Set Up For Success in 2023 | Amazon FBA Strategies And LIVE Q&A with Kevin King

Set Up For Success in 2023 | Amazon FBA Strategies And LIVE Q&A with Kevin King 00:00:01 Hey everybody, it's Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy here. Welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the e-commerce and Amazon FBA podcast. Okay, in today's episode, we're going to be doing something special. I got a special guest, Kevin King, and he's going to be talking about Amazon. It's just going to be a Q &A, ask me anything session that Kevin and I will be talking about. A lot of people have already sent in some questions. But it's just going to be news, tips, updates-anything you'd like to talk about today; so welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the e-commerce and Amazon FBA podcast. 00:00:49 Okay, we're going to try to make it work. We are still in Austin after our event, and Kelsey's in the lobby, I'm in the hotel, and Kevin is at home. So we're going to try to make this thing work. It looks like it's going to be fine. But today we're going to be, as I mentioned, talking with Kevin King about questions, and it's going to be an Ask Me Anything session. We've already got a bunch of questions submitted. So if you do have questions, please submit them as soon as possible. So our guest, if you don't know Kevin, mentors sellers collectively and does over a half a billion dollars in sales on Amazon. And he's also known for Freedom Ticket and Helium 10 Elite Masterminds. 00:01:36 He also organizes one of the best events out there, called Billion Dollar Seller Summit. And he is a regular podcast guest. My buddy, the king of Amazon, Kevin King. He'll be coming to us shortly, but first let's have a word from our sponsor. Have you got as far as you can using automated tools to manage your advertising, but know that there's so much more you could be doing? Maybe you don't know where to start or how to improve your Amazon advertising. Why not talk to ClearAds, an Amazon certified partner with over five years of experience in moving beyond automation campaigns to sophisticated and proven advertising approaches that are far more effective for larger scale Amazon sellers. 00:02:23 ClearAds prides itself on being an extension of your business, providing insights into how to achieve results and ensures that you are able to understand the approaches taken and how they work for your business. Talk to ClearAds today and let them know you heard about them on the Lunch with Norm podcast and get a free audit and see how ClearAds can work with you to build your business today. All right, we're going to try to see how, if Kelsey. Can get to us today, hello everyone, hey it's Kelsey I'm in the lobby so I hope um it's not too loud for anyone but um I want to keep it short today so make sure yeah so I hope he's on a timeout Yeah, so I hope everyone's doing well. 00:03:13 Remember to smash those like buttons. Give us a thumbs up if you enjoyed today's episode. And I can see we already have some questions coming in live. We had a couple of people already send us questions in beforehand, so we'll get to those as well. These episodes tend to be pretty busy, so make sure you get your questions in beforehand. And if you haven't yet, make sure you join our Facebook group, Lynch with Norm, Amazon FBA and Ecommerce Collective. That's where all the fun happens. That's where you can ask questions to Norm and I, and the rest of the community. And yeah, I'll keep it short and sweet today. And I think that's it. All right. Well, I just wanted to say hello to Cool Hand Claudia. Simon, you're back. 00:03:53 Great to see you. Connor. And again, if you've got any questions, throw them over into the comment section. I think, like usual, whenever Kevin's on, we have a ton of questions. Okay. And by the way, stay tuned because we've got an incredible, an incredible giveaway today. So this is one of the best giveaways since the podcast started. So anyway, it's just this month of incredible giveaways, isn't it, Kels? Yeah, the last, I think, two weeks we've given away tens of thousands of dollars in value. Yeah. But anyway, stay tuned because it's going to be awesome. All right. So, Kelsey, you can get out of here. Sit back, relax. Welcome, Mr. King. I can't hear you, but I can read lips. But can our crowd? Especially on a podcast. It helps if I unmute. 00:04:55 Okay. What's up, Norm? How are you doing, man? Long time no see. I think it's been, what, since about 2 a. m.? Only finished a cigar? Yeah, a couple of cigars. Oh, my gosh. So first thing I want to talk about, and we're going to get into all that. We've got tons of questions right now, and we've got a new one that just came in. But we had an event this weekend, and some of these people that came out to the event, I've never met before. I think you've met everyone. But anyways, it was a great event. I mean, not only did we get to see the first spin out. I mean, Simon, I know you're an F1 fan. We were right at the first turn when the start of the race happened and Leclerc spun out. 00:05:42 We smelled the rubber. But we had a blast, didn't we? Like the whole weekend. Yeah, it's been great. The last four days have been really, really cool. We've been spending a lot of time out at the F1 track, hanging out in the cabana, networking with each other, having cigars, having good meals, watching some good concerts. Some of us drink a little bit. Some of us ate a lot. And yeah, it's a lot of good times. Some did both. That's true. Some did both. And then a few people got a nap in here or there. Yeah. And even now, what's really cool is that this is what I love about small events. Everybody bonded. Everybody got together. This wasn't an Amazon event. This was just an event sitting around a campfire and talking shop. 00:06:34 And like into the night, 2 a. m., last night. We're still sitting around talking shop about everything, wasn't it? Yeah, the Collective Mind Society is what we do, and it's not the presentations. It's not about come and listen to a bunch of presentations, take a bunch of notes. It's more about just natural. It's like you said. It's bonding. It's having some fun together. It's sharing bread together, and then things naturally come out. Just like last night at 1 o'clock in the morning, we're having discussions. There's three of us, four of us there, and something comes up about, oh, you're just naturally in conversation. How do you handle this particular problem in your business? And you were like, 'oh, I do this, this, and this'. 00:07:18 And there's this one special app that helps me do what I'm doing. And the other three of us were like, wait, what did you just say, Norm? Back up. And you're like, how do you spell that? And then you're like, oh, it's this one. Look it up. Pulled it up on your phone and you showed your phone and then, you know, everybody's taking pictures of what the URL was so that we could go, you know, those are valuable things. That right there could have paid for someone's trip. Just that one thing and the time savings and the productivity that's going to come out of that. And that's what it's all about. It's those natural little things that it's not jam-packing days with just a bunch of information, a bunch of gibberish from someone speaking. 00:07:58 It's actually natural. Things that happen, and then that that's the beauty of it, sitting like you said, sitting around that campfire, and just and seeing what comes out. And get it, you get enough good people together, collectively, uh, their minds start turning, and a lot of good things happen as a result, exactly so. Uh, long story short, the event was great, but I really encourage anybody if they can go to an event to go and do so. Like virtual events are awesome, you learn a lot, but breaking bread with people, which we did, you know we were in, we actually had this chef's table at this incredible restaurant, where we're all kind of crammed into the back, and had an 11-course meal, it was awesome, but it is breaking bread and getting to know people. 00:08:46 So I think that's bigger than anything because now you're not knowing them at a business level, you're knowing them at a level where you can, you can talk, you can just like again, I didn't know a couple of people that came out, and now they're friends, you know we're going to be able to join groups and meet up and do whatever. Okay, so let's get into this, we got lots of stuff, we got lots of stuff going on today, and I don't know if Kelsey, if you want to just start feeding us questions. Or, what how would you like to handle this? So I can start off with some of the questions that have been sent in. The first one was from Brian. He's asking, how do you go about finding the legal requirements for your product's labeling? 00:09:31 For instance, his hand sanitizer product or something simple like a Band-Aid? Well, there's agencies, there's inspection companies that will do that for you. There's actually a directory of those on Amazon, actually on sellercentral.amazon.com. They actually have a directory of a lot of the ones that they recommend so if you just Google actually define that I don't know what that URL is but if you just Google something like a product labeling compliance uh sellercentral. amazon. com it'll it'll pop up um and that'll give you a list there of of some companies that you can do there's also several companies that that do this as a service uh out there um some of it you're able to Google yourself, like for hand sanitizer, for example. 00:10:20 When we did that, we figured out just by Googling who regulates it, and it's the FDA. And then we went to the FDA website, and they have a search function there where you can actually see what are all the rules and regulations for hand sanitizer. And there were some special ones that happened during the pandemic that they made some special exceptions on certain things, and we made sure we're in compliance with that. And then we actually registered. There's a company that actually helps you register with the FDA. You pay them a fee, and then they check everything for you as well. Check all your labels. You send over copies of your labels to them, and they check it all. They're like compliance companies. So there's several of those that are out there. 00:11:01 But the best source, the easiest, is to do that Google and find that one on Seller Central and then follow those. And they break it down. Like, if you're selling medical equipment, go here. You know automotive equipment, this is one um, that's that's what I would recommend, yeah that's right. They brought out that program probably about a year ago maybe a bit longer and it'll just lay out everything for you, that's i, i agree 100 that's the best way to start, okay great. Uh, the next question um, so i, i know being on this podcast that I've heard a lot about hijackers and um, one of our listeners was asking, What does that mean exactly? Can you tell us what exactly is a listing hijacker? 00:11:50 Yeah, you hear that a lot, and a lot of people will say their listing got hijacked, and it really didn't get hijacked. People think when they sell on Amazon, and they go to Alibaba, and they find a product, and they don't really change it hardly at all, and they just stick their logo on it, and then put it up on Amazon, and then someone else comes right behind them and sells the same thing, basically, or sells a version of that, that they're being hijacked. It's kind of a gets confused with counterfeiting and sometimes, but that's one thing. Another time someone is referring to hijacking and someone goes in and changes the listing or their listing gets hijacked and they change out the pictures, you know, to make them something nasty, perhaps to get you classified into the adult category to get you suspended or they go in and they. 00:12:39 They modify some of your backend keywords or something like that. That is another way of having your listing hijacked. But a lot of times people are referring to someone's actually selling on the listing. So it depends on the context, but it could mean one of those two things is what people usually are referring to when they say their listing is hijacked. It's basically someone messing with your hard work of creating. Creating the listing, uh, and or finding the product and basically taking advantage kind of writing your coattails and taking advantage or trying to screw with you, I think that sums it up. Okay, and my next one is from Connor; uh, it's a question on PPC: should I keep low-converting keywords on super-low bids for ranking purposes or drop those from campaigns and focus on high-converting keywords only? 00:13:37 There's different schools of thought on this one. Some people would say drop them. Some people would say keep them. If they're not converting, definitely drop them. But if they're low converting, by that I'm assuming you mean like a very low percentage. Maybe a high converting might be you're getting 10%, 20% conversion rates or something, and a low converting might be a couple points, like 1% to 5% or something. I don't see any harm as long as it's – your tacos is is reasonable and in line with whatever your target is on that I don't see any reason in keeping that going just for for the ranking purposes of ranking because the algorithm does favor nobody knows for sure but it does favor if you're running ppc some people say it might give you a couple positions bump um but nobody knows that for sure that's just a kind of a common uh running old wives tale or something, that's what happens. 00:14:33 But I don't think it hurts as long as your tacos is in line with what your targets are. It may be a worse tacos than those high converting ones, but as long as it's below the water threshold you've set, that's reasonable for and profitable for you, then I don't see any problem in continuing. All right. So thank you for the question, Connor. And we'll move on to the next one with Simon. For Amazon PPC, what is the best practice to manage, monitor, and measure campaigns and campaign adjustments? That's a too open-ended question. I don't like the word. Number one, I don't like the word best practice. Best practice is a horrible word. There is no such thing as best practice. Best practice is corporate bullshit. 00:15:21 Every situation is different, and you've got to tailor things to your situation. I mean, I can give you an example like why I say there's no best practices in doing webinars. There's webinars if you want to sell something. Say you're selling a course to sell on Amazon. There's a certain thing that actually works to sell people a course on Amazon. If I'm selling somebody a $5,000 course on Amazon, if I go by best practices for webinars, that's going to be make it a 45-minute webinar with a 15-minute Q&A. But I could tell you that's not going to sell anybody a $5,000 course. There's going to be zero buys off of that. So best practice is when you hear that from anybody out there when it relates to PPC, ignore it. 00:16:09 Because every situation is different. And you've got to tailor it to your product, your cost structure, your competitiveness of the keywords. There's so many variables in there. So throw out best practice. But the key on PPC is to determine a taco, so total advertising cost of sale. That's not a cost. You add a T to the beginning of a cost to get tacos, and that's your total, what you're willing to spend off of every product you sell, whether it came from a PPC sale or whether it came from an organic sale. You're assigning a value to everything. You're saying everything that I sell, 10%, I mean of the cost, I assign to advertising. So if I'm selling my products for $19. 95, 10%, that's basically two bucks. 00:16:58 So for every product that I sell, whether I ran an ad or not, whether someone just, whether my mom went and bought it, if my mom went and bought it because I told her, hey, go to my Amazon page and buy it, I'm still in my head, I'm thinking that cost me $2 in advertising. That's tacos. It's your advertising costs spread across all your sales, not just your advertising sales. And that number you want to shoot for about 10%. So that's that get that number and when you first launch your product that number excuse me That number should be will probably be a lot higher because you're trying to get position You're trying to prove you're doing prove your product. You're doing some testing. 00:17:35 You don't have the reviews yet to support higher conversion rates. And so that probably will be higher but over time, over about a six month period. You want to make sure that's that's going down and ideally get that below 10% and then that would be So everything you're doing to monitor, measure, manage should be geared towards that. And it's just like we talked about earlier. What do you do with high converting or low converting keywords? That would be part of it. Which keywords are you actually going after? Which ones can you figure out this is just impossible for me to rank on? Go and use data dive or something like that to see where the opportunities are, where people are missing, and go after those. A little more low-lying fruit, that type of thing. 00:18:16 So there's a lot to it. All right. And one of the things I just wanted to throw in there was that a lot of people you hear talking about ACOS and keeping your ACOS at around 20% or so. And when you hear that, just turn off, like just go somewhere else, listen to something else. Because 20%, I've had ACOS in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and I'm experimenting, I'm playing around. And as long as that TACOS is in line, then I'm fine. And like you were saying, Kevin, it might go up, it might fluctuate, but you're experimenting with, you know, different types of keywords or, you know, doing whatever. But as long as the TACOS is in, you know, 10%, 12, maybe a little higher, I mean, that's fine. 00:19:08 And that is your main number you want to take a look at. All right. So I also want to give a big, big happy birthday to a beloved. Beard uh nation member uh it's Marcia Reese's birthday today so happy birthday Marcia hope you enjoyed the weekend and uh enjoyed some cake too and um and we'll jump into another question so we're getting tons of questions coming in right now so we'll try to get to everyone but let's see um From Claudia, what is your formula to decide how many units to order for your first order of a product you've never sold before? What factors do you take into account when forecasting your first order for new products? Yeah, the formula for that, there's a spreadsheet in Freedom Ticket. 00:20:01 So if you're a Helium 10 member at any level, you get Freedom Ticket for free. So if you have access to the Helium 10 software, I would go into Freedom Ticket. and one of the modules on there is actually all about that and there's there's a form in there so I don't want to go through that here but I'll talk about the second part of the question what some of the factors that you take in um some of the factors that you're going to have to take in is what what are you projecting to sell so when you first launch your product where what kind of budget do you have to actually promote this what are you doing to market what kind of influencer stuff are you doing what kind of outside traffic are you doing how much does your budget for ppc that's going to have a factor on on how fast you're going to ramp up. 00:20:42 And so I like to say, I like to know that I have 90 days worth of inventory on most cases. Some products may take longer than that, but there's a formula in the Freedom Ticket that actually, I don't remember it off the top of my head right now, but it actually guides you through how many days does it take to actually make the product? How many days does it take to get it in? How many units are you expecting to sell per month? And that's a guess. And usually what I shoot for is somewhere between position three and eight so I'll take a look on Helium 10 of the all the relevant products for 00:21:16 me so I'll do like an X-ray and I'll sort, sort the X-ray by by sales per day not by dollars uh or not by position but by cell units sold per day and then I'll eliminate all the ones that are really not relevant not my competition and they're they're if I'm selling a aluminum baseball bat for left-handed batters I'm going to eliminate all the wood bats that just say wood bats, or they're not targeting left-handed batters because I'm targeting left-handed batters. And I'm going to then see what are their sales by units. And I'm going to put, I'm going to say, I think I can get, you know, to position four, how many units is position four going to sell. 00:21:53 And that's, that's what I usually would base it on and then multiply that out by 90 days or however long, how many, however much inventory you're ordering, but usually it's 90 days for me. And that, that will tell me that that's a baseline then. If I'm doing any promotions or I need some for influencers, I'm going to add more on top of that so I might say, 'Hey, I need 100 extra units because I'm going to be sending them out to influencers or I'm going to be doing a Vine program. I need a 30 or 60 more for that.' So I add those on top uh to to that number and that those are some of the biggest things that I take into account. And then you have to look at fact, you know. 00:22:31 Is it Chinese New Year coming up or uh those kinds of things? Um, delay things so any kind of holidays any kind of seasonality that comes in. Um, but there's a... I refer you just to free I'm not you know, freedom tickets free. I'm not selling a course or anything, but to go to Freedom Ticket and there's a whole module that outlines an entire formula on that for you and with a spreadsheet and everything. Yeah, the other thing that could mess you up, not right now but you know, back in July. If you were ordering, if you didn't take a look at your numbers properly, They might look a lot lower than what they would be right now. 00:23:09 So if you're launching, like we're launching some products, we launched some products about two weeks ago, and we had to take into consideration the time of year because the numbers that we saw prior, I think they'll dwarf going into right now. So what we've done is we've ordered about two and a half times what we normally would. And it might even be more. But if you go off of those numbers, you'll easily, easily run out of inventory. So seasonality is very important. Oh, and by the way, when you're ordering your products, that's something else that we've got to talk about, Kevin. Because when you're ordering the product, you mentioned Chinese New Year's, but the whole supply chain issue, there's all sorts of things that are happening. You got stuck in Chicago last year, right? 00:23:59 Almost a year paying storage and everything um for product because of supply chain issues, but that's something else that we have to think about when we're ordering or doing a new launch, especially when it's coming over from overseas, yeah, that's yeah, supply chain, supply chain fluctuations are another big thing. I mean, those most a lot of those have uh at least from on the shipping lanes have sorted out now; shipping prices have come way down. They've got a lot of that congestion out. You're still having issues at factories and raw material problems. But the time on the sea, which was the big problem for a while there, and the time in the ports, ships waiting off the coast, most of that has all worked itself out now, and the prices have all come down. 00:24:42 But you still have a lot of raw materials issues. China is still locking down cities; two people get COVID, and they lock a whole city down, it seems, right now. And that can affect a lot of things. As well, you know, there's a thing that's electronic, you know, it has chips in it. It is having issues right now. Anything that was affected by like the war in Ukraine? You know, there's lots of little parts and little metal pieces, and Ukraine was a big a big country making lots of small little parts, especially for automakers and stuff that you know, they're making some of the electronics parts for like Porsche, for example. And that's delaying things. So you got to look at those kinds of things too and factor that in, which may mean you need to raise your order to have a little bit more of a buffer. 00:25:32 And how much do you have to raise it? It's a guessing game a lot of times. You don't know what's going to actually happen. So it's going to be a find out how deep are your pockets and what risk level are you willing to take and then doing your best guess. All right. Next question, Kelsey. Okay. Following up on that from Tony, do you ever try small quantities like 100 to 300 to test a new product? Never. I think that's a fool's game. That's my opinion. You'll see people say that online. You may hear someone that's successful doing that, but if you hear someone preaching that, I would like to see their books and their numbers. 00:26:13 What you do when you do a test 100 to 300 is, basically, you're doing that for everybody else because if you're successful, everybody else that's that's watching X-ray or one of these other tools, uh, is going to see it and you're just inviting your competition in my opinion. The only time now there is an exception to this rule, the only time I would do any kind of test of 100 to 300 is if it's something that's not sold on Amazon, it's never been sold on Amazon, you know, there's you've you found some village in the deep mountains of Costa Rica where this person makes this incredible I don't know quilt that's um that talks like a parrot or something. I don't know, something crazy. I'm making this up. 00:26:56 It just doesn't exist on the market. Then maybe buy 100 of them or 300 of them to test it and just see, be prepared to go after that. But what if it works? So if you buy 100 to 300, you've got to make sure the capacity is there after the fact. There's a problem with – I'll tell you a little story about that. Was it 2009, I believe, or 2008, no, 2009, sorry, 2009. I went to Morocco, the country of Morocco in Northern Africa, and just as a tourist, and I was traveling around in Northern Africa, and my guide took me to this one little village, and inside this little hut, there were about 20 women sitting on the floor with a little bowl in front of them, and like a little hammer-type thing, banging on these nuts, these like nuts. 00:27:47 Just banging on these things like as hard as they could and every time they would bang a little tiny amount of, like, liquid would would come out I'm like, what the heck is this? And they're like, 'This is Moroccan oil. This is like what all the women in Morocco use to put in their hair, and just look at their hair-how lustrous it looks! And look at their skin; they use this stuff to stay young.' I'm like, um, you know over here in the gift shop, you can actually, you can actually buy some. And that they make, and they're beating these nuts that fall off this special tree that's only found in Morocco. And there's one other place in the world that has it. 00:28:20 And what happens is these goats go up and grab these nuts off the leaves of the tree. The goats stand on their hind legs and like reach up and grab these nuts. Then they shit them out. And when they shit them out, they actually go and grab them. And that's what they break. So if you're using Moroccan oil, you're using something that was shat out by a goat. But then they beat these to get the actual oil. And that's what they were using, so I went into to the store. I was like, holy cow! This is an opportunity! This is before I knew FBA existed; I was like, this is a massive opportunity here! And this is before it existed out there in the rest of the world, uh, where it became a hot hot thing and so I went and came back and me and my business partner Mark were like, dude, we got to get on this! 00:29:03 So we took another trip back over there for the purpose of of finding supply chain and and talking to people. And we found some people that could make it. We went to factories; we went to suppliers. Then we came back and we ran numbers and we're like, back then, this is before Amazon FBA really existed, and we were like, we're going to do infomercials! So we put together a whole budget To do infomercials on television and we ran our numbers and, like, this is what we need just for a basic test and what happened is the supplier said we can't supply that much-we can only give you I don't remember what the numbers were. We need 100 barrels of the stuff; like, we can only supply And we're like, 'That's just not going to work. 00:29:42 It's not worth us doing this.' So we had to back off on the entire project. Well, then about two years later, it exploded and became like the hottest thing in the beauty industry. And so we were kicking ourselves after that. But that's an example of where you get to look at, you know, supply chain and availability can mess with you. And it could cost you opportunities or it can create opportunities. Okay, well, hold it, Kels. We're right at the bottom of the hour, so let's talk a bit about today's giveaway. So today, we have a great giveaway. Mr. King, why don't you talk a little bit about it? Yeah, sure. So what I'm happy to do today is give someone a free ticket to the next Billion Dollar Seller Summit, the virtual one. 00:30:29 Now, I've done six Billion Dollar Seller Summits. Four of them have been in person. And two of them are virtual. So you don't even have to leave your house. You can do that from anywhere in the world. The next one's coming up in February, February 22nd and 23rd, I believe it is. So we're still a few months out. But it's a great event. It's not like a lot of these other, you know, set virtual things that you might do. It's live. So none of the presentations are prerecorded. Everything is live. We use a special software called Hopin that actually creates like, all these cool little lounges and cool little, almost like being at an event in person. It's really, really cool. People always love it. So it's a great experience. 00:31:11 It's a two-day event. Some of the best of the best will be speaking at it. And I would like to give away a free ticket to that. It's a $1,497 value. So the tickets cost $1,497. They'll go on sale to the public in January. But someone today on the Wheel of Fortune is going to actually win a ticket for free. So you'll be able to come to to that event virtually from anywhere in the world, uh, totally for free in February. Oh, that's fantastic! Okay, so another great giveaway this is uh one you don't want to miss like I always say when uh Kevin's billion-dollar seller whether it's virtual or in live um it's it's one of the top in the world, so hashtag wheel of Kelsey tag two people and you will get a second entry. Now, before we go any further, Kelsey, we could just have a word from our sponsor. I want to give a quick shout-out to an incredible group of sponsors who help keep our podcast running. The Lunch with Norm podcast wouldn't be possible without the support of the following sponsors. 00:32:28 Startup Club, and Dragonfish Brand Management. I just want to let our sponsors know, you're awesome. Now, let's get back to the show. Alright, before we get to the next question, the most important thing that happened this weekend was, I don't know if this is something we should never do again, or we should do it all the time. We had something I'd never heard of before, and we'll be posting it in lunch. But I don't know if you guys have heard of this. This is one chip challenge. Anyways, my two kids, Howard, Ty, and, um, uh, Corin got in there. Uh, you want to tell a little bit about what happened? Yeah. So on Saturday, uh, after the race, uh, finished and while we're waiting around to, uh, for the Ed Sharon concert to start, uh, in our, in our little cabana. 00:33:24 We decided to have a little contest because some guys, you know, some of the food at the event was a little bit spicy. And people were like, oh, I love spicy. I can eat spicy. And we're like, well, let's put this to the test. So there's something called the One Chip Challenge. You can Google it where you buy a little box and it's got one chip, one like potato chip, kind of like a tortilla chip basically inside. And the goal is you eat that chip and you see who can last the longest without taking a drink or without eating something. And this chip is super spicy. Well, they say it's super spicy. And I thought it was spicier than what it was. But we decided to have a little contest and see who could last the longest. 00:34:08 And so we put a cash prize on it. And we said, hey, whoever is the last one to take a drink or eat something to get this heat out of your mouth, we'll give you the cash prize. Four people decided to do it out of our group of 12, and they all ate the chip. And you know they they said, 'Yeah, my mouth is a little bit hot and but you know, a few tears were coming out just a natural but that's no big deal, uh. And after about 10 minutes or so, nobody had taken a drink, nobody had uh eaten anything; they're like, 'Yeah, this isn't too bad. Yeah, I feel it a little bit, a little burning and um, and so I was like, 'Well, shoot, maybe this thing isn't as hot as we thought it was. 00:34:48 Let's up the game.' So, we're going to double the prize. If you take a second chip, and you win, we're going to double the prize money. You'll get double the prize money. So two people, Norm's sons, Hayden and Kelsey, actually took the second chip. And Norman stepped away to grab a drink or to grab something from the snack bar. And when he came back, he's like, what's going on? No, no, no. My kids, my kids, they just took another one. No, no, you didn't. Why did you do that again? Because the night before, Norman. Considered we talked about the day before that we might do this and so he googled it to see what the heck this thing was and he saw all the reviews like on Amazon of people saying I ended up in the hospital or you know this thing burned my mouth or whatever. 00:35:31 Norm's like, 'Heck no, I'm not participating!' Then as kids, he comes back, steps away for a minute, and comes back and sees that they just took a second one so he's like freaking out a little bit, like, 'Oh my god, I hope I'm not having to rush to the ER tonight; we got a concert to go to.' So The guys, all four of them, just sat there like, 'No big deal. You know, I feel a little bit now it's kind of moving down my esophagus, moving into my, you know, but no big deal.' I think we got this. And they lasted an hour, all of them. All four of them lasted an hour without taking a drink or eating anything to get rid of the heat. 00:36:06 Well, when that hour kicked in, it was time to go to the concert. So we're all with a little transportation, a little buggy that took us over to the concert. By the time we got to the concert, two of them were in severe pain, were just like bent over. One of these guys was a big old guy, ex-football player. He was like bent over on the ground, and he said he just wanted to curl up like a baby. This pepper, the spice, had worked its way down into their stomach, and it was just an excruciating pain. And he said actually the next, later that day, I think it was, no, when he got home that night, he went to the bathroom to take a pee. 00:36:44 And he said he actually felt it when he took a pee coming out of his, you know, the parts where you take a pee. And that's how strong this pepper was. He said, never again will I do this. So that was a pretty interesting thing. I don't know, Hayden or Kelsey, I don't know if you ever want to do that again or not, but I've got four more of the boxes if you want to go another round. You know what? I think I'm okay, Kevin. I appreciate it, but I'll take this. I'll step away. I've learned my lesson. Oh, Norm, you're on mute. We do have video of Kelsey and Hayden sitting together. Kelsey is breaking out in sweat, like breaking out in sweat. 00:37:29 He's in pain and he's crying, like tears are coming down while Ed Sheeran is singing in the background. And he looks like he's. He's wording Ed Sheeran's lyrics while he's crying. I just thought, you know, it just touched a part of your heart. But it wasn't that. He was in severe pain. All right. 50-50. But anyways, yes. Who won the money? That's a good question, Claudia. This guy did. Me and my brother, actually. We spent the money because we both ate the two chips. So just one last thing, and we'll get to the questions. So three people went down for the count. At the end of the concert, we're looking for my other son, who's looking for a medic, because he's down for the count. So anyways, yeah, this one chip challenge, be very careful. 00:38:25 It doesn't kick in until a little bit later on. And even the next day during the race, they were feeling it. Yeah, this is a good promo for your event. Yeah, yeah. Everyone in excruciating pain. Yeah, join the fraternity. The brotherhood. Okay, let's see. Next question. This one's from Kurt. If you want to be on top of search, do you do this only with the keywords of your performance campaign in Seller Central? And what about settings or bid optimization in AdTomic? Say your campaign is set at 30%, do you change your target value? Yeah, I don't use AdTomic, so I can't advise you on the settings for AdTomic, unfortunately. I manually do my stuff, so I don't use AdTomic. So I don't have an answer on that one. 00:39:22 Yeah, I'm the same. You're the same? Okay. All right. We'll move on to the next one. This one is more on the mindset from Simon. Selling on Amazon is so goddamn frustrating. So many levers to pull and buttons to press. How do you stop yourself from going stir crazy and stay on track? Yeah, the problem with – we were actually talking about this a little bit last night. The problem with selling on Amazon right now is it's actually – It's sold to a lot of people as being easy. You see a webinar, you see a YouTube video or someone, and yeah, this is pretty easy. Just buy something for $2, sell it for $20. Look at all this profit. Look at all these vacations. 00:40:01 Look at all this freedom of me traveling around the world. It looks easy. Selling on Amazon is not easy. It's not easy, and you have to know a lot. You have to know stuff about marketing. You have to know stuff about product sourcing. You have to know stuff about logistics. You have to know stuff about advertising. You have to know stuff about inventory control. You have to know stuff about hiring and working with people. You have to know stuff about ranking. You have to know stuff about compliance and what regulations there are. You have to know accounting. There's a lot to it. And any one of those, you can have a hiccup and something go wrong that can make you want to pull your hair out. And people make it look like it's easy. 00:40:38 It's not easy. This is not easy. And it's actually harder now than it's ever been because there are big brands and big money involved. They're serious players in there. And it's much more difficult for the small guy right now to make it. To be honest, is it a bad opportunity? No, it's still the best opportunity out there. Selling on Amazon is still incredible. But you have to come in. It's a real business. It's not a get rich quick thing. It's not a quit your job in two months because you're selling on Amazon and making a million. It's difficult. And it takes to really grow. It takes deep resources, good good networking connections, and money or at least a combination of some sort of combination of those. 00:41:21 If you don't have that, then it takes a skill set. You look at these aggregators that came out, you know, 100, 100 plus aggregators popped up in the last couple of years. Most of them are struggling right now. And you're going to see consolidation. Some of them are going out of business. A few of them are going to survive and be stronger. But those guys, they actually when they started hiring or started buying companies. They're like, well, it's going to be easier to hire people to run these businesses. Well, we got some guy that just graduated his MBA from Harvard. He can come in and run this business. He failed. He didn't know what he's doing. They thought they could hire the people that they're buying the businesses from. 00:41:58 In some cases, they can. But in most cases, those people don't want to go work corporate. The whole point of them doing this was they want that freedom and they want that independence. They don't want to go work for some big company. So, they had a hard time finding very many people that would actually do that, other than maybe they're their commitment when they got bought, they have to stay on for three months to help them out or something, and they're struggling to find people that actually know how to do this, and actually it's not easy. That's what that's a misconception. So, the thing is: if you if you're into this and you're in knee-deep just keep plugging away and learning as much as you can; go to a few events if you can afford it to network with other people, and they can talk your language. 00:42:38 You know, a lot of times people don't get out and they don't get around other people that are doing the same thing that have these same experiences. And that can be, that can help as much as anything you learn in a presentation. Sometimes it's just being around other people that are going through what you have or that have the same kind of thinking and mindset as you, because talking to your, to your parents or talking to your boyfriend or girlfriend or husband or wife or your friends, they just look at you like 'what is this crazy? I don't understand, you're selling stuff on Amazon. How does that work? I don't get it.' They don't understand. That's some of the things that you can do. 00:43:09 But in some of it, you've got to wear a lot of hats. Until you can afford to hire experienced people or learn it yourself and then train up other people, you're going to have to wear a lot of different hats. And I still, to this day, in some of my businesses, some of it's by choice, but I still wear multiple hats. In one of my businesses, three of my businesses, I have three PLs. The stuff goes into the 3PL. It gets shipped out. I never really touch anything. The other business, I'm still the guy down in my garage actually putting the stuff in the boxes by choice. Some of that is to keep myself close to that side of the fulfillment and understanding how ShipStation and all that stuff works, so then I can then communicate. 00:43:51 It's come in handy when I've had problems with my 3PL. They tell me they can't do something. Yes, you can. In ShipStation, you do this, this, this, and this. Oh, we didn't actually know that. But I knew that because I'm keeping my hands dirty a little bit. It's kind of like the executive that, you know, at one of the big companies that, you know, what's that TV show? Hidden Boss or Undercover Boss? Where they go in, they actually work the front lines and so they can relate. So I do some of that on purpose. But it's a difficult business. It can be a very lucrative business, a very rewarding business. but it's a difficult 00:44:30 business and there's always some some curveball coming your way with amazon making changes or somebody messing with you or new competitors coming in or supply chain problems it it's a problem solving business yeah just to add to that you go out and if you're thinking that you're just going to be going and taking a course so you go take freedom ticket and you think that's it I don't know if anybody's ever done martial arts, but you've got your white belt and you think, oh, I finished my class and now I'm a black belt. Well, what they say is that's where the learning begins. So now you have to learn all these other things, all these other steps. And I don't know about Kevin, but for me, I can't be an expert in everything. 00:45:17 So I know. At some point, I've got to have a Facebook ads expert or some other type of expert. And you go in and you start hiring other people to do that because I like to know this much of it. If I can understand it, like Kevin said with the ship station, he's on it. But if I understand the process, then I can't get the wool pulled over my eyes when somebody's trying to quote me on something. So anyways, it is tougher. But don't be discouraged because if you're on it, then you'll know 10 times more than anybody else. Okay, so we still have lots of questions coming in. I do want to just take a pause and remind everyone that we have our Wheel of Kelsey. 00:46:07 If you're new to the channel, we do this giveaway every single podcast. So if you write-I do have a call at the top of the hour too, guys, just to remind you too. So whatever questions we need to get in, we should do. Yeah. Okay, great. So #WheelOfKelsey to win a free virtual ticket to a virtual billion dollar seller summit. If you take two people, you'll get an extra entry. And we'll jump into another question. Let me see, answer that one. Oh, we have one from Darwin. Here, just a second. I have a new second account with a new product. I expect to sell a ton, but my first shipment into Amazon is only allowing a 25 CB of storage and standard. Turns out to be only 36 units. 00:46:51 How can I increase this? You can actually, since it's a brand new product, it might be a little bit difficult. It'd be great if you had a little bit of history, but you could actually, there's a, There's an email address where you can write in. Let me see if I can find it for you real quick. If you make a case, if you send an email to this particular email address. Here it is. We actually shared this in the BDSS. The email address. Oops, that's not it. But you write into this particular email address and you lay out, say, 'Hey, I'm restricted to 36 units right now, but I have whatever, 100. I don't know what your number was. I have 100 units that I need to send in. 00:47:50 I'm doing a big promotion on Instagram with these big influencers, even if you BS a little bit in there, that have 2 million followers and we're doing this whole campaign. I really would like to be able to sell these. Something along those lines. And could you please temporarily or increase your storage limit so that I can actually ship these in? And if you send it to this one particular email address, it usually works. You might have to send it twice. If you get a no the first time, just reword the letter and send it in again. But let me see if I can find that address real quick for you. 00:48:29 I'm looking on my computer. 00:48:38 Okay. So while Kevin's looking for that, is there anything else that we have there, Kels? Yeah, let's see. This one, okay, this one I think might be a little controversial, but from Spring Signals, I'm a beginner starting on Amazon FBA with 3. 5K. What kind of product should I sell? Well, is that enough? 3. 5K is going to be difficult. That's a pretty low number. So, you're going to need to find something that's not competitive, number one. Don't go into anything that's super competitive right now with that number. The product that you need to sell, if you have $3. 5K, you need to – divide that by 2. 5 so three and a half k divided by 2. 5 is what about $1,700? 00:49:41 What's that about seven uh, $1,500 or so, um, $1,400 I'm just doing this top of my head, so you need to find a product that you can buy your entire inventory including the shipping and get it into Amazon for $1, 400... And that's what you need to do. Don't spend all $3. 5K on your first product. Because if you're successful, the reason for that is if you're successful, you're going to have to place a second order with the factory and spend another $1. 4K before you get paid, most likely from Amazon. So you're going to need that money sitting there in the bank. And then you're going to need a little bit of money for advertising and maybe a software tool or two, a few other things. 00:50:22 So that's my rule is take the amount of money that you have and divide it by 2. 5. And so you need to be looking only at products where you can get into it, including the shipping. This is where it's hard for $1,400 in your case, in your particular case. So that means you're probably going to need to find stuff that you can buy for about a dollar or two. And stuff that you're not going to have to buy $2,000 of. So it's going to be a very deep niche down product, something that's probably only selling five units a day or 10 units a day. Nothing that's going to be gangbusters off to the races. And that's where you're going to need to start. 00:51:01 And there's nothing wrong with starting there. You'll learn the systems. You'll learn how everything works. And if you're successful, then you'll have the money to grow it. And then you'll start knowing what to do. And you'll be turning cash in the next product. Maybe you'll have some profits off of this one if you've got good margins. If you're buying it for $2 and selling it for $20, and it's a niche-down product where you don't have to do a lot of advertising to really move the needle, you'll start generating some cash flow and you'll start generating some relationships with that factory where you might be able to come back and do a second product that you know might have like a 10k uh starting investment uh by rolling your profits and by maybe getting some sort of concessions from your supplier. 00:51:40 And you can build it's going to be a slow process and going to take you years probably to build that up but it can be done, but that's the number one thing is don't-The amount of money you have to invest dictates what kind of products you should sell. So just on that, Kevin, I've dealt with a lot of different clients in the past, smaller clients just getting into it. And when they've come to me with a budget like that, maybe $5,000, especially nowadays, a lot of those people just don't have the cash flow and they don't realize the cash flow. I know you mentioned it, but that second order could kill you. And just from my end, this isn't from Kevin's end. 00:52:24 From my end, I usually say that if you have $3,500 or $5,000 in today's environment, be very careful. I would probably suggest saving your money and waiting until you can really jump in. Because right now, I know a lot of people who have gone into the markets. I don't know about you, Kev, but there's a lot of people that go in underfinanced and they just never, they lose it; they just never get to compete. Even some people go in with that and they're successful, but they end up losing because they run out of stock. They come out, they start with 3500 and like holy cow, I'm selling 100 a day; I hit the mother load here, and they run out of stock. 00:53:05 And then they're there, because they don't have the money to to get the next order, and they're scrambling around calling all their uncles and and their buddies saying 'Hey, can I borrow some money'? Or they're trying to get another credit card or something in the meantime. Everybody else is on X-ray looking and seeing what you just did, and they're jumping on it; and they have deeper pockets. And by the time you come back in stock, there's 20 other people selling the exact same thing, and you're dead in the water. And when you run out of stock for a long period of time, you're basically starting over. So all the efforts that you did for promotions or Vine reviews or PPC or getting influencers or whatever you did is basically wasted. 00:53:41 Okay. All right, Kels, do we have one last question and then we'll get to the wheel? Yeah, it'll have to be quick. From Dick, currently selling in UK and launching in US next month, looking to source my products, cosmetics in Mexico. Where do I start? Are there sourcing websites, groups, companies that focus on Mexico? That's a question for Norm. All right. And yes, there is. Kelsey, we've got two sourcing agents that we've been working with. I don't know if you can post it in the group. And one has been on the podcast before, and maybe you can put the link right into the chat here. And they are very diverse. I saw another comment that came up talking about Mexico, what you can get outside of what we were talking about earlier, if we've sourced anything. 00:54:38 And yes, there's all sorts of things that have been going on in Mexico. Eva foams. One of the things I didn't talk about from the event that we did were the companies that were even making not knockoffs, but similar to Crocs, barbecues, you name it, plastics, way beyond what I thought would be coming out of Mexico right now. But anyways, we'll put that podcast in there. Oh, yeah, you did. Okay, so good Omar. He's a person to get in touch with. He'll go out, he'll source everything. You don't have to touch anything. And he's got great connections with a ton of suppliers. Also, Greg Reynolds. He's not been on the podcast yet. I'm trying to get him on. But Greg, I think he owns Source Mexico, I think. Anyways, he's another really great guy to contact. So he owns Zahn Support, but his offices are in Mexico. And I think that's it. Let's pop over and do the Wheel of Kelsey. Okay, here we go. And Kevin, if you need to pop out at any time, no problem. Yeah, I need to hop out in just about two minutes. Okay. All right. So we'll do the Wheel of Kelsey. 00:56:15 Thank you everyone for entering today's Wheel of Kelsey. We do this every single podcast. I'll shuffle these names up and give it a spin. If you are the winner, please email me k at lunchwithnorm. com and I'll connect you with the prize. It looks like the winner is Claudia. Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. She's she's been trying to get her Amazon listings up and going. She's a Canadian, and I think that's going to be perfect for you, Claudia. So congrats. All right, Kevin. I know you have to go, sir. I appreciate it. Thanks, everybody. And have a great rest of your week. All right. We'll see you later. That's right. Later on today, all right. Take care, buddy. All right. See ya. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed today's podcast. 00:57:15 We're hopefully going to do a lot more of those. Just ask me anything podcast. Anyway, I'm glad Kevin had a chance. He was away from his business for a few days, you know, from this Formula One event that we had, but back to business today. So thank you everybody. Kelsey, if you want to come in and say anything. Okay, we're going to throw it over to the sponsor and then we can wrap things up. A big thank you to our sponsor, Post Purchase Pro, the only complete A to Z done for you real email and text marketing service built specifically for Amazon sellers. My friends, Sean Hart and Seth Stevens, co-founded Post Purchase Pro after launching over a thousand successful private labeled products, growing 53 brands, and getting this exciting 17 businesses. 00:58:10 Post Purchase Pro creates all of your digital assets 100% for you from marketing inserts, complete sales funnels, email follow-up sequences, and weekly email promotions. They manage and optimize everything for you to drive more sales, get higher rankings, and receive more reviews on Amazon. So check out PostPurchasePro now to see if you too will see enormous growth like their nearly 500 clients worldwide. That's PostPurchasePro at PostPurchasePro. com slash lunch. Okay, we're back. What do you have to say, girls? Alright, so hopefully you guys enjoyed today's episode. It's been a while since we got Kevin on, so I'm glad this worked out. I do want to mention that Friday we have a special episode. It's our Trash My Product episode happening. Yeah, Trash My Product. 00:59:09 So we've got three people who sent in their products where we've got to see them, and we're going to go through and take a look and give our honest advice. And what we think of it going through the customer journey and taking a look at their listings, and yeah, kind of do like a little audit for them. And so check it out. I'm sure you'll learn something even if it's not your product. And even today I checked my email and I got a bunch more inquiries. So it looks like this might be popular. So, yeah, looking forward to that. Today I got seven. Today. So just letting everybody know. Yeah, it's going to be great. We're going to be heading back. Yeah, we'll just be getting back on Wednesday before we get to the podcast. So, yeah, join us Wednesday. It was a late night. Anyway, join us Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. And thank you for being part of the community. You guys are all awesome. And please don't forget to join the Facebook group. We're going to be posting some really fun pictures of Kelsey sweating it up, many pictures of Kelsey. But, you know, I'm his dad. I can do that. Alright, guys. We'll see you later.