Talkin' Shop September Amazon Seller Q&A | Kevin King | Ep. 31 | Lunch with Norm

Talkin' Shop September Amazon Seller Q&A | Kevin King | Ep. 31 | Lunch with Norm 00:00:02 Hi everyone, welcome to another Lunch with Norm, the rise of the micro-brands. I'm Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy. 00:00:20 All right. We are broadcasting to you live on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. And if you're watching us on a replay, just skip ahead a few minutes. For those of you watching on my profile, why don't you head over to the official Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy page, and you'll be able to see a bunch more highlights, content, and a bunch of tips. So let me see. Kelsey, where are you? I'm here, Father. Now, remember, you got to pick up some cigars for me before you come over tonight. That's right. Yeah. OK, very good. And you're paying for them. Yeah. So how is it going, sir? It's pretty good. Pretty good. We've got some big updates for next week, I think. 00:01:04 So, for everyone that will be tuning in next week and the week after, we will actually be streaming on Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and Thursday. So, that would be Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, right? Yes. Yeah. Yes. Thursday. Thursday is for next week and the week after. So, we'll have four episodes. So, it's very exciting. Yeah. So, that'll be a first. Yes. Yeah. So, also, if you haven't yet, please subscribe to our podcast. It is official now. So, head over to Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. Yeah. That's very good, Kels. Thank you. Okay. So I think that's it for any of the updates. We have a special guest, actually a very good friend of mine, Amazon aficionado, which is a nice segue to my cigar aficionado, pal. Kevin King. 00:02:06 So, Kevin sells millions of dollars every year with his brand on Amazon. He also is a highly sought-after speaker and speaks at Amazon conferences all over the world when we can nowadays. Maybe it's virtual summits nowadays. He also mentors sellers with I believe it's over a half a billion dollars of sales on Amazon per year through his Freedom Ticket and Helium 10 Elite membership. And Kevin also has one of the best events out there, if not the best event. I've been to Billion Dollar Seller Summit, and I'm going to get him to confirm this, but the average person attending this event has about three I think it's $3 million in sales per year. And that might even be higher now with the second summit that came up, and there's going to be a third summit coming up very shortly. 00:03:00 So we can get into that when we talk to him. But if you have any comments, shoot them over in the comments section and we will get back to them. If we don't get back to them, we'll answer them after the podcast. So sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show. Hit those like buttons right now. You're still on. Yeah, I'm still here. All right. Enjoy everyone. Go. All right. So, Kevin. Sorry, I'm hitting the like button. Wait, I got one more. You got a like button on your shirt. Just hit that like. Hit that like button. How are you, buddy? Good. How are you doing, man? I am doing great. Yeah, it's still hot in Canada, so mosquitoes and all that are fairly not too existent right now. 00:03:46 So I'm doing all right. Awesome, man. Awesome. How's Austin? Austin's all right. It's raining today. First time it rained in about a month or so. But Austin's been hot, 105 degrees Fahrenheit. And over 100 almost every day for the last couple months. But that's Austin. August in Austin as September starts getting a little bit better. And we might be getting down into the 70s by October, November. I wish it was October, November. But anyways, one of the things I want to just let everybody know, we got a special announcement. Kevin is going to be joining us. We're going to try to get him on at least once a month. And as you know, anybody who knows Kevin King, he's packed with information. 00:04:37 So it's going to be a privilege to have him on, and I can't wait to do this with you over and over. I don't know the question. I don't know the answer to that though. You introduced yourself at the beginning as Norm, also known as the bearded guy. But I saw a picture a couple weeks ago of you without a beard. I think it might have been on your anniversary, happy anniversary! Oh, thank you. Thank you. I think it was back in the day, yeah that was what do you say when you can see your feet and you didn't have a beard? Right, you had no beard, I could see my feet and I didn't have a third chin. That's why I grew the beard. That was a great picture! 00:05:21 Oh, thanks. Alright, sir. So there's lots going on in Amazon. We're heading into Q4. Just what I want to talk about basically is anything new that I see on the forefront and what do we have to address? Yeah, I mean, I guess the big one that's affecting a lot of people right now is the restrictions on shipping items and new products. And if you have a brand new ASIN, you're restricted to 200 units initially. And I think that's messing with a lot of people. And what I've noticed on this is it doesn't matter if you're doing FBM. We have a product that was selling 200 to 300 a day FBM for a couple months, and we switched it over to FBA and attempted to switch it over to FBA, and FBA didn't matter that we were selling 200 to 300 a day FBM. 00:06:13 It just automatically said, 'You can set 200 in, that's it.' So we had to toggle back and forth. So I think that's going to be the new way to launch any kind of product that has any kind of sales. You're going to have to have FBM set up. And so that's going to be an additional cost, an additional struggle that a lot of people are going to have to deal with. And even on which sold through those 200 pretty quickly in a few days, I think in like two days, but it takes the system still about a week to catch up to it. And then it's still not accurate. It still says, I think even today, this was three weeks ago, it says we sold 178 of the 200. 00:06:53 And I'm like, no, we sold all 200 really, really fast. So, yeah, it then popped up and said you can send 400 and something. And I'm like, oh, come on, guys. And then with all the delays it's taken to ship into Amazon. You know, it's just going to be a back and forth, back and forth until you can get those numbers high enough. I know there's some people that have come out with a way to work around that. And I think that got shut down right away. And I don't recommend you do that. I think that's playing with fire. Yeah, I agree with you. And with this, with the IPI, I'm going to get back to FBM. But one of the things that we're doing is if we do have a new product, you're at 200 units. 00:07:34 If you can get the, if you can get the inventory, like let's say you're running rebates or let's say that you're running some sort of deal where you can clear out as many, like 150 or 200 units, get that inventory. In as fast as you can, so keep checking if you're if you've got a blocked shipping plan, next day check it out, check it out, and as soon as the algorithm catches up and it allows you to ship in, just continually ship in; it's a trailing 30, I believe, and it will change, and you still have time to improve. But if you're not on it now, you're first of all prime, and then second of all, your Black Friday sales will be messed up because you've got to be able to bring up those numbers. 00:08:17 Would you agree, Kev? Yeah, I would agree. And sometimes it's a little difficult to ship in because I've noticed like on one of my other accounts, it's allowing me to ship in four units right now, you know, over and above. And then it goes up to six. And it's just not economical for me to ship in that. So I've got to wait another week or so for that thing to catch up to itself where I can ship in a couple hundred at least. So it's actually economical. Where do you weigh the economics though? Because, like, right now, if you had six units or eight units that could possibly go in and that could affect your IPI score, correct? Like when would you say, okay, I'll send it in? 00:08:56 Does it have to-Pretty much when it gets to a case quantity. Okay. In this case, it's 50. Uh, cause they're, uh, they're like calendars. Uh, so, I mean, that's a good point. You know, like you said about the Black Friday and summer Monday and the fourth quarter is, um, one of my, on one of my accounts, uh, the primary, one of the primary products is calendars and most people buy these in November to January or really November and December. But I'm, I started selling them in July and even though they have a history of, of the past every year, it's a different ASIN every year because, uh, there's, you know, slightly different product. But even though they have a past history, that doesn't count either. And so it's still limited to 200. 00:09:39 And I started sending them in in July. And Amazon, I was able, luckily, I created the shipment plan before Amazon put in these rules. They put in the rules about a month ago or so. And I just happened to create the shipping plan on the Sunday before to ship in, I think it was close to 3,500 units. Amazon has misplaced 2,600 of those. But in the misplacing, that's restricting me from sending more in because it's still showing as inbound or inbound or inventory, that they've completely misplaced and so I cannot ship any more product in. And it seems like uh, just uh, like Monday of this week, so we shipped these in July, like 13th, and then I had to wait till I could reconcile, and they kept moving them the date back and back before I could reconcile. 00:10:32 And as soon as I could actually reconcile and file a claim, then it released and I could ship more in. So if you have that problem come up, you're DOA in the fourth quarter. Right. And there's nothing you can do about it. And that worries me. So I'm getting ahead of this now, getting inventory in there, getting sales going and juicing the system so that by November, I can send in thousands of these. Because if I'm having to ship in 50 at a time, I'm going to lose literally, tens of thousands of dollars in profit per week on this. And it's crazy. So we have, hey, Frank, thanks for listening. I got a question. What's FBM new to this? So that is a great question. There's fulfilled by merchant. 00:11:19 So when you have your product, you have the ability to fulfill it yourself through your own warehouse or your garage or whatever it is. And then there's FBA, which is fulfilled by Amazon. So usually, and they did switch this during the beginning of COVID. They usually put the highest priority on FBA. So if your sales are at F at Amazon and you've got the product in their warehouse, they'll promote it more. They'll give you a bit more because they're going to be making a bit more money, I think. But anyways, that's the difference between the two. And actually, that's a great question for Kevin because you heard him talk about he had to switch back and forth between FBM and FBA. And I learned this from Kevin a little while ago. 00:12:10 There's a trick to it. I used to open up a separate listing. Well, you don't have to do that. So, Kevin, why don't you talk about, you know, the way that you switch back and forth? It's so easy. And I overlooked this. I had no idea you could do this. Yeah, the way I set them up. So to answer the question there from Frank to FBM is basically means somebody else is shipping it besides Amazon, whether that's you or. Sometimes you'll hear the term 3PL. That means third-party logistics. That's like a company that specializes in shipping stuff out. So in my case, I have a company that ships this out for me. I'm not sitting in my garage shipping them. The orders come from Amazon. 00:12:51 Instead of Amazon sending them, they go to a program called ShipStation. And then this program called ShipStation, it's all automated. They can print the labels and can do everything. And then the tracking number automatically gets sent back over to Amazon and gets updated. So that's what we use. But to actually set this up so that it flawlessly, seamlessly goes back and forth is you want to do what's called set up another condition. So you'll create one of your listings. So maybe it's the FBM. What I do is I create the FBM one first and I'll call the SKU. Something like a, you know, dog bowl, uh, dash, uh, uh, FBM, and then create the whole listing, put all the, the title, the bullet points, everything in there. 00:13:36 And once it's done, then I'll go in and there's an option over on the right-hand side and Seller Central. When you're in your Inventory tab. And when you look at, when you go into a, your inventory tab, there's an option on the right-hand side and the little columns, and you can pull that down on your, on, on your product. And one of the options there is create another condition. And so I actually, you know, it says like some of the other options are like close listing or edit listing or there's a bunch of different options there. But one of them is create a different condition or a new condition or something like that. You click on that one, a short little window pops up. 00:14:09 And what you can do is choose a condition that is fulfilled by Amazon. There's conditions there that say like used or new like used or whatever. But the one you want to choose is the 'Fulfilled by Amazon' option. Then you give it a different SKU. So this one might be 'dog bowl FBA dash FBA' and hit submit. And that's all you have to do. All your bullet points, all your title, everything automatically goes to that. And then those two are tied together. And so then what Amazon will do is typically when you have FBA stock, they will actually ship it from FBA. And once the FBA stock runs out, it'll automatically just switch to the FBM in the buy box. And so you'll sell FBM, and you won't lose a sale. 00:14:56 You don't have to do anything. Even if it happens in the middle of the night, you're good. And then as soon as you get more FBA stock in, it'll typically switch back automatically because FBA typically gets a buy box preference over FBM almost every time. And if you're ever worried about that not occurring, you could make your FBM listing slightly prominent. Higher in price, uh, just and that'll force it if it doesn't work, but usually you don't have to do that. Kelse can you come back? Frank's got another question. Yep, all right. So, in cases like yours where you typically sell thousands, you know, uh, you now have to flip back and forth between FBA and FBm just to keep up the sales. Any insight if Amazon will lift the FBA 200 restriction? 00:15:45 I think if they're going to lift it, I think it's going to be next year after they get out of the fourth quarter. And the fourth quarter, remember, doesn't stop at Christmas. The fourth quarter goes to the end of January because January is almost as good as December on Amazon, especially if you're selling something that's New Year's resolution related. It's going to be even better, fitness stuff or diet stuff. So I have a feeling it might be sometime next spring. But I don't know that it's going to go back to the way it was. They may make some changes this fall, you know, based on like, for example, counting my FPM sales, you know, into the equation or something. They might tweak it some, but I don't think it's going to change too much. 00:16:32 And they may switch it to where if you're a brand and you're brand registered, you know, you get some extra privileges or something or something based on your score. They change it from 200 to 500, you know, or something. But I think some version of this is here to stay forever. And my theory on it is one of the reasons is they're just trying to get rid of the riffraff. There's a lot of people that are watching YouTube videos or taking courses or whatever and are just sending stuff into Amazon. And this stuff's just sitting there taking up space. And Amazon doesn't want to be a warehouse. They want to be a fulfillment center. So they don't want stuff taking up space. 00:17:14 And there's a lot of people that will order 500 or 1,000 spatulas or posture correctors, I think is the hot one, the last hot ones. For whatever reason, people still think they can make money on those. They'll send in 1,000 posture correctors direct from their factory to Amazon and sell six of them over the course of the next six months and then abandon them. And Amazon can't legally get rid of them. They got to come after you for storage fees, and probably some people are fighting back on that. So they're just tired of that. So they want only proven products in there. And so I think some version of this is here to stay. Yeah, I agree with that. They just don't want junk. 00:17:53 I mean, if they're not going to move it, they're not making money. And the other thing, I don't know, did you hear about this, Kev? There was an article that I was reading that was was saying the IPA, the reason why they came up with the IPA restrictions was due to COVID. They think now maybe this is completely wrong. Maybe I'm spreading a rumor, but they think that COVID is going to come back with a vengeance and that instead of being able to get all this stuff out of their warehouses, they'll be able to control and not have to shut down. And put on the restrictions they had during the first few months of COVID. Have you heard anything about that? I haven't heard that, but I would buy it if it was true. 00:18:37 Because I do think you have the fourth quarter coming up, which is traditionally heavy anyway. And then I do believe that, at least in the United States, you guys are better off over in Canada, but at least in the United States, I think we're nowhere close to being out of the woods on this. Come October, mid-late October, November, December, I think this is going to have a big resurgence if you look at the Spanish Flu as a from 1918-same kind of thing happened. People are getting complacent, they're getting tired, they're getting sick of it. People are back in school, you know there's gonna be people starting to go to football games and stuff here in the U.S. 00:19:13 American football games um so so I think uh I think we're gonna and the sun's gonna start going down a lot earlier instead of 8:30 at night for me in Texas is going to be 5:30. People are inside more, get the regular flu. I think COVID, a big surge is coming back. And a lot of people think, well, a vaccine may get pushed out here. I hope if they do that, it's properly done and not political. But if that does happen, that's not an instant cure. That's going to take a year for that to work its way through the system and actually make a difference. This is with us for at least until next. next spring, maybe next summer or beyond. 00:19:53 And so I think that could have something to do with Amazon's decision too, is like, let's just cover our butt in case this happens again. Right. So just to shout out here to Rob, I'm glad you're being able to work by your pool and have a couple of beers. So at a go and thank you for listening. All right. And also Frank, yeah, you're welcome. Okay. Messy. What was, So the question is, do you keep your FBM listing closed while you have FBA in stock? No, I don't. Because there are people that don't have Prime. And so sometimes they actually might want to order from your FBM listing. It's very few that would do that. But no, I keep it alive because if something happens on FBA, all of a sudden some guy buys me out. 00:20:44 Some business comes in and buys my last 100 units or whatever. To be able to take a sale right away. Okay. So let's get off of the IPI issues for now. But other than that, any insights going into the fourth quarter people should be looking at? The thing, like I mentioned, is get your stock in way earlier than what you normally would. Now is the time to be getting that in. And be prepared. I think this fourth quarter is going to be off the charts. I think it's going to be insane as sales volume goes. So try to get your rebates, get your positioning, get your stock in, get everything lined up by the latest. You should be ready to go by the end of September. 00:21:32 And if you're not, I wish you the best of luck. Right. It's going to be the people who thrive are the people with inventory. And I'm not sure how having these two or three big dates in the fourth quarter are going to turn out. But if you run out during Prime Day, good luck trying to get inventory, at least if it's coming in from China or overseas, into Amazon. And even right now, I know with our clients, we're telling people you've got to think differently than you've ever thought before. You've got to get this into play a lot sooner. And you should probably try to negotiate where the supplier is well-prepared to already have product to come over. If you can negotiate your deals for inventory with your supplier, throw 20% down or 30, or maybe they'll even do it for free. 00:22:26 And we've talked about this on other podcasts, but just have it ready. So if the sales take off in October, you can do some form of combined shipment so that you don't run out coming November because we don't know how long it's going to take to receive. It was three weeks, four weeks, just a few weeks ago to get some products in. I had 11 products stuck for three weeks on Amazon. Couldn't get them in. Well, imagine if that happens. You try to bring it in and do it like you did last year. You get it in November the 1st and it takes a month. Sorry, you missed the date. So I'd rather proceed with caution and bring them in a little bit earlier and make sure that you talk to your manufacturers and see if they can do anything for you. 00:23:14 It's not just Amazon either. If you're using a 3PL, you need to talk to them for FBM. Don't think you can do that at the last minute. Several, I'm looking for another 3PL for a brand new company that I have that I don't want to use the one I have now. And I like to keep my stuff separate. My business is separate. So I'm looking for another one. I talked to eFulfillment Services in Michigan. They told me they're eight to 14 days to check in a product at their fulfillment. So if you send in your product to them, they get it today. They're not going to have it available to ship for another 8 to 14 days to your customers. Deliver with 2Rs, which is a big company. I talked to them yesterday. 00:23:58 They told me that October 9th is the deadline for Christmas. If you don't have stock in by October 9th, they're not guaranteeing check-in for fourth quarter. So you've got to get ahead of this. One little trick you might use if you’re shipping in bulk stuff, and you normally ship in by freight, by pallet, don't. Ship in by UPS, UPS ground. UPS ground is getting checked in quite a bit quicker. You might be able to cut something. I had some pallets shipped in June, June 16th, I think it was. One of them didn’t get checked in until like August 25th. So what’s that, seven weeks, eight weeks almost? Others were taking three to five weeks to get checked in. And that was using like a freight, you know, the big semi trucks, LTL. 00:24:47 And I quit. And so now we use only UPS ground. And if you’re not able to ship, you know, some products are not able to ship using Amazon’s accounts. So if you're not able to ship in using Amazon's, you know, cheaper UPS account where they bill it to you and they take it out of your account, call up UPS, get a salesperson and actually negotiate with them. Was something that's called a ground with freight pricing so we were shipping in on my account uh well I have a product that's I'm not it's a dangerous good so I'm not allowed to ship that in using Amazon's uh accounts I have to ship it on my own UPS account and so what I was doing was I had a probably a 24% discount I think it was off of the normal UPS rate so you know it was that's better than no discount but it was still it was costing me 00:25:39 I don't know 20 bucks a case to ship these in uh versus you know Amazon's rates are like $7 or $8 per case or something like that so it's a pretty big difference when you're shipping in a lot and you're selling a lot so I called them up and I said, 'Look we're doing this kind of volume' and they oh let's let's get you on what's called a ground with freight pricing it's about a 90% discount and so now it's a minimum of $8 per box. So no matter what I ship, it's going to be $8 per buck. So as long as you have 150 pounds going to one address, you can use this ground with freight pricing. And you don't have to do anything different, nothing palletized, nothing. 00:26:17 It's just you stick UPS labels on it and throw it in the truck just like you would if it was a single package. The requirement is 150 pounds or more going to one destination per shipment. And that is, this year is going to save us probably about $360,000. Just doing that. And then I compared it the other day to what Amazon has. I did a little test on one of my other accounts that can ship into Amazon to see what they would cost. Amazon gave me a price. And then I was like, whoa, let me check on my other UPS account. If I'd ship this in with my ground with rate pricing, I actually saved about 10 cents. So it's technically, you know, slightly cheaper in this this one case, you know, but I think. 00:27:01 probably that's what amazon has is ground with freight pricing too uh across the board but it's it's dirt cheap and if you're shipping even stuff to yourself or you're shipping to different 3pls you got to move stuff around maybe you got a 3pl in a you know it receives your containers in california and you're splitting that up to go different places on your own dime to say deliver or someone like that for your 3pm stuff uh 3pl stuff check into a ground with freight pricing it'll it'll If you're a big seller, it could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, I heard we were talking about this the other day. You told me about it. I'm like, what are you talking about? And I called UPS. 00:27:44 And I don't know how much it's going to save, but it worked. We talked about it, what, two weeks ago, three weeks ago? Product's already in, no problem, and saved money. So what you just said, anybody listening, you got to check this out. It is the best tip you'll hear on this podcast. You got to check it out. It works. And it's verbatim. You just have to call up, talk to a sales rep, and they'll get you hooked up. So, yeah, thank you, sir. See, every time you come on, I learn something. Every time we talk, I shouldn't even talk. Alright, so Messi's got another question. Yes, we got hit with a bunch of questions, actually. Good. So, yes, this one. So you don't get any buy box issues if both FBM and FBA is open at the same time? 00:28:44 No, I haven't. I mean, I do see my buy box percentage sometimes is like 98% or 99%. And so I'm the only seller. And there's no way there's some Chinese guy jumping on in the middle of the night. So I guess it's possible there could be some little something periodically. But no, I'm not noticing any major issues with it at all. Right. Alright. Oh, I got to give a shout out to Eric Payne. Oh, yes. Eric Payne. What's up, Eric? And Owen, and Tony. Okay, Tony Sagar, yeah. All right, so Owen is asking: UK-based, even with IPI of nearly 600, Amazon's still restricting the amount of inventory I can book in. Consequently, I am sending container to my US 3PL to ship in my FBA by UPS ground as we request it. 00:29:33 Yeah, that's pretty much what you have to do. I have an IPI of like 711 on one account, 800 or something on another, and it doesn't matter. No, and what you do, so going back to Owen. The only thing you can do is so if you're going into your seller central, you go to inventory planning, and then you can go, there's tabs across the top, inventory restock, and you can see each one of the products individually rated. And you can go into there and monitor it and try to bring up, just like Kevin and I were talking about earlier on, just try to monitor, throw out some rebates, get the product moving. It's a 30-day trial, and you'll start to see the product move up. All that. It's an overall score. 00:30:17 So some people think, oh, if I, if I have, you know, 600 or 660. I'm good. No, you have to take a look at the individual products. And it's always good. I mean, there's really there's four things you can do. Amazon tells you there’s four things you can do to improve your score overall score. So you can go in and you can get rid of excess inventory, inventory over 90 days, they would like that three-month buffer. You can go into excess get any so excess inventory, stranded inventory, sell-through inventory. So adding up PPC or driving traffic over to try to get sales, or you can do lower the price. They'll give you options. It could be a modify the SKU. They'll give you options on that. 00:31:01 And then the last one, and the most important one, is you can’t let your most important SKUs go out of inventory. That probably, I’m not sure, Kevin, but I think that’s weighted the most, right? Quality, um, uh, skews run out. Do you agree with that? Yeah, that's, that's a, does, does affect it. But sometimes, unfortunately right now, sometimes you can't control that because you may be looking at your projections and you're selling 20 units a day and you're like, okay, I've got, uh, I got 300 units in stock right now. So let me ship in, uh, 20 units a day. That's 15 days. Let me get my 3PL. The guy over in the UK there, uh, tells us 3PL send in some more stuff. 00:31:46 Right now, we don't know if that stuff's going to get checked in or not before you run out. In the past, you're like, no big deal. You'll be there in a few days or a week, and I'll be good to go. But now, it's a game. that you got to play and try to guess right. But yeah, running out of stock is a bad thing. The other thing you want to check is make sure you don't have any old shipments that you created that you never shipped in. Maybe you're doing some testing or you're playing around and you forgot to delete some old shipments that are sitting in your queue or plans, either shipments or plans. 00:32:20 Go in there and make sure that's all cleaned up if you've been doing a lot of that because some of that could be held against you on the new system. I would go in there, clean that up if you're a heavy shipper. How many days? They do give you a buffer. So how many days do you know? I don't know. Yeah. I don't know on that one. I just know that that affected me the other day, and I had to go delete some, and then I had to wait. It took about three or four hours for it to actually update to where it said, because it was telling me, nope, you can't ship any more in. I'm like, why not? 00:32:52 Now that I remember, oh, like five days ago, I was playing around with something that's check pricing, and I didn't delete it. Uh, so I went back and I deleted it. And if like, like I said, about four hours later, then the number changed. Hmm. Okay. Tony's got a question. Yes. He's asking Canadian. How is that recycled plastics program going? I'm launching a line recycled plastics turn into polyester. Awesome. Uh, yeah, we're, we haven't launched yet. Uh, we're, we have two products coming out, uh, this fall. Uh, and so, uh, it's taking a little bit longer than we had hoped. One of the factories that we're doing, they've never done this before. And the process, you know, this is not find someone on Alibaba that already has this and just change it to recycled. 00:33:40 We're having to reinvent the wheel. And actually, you know, the last thing was like, we have to buy a $40,000 machine. So you guys got to commit to 2. 7 million units. We're like, no, we're not committing to 2. 7 million units. We'll talk to you about the machine. So it, it'll be out, uh, uh, two of them. Uh, one of them, um, we're also doing some stuff under license. So one of the biggest companies in the world for, uh, that has ocean-based products, um, or products for people who love the ocean has, uh, uh, approached us and, we're actually doing a licensing deal with them. So that's going to be huge too. They got some influencers that have three, four or 5 million. 00:34:20 So just for product launches alone, that could be huge. Yeah. Oh, by the way, Sammy, yes, this is live. Yep, it’s live. All right. Next question. Alright. Do you see vendors eating these increased costs or passing them on? You have to eat them. Alright. Now, I mean, it's competitive. So it depends on the competitive nature of your product. You're going to have to eat it. Unfortunately, that's why I always say the money's made in sourcing, not in selling. So a lot of people think it’s how much can you charge? It’s not how much can you charge, it’s how much can you buy it for. And the spread is where the winners and losers are separated. 00:35:05 Because if me and Norm were both selling dog treats of some sort, duck treats for dogs, and he can get his at $4, and I can get mine at $3. 10. When I get squeezed like this on extra costs or have to ship in stuff by, you know, rush in some product, a case at a time, cost inefficiently or whatever, I have more room to work than he does. I can spend more on advertising if I want to. If everything is equal, then I can spend more on advertising to beat him and kick him out. So money is made in sourcing, not selling. Right. You should have been on the podcast with Alpha Lobby last week. Okay. Have we caught up to the questions yet, Kels? We've got two more here. 00:35:55 And I think we have a couple in the script. What's your timeline, Kev? I'm good. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So for Marina, if you're enrolled with remote fulfillment with Amazon, can you still have two SKUs, FBM and FBA, on the same listing? Yeah, I don't see why you couldn't. I mean, remote fulfillment means you're going cross-border stuff. So I'm pretty sure you can. But remote fulfillment, though, the FBM one, you're going to have to ship it yourself versus Amazon taking it across the border. So, yeah, I mean, the way I would do that is if you're based in Canada and you're using remote fulfillment crossing the U.S. Through the FBA, I would have a little 3PL in Buffalo or somewhere across the border that can ship in your FBM stuff. 00:36:49 And if you need a 3PL, I happen to know somebody that has one. So contact me after the podcast. All right, this is the last question. We have a couple comments. This question, two weeks ago, I had an inventory limit of 10,000 units. One week later, 5,700. If I was to send in all 10,000, I would by now pay an insane amount for extra storage. Any suggestions for how to overcome these huge spikes of inventory limits? No, so you had, let me read this again. So two weeks ago, you had 10,000. It's a dynamic number. It's not like once you reach something, it stays at that number. If your sales go down or if your listing gets suspended or something, it affects it. 00:37:42 So in my case, when I have that $10,000, if I know I'm going to be selling those or I'm going to be doing a rebate campaign or promotional campaign, I would send in the $10,000 and take my chances on the extra storage. If you're not confident in doing that, then you'll have to adjust that down to the $5,700 and send that in. But in my case, I would be sending them in. And the extra storage fees, yeah, it could go higher. But unless they sit there for a long time or these are huge, you know, they're refrigerators or beds or something like that that take up a lot of space. If it's something that's more of a reasonable size, I would still ship it in. 00:38:24 Yeah, the other thing when you're looking at 10,000 units, you might want to make sure that the sales are within that one to three months. Let's say that you don't want to take that chance. You can always use a 3PL to store part of it, get it over there, and then start to move it over. You can move over 1,500, 2,500 units at a time. So you don't incur these extra costs as well. So a 3PL can be a really great partner for you. I've noticed, too, with my switching of FBM and FBA, I'm not noticing a huge difference in sales. In the past, Amazon gave preference to FBA over FBM. But when COVID came, Amazon said this themselves, straight from the horse's mouth, that they actually adjusted the algorithm to not weight it as heavily towards FBA. 00:39:17 And with all this going on now, FBM, I'm not so sure that there's a huge penalty anymore for being FBM. The biggest penalty is people that don't trust you to ship it or it takes longer. If it's FBA, it says it's going to be there in a day or two versus FBM, it says five to seven days. That's the biggest penalty, I think, where you lose some people. But I have not noticed a huge drop off. It's not like I sell 50 a day when I'm FBA and 10 a day when I'm FBM. It might be 50 and 45 or something like that. It's not a huge drop off. The biggest problem with FBM is it costs me more. 00:39:55 One of my products, it's a $9 difference to actually do FBM just because I don't have the economies of scale that Amazon has where they can deliver something for a $5 fee, it's costing me 15, 14, 15 bucks to ship that out. So that's the biggest problem. Now, I asked this other question about Texas. Do you know any prep centers in Texas? There's one in Austin. There's some in Houston, but I don't use any of them. But in Central Texas, there's one here in Austin, which is Central Texas. But I haven't used them, so I don't like to recommend or mention names of people I haven't actually used and can vouch for. Okay. All right, we've got another question. 00:40:45 I currently have Amazon jumping on listings and suppressing established ASINs three years due to a prohibited phrase in the title. Is this a trend, or are they just picking on little old me? No, they're getting more strict on this stuff. there's some people still skirting by but uh yeah the amazon is getting more and more sophisticated on phrases and titles words the back ends things that they're not allowing um yeah so it's it's may feel like it's you and you've been you've been fine for three years but they're doing this to a lot of people i've had i was telling norm just before we jumped on i i have one of my products now that just this morning got suspended for the 10th time in two months And it's for the same reason over and over. 00:41:34 They're classifying this product as a pesticide when it's not a pesticide. And I actually have someone in business development at Amazon. I have my own rep that I can pick up the phone and call. I'm not dealing with tech support or seller support in India or Costa Rica or anywhere. I'm dealing with someone higher up at Amazon. Who can then take it to Amazon Legal and actually present it to the legal team, and they sign off on it, and it goes back up within an hour, and then a week later, it's down again by the algorithm saying, nope, and I have to fight it all over again. So it's extremely frustrating, and every time it happens, it costs us thousands of dollars and lost rank and everything that we have to regain. 00:42:25 But unfortunately, that's happening more and more now, and it's becoming more difficult to actually get things back as well for a lot of people. Right. You almost could go in, take out the word 'in' the title, wait five minutes, and it would be back. Now it could take days. Yeah. It used to be, yeah, you could do that. A lot of people with COVID were using the word FDA. You see listings that say FDA approved hand sanitizer or authorized by the WHO or whatever. All that is illegal. You're not allowed to do any of that. You're not allowed to use the word FDA, the FDA logo. You're seeing hand sanitizer people and mask people putting FDA logos on their pictures and everything. You can't do that. 00:43:13 Used to, you could go in, you know, you get slapped for that, and you just go in, you take out the word FDA in your back end or your bullet points or whatever, and listing would be back up pretty quickly. Like Norm just said, not anymore. I mean, it still does happen. I've had a case like that where I had to take out a phrase, and it did go back up quickly, but in most cases, it takes human involvement now to refresh it and get it back up. So what about So this happens all the time. You go into a listing. You're trying to put up your own listing. You're looking at all your competitors. Your competitors are all breaking TOS when it comes to the image. 00:43:49 So they might have the model sitting there. They might have, you know, just something to make the image look better, right? Have they got to the point where they're starting to take those primary images as well? You're asking what do I do when I see that happen? No, no. I know that it was the odd one that they would take down in the past. Are you seeing that more and more of these images now are being challenged and they're removing them and suppressing the listing due to bad or breaking TOS on images? I'm seeing it on the main image, but not on the subsequent images. There's someone right now that competes against us that's been very careful to not use certain words in their listing and their bullet points or title, but their third image blatantly violates this. 00:44:36 This is a big $100 million company. Blatantly violates it, but they're not doing it in the first image. The first image is the one Amazon's really checking. I don't know that they're really going through the rest of them. It's harder on images. uh to ocr them and actually see what's in there i mean usually the images requires a human reporting it or you know someone at amazon that's on the uh the image patrol team just stumbling on it and taking it down right amazon themselves violates their own stuff left and right i mean amazon for their branded products you know whoever's creating their images violates every rule in the book uh you know they put 800 numbers on on their images they put All kinds of crazy stuff. Write a review. 00:45:21 Yeah. I don't know if it was you. Somebody sent me. It might have been Steve Simonson. But he sent this image about if you like this product, write a review. It was on an Amazon listing. I've seen crazy stuff. So what I just try to do is keep my head down and keep my stuff. up and running and not, not worry too much about the competition. It'll eventually get to them. They'll eventually get slapped. Okay. We've got a couple more questions here. I want to ask him about a listing or meet a messy asking, but does it take a human involvement to lift a listing suspension when you only have the word gift in the title? It seems to be a word that Amazon doesn't like. Yeah, the Gorg gift is not a title. 00:46:08 If you ever want to check this stuff too, you can actually, if you're curious when you're creating your listing, if you go into supports, help, and do the fix a listing option, and then go into whatever the bullet points come, one of them is like change title or update description or whatever, and just say you want to do that. don't actually do it there but just say you want to do it and then it'll give you a little form where you can actually put in your title and then you can uh it'll actually come back and tell you i'm sorry this is not accepted it's too long or sorry you're using a word that 00:46:41 we don't allow or sorry or it may not even tell you what the word is but i'll tell you you'll kind of know what the word is um and you can test it right there and test the system if you ever want to do that but yeah so the word gift if you take it out of the title That would be one I think that the system might put back up automatically versus if you're doing something a little bit more blatant like using the word FDA or something that's a little bit more of a legal type of thing. I think those more are the ones that, in my experience at least, I'm not 100% sure on this, but in my experience are the ones that take a little bit more human intervention to get back up. 00:47:17 Yeah, so if it's a claim, so if you're claiming something and you've got a topical, then it could take longer. Mm-hmm. Owen says he saw a listing that competes, but their name is brandname. com. Surely this is against TOS. So, yeah, if their brand name is kevin. com dog treats, yeah, that's probably – they're skirting the rules. Amazon will probably catch them on that. Yeah. Yeah, I'm surprised that could be legal. I'm surprised the agent got through. They found a technical way to get that through. Okay, so we have a couple of questions that are not on here. This one is from Julie Tolman. And she was saying, how are sellers? See, Kelsey. When these are sent over previously, they can be in like 78 font, and I can read them, not like on the listing over here. 00:48:17 Okay, all right. But anyways, how are sellers dealing with the extremely high shipping rates from China and new tariffs? Any thoughts, Tim? I'm sorry. Can you say that one more time? How are sellers dealing with extremely high shipping rates from China and new tariffs? You've got to build it in, I mean a lot of my stuff has a 25 percent Trump tax plus a two to five percent tariff on top of it, you just gotta, you have to build it in, I mean so that's or you source don't source in China, yeah, source in Vietnam or Malaysia or somewhere else um and save that, I mean I've, we have a product now that we're doing that on, we're actually having them made in Vietnam instead of China and saving us at 25%. 00:49:06 So that's one way. As far as the high shipping rates, the high shipping rates are mostly for air. Sea shipping hasn't really gone up that much. It will go up for the fourth quarter. As it normally does, the price will be increasing here soon, if not already. But the air freight stuff is where you've seen big – it's come down. But you just have to either source somewhere else or build that in. That's where I said earlier, if you were with us, the money's made in sourcing, not in selling. Yeah. This is where you have to take a look and you might have to bite the bullet and do some form of combination shipping 00:49:46 where you might do some air, some high-speed vessel, and just regular sea cargo, and do a blend, take a hit because what you don't want to do right now is if you're going out of stock and you're losing your rank, I'd rather spend that little extra to keep my rank there and just move forward, again you've got to the amount of units that you're selling, if that drops because you're out of inventory, it's going to affect your IPI. Remember, it's a 30-day moving scale, right? So it's tough to do. We do have to suck it up. But remember one other thing. If the product that you're working on is from China and you've got Chinese competition, everybody's going to be going up 25%. 00:50:30 So unless there's a way around it, like Kevin said, if you can go over like cosmetics in Korea, okay, go over to Korea. They have incredible cosmetics. I mean, they're known for that. They're more expensive. That stopped you from doing it before because if you did cosmetics in China, I wouldn't be too crazy about that. But anyways, let's say that you'd go over to Korea. You might pay more, but you don't have the same 25% now. Okay so Julie has another question: any tips on getting shipments checked into Amazon faster? Yes we just answered that uh Julie a little earlier on Kevin dropped that uh incredible tip about using UPS, so hopefully you're listening and Julie I know you so I can also answer that question after the podcast all right anything else I think we had um Just a question from an anonymous viewer. 00:51:28 Can you recommend some niches for newbies? Is there anything, I guess, easier? No, there's nothing easy on Amazon. There's ones where the advertising is a little bit lower. I mean, like pets and supplements are two of the more competitive ones. So from an advertising point of view, those are ones that you might reconsider. Most newbies go into health and household, or kitchen, those are very common for newer people because it's typically smaller, lighter weight, cheaper items and um, there's not too many restrictions and requirements for for a lot of that stuff, um, so that that that's one that a lot of people go into but I would not I would not restrict restrict yourself as a newbie to a certain category. 00:52:15 The only ones I would stay away from are ones that require special permission, like maybe automotive or some of the topicals or something like that. I would probably steer away from that. Some people say don't do electronics. I disagree with that. I think there's nothing wrong with doing electronics. So look for the opportunity and go there. Don't limit yourself to a category. Okay. Oh, just another couple of shout-outs here to Matt and Kathleen. Just saw them pop up here. Okay. Kathleen had a question about fixing a listing. Where do you find that? So you go into Seller Central, and then you go into – I'll just do it real quick on my side so I can walk her through it. Let me sign in. So you go into Seller Central. 00:53:09 And if I can get my probe. And then you go into help. And there's, at least on my page, it says recommended for you. There's about six boxes. One of them says fix a product page. And so you hit that fix a product page. And it asks you for the ASIN. You enter the ASIN there. And then it'll ask you some additional questions. And that's where you can do it. Yeah. And the other thing, if you want to check out what's Amazon recommends on a listing, I know, you know, we talked about this way back, but just style guides, check a look at, take a look at what Amazon wants and recommends for your title, for your bullets, for your images. People forget to check out the style guides. Okay. 00:54:05 So Matt had a question, Kels. Yeah, so Matt is saying, what are your thoughts on using images of your product label that has your . com telephone and or support email? Yeah, I typically take those out. I mean, I have a product where I do show the label and show the ingredients, and the actual label does have my address and phone number and website on there. I actually take those out in Photoshop before I list them. Technically, it's part of your product. You could maybe try to make an argument and say, it's just my product. I'm just showing it there. Amazon doesn't like that at all. I see people do that quite a bit. I don't know what you're really gaining by doing that. 00:55:00 I don't really want a lot of people calling me, asking me, questions um for the phone number with your with your website address there you may be like well maybe they'll come to my website and buy there um but most people aren't going to do that if they're on Amazon they're Amazon buyers so I don't want to take them away from anything of buying the product I'd rather them just stay on Amazon and buy it there and then we get the rank juice versus trying to steal them away so I don't know that you really gain anything off of that you just create headaches so I would I would blur that out or take it out. Yeah, and if you really wanted to drive people over to your website, you could always throw that insert card in and you don't have to show it. 00:55:41 You could be causing trouble for yourself. Okay. All right. So we are coming up to almost an hour. Okay, we'll be closing her up pretty soon. Please, audience, that's it for the questions. We won't take any more in. But we do have, I think, just one or two left. Any tool which works with Australian market like Helium and JS? You know what? I don't know. A lot of people, I don't think Helium, I don't know that there's too many that it's such a small market. A lot of people still haven't expanded. Does one have enough user base for these big companies to go and develop it to make everything work over there? And I guess they just haven't figured there's enough demand yet or enough reason to put resources on that. 00:56:32 So I'm sure there's something. But I don't know. Sometimes those European guys, some of their stuff works a little bit in some of the more emerging markets quicker than like the big Helium 10 or Jemco Scout from the U. S. I know Kipa used to work, but I think they pulled out. Yeah, I'm not sure on that one. If we find anything, we'll post it in the comments. But yeah, I'm not sure of the tools. Sorry, Fahid. All right. Okay, so anything else? I think that's it, Kels, right? Oh, there is one other question from Yelchin. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so which deep link do you generally send traffic to Amazon from the outside? What do you think? Like the ones that I use deep link wise, I use a Pixify me and I use their, their Supreme. 00:57:33 I think it's the Supreme 2 . 0 or team does anyways. The Supreme 2 . 0 from Pixify me would Pixify . me would be the, probably the best, one of the better ones. But for me, I've actually steering away from using a lot of links and using, trying to, at least for launches and using more of the search find by. And go on that route versus any kind of hyperlinks. But sometimes you do need a hyperlink, and if you're going to do that, yeah, I would use the Supreme link from pixelify. me. Okay. All right. Very good. So I think that's it. So this is officially the longest podcast. Thank you, Kevin. Oh, is it? One hour? It's already been an hour. Oh, wow. Yeah, I know. 00:58:22 I can't wait because you're, you know, being a guest, you know, once a month, just like today, you know, there's, you're, you have so much knowledge and even sitting here, I'm picking up, I'm writing notes myself. I don't know if you noticed, but, but anyways, thank you for being on the podcast. How can people reach out and contact you? Well, best is, you can find me on Facebook. I don't use LinkedIn, whatever, but, And you can check me out. Just look me up on Facebook. That's probably the best place. Okay, perfect. All right, everyone. So I hope everybody enjoyed the podcast today. We'll be putting the whole podcast up with a bunch of shorter clips on Norm Farrar, aka The Beard Guy. And also. 00:59:13 If you want to watch instead of hear the podcast, you can always scoot over to our YouTube channel. So, anything else there, Kels? Yeah. So, please, if you're watching this right now, like and share it. Gets our name out. More eyes, more reach. It's all good for us. And if there's one thing I can please ask you is look up Apple Podcasts or Spotify Podcasts. Search Lunch with Norm and then hit that subscribe button. That's the number one thing we can do. Do you want to mention next week's guest on Monday? Okay. Let me see. Paul Barron is going to be talking about influencer marketing on Monday. He's going to dive deep into it. It's going to be a great podcast. You can see how working with influencers to make them your brand ambassador. 01:00:12 And instead of ending up using rebates and spending a little bit of money, Paul's been able to turn this into a profit center. So he ends up finding influencers, turning them into brand ambassadors. And at the end of the day, he's profitable on a launch. He doesn't spend anything on rebates. So that'll be interesting. At the end, we switch this around. And this is really important. This is actually quite serious. So we had some friends commit suicide over the last little while. And I think National Suicide Prevention is on Friday. So I've got a special guest coming on. We're going to be talking about this. You know, we talk about Amazon, but we still have to address why people are, you know, at home. 01:01:02 Depression can set in, and, you know, what you can do to help minimize the depression or seek the help. So, we're going to go a little off topic there, but I think it's really important to cover. So, we've switched our guests from Friday over to Thursday and we'll take it from there. So, okay, let's go back to the newsletter: subscribe to our newsletter. It does not suck. So, just go over to lunch with Norm, hit the subscribe. subscribe button, and you'll see some great content. And I think that's it. Stay tuned Monday, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Eastern Standard Time at noon. And I think that's it. Just if anyone. Yeah. Say something. Yep. One last thing. We have all the events for the next week's podcast up except for Fridays, but we have Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. So you might want to take a look, look at the event page on the Norman for our AKA The Beard Guy page. Find an event that you like, hopefully all of them, and hit the interest button or say you're going. Yeah, sure. Share and like. And that's it. Alright. So thanks, everybody, for watching today's show.