Worlds No.1 DTC Expert: Top 5 Secrets to Unlock Successful Marketing on Amazon

Worlds No.1 DTC Expert: Top 5 Secrets to Unlock Successful Marketing on Amazon 00:00:00 AI is a hot topic right now and it's game-changing. It's going to uproot quite a bit of industries, not just e-commerce, but it's going to have a major effect across everything that we do out there. It's going to affect everything from search to the way we create content to the way we do everything. But yeah, it's amazing what it can do. I mean, it's not perfect. You still got to go read it. Sometimes it can mess a few things up. I've had that happen a few times. I was doing a dog bowl. I was just playing around. I was doing this for a presentation for a talk I did in New York at ASGTG a few weeks ago. And I said, look at these reviews. 00:00:32 I took the four and five-star reviews from Amazon, downloaded those using the Helium 10 extension and just pasted those in ChatGPT. And then told it, analyze these reviews and write me an Amazon listing based on the key positive points people are discussing in these reviews. And it spit out within seconds, like a perfect listing with five bullet points and a description and a title and everything. But then when I started reading the bullet points. One of the bullet points said something to the effect of this dog bowl, the slow feed dog bowl is so awesome. Me and my family like to eat out of it too. I had to, you know, correct that. So you gotta be careful. 00:01:22 You're listening to What The Tech. Welcome to the What The Tech podcast, where we talk about business and office technology and put our 20 years of expertise to discussing trends and issues impacting the workplace. You're clear for departure. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You're listening to What The Tech. Welcome to the What the Tech podcast, where we talk about business and office technology and put our 20 years of expertise to discussing trends and issues impacting the workplace. Hi there, it's Rolando. And of course, it's Dave. And you're on What the Tech. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to What the Tech. Today, we have a true rock star in the house. He's the wizard of Amazon marketing and the guru of building a business on the platform. 00:02:26 If you're looking for the secret sauce to Amazon success, stay tuned. Dave, to get the full rich experience, go ahead and put on your headphones so the podcast can come to life with all the sound effects that we have in store for you. Dave. And I love the sound effects that we have. And listen, before we introduce our guest, I got to give big props to a guest of ours that was on a few weeks ago. You know what? Big props to Tyler Jeffcoat. Tyler is a seller accountant. And I'll tell you, this guy is amazing. He shared a lot of tips and tricks with Amazon sellers, new and old, popular, and trying to build more brand awareness. Tyler was just an amazing guest. 00:03:12 And if you want to hear more, definitely check out that interview that we had with Tyler on circuitloops. com. All right. Dave, Tyler is doing some big things. Big props to Tyler. All right. Let me tell you about Kevin King. If you haven't heard who Kevin King is, you've been living under a rock. Kevin King has been an entrepreneur his entire life. It's been 30 years that he's received a paycheck from someone else. But I know that his time is money, so I know he's got to be making good money now that he's not getting a paycheck from anybody else. His business is legendary. He has traveled to seven continents and 90 countries. I love that. I love the globetrotting aspect. 00:03:58 A few years ago, he was named one of the top 40 direct marketers under 40 by Target Marketing Magazine. Woo! He is an amazing guy, and he's been quoted in such publications such as New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and appeared on shows such as Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Look at that. Inside Edition and Entertainment Tonight. Kevin is the current host of the AM PM podcast and leads the extremely popular Billion Dollar Seller Summit, where top Amazon sellers meet and learn. Pure gold knowledge, let's welcome to the podcast Kevin King, what's up gentlemen? Hello everybody, hello Kevin! We are so honored to have you on the podcast today. I know that you're like gold-you are like one of those figures that I've been waiting to have on the podcast because we are in at the intersection of so many cool things happening. 00:05:04 So much change when it comes to Amazon. And you are the wizard when it comes to what's happening on the platform. You talk to sellers. You have your billion-dollar summits where you get all this rich knowledge and everywhere else. So I wanted to bring you on because I know Kevin's got the 411 on what's happening right now. I try to keep my ear to the ground. Don't know everything, but I know a few things. Listen, we have a lot of questions that we want to ask you, Kevin. Before we get into that quick sponsorship read. This podcast is brought to you by Global Tech Worldwide, your technology office experts that's been around for 20 years providing trusted, personalized office IT solutions. Check them out at amazon. com slash T-E-C-K. That's amazon. 00:05:51 com slash T-E-C-K. Still paying for slow, outdated business internet? Why would you do that? Everything is so expensive in 2022. But listen, you might not realize you can go to circuitloops. com instant quotes to easily compare with what you're paying for and find the upgrade that's right for you. It's that easy. Go to circuitloops. com. All right, Kevin, back to the show here. And Kevin, let's start with something where I know it's near and dear to your heart. The last time you and I spoke, and I actually was watching you on a webinar just recently. You were talking about technology and how Amazon sellers need to pay attention to that. I just want to ask you as we start the show, what tech are you geeking out on right now? 00:06:37 In regards to Amazon, it would be the AI stuff. In regards to just general tech, I just discovered these little projectors, this LG projector that you can actually set within three inches of the wall and it projects 120 inches, like movie theater screen or something. That's the tech outside of the Amazon space that I'm geeking on. But within Amazon or within e-commerce, it's AI. AI is a hot topic right now. I just did a podcast on it on the AM PM podcast on the Helium 10 Elite. Just recently, we actually had someone come on and speak about that. You and I have spoken about it a little bit in the Helium 10 Elite, the Mastermind talks that we do every month. And it's game-changing. 00:07:15 It's going to uproot quite a bit of industries, not just e-commerce, but it's going to have a major effect across everything that we do out there. That's why, I don't know if you saw that Google just recently asked the two founders to come back full-time. They kind of semi-retired and we're just doing advisory stuff. And they said, hey, this AI stuff, this chatbot stuff, a big enough deal; we need your help. Come on back into the office. And you see what Microsoft's doing, where they just invested billions of dollars into Open AI. It's game-changing. It's going to affect everything from search to the way we create content to the way we do everything. It's amazing stuff. And that's what I'm trying to get my head around right now is how can we best utilize this in what we do? 00:07:56 No doubt. And just this morning, I was talking to one of my colleagues. And as you know, Amazon bots went out of control with a word, oddly enough, lithium, which they said in the details of the seller performance, we suspect that your product is a pharmacy product. We don't even sell pharmacy. And get this. So the product is just your regular generic headset that you could wear. There's no lithium anything in that product. Now, there are wireless version of that stuff that contain batteries. Those contain lithium. But somehow the bots went out of control. suspected that we were selling a pharmacy product that required a prescription. And that's not allowed. So we had to submit a plan of action here to just get that all corrected and whatnot. 00:08:50 So we went into ChatGPT within 15 seconds. We put in the notification that Amazon sent and just put in, act as if you were an Amazon seller in creating a response to this. How would you write this? How would you write this appeal? 15 seconds later, beautifully written appeal. And my coworker submitted that to Amazon. I don't know what the result is because that happened this morning, but something that would have taken a lot more brainpower to think about this and that and the other, done. Well, one of the things about that too is I don't know if you did this, but you can tell it exactly how long to write that appeal. Because one of the tricks on Amazon when you do a plan of action is you need to keep it short and to the point. 00:09:31 And a lot of people tend to just ramble on. And, you know, those agents on the other side have a short window of time to deal with something. And if you ramble on, your chances of having success with it are minimized. So that chatbot. It was all bullets. It was all, it came back with all bullets, by the way. That's great. That's awesome. Yeah. You can tell it, do it in 300 words or less or whatever bullet format or. However, but yeah, it's amazing what it can do. It's not perfect. You still got to go read it. Sometimes it can mess a few things up. I've had that happen a few times. I was doing a dog bowl. 00:10:01 I was just playing around and I was doing this for a presentation for a talk I did in New York at ASGTG a few weeks ago. And I said, look at these reviews. I took the four and five star reviews from Amazon, download those using the Helium 10 extension and just pasted those in chat GPT and then told it. analyze these reviews and write me an Amazon listing based on the key positive points people are discussing in these reviews. And it spit out within seconds, like a perfect listing with five bullet points and a description and a title and everything. But then when I started reading the bullet points, one of the bullet points said something to the effect of this dog bowl, the slow feed dog bowl is so awesome. Me and my family like to eat out of it too. 00:10:51 I had to, you know, correct that. So you've got to be careful that it'll do little things like that sometimes. And then I think the major thing that people are worried about is it can be misleading. You know, it takes the information that's out there, but that information may be wrong. It still needs human verification. I think it's not there where it's like a hundred percent accurate, but brings you something that would have taken an hour down to about 15 minutes, you know, between you adding the prompt properly and maybe going back and forth and cleaning that up. But it's not just for business either. My wife, I told her about it. I was like, 'baby, you got to check this out.' She's like, 'what is it?' It's the rage right now. 00:11:28 Just go play with it. Just go sign up for the free trial and play with it. So she did. And she's, ah, this is freaking amazing. We were sitting there one time and she was talking about nuts. You know, she's wanting to get some snacks from Whole Foods or something. And she's like, 'you know, which nuts are the best for me, which ones are the healthiest or have the lowest fat and stuff.' And we started rattling off the top of our head. I think pistachios are good. I think this one's good. I was like, 'why don't you ask the chat GPT?' And so she just typed in something like which nuts are the healthiest and high in protein, low in fat or something like that. 00:12:00 And it spat back like this detailed thing, like list, here's the top 10 nuts. Here's the breakdown of each one. Here's why each one is, this one's better than this one. Or I was like, you couldn't do that on Google. You'd have to go find some blog posts where someone was ranking them or something. But it was like analyzing the nuts between each other. It was amazing. What I love about it and comparing it to Google is Google will, if you're searching, you know, what are the best nuts for antioxidants or vitamin D or whatever it might be. Google's going to throw all these ads in your face. You know what? Like my mother, she clicks on the first thing all the time. She wonders why she has so many problems with her computer. 00:12:37 But my wife is not a tech person at all. My wife is starting her new business. And she came to me last week. Now, first off, I just want to say we've incorporated chat in GPT. Eddie. So we've named him. We've hired him. He comes to all of our team meetings. We're teaching salespeople how to use them, customer service, how to use them. The customer service team loves it. Kevin catalog people love it in our team, you know, just having something polite to say back to an angry customer. He helps Eddie helps to kind of diffuse that. But my wife, she wasn't convinced until late last night she wanted some help writing a contract for a client of hers and I said come into my office and we went online and I showed her how to do it and she was absolutely blown away. 00:13:24 We were pretty specific what we asked for, some of the details within the contract, but she had blocked off like four hours last night so that she could focus on doing a couple of these contracts. We finished the job in like 20 minutes and she had three contracts written for three separate clients. So I took a non-tech person and she is a huge believer, and we're using Eddie so many different ways. Everyone on the team is learning how to do it, and we're just so excited to have this as a tool. It saves so much time, so much time. Yeah, I mean, the beautiful thing too is, I didn't actually realize this until I did my podcast, is it actually goes back 8,000 characters. So you can have a conversation with it. 00:14:07 So you could type in a question and then reference something that's in this whole conversation thread. It will use that information to modify exactly the next response. Kevin King has given us pro tip numero uno, Alex. Get ready for a pro tip. Kevin, tell us about having that conversation within ChatGPT and going back to the results. Yeah, a lot of people don't realize there's a couple settings in ChatGPT. One's called the heat setting. It's like a temperature setting that can determine how tuned in it is. And the other one is a lot of people don't realize it goes back 8,000 characters. So within a chat thread, it can actually reference something that you asked it before. It will build upon that or it will use that to negate something else or however you want to do it. 00:14:53 But it's amazing. It's like having a conversation with the smartest person you know. Awesome. I love that. The other thing that I just discovered recently, and we're going to get to somewhat of your ninja hacks here soon because I love that. I eat them all up. But if we were to give another tip to folks that are listening to us is that you can take ChatGPT now and put them into a spreadsheet. And I was playing around with this last night. It's an extension for Google Sheets where we have all of the different things we want it to do. So the prompt is act as a Hollywood script writer with 20 years of experience, go ahead and make a description that gives an epic story about, and then we put the product. 00:15:37 And then, within the Google Sheets, which is where our people that work on our product listings, it spits out the result. A thousand words. Now that's going to go into the description and we don't have to worry about going back and forth between copying and pasting and then they have their other things okay. Spit out five bullets that that highlight some of the keywords if we're using let's say Helium 10 as a tool for extracting keywords, use these keywords within the bullets; five bullets done. And then we go into all the other aspects: What are the most frequently asked questions around this niche? So now folks that are working on the team can get to the part of analysis and spend more time around that rather than just the creation side of catalog work, which is not glamorous, but essential to the work of being on Amazon. 00:16:32 I know people that are using it now to write Kindle books. They're actually going to the tools and looking up keywords. And looking for opportunities on Amazon or within the Kindle system. What are people looking for that there's not much about this subject? And they're going into ChatGPT, and they're saying, 'write me a children's book that has a princess and a frog, and they go on a journey to some imaginary world.' And it writes a whole freaking short story. The whole e-book? The whole e-book, yeah. Oh, my goodness. That is amazing. Amazing. Kevin, the— Tips and hacks don't end there because you've inspired me today and paying homage among the many things that you've contributed to the Amazon world is your ninja hacks that you provide within Helium 10's elite group. 00:17:19 And for those that don't know it, you could just go check out Helium 10 and they have a bunch of information on the elite group. I really love it. I love what you do there. So in tribute to your ninja hacks, I have the five. Best Kept Secrets. Alex, go ahead and hit that segment. And these five Best Kept Secrets, Kevin, that song was written by Eddie. By our in-house Eddie. And another website that does song composition. So the whole thing, the entire thing. Now, obviously, that's not some musician. We're not musicians here. We're sellers. So it could get a lot better. And I'm sure version 10 of this at some point will sound exactly just like a musician at some point instead of some auto-tuned amateur. That's cool. 00:18:25 So go ahead, Alex. Give me the graphic here on the five best kept secrets. Kevin, you can weigh in on these as well. These are just ours. I felt that there are some things that are not necessarily hidden, but they're in plain sight. And a lot of folks undervalue some of these things. And the first thing, number five, I have brand registry. Brand registry unlocks the keys to the kingdom. And there's still tons of sellers. I talk to sellers and they don't even know what it is. You know, and it seems like it's worth mentioning if you're not brand registered today, if you are starting out, because, Kevin, there are a lot of folks that are probably going to be hearing this that are probably moving away from the tech space as it relates to one of these tech companies that have been shedding employees. 00:19:12 And they may be looking to start their own thing on Amazon. I would say make sure you get brand registered. Would you concur with that or you have a different opinion on that? No, that should be the first step you do. It should be the very first step. If you're going to sell on Amazon specifically, you need to get brand registry. And to get that, you need a trademark. So whatever your brand is or your company name is, go get a trademark, apply for a trademark. And it used to be you had to wait for that trademark to actually complete and take nine, 10 months before you could get brand registry. But now Amazon will take the little confirmation ID number, the registration number while it's in progress. 00:19:49 and actually allows you to use that to get that, but brand registry opens up so much stuff, so many tools like you said it's the key to the kingdom, it gives you all this data straight from the horse's mouth, that Amazon has on search terms and on categories and on all kinds of stuff, what's being clicked, what's being bought, all straight from Amazon. It allows you to do a lot more on your listing to add to what's called a plus content which is that extra section if you scroll down the bottom where you can put additional pictures and video, it lets you do some different stuff in the advertising realm that you can't do if you don't have it. It gives you a little bit of protection if someone else tries to sell your product that's maybe perhaps not authorized. 00:20:25 It's so important that it should be one of the very first things that you do, even some cases before you pick your final product. No doubt. No doubt. The other is you're flying blind and I would say even naked on Amazon because a lot's going to happen on Amazon. A lot. Good, bad and sideways. And without brand registry, you don't have, some protections. I'll just put it that way because it doesn't do everything, but it's going to do way more than if you went on Amazon, started selling today without being brand registered. Number four. When you can get that for the people that don't know how to do that, just Amazon . com. So if you're new and you go, how do I do it? Brandregistry . amazon . 00:21:04 com is all the information. Awesome. Thank you, Kevin. And one of those. I would call a hack. Now, this is something that we've discovered, and I've shared this one with you, is that you can react and engage. Now, let's say you're beyond brand registry now. One of the things that we really like, and we are taking full advantage, is to be able to react and engage with old questions that are on your product listing. Today, when you go on Amazon, it will tell you 10 questions answered. There are way more questions, especially if this is a product that you get consistent sales on. And sometimes it just falls through the cracks. You don't get the notification or maybe you get a thousand emails in a day. 00:21:44 And somehow you missed that notification that somebody actually had a question on there. You can now respond with a video, show your face, address the question, as well as put in the text. And what we do as a best practice is put both. So we get seen by the. Algorithm, as well as being able to provide a clear answer where somebody can either see the product or address a question straight on. And there's a link that we've discovered that will allow you to reveal. So if you had 10 questions, maybe you had 30, but Amazon will not expose those other 20 questions unless you've answered it. So that's one of our kept secrets there. And I shared that with you a little while ago so that you could do the same. 00:22:27 What do you think about that one, Kevin? That's a good one. That's another one where you could, if you need to get that word lithium in there and not have your listing shut down, you could actually do it. Because the Q &A section, that stuff gets SEO indexed. It gets indexed, but it doesn't count against you on your listing. So that's where a lot of people, if they're selling stuff related to CBD, some of those keywords will get you flagged, just like you had the problem with lithium, where lithium can be for batteries or it can be the medicine for people with a mental disorder. That's a way to get around that is actually put that stuff in the Q and a, and it won't flag it. Oh man, I love that. 00:23:03 Love that. Yeah. Good point. And also Kevin, what we've been doing is, so we've been going back and answering questions for quite a long time on our listings. Been adding video for about a year and a half on some of these listings, answering the questions. We'll do a little bit of editing to make it a little more entertaining than just a talking head. But we've been incorporating the AI. A lot of the products that we sell will have a lot of the repeat questions. I can give you the top five questions that people will ask. So when you've been selling the types of hardware that we have for 20 years, some of our responses, we haven't changed up our responses in so long because it's just how we talk and we can answer these things in our sleep. 00:23:45 But what we've done is, we'll take our standard answer, put it through AI, and then it's coming up with responses, just different ways of raising the answers. And it's just putting a new spin, a little more dynamic touch to what we're doing. So it's just one of many ways that we've started using the AI piece. There's one important thing to say on this AI too, like what you're talking about there, that's important for people to note: is the current technology that's out there, like OpenAI and ChatGPT, only goes through 2021. So it knows everything through 2021. So, anything if you ask it analyze the Ukrainian-Russian war and it's not it's going to refer to something in the past, not the one that we all know is happening so that's one that probably the only big disadvantage to it. 00:24:32 It's not current to this date. Now that's going to change with GPT-4, which is the next generation of it. But right now that is a limiting factor. So if you're having to analyze reviews, which you said, it's not going to incorporate anything that's on Amazon from 20'22 forward, unless you copy and paste that into the thread. So you can put a link in there that says, go analyze these reviews and give it a link to the product on Amazon. As long as that product was there in '21 or before, it can do it. But if you needed to incorporate new material, you need to copy and paste that. So if it's a new product that just launched last year, and you're trying to analyze the reviews that say on it, then you would need to actually go in, use a tool like Helium 10's X-ray plugin or something, and download those reviews, paste them in there just as raw data, and say, analyze these. 00:25:20 That's the way you get around that. Good point. No, terrific. Terrific. Kevin, you're just dropping so much knowledge. I wish we had five hours to probe with questions because we could do like 10 podcasts alone with you on just these few things. Because there's going deep, and how to analyze it, and even how to optimize ChatGPT for it. We've been playing around with it on the back end. But I also want to continue here on our top secrets and get your feedback on it. Something I just heard, but I've known. Never run out of stock. Now, what? I would have to add to this is what I heard was that from a former Amazon employee who worked on the fulfillment side and had an intimate knowledge about fulfillment and how Amazon views this as it relates to the A10 algorithm now. 00:26:11 One of the reasons why when you go out of stock and your product may not be back at the same level, he said to me, if you're in a niche where Amazon's algorithm can offer up more choices. It can offer up substitutes or similar products that a customer might be looking for that now where your product filled that void, they can fill it. They're going to put it there. So even when you come back into stock, if your product is in stock, it will take you longer because there's more substitutes. There's other things in that niche that can fill that void. Whereas if you're in a smaller niche, a category that doesn't have as much competition, you may pop back right away to that level where you were at before. 00:26:56 Does that square with what you know? Yeah, it's because Amazon, what have you done for me lately? So, the ranking on Amazon, there's a lot of factors. There's 222 factors or something like that in the ranking. I'm sure that's constantly changing. And I just want to correct one thing. It's the A9 algorithm. There is some reference out there. There's one of these gurus used as a marketing thing. And hey, look out, everybody. There's a new A10 that's BS. Amazon, it's called the A9. They do tweak it and they do modern versions of it, but it's actually called the A9. But within that algorithm, there's 222 and probably plus now things that they look at. And each one of those is weighted. And one of the ones that's weighted a lot is, what have you done for me lately? 00:27:34 What have you sold lately? And so the algorithm looks at it and it breaks it down into hourly sales into six hour periods into one day periods into three day seven day 14 day 30 day averages 90 day averages and 180 day averages and so when you run out of stock and you're not selling, it's logging zeros in there as that's what your sales were-zero. So a lot of people will say, 'Hey, I'm about to run out of stock,' which, by the way, Cristiano Ronaldo has never run out of stock, so should I raise my price? Should I jack my price I'm selling this for $20. Should I raise it to 25 or 30 to slow the sales down so I don't run out of stock until I can get some more in there? 00:28:11 That's one of the worst things you can do because that actually hurts your average as well. Here comes a pro tip. Kevin, clear the deck here on raising the prices or not to raise the prices before you run out of stock. Yeah, you should not raise the price before you run out of stock. If you can raise the price and it doesn't slow down your sales momentum. By all means, raise the price. If you're selling 20 a day and you can raise the price $5, $10 and still sell 20 a day, more power to you. But if you're raising the price for the point of actually going from 20 sales a day to 15 to 10, just to stretch out that inventory while some more is in transit so you don't run out of stock, that's actually a mistake. 00:28:52 And the reason that's a mistake is that will hurt your averages. So your average is just, like I've said, there's multiple days, there's time period averages. And those time period averages, the more recent ones are going to be worse. And those have a higher weight. So, if you have averages of hourly, three hours, six hours a day, three days a week and so forth, if for a week you raise your price and you slow that down to 10, your weekly daily average, your three-day daily average, your daily average, all those are going to be lower numbers and they carry a much higher weight in the ranking. They're like, it depends on who you listen to, but 60 to 80% of the ranking is what have you done for me in the last week? 00:29:27 And so that's going to pull you down. And so then when you come back into stock, you're going to have to build yourself back up. And if it's like you said, if it's in a non-competitive niche, it's probably not that big a deal. But if it's in a competitive niche, you're going to be hurting yourself and you're going to be fighting to get that position back. And we've seen this in a product that, during the height of COVID, manufacturers had all kinds of supply chain problems. And we had one particular SKU that was doing well for us and we experienced this. It's a very competitive niche that this product was in; it was out for a month. We couldn't get it. There was nowhere to get it. We just had to deal with it. 00:30:03 They weren't shipping it because they had all kinds of problems as well. And we've got it back in stock since, but it's still inching. It's not back. It's just inching its way up because there's a lot of competitors in that space, just like you said, Kevin. It's a momentum killer. I see that happen all the time with new sellers. They'll watch some YouTube video. Some gurus say, yeah, don't buy 1,000 of a brand new product. You don't know if it's going to sell. Just buy 10. Or buy 50 or 100, maybe 50 or 100 and get into it. And they get into it and maybe they do hit a chord there on Amazon. They did good research and they do well. 00:30:36 And they get those 50 or 100 and they're like, holy cow, I need to get some more in. And by the time they get some more in, all they're doing is starting over again. Because once they come back into stock. After selling those 50 to 100 that they started with, they're back to ground zero and having to build it all the way back up again. And in the meantime, there's been a lot of other people watching on these tools, X-ray and other tools, seeing that they did well. And they've entered the market with deeper pockets and bigger inventory. And you're basically just leading the way for others. And it's a problem out there for a lot of new sellers. 00:31:06 But as a seller, if you're stuck in that situation, so you have product going to FBA, it's in transit, your inventory is running short. Trends say that you have five days left of inventory, but you know that product won't be available at Amazon for another 10 days. If raising the price is a detriment to all the work that you've put into it, if it slows down sales, what should you do? There's two things that you can do to keep those zeros from appearing on those dailies. One is to close the listing. So you go into your FBA inventory and there's a little pull-down menu there. It has a bunch of options. One of them is delete listing. One of them is edit, and some others. One of them is closed listing. 00:31:48 And that's scary to people. Oh, no, I don't want to close my listing. You can always reopen it. But by closing that listing, it will actually temporarily close it, and it won't log those zero days of sales. And so that will help you. Now, that's not going to preserve your BSR. So if you were a BSR at 10,000 and you do that, you're going to slip to 10,000 or 20,000 or depends on how long you're out of stock. You're going to slip, but it's not going to hurt you as bad. And when you come back into stock, if you slip down to 20,000 and you're back in stock in 10 days, you're going to be able to jump from 20,000 to probably 14,000, 13,000 pretty quickly, and then work your way back up hopefully to that 10,000 and maybe even better, but it will take a little time, but it's a much faster climb. 00:32:30 Then if you just let it sit there and accumulate those zeros, and you fall to a BSR of say 40,000 or something like that. The other way you can do it is by modifying your price. So Amazon has pricing bans and most people don't even realize this exists. They'll raise their price or lower their price. And Amazon knows that if you're selling this particular item and most people, a reasonable price for it based on what everybody else is selling it for is between 10 and 40 bucks. If you lower your price to below 10 or raise your price to above 40. It thinks you might have made a typo or made an error and so it will actually suspend the buy box on your listing and sometimes it'll actually suspend the listing temporarily, and indeed and you can control that by going into your settings Amazon and actually saying this is my minimum and maximum price, and that gives you more flexibility there if you're playing around with this. 00:33:17 But what I do is I use that and I go and I set my settings to something fairly low, so then I deliberately raise my price from, for example, if I'm selling it for $20, I'll say my max price is 25 in the system, and then I'll raise it to $200 or something crazy like that. And the Amazon system freaks out thinking you made an error, and so we're going to pause this, and it pauses it, and that also prevents those zeros from being logged. And I believe they call it fair marketplace policy or something. I've seen those notifications. So when you get that notification, although it's technically a bad thing, it can be a better option than being completely out of stock and then having to deal with those ramifications. 00:33:59 So you're saying, go ahead. Within the minimum maximum bands go above the or the maximum or below the minimum and you need to go above it if you do it in the same screen like there's three columns there and there's a column for my price or sell price or whatever it says and then minimum maximum if you do it all on that screen sometimes it'll catch the error right there it'll pop up on the screen and say nope you can't do this you gotta set the minimum maximum on the FBA inventory screen and the way you can make those appear is actually go up to the preferences in the top right corner And you can turn columns on and off. So that's where you want to turn those columns on. 00:34:30 And then you want to actually change the price, maybe using the seller central app or from the main screen, not from that, because that way it won't give that a built-in error checking. Got it. Love it, man. That's a great tip. We're going to remember that on how to blunt, not that you're trying to run out of inventory, but. Things happen. Supply chains are crappy right now. 3PLs don't always get things out on time. It's taking longer to get Amazon stuff checked in. It used to take, like, for us, a couple days. We could see when it arrived. In a few days, the inventory process on Amazon's FCs would kick in. Now it's taking a couple weeks. 00:35:06 Whether you use a small package, I would hate to be a seller that's got to send in LTL right now or pallets through trucking because freight is just ridiculously slow when it goes into stuff getting checked into Amazon. So I feel for you if you've got to rely on trucking to bring your packages over to the FCs. There's a workaround on that. If you're able to get into the beta program, Amazon basically, I'm forgetting the exact name of it right now, but they have their AWD, I think it is. They have their own basically fulfillment service now, 3PL. If you can get into, I think it's in beta right now, but if you have a SaaS rep or you have a rep, you can ask them to get you into that. 00:35:41 And they actually have their own 3PL. So you could ship your LTL shipments to them in bulk, even bigger bulk than what they may allow you to ship into the warehouses. And they will store it and they feed it in as needed. So they use their algorithms. This warehouse over here needs 26 more. So, they take it from like your back stock. It's like your 3PL stock and they ship it in as needed. And that way you can store more and avoid running out of stock. And it also lets you get around some of the inventory limits. And the beautiful thing about it too is if they do run out, say someone comes and wipes you out because they bought a big bulk purchase, this is a business or something, and Amazon's got to backfill it from their little 3PL, the AWD, they will actually show it as still in stock as it's being transferred. 00:36:26 So you don't actually lose that customer confidence where it says it's going to be delivered. Three weeks or it's out of stock or whatever. So it'll still stay in stock, just having a little bit longer shipment window, but that can help you on your conversions as well. No doubt. Kevin, you just, that's the surprise. I've heard of that program, but the behind-the-scenes on that is just, it's amazing that Amazon is essentially rewarding you for placing inventory into those new warehouses. I can't wait to see how they roll it out to other sellers to take advantage of that. Before we run out of time, I still got number one to go. Yes. Yes. Chat GPT deployment. Now, for some, believe it or not, Kevin, folks aren't really clued in like you and I on what's going on there. 00:37:15 And you alluded to it earlier. Chat GPT, which is our number one here, is a game changer. And with version four, you are going to be going on ChatGPT. They're going to solve some of the problems. There's going to be an update with the timeline for when they're pulling information. There's some talk that they may even include some ability to go out to the web. If you don't have that, there is a plugin called WebGPT. We'll also bring those results right now, even with the current version, into your search. And the parameters, get this, Kevin, it's going over to over 100 trillion parameters. So it's going to be able to have what's called more tokens. It'll go back further in time in terms of that conversation. 00:38:01 It'll go over that 8,000 characters and whatnot so that you can have even more data fed. So if you're writing an ebook and you're scraping some website and you dump in over right now, you dump in over 10,000 characters, it will timeout and tell you that's too much data and it won't handle it. It's going to blow the lid off of the amount of data you can feed it into the chat at one time. As well, yeah, no ChatGPT! It's super; it's free right now, their servers can get overwhelmed, so I know there's been a few times I've tried to go into it and they'll say, 'Please come back.' A lot of people are using it, but they're getting ready to actually charge for it. 00:38:33 They can move that people want this, and it's cool, and it's really good marketing, so they are going to start charging for it. But I think $40-something dollars a month maybe is what the word is officially announced, but for me as a business owner, as an Amazon seller, it's worth every penny of that. Heck yeah. Heck yeah. It could have been $400. It'll be totally worth it. Kevin, because you are the master of all things hacks, I want to ask you, what ninja hack or thing that you've heard, because these things sometimes are temporary. You could do this today. We go back and play the tape a year from now. They put a stopgap on it. You can't use it anymore. 00:39:10 Is there a hack or hacks or things that people have told you to do that is still viable today? That are still paying dividends for you? Oh yeah, there's hundreds of them. But like you said, sometimes they do start working. But an important thing is, yeah, I'm known for doing these little ninja hacks. And sometimes they're like little tricks, like little software things, like do this or add this to your URL and ways to get around the way that the original coding was done or to accomplish a goal. And other times the hacks are just tips. Let's check out this Open AI or check out this AI software. This one does some cool stuff. It's not always like a very specific hack. Sometimes it's just cool information or cutting-edge stuff. 00:39:50 But the thing is, you have to keep in mind, no matter what the hack is and whether it's working now or been working for 10 years, you can't build your business around hacks. I do those because that's what people, they love to hear them. I mean, oh, what's the coolest thing to give me a competitive edge? Or what can I do right now to solve this particular problem? And that's great. But sometimes Amazon's listening to that and they're like, oh, that's a loophole. We got to close. And they go and close and it quits working. Or they just make internal changes that just make it not work. So you have to build your business on sound business principles, sound marketing, sound fundamentals. 00:40:23 That's what you really should be focusing on, not knowing what the latest hack is or what the latest shortcut is, but building on sound principles. And that's what you guys have done. That's why you've been in business for as long as you've been in business and were able to migrate over to the Amazon platform from doing what you were doing in the past. It's sound business. And that's what you really need to focus on first. And it's not so much the hacks. So hacks come and go. But the fundamental business principles don't. Well, you must have read my mind because that's the next thing I wanted to follow up on you about the business. This is how hard it is to be on Amazon and hacks alone can't get you to the top. 00:40:56 And given that you live in the great state of Texas, I put at the top of a horse, a Texas horse, maybe. But look at how hard. And this is from Marketplace Pulse. So if you're watching this, we have the infographic. So for those that are not watching it, I'll just tell you, this is an infographic here that shows a pyramid where at the very top of the pyramid are approximately 50 sellers on Amazon. And depending on the numbers that you hear, you may hear anywhere between a million and a half to three million active sellers. I know, Kevin, you may ever shed more light on that. But essentially, this report by Marketplace Pulse that came out last year, it had 350,000 sellers. Only get up to the $100,000 mark in terms of sales. 00:41:44 I don't know about you, Kevin, but even if you had a job and your job was, depending on what city you live in, that may not cut it to pay the bills. On Amazon, it is not enough. I can't imagine you could pay the bills, make profit, and make much money on $100,000 in sales on Amazon. And as you move up the pyramid, it gives you the information on, so at the million-dollar level a year, sellers, that's about 60,000, roughly 4% of the sellers out there today. $5 million level, that's about 9,500 sellers. $10 million level, around 3,300 sellers, which is 0. 22%. of all the sellers. And at the very top of the pyramid, those that are 100 million or more in terms of sales, roughly 0. 00:42:33 003 or around 50, 50, 5-0 sellers on the platform. And if you're trying to build a business-This is third-party sellers, just to be clear. Okay. It's not first-party. So there are some first-party people that send into Amazon based on invoices and purchase orders that-So these numbers would be higher, but this is third-party sellers. Thank you. Thank you for that clarification, Kevin. And so if you're a third-party seller on the platform, it's not easy. That's to my point to what you're saying. It is not a passive activity. And if you're looking to build a business, it is hard. It takes work. It takes dedication. It takes research. It takes continuous effort, continuous improvement, as I'd call it. 00:43:19 And having And knowledgeable resources like what Kevin does on his podcast, AMPM Podcast, as well as some of these other places where you're able to grow your knowledge to grow on the platform to really have staying power. Kevin, what would you say to folks that want to establish their business on Amazon and you want to grow and move up that pyramid and be a legit business that's on Amazon? Well, the number one thing is when someone, whether they're new to Amazon or been selling for a while, is they think it's a quick cure. they come in that they've been working their corporate job and they're like i'm tired of working for the man i 00:43:54 want to go out on my own they come in and they think they're going to be able to actually like you said it's a hundred thousand dollars enough to live in some cities that's gross revenue that you're showing there that's not profit right so if you need a hundred thousand dollars to pay your bills it's going to take you quite some time to actually get to that point on amazon where you can take a hundred thousand dollars out unless you start with millions of dollars to invest and it's going to take some time and the average person It doesn't realize that they want to quit their Job too soon or they want to get to the point where they have this total freedom quicker than what is realistically possible. 00:44:28 Now, is it possible to do really well on Amazon? Yes, but usually it takes a little while to get to that point. If you're living in Pakistan and you want to sell on Amazon and the average wage there is $500 a month. And by selling on Amazon, you get freedom and it can make six, $700 a month. That's a different story. But for us in the West, in Europe and the United States and Japan and so forth, it's a different story. So it depends on your goals. A lot of people use it as just a side hustle to supplement their current income. And there's nothing wrong with that. They're a school teacher by day, and the Amazon seller by night. 00:44:58 And they make a little extra money to take nice vacations or buy a few extra things for the house or whatever. And the other thing is, a lot of people come into it with, they don't realize how cash-intensive this business is. And that's one of the reasons you can't take money out is because if you're successful, you're going to be constantly growing and rolling that over into inventory. So if you spent $5,000 on your first round of inventory and you're selling like crazy, and like we said earlier, you don't want to run out of stock, then you're going to need to order. You're like, holy cow, these numbers keep going up. I'm selling 10 a day. And then the next week I'm selling 15 a day. 00:45:28 And a month from now, I'm going to be selling 50 a day. And you're super happy. That's a great problem to have. But then you got to go to the factory and say, hey, I need five times what I ordered last time. I need $25,000 worth. And you may not have that money. Or it may have to come out of the profits that you've been making. You're just rolling it back over and you can't take anything for yourself. Maybe you buy a cup of coffee or something, and that's about it. So, a lot of people don't realize that and they don't understand how much money it takes to reach their goals. So, that's some of the stuff. I have a course called the Freedom Ticket. So, that's a part of Helium 10. 00:45:56 So, if you have a Helium 10 membership, you get this course for free. And we go through 60 hours of training and spreadsheets and how to figure this out. We have a spreadsheet in there from Profit First, which is a book, you can look that up on Amazon. It's a really good book and shows you how to set your goals. If you need to make $70,000 a year to pay your bills, this is what you need to sell. This is how many products you need. This is what the price point needs to be. So you can have a clear plan. And a lot of people just wing it. But it's the greatest opportunity of the last hundred and some odd years of entrepreneurship or business. There is no better opportunity out there. 00:46:31 than selling on amazon it hasn't jumped the shark you'll hear people say ah selling on you know you're going to the forums on amazon ah this just doesn't work anymore you'll see it on facebook and it doesn't work for a lot of people because they do it wrong or they're listening to the wrong people but to make money you need leverage that's why people do real estate that's why you get leverage and you can use other people's money to make money in amazon you can use other people's systems and other people's money to make money there's no way you or i could start a shopify site And it doesn't matter how much money we have to spend on Facebook advertising or what list we have and build it as quick as just getting in front of all these 200 million eyeballs on Amazon. 00:47:09 And if you know how to play game, it is a game in a way. If you know how to game the system or how to actually show up on the results and how to stay there, you can make bank. As long as you got the bank behind you to actually fund the inventory. And that's why a lot of people, that's why. There was a huge rush of aggregators that were coming in and they're seeing this and they're like, 'Hey, you got these mom and pop operators that start on their kitchen table with five grand or 10 grand and they grow it to a million-dollar-a-year business, but they don't know what to do after that. They don't know how to hire the people. They don't know how to scale it up. 00:47:44 They don't have the money to scale it up. A lot of backend to really scale a business on Amazon. If they would just do this and this, they could be doing 5 million.' So they come in and they buy those people out and then roll it into their system. And a lot of times when you sell your Amazon business, it's the biggest payday you're going to have. There was a real hot rush in 2021 where people were paying ridiculous amounts. It's calmed down now, but there's still a great opportunity where you can get two or three extra profits. And that's additional leverage. So if I build a company on Amazon to a million dollars in sales, and I'm private label, I should have at least a 20% bottom line profit. 00:48:17 If not, you're doing something wrong. It could be higher than that, but let's just say it's 20% at the end of the day. So that’s $200,000 in net profit on the books per year. That doesn't mean you put $200,000 in your pocket. That means on your accounting software, on Tyler Jeffcoat's accounting program, which we talked about earlier, it shows $200,000 profit. And someone will come in and buy that for between $400,000 and $600,000 right now in the current market. Cash. And give you that up front. And a lot of people are like, why would I want to sell my business? I've got $200,000 in profit. It's growing. Next year, I think I'll have $300,000 in profit. 00:48:53 I want to save this for my kids. It’s my legacy, whatever. No, you should actually sell it and take that $600,000, take some chips off the table and now go do it again. You'll probably have a non-compete. You can't do it in the same category, but you know the system. You know how it works. Go do it again in another niche. And you're starting with a much better starting point. And now that's $600,000. Maybe you bank half of that and you use $200,000 or $300,000 of it to start the next one. And you have a lot more confidence in what you're doing. And you build that one. This company grows to five million really fast. 00:49:22 Within a couple of years, you sell that one for millions of dollars and you do it again. There's a couple that I know out of Indiana that it's exactly what they've done. They started in 2015. They just sold their like sixth or seventh business and they just keep rolling it and building it and stair stepping it up. And they're millionaires in the eight figures, millionaires now. Wow. Love it. Those opportunities don't exist in hardly anything else. You look at this, you look at franchises, people buy a subway. I always do this. I go into a Subway store to get a sandwich and I'm just looking, okay, I just spent nine bucks or whatever for my sandwich and chips and drinks. And I'm looking around, okay, how many people per hour come through here? 00:49:59 I'm doing the math in my head going, this place must be doing a thousand, 15,00 a day, maybe. So you course that over a year, that's two, three, four, $ 300, $400 ,000. I'm like, man, all this hard work with these low margins, they had to do this. Huge upfront franchise fees yeah and the build out fees and all this kind of stuff how are they making any money and they're not the owners of those places are usually back there working or the only ones that make money are the ones that own a hundred of them and they're just they're skimming a little bit of money off of each one and that makes sense but On Amazon, you don't need all that overhead. You don't need all that stuff. 00:50:31 You can do this in your pajamas with your laptop and it's going to get easier there with ChatGPT, no? So the workload should come down a little bit, right? Let's say you're that solopreneur, Kevin, and you're starting off. You've got to create listings. You've got to have an inventory. Some systems, right, to start. And you have some of those things and maybe, let's just call it a 40-hour work week. Maybe now it's 30-ish hours, right? And that gives you a little bit more freedom. It's going to definitely help. I don't know if it'll make it easier, but it's going to allow you to focus on other things you need to focus on. Instead of spending four hours writing a listing, you might be able to do it in 30 or 40 minutes. 00:51:09 You can spend the other time focusing on PPC or marketing or something else that you need to put your energies to. All right. I don't think it'll make it easier. I think it's going to put a shift in where the priorities are and let that thing be taken care of so you can focus on another core thing. Let me ask you about this then. I think I'd love to get your take on, because this is something I'm really interested to see, what your view on this is. What are your predictions for Amazon in terms of where it's going? It's a maturing platform. There is a greater reliance on PPC from the Amazon corporate side to generate profits. As it matures, we're off with the COVID party is over from like everything goes, let's sell everything. 00:51:50 That's not happening anymore. A little bit more competition from the Walmart and Target side. Obviously, they're still way behind. What do you predict is going to happen on the platforms and sellers should be looking for now that we're in this kind of new phase of Amazon? Amazon is going to continue to grow. It's going to be slower growth. Like you said, it's more mature. So, the growth will be slower and you'll hear some negativity-Amazon down from last quarter so what they're still up overall and it's not going away like you said Walmart and Target they have a long way to catch up they'll chip away at it especially Walmart but they'll never surpass Amazon unless Amazon just implodes. 00:52:27 Amazon's biggest risk is government regulation being too much of a monopoly and the government making them split their 1p and 3p business or doing something along those lines, and that's one of the reasons that you've seen all this data being given by Amazon to sellers now. All the brand analytics data and all the search term data that used to have to pay some guy in China or India $100 a report to get these things from the inside. Now Amazon's just saying, here you go. And that's one of the reasons they're doing that is to say, look, we're giving them the same data that we're using. And so that's their biggest probably threat. From a seller, it is becoming more of a pay-to-play platform, it's going to become more and more. 00:53:08 What are you willing to spend to actually make the sale versus what are you willing to organically try to maximize to make the sale? I think there's always going to be an organic element there, but it's going to become less and less because there are some natural things that should pop up organically and be rewarded. But it's just like in a grocery store. If you want to be on the end cap, you're paying for that. If you want to be at eye level, you're paying for that. So that's why the big brands are on the end caps, right? I was at Altria, so packaged goods company. You're going to pay to have your sodas, Pepsi and Coke fighting for it as you walk into the supermarket. And they're paying for that. 00:53:44 They're not just a store manager wheeling it out because that's all they sell. They're being told Pepsi and Coke are paying for that. Put them out there in front, right? Yep. So you're going to see Amazon become more of that. So you're going to have to have the margins. And that's another mistake a lot of people make is they don't have good enough margins in their product where they can adjust to those kind of things and still maintain a decent profit level. So the money on Amazon is made in the sourcing, not in the selling. And that's where a lot of people, they think it's all in the selling. It's not. It's in the sourcing. If I can source a product for $3 and sell it for $19. 00:54:15 99 and my competition is sourcing that same product or a very similar product for $5 or $6. And they're selling it for $19. 99 and they decided, hey, I want to undercut Kevin. Let's go down to $17. 99. I can go down to $17. 99. It's a lesser percentage cut into my margins than it is for them. And so I have more room if I need to compete on price to compete on price. But the money, it's always made in the sourcing. The better you can source, the more money you can actually make. And it's also in packaging and perceived value. Everybody thinks Amazon is a platform to buy stuff cheap. In some cases, that's the case-people go there, they don't care what the brand is; they just want the cheapest thing that's going to work and has decent reviews. 00:54:56 But Amazon reaches so many people; there is a sub-market on Amazon of people that are willing to spend a lot of money for something. I heard you talk about that with Norm Ferraro on your AMPN podcast, and the perceived value of taking the same product, putting beautiful packaging, and then being able to raise the price. And you spent maybe an additional dollar on packaging, but your price went up 100% because you were able to just spend more on packaging. And people eat with their eyes first. And so you have to remember that at the dinner table and when you're selling products as well. It's an important thing that a lot of people. They're just trying to cut costs and they're not thinking about the user experience on the other side and who's willing to pay for a better experience. 00:55:37 Just like some people, when they travel, they're like, 'I'm Motel Six all the way.' No way in hell I'm going to pay more than 50 bucks a night for a room. Other people are like, 'No, I'm staying at the Four Seasons.' I'll pay the 800 bucks a night or whatever because I want that experience. It's the same thing on Amazon. There's different markets and a lot of people just think it's all cheap and it's not. Amazon, a lot of times, is not the lowest price. Amazon likes to say that all their trucks driving around to have that to choose two things, whatever faster, literally low price. They emphasize that, but that's not necessarily the truth on everything. And so there's tons of opportunities there if you know how to do it. 00:56:11 Hey, Kevin. So this is just a rapid fire segment. You tell me what comes to your mind when I'm going to ask you 10 things, words or phrases, whatever is in your mind, spit it out. Number one, FBA. The best. Fulfillment thing ever created. Amazon advertising. Expensive. Chinese sellers. Motivated and competitive. Amazon seller support. Often not very good. Amazon Q&A video responses, a powerful hack most people don't use. Interesting. Drone deliveries. I think it's in its infancy. Lots of issues still to overcome on that. All right. We touched a little bit on this one. Walmart versus Amazon. Amazon is king. Walmart is prince. All right. Elon Musk. Super smart guy. The future of Alexa. Voice chat is going to be around, especially now with the ChatGPT and stuff. 00:57:30 It's going to get integrated into that. Okay. And last, but certainly not least, Jeff Bezos. One of the most brilliant pioneers ever. Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for playing Rapid Fire Segment. Kevin, you have been such a great sport today. We've been talking to you, dropping knowledge. We could do five more hours. on that. If people want to know more, they want to get in touch with you, listen to you, what should they do? You can go to ampmpodcast. com. I do a weekly podcast. You were just on a recent episode as well as a great episode. Also, you can look me up, follow me on Facebook. I'm not on LinkedIn or Instagram really, but on Facebook, you can follow me there, post some different stuff from time to time there. 00:58:18 Or if you're a large seller, and interested in cutting edge, a billion dollar seller summit is an event I do virtually and in person each year. Awesome. Kevin, you are a pro. I'm really, truly honored that you've been able to be on our podcast today. Now we got to go pay off that Amazon lending loan that we paid to get you on the show today. No, no problem. So we've been talking to Amazon master guru Kevin King today regarding life on Amazon and what sellers should be paying attention to. You can listen to this episode, hit rewind because there's a lot of good nuggets and hacks that came out of this conversation today. Check those out on our website, circuitloops. Come or wherever you consume your podcast, as well as other episodes where we've got other wonderful, smart people that have come on the podcast. So check that out at circuitloops. com and we will see you the next time. Thanks for listening to What the Tech. Be sure to check out our other episodes featuring awesome tech and amazing guests. Find them on circuitloops. com or wherever you consume your favorite podcasts.