get 20% of that, that wouldn't be too bad. All right. So, Mr. Kevin. Your product, maybe it's a sub-niche. Maybe that other guy is more broad, and the only reason 20% of yours chose is because it's a sub-niche, and maybe that sub-niche is big enough. So, like Norm said, it might be okay. Look at some additional information there. Right. Okay. For people who have not heard, Kevin and I, in October, are doing something kind of fun. 01:12:22 What are we doing? Doing something with you? Yeah, you are. Who the heck convinced me to do something with you? Your wife. You're going to ruin my name. You'll have to talk to V. We were going to go out. We already had bought our tickets to go out to the Formula One. We're huge F1 fanatics. I guess F1 events had reached out to Kevin to see if he wanted to get a cabana. When we tried to go, Norm, the tickets went on sale in March. We're like, 'Hey, we got to go. Let's go.' We want to get a group of people to go. We called them. We said, 'Hey, we'd like a cabana because I've been out to this thing so many times.' 01:13:05 that that's the way to go this if you want to do it right and do it cool and have a blast and not be in huge crowds and in the sun and stuff you gotta get a cabana well when we call they're like sorry they're uh there's not available you know all the people from the past years have had them it's like well put us on a wait list uh if something opens up and then last week the guy the sales rep over there for the vip people calls me said hey we just added 12 more uh to this to turn one we've never had them on turn one before and we just we 01:13:34 just decided to put something there like holy 12 turn one that's like an amazing location uh he's like yeah it's really good so at the start of the race at the end of the race you see everything's a cool turn it's like wow how many how many are available we got two left uh do you want one and i said hold on let me give me five minutes i was in my car let me call my buddy so i called norm he said i said you want one and he's like hell yeah we won how much do you think you have to ask the price Like, wait a second, let me tell you what this thing costs. I don't just get it. We'll figure something out. 01:14:04 I'm like, so I called the guy back and said, 'Can we have it? Yeah, put it on hold for us or whatever and we'll pay you. Take our deposit, you know, our money that we've already paid. We already bought nice, you know, VIP tickets at like $5,000 a piece. We're not even close to this level. And literally that cost, it's not like from some secondary market. And they applied that, and we had to come up with a lot more money. So then Norm and I decided, 'Hey, you know what? Why don't we make this a little event? We've got room for 15 people. Let's see who else wants to join us.' And so that's what we've done. And Norm can talk about that. Yeah, basically overnight, we put something together. 01:14:44 We put up a website called CollectiveMindsSociety. com. You can read about it all there. It's just everything that's happening, the event, the mastermind, the networking. We're going to be going out for a networking session, just a casual time out, cigars and drinks. If you don't smoke cigars, don't worry about it. Also, we're going to go out the last night for a really nice dinner on the town. Transportation back and forth from one location. Anyways, there's a few tickets left. 70% were sold out. It's in October. What we're trying to do is if you are interested, because we have to pay everything up front, is if you are interested, just let us know. You can either email us or you can book a ticket online. And it's not for everybody. It's expensive. 01:15:38 The ticket for everything. It's pretty much all inclusive, except for the hotels. Hotels are extra. It's about $10 ,000. So check it out. If it is something that you'd like to see, let us know. There's a few tickets left, and then we'd see you in October. So anyways, I think that's about it for our F1 thing that we put up. How fast do we have a website, sponsor package? You've been working around the clock. I'm slave driving his people. Kelsey. Yeah, driving Kelsey. Anyways, that's it for that. Now it's an extra gift for his birthday. Oh, I forgot. Yeah. We're going, we've got really great seats for Green Day and Ed Sheeran as well. So Kelsey just put that in there. Okay. So I think we could head over to the Wheel of Kelsey. 01:16:29 We'll give you a couple of seconds. If anybody has not done this before, hashtag Wheel of Kelsey, tag two people, you'll get a second entry. And that is going to be for one of the three options from Afolabi over at Honu Worldwide. All right. And Kevin, if you have to get going to your meeting, just feel free to drop out. We can cover it from here. Two minutes. I'll hang and see who wins this. All right. All right. Very good. So, first word from our sponsor. If you're selling on Amazon in 2022, you know how important it is to stand out from your competition. Let Honu Worldwide lend a helping hand with your product innovation to out-compete your competition online. That's right. Sit back, relax, and enjoy the success of your newly innovative product while Honu handles all the work. Visit HonuWorldwide. com for more information. That's Honu, H-O-N-U, Worldwide. com or email [email savings] at HonuWorldwide. com. There we go. Right. Here we go. The Wheel of Kelsey. It's time for the Wheel of Kelsey. 01:17:52 Okay, here we go. Thank you, everyone who entered. I want to shuffle these up and spin the wheel. And let's see who today's winner is. No, no, it can't be. Rad, are you paying Kelsey? I don't know how this keeps happening. Rad caught it again. All right. Well, congrats, Rad. I think, Kevin, he won last time and then just... Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He, he's got a, I think he's got Kelsey in his back pocket or something. I'm making a lot of money right now. All right. Well, I know you gotta get going. You know, Kevin, like always, it's just a pleasure to have you on. You're just tons of information and yeah, just can't wait till you're back on. I'll send you over a link to book for next month. 01:18:50 Okay. Awesome, man. All right, Kevin, we'll see you later. All right. So I hope everybody liked that episode. Whenever Kevin comes on, we just talk about pretty much anything that comes to our mind. And we went down a couple of different rabbit holes. I thought it was a lot of fun. So Kelsey, where are you? Here. Hello, hello. All right. All right. So do your thing. Do what you get paid for. I know there's a ton of questions today. We didn't get time to answer all of them, but if you go over to our Facebook group, it's Lunch with Norm, Amazon, FBA, and e-commerce collective. That's the Facebook group, not the Facebook page. You can join there. You can ask your questions or if you have any comments, you can put them there. 01:19:38 We've got a great community over there. So yeah, feel free to post them. And hopefully you'll get the answers you need. Also, don't forget to smash those like buttons. Give us a thumbs up. I hope you guys enjoyed today's episode. It's always great having Kevin on. He comes on usually around once a month, depending on schedules and everything. So yeah, you can stick around next. So make sure you subscribe to the YouTube channel. Follow us on Facebook. Norm also is on Instagram. He does little video highlights, giving tips. So yeah, I think that's about it. Okay. The only other thing I would say is if you are interested, there is a paid. Membership service 01:20:23 which is dirt cheap but you could buy Kelsey a cup of coffee for three bucks and there's a couple of other levels, it's all training-it's not a podcast; we have special guests come on, Kelsey does uh some training every month about social media, I come on and I do a couple of trainings as well in question periods so um if you're interested, love to have you over there, it's our Patreon group uh it just helps uh support uh Kelsey because I don't pay them, so well, Kelsey says they don't pay them enough. And, you know, three cups of coffee a day, you know, that's not bad pay. Yeah, we'll put it to the poll; we'll put that in the Facebook. Okay. All right. That's the poll. All right, everybody. So thanks for joining us today and join us every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. Thank you for watching. Thank you for being part of the community and enjoy your long weekend. 01:21:23 you