Talkin’ Shop March: Amazon Q&A with Kevin King | Kevin King | Ep. 120

Talkin’ Shop March: Amazon Q&A with Kevin King | Kevin King | Ep. 120 00:00:02 Hey everyone, it's Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy here, and welcome to another Lunch with Norm, The Rise of the Microbrands. 00:00:14 Alright, so first of all, today we have a returning guest, Mr. Kevin King, the King of Amazon, and we're going to be just talking about Anything. Anything going on in Amazon. So before we do that, where are you, Kels? Hey, how are you? I'm doing fine. How are you? Pretty good. Pretty good. I'm almost getting this new setup set up. Almost. You were fine-tuning. A little fine-tuning is right. We'll get it sometime. But yeah, welcome everyone. Yep. Be careful. Be careful. Alright. Welcome, everyone. We got a good turnout already. Wow. Already up to 20 people. Welcome to the show, everyone. If you haven't already, please smash those like buttons and share with any friends. If you know anyone that is interested in some Amazon content and needs help with their listing, if you want to share it into a group, go ahead and do that. 00:01:23 Also, our Beard Nation Facebook group is always available if you haven't joined yet. Lunch with Norm, Amazon, FBA, and E-Commerce Collective. I'll put the link in the comments. We also have a really great prize today that I just want to get out there right now. It's from Tony Sagar. He is giving away two, let me see. It was two European down feather duvets and they retail at about $150 each. So he's giving out two of them. So this is only for US and- Canadians only. Sorry, guys. Yeah, sorry, everyone. Any complaints about that, give to Kelsey directly, k@lunchwithnorm. com. Thank you, thank you. And yeah, like and subscribe. We have our clubhouse next week. We still have to make the link and everything, but that'll be up shortly. 00:02:14 But yeah, welcome, everyone. Welcome, Simon. See, he knew. All right, so how do people get into this contest for today? All right, so. I don't know what are you thinking I'm thinking I just well you know what it should be I love Tony but you know because Kevin's on let's just put uh and I'm gonna I'm gonna say this because I know he's gonna just kind of roll his eyes I love Kevin #I Love Kevin okay perfect all right so #I Love Kevin It's love not want love. Yeah, I love Kevin put in the comment section if you're from the US or if you're a Canadian And then we can send that prize to you. It's to feather debasement. But yeah, welcome everyone. 00:03:01 Welcome Oleg the TIA Ray Andrew Mark Brad Tony and thank you Tony so much. We really appreciate it. You know, Tony, you're awesome. And he's got a great product. And he doesn't you know, just just like Alan. He doesn't mind sharing the name and the brand of the the product. So, that's that. So, I'll put the link in the comment section and yeah, please check out his website and yeah, I think that's very good now move there. Good he's off, Kevin. What's up? Hey, hold it, i gotta say sit back, relax, grab your coffee, and enjoy! But for us, it should be grab that cigar-that's right! One of these days one of these days we'll have to sit on the balcony, I'll sit on mine, and we'll have a cigar together while we're doing this. 00:03:51 There we go, yeah, sure for sure because the way things are going, we're never going to see each other just like this-just, you know, just have lunch together once a month. You know, i want to see hologram Kevin; hologram camera? Yeah, so he can sit across from me and, you know, a hologram. Yeah, yeah. We should do that. There's something that can create that. It's called the Shape Scale. Have you seen that? The what? It was a Kickstarter about three or four years ago. I'm getting ready to go on to lose some weight and stuff, so I'm buying all these little gadgets and everything, and one of them is called the Shape Scale. You stand on the scale, and it's got like an arm that rotates all the way around you. 00:04:33 and it makes like a 3d image of your entire body and so it makes that hologram and then then you can actually actually monitor all your uh you know everything that you do if you do certain exercises or do certain things it'll actually show you you know your gut went in this much this month and this much it'll show you the whole progression of everything how much how much fat's around your heart how much uh you know everything um it's called the shape scale it's it's not out yet it's coming out to this this uh in about three or four months but yeah if you google shape scale it'll make a hologram so that's what i'm saying is um um i can get create a Hologram for you! 00:05:11 I'm getting so big that I might have to put one on one foot one on the other, hey! So, in case anybody doesn't know who you are and what you do, can you just give us a little bit of information? Sure, yeah. My name's Kevin King, and I'm an Amazonaholic. I've been selling on Amazon since 2001, so what's that, 20 years now? I've been doing FBA since 2015. I run about five different Amazon businesses. focused on Amazon. We sell offline and off Amazon as well, but primarily most of the sales are coming through Amazon. I do a product sourcing company called Product Savants with Steve Simonson. I have a calendar business that's partially on Amazon, but mostly off Amazon, where we do a lot of stuff in direct mail. 00:06:09 Still sell catalogs through the postal service. And then I do a bunch of training for Helium 10. So I create the Freedom Ticket course, which is a course they offer for free to anybody who has a Helium 10 membership. And then I lead their advanced training called Helium 10 Elite, which is a monthly, about three and a half, four-hour training. And then I run the Billion Dollar Seller Summit a couple times a year, which you spoke at the last one. We had to do it virtually because of the pandemic, but the last one was about three weeks ago. And you came on and delivered some awesome nuggets of advice. Some cool strategies about some things of how to use Google that most people don't understand or don't know, which is really cool. 00:06:50 So, yeah, that's basically what I do. Just a little thing. You're not too busy. No, I don't have too much to do now. No, no. All right. So I heard some really crazy things about Amazon that we're going to get into or even Google. We could get into it later on in the show. But what about right now? What are your thoughts on you know we're going into April what's going on anything that we should be aware of um well Amazon seems like they're constantly making changes you know they just added the deal where you can actually add uh instruction manuals and and stuff like that uh some people had that ability before uh but they just really opened it up uh to pretty much any brand owner which I think that'll help uh you know it'll cut down on some of the returns and help sometimes before somebody wants to buy something, they want to know how hard is this thing to put together? 00:07:46 And so I think that's going to help. You're seeing more in the advertising side, they're doing more stuff there. Some of the restrictions, it seems to be, are coming off of the 200. I have not seen this exactly myself, but a couple of people have told me that. On a brand-new product, they were actually allowed to ship in like 370 instead of 200 on a first-time shipment. So I'm saying there may be a beta. There may be a test. I'm not sure. But they seem to be opening that up a little bit. You know what I heard, Kevin? Yeah, what's that? With that 200 restriction, I don't know. I heard it through the grapevine. But I heard that they're thinking about removing it and putting it up to 1,000. 00:08:30 Have you heard anything about that? Uh, yeah, I've heard, you know, I think they're on or somebody was saying something about that or posted something like that a while back. But I, um, I have not seen that myself. I'm still on my accounts. It still has restrictions on it, but I think what they may be doing is maybe basing it on your past inventory management. I have a feeling that, you know, this person that told me they could send them 370 instead of 200. Um, they, they sell a lot of stuff. And so that may be. some sort of algorithm that's like, okay, you've been pretty good at managing inventory in the past, so we're going to let you send in 370 instead of 200. So I don't see them raising that to 1 ,000. 00:09:09 Not until anytime soon. Not until they get a lot more warehouse space online. I mean, once they get a lot more warehouse space online, maybe that'll go up, but I just, I don't know. I think they're going to keep it, you know, they might raise it from 200 up to 500 or something. But for a new product, I just don't see them opening the floodgates back up. They don't want to become a warehouse again. Right. And so, but if you have a history or you're an existing seller, I can see them making some dramatic differences where maybe they'll let you go to 1,000 or maybe even more if you have some sort of history. Let's go back to that instruction book. 00:09:51 what are the restrictions on that so i'll give you an example let's say that i have a beverage but the beverage and i'm thinking of one in particular non-alcoholic spirit okay it has to be mixed with something you can't drink it straight it has to be mixed the instruction manual is basically a recipe book could you put that up as a recipe book or as a manual uh i suppose i suppose you could do it does amazon is that the intended purpose i don't think so um yeah but could you do that um i don't think they're going to be checking this stuff i think it's just going to go up and maybe some algorithm looking through it and making sure but um yeah i i don't know that's that's You know, I'm sure people there's always people going to beat the system uh so I think uh I think some people will abuse that and use it for other things. 00:10:48 Yeah, and I'm not looking at it so much as abuse. I'm looking at it because it really is. Let's say I take a look at most of the products in this category. People don't read the instructions, so they drink it direct instead of mixing it with a mocktail. And so all of the negative reviews are because people drank it straight. So if the instruction book was out there, then they would know how to do it properly. Yeah, I would think that would be okay. Yeah. I mean, that's basically how to – I mean, it would be just like if there's a little pamphlet attached to the side of the bottle or something. yeah yeah 00:11:33 that no i think that would be okay yeah and now i got to think of other ways to do it and abuse it yeah no that definitely make that's instructions on how to mix the product um how to properly enjoy it i think that would be totally okay and probably wise to do and but then your bullet points are somewhere see the instruction booklet below now i'm kind of curious about your ppe product you're not going to get into the the the brand and everything but um how are you finding that are you have you got a backup because i know you've had you were having all sorts of problems with amazon you'd be answering it and providing game plans and doing everything according to the book and they'd suspend you yeah we had a lot of problems last year uh we knock on wood we haven't had uh any well we had one this year but it It just got classified as a pesticide. 00:12:27 And then another one just randomly, a case quantity of it got classified as not allowed on Amazon. And because we went through all this rigmarole where we're down for sometimes a couple weeks last year on things, we have all the documents from Amazon. So when that happens now, I can just upload a screenshot from Amazon Legal, a couple other screenshots I have from inside Amazon, you know, with the name of the person and everything on there and say, look, we're authorized, put it back up. But I put that screenshot and, you know, originally that used to be, uh, they would get one of those canned responses back saying, uh, okay, thanks for the, thanks for the info. We're going to check with the concern team or whatever. 00:13:08 Um, but now it's pretty much as soon as I upload that within hours, it's back. Really? Oh yeah. So, uh, but so that's, that's definitely helped. But in the, in all of that, we've lost; This is products that were doing $40,000, $50,000 a day last year, single products. They're nowhere close to that now because all the history, all the momentum was lost. You got a bunch of zeros in there on sales days. It's just a mess. Those are nowhere near that, plus the PPE market is completely saturated. I was just in a store yesterday, a convenience store getting some gas. They had a hand sanitizer a little two ounce bottles of hand sanitizer Clearance for for a dollar, you know 25 cents each and I know That's basically below the cost of what most people are manufacturing something like that for I know I know the costs on all the different things it So how do you compete against that? 00:14:12 You know when you're going on Amazon, there's people selling two ounce bottles for $4 . 99 or pack of five for ten bucks or whatever um you know it's a very very that market's way over saturated uh and not not and everything masks face shields sanitizer there's so much of it out there that you can't it's hard to even give it away so you live in uh you live in austin so it's the foodie area right Yeah. And I saw this the other day and I was just wondering if you'd be either getting into this market or if you've already bought one. The nose mask. The nose mask? Have you seen it? No, I haven't seen it. So another PPE product. So while you're in a restaurant, you have a mask across your nose. 00:15:04 It looks completely ridiculous. But anyways, I was just wondering if you might be using nose masks. I get my second shot of Moderna on Sunday. Oh, you've got a nose mask. But I still wear a mask. This is going to be with us for a while. I know there's a lot of different schools of thought out there, depending on no matter which side of this you're on. This is with us until 20/23, 20/24. It's with us forever, actually. This is not going to go away any time in the next 10 or 20 years. But the pandemic side, well, will subside, but before things are back to somewhat fairly normal for everybody, it's going to probably be 2023 um or later and then and that just that's based on uh you know more variants not showing up that mess up stuff but people are tired of it so that it's not going to be the same as what it was last year, you know. 00:16:00 People are going to go about their business in some ways, but this is not going away. You guys in Canada are way behind us in the US. The US is one of the top five or six or so in the world right now as far as percentage of people. We still have a lot of issues. You look at what's happening in Europe. Hopefully, the PPE stuff, people are still buying it. People still need it. Hopefully, we can sell what we've made. It's important. When you start looking at it like the nose mask, okay, I guarantee you they'll try to put it on to Amazon or whatever. Whatever it is, PPE is a really tough market. I mean, you know people think supplements are tough but trying to stay on the PPE market for hand sanitizer or for masks or for anything. 00:16:59 So anybody that's new out there that thinks that they can go to China or go to an American company and just get hand sanitizer and put it on Amazon, it's a pretty tough go. Yeah, don't do it. There's a helmet called the Microclimate that actually my wife bought one of those. It looks like a little space helmet, basically. It's actually pretty cool. It's black. It's sleek and not really bulky. But our doctor actually recommended it to us. We have a concierge doctor, and he actually said, 'Hey, check out this thing we're using in some hospitals now called MicroClimate.' And it goes right over your head, and it's really cool. Check it out. You just Google it. And we have a couple of those that come in handy. 00:17:47 Can you send me a picture? Yeah, I can see your picture. Perfect. It'll be good. I'll wear my nose mask. You wear your Microclimate. There you go. There we go. All right. So getting back to Amazon, anything on the horizon right now that you're excited about? Anything on the horizon? Yeah. I just think the opportunity is still really good on Amazon. I'm in the process of launching a new company. We started it actually last, incorporated it last March, a year ago, and haven't launched a product yet. We've got all the funding, hundreds of thousands of dollars at the bank accounts and funding, and it's just been sitting as we've been developing the product. The first one's coming out in June, and I'm excited about that. I think the opportunity is great out there. 00:18:44 Still in the space in e-commerce in general, you know some of the stuff that Amazon’s doing I think is already a lot Amazon live right now. It’s still kind of a little niche play But I think that's going to become more and more important over the next few years And I think you’re gonna see Amazon becoming more of a pay-to-play platform it already is but even more so than it is now And the organic stuff is going to become less and less and everything else. It’s going to be more positioning papers, propositioning, and more brand-oriented type of stuff. So, I mean, I don't see anything that Amazon's got cooking that I'm excited about, you know; they have the drone delivery and all that kind of stuff. 00:19:27 You know, I don't see that as being anything significant anytime soon. It's more just a gadget, maybe a New York City or something, you know, concentrated area. But I don't see that as being anything that's going to happen anytime soon. But yeah, is there something you had in mind? No, I do know that April 6, Amazon's going to be eliminating all information from the buyer. So I don't know if you've heard about that. No, I didn't hear that. All information will be eliminated. I think they've come up with April 6 being that date. I haven't seen that. Did they post that somewhere? Yeah, I was going to talk about it um uh in the 00:20:13 group but uh yeah, I've got a an email that states that oh yeah, no, I have not seen that so that's just for FBM or FBA or every, but they can't do it for FBM, they gotta give it to you so you can fulfill an order, I don't know what the heck they're going to do, but I can show you what I got and I'm sure it said April the 5th or 6th. The other thing which is kind of interesting, I don't know if you know about this. This has been out for a while. But Google announcing that they're getting rid of cookies. We had somebody on. Oh, I'm not sure. I'm going to say the name and it's going to be the wrong guy. 00:20:52 So anyways, it was just last week talking about Google and they're doing away with cookies. Well, what does that mean? Affiliate marketers are going to be gone. Are you sure that's Google, period, or is that because of the stuff with the new Apple iOS that's really screwing around with pissing off Facebook and Google and all these marketers that are not going to be able to do a lot of the things that they've been able to do? Yeah, so it was really interesting. When he came on, he was talking about this. I had no idea it was going to get to that extent. So I can't give you detailed information about it. But Kelsey, who was it that said it? Was that Tom McNamara? Yes, it was Tom. Last podcast. 00:21:36 So they're completely getting rid of the Pixel? They're getting rid of cookies. Or cookies. So Pixel still exists. A Pixel will still exist. Okay, cookies. Cookies is more used. Cookies is an older technology. That one I'm not so worried about. That'll affect you on your browser. Maybe remembering your password and some things like that on between sites or whatever. But I don't think that one's as big as if they affiliate marketers, they're going to feel it. Yeah. Affiliate marketers are going to feel it some, but a lot of them are still using pixels. But yeah, on serving up ads online, on some of these ad networks and stuff, they still use a lot of cookie-based stuff on what to show you. Yeah. That, that, that, that's interesting. Yeah. 00:22:29 So one other thing, And I know you're really data-driven. I'm curious about 2021. When you're looking for a product opportunity, and I know this can take a day to answer, but any quick insight on what you're looking for when you're picking a product? I mean, like for Product Savants, for example, when I'm picking products for that, my process right now, and this is always evolving. I use Brand Analytics I start with Brand Analytics and so uh for product savants I'm I'm looking for existing things I'm not you know for that we don't actually come up with brand new ideas you know we're not going to reinvent some new thing that's got to be patented and you got to develop from scratch That's not the goal of that company I think that's where more and more where Amazon is going just as an aside I think in the future, 00:23:24 The next few years, the people that are able to not just go to Alibaba and find something and stick their label on it or find something and maybe modify it or bundle it in a different way, you're going to have to create something from new and have the idea. I think that's going to be the next big opportunity on Amazon. Someone who comes out with a course that says, 'Here's A to Z on how to to create brand new products and launch them on Amazon from, you know, from scratch, from an idea.' But it can't just be, the thing with Amazon is creating something that's brand new, you've got to make sure the keyword demand is still there. Otherwise you're going to spend a lot of money educating people and getting it out there. 00:24:04 So, but there's still plenty of opportunities where you can see that there's a key, people are searching for, I don't know, slow dog feeder slow dog eating bowl, or whatever, and there's a ton of products there. But versus going and just finding and one that's already existing, or even finding one that maybe doesn't exist in design, but coming up with some sort of new thing – I don't, I don't know what it is, but it self-cleans itself or something – I don't know. Um, there we go, yeah. Developing that from scratch and putting that out with somebody behind it, I think it's going to be where the big money is going to be made in the future, and you're going to have little moats around you, and in licensing too. 00:24:45 I think there's a big opportunity still in licensing on Amazon that hasn't been exploited. If you had a slow feed dog bowl and you could go get a license from the U. S. Army, and the dog bowl is in camouflage colors or something, and it says U. S. Army on the side of it, that creates some sort of little bit of a moat. So there's those kinds of things for product development. Back on the other one, brand analytics. So if I'm looking for something that already exists and it's a little bit easier where people do want to do the traditional model, go to Global Sources or Alibaba or find something, modify it a little bit, and launch it, I take brand analytics. I download the last month's data. 00:25:27 I like to do it in quarter if I can. But it just depends if it's too far out. Like if Amazon only lets you [do something]. So if it's the middle of March, usually the last quarter available is the fourth quarter of last year. So that's a two and a half month gap of data. So I won't do that. I'll use the last month. I'll use February. But if I'm pulling the data January 5th or 10th or whatever, then I'll use the last quarter. So I'll download that data, which is what, one point something million, around a million plus. I think it actually shows like 1. 6 million. It lets you download like a million of them. I'll download that in an Excel file. 00:26:06 And then I'll run through that Excel file, and I personally delete everything that's below $500,000 SFR. Now, you don't have to do that. There's still plenty of opportunity down below $500,000. I'm just looking for things. I want things that sell $10,000 a month or more. And typically, the demand for that is something below $500,000 SFR on the keywords. And so I'll delete that. And then I'll go in, and I'll actually add a column-a fourth column on the spreadsheet, and I'll take the conversion share. So the three columns, ASIN 1, ASIN 2, ASIN 3, the conversion shares, and I'll sum those up in that column. And my personal cutoff is 40%. 00:26:51 So anything that's where the first three ASINs have more than 40% of the buy share, or the conversion share, that tells me that that market, that only 60% is left for everybody else. And to me, I want more than 60% left. That tells me it's, you know, the top three guys basically have half the market. And the other half of the market is still big enough. And if you get a piece of that, you're still going to be happy. But I'm just saying this is how I eliminate it down to find the better opportunities. You could change these parameters however you want. And so then, that eliminates those 500,000 down to, I don't know, 100,000, 200,000, something like that. And then I go through and anything that has. 00:27:33 A high click share but a zero or less than one percent conversion share all those keywords get eliminated as well because that tells me there's manipulation going on, anything where you have you see those zeros and conversion share uh there's some sort of funny business going on where people are doing add to carts or there's something going on because why would you have a 20 click share and zero percent conversion share um I mean not all it's not always funny business there could be legitimate reasons for that but those are ones I eliminate too. So then you're left with, I don't know, 50,000 keywords or something. And then I start going through them with my eyes and scrolling down and looking for, you know, obviously I've been doing this long enough. 00:28:15 So I know to skip over garlic presses and obvious stuff that just looks competitive. Or I already know it's competitive. And then I'll stumble across something that, you know, I'll take out also seasonal stuff. So the word Christmas, I'll filter out. Christmas or Easter or Halloween, all those seasonal things out because I'm looking for year-round stuff, and then I'll go through and just look at them one by one and and punch them into Google, I mean sorry Google into Amazon, uh and run the uh X Helium 10 X-ray tool on it, uh and see what the market's doing, see how the competitors are, see how how much depth there is in that keyword, see uh they look at look at the reviews and you know that has some criteria, look for there. 00:28:58 And then if that passes muster, that keyword passes muster, then I'll take that keyword and then I'll go back to the full brand analytics with past 500,000 and see how many other related keywords are there around this. And then I'll see if I can find two or three other keywords that have similar metrics to this first one, you know, that the conversion share is 40% or less for the top three. And if there is, then that's a good opportunity product. and then I'll take that and you know for product savants and i give that to Steve's team, they go and they source it, and then come back to us with all the sourcing and the tariffs and the duties and everything; um, about probably a half or two-thirds of the products get eliminated at that point because just the math doesn't work; um, and what's left are good product opportunities. 00:29:51 Wow, so Kelsey, yes. You're going to have to listen to this and go through these action steps. And we'll post it. And that's why it's so successful, because you do take the time to go through and do all of this work. There's lots of ways of doing it out there, but this is a different way. I don't think a lot of people are talking about the style that you're just doing, the strategy that you're doing. You know, it's interesting because you're talking about product innovation. Excuse me. And I talk about you a lot, but I don't want that to go to your head. The way that you have already done product innovation years ago, when you took the bully sticks, a typical bully stick, and the way that you created that bully stick and you did a completely different, you created a different market for it and a different price point. 00:30:58 And then when you took that charger, the holder, and you completely re-innovated this new product. And it killed it. And these steps, like Alpha Lobby was on the other day, and we were talking about product innovation and the importance of it. And I used you as an example. You know, you did it years ago, way before I knew you. And, you know, what you did back then is current today. If you can do that and you can do it well, you can dominate on Amazon. Yeah, I mean, there's still risk. There is. But yeah, that and I think there's that's the future um of people that I mean that's the future of the the 00:31:43 big companies, you have you have Thrasios and all those guys right now buying up you know there's 40, 50, 60 of these aggregators that are buying up these Amazon businesses have done it the old way but there's going to reach a point where there's going to be less and less of those and they're going to be looking for these others that have more of a moat around them and more of an edge that's the people that are doing the innovative, innovative products um and you know Amazon has the launch pad for this they have a program where they get Kickstarter and Indiegogo stuff and help them kind of get going um but you know when You put something on Kickstarter or Indiegogo. 00:32:18 You're telling the world what you're doing, uh, and you're giving them a head start because you haven't even got the thing made yet, and so you're telling them. And know a lot of times these guys are showing the whole process of making it, pictures and everything, so it's super easy to copy anything that's on Kickstarter or maybe not super easy is not the right word, but if you have the money and the capacity, it's super easy to copy anything there. And so by the time a Kickstarter thing gets launched, and most of these people doing Kickstarters that are innovating stuff are not good at forecasting how long it's going to take them to do this, and they end up having delays or even never coming out with a product. 00:32:58 And then other people are using Kickstarter. I mean, big companies are using it just as a marketing tool, too, that already have everything behind them. So you've got to be careful of putting something out there like that that can just be imitated. By the time you get to market, someone with more money and a bigger pocketbook and more capacity can squash you. So this leads to another question about costs. The average or the white label seller going out and just finding a plastic shoe stretcher and throwing their their name on it, and then coming up with product development how much cash flow do you need for the plastic shoe stretcher, whatever it is? I i know it would be a huge range, but you know, on average and then on the product innovation side, what kind of cash should you have put aside for it? 00:33:52 And again, that's a huge range as well. Well, it's more probably time than it is cash. I mean, it depends on the product to create a mold. Like I did slow feed dog bowls. Those molds were $3,000 each. So that's my additional cost on that versus just going to a factory and saying, give me the one off the shelf and stick my logo on it. It was three grand. But I also had to design it. So I had to actually go through the, you know, I can't draw worth a damn, but I had to sketch it or find something. And I went on Upwork. Found a guy, and he happened to be in Argentina, that could do the CAD stuff for me. 00:34:25 And I said, hey, I want a bowl that looks in the shape of a bone and has this, and it's this high, and give me the basic specs. And he created a CAD drawing of it, sent it to me in 3D, where in a little program where you could spin it around, and you can kind of get a pretty good idea of what it's going to look like. Made some changes, a few changes to it. And then I had to do 3D printing, which is not expensive either. Because I wanted to test it, and I had some different dogs stick their nose in between the little grooves to make sure a flat bulldog face could get in there with his tongue versus a dog with a long snout or long nose could get in there. 00:35:00 And then I had to make some additional changes. You know, that wasn't expensive. You know, it was $400 for this designer, I think, to do all his work. Probably by the time I said $150, $200 in 3D printing. So that's not super expensive and then three thousand dollars for a mold so you know it's four grand or so uh roughly there uh but that took a few months um you know to do that process and then then have the molds made took a little bit longer and then the manufacturing and then the first time you manufacture something there's problems because we had silicone and plastic on top of each other I made it look really pretty and it actually um wouldn't slide on the floor and a bunch of stuff. 00:35:45 And there was some issues with bubbling in the night. So we had to work that stuff out. So the whole thing to come to market probably took about eight, seven, eight months from concept to actually being for sale. And so that's longer than if you just found something on Alibaba and stuck your name on it or made a slight modification. So it's more time than it is money. So the $4,000 was not that much. I mean, maybe that's a lot for someone on a $10,000 budget. That's a lot of money. But for where I was doing, it wasn't. And then we sold those and Chewy. com took them. Amazon sold them on Amazon. I'm not making them right now because the factory that I was using ended up having an issue. 00:36:37 And then I couldn't get the molds back out. They wouldn't release the molds. And so I had to, I just got so busy. I was like, screw it for right now. But these were making me, yeah, these are $24 bowls for $25 versus most of them on Amazon are $6,$7. But this was a nice, good looking bowl that sits on your floor. My dog still, they just ate out of them this morning. I have two here and they just ate their food out of them this morning. I still use them and I'm probably going to bring them back. We're looking at bringing them back. But, yeah, I got away from it. But they were making $5,000,$6,000 a month profit on two different sizes, small and large. 00:37:16 Not earth-shattering, but good. And they sold well. And I still get people today still emailing, hey, I saw this in my neighbor's house. How can I get some? Oh, cool. Very cool. So I think we've probably got a ton of questions. Kels? Oh, yeah. I thought so. So whenever you guys want to jump into them, we've got tons. Yeah. So first, today's giveaway is from Tony Segar. And he's giving away two feather-down comforters or duvets, right, Kels? Duvets. Two duvets. This is only for U. S. and Canada only. So if you entered before and you didn't. Realize that. Just let me know, and then I'll take your name off. And by the way, when you receive Tony's duvets, you'll see what branding is all about. This guy does it right. 00:38:11 I know his product. I've seen how he's packaging it. I've seen the brand. He does it up right. He spent the time, the money, put the energy in, and he's got a great product. So whoever gets this, you're going to love it. Yeah, so #IloveTony or #IloveKevin and that'll get you in All right, so do you wanna do the first question? Yep, let's do it. Oh my gosh, that's a book Okay. We were selling a product on retail arbitrage. We ran out of the product for a month. The listing was inactive. We got the product and we listed it again. Our sales are not good. We found out that the reviews are for a different product, but the category is the same. How can we read this, this product? 00:39:00 So usually on arbitrage, someone else is selling the product. So, so is this something you're buying? I mean, I guess retail arbitrage is usually there's already a demand for the product on Amazon. There's already a listing and you're jumping on it and, and being one of the sellers. But if you're maybe, you know, I know when I first started doing FBA, one of the things I did is I tested barbecue sauce here in Austin. There's a company called the Salt Lake Barbecue. That's, you know, it's not one of the better ones. Which I've tested and it's very good. It's very good. But by Austin standards, it's; it's the lower half of the top 10 there's much better barbecue in Austin, but it's the it's the famous one, it's one of the originals and it's very good. 00:39:47 I mean anywhere any other city in the world it would be number one, but Austin is known for its barbecue so it's not number one, but people know it, and they have a barbecue sauce, and um that sauce I would go out and get that; I would buy that went down to their their facility there's a big restaurant they have a little gift shop and I said how much for a case of this stuff and you know they sold me a case of it and I threw it up on Amazon um as a as a seller um basically you know without their permission or anything, I don't buy in wholesale; I just bought a 00:40:16 case of it, it was at a discount and then put it up on amazon and and sold it i need to get ungated in grocery and so i used that to get ungated in grocery and ended up selling it but i i didn't it was just a test so but that i didn't consider that really arbitrage i consider that uh it's not really private label it's just basically selling uh so Back on this question. So you're down for a month and you want to get back up. What was it? Can you bring the question back up there, Kelsey, again? Yep. Just give me a second. Okay. So how can we relist this product? I'm not understanding. If you listed it again, did you list it from scratch? 00:41:01 Then there should be no reviews on it. But if you just threw it up on. Another product the reviews for a different product so it sounds like you're jumping on somebody else's listing that's what that sounds like and it sounds like someone might be using that listing for different things um and you want to relist the product you'll probably have to relist it as a standalone product you probably have to create a new ASIN now the the problem there is you have a UPC code on that product probably and that UPC code may not match So you would have to try to get a GTIN exemption or you have to game the system and use a different UPC code that you have for your company. You need to get one from GS1. 00:41:45 I mean, Amazon doesn't like you doing this, but get one from GS1 and you have to use that. I've used it probably with GTIN exemption and you'd have to put an FN SKU label on that and send that in. How do they go about getting a GTIN exemption? You have to request it. And that's not always easy to do, especially on an existing product. But what I would do in this case is when I request it, I'd say, we're trying to sell this product, but the one that's on Amazon that's associated with this UPC is actually for a different product. The reviews are all for something else. And Amazon may fix that problem, or they may grant you the exemption. Got it. All right, Kels, next. Okay, next one. 00:42:33 Hey King, when you start your day, what does the first hour of work look like? A regiment for daily Amazon King seller? Well, I'm a late riser, so Norm does these calls. It's 11 a. m. for me, 12 noon on the East Coast, but I'm an hour behind over in Austin. I usually don't roll out of bed until about 10:30 or 11, so I actually have to set an alarm. I don't wake up to an alarm, number one. Except unless I have to come on lunch with Norm and then I wake up to an alarm and I, you know, comb my hair but yeah the first hour is uh when I get up it's usually I feed my dogs hit the head uh take a shower uh and get something to eat and then I go through my email and messages that have come in over the night um but I'm up until about three o'clock every night two or three o'clock every night 00:43:29 um some of that's just chilling uh because I like that hour there's no phones ringing no emails coming in nothing bothers me um I'm one of those that I hate my inbox to have unread messages you know, you'll see somebody's, some people have their phone it's got all these little dots that you know they get all these things that drives me crazy even if I've read the message it has to get it I guess it's The add in me or something, it has to be filed or has to be dealt with so I stay on top of all my social media; I don't participate in LinkedIn for that reason, I mean, I just I think there was a profile on me on LinkedIn. People used to be like, hey, contact you, you never got back to me. 00:44:04 I was like, I don't use LinkedIn. So if you ever go to LinkedIn and you see me, it's not me, and I don't answer. So I fine-tune what I use, four or five different ones; and sometimes it might take me a few hours to get back to somebody, but I go through everything within 24 hours. I either file it to be answered or answer it. They get moved off into the little organized places. So that's the first thing I do in the morning. And then I check all my bank accounts. I log into every single, like 15 different bank accounts. I actually log into every single bank account just to make sure there's no funny business going on. You know, make sure there's not a massive charge back that came on one of them or something. 00:44:45 Or make sure, you know, Amazon deposits actually hit when they're supposed to. So if I need to be all at Amazon. And then filter out the emails and then. Then whatever the tasks are. Most of my creative stuff is done in the evenings. So, creative work, busy work is done during the day, during normal daytime hours, and creative stuff is done at night. Very good. Okay. All right. From Darwin, is it possible to move one listing to another Amazon account? I have a listing that works better with another brand under another account and a company altogether. Yeah, you can do that with Amazon's permission. You just got to make sure you can't sell the same thing on two different accounts. 00:45:27 So you would have to get their permission and probably write a letter and say, hey, I'd like to move this ASIN to this other account. You may have to show that that company bought it. But as long as it's a totally different company with totally different bank accounts, totally different EIN, all that stuff, you should be able to do that. But you are going to have to, whichever one you remove it from, you're going to have to eliminate selling it there. But yeah, it's similar to someone buying your business. That's basically what they do. If one of these aggregators bought your company or bought your ASINs, that's what they would do. So yeah, it's definitely possible. Okay. 00:46:04 From Simon, if you're going to launch a new winter product in preparation to rank well for Q4 spike, when would the ideal time to activate the listing be? Probably July. July or August and start getting sales. Now, the sales are not going to be much, but start the ranking process. Like I have, for example, I have a winter product. I have calendars. That's basically a winter product because people buy those at the end of the year for the next year. The bulk buying time of that is between Thanksgiving in the U. S. and mid-January. It's about a two-month period, basically mid-November to mid-January is when 90% of the sales occur. But I start selling those. Like this last year, we started selling them in July. I put them on Amazon and activated the listing. 00:46:48 In July, and that's for a couple reasons. One is we can only send them 200 so we start getting that algorithm going and then we start ranking them. Now, in July people buying it, July 2020, people buying a 2021 calendar was not very many-uh, maybe one or two a day-uh, but um, I wasn't worried about that because I rode the wave. So I got ranked on keywords and as the demand goes up, you ride that wave, it's like catching catching a wave out at sea and just riding it all the way to the shore, where it gets bigger and bigger and bigger as it cooks, and that's what you want to do, you know. Knowing that you said July, and you if you're having the product manufactured in China, you've really Got to look around May to get your ducks in a row, yeah? 00:47:34 Would you agree, yeah? Our calendars for example are seasonal like this. We make them in South Korea and so we actually um we actually they go off uh the the actual files go off in April uh to the printer in South Korea and they they typically you know come back uh by the end of April then and in May we're looking at proofs, and June early June they're shipping uh they're they're printing and shipping to us and they arrive mid-July time frame um but yeah you you have to book that up and it's kind of weird to be in March or something thinking about 2022 already, but it's what you've got. to do And if you go to the big, if you look at some of the big companies like Calendar Club, for example, that has all these kiosks in the malls and they have calendars . 00:48:24 com, they actually ask for 2022 calendars. They ask for all the details, January 3rd of 2021. So they actually send you a spreadsheet that you have to fill out all this information on by January 3rd of the preceding year. So they could start forecasting and issuing POs and everything. So it's, it's, it's a different way of thinking. It's just like Halloween, you know, Halloween stuff for this coming season was actually the shows were last fall. It's, it's a, you have to be constantly thinking in the future. So that's what on that, those winter, winter clothing, I would be July or August. Okay. Thank you for your questions. I also just want to say if you haven't yet, if you can just please hit the like button or share this out to your friends, we'd really appreciate it as well. 00:49:22 Okay, next question is from Steven. Hey, Kevin, not sure if you know the answer to my question, but how do you successfully get ungated from baby furniture? Is it hard to get approval? I've never done baby furniture, so I don't have a clue on how hard or easy or hard it is, unfortunately. Yeah, I don't know. Sorry. Yeah, I can't help you on that one either. All right, from Daniel. Kevin, how many percentages more does your landing cost? Do you sell your products on Amazon FBA? What is the cut line to launch or not? So a product that retails for less than $100, so the suggested price is under $100, I want a minimum 3X markup, ideally four or five, or higher, the higher the better. 00:50:10 I mean, like my calendars that I was talking about just a second ago, the land it costs on those is $1. 52 and we sell them for 20. Amazon's fees are about $5.50. And so, you can see that on a $20 product, there's about a $12 margin on every single one of them. That's pure profit because we don't do any PPC or anything else on it. I mean, there's a little bit of, call it 50 cents to ship them in FBA. So there's a little bit of extra cost there, but it's not much. So a minimum 3X off the line of cost. And that's what a lot of people forget is they get a price out of China, for example, and the price is $5. 00:50:47 I'm like, okay, I'm going to sell this for 15. Kevin said 3X it, so 15. That's not good enough because that $5 actually is probably more like $9 because the $5 is most likely going to have a 25% Trump tariff on it. So you got to add a buck and a quarter right there. This may have another duty on it. Then you get your freight in um and if it's going to a 3PL you have your freight from China to the 3PL and all the fees associated with that, and then you get from the 3PL into Amazon so by the time you're said done it's probably eight or nine bucks, um, by the time you've got your total landing cost. So that product needs to be selling for bare minimum $24. 00:51:23 97, probably more like 26 or $29. 97 to actually have a chance uh, and the more competitive categories where you guys spend more on advertising, you probably need more like a four or five times to make sure you're doing, you have enough margin there. That's a big problem I see in the Freedom Ticket. People, back a couple years ago, I would do calls, and there was an option where you could actually pay to speak with me. I don't do that anymore, I'm too busy, but people would pay an upgraded option and speak with me. I'd get on the phone a lot of these times with these guys and gals, and they'd be like, 'I just don't know why I'm not making any money.' I'd say, 'Well, what are you selling your product for?' Oh, '$11. 00:52:03 97.' What's your landing cost? What's your factory cost? Oh, '$4.' What's your landing cost? Oh, I'm not sure. Well, let's just call it '$6' and you're selling it for '$11.97'. Yeah, but everybody else, I can't sell anything. If I put it at $12. 97, they don't buy. I've got to sell $11. 97. Otherwise, I'm not selling or I'll lose my BSR. $11. 97 after Amazon fees, you're not making any money. You can't have any room for advertising. There's no margin there. So you're just donating to Amazon. That's a common, common problem. People just don't know the numbers and don't know the math. You've got to know that. You have to, and you have to have room to work. 00:52:42 And that's why I said earlier half to two-thirds of the products that I find we eliminate after doing the sourcing on it because there's not enough margin. The money a lot of times on Amazon is made in the sourcing, not in the selling. And so being able to source and engineer a product at a really good product at a good price and get it at that price, it gives you more room to work on the other side when competition comes in. I can give you a good example of it. I made this mistake. So I took a look when I was getting onto Amazon in the earlier days, and I thought I had a great product, about a buck, with packaging and everything. It was about $1. 10 to $1. 00:53:21 40. So I thought, wow, I can sell this $10. 99 no problem. I didn't think about it, because it was such a low dollar value, Amazon's going to hit me with $4. 65 right off the top. That was my first mistake, not knowing those numbers. And all of a sudden, well, sorry, I was trying to get them out there at $7. 99 to $9. 99. Then it turned into an add-on product. So the add-on product you had to have 24 bucks so I made a major mistake when I first got into Amazon by not understanding the process so and the the extra FBA costs and like you just said, knowing the numbers but all of the numbers and it's too many people don't don't know it uh it's sad and that's why probably 95% of the people that try to sell on Amazon they fail, most most Most don't work, don't succeed. 00:54:21 I mean, I saw, I think Leron posted this yesterday in one of the Facebook groups, a link to an article at Marketplace Pulse about saying there's, what, 6 million accounts or something worldwide on Amazon seller accounts. But something like, I'm getting these numbers wrong, but it was a fraction of that that actually had its single seller feedback in the last year. That indicates that it actually made a sale. And then a fraction of that are the ones that are hitting a million dollars in sales or more. Most people selling on Amazon, it's either a part-time hustle or a side gig that they're making some money on, or the vast majority don't succeed. Amazon makes money, and they don’t. But that doesn’t mean this is a bad opportunity or you gotta go look for something else. 00:55:18 The opportunity is still there. There’s a lot of bad information out there and a lot of bad advice. And a lot of people that may not have business experience or entrepreneurial experience and aren't thinking through everything properly. They're watching a webinar somewhere where they show you, I bought this for five bucks and sell it for 20. I made a $15 profit on every one. They leave out a bunch of the costs to make it look really good. And so people get excited and don’t do the math. Or don't come into it with enough money. And they come in and they wipe out their initial investment and don't have the money to sustain it. Maybe they're successful, but they screw up and run out of stock and are basically in a constant start-over mode. 00:56:00 Did I ever tell you this story about how I got into one of your products? You know the product. And the way that I came about, it was a home run. When we got into the marketplace. It was a home run, we were making a ton; it just went. We ordered it three times and each time it was doubling, tripling, doubling, tripling. The guy ran out of money; he couldn't afford even though it was successful. He couldn't afford it, so I bought it. But then he ended up, yeah, just selling it off selling the inventory, and it was so unfortunate because you know it was a great product, and and he was being like it was a successful product, yeah, yeah. But you've got to have your money. 00:56:44 You've got to have that cash. You've got to have a source of it. You have to get it. And sometimes it's hard. You're successful too quick. You know, seller's funding or alter some of those will help you. But you have to have a history or you have to go to someone like Prove Me or you have to have a rich uncle or you've got to be willing to put some of your own money on the line and. And I would never recommend anybody put their house or anything that's going to affect their way of living on the line to do this. Always only use money you can afford to lose. And that's not going to change your family or your lifestyle or anything. And always be careful borrowing money from friends. 00:57:22 You know, a lot of times it's which one you can't have them both. You can't have money and a friend. You can either have the money or the friend, but not both a lot of times. So be careful with that as well. So that means I can't go to Uncle Kevin for my next project? No, probably not. All right, Kels. We are at the top of the hour at 1 o'clock. So anytime you need to go, Kevin, just let us know. Oh, there he goes again. How much time do you got, Kev? You got another 15? Yeah, I can do 15. Okay, yeah, we got a bunch of questions. I just got to jump on a clubhouse vote. 00:58:00 uh rana's clubhouse yeah yeah yeah it's just getting going right now so it's fine okay all right okay from simon uh we see a bunch of aggregators and brokers now however there are zillion exit focus sellers do you think there's ever going to be a point of saturation of exiters i personally i don't know i mean i asked this question of uh thrasio and they seem to think there's not i asked this uh of their the board when they were having a clubhouse call a few about a month ago or so. And they said, no, they, they think there's going to be, uh, there's not, uh, there's not going to be a saturation of people exiting and there's enough people buying right now that can cover that. 00:58:42 Um, so, but I think there will be at some point. Um, but I, I think it's actually the reverse of that. I think there's not going to be enough companies to buy that makes sense to buy or are willing to sell. Uh, so I think, um, um yeah it's going to be interesting i think this is the the golden period this this year and probably into next year is there's going to be a shakeout some of these aggregators are going to fold or consolidate because a lot of them don't know what the hell they're doing they're getting into it and don't realize how hard this actually is and so they're going to fail and so if you're looking to exit i would highly recommend you check out whoever it is that's buying you and especially if you have some sort of profit sharing on the back side 00:59:27 where you're not getting all your money up front be careful and and whatever deal you do uh assume you're never gonna see any of that money and and just consider that as a bonus and if you're happy with a deal without ever seeing Any of that money, then it's probably a good deal, but I think a lot of people are gonna get screwed. Um, and so uh now is a Thrasio gonna screw you, probably not. Um, I mean they're pretty well-funded, they've got a big team, but you just never know. Um, but I think they're less likely than some of these other startups that bought their first three or four businesses. I would be doing your due diligence on who's running these things. 01:00:06 And the problem is with a lot of these companies is I saw this with 101 Commerce. They were one of the first ones to do this like three years ago. Richard, who started that, he came to me. He talked to Norm. He talked to a bunch of people out there. He did his homework up front, and he was trying to hire us. He's like Kevin, you know. I'll buy your company, and you come work for me, and you get paid twice. And I'm like, 'I don't want to work for you.' Um, you're a nice guy, but I'm doing this because of the freedom. I don't want to go work a corporate job and work for somebody else, even if you're going to pay me nicely. I can do better on my own. 01:00:40 And so, a lot of these guys are finding that to be a problem. You know, Thrasio has been able to hire a couple of the sellers that they they they bought their business and that's helped them immensely, a couple good people that actually have a clue. But a lot of this Amazon selling is guerrilla marketing, and it's being able to fly by the seat of your pants and move quickly, and these big companies can't do that. And you get this infrastructure, and bureaucracies, and layers of management stuff that makes it difficult to do and it can crush businesses. And hiring good people that know what they're doing is hard, and there's only so many of those to go around. And so, that's the challenge that a lot of these guys have. 01:01:19 And so, it's going to be interesting to see. I mean, if you're in a position to sell right now, I would seriously Because I think now could be better, just because there's so many of them out there, you're going to get, most likely, more offers than you would get a couple years from now, right. But one of the reasons to not sell right now to an aggregator is if you're truly building a brand; if you're truly building a true brand, um, you might not want to sell to an Amazon-only aggregator; you might want to hold off if a Procter & Gamble or one of these big, you know, Uni Lever, or one of these big, you know, type of companies like that might be interested in your business at some point because you're truly a brand, not just an Amazon. 01:02:03 Play, you might not want to sell. Maybe you want to go through the motions to see what you're worth right now and then they'll give you an idea and get some of your ducks in a row. But you might not want to sell until if because those guys can pay more than any of these aggregators will and they'll give you a better multiple and it'll be a better strategic play long term, most likely. So, it depends. Next is from Matthew: adding variations versus new listings. It's a different length on a home improvement product. Existing sellers is 50/50, top two have variations. Part two: how do I add a variation to an existing listing? Which was not set up as a parent Yeah, you can add that by using a flat file. 01:02:47 So you can go in and use a flat file and do what's called a partial update. You can probably Google this. There's probably people that have screenshots that will walk you through it. Or go look on the seller forums on Amazon. I'm sure there's someone that's linked to an SOP or something on how to do it. But you're going to have to use a flat file, which is like an Excel file that you download. And so as far as doing it or not doing it, that's something you just got to test. A size difference, I would probably make it as a variation. But some people, there's the argument that if you can get them both ranked on page one, that's more real estate you're taking up. 01:03:23 That's having Starbucks on two corners of a four-corner street instead of just one corner. But sometimes one corner is good enough. And you can focus your energy on keeping one of them ranked so that the other one follows it. Otherwise, you're going to have to keep both of them ranked to keep them both there. So it's a testing thing. I got a question. How are you setting up your titles right now? How am I setting up my titles? Yeah. Everybody's doing things differently. I'm just curious on how you're setting up your title. Short, long, keyword up front, keyword in the back. I put the main key. I don't follow the Amazon guidelines to put your brand first unless they force me to. Right. So I don't do that. 01:04:09 I put the main keywords up front. When I first launch a new product, I try to make the title fairly long, try to get up to about 200 characters or so. And then over time, I will cut that back. Within that first month, I'll usually cut that maybe in half and cut that down to just after I see what's working and what's not working. Because I think a shorter title probably long term is better. If you look at a lot of the top sellers, a lot of them have shorter titles. Take away the fact that someone's doing a launch or whatever, you can see. You kind of see that when you're looking at some of the trends in the graphs. You kind of figure out this person must be doing launch. 01:04:46 Take away those, but the consistent long selling people often have shorter titles. And so that's what I do. I start long main keywords in the front. I try to get as many keywords in there as I can that I think might be relevant for my ranking, and then I pare it down over time. Do you use single keywords or phrases? Do you duplicate? I do. I do duplicate if I need it. I try to avoid that, and I try to put things back-to-back or bottom-up to each other so you can have nesting and stuff. I try to do that, but I try to get my top three phrases in phrase order all right, very good, uh... From Fatih, Amazon sells competing products to me, which they buy wholesale, but they're a basic listing with a very simple cheap product. 01:05:36 Do you think we have a disadvantage going against Amazon or does it really not matter? No, I mean the only if Amazon if you're creating a new listing and Amazon's got one has their own listing and you're you're creating a new if you're on this the same same listing that you have a disadvantage, but if you're separate listings um no, you can usually beat amazon i mean they might have a pricing advantage because they might be willing to go lower than you uh but a lot of times you can beat them the one place where i don't like to compete is if when i'm looking at a keyword if if most of the page one is all um amazon bought and sold by amazon not just i mean bought and shipped by amazon or sold sorry i can't speak sold and shipped by amazon um that one might be a little competitive uh but to have amazon as a seller um doesn't worry me too much because they don't know what they're doing 01:06:33 um honestly they don't i mean the only thing they have they have a price advantage or they Might they don't care sometimes that would be the biggest one, but I can usually out-market them. Okay, great, um, from Jack, uh, do you follow other FBA sellers besides, uh, Norm? Why there's no need to; I mean, Norm's the third one, he's got the words, he's got everything, you know, he's from the Great White North, so you know it's he's mythical. So why Why do I need to follow anybody else? I'll give you a follow too. I already did. Copy everything I know. Alright, I'm not sure who this is from, actually. But my question is: if I'm going to run out of stock, should I be with high velocity and then close until I get stock in? 01:07:28 I am a newbie. Would appreciate your thoughts. Should you turn off PPC to reduce sales? No, do not turn off PPC to reduce sales. Go out with as high a velocity as you can. I'll give you a point on this. Velocity matters and sales matter. I keep going back to these calendar examples, but it's fresh in my mind. I have a calendar that was selling this last year, and in December, it's in the office products category. It got up to a BSR of about 500. Uh, in the office supply category, which it was selling a lot of units a day, I ran out of stock of this product uh, forget exactly when but somewhere right around Christmas time uh, probably right before Christmas, completely ran out of stock had no more in my warehouse, completely out of stock. 01:08:15 I have five calendars so the other four were still there. I left that listing live because people were still finding it and it had down at the bottom frequently bought together customers who bought this also bought and a lot of those are my other four calendars so people are coming in using that as a gateway to find my other ones, oh this one's out, let me go get Kevin's other calendar um. But the point of this is going out with velocity, that count that calendar has not been in stock since before Christmas so three months ago um, three months has passed. Out of stock, I was just in my account the other day checking you know, wiping out some of the last little cash from last season and just checking on uh, making sure the account's in good shape. 01:08:55 That calendar, despite not being in stock for three months, still had a BSR of 88,000-still not had, not been in stock and it sold from July of last year; one or two units a day. And it started selling a lot in November uh, in December, but to still have an 88, 000 BSR three months after completely being out of stock says something about velocity, and that velocity freaking matters and that your past sales history. Your older sales history is very important in the algorithm. Now, if I had gone back and stopped on that, if I suddenly magically March 15th got some more in stock and put it back up, that BSR probably would have gone from $88,000 to $60,000 to $50,000 to whatever it could have. 01:09:44 It would have gone back. It probably would never have gone back to $500. But it would have gone back to something reasonable much, much faster because they're still using that past sales history. And there's like this thing sold really well in the past. So let's give it another shot again. And let's move it up. So always, always go out with velocity. Always. Never reduce your price to slow. I'm sorry. Raise your price to slow sales. Never cut off your PPC. Go out with velocity. Yeah, I hear that all the time: 'All raise your sales and I'm going, 'Oh, what are they doing?' No, don't, don't, don't do it! And let's do Barbs... Do you sell on other platforms like Walmart? So I have Shopify stores. 01:10:31 I have some on some other platforms. I do some eBay; I have done Walmart in the past. I'm not currently doing Walmart right now, but we we will be with one of our this new brand that's coming out the first product in june we will be doing some walmart and on some actual national retail other national retailers but um that that the first product actually has a licensing component to it so we actually uh have a licensing deal with a pretty big uh well-known brand um and we're doing their stuff in the pet space so we and they have a distribution already in sporting goods stores and pet stores and macy's and nordstrom's 01:11:10 and stuff so we'll be tagging along into into some of that plus they have influencers some of their athletes and stuff have like uh two three million followings on instagram so they'll be pushing the product there um you know when it first comes out and using it with their pets and stuff and showing it to places hey You go get it at Amazon so I think it's going to be a It's going to be interesting. My first time doing a pure licensing deal, we had to do guarantees. They get 7% of the gross. So that's the licensing. And you have to pay upfront fees. We had to pay the first year a $10,000 guarantee up front. The second year is like a $50,000 guarantee. And then it goes up. 01:11:53 But they gave us a runway to wrap up because we say, you know, first year is going to be like two products. But what we're doing on this is a little bit different. They're like, oh, why don't you do a leash? And I'm like, no, what we're doing is we don't know if your brand, how well, we don't know yet if your brand's gonna make that big a difference on Amazon. We want to see, so we're finding products that we know will sell on Amazon, no matter whose brand's on it. So it could be Kevin's unknown brand. And do I think that can sell well? But yes, I do. But now let's take their name and stick it on it and see what a difference it makes. And it's kind of a test. 01:12:33 And that way we know that at least the first couple products, if this doesn't work, at least we know we can sell the thing no matter what name is on it. And then later on, once we build an audience around this, then we can maybe, okay, now we'll do a lease, even though leases are super competitive. And I would never do that otherwise. But now maybe we have enough people that are following this. We'll do a lease. Okay, let's do one more question. Okay, do you want to segue into this one? This is a good one to leave off. Which clubhouse room are you going to go into? Yeah, it's one, what's the actual name of it? It's this guy from Canada that Norm knows well. He does a room called, it's every other Friday. 01:13:19 It's called the Amazon Mastermind. It's in the Amazon FBA Club, but Amazon Mastermind Advanced Strategies and Techniques. And what he does, you know, a lot of clubhouse rooms are Q&As where people bring up different, they have a group of people on the stage and then they let people from the audience come up, kind of like what Kelsey's doing here and ask questions. But this particular one he does every other Friday is a mastermind. So you can be in the audience, you can't ask questions. You just sit back and listen. And he brings up, like I'm looking right now at the list of people that are in the room. There's some pretty good people on stage and he has some topics and he throws them out there. 01:13:55 You're like a fly on the wall listening uh to all these really smart people uh talk about different things regarding Amazon and e-commerce, so I'd recommend it. It's Amazon if you go to Clubhouse, just search for Amazon Mastermind Advanced Strategies Techniques Mindset. Yeah, Rana Singh, yeah Rana Singh, r-a-n-a-s-i-n-g-h. I think Rana was actually in watching today too, he was commenting, oh was he? Yeah, didn't see that, yeah but uh, yeah it is 1:17 here, okay, so I think that was the last question man, this time flies when I'm with you guys man, six hours or something, we gotta have a how long does it take to get through two cigars, that's that's how long, yeah that's right, big 60 gauge cigars. Alright, so it is time. You haven't seen this, Kevin. This is brand new, but watch this. Okay, here we go. 01:15:06 That, 01:15:14 of course, is courtesy of my older brother, Hayden. He made the music, the graphics, and yeah. Thank you for that, Hayden. Shout out to him. So I think I've got everyone. This is for one of two DeVays from Tony Sagar. And here we go. Three, two, give it a shuffle. Three, two, one. 01:15:45 Oleg. Very good. Oleg. This is the first one. Give it another shuffle. Three, two, one. 01:16:01 Okay, Matthew. Matthew. All right. So we got our two winners. And what do they have to do to claim their giveaway? All right. So they can email me at k.lunchwithnorm.com. But I'll also be reaching out on Messenger. So just check your messages. And you can always message me too. But I'm at lunch with Norm. com. That's where you can email me. Just send over your bedding size and your address so I can hook you up with Tony. All right. And once again, thanks a lot, Tony, for donating those two prizes. That's awesome. I'm sure everybody's going to enjoy that. All right, Kevin. So I guess I'll be seeing you over in the clubhouse room in a few minutes. I'm going to go eat. I'm starved. It's lunch for Norm. 01:16:53 I'll see you over there. All right. Thanks, Kevin. Next month as well. We'll have to do this again. Absolutely. Yeah. I'll send you over to it. Since you're the only guy I follow, you know, I got to be here. All right. You know, and right back at you. All right. All right. So thank you, everybody, for joining us today. It was a great session. Hope you learned something. Kelsey, what is coming up? Okay, we have Taylor Boone next weekend or on Monday. She's going to be going over product photography. She is an amazing photographer recommended by Marsha. And yeah, we're going to dive into that as well. We have a YouTube, a pretty big YouTube star coming on, Suminar Hobart. 01:17:43 He's coming on with his wife and they're going to be talking about their experience living abroad and working as a husband-wife team as well. And yeah, so we had a pretty good lineup next week and hope you guys tune in for that as well. Follow our Beer Nation. Just search Lunch With Norm, Amazon FBA, and e-commerce collective in the Facebook group and you'll find it. That's where all the good stuff is. I'm sure I'll be making a meme of the mythical Norm in the page soon. So look out for that. But yeah, thank you everyone for watching. You know, we got to get going. So. Really appreciate everyone's views, you guys are the best! We love the Beer Nation and yeah, okay. So just remember to join us every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. Thank you for joining us today, and thank you-we couldn't do this without you. Without this community, we're growing this community every day. So by the way, enjoy the rest of your day. We'll see you later.