British Amazon Seller

Creating your own product is a key to e-commerce business success. But it can be a long and complex process. In this multi-part episode Michael shares a 6-step process for creating your first unique product.   What you'll learn The 6 steps to creating a custom product

Eugene Terk is the vice president of business development at AlignToday, a business management software that focuses on detailed daily projects workload and helps manage higher-level strategic goals of your company. Eugene will be teaching us how to scale up business through strategy and execution based on his knowledge and experience. You’ll Learn About: The methodology of AlignToday The highlights of the Scaling Up Structure The importance of knowing your foundational principles The foundation core of the Rockefeller habits How to move from strategy to implementation Specific action steps to achieve goals How AlignToday organize their meetings The importance of tracking your metrics   Related topics about Scaling Up a Business: Scaling an Amazon Business to 8 Figures with Fernando Cruz of Marketplace Ops Scaling up – Private Label Strategy (Step 9 of 10) Scaling a business on Amazon with Ashley Pearce Part 2 Scaling your Business Accounting with Penny Lowe Part 2 Grow Amazon Business with Jenna Lieber   Resources: amazingfba.com/align Aligntoday.com

Running an agency can be an interesting adventure! It’s how you navigate the highs and the lows that can help you build a long-lasting business. John Cavendish an Amazon seller with a 7 figure FBA business and co-founder of SellerCandy with his business partner Brian Patterson will show us the best way to run an agency. You’ll learn about:  How John became very good at selling $100k a month The best practices of Sales The importance of the Sales Process The significance of having a Sales system John’s process in the Sales system Next Steps: To work with John just go to sellercandy.com or email John@sellercandy.com Mention “Amazing FBA” - pro package $100 discount amazingfba.com/sellercandy   Other interviews with John: Amazon Account Management Coronavirus for Amazon Sellers Translate Your Amazon Listing How to Access Amazon Europe The SellerCandy Services   Resources Mentioned: www.massconversionmarketing.com  sellercandy.com

This is part 3 of the interview with Joshua Price of www.SuspensionExperts.com regarding Amazon account suspension and how to prevent that happening in the first place. In part 2 of this interview, Joshua covered some of the performance violation details, and now he’s explaining policy violations that lead to a suspended Amazon account. The Risks of Mistakes leading to Policy Violation Amazon has over 100 pages of different policies, rules, and regulations that you have to follow. That’s a lot of different areas and you can make lots of mistakes. Nobody can remember all of those things and even small little things can exaggerate out to bigger problems quite easily. Most larger sellers will have more products and more orders. The more things that are happening, the more chance there is for errors to occur. This is especially true if you start bringing in staff and other people into your organization because it increases the risk of someone making a mistake that leads to a suspended Amazon account. We might not be aware of the requirement to have white backgrounds on images, for example. It only takes one member of staff uploading the wrong image or an image incorrectly and you could be suspended for that reason. Another example is to do with product variations, which has often been a system that has been abused. For people who use it, it’s quite complicated and for an account with 1000 linked listings, it’s almost impossible for a seller to keep track and make sure that products are a true variation as per Amazon’s definitions. All it takes is one small issue, such as accidentally linking products that are not variations of each other, for the account to be suspended. The more volume, the more products, the more staff involved with your account, the more room there is for issues and mistakes to shut down accounts. So whilst in some online worlds expanding fast and cleaning up the details later can be a viable approach, when interacting with Amazon systems you must have strong internal business systems and be very careful who you let loose on your Amazon account. Intellectual Property Rights and Complaints A common policy violation is intellectual property rights and complaints. The topic is governed by the laws of the country that you’re selling in, so Amazon tries to be as general and vague as possible. Essentially, this is when you’re selling Brand A and buying it from your supplier. If the manufacturer of Brand A doesn’t really like what you’re doing, they tell Amazon and say there is a problem. Now, because it’s a legal issue about whether you can sell the product—for example, whether you’re infringing on a trademark, design rights, copyright, etc.—you now have a suspended Amazon account until you have sorted out the issue. Amazon doesn’t want to be involved so they back away until you fix the problem. It’s a fine system; it means Amazon won’t get sued and you have the opportunity to resolve it without Amazon giving you too bad of a penalty. The problem is that Amazon doesn’t vet any complaints. Which means that anyone can make a complaint and you still have to take it seriously because you get suspended for it. The abuse of this infringement system at the moment is causing havoc for sellers because people who are competing with you are making these complaints so that you get kicked off Amazon. Responding to Intellectual Property Rights Suspensions The first step is to work out if it’s genuine or not. The email address the complaint came from is always a good indicator of that. If it’s from a legitimate company the email address will include the domain name of the business. Obviously then it’s something you do need to take seriously. Large companies will also have lawyers first to represent them in these issues. You also need to consult a lawyer if it gets serious. Ideally, you don’t want to need to contact a lawyer or even have this issue, but it does become a legal issue and not an Amazon issue if t...

Welcome back to Part 2 of this interview with Joshua Price of SuspensionExperts.com to talk about how to write your Amazon appeal letter. Getting your Amazon account suspended is the elephant in the room that most people either ignore or run scared from. But the truth is, of course, like any good business you have to look at the reality and deal with it. The best way to do that is to work with an expert to help write your Amazon appeal letter. The Size of Your Business Lends Itself to Different Problems There are various different grounds for suspension, which Joshua covers in Part 1 of this interview. The two broad areas to cause your account to get suspended are performance and policy. The performance side is about customer-facing operations, which Amazon monitors with customer metrics and data. The policy side is about Amazon’s rules and regulations, and keeping to them. Joshua deals mainly with inauthentic suspensions and intellectual property rights and complaints. Those are the most common for larger sellers and they are policy issues. For small sellers, it’s always going to be your Order Defect Rate (ODR) because you just can’t avoid those suspensions if you’re doing lower volumes of orders. Language Leaves Clues Amazon will tell you the reason for the suspension which will help you write your Amazon appeal letter. They may not be entirely clear but they do tell you and it’s in the first line of the notification. It will say something like “we’ve removed your Amazon selling privileges because of…” and for Order Defect Rate it will say “…because your order defect rate is above the 1% target.” For most performance suspensions, it’s quite plain language in the notification. Amazon will use the terminology that will be reflected in your account health dashboard. E.g. late dispatch, cancellation rate etc. For most sellers, you’ll be familiar with these if you’re familiar with the account health side of Seller Central. In that regard, it’s easy to work out why you have been suspended, and you can log into your account and see. On the policy side, they tend to use technical language and terminology, which won’t explain for most people what’s actually happened. For example, inauthentic complaints, intellectual property rights, owner complaint and a myriad of other more small and complicated policy issues as well. They’ll often use the language in the policies which is very legal and complicated language. Order Defect Rates The first step for any seller is to make sure you’re familiar with the numbers and targets that Amazon is tracking in the Account Health part of Seller Central. You must do your research and know your exact numbers. The Order Defect Rate (ODR) is the amount of negative and neutral feedback you get, which is the number of people that leave 1, 2 and 3-star reviews about your service. It’s not about the product, it’s about you as a seller. Then Amazon adds the number of A to Z claims in, which is Amazon’s guarantee program for dissatisfied customers. They also add chargeback claims, which is chargebacks from credit card companies, although that’s fairly uncommon. Amazon adds all those up and divides it by the number of orders you have taken in a 30 and 90 day period, which gives them the ODR percentage. For both 30 and 90 day periods, the target is to be under the 1% order defect rate. Often, January and February are key times for suspension due to order defect rates. This is due to the large influx of orders over Christmas and the higher number of complaints over that period. Diving Deeper into the Cause of the Problem Once you understand the pieces of data that Amazon is using to calculate it, we need to look at why those customers have had those complaints. So this means going to the negative feedback section of Seller Central, reading the 1, 2 and 3-star reviews and understanding the common complaints. Usually, there will be a theme because they customers will explain tha...

On the show today is Joshua Price from SuspensionExperts.com. Amazon suspended account is the elephant in the room and can become a very technical issue. Which is why you need an expert like Joshua. Joshua’s Background Joshua started his career in eCommerce working with larger organizations on multiple platforms. This included Amazon and a range of other international marketplaces. Eventually, an Amazon suspended account occurred and almost by chance, he was the guy assigned to fix the problem and work it out. From there, he ended up in the world of suspensions and it became clear that it was something most people don’t know enough about. Soon enough, he had queues of people asking him for help with their account suspension because it was a massive need not being addressed. Now, 3 years later Joshua has helped over 700 sellers. The Risk of Amazon Suspended Account Amazon does not give data on this. But from his interactions, Joshua believes that Amazon suspended account is a risk for every seller. He estimates that 10,000 sellers a day get suspended and that most sellers making between $10,000-50,000 per month will get suspended once every 2 years. There is less risk if you do fewer sales simply because you’re not interacting with as many customers. However, smaller sellers are often less aware and less experienced, so they can fall into a number of other pitfalls. Getting Your Amazon Suspended Account Reinstated Getting your account reinstated depends on lots of factors. Essentially, a first offense is generally something that can be excused. Depending on the reason for the suspension, you could be offline for maybe 2 weeks. Generally, every seller can get back on the platform after their first suspension. Amazon does want you on the platform so they will give you the opportunity as long as you correctly handle the appeal. It’s not guaranteed, You do have to do the right things, but they’re open to it. Getting reinstated on your 2nd, 3rd or 4th offense becomes much more technical. The reason that a lot of people need help with the 2nd suspension is that their case is instantly complicated by the previous suspension. Performance Suspension vs. Policy Suspension There are 2 types of suspension categories: performance and policy. Policy is the rules, and performance is your way of serving customers and running the account. Multiple suspensions in performance over a long period of time is much more understandable because it’s about your operations. We all make mistakes. Customers complain about little things, The Royal Mail may be running late etc. Amazon will be lenient for that and therefore it takes less time to get your account back for the 2nd suspension in the performance area. Perhaps a week to a month. For policy suspensions, it’s easy to break the rules but Amazon is slightly tougher for allowing people to be reinstated. It can be very quick to get reinstated for policy suspension if handled correctly. However most people, especially if they are appealing on their own, could be looking at a couple of months to be reinstated. If they are reinstated at all. The First Steps in Case of Amazon Suspended Account Joshua says the first thing you should do the moment you see that notification email is to take at least 24 hours before responding. Our businesses mean a lot to us, they’re important and we’re emotionally involved. He says it’s the emotion ruins most people’s appeals because they send an instant response without doing their research or considering the bigger picture. They appeal too quickly and it fails. This is a problem because the first appeal is the most crucial appeal. It’s the best opportunity to get reinstated. Take 24 hours to work out your plan in detail, and if it’s suitable for you, contact an expert like Joshua. When you get suspended, Amazon invites you to appeal their decision. They give you a little button in your performance notification that you press.

Today we will be delving further and looking at Amazon Europe. In Part 1 we spoke with Gil Lang of Private Label Journey, a German Amazon seller about the mindset of German consumers and the challenges and opportunities of building an Amazon business in Germany. Strategize Your Expansion into the Amazon Europe For an American or English seller who is looking to branch out into the German market, Gil does have a process he steps through to help set you up. If you’re an American seller, the logical second step would be to set up in England, and vice versa for English sellers. Once you’ve done that and you’re at the point where you have 10-20 products selling well in the English and/or American market, then it’s time. You need to strategize which market in Amazon Europe is interesting for your some of your products. Gil says it would probably be Germany, but afterward start looking at France, Spain, and Italy. He recommends looking at it as a whole picture. It’s already hard to set up so you might as well go for all the markets. However, don’t think you can slap everything you have in America on the German market. You have to have a good look at the products and the market. Use BSR knowledge and professional help to get the listings translated and do the marketing. Gil uses a tool called Amalyze, which helps him monitor his PPC. Right now it only works in Germany. This is one area where he suggests getting professional help. It’s surprising to see how many American sellers have only American words in their PPC, which doesn’t help them with German consumers. If you’re going to make the effort to go somewhere, you might as well make the whole effort. It’s going to be an effort for the American seller to sell as a whole, so you might as well consider all of the marketplaces, go to town and do it properly when selling on Amazon Europe. Things to be Aware of for Americans Selling on Amazon Europe Some of the things American needs to think about from the start are how they structure their company, where they pay their taxes and whether they will use the Pan-European FBA program or not. In Europe, even though there are different countries and different marketplaces, they’re all part of the European Union (at the time of recording.) If you’re looking to start selling in Europe, get somebody to tell you about the Pan-Eu program and how it works with VAT tax before you set up shop. After that is done, and you’re registered, get somebody to help translate and do the listings, customer support and marketing efforts in their language. If you are selling 5 or more products, you are really selling a brand. Don’t destroy your brand image by selling in Germany with weird translations and getting bad reviews. Apply the Pareto Principle to your Portfolio Gil helps people navigate the difficulties with branching out into the German marketplace. So far he has worked with people who were already registered in Germany, had their account going there and also in the rest of Europe. They started by looking at their whole portfolio of what they were selling in America and, based on the 80-20 rule, figured out which would be the best 20% of products to start selling in Europe. They followed the process that was discussed in Part 1 of this interview: get it translated, put the keywords in, launch and start PPC. After doing this with just the top 20% of products, they added more and more products to the European market for them. However, they didn’t do this for their whole portfolio because not all the products make sense. Tailor Your Listings to the Consumers Some things don’t translate well due to climate differences, such as camping gear, which doesn’t do well in the UK but does really well in Germany. Also sometimes it’s due to cultural differences. For example, tablecloths do really well in Spain because the Spanish value their formal family meals. Even though it’s a very small market,

Today’s guest on the show is Gil Lang of Private Label Journey. Gil is from Germany, which is an important area that we need to investigate more and he’s here to share his insights into the Amazon Germany market. He is also a private label seller and runs the podcast Private Label Journey. Gil’s Background Gil started selling on Amazon nearly 3 years ago now, with a sports brand. He learned about Amazon selling on America podcasts while he was looking for different ways to make money online to give him the freedom to travel. Gil started blogging, YouTubing and podcasting on the topic with his partner Thomas, because there was no content for the German market. He now has the biggest Amazon Germany FBA community there is, with over 10,000 members. Gil has 2 brands with 2 seller accounts of his own on Amazon, has partnered up with 3 other companies and also runs an agency helping English speaking sellers to sell in Europe. Germany is an Interesting and Important Amazon Market Amazon Germany is interesting from the size alone. It’s the 2nd biggest Amazon market there is. Most importantly, compared to the American market, Germany’s is not that saturated. In America, you have to have either a big budget or niche right down. In Europe, that’s not the case. You can go for a more broad niche. Which is the biggest reason why anybody should think about entering this market. Even though the Amazon Germany market perhaps isn’t going to grow much from here, European markets are all linked. Gil predicts that Spain, Italy, and France are all going to have growing Amazon markets in the next few years, so there’s still a lot of opportunities there. Gil started with one product in the sports niche: jump ropes. Three years ago when he started with that in America it was already saturated, whereas in Germany it wasn’t a problem. Nowadays even in Germany, there are a lot of people playing in that field. If you look at products selling well in America, you can still jump in that market over in Germany. You do have to look a bit broader because, being a smaller market, there are no super small niches. You also have to get used to the difference in size of the market as it can feel quite boring selling 1 unit a day if you started out in America and are used to selling 20-100 units per day! The Biggest Opportunities and the Biggest Challenges of Amazon Germany Firstly, as discussed, the German market is not saturated, which is a huge upside. Secondly, the marketing services also not as used. So there is lots of opportunity with the AMS platforms you could use. Thirdly, the sellers are not as aggressive in Germany as they would be in America. The review game has changed. In America, you have products with thousands of reviews. That’s not the case in Germany. As for challenges, the language barrier is going to be a problem. You can’t have just a generic listing or get a random person to translate your English listing who doesn’t understand Amazon. You need to get a combination of people who know about Amazon and also know the language. The language barrier is not just about translation, it’s about rewriting listings. Secondly, you must strategize if the product makes sense in Germany. Not everything will sell in Germany like it does in America. It’s just a different market so be prepared for that. The third challenge is all the regulations you have in Germany that you have to take care of. In each European company, there are different regulations, you have to keep them in mind. There’s also somewhat of a cultural barrier too: the reason things are more aggressive in America is that the consumers need you to scream in a place where everyone else is shouting, and also the regulatory environment is different. Product Research for Amazon Germany If you’re used to using the BSR for estimating the sort of sales you can get in the American market, that will lead you up the garden path in both Germany and the UK.

Antoni Watts got into the Amazon business after running his own sourcing company in China. Today he’s going to teach us about how to import Chinese products. Dos and Don’ts when Considering a Supplier You may contact hundreds of suppliers, maybe even 1000. However, only a percentage of those will reply to your email. Out of those responses, you’ll be able to weed out others based on how well they answer your questions. The most knowledgeable suppliers will have follow-up questions for you based on the information you requested. It’s a strong indication that they know the product. Here are other things you want to know from the supplier before you import Chinese products: Ask for a list of past customers they have worked with Find out if they’ve ever exported to your market (geographic location) Within a few days, you will have your list down to 4-5 suppliers you’re interested in. Go with your gut! Steps to Take Once Your Ready to Order You’ve received your samples. Now you’re ready to order. You can do it a couple of ways: 1. If you already have a relationship with the factory, you can simply send an email and let them know you’re ready to order. They will send an invoice and ship your products. Some factories may require you to pay a deposit upfront. Once you do that, your products will be on the way. 2. If you’re establishing a relationship with a new factory, they may ask you to submit a Purchase Order. Regardless of whether you’re ordering via email or a purchase order, make sure every detail is listed regarding the item, the packing order, and the quality assurance standards. Send pictures of specific improvements if need be. Everything should be listed as you hope to receive it. It helps you to catch any mistakes or any missing details before receiving your shipment. Information on How to Export and Import Chinese Products You think you’re ready to order. You’ve been in contact with the supplier. You’ve received your sample and even talked about how many units you need. But wait… You need to get clear about a few more things before your product leaves the factory. Check the freight costs Contact the freight forwarder (Who will be handling the shipment? Exactly how will the package be handled?) Find out if there are any product regulations Shop your product around to 1-3 freight forwarders. It allows you to cross-reference pricing and to learn about various processes or regulations Make sure the factory packing is secure (item to box, box to carton, carton to outer carton/crate) Ask for examples of other customer shipments to learn about any differences Drop test (optional) Vibration test (optional) Know exactly what all of this looks like prior to placing your order. Watch How to Import Chinese Products with Antoni Watts of Cashcow Pro Part 4 of 4

Antoni Watts got into the Amazon business after running his own sourcing company in China. He’s here to teach us how to find Chinese manufacturers for our Amazon products. The Top Mistakes FBA Sellers Make when Sourcing from Chinese Manufacturers Rushing to Find Chinese Manufacturers The most common mistake sellers make when sourcing from China is rushing to choose manufacturers. It’s important to vet multiple suppliers before making a decision. This will: ensure superior products, allow you to get the best pricing possible, and it will greatly increase your knowledge of the product and the manufacturing process. Antoni warns that choosing the wrong factory can become a nightmare. Do your due diligence. If you don’t, it can get expensive rather quickly in money and time. This can eat into your profits. Here’s a checklist as a safeguard: Make a list of every supplier possible who makes the type of product you sale (via GlobalSources, Ali Baba, etc.) Ask for a sample of the product Talk to the manufacturers Inspect the product for quality assurance and offer feedback on improvements Make a Trip to China We’ve covered the importance of choosing a supplier wisely. However, it’s even better if you, a business partner, or a liaison can talk to manufacturers in person and actually walk through the factory. What are the key benefits of traveling to China? Build a better relationship with the manufacturer Weed out much of your competition as the low-price leader See many more product variations available than those viewed online Superior quality assurance (see and feel the product) Allows you to see products they are making for the competition and receive firsthand tips about other items they are selling Mistakes to Avoid when Searching for Chinese Manufacturers Those who complete the checklist above won’t have to worry about this one. However, there are still some unwise sellers who fail to inspect goods before shipment. Avoid this common mistake to prevent: Bad reviews Having your account shut down by Amazon (for too many items shipped back) Too many refunds Massive profit loss Have a conversation with the manufacturer to troubleshoot problems prior to shipment. No one wants to have to ship a faulty product back overseas. Improve Communications with Chinese Manufacturers 1. When you’re first starting out, be patient. There’s a lot to learn about products and processes. So, your communication with the supplier will likely be much more frequent 2. Create a generous timeline to allow for learning, mistakes, manufacturing, and potential problems It bears repeating that rushing is the worst possible thing you could do when first entering a market. After you’ve sold products for a while, you’ll become familiar with the ordering process and will be able to circumvent problems faster. It simply takes time. Sometimes it takes 6 weeks for product development. A good rule of thumb is to plan for a product launch to take 3 months. Prepare for that months in advance. 3. Set up a separate email account for sourcing to combat SPAM 4. Ask for photos of other products competitors are ordering Quality Control Ask for a list of the major and minor defects that are common to a specific product. Have a liaison check the quality of the production early in the process. Give an ample amount of time to deal with these issues If you’re ordering a product that has fabric, see what other fabric options are available (if you foresee problems with the current option) Watch Finding Chinese Manufacturers with Antoni Watts of Cashcow Pro Part 3 of 4

Once again we have Antoni Watts on the show. Today he is going into detail about his Amazon seller software, Cashcow Pro. If you have ever been frustrated by trying to figure how to get meaningful data from Amazon Seller Central, you need this tool. With it, you can track your profit and loss, inventory, conversion rates and more. Profit and Loss in Cashcow Pro – Amazon Seller Software When accessing the profit section of the dashboard, you’ll see product costs minus other key metrics (such as refunds, PPC costs, taxes / VAT, cost of goods and shipping). It allows you to see specific trends for each product so you can assess bottom line profits, not just revenue numbers. The dashboard clearly displays trends and graphs you need to view growth over 30 days and 60 days instead of getting sucked into the anxiety of checking Amazon for daily changes. It’s not enough to just see units sold. That alone does not show you all the variables you need to make a solid business decision. Cashcow Pro provides a more comprehensive breakdown so you can see where to focus your attention on biggest gains, where to scale back, or where to cut your losses. Cashcow Pro vs Other Amazon Seller Software Options Controlling for key metrics is very important. Additionally, sellers need to know how their product checks out compared to their competition. The dashboard shows a seller’s top competitors based on sales, reviews, and product price for a specific Keyword in your niche or marketplace. This allows you to make other sales decisions such as: Increase price Increase sales This Amazon seller software works in Mexico, Canada, USA, North America, and Europe. Expansion to Japan is in the works. Great news! If you want to upload multiple products to your dashboard or create an account for products you sell in different countries, it’s simple to do in Cashcow Pro. There are no added costs. It’s a benefit Cashcow Pro provides for FREE while some other competitors often charge for it. Inventory Tracking Cash Cow Pro shows the average sales for the last 3 days, 7 days, and 30 days. It predicts when you might run out of inventory in the future based on these various time periods. The Power of Split-Testing One feature that is often underutilized in Cashcow Pro is the split-testing feature. Most sellers choose their product pricing based on their competitors’ price point. This Amazon seller software allows you to run split tests for a period of time and shows you the data regarding which price is actually the best. Simply enter your current price into Cashcow Pro and the duration of time you’d like to run the test. Then choose 2 more price points below and above your current one – including how long you want to test each. In this case, Cashcow Pro will automatically go into Amazon to change your pricing and run each test consecutively. You’ll be able to clearly see the percentage of sales increase and other key metrics for each price point and make a more sound decision about pricing. You can also test the listing price, sales price, 4 different product titles, product images, and other main elements of your listing. Other test features are in the works in the future. With Cashcow Pro, you can truly figure out how your business is doing. Get 40% off Cashcow Pro until 2017 June 15 by using this link! Watch Amazon Seller Software with Antoni Watts of Cashcow Pro Part 2 of 4

Today on the show we have Antoni Watts of Cashcow Pro. He is a sourcing expert here to teach us how to use Cashcow Pro to boost our profit. Antoni moved to Hong Kong when he was 19 to work for an import company. He was in charge of sourcing the products from Chinese factories. After doing this for 18 months Antoni started his own sourcing company in Hong Kong. At one point he was developing 3000 products in a year! Eventually, a friend told him about Amazon. Since he already knew the industry and was familiar with developing products, he decided to give it a go. Frustrated with the lack of data and the complexity of trying to make sense of everything, Antoni created Cashcow Pro. Cashcow Pro Cashcow Pro is all the tools a small to medium sized Amazon seller would need. It’s for seller first starting out or have 100-200 products. It’s everything you could possibly need to run your day-to-day Amazon business. From how much profit you’re making to free, unlimited, feedback collection emails. He was paying hundreds of dollars a month for all these different tools that were performing basic functions. He wanted one dashboard to handle all of it. Get 40% of Cashcow Pro until 2017 June 15 by using this link! Dashboard One that people love is the dashboard. It takes all your key data from Amazon and shows you how many products you have, what your inventory is, what your rank is, your conversation rate, and much more. It gives you a quick snapshot of your business. From there you can drill in on more specific data. You can look at how your conversion has changed over the last 30 days. You can see how your reviews have been doing. Messaging Another favourite is the message feature. It includes the automated emails to your buyers, which is more important than ever since Amazon made it more difficult to get reviews. You have unlimited free emails that go out with every new order automatically. They have template system. You can create several emails and choose when they go out. Whether it’s an hour after delivery or 7 days after delivery. You don’t have to create a different email for every product, you can use a template. You can put in links for the buyer to leave a review or seller feedback. There is an automatic tool for seller feedback. If a buyer leaves negative seller feedback, it will send a customized email automatically to that buyer. Or if a customer leaves a positive product review, it will send a message asking them to leave seller feedback. Remember, this is an unlimited feature that is included in the cost. You won’t be hit with an extra $100 charge for using too many emails in Q4 like some of the other companies. You won’t be charge more for being successful! Keyword Tracking With keyword tracking, the work needs to be done upfront. You can use tools like Merchant Words or Google. You need to create a really deep and detailed list of keywords. For most niches, people are going for the top couple keywords. You need to think outside the box. If you’re selling a mug, is it something that could be used for a Father’s Day gift? You should have 5-10 main keywords that you’re trying to rank for. Look at the data for the past 30-60 days then take action to try to rank for those keywords. Once you’ve identified and ranked for these few keywords, then you can use the tracking feature to keep an eye on it. There’s no point in using it if you’re not doing the work at the beginning. Other Features AB Testing – You can put in different price points and test what sells best. Product Research – Similar to Jungle Scout Chrome extension. Product Database – 20 million best selling products on Amazon. This database is included for free. Before, you could say that Cashcow Pro has all the features, but the other companies do it better. Antoni and his team as spent that last nine months ensuring that their features are at least as good as the other tools out there.

Welcome back to part 3 of the interview with Dana Derricks of copywritingprofessor.com, author of The Amazon Listing Optimization Secrets Work Book and also another book about email marketing for Amazon sellers. Today we are talking about split testing your Amazon listing. Split Testing Your Amazon Listing Dana says that split testing your Amazon listing is worth it for a seller. Even if they aren’t doing millions in revenue. If you’re going to invest in this, you should test and make sure that it’s working. It’s tough on Amazon to test anything because there are so many variables. When it comes to listing optimization, one of the most difficult things is figuring out traffic quality and traffic sources. Conversions are good but they aren’t the whole story. On a typical sales page outside of Amazon, you do figure out what makes it convert. Do more of that. Then drive traffic to that page. But it doesn’t work that way on Amazon. It’s a combination of the right keywords and the right places to get people in the door and utilizing the right format and words to get them to buy and convert. Even though it’s hard to do, Dana does recommend split testing. His advice is to limit any variables that are in your control to keep the same traffic coming. Don’t optimize your listing and then change your PPC spend, for example. Be aware of any other variables such as seasonal variations or Black Friday sales. Make sure it’s a comparable time period with very few, if any, variables. Then you can make your comparison when it comes to split testing. Get expert guidance on this and many topics! Watch the Metrics That Matter Sometimes, when Dana re-optimizes a listing, the conversion rate actually goes down. But, if the listing has been optimized so it gets a lot more traffic or it gets indexed higher because of the right keywords or it actually gets clicked on now, then sales still go up. Or, it might be the opposite situation: the listing might get less traffic post-conversion, but it’s better traffic (as opposed to the irrelevant traffic it was getting before), so the conversion rate goes up. Either way, sales increase. At the end of the day, the metric that actually matters is sales, not conversions or traffic. Keep this in mind when you're split testing your Amazon listing. The Book Dana’s book, The Amazon Listing Optimization Secrets Work Book is $500. Which might seem like a lot for a book, but remember that price would be considered cheap for an online course. It’s also much less than the $10K Dana charges for one-on-one work. For someone who is serious and wants to ramp up their Amazon listings, it would be a great investment for split testing your Amazon listing. Dana was doing this work for hire, and there was a reason he charged $10K per client: he’s very good at what he does. He had a guarantee and never had to pay back the money even once, in over 1000 clients! However, he was so overwhelmed with work and had to turn a lot of people down. Plus at the price point he was charging he knew he was also pricing people out of working with him. So instead of catching fish for people, he decided to teach them how to fish for themselves. Learn The Process Everything that Dana would do for a client is in this book. In his opinion, it’s better than having him do it for you because it gives the why the how and the control of the listing optimization. Plus, it gives you the flexibility to be able to get your assistant to learn the process and apply it to all your listings. In a crowded market where there are many people taking advantage of sellers, Dana believes this is a product that finally does what the advertising says it does. He has sold nearly 700 copies worldwide now and the response has been excellent. It’s the real deal. Michael’s advice is that it’s worth it if you’re a serious seller. If you’re just starting out, it’s probably not for you yet. At the very least,

In the previous episode, we began our discussion with Dana Derricks of copywritingprofessor.com about the importance of copy and a little about the format he explains in his book, The Amazon Listing Optimization Secrets Work Book. He also explained why the title is 50% of your listing in terms of optimization. The title has two jobs: get ranked for certain keywords and get the click. Here he shares what to do with the rest of the listing. The Bullets You’ve got your listing clicked on because your title has benefits. That’s half the job done. The other half is once people are there, you have to get them to buy. That’s where bullets come in. Anybody that’s buying anything has the main benefit they’re after, but then they have secondary benefits. For example, if you were to go buy a car, maybe the main benefit is that you want to have something you can fit your whole family in, so you need plenty of room. But you might also want the secondary benefit of fuel economy or gas mileage. Then another secondary benefit is you want to make sure that it’s safe. It’s the same on Amazon: customers have one main one that draws them in, but then there’s a bunch of other ones that you need to think about too. Amazon is going to want the features too. You have to give that to them, but you can do it in a secondary way. Because what the people want are the benefits, that’s what gets them to pull out their wallet. So give the benefits first and then give the keywords with features afterward. This addresses the customer psychology but also the Amazon requirements and the algorithm. If you can master building a completely optimized listing for Amazon and can do well with it in the toughest place on earth to sell, everything else you do is going to be easy. This stuff is very transferable to anything else you do, which is an interesting side benefit and yet another reason to get good at copywriting. Formatting the Bullet for Amazon Listing Optimization Dana’s book lays out an all-caps format for the beginning of each bullet when if comes to Amazon listing optimization. He suggests using the beginning of each bullet to explain every single possible benefit or reason someone would buy the product. Then you have to get the keywords in because Amazon indexes the bullets as well as the title. Integrate the keywords into the lower case sentences after the all-caps beginning. Those sentences must flow properly so that the keywords get used in a way that makes sense and will actually convert people. Use capitals are for the benefits, then normal lower case sentence for the details and main keywords. The Description For a while, the description was one of those things that people said not to bother writing about because it didn’t get indexed very highly. Dana has tested this pretty extensively and while the description is far less important than the title or the bullets, it is important to focus on and get it done well to have proper Amazon listing optimization. The description is sort of an extension of the bullets. You don’t want to introduce any new stuff. If the customer has gotten to the description, if they’re reading it, they’re sold. If you add new stuff it will confuse them and possibly drive them away. It’s a sensitive place because above and below the description are about two-dozen other similar products. It takes one click and they’re gone. So the description is taking what you started on your bullets and elaborating on that, bringing it home. Once concept from Dana’s book is called Dual Readership. A group of people out there need to read every word and know everything about something before they read it. So the description is a fantastic place for those people. Another thing to know is that the description is indexed, but not always. The algorithm is funky and always changing. Dana prefers to put eggs in the basket of things that have a timeless impact. The description is not indexed with the weight that the bu...

Dana Derricks is our guest today and he is the number 1 Amazon listing optimizer on the planet. It’s no small claim. His motto is ‘Go Big or Go Home’ which is just the kind of American thinking we need to have here. It’s also reflected in the amazing stuff in his book, The Amazon Listing Optimization Secrets Work Book. He’s here today to teach us about listing on Amazon. Welcome to the show. Amazon Copy Writing specifically, everyone talks about listings but not many talk about the importance of the precision use of the words. Dana’s Background as an Amazon Seller Dana has quite a deep background in copywriting as he has been doing it for about a decade. He started copywriting for clients who were doing stuff off of Amazon. When he started working with an Amazon seller, that seller was doing $50K a month, which is great. But Dana helped him get that to $3 million dollars a month by helping fix his listing on Amazon. It was at that moment he realized Amazon was where it’s at. Dana has worked with sellers one-on-one for almost 5 years and then started to realise he was making everyone else rich, so needed to get on Amazon himself. He launched his own Amazon company and did $635, 000 in first 12 months using all the strategies he had been using previously for clients. He is still selling on Amazon, and now works with people and teaches people the stuff that really works. Dana is known as the Copywriting Professor. He realized he could affect more people if he taught what he knew than by only working with a small group one-on-one. The name came about purely by accident when he was digging around on Go Daddy for a domain name. Copywriting Professor was available, so he bought it and that’s how he got the name. Words vs. Photos When Listing on Amazon Images are great. They make a difference. But the copy is the number 1 thing that matters in your listing. Dana has worked with over 1000 sellers one-on-one in his career and been around the Amazon world for quite a while. He has tested everything and seen everything. When it comes to ROI, the most important thing is the copywriting for your listing on Amazon and getting it optimized. It’s not just about words, but about the format, and getting people to do what you want them to do, e.g. click on your listing and then converting. The copy is important because words are what get you to do things. Images are important for sure, but still, people aren’t going to be swayed by the image itself. The words are what will get people to actually take the action that you want them to. Arguably one of the best things you can do on Amazon as a seller is to differentiate your product. Ultimately, if your product is very similar to the next guy’s product, then you’ll have to compete on things like price and reviews. It starts with the title. What gets the customer to click on your title over anybody else's’? And then, once they’ve clicked, what gets them to buy? It’s the bullet points that gets them to convert. Dana’s copy is speaking to them, giving them exactly what they want, and justifying all their concerns. The photos have an impact but the words are what persuade people to action. A Word on Cultural Differences When Listing on Amazon Selling on Amazon US means you need to know how to speak to Americans. Being one of them. Dana acknowledges, “We are not humble, we are obnoxious and belligerent when we buy things. People from the UK are reserved and passive and reasonable and rationale. We are not, we are aggressive. If you aren’t that way you will get squashed.” His advice is even though saying crazy stuff that sounds sales-y and like an infomercial can feel weird, it works. This is very important for the British listeners and readers. It’s a really good reminder that there’s a big cultural difference that needs to be respected. The First Steps to Listing on Amazon Do not sit down and copy the competition’s listing and just change the words.

This is Part 4 of the series with Nathan Hirsch of FreeeUp.com who is sharing some fantastic information about using FreeeUp. This episode is exclusive to the YouTube viewers and anyone who is watching rather than listening. In the video, Nathan is walking through an example of using FreeeUp because it’s great to actually see it in use. Using Freeeup From the start, it’s simple to use. There is a dashboard with billing periods on the left side. Billing periods are Wednesday to Tuesday and you get billed automatically every Thursday. You can see your worker and the hours that they work. If you click ‘View Details’ you can see the notes from your worker about what they worked on so you can see what they did. On the right side, it shows how much you’re spending, how much each worker is. You can also see the total hours billed for the billing period and how much you’ve spent in the billing period. You can filter through different billing periods on the left. The Workers Tab Under the workers tab you can see a list of all your workers and their hourly rate so you always know what it is. Anytime you need a worker you just click ‘Request a Worker’. A pop-up will appear and you enter the details of what kind of worker you’re looking for. For example, U.S. or non-U.S. based, schedule requirements, price range, one-time or ongoing, how quickly you need the worker etc. When you’ve done that, click ‘submit’ and a ticket gets created. You can also view all your tickets, and anytime FreeeUp fills a ticket you will get notified by email. The worker will introduce themselves and you can make contact via a number of different platforms so you can communicate easily. Pricing when Using FreeeUp If you click on ‘Pricing’ there is an infographic about the ballpark pricing figures for different skillsets. This can help you get an idea of what you will pay for lower level, mid-level, and expert workers. The lower level workers are more suited to when you’re bringing your own SOPs and they follow them. Mid-level might specialize in one or two things but you’re not hiring them to run your whole business. And experts are top-level talents, consultants and people that do discovery phases, audits, and game plans. You can pick what level of worker you want there. The more information you can provide the better. Affiliates and Partners FreeeUp has a great affiliate program. Any clients that you refer to FreeeUp, you will get 50c for every hour billed forever! You can get your affiliate link or introduce them straight to Nathan or his team, or have them mention your name on signup and you will still get credit for that. You will be able to see the details of people you have recommended in this section too, along with how much you’re making from the hours they are billing. There is also a ‘Partners Page’ that details the different people FreeeUp works with. They have a number of partnerships with top notch eCommerce companies to help you out in those areas. Payments The last section is ‘Payments’. FreeeUp is currently working on totally revamping this section. There are three different payment options: ACH, credit card or the retainer. That’s the inside of the FreeeUp portal and we try to keep it pretty simple. Using FreeeUp for Amazon I find that the two tasks that take the most time in my Amazon business are the product research in the raw phase, and then contacting Chinese suppliers. FreeeUp has people that are already trained in both of those areas. For the Chinese sourcing, there are plenty of pre-trained, mid-level, or expert-level workers using FreeeUp from China that do this already, all day. For the regular sourcing, most people hire lower level workers, especially if you have a system for doing that. There is no set way to source products and do product research when using FreeeUp, but there are different consultants that you can hire that have their own systems or help you create the system too.

This is part 3 of the interview with Nathan Hirsch of FreeeUp who is sharing some fantastic information about outsourcing. In the last episode, we talked about the general principals of outsourcing, which he is incredibly experienced at. How FreeeUp Compares to Other Outsourcing Platforms There are 2 things that are unique about FreeeUp. Firstly, it’s not a job board. They get hundreds of applicants every week and take the time to pre-vett them so only the top 1% get accepted and added to their network. Then FreeeUp makes them available to you as a client whenever you need them. There’s no monthly fee, there’s no signup fee. You sign up as a client whenever you need a worker. You simply have to log into your account, click the ‘request a worker’ button and explain exactly what you need. Then FreeeUp fulfills that request pretty quickly, usually within hours but sometimes within minutes. You get to then speak to the worker and decide if you want to work with them or not, and if not you can request a different worker. The other cool thing about FreeeUp is that they are very hands-on and make sure you have a good experience. Besides having great customer service, they have a lot of content to help you as a business owner, including the FreeeUp blog, online hiring mastermind groups, and a 20-person team available to help you and guide you along the way. Benefits of FreeeUp FreeeUp is also like insurance against turnover for your business. As a business owner, turnover of workers is so frustrating. If any of the FreeeUp workers quit for any reason, they cover all retraining costs. They will get you a new worker right away and make sure you never take a step backward for HR reasons. That solves the problem that every business owner hates which is their worker leaving halfway through the project, leaving you hanging. FreeeUp has a talented team and vett people for not only their skill and communication but also their attitude. Nathan says, “We’re not perfect but when something does happen, we fix it.” Getting Started on FreeeUp The first step to getting started on FreeeUp is to sign up as a client, which takes 5 minutes. There is a questionnaire and e-signature saying that you won’t try to steal the workers and you will actually pay for their work, and then a payment method on file so the automatic payments can get set up. FreeeUp’s billing period is Wednesday to Tuesday, and they charge you automatically every Thursday. Once you have an account you never have to set that up again. The payment side of things is automated. Anytime you need a worker, ‘click request a worker’ and answer the questions about what you are looking for, including U.S. vs. non-U.S. workers, pricing considerations, and schedule restrictions. Within a few hours, you will get an email detailing the worker selected for you. You will be introduced to that worker. You can also meet with them in a 10-15 minute conversation if you want. If for whatever reason, it’s not the right fit, you have a red flag or you just want a second option, you can request another worker and they’ll send you someone else. Or, to get started you just click “hire”. The HR Support Your Business Needs A lot of FreeeUp’s clients have chosen to work with FreeeUp because they don’t want to spend the time on the hiring. It’s a simple process and FreeeUp values simplicity. A lot of people don’t actually know how to interview well. Often, there is no correlation between how well a candidate did in an interview compared with how satisfied the employer is with that person’s work down the line. The best way to judge a potential hire is by the results they give, and FreeeUp has already vetted them for results. In addition to that, FreeeUp posts a lot of content on how to interview people, what red flags to look for and other information you need in order to hire the person that is the best fit for your business. If you’re happy and the worker is happy,

Back on the show today is Nathan Hirsch to continue our conversation about outsourcing Amazon tasks. Hire Somebody to Create Their Own Job Description Tim Ferris gives the advice to outsource the creation of the Standard Operating Procedures to the people who will have to follow it, and Nathan’s approach is similar. When you’re outsourcing Amazon tasks, provide them with a rough outline. Then outsource to them that one of their jobs is to create their job description. It is an extremely effective way to co-create the standard procedures in conjunction with you, the business owner. A lot of business owners make the mistake of being top-down instruction-givers. In Nathan’s team, they’re all on the same side. If his team members come up with an idea then he wants to hear it. He does contribute and review things, but they’re responsible for their own team and creating those SOPs. As a business owner, taking this approach protects you because if or when they walk out the door, it’s still a hassle but less so than if you didn’t have any SOPs and they had the whole business in their head. Jack of All Trades vs. Specialized People Quite established businesses are incredibly vulnerable to somebody walking out the door with half the business in their head. Finding a good person and relying on them too much is a common mistake. Another mistake is hiring one person and teaching them to do everything, instead of hiring a variety of specialized people. Everyone should have their role. If someone quits you replace one person in that team, instead of spending 6 months training one new person to do everything. What to Outsource First Where to start outsourcing Amazon tasks depends on the business, where you are, and how fast you’re growing. Nathan’s approach is to hire a number of part time people and have them prove themselves and their skills over time as their hours get increased. In some ways, there’s less risk in this approach compared to hiring somebody full time straight away. However, you do run the risk that if they are part time at first and turn out well, then you want to increase their hours but they might have another job and won’t be able to do both. Bookkeeping and accounts are very important to outsource as soon as you can afford it. A lot of entrepreneurs are great at creating things but they aren’t good at being meticulous book keeping. So, outsourcing Amazon bookkeeping show be done as soon as possible. It helps to advance your business beyond what you can imagine. Calculating Risk When Outsourcing Amazon Money Tasks There’s nothing you can do to make the risk zero when you are outsourcing the tasks related to your accounts. However, do be smart and make sure you do the research on the potential workers. FreeeUp’s approach is that it’s really hard to get into the FreeeUp team. So by the time somebody has made it through the vetting process, they’re trustworthy because they are much more concerned with staying in the FreeeUp community than they are with stealing your money. In Nathan’s experience, 99% of the time people are more interested in working for you and helping you, than they are hurting you. The fundamental issue is that you can’t grow or start a business without a certain degree of risk. So know what you should be looking for, do your due diligence and use common sense to insure yourself against the obvious risk. Then, you have to have a degree of trust which then enables you to expand beyond anything you could possibly achieve on your own. The Importance of Trust Nathan’s advice is that you can’t go in with the attitude of not trusting anyone. Business doesn’t work that way. He takes the approach that working for him is a great opportunity and the people he hires appreciate the work because it’s so hard to find a job nowadays so the majority of the time is it’s not worth it for them to fraud you. They’re going to make way more money by having an honest business relationship with...

On the show today is Nathan Hirsch of FreeeUp.com to talk about how to outsource Amazon. If you are running around and there aren’t enough hours in the day to run your business and your life, this is a sorely needed interview. It is all about how to outsource Amazon tasks. Nathan shares with us his story of going from a broke college student to Amazon drop shipper, to creating FreeeUp. He did it all with an attitude of strategic trial and error. He explains why it’s important to know whether you are hiring somebody to do something you do know how to do but is repetitive, or hiring somebody for something you don’t know how to do and that isn’t worth your time to learn. The first person to hire in Nathan’s business model is an outside expert to help you move forward. Then start with outsourcing to one assistant at a time. Nathan’s Story Nathan was a college student looking for extra beer money when he started buying and selling textbooks. He felt that the bookstore was ripping everyone off. Soon enough he had lines out the door of people selling their textbooks to him. That soon led him to Amazon because, as he says, “you don’t sell books for very long without learning about Amazon.” Thinking books were soon going to be a thing of the past, Nathan began experimenting with other products and drop shipping. He ended up running a million dollar business out of his college dorm room. He hired friends, making good and bad business decisions and learning along the way. Once Nathan graduated, he did his Amazon business full time and it was growing and doing very well. But he realised he was spending too much time on HR activities. He was using UpWork at the time and had a great remote team, but wanted a more efficient way to hire, and so FreeeUp was born. FreeeUP - Outsource Amazon Tasks FreeeUp is different from other outsourcing platforms because it isn’t a job board where you have to post the job and then sift through all the applicants. Instead, FreeeUp does the vetting for you and they introduce you to one worker they have pre-vetted who meets your requirements. They only let in the top 1% into their network so you get that experience of being able to hire top talent quickly, which is so important as a business owner. Getting Started and Outsource Amazon Tasks Nathan recommends starting with outsourcing pretty early, but waiting until you have some sort of revenue stream. If you’re still in the idea phase, don’t hire yet. He does believe in bootstrapping at the start—he even wrote a book on bootstrapping called Free Up Your Business: 50 secrets to bootstrap million dollar companies—but advises once you start having a little bit of revenue you should start investing it back into the company. The best way to do that is with good people. There are two main ways to do that. Either hire someone to take something off your plate or hire an expert to do something that you don’t know how to do. If you have tasks that you do repeatedly and you have systems and processes in place, and your time isn’t focused on the right thing, because you’re doing these tasks instead of focusing on the company, then you should hire lower-level workers and put them in place to free up your time. If you are approaching something that you don’t know how to do (e.g. marketing or creating a video) then you should hire the mid-level or expert-level workers. They are more expensive but you don’t have to train them and there’s an opportunity cost if you learn how to do it yourself because it usually isn’t worth your time as a business owner. The best business owners have a hybrid of both. Don’t Be Afraid to Invest in Your Business Many people are too obsessed with trying to find the cheapest way to do stuff and are very afraid of spending money. The problem is that they are not taking the opportunity cost of that attitude seriously enough. Cheap becomes expensive. Trying to save money in the short term can cost a lot in th...

Today on the podcast we have Anthony Famularo from Rosenbaum Famularo Lawyers, the Amazon Seller Lawyers. We are going to be discussing trademarks for Amazon. A lot of people have fear around legal issues because they are important topics. Most of us either sit in worry or duck our heads into the sand because we don’t know what to do. To help with this in one area where many Amazon sellers have fear, Anthony is here today to talk about patents and trademarks for Amazon. Intellectual Property: Trademarks, Copyright, and Patents Anthony finds people generally understand copyright and to a certain extent, trademarks. However, the most common mistake he sees is people confusing trademarks with patents. People think that if they register their own trademark and private label their product that they are protected from patent law, but that’s not true. Trademarks are used to identify the source or quality of the goods and are often about the branding. A patent is a government-granted right. It’s the right to exclude other people from advertising, offering for sale or importing your invention without your approval. There are utility patents and design patents. The utility patent covers what you would think of as an invention or the useful part of an invention. A design patent covers the appearance or ornamental, non-functional aspect of an invention. To get the most protection people will usually try to register both at the same time. For copyright, you can’t copyright the idea. But if you put it into a tangible medium—whether you write it or record it—you can. Once it’s in that tangible medium you can protect it by registering a copyright. With a patent, you can protect the actual use of it, and it can be the idea. If properly drafted it protects your idea for that invention or product. An Example of Utility vs. Design Patent Let’s say you are looking at a phone case that has a light on it to light up your pictures and make your selfies better. The use of the light on the phone case would be protected by a utility patent. Then the design patent could be used to protect the appearance of it. One product can get protection from utility patent and design patent. Getting a design patent is much simpler in that it usually just has one claim. Usually is just illustrations of the product. It is much faster and easier to get protection for your products through a design patent. The utility patent is much more complex, much harder to define. It’s harder to find it there’s already a patent that exists and then if there isn’t. It’s harder to construct your own application for it. Clearance Searches Anthony recommends looking into this for new private label products before spending money on manufacturing. The first step is to do a clearance search. Start with your own research via the United States Patent and Trademark Office at uspto.gov where you can search for patents and trademarks. That is the starting point in terms of doing your own research for your trademarks for Amazon. Your own research will help you to identify whether or not you should have a cursory or preliminary search done. If you do, and that preliminary search is successful then you can make a business decision as to whether or not to make sure before you go any further. That’s when you do a more extensive search. At that point, Anthony says you have to hire someone to make sure because you need to find out early whether or not it’s worth it to go further with your private label product. Anthony advises even if you can’t afford a comprehensive search, have at least a preliminary search done. He recommends spending a little bit, under $1000. It’s worth that investment and everyone should do that at least. You have to weigh up for yourself the risk vs reward. People want to put in $3000 and get out $10,000, but the reality is you could put in $3000 and end up with $0 if you go really wrong.

Once again we have a lawyer on the show today, Anthony Famularo from Rosenbaum Famularo, The Amazon Lawyers. Today we’re going to talk about patents for Amazon and trademarks. We’re going to start with definitions. People tend to get confused with these words, myself included, so I thought it would be good to define them first. Intellectual Property The biggest misconception, when it comes to IP, is patents. People can generally understand copyright and trademarks, but don’t have a good grasp of IP. They have a hard time trying to interpret patent laws by themselves. Patents Patents are a government protection that gives you exclusivity for your inventions. To get a patent, your invention must be new, useful, not obvious. For sellers, there are two types of patents for Amazon you need to worry about. Design patents, and utility patents. A utility patent covers what you think of as an invention. The useful part of an invention. A design patent covers the appearance or the non-functional aspects of an invention. For the best protection, you will want to register for both. There are many misconceptions about patents. One is that people will confuse trademarks with patents. They think that because they private labeled their product that it protects them from other people’s patents for Amazon. Patents are government issued and protects you from having your products used by others. Just because you trademark and private label your product, doesn’t protect you from someone taking your idea. Example Patents for Amazon An example of a utility patent would be a phone case with a light on it. A utility patent would protect the case itself. It would make it illegal for someone to make a phone case with a light on it. A design patent would protect the look of it. Private Sellers One fear many new sellers have is violating a patent. There is a fear that you might inadvertently infringe on another’s patent when you source from China. Before you spend a lot of money on product development, you want to perform a clearance search. You can search on your own and find out that way. A good resource would be https://www.uspto.gov/. Then you can have a law firm do a preliminary search. They will attempt to find any obvious products that would have a patent. If that doesn’t find any issues, you can then make the decision to conduct a more thorough check. Getting Started It might be adequate to use https://www.uspto.gov/ if you’re coming out with a private label product. If you have the money, it is best to have a comprehensive search done. However, many sellers that are just starting out may not have the resources for that. They should at least attempt to get a preliminary search. You should be able to get it for under $1000. It’s worth the money to avoid the risk. With trademarks, the https://www.uspto.gov/ would be a good resource. It will tell you if there are any current registrations, applications, or abandoned marks. If you are looking to trademark your brand, it’s a lot easier to look up the brand than it is to find these patents. The next step, if you found that there won’t be an issue, is to register your trademark. You will want to keep everything confidential to avoid it getting public and running the risk that someone beats you to it. Risks with Patent for Amazon The biggest risk is the potential for damages that comes with not doing your homework. If you infringe on someone’s patent, they probably won’t care that you’re a new seller. If you do infringe on a patent, the first thing is that you will receive a cease and desist letter. Most of the time, if you stop selling the product, the other party will drop it. It’s not worth it to them to spend the money on litigation. It is a much different case if you ignore the letter. They can go after you for wilful infringement. They can also try to go for punitive damages beyond the money they lost. Hopefully, you won’t make the mistake of ignoring the letter.

Today’s show is part 2 of the interview with Ashlin Hadden of Ashlin Hadden Insurance. We discuss Amazon account suspension insurance. Insurance is an area that tends to strike fear or boredom into people’s hearts but Ashlin has a way of making it all very palatable. Which is good because you really need to know this stuff. In the first part of this interview, we talked about Ashlin’s story and the requirements around Amazon liability insurance for Amazon sellers. Amazon Account Suspension Insurance Ashlin Hadden Insurance has created the first ever account suspension policy for eCommerce sellers (which includes Amazon, eBay, and other platforms) that will help pay your lost income if you’re suspended. This is a Lloyds of London policy, and it’s fairly reasonably priced. The policy is a 90-day aggregate and you can qualify for 250,000, 500,000 or a million dollars in coverage, depending on how long you’ve been in business. How it Works When you get the email to say your Amazon account is suspended, you call the 1800 number like you do with any type of claim for your auto or home or commercial insurance policy. We will get you in contact with an account reinstatement specialist. For example, CJ Rosenbaum who has been on the show before and then have 120 hours to get you unsuspended. You’ll make the contract with them and pay whatever fees there are. You must keep that receipt that you paid because you will be reimbursed up to $500 for that. If they don’t get your account unsuspended within that first 120 hours then the insurance starts paying your loss of income back to day 1 of suspension. This is coverage for your bills, so your payroll, owner draw, cell phone bills, storage fees, internet bills etc. What It Does and Doesn’t Do Amazon account suspension insurance does help you get reinstated as quickly as possible through experts like CJ Rosenbaum. Assuming you do have to use the actual insurance, the policy will cover the ongoing overheads like payroll and internet bills. It does not cover direct lost sales. However, if you’re taking those sales out as an owner’s draw then it is covered. However, you have to show that there’s a loss there. As long as you can show that you’re taking that then it is covered. For example: let’s say there’s $25K revenue, with $10K profit, and $2K for owner’s draw. There’s $8K left that was profit going back into the business. If you’re leaving the $8000 in the business then it isn’t covered that because it’s not a loss. However, if you were to take that out as owner’s draw then the $8000 would be covered plus the expenses. The figures are based on the previous 12 months, so it’s a rolling 12 month period. Exclusions to the Policy By far the biggest exclusions is lying on the application. If you are not completely honest on the application, that will be the thing they look at to deny a claim. For example, if you say you’ve never been suspended on the application, then you get suspended; if they go into your seller central and see that you’ve been suspended before, you will end up with no coverage. Making sure that you’re 100% honest on the application is most important. Violating a prohibited items list on your terms of service with Amazon will also be not covered. Anything you get suspended for that is on that list isn’t covered. The other big one is the intentional violation of the Amazon terms of service. Anybody who gets suspended is violating the terms of service. But it’s the intentional violation that specifically is what is being looked for here. Be honest and making sure you’re following terms of service. Amazon doesn't always make that very clear so it is worth digging through for anything to do with any borderline activity, any grey areas. If you’re going to try to make money with it, if there’s any question whatsoever, you must double check. Other Terms and Conditions This Amazon Account Suspension Insurance is only open to the U.S.

The guest on the show today is Ashlin Hadden of Ashlin Hadden Insurance. She is here to talk about an area that nobody wants to think about but that is really important: insurance. Even more specifically, Ashlin specialises in Amazon liability insurance and has some great tips for Amazon sellers to help them in this area. Ashlin’s Origin One day a customer needed insurance for an Amazon business because at that time Amazon had just introduced new rules regarding sellers needing General Liability Insurance. Ashlin’s initial response was no because people don’t really know what Amazon sellers do. Carriers didn’t want to work with them because they don’t really understand the industry. However, this customer was persistent and Ashlin did agree to help. Educating the carriers about eCommerce was part of the process. She has done a lot over the last 15 months. Now Ashlin focuses on helping eCommerce sellers get their Amazon liability insurance and proving to insurance carriers that you are good risks for them to have. Amazon Liability Insurance for Sellers Amazon used to require a general liability insurance policy if you had 3 months of $10,000 of sales or more. Recently this has changed, so now any seller must have a $1,000,000 general liability insurance policy with products completed. What that means for you as a seller is that you need a policy that has general liability and product liability no matter if you are private label, wholesale or retail arbitrage. A lot of people think they can’t afford it, but it really is inexpensive. If you’re a fairly new seller doing retail arbitrage you’re looking at about $500 a year policy. That might seem like a lot but it’s part of your terms of service to have Amazon liability insurance. If you don’t have it, Amazon could suspend you and take you off the platform, so it’s a very cheap policy to make sure you’re protected. General Liability vs Product Liability Insurance General liability is anything you do or say as a business that could harm somebody. Product liability is anything your product could do to harm somebody. It doesn’t matter what your product does if it hurts somebody or their property, it’s covered under the policy. General liability is anything else that’s not really included in your product liability. For example, if somebody says you slandered them, you stole their intellectual property. If you do get yourself into a situation like that, you would also need to call a lawyer. Of course, the person to call is CJ Rosenbaum because he knows about the nitty gritty of all of this. Amazon Liability Insurance Ashlin isn’t the only broker providing Amazon liability insurance, however, there’s not a lot that know where to get it. There just aren’t a lot that know what Amazon sellers do, how to class you, and really what coverage you need. From the 30 different companies, Ashlin works with there are only about 2 or 3 that understand and are comfortable insuring an eCommerce seller. Not only does Amazon require the liability insurance, they also require the Certificate of Insurance to be sent to them along with some verbiage on it. Ashlin takes care of all of that for you. She will organise a policy that meets the Amazon requirements. General and Product Liability, a $1M aggregate policy. She sends Amazon the required information for you so it’s uploaded onto your Seller Central. Plus she will do it every year moving forward so Amazon always has an updated copy on file for you! You get to sit back and relax and know that you’re protected and don’t have to do anything else with the insurance. Ashlin will take care of it. Amazon Liability Insurance Premium The insurers will take into account your sales numbers, where you’re from, what you’re selling and how you’re selling. e.g. retail arbitrage, wholesale or private label. Retail arbitrage is the cheaper one, then wholesale. Private label is more expensive because you’re really the one that’...

Today We learn more about how to sell your eCommerce business with Coran. In Part 1 we spoke with Coran Woodmass from theFBAbroker.com about how to make your FBA business worth buying in the first place. In this episode, we look at who the buyers are. Who are these people? Why are they buying Amazon businesses instead of investing in stocks and shares and bonds and other investments? The Current Market The bulk of the market right now is $100,000 - 500,000 businesses. That’s also where the bulk of the buyers are looking. Did you know that 70% of the buyers are 100% new to Amazon? And most are new to eCommerce as a whole. The attraction to FBA businesses is the same thing that got us all into it in the first place: they’re very easy to run and the return on capital for inventory is really good. As a secondary investment getting access to that capital return on inventory itself is very appealing. Most buyers are high 6-figure executives, who have a lot of savings. They’re looking to either quit their job and start something with less time involved, or they’re looking at it as just an investment. The latter is the biggest buyer pool. The information from Part 1 about making your business saleable and attractive to a buyer is to attract this type of buyer. They’re more of an investor, they have less time to manage the investment but they’re looking for a better return than on stocks or bonds. Positioning to Sell Your eCommerce Business A small percentage of that market are strategic buyers, but they’re few and far between which is why you want to position your business for the wider investor audience. Those high paid executive investors are going to have a very corporate mindset. If they’ve only just started looking at FBA businesses they’ll be most appealed to the history and clean books. For the most part the more research they’ve done into the industry, the looser they’ll be with their criteria and more understanding and less nervous. They typically don’t buy very fast if they’re a very new buyer, there’s a lot of education that needs to come into play for them to feel comfortable to move forward, to understand what is a good business and what isn’t a good business. A much smaller area than $100-500K are businesses that are selling the $1 - 5 million. As you would expect there are fewer buyers that have over a million to spend. In that range, you’ll see very sophisticated, strategic buyers. You won’t get past them if you’re dodgy. You’ve got to be very up-front and honest about the good and the bad if you want to sell your eCommerce business. At this level, the buyer is commonly an operator that has raised capital or a couple of investors getting together. Also, it might be someone looking to consolidate some brands and sell them on to an equity fund down the track. At the top end of the 5 million range, and over $5-10 million, it is definitely the playground of private equity funds. The multiples can get quite interesting at that point! The Selling Process Every broker does it a little bit differently but there is a general overview. Firstly, a buyer will start looking for a business and it will take them a while to figure out exactly what type of business they want. Typically there’s a very high funnel at the top, with lots of inquiries. Most brokers don’t reveal your brand or links to anything personal at the top of that funnel. In the second step, the buyer will say yes. They want info about the business. That’s when you can start engaging with the potential buyer. There will be some sort of call process, they’ll want to meet you. At this stage, it’s important to be very responsive and very upfront, because remember the buyer is also buying YOU as part of the deal. They need to trust not only that your business is doing what it says, but also to trust you enough to know that after the sale you’re not just going to disappear. Step three is the offer stage, the fun part!

The guest today is Coran Woodmass from The FBA Broker. Coran specialises in buying and selling FBA businesses. He has been involved in buying and selling online-based businesses for 4 years. He learned by trial and error and then expanded to share his knowledge and expertise with others as a broker. In June 2016 Coran launched theFBAbroker.com which focuses exclusively on e-commerce businesses that have an Amazon component for at least one channel of income. Today he will be teaching us how to sell your Amazon business. Logistics to Sell Your Amazon Business The tricky part is that Amazon owns your listings which can make it a bit confusing. You can sell your Amazon business but it boils down to what type of FBA business you have. Firstly, retail arbitrage type businesses, for the most part, aren’t sellable because there isn’t a specific supply chain that is scalable. Even if it’s making good money it isn’t attractive to buyers. There needs to be an ongoing supply chain in order to have ‘sellability’. More traditional wholesale or retail businesses are sellable, despite similarities with retail arbitrage. Some have been in the marketplace for 5, 10 or 15 years. They have a supply chain setup. They have exclusive contracts or the ability because of volume to get really large discounts. The major difference is that there is a solid supply chain that you can hand over. Buyers want economies of scale, exclusivity, solid supply chains, and history and that makes it easier to sell your Amazon business. Sell Your Private Label Business Private label also depends because it can be broken down into further categories and these days buyers are more savvy about private label. It needs to have something unique or proprietary or patented that is differentiating the product/s from the rest of the marketplace in order to be sellable. Private label as a type of business is not a ‘buy and forget’ option. If you have this type of business you must create something unique (e.g. bundling items is very popular) that makes your business more sellable in the private label space. How to Value a Business There are nine factors that are critical when valuing a business. The type of FBA business. The more defensible and sustainable your business is the better. A brand registry is one version of defensibility that also helps. The age of the business. You can’t shortcut this. The longer the business has been in existence, the longer the history, therefore the more attractive it is to buyers. The income channels. The more income channels the better. Buyers are interested if you have multiple channels, in multiple Amazon stores, and other platforms such as your website or eBay as well. The percentage of income coming from another channel (and that channel also needs to have history) needs to be at least 30% in order for it to really be counted as another channel. Having 98% from the one Amazon store and 1% from a different Amazon store and 1% from your website doesn’t cut it. The time needed to run the business. If it’s more than 10 hours a week it will limit your buyers. The least amount of owner time needed, the more attractive your business will be to buyers. The history and account health of the business. Buyers are getting savvy with things like reviews, seller metrics, A-Z compliance etc. Access to the AMS doesn’t necessarily add to the multiple but makes your business more interesting. Competition. Buyers are interested in what type of competitors you have, how sophisticated they are and how many new competitors are entering the market month over month. If there are a lot of competitors in your one vertical or highest selling products then it may be worth diversifying to make your business more sellable. The trend of the business itself. A few year’s history helps here, so you can look year over year and see the trend of the business overall. How much cash flow the business makes.

Back on the show today is Nadine Eich from Enida, the Amazon VA Agency for the German Marketplace. In the last episode, we talked about German customer service. Today we’re discussing the challenges and opportunities of the German Amazon listings as well as selling in Amazon Germany. After all, brilliant customer service is great but you've got to have the listings up to sell to get customers in the first place. Biggest Mistakes when Selling in Amazon Germany Don’t just use Google Translate. Don’t put the text of your English listing in and think you’re done. Firstly, there are character limits for the title, bullet points and description of Amazon listings and Google Translate won’t get that right! But more importantly, the language in your listing is crucial so you must get it right. As discussed in the last episode, you need to understand some things about the German people in order to effectively sell in Amazon Germany. One important thing to know about Germans is that if you don’t use German perfectly, they won’t trust you. This is how the Germans work. Nadine is only 25 and very international, and even she feels this way. So people of older generations feel this even more strongly; they would never buy from someone who has typos or grammatical errors in their listing. Get a Proper Translation In terms of translations, you could hire a translator from Fiverr and then copy and paste the translated text into the German listing. But even though this is a step up from Google Translate, it’s still not going to play out well. If you speak German and know the rules and the grammar, you could try it because there are good freelancers out there. But if you have no idea about the language, do not do it. There are so many mistakes that can happen and you will have no idea and no way to check that the translation you have gotten is actually error-free. In printed text industries there are strong quality control processes in place, and with good reason. Nadine knows she makes mistakes, everybody does. That’s why at Enida she has a team of 4 people checking everything because 8 eyes are better than two! Don’t let any of your text go into the public realm with errors because everyone’s judging you. German customers, in particular, have high standards about this. The language in a listing needs to be top quality because if it’s poor, it gives the first impression that the quality of your services and products are also poor. Good Copywriting is Important when Selling in Amazon Germany Obviously, a rough translation isn’t good enough, but even a good translation won’t be enough for an Amazon listing. It might be correct linguistically in terms of translating exactly what the English text said, however, you need more than just accurate translation. For an effective Amazon listing, you need a mixture of copywriting and translating. It also needs to fit the character limits of Amazon, it needs to be in marketing speech and it needs to be in a casual tone. That means you need a native speaker who knows how to do keyword research. Straight English keywords won’t translate properly either. You will need to start from the ground up again with keywords. Do the research in the language and in the marketplace that you’re selling. Then you get the listing written, through a blend of copywriting and translation. It’s a tough combination but Enida has these people. Know Your Customer and Speak to Them The tone of voice that you use in the listing is very important when selling in Amazon Germany. It’s important because really formal language and tone can make people disengage. You have to take the product and think about the customer. The tone isn’t an extra when trying to sell, it’s the entire deal. Very traditional marketing thinking is the core of what we should be doing. However, it’s easy to forget on Amazon and the internet. The more you know your customers,

Today we’ve got Nadine Eich from Germany. Nadine runs a virtual assistant agency for Amazon sellers called Enida and she’s here to share her tips for selling and Amazon Germany customer service. Nadine’s Background Nadine originally studied psychology and worked at a big international online store during her studies. When she finished her studies, like so many of us, she thought ‘this can’t be it’. She wanted to be free and work whenever and wherever she wanted. However, unlike those of us who take years to leave the corporate world, Nadine became a virtual assistant very soon after finishing her studies. She also quit her job at the online retailer to pursue freelance work. After meeting a German Amazon seller who hired her and then began recommending her to other Amazon sellers, Nadine soon found she had too much work for just her. So she teamed up with some other VAs and began running Enida, providing virtual assistant services for Amazon sellers since September 2016. The name of the company actually means ‘you don’t have to be there at any time.’ As an Amazon seller, the message is that you don’t need to be at your business because Nadine and her team are taking care of it for you. Selling on the Amazon Germany Marketplace Everybody talks about how Europe is the big opportunity for U.S. sellers but Germany specifically is important in Amazon terms because it’s the 2nd biggest Amazon marketplace. It has 134 million visitors in a month, which is just behind the U.S. However, the customers are really different. American customers are very kind, they leave reviews and reach out if there’s something wrong. They want to communicate with you and they’re quite informal. In contrast, German customers are more blunt and much less communicative. They are used to the ‘seller is always right’ style of customer service that is common in Germany. They don’t expect anyone to reply if they do reach out. Thus they are much more likely to leave a bad review because they think it’s the only way to get a response. The Challenges of Amazon Germany Customer Service The main challenge of Amazon Germany customer service, as Nadine sees it, is that difficulty of the German customers. However, another big challenge is that German law actively forbids you from doing anything that might increase your revenue. In Germany, it is illegal to send out email sequences. So communicating with the German customers is a big challenge. It’s difficult to let them know that they can reach out to the seller if there is a problem and it will be fixed and that they don’t have to leave a bad review. One possible way around this law is to use the invoice email to communicate with the customer. You can send them an invoice and leave a message there. It’s unlikely that a customer would sue for leaving a message along with the invoice. Nadine doesn’t recommend it, however, it is something frequently requested by her clients. Enida does offer the service of writing these emails and inputting them into the systems for the client. Another challenge of Amazon Germany customer service is that sellers are not allowed to ask for feedback. Anything that may increase your revenue as a seller is considered spam advertising. The solution to this that is to print something on the packaging of the product or include a flyer with the product. She says it’s really unlikely that someone would sue you for that! This is a way of bypassing email because as discussed it’s a risky channel. However, it also adds value to the customer rather than just asking for something (a review). Listeners to Amazing FBA can get a 10% discount by going to Enida, and mention the code “ENIDAMAZING”. Opportunities in the German Marketplace Even though Germans are difficult and complain a lot, you can really stand out and strike through with kindness. The usual kind of communication in Germany from businesses is cold and formal.

Back on the show today is Steve Chou from MyWifeQuitHerJob.com. In the last episode with Steve, we explored his story of going from the corporate world to the eCommerce world, and how to get started on Amazon. In this episode, we discuss transitioning from having an Amazon store to your own eCommerce site. This information is most relevant for sellers who have been on Amazon a while. That’s the time to create your own eCommerce store. It will take some time to get going and it’s a long-term investment. Create Your Own eCommerce Site and Build Consumer Trust The way you structure your site is like a long-form sales page. You have your value proposition at the top, all the testimonials and the good things about your product, and an “Add to Cart” button at the end. You can use software like ClickFunnels, which makes it easy to sell individual products online. If you want to create your own e-commerce store, the key is making sure the consumer trusts you like they already trust Amazon. There are multiple ways to do this. Testimonials, trust seals and satisfaction guaranteed offers, as well as high-quality images, will go a long way. Steve’s whole site is set up like this if you want an example. Check out bumblebeelinens.com. You also have to replicate a lot of what Amazon does already. Such as free shipping, no-hassle returns, a phone number, and contact information. Common Mistakes when You Create Your Own eCommerce Store A common mistake people make is thinking, “Why bother even thinking about my site when the Amazon revenue keeps growing?” Then a year passes and they don’t do their site. But then something goes bad with Amazon, and not only will they lose revenue but they’ve lost a year’s worth of customer-building on their own site. The most common mistake is not having systems in place to bring the customer back over and over until they’re ready to buy. Be aware that the average conversion rate on eCommerce store is 1 - 2 %, which means 98% of people aren’t buying. If they leave, and you don’t have a way to bring them back, they’re gone for life. With Amazon, you only worry about getting the listing up, optimizing the listing and maybe advertising. When you create your own eCommerce store, you have to have all the links in the chain ready to go in order for it to work. E.g. email marketing, retargeting, Facebook and Google, push notifications, and everything designed to bring people back to your site. Amazon versus eCommerce The main difference between Amazon and having your own site is that with Amazon there is a big audience. However, it’s mostly one-off customers. With your own site, you have the opportunity for repeat customers. In fact, this is where you make the majority of the money, by bringing your existing customers back to your site. There’s no real brand loyalty on Amazon. Your own site is designed to bring repeat customers back and establish a brand, which you cannot do on Amazon. If you have chosen products that fit under the same umbrella then you can create an overall brand that encompasses all of those products. There must be unity within the brand in the long run. The idea is to treat Amazon like cash flow. The customers there aren’t loyal but there is a huge audience and money to be made. It’s not long term consistent money. Amazon isn’t long term. When they change things like FBA fees and feedback processes, and rankings, that impacts revenue. The only way to maintain consistent revenue is to find other ways to generate income on your own, hence building the brand. Repeat customers who feel loyal to your brand are low effort customers. The Long-Term View Driving traffic is what you need to be focusing on when you create your own ecommerce store. Amazon’s marketplace drives all the traffic if you’re an Amazon seller, but on your own site, the two primary channels are Google Shopping and Facebook Ads. Google SEO is another one but it’s long-term, not short-term.

On the show today is somebody who is really a big name in the ecommerce and online training for the ecommerce world, Steve Chou from MyWifeQuitHerJob.com. Today he will be teaching us how to get started with ecommerce off Amazon. Steve’s Story Steve and his wife started as consumers looking for a product (custom wedding handkerchiefs) that they couldn’t find, so they created it themselves. However, they had to order over 100 from the manufacturer, and they only needed 6, so they sold the rest on eBay. A few years later, in 2007, they got pregnant and wanted one of them to stay home. But living in Silicon Valley they needed two incomes to live, so they started looking for ways to replace her 6-figure income. They remembered their success selling handkerchiefs on eBay, and started there. In their first year of ecommerce, they made 100K in profit. Steve’s wife quit her job and the rest, as they say, is history! These days, their online store Bumble Bee Linens is still going strong. They’ve both quit their jobs. Steve teaches others how to get started with ecommerce. Ten years on, Steve has some tips for people to get started with ecommerce today. Get Started with Amazon Start with Amazon. It’s the easiest option because there’s a built-in marketplace where customers are already looking to buy. In comparison, eBay is more difficult to use and the customers are more likely to complain and not willing to pay as much. However, you can use eBay to minimise your risk. It’s like a safety balance: if it’s selling on eBay then you know you will be able to liquidate it if for some reason it doesn’t sell on Amazon. Steve mostly recommends starting with private label. Creating a unique product has more long term benefits. Retail arbitrage isn’t so good because it’s not scalable and won’t be sustainable in the long run (5 - 10 years). However, it can be good for certain personalities that are too nervous to go straight into private label. It is more temporary but it gives people the confidence to get started. The Minimum Investment to Get Started with eCommerce The minimum amount you’re going to need to get started in private label is $1000 but preferably $2000. Be aware that when your budget is very low you are limited to some of the cheaper products. If you do need to get started really cheap, go the AliExpress route. You won't necessarily make a profit, but just break even and validate that something will sell. As for advertising, you will need to set aside money for that as well. It will take you a little while to get profitable, but to get to the profitable point it depends on what you’re trying to sell and how competitive it is. Tips, Tricks, and Tools to get Started with eCommerce Steve uses Jungle Scout, Long Tail Pro, and Terapeak. Jungle Scout web app is a great tool but if everyone else is using that too then everyone comes up with the same products or similar products. In an ideal world, you don’t rely on that but some people get stuck and need ideas, so it’s great for students just starting out. One way to start is to find something good on Jungle Scout then use Terapeak to make sure that it’s selling on eBay. Look for the sell-through rate on Terapeak (the number that specifies the percentage chance of an item selling once it’s been listed) to be over 33%. This provides confidence because if you know going in that you have a way to minimise your losses and liquidate your inventory to cash it removes a big mental barrier to entry for private label selling. Terapeak also cultivates and categorises the completed listings, including what’s hot. You can perhaps find something there because eBay and Amazon are different marketplaces. Steve also uses Long Tail Pro to help find out what people are searching for on Google. You can use it to determine how viable a niche is in terms of a search for your own website. When picking a product to sell, determine how competitive it is in the website landscape because they...

We have, once again, Brian Johnson of PPC Scope and Sponsored Products Academy on the show. After we released the previous episodes I got so many questions that I had to get Brian back on. We’re going to do a Q&A session right now to address questions sent in from the listeners. Relevancy of Keyword Phrases Why do keywords sometimes not get impressions, even though I putting a high bid and the auto-campaign is showing they’re relevant? It comes back to relevancy. Amazon continues to tighten up what they consider relevant to the keyword you’re trying to advertise for the product you’re trying to sell and the search terms the potential buyers’ are using. The first thing they’re going to look at is how directly relevant is the phrase you’re bidding on to the search term the shopper is using. Amazon is also looking at the information they have on that buyer. What they searched before and the products they bought. Often times, the match they don’t find is with the frontend content of your listing. If you’re getting zero impressions, check that the keyword is in your frontend content. Just last week Amazon started messing with the backend indexing and it’s throwing off a lot of sellers. It comes back to what Brian teaches, you have to know your target audience and set up your listing based on the keywords that will convert. If I’m not appearing for a search term, how much is it about the PPC setup, and how much is it about the product listing? The question is: Is your ad showing at all? Or is it just showing lower? If your ad doesn’t show at all then you’ve been filtered out completely. That’s usually a product mismatch or a category mismatch with your product. If your ad is showing up low then you’ve passed the relevance test, but the quality score of your campaign is too low to be competitive. You can compensate by bidding higher, but there are better ways of doing it. Segmentation is Important Is it all about the listing matching up to the keywords or is there something else we need to be aware of in how we approach the PPC campaigns? There are best practices that you can use when it comes to setting up campaigns in order to have the best analytics and the best control. The short version of that is to segment to everything. Segment to the match types, to the skus and have separate ad groups for everything. As far as getting filtered out because of relevancy, yes, you listing plays a major role in that. Is your product in a sub-category that is directly relevant to that search term. Is there a match between the keyword phrase your bidding on, the search term phrase the buyer is searching, and the keyword phrase that is in your frontend content. This is a major oversimplification of a very complex idea and system. We couldn’t possibly cover everything adequately in this podcast. If you want the full version and many many hours of training, you can get his full lesson with the  release of SPA 2.0. Google Adwords as a Learning Campaign If I run a campaign on Google as a learning campaign, talking about Adwords with single match goals, does a different keyword perform differently on a campaign on its own or with other keywords? There are specific uses for splitting a keyword into its own campaign. In sponsored products, I would set that up in its own campaign if I was going to test bidplus, for instance. I wouldn’t run a whole portfolio of keywords in a campaign and try to run bidplus because I want to control what Amazon is using for the bidplus. You might have a high performing keyword segmented into its own campaign to protect that keyword phrase. That is usually only necessary if you’re in an extremely competitive advertising space. Most sellers don’t need to do that. Different Languages What about running different languages in certain markets? For example, Polish ads on the German marketplace and Spanish ads in the US since such large populations of the residents speak those langua...

The Future of Amazon 2017 The future of Amazon is going to be challenging for Amazon sellers. Products are becoming more competitive and this making the Amazon space more congested than before. Therefore, people need to find a way that they can assert creativity in their sales by creating something original or by adding something original to the already existing products. One Amazon seller found a way to improve a product that already existed. By adding a feature she was able to become the only seller in that space with that kind of product. Now she’s taking home over $100,000 in the last 6 months. There are numerous ways that one can do this. The most basic form of creativity originates from understanding what feature of a product attracts the consumers. Then come up with a way that you can alter the originality of the product to make it unique from the original. It is important to understand that just because you have created a unique product that is one of a kind, does not mean that getting sales is going to be easy. It is best to learn ways to convince people that what you product is what they should be spending money on.  This can be done through pay-per-click campaigns to gain attention. This is one of the ways to enhance private label space in the competitive market. Diversification of Marketplaces Diversification is the key to success in making sales right now. Just because a specific product is selling, does not mean that it will still be in demand in the future. Diversity also applies in terms of market as it is important to not only focus on one location but rather try and access other countries in order to widen your perspective. The future of Amazon is going to be having a presence in many different marketplaces. We’ve seen how politics can affect your business in the Brexit vote and the election of Trump. The GBP lost value and now you won’t make as much money by selling to the US. For US seller, the new president’s stance on imports might make it more expensive to buy from China. Also, if you plan on selling in the European markets, you have VAT to deal with. Having clarity in your numbers is very important in improving your sells. This does not only mean having knowledge of how many products you are selling but rather understanding how to set your targets using your expenses. This entails having viable knowledge on how to minimize refunds and take advantage of reimbursements. These are just some issues that a seller needs to be aware of. Be sure to head over to amazingfba.com/shane for all the interviews and a list of resources available. If you need help with your numbers, please head over to Fetcher and give it a shot. Watch What Fetcher Will Do for Your Amazon Accounts Shane Stinemetz Part 3 of 3

Once again we are joined by Shane Stinemetz to discuss more ways to use Fetcher and improve your Amazon listing. Preventing Refunds The best way of managing sales is being in touch directly with your customers. You can send emails to your buyers to ensure they are satisfied. This gives you an opportunity to understand the consumer demands as well as grants you the opportunity to intervene with problems before they happen. It also helps discover quality issues that you can take to your supplier. This will, in turn, boost your Amazon profit. If a customer is not satisfied with their product, it’s better that you ship them a new, free product rather than them getting a refund through Amazon. This will also help prevent the buyer from leave negative feedback. This is huge. If you get over 1% negative feedback, you run the risk of having your account suspended. How Fetcher can Boost Amazon Profit Fetcher is currently the best solution for those who do not have an accounting background and that need to keep their profit and loss numbers in check. Fetcher is suitable for those who tend to have a general understanding of accounting, but not super high-level. It was built because 80% of people who sell on Amazon stated are not confident in their Amazon profit and sales reports. The software helps make raw data available for the average sellers who are struggling with their accounting information. They need to be looking for ways to improve their business. Fetcher, therefore, takes raw data and simplifies it. The software helps Amazon sellers make better business decisions that will improve their Amazon profit through their knowledge of transactions. Fetcher integrates a seller’s account with Amazon’s API to help the users handle complicated calculations that strain their understanding of how to maximize their Amazon profit and sales. Fetcher helps you understand your sales numbers so you can better compete with these larger companies. How to Set Targets to Maximize Amazon Profit The discussed matrix are crucial in setting targets. This begins by first understanding where your business has been and where your business currently is. This gives you an understanding of how your business is currently performing. It is very important to have historical data. In setting targets, you need to assess if there is an upward trend in sales. In the case there is no upward trend, then you needs to analyze what needs to be done to increase sales by setting quantifiable goals. It’s not enough to set a goal that you will increase sales by 5%. It needs to be a measurable goal to get you to that 5%. One of the best places to set the targets is recurring fees. Recurring fees are very much about inventory management. After 6 months, Amazon hits you with a long-term inventory fee. Fetcher has an inventory tool that can assist with preventing overstock. By knowing how much inventory you hold and how much you’re selling, it is easy to tell when the inventory will run down. This helps in reducing the inventory fees. This is unique because it involves setting goals for expenses rather than for sales. It makes sense to create targets based on things that is easy to have control over. Inventory is easier to control since sales are sometimes unpredictable.   Be Realistic It is great to have long term goals for sales but still important to set short-term, achievable goals. The best way is to understand how to fix refunds by having automated emails and communicating with customers to reduce the number of refunds. This helps in understanding margins in the end that can help you make targets that are quantifiable. Therefore, in setting targets, you should set targets over factors that they can easily control and forecast. It is easier to influence your costs rather than sales. Watch Common Amazon Profit and Loss Mistakes with Shane Stinemetz Part 2 of 3

It is important for any business to measure its profit and loss as this helps in determining the direction of the business. It helps in understanding if the business is headed in the right direction or if there are changes that need to be implemented. Most people, when starting a business, do not have a financial perspective of their businesses; instead, they only pay attention to the sales they make. This mentality does not look at the cost of operation and how it affects the profit and loss figures. Without tracking the cost, it is simply is moving forward making business decisions without the crucial data. This will ultimately hurt your Amazon sales. Today we have Shane Stinemetz of Fetcher to help us understand this complicated subject. Importance of Understanding Profit and Loss Understanding the profit and loss information of a business helps in setting up goals and targets. It will help the business move forward and maximize Amazon sales. This helps in making better business decisions. It will give you the information you need to understand where your business stands at a given time. With Fetcher, you don't need a financial background to understand this data. Understanding expenses helps you determine what you are spending on a sale. This includes money spent and fees such as shipping, custom fees and other business expenses. Cost of goods refers to the cost of manufacture and getting the products in the market. It is important not to summarize your costs when handling the data as this will give you a clear picture of where money is spent and help in developing a plan of deducing the expense. How to Calculate Profit from Amazon Sales You get your profit by subtracting expenses from sales. This helps in understanding the amount of money made and the margin of every product. This is a laborious task. It involves management of big data which discourages many people. Refunds are reimbursements and are critical in sales because they are offsetting sales that bring in negative sales and this is a loss to the sellers. Fortunately, Fetcher makes all this simple by automating the process. Challenges in Managing Profit/Loss Data The biggest challenge that people face is that they are not aware of costs that they incur. This can include shipping and storage because they mainly concentrate on the sales alone. These recurring fees are hidden deep in the reports. Because of this people  do not give it the attention it deserves. It is also important to know how to deal with refunds as this will improve Amazon sales. Returns affects your rankings. It’s important to get in front of the refund process. The first way to do this is to change the mindset from the idea that returns are part of the business. Therefore, the first thing is to track the return rates of the products over time. Secondly, you needs to communicate constantly with the customers in order to understand any quality issues that the customers face. This limits negative comments and reviews that customers make as well as reducing the chances of products being returned. Lastly, track down your reimbursements for any money that you are owed, such as of lost or damaged products. Fetcher will be implementing a new feature that will help get reimbursement from Amazon. Watch Amazon Sales with Shane Stinemetz Part 1 of 3

We have a special guest today, Augustas Kilgys, to help up with seller optimization. Augustas is from Lithuania and Germany which gives him a unique insight into selling. He is also running the Seller Optimization Summit which is going to be going on very soon. If you are interest, please sign up to get more information. Seller Optimization Summit Seller Optimization Summit is a virtual summit. There is going to be a lot of great speakers that will help you improve your own optimization. Many of the speakers you have already heard on this podcast. Back in September, Augustas organized the European Private Label Summit which focused on delivering information to European sellers. It was a huge success. A lot of the attendees were very happy with the experience. This inspired Augustas to organize another one. It started out very as a very simple idea to focus on listing optimization. However, once he started contacting speakers, the topics grew far beyond the initial scope so Augustas decided to expand the summit to Seller Optimization. Topics Covered There is going to be speakers on listing optimization as well as optimizing sponsored ads. He will have Manuel Becvar to talking about sourcing. He wanted to get the attendees to think outside the box. You can learn how to expand your business outside Amazon onto other platforms and how to get external traffic to your listings. External Traffic He will be talking with Bryan Bowman about Facebook ads. Augustas will speak with Michael Hecker who is a German software developer that has a program that can track Facebook advertising clicks. Brian Burt will speak on how to approach influencers and get them to promote your product. Augustas will present a case study about a beginner seller with only a few thousands dollars. He managed to meet and influencer in Asia that he teamed up with. He went from selling $3,000 his first month to doing $70,000 a month now. Brand Building There will be four or five speakers to cover brand building. Susan Hixon, a private label lawyer, will be giving insights from a lawyer’s perspective. She will be discussing everything that goes into registering a trademark. Shelly Simon who is a UK seller, will be discussing her success in building a brand. He will also have a speaker that runs a subscriptions based business and how this can make your business much more valuable. Normally you can get 3x your net profits. Subscription businesses can sometimes get 11x. Sign Up If you want to participate in this sumit, head on over to amazingfba.com/sos for all the details about how you can sign up for free. It will be free from 3 April to 9 April. Every day during the summit you will be getting an email with videos to watch. They will be available for 24 hours. After that, they are locked and the new sessions are unlocked. You can upgrade and get more access to the videos. These videos will be pre-recorded. Every day there will be a live session with a presentation and Q&A at the end. This all starts 3 April with a kickoff webinar the day before at 3pm EDT, 8pm UK. This will have three guest speakers. Watch Seller Optimization Summit with Augustas Kligys

Today we have CJ Rosenbaum with us to do answer some listen submitted answers. I recently sent out a newsletter requesting the listeners to submit their Amazon questions. Be sure to subscribe to the newsletter so you don't miss the next opportunity. If you are interested in meeting CJ Rosenbaum and asking him some questions in person or simply enjoying a pint with him, he will be in London from 31 March to April 2. Sign up below so you can get the details. It’s rare that you can ask a lawyer questions for free so let’s get started. Q&A with Amazon Sellers Lawyer, CJ Rosenbaum Clothing and Jewelry Copyrights I keep hearing about so-called “generic designs” of clothes and jewelry. I keep hearing about it, but after researching into it, I seem to find this doesn’t exist. For example, at some point in time a piece of jewelry must have been designed by somebody. Are they given to the public like open-sourced software? Is there a database where I can check jewelry copyrights? You can absolutely do a search. You can try it yourself. CJ isn’t familiar with the UK system, but in the US you can go to the United States Patent and Trademark Office, and they have kind of an archaic search engine, that you can use to try and find patented products when it comes to anything at all. If you’re not real skilled and you don’t have a lot of patience, you can hire someone to do a search. Many designs are going to have been filed for protection and many will not. It could also be that you start selling a product that someone has already been selling for a number of years and since the US is a first to use rather than a first to file country, you may still have some problems. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean you don’t want to get into that product. It’s all risk vs reward. If you think you can make a couple of hundred thousand of pounds in a short amount of time, with a fairly insignificant risk, it might be a good business decision to do that. Other people may avoid taking that risk. It’s a product-by-product and profit-by-profit analysis as to what you’re comfortable doing in terms of taking a risk with a certain product. There’s one sort of follow-up part to this question, it says, does design copyrights just run out? And do factories in China just turn out thousands of replicas? Does it work that way? There are certain IP rights that expire, they become part of the public domain. It really depends on how they’re filed. There are certain designs that are used that have what’s called trade dress, and that does not expire. In generalities, it can't be answered. You need to look at the product, look at the investment, and if it costs $300-$500 to get an opinion on that particular product, you decide as a business person whether it’s worthwhile to pay that. Or just make your savvy at checking the listings and seeing what the risks are. There’s a lot of misconceptions about attorney’s fees. You can get good protection and a great amount of information, for a relatively small amount of money in most of the issues Amazon sellers face. It doesn’t hurt to call, they don’t charge to talk to you. You can find out and make the decision yourself. CJ tries to provide every client with a flat fee you know exactly what you’re going to pay and what you’re getting. That way you can make an informed business decision. Liabilities Who is legally responsible, in the worst case scenario, someone dies from using my private-label product? As a trial lawyer, CJ Rosenbaum had a ton of trials and employee cases for many years. Responsible or not, if someone gets seriously hurt and you touched that product, you’re going to get sued. If someone gets hurt or dies and they have enough money that it’s worthwhile to the lawyer, you’re going to be part of the defendants. If you designed it, if you manufactured it, if you’re the middleman, you’re going to have some responsibility. Even if someone isn’t terribly hurt,

Once again we have with us Brian Johnson of PPC Scope and Sponsored Products Academy. Today we will be talking about Amazon Marketing Services. Brian Johnson of PPC Scope If you haven’t already, please listen to the first two parts of this interview, where we address PPC for Amazon Seller Central. Just head on over to amazingfba.com/brianj for all the episodes as well as some great resources, including Brian's proprietory PPC Cheatsheet. Amazon Marketing Services Brian is going to teach us how to hack into your competitors’ listings, and ethically steal their traffic and sales. Sounds crazy, right? There is an Amazon platform that most people are not aware of called Amazon Marketing Services, AMS. It’s the banner ads that appear above every ad when you search on Amazon. It’s the ads below the “Add to Cart” button on a listing. Amazon Marketing Services is a gated advertising platform where you have to meet certain qualifications to join. Once you do, you get much higher visibility, much lower cost-per-click, and you can target your competitors and defend your own brand by having ads on product pages. It’s below their description and offers you the ability to show off your product to their customers. Get Started with Amazon Marketing Services AMS is gated by Vendor Express.  Once you get past the stage where you send Amazon a sample order, then you can begin using Amazon Marketing Services. For Free video training from Brian, click on the video image below: Once you’re in, you have to structure your AMS ads to proper way to make sure you pack a punch. It doesn’t work the same way as sponsored products. AMS has three aspects: Headline search ads which are the ads at the top of the search results. Product display ads which are below the add to cart button. Sponsored Products ads which are not the same as the sponsored ads we’re used to and they show up in different locations than the classic sponsored products. The best case scenario is to use both types of sponsored products. You can use AMS to help filter down keywords based on what Amazon thinks will be relevant. There are ways to streamline the process of getting approved for Vendor Express. However, that would be way more than we could cover on this episode. It is something Brian teaches in his course. Many people are confused about what you can advertise for on AMS. They think you can only show ads for products you submit through Vendor Express. That is not the case. You are only using the product to get approval. AMS allows you to show ads for all your products. Brian’s course covers all that and more. Brian will teach you how to get started, how to get un-gated, and how to make the process very simple. Get More Information The best place to get more info is in Brian's free training at Sponsored Product Academy. There are 4 free videos about this whole area. Just click on the video image below to access that: The Academy full course itself It is very in-depth training. It’s about a 5-week course. It’s the best place to start if you want to dominate your competitors in advertising. You can start with the free videos and take it from there.  For the cheat sheet and other resources, including instant access to training videos, just visit the link below:  amazingfba.com/brianj Watch Amazon Marketing Services with Brian Johnson Part 3 of 3

We are continuing our conversation with Brian Johnson of Sponsored Product Academy (& PPC Scope) to discuss how to simplify your Amazon PPC. If you haven’t listened to the first part, you really need to. Simply because if you are selling on Amazon, Brian gave us a ton of useful, mindblowing information that will change the way your thing of sponsored ads. Do yourself a favor, and go listen to part one.  Amazon PPC the Wrong Way One mistake many sellers make is that they don’t structure their campaigns properly. They want to think that they can set up the campaign, and let it run. If you want to do the bare minimum and ignore any other aspect, there are a couple of things you should do.   You’ll want to set up and automatic campaign with a low bid. Probably, no more that $0.30. Each variation of the product should be separated into their own ad groups within the campaign. With the low bids you’re likely to turn a profit with any product. This is the simplest way, you relinquish all control. You probably won’t get many sales or impact your organic positioning, but it’s better than nothing. For more tips on what not to do, check out Brian’s training videos. Amazon PPC the Right Way If you want to do it correctly, you need to structure your campaign properly. That way you can read how the audience responds to the ads for each of your products. Advertising only affects about 10-15% of sales Amazon PPC Goals Most people don’t had an advertising plan. They just want to get to page one and thinks ads are the way to do it. Advertising only affects about 10-15% of sales. So if you’re on page 10, advertising isn’t going to get you to page 1. That’s just not realistic. A realistic goal for PPC would be to learn the audience so that you can position your product. You have to go back and identify the search terms that are showing your ads, that brings a shopper into your listing and converts to a sale. If you don’t know the terminology your audience is using, how do you target it? You need to learn the terminology your audience is using, then you can focus your listing to target that audience. If you do that, you are more likely to have a higher organic search position. Sometimes your ad campaign will be profitable and that’s great. Run with it, expand it as much as possible. Other times, you might find that you're losing money because it’s too expensive and not converting. However, that may not be a failed campaign because you can still learn from it. If, through advertising, it is raising your organic listing, then it could be profitable that way. Using Amazon PPC for Product Positioning So the next question is, how do you take what you learned from your campaign and use it for better organic search position? Through your Amazon PPC campaign you learned different search terms that draws shoppers into your listing. You might find that you convert really well on 5 of those search terms. However, you might find that only 2 of them have low enough competition that you have the chance to rank really high in them. If you tailor your listing to search terms that have low competition, it gives you a better chance of positioning your product higher in the niche search terms that you know convert. For Free video training from Brian, click on the video image below: Keyword Stuffing An old technique that used to work very well, was keyword stuffing. That is when you take every keyword that anyone might find your product through, and stuff them into your listing. The idea was that you could boost your ranking for all these keywords by just having them in the listing. Around mid-2016 Amazon changed the way they view relevancy and content matching when it came to keyword advertising. Before, they used a broad match search where they took all the words in your listing and matched them with the search terms. Now they also factor in phrase match, where if you have the exact phrase the buyer searched for,

  Brian Johnson of Sponsored Products Academy Today we have Brian Johnson of Sponsored Product Academy (& PPC Scope) to talk to us about PPC and the REAL reason for the  end of Amazon incentivized reviews. This is a guy that has been in ecommerce industry for years. He started out selling banking equipment on eBay for seven years before a friend pulled him into Amazon. He began launching his own private label products. This was about three years ago when Amazing Selling Machine launched. Soon after that he got in touch with a large company that was struggling on the Amazon platform and needed help. Brian slowly shifted into doing more consulting work once he saw the demand there. He found that the greatest need came down to visibility. He needed to do more marketing which meant Pay-per-click Amazon ads. Once he began researching Amazon PPC, he found that there simply wasn’t enough information out there. He decided he had to teach himself. Like many entrepreneurs, his success came about solving the problems he faced. End of Amazon Incentivized Reviews In October of 2016, Amazon announced the end of Amazon incentivized reviews. Sellers could no longer give products away in exchanged for a review. This was a major change because, until that point, incentivized reviews was the biggest ways for Amazon sellers to launch new products. In their press release, Amazon cited the reasons as wanting to improve the user experience. Which makes sense because so many reviews were fake. This started a bit of a frenzy among Amazon sellers. No one really knew where to go from there. It soon became clear that the best way forward was to focus on Amazon PPC. Sellers began to turn their attention, and their sole attention, to Amazon ads in order to drive traffic. It didn’t take long for Amazon PPC costs to begin to rise. Brian did some research and realized that the cost increase began about a week after Amazon’s announcement. It became quite clear that this was the new norm and not simply temporary spike. Amazon sellers began seeing advertising costs increased by as much as 5-10%. For Free video training from Brian, click on the video image below: Amazon’s Benefit It may have not been Amazon’s main intention for the end of Amazon incentivized reviews, but they did see a major increase in profit because of it. In the course of his research Brian saw that you were still able to use Amazon Vine. This is Amazon’s programme for paid reviews. Instead of using a third party option, you could pay to use Amazon’s program which starts at $2500 a product. Brain also found that Amazon makes a lot of money from PPC. Over a billions dollars a year. With PPC costs rising by 5-10%, that’s a lot of money Amazon made by eliminating Amazon incentivized reviews. How to Sell in a Post-Incentivized Review World You don’t want to get swept up in the Amazon PPC craze. Everyone is moving to PPC, they are flooding the market, and driving up costs. You need to figure out how to sell in a 2017 Amazon. Don’t Do List Don’t listen to seller support. One of the biggest mistakes Brian is seeing is following the wrong advice. They call up Seller Support which tells them to run one campaign and increase their bid. These reps are not trained property and they simply give bad advice. They don’t understand how the platform works. This works well for Amazon. They make more money and can quickly clear out their support tickets. It doesn’t work well for sellers that can afford to waste a lot of money by throwing it away in Amazon ads. Click here for video training on this. Best Practices Amazon PPC is a complex system. There is not one size fits all. Each product is different. They have different customers, different click through rates, so you have to run a solid PPC campaign. Not only does Amazon look at your products, but they also look at the customers. Sometimes they will show your ads to audiences that are related to your prod...

A lot of us sellers do while label existing products. It’s important that you don’t inadvertently break IP laws and get into Amazon legal issues. The best option is to hire a lawyer to run a search on that product. They will give you an opinion as to whether or not that product is likely to be problematic. To further protect yourself you want to add in a feature that no one else can deliver. For example, a membership program. If you’re selling a generic product, every quarter your members will get a newsletter where they can log into a system and get exclusive content. If you’re selling yoga pants, you can include a fitness routine. While the pants may be generic, that fitness routine is copyright. Avoiding Patent Issues There is a general rule that if you take a patented product, change something about it, it is no longer covered by the patent. For the most part that is true, at least for simple products. For more complex products, it may not hold up. An example is that Apple and Samsung have been battling for years over patented technology. While the phone was different, Samsung had used some patented technology in their phones. Be sure to consult an IP attorney on your products to avoid legal issues. Amazon Legal Issues Having a Limited company in the UK offers protection against liabilities. It prevents your personal assets being used to compensate legal issues for your company. If you’re doing business in the US, you’ll want to register your company in at least one US state. This should offer you some legal protections for your UK based company. It is highly recommended that you have a general liability policy to protect your company's’ losses should your product hurt somebody. If your company is a legal entity, like a Limited company or a LLC in the US, this will protect your personal assets. Product liability insurance is always a good idea to protect you from Amazon legal issues, but how vital it is depends on your product. If you’re selling t-shirts, the likelihood of somebody getting hurt is pretty low. However, if you’re selling those hoverboards that blew up, then the risk is much higher. Amazon Account Suspension Insurance There is a new type of insurance that is coming onto the market that protects you in case you run into Amazon legal issues and are dealing with account suspension. There are three types of insurance dealing with the different types of Amazon sellers. That is private label, wholesale, and retail arbitrage. There are different rates for each type of seller. It helps cover money lost when your account is suspended. They give you $500 to pay for Amazon Sellers Lawyer or another attorney to help with your plan of action. If you don’t get reinstated in 120 hours, they start paying your lost profits. Risk vs Reward One mistake people often make is that they don’t take the need of insurance seriously. The chances of your product injuring someone or of your getting sued is slim. However, if it were to happen, the reward for having insurance is astronomical. These insurance policy protect you in two ways. The first is that they cover the cost of the liability called indemnity. If your product were to burn someone’s house down like the hoverboard did, insurance would cover that payout. They will also provide a lawyer to defend you. These legal fees can become tens of thousands of dollars in the blink of an eye. Watch Amazon Legal Issues with CJ Rosenbaum Part 2 of 3

Today’s show is something that I feel is long overdue. I am always getting legal questions when it comes to selling on Amazon. We have with us CJ Rosenbaum, the founder of Amazon Sellers Lawyer, to help answer some questions about Amazon account suspension. CJ has been representing entrepreneurs ever since he graduated from law school. He got started with Amazon sellers after client started investigating buying an Amazon based business. After the client managed to buy the business, he immediately had issues with Amazon account suspension and ASINs getting knocked off. He came to CJ because when he tried to find someone for legal help and the only people in the industry were non-lawyer consultant types that didn’t know much about being a seller. CJ has always enjoyed the challenge of working with entrepreneurs. When he looked into, he found that there were really no lawyers involved. So he jumped in with both feet. He went from doing nothing but trying cases in court, to solely focusing on Amazon entrepreneurs. He has grown to four lawyers and six staff in New York. If you use Amazon Sellers Lawyer to handle your Amazon account suspension issue, you’ll know that whoever works on your case is a college educated paralegal. They are opening offices in London and Dublin and are looking to open an office in Mumbai. They have an office open in Shenzhen, China, with plans to expand into Guangzhou and Dongguan. Amazon Account Suspension The number fear of any Amazon seller is an Amazon account suspension. Not picking a bad product. Not shipping issues. It’s getting that email that Amazon has suspended your account, they’re holding your money, and charging you storage fees. Account suspension can be divided into two categories: non-intellectual property and intellectual property suspension. Non-intellectual property suspension is from late shipments, bad feedback, etc, and are not really legal issues. The other half is solely intellectual property. This is another brand complaining about you as a seller and doing a sweep of their listings claiming your violating intellectual property laws. About 95%-98% of the IP, intellectual property, claims, in the US, are entirely baseless. They are bogus complaints meant to thwart competition. These are coming from major brands like Wal-Mart, Samsung, Major League Baseball and other companies from around the world. CJ and his team stand up to these companies. Almost every time, these brands withdraw their complaints. Amazon Sellers Lawyer don’t charge outrageous fees for this service. If you hire a lawyer to defend you in court, it can quickly cost you tens of thousands of dollars. CJ is looking to get you back to selling without charging you an arm and a leg to do so. Amazon Account Suspension from Non-IP Complaints These are not really legal issues, it has more to do with Amazon’s internal regulation. They come from customer complaints about late shipments, bad feedback, and the like. The first step is to write a plan of action if you find that your account has been suspended because of a non-IP complaint. A plan of action is a practice in persuasive writing. You’re trying to persuade the person at Amazon to reinstate your selling privileges, rather than asking for more information or saying no. As lawyers, CJ and his team are trained to identify issues and write persuasively. Writing a Plan of Action There are three parts to a plan of action. Part 1 The root cause. This doesn’t mean admitting to doing something wrong that you didn’t do. You don’t have to admit to wrongdoing if you didn’t actually do something wrong. The root cause can usually be something that you can do better to avoid a customer getting a product that they feel is not authentic. You need to look into your account and figure out what cause the customer or Amazon to have an issue with your account. Part 2 The immediate corrective action that you took.

Get Started with Splitly The first thing to do when you get started with Splitly is to sync your Amazon account with Splitly. Splitly will then organize your products based on the best selling products. It also provides a hint as to what product you should start with. It will offer suggestions for each listing before you even start testing. For instance, if you are only using 5 of your 9 images, it will alert you. Images and Pricing The best place to start, when you’re ready to test, is with images and pricing. These are the easiest tests to run without much effort, and give very good results. Bear in mind that these are general suggestions and it will vary person to person. Even if you’re not willing or able to get new images of your products, you can still test you main image. Simply test one of your other images as your main. Pricing is another great test to run as long as you’re changing the price significantly. If you’re only adjusting is by $1, you’re not likely to see much improvement. However, if you alter it by $5, you’re probably going to see a large difference. The best technique is to start wide, and narrow down through testing. Let’s say you're testing $19.99 against $21.99, and you find that you get better results with $21.99. The next thing is to try $20.99 against $22.99 and see what performs better. Splitly Features One thing to keep in mind is how Amazon does it’s search results. Google isn’t going to boost a page in its results because it’s selling well. Amazon does. This is probably the single greatest factor in search ranking. So if you’re testing different price points, you will want to go with the one that has higher sales. Since this can complicate the test results, they released a new feature called Profit Beak. With this feature, you set the minimum and maximum price for the product. The software will then update your listing every hour, and try a different price point. This allows Splitly to gather data much faster and they can determine the best price based on profit and sales. You can adjust it so it focuses on one or the other. It can also test multiple other factors including keyword ranking and conversion. Keyword rank tracking is a standard piece of software that most people are familiar with. Now, you can tie it into Profit Beak. You can then tell the software that you don’t want to fall below number 10 on a keyword, and that become a new floor. So during testing, Splitly will monitor that and keep it ranked high enough. What You Can Test At its core, Splitly is a testing suite. When you get started with Splitly , the possibilities are endless. Unlike other tools, the software create more work for you because now you have to think of different ideas of how to tweak your listing. However, in the end, it will make you more money. You can test a title that is packed with keywords against one that isn’t. This is really useful because the effects happen quickly. You can see your ranking change within 10 or 20 minutes. It’s very useful if you’re testing your keywords. Your bullet points are another great test because it’s never easy to figure out the best way to go about it. It’s best not to stuff keywords in your bullet points. It’s best used for selling to potential buyers. You can look at the negative reviews of your competitors, and address those concerns in the bullets. Then you can split test them to figure out the best way to do it. How to reach Andrew Browne There is a lot of great resources at splitly.com. You can email them at hello@splitly.com as well as a live chat where you can ask them any questions you may have about the product. Watch How to Get Started with Splitly with Andrew Browne Part 2 of 2

Split testing is a technique you can use to test which variation performs better. It’s very common in web design. An online store may want to find which color checkout button converts the best. They would then show half their audience one colour, and the rest another and track conversion rates. It’s very important to split test your Amazon listing to help optimise it. Split Test your Amazon Listing Andrew Browne co-founded Splitly as a way to use this technique with Amazon listings. This way you are able to test different aspects of your listing, to fine-tune every feature so it converts as good as it can. You can test different main images and title to find out which gets better traction. This uses objective data rather than your subjected intuition. Best Place when Getting Started Main Image It is the first thing your customers see therefore has a major impact on getting potential buyers’ attention. If you split test your Amazon listing image, you can determine the best picture that will get people to click on your product. One success story that Andrew shared was one he did on his own product. He wasn’t looking for results, he was merely testing the software. In doing so, he found that by changing the main image, to one he thought were do poorly, he improved his conversion rate by 50%. Price Another great place to start is your price. It’s easy to test and is incredibly impactful on your conversion and you can get your results quickly. Other places to test are your title, bullets, and product description. Split Test Your Amazon Listing with Splitly Splitly is an amazing tool that does the split testing for you. When your start you test, your listing updates at midnight, Amazon time, which is GMT-8. The reason for that is Amazon does your reports based on that time. Then every night at midnight, you listing updates with the other version of your listing. While it’s not true AB testing, it’s the best you can do with Amazon’s limitations, and it’s better than using your own intuition. Which Products to Split Test It’s important to understand that split testing isn’t for saving products. If you have a failing product, it won’t help to split test to try and save it. You need to have enough traffic in order to get enough data to make improvements. You want to split test products that are already doing well in order to improve them and boost them a few percent. You’re looking to improve upon products that are already getting traffic and sales. Timeline for Testing How long it takes to split test a listing depends on a few factors. The more sales your product gets, the quicker you’ll get your results. If you’re selling 5 units a day, Splitly will be able to collect enough data much quicker than if you’re selling 1 unit a day. The significance of the difference places a large factor. If you’re testing a price difference of 5 cents, it might not affect the sales enough to determine a winner. Whereas if you’re testing a $5 difference, it will have a larger effect and the software will be able to determine which is better. There is no specific number, it just depends on how long it takes Splitly to gather enough data to give you an answer. It may determine that there isn’t enough difference to go one way or another. Watch How to Split Test your Amazon Listing with Andrew Browne Part 1 of 2

The great thing about running an Amazon business is the freedom it allows in your personal life. You can go on holiday as you want and you can take a day off as needed. You set your own schedule and make your own deadlines. That also creates one of the more difficult aspects of your job as an Amazon seller, time management. Today on the show we have David Aggiss and we’ll be discussing time management techniques when you’re running an online business. Time Management for eCommerce If you are first starting out, the challenge is finding enough time to work on your business. You have your full-time job, maybe a spouse and children, then your Amazon business on top of that. It’s going to lead to some late nights and long days. That’s the struggle of it. It’s important to set aside time-blocks for specific tasks. If you start working without this, you’ll end up working on a number of things and accomplishing nothing. Customer service is a daily task. You’re probably going to be in Seller Central a lot anyway, which is a good thing so you can respond to customer questions and other issues as they arise. Once a week, you want to look at your listings. See if there is any way to improve them. You should take a look at your PPC and keywords to make sure they are performing how you want. Time Management when Expanding Your Business Expanding your business is an evening job. If you are looking to research new product lines or find new suppliers, make sure you have a few weeks available where you can put in some serious evening hours. You’re going to have to work everyday with emails back and forth with your suppliers, especially if they’re in China. Unless you can get on a Skype call, this process could take a week or more because of the time difference. Skype is recommended to help speed up this exchange. However, keep in mind that if you’re looking into several suppliers, that Skype could get overwhelming. It is easier to maintain all the information if you limit it to email since that has understood, built-in limitations. Also, you will have a record of everything discussed. Outsourcing If you find that you don’t have the time to handle everything that you need, consider outsourcing. Be aware of what your strengths and weaknesses are. Focus on your strengths, outsource your weaknesses. If you are making enough money from your Amazon business that you can afford to outsource, then you are probably pretty proficient at the day-to-day Amazon tasks. Then you’ll want to continue to handle those. If your background is in web design, then build your website yourself. If, however, you don’t know the first thing about building a website and you have no idea how to work on social media, outsource those. Chances are you can find someone that will do it better and faster. If a task is going to take you a week, but someone who is an expert can do it in a day, pay them to do it. The task will get done several days soon and you now have that week to work on something you’re an expert in. Focus Management While time management is important, focus management is as well. Like I said before, you have the freedom to make your own schedule, but you don’t have a boss to keep you on track. It’s easy to lose focus and let your business suffer because of it. You have to keep in mind why you want to run your own business. Whether it’s to have a luxury house, nice cars, or to simply spend more time with your family. Whatever it is, whether it changes over time, always remember that and let it be your motivation to stay focused. Watch Time Management for eCommerce with David Aggiss Part 2 of 2

Today on the show, I have one of the first contacts I made when starting this show, David Aggiss. I had him on, all the way back in November of 2015. Since then, he has given up the day job and is his own full-time boss. He has a few business, one of which being an Amazon business. We’re going to dive in and find out David’s strategy for selling on Amazon.com. Getting Started selling on Amazon.com David started learning about Amazon in April/May of 2015 and began receiving some training. In about four months, he started selling his own product. He took off quite well in Q4. At the time, incentivised reviews were still allowed so he made that a large part of his strategy. His sales exceeded his expectations going from 10 units a day to 30 on average. He launched his second product in Q4 last year and focused on his listing since incentivised reviews were no longer available. Finding a product There are a lot of techniques for finding products. David decided to simply look through Amazon. This is a great technique for finding good products. Look for lower prices and low competition items when first starting out. If you find a good product and the listing isn’t optimised, then there is definitely an opportunity for you to sweep in and take over. You can use Google Trends, Merchant Words to help you find what popular and what people are looking for. David didn’t use any tools to find products, like Jungle Scout etc. He didn’t know what his products would be so he wouldn’t know what to search. Once he picked the products, he verified through Jungle Scout that there was a demand. Now he has about 5 products he’s working through launching. He search Amazon to find his products. He narrowed his search to products between $15 and $50 and looked for products that interested him. If you are interested in the product then it’s easier to relate and figure out what those buyers are looking for. Then you can tailor your listing to those shoppers. Selling on Amazon.com Post-Incentivised Reviews Getting reviews has become much more difficult since Amazon banned incentivised reviews. With this new world, you have to pay more attention to reviews since you can no longer give products away in exchange for a review. One thing to pay attention to when getting started with a new product is the number a reviews your competition has. If they have thousands of reviews, it’s going to be much harder to compete because it is more difficult to reach a competitive level. Make sure you competitors only have a hundred or so reviews so you can better compete. Then you can use other services to help get legitimate reviews. You can also try to get traffic coming in from off Amazon.Ads on Facebook, Google, and Bing are great places to start. There are also ways you can use Amazon to boost your listing. Spending heavy on PPC at the beginning is a good way to drive traffic when selling on Amazon.com. Once your listing gets going, then you can cut back to where it’s profitable. One thing David mentioned was participating in Lightning Deals. These deals on put on by Amazon that offers their shoppers very good discounts for a very limited amount of time. There is a link underneath your Advertising tab on the main screen of Seller Central. It’s not all the time, but Amazon will offer you a Lightning Deal when it’s relevant. This is a great way to drive a lot of sellers to you listing and gives a nice boost to new products. Amazon sets the parameters. They will tell you the time slot, the minimum number of units, and the sale price which is based on your sales history. David, for example, recently got a time slot for 1am to 7am. Not the best time as many people aren’t looking at Amazon so early in the morning. Despite that, he had an additional 40 sales from the deal. Watch Selling on Amazon.com with David Aggiss Part 1 of 2

AMS - Amazon Marketing Services It’s offers more robust to you PPC advertising. The top banner ad on Amazon, that is usually a link to someone’s storefront, that’s Amazon Marketing Services. Sometimes there are ads under the Buy box, those are Amazon Marketing Services ads. It’s more exposure and drives more customers to your products which, in turn, could lead to more sales. Getting Started With Amazon Marketing Services It’s only accessible to vendors. This used to be invite only until Amazon started Vendor Express, which is open to everyone. Now you can get access to Amazon Marketing Services once you have a purchase order. So once Amazon orders product from you, then you have access to AMS and all the benefits that come with it. To learn how to get started with Vendor Express, please check out my interviews with Will Tjernlund. AMS Workaround If you don’t want to go down the route of Vendor Express, there is a work around. You can sell Amazon a product that you don’t intend to keep in stock. Go to aliexpress and buy 10 units of some item. Tell Amazon that you want to sell it to them and they will request samples. Once that process starts, you should be able to then sign up for AMS. Once in Amazon Marketing Services, you are able to advertise any products, not just the ones you have in Vendor Express. Not only can you advertise products that are in your Seller Central, you can advertise products for items that Amazon doesn’t list you as the seller of. This is very beneficial if you have a Merch by Amazon account. If you sell Merch, you don’t have access to ads. With Amazon Marketing Services, you can then run ads for you t-shirts. You can check out my interview with Chris Green if you are interested in getting started with Merch by Amazon. Issues with Vendor Express It may not be worth it, for everyone, to utilize Vendor Express beyond getting your foot in the door. There are many issues with it because they take over the listing and they tend not to optimise it so it converts. However, it’s almost a necessity for some. For example, Anthony has a friend that selling a health and beauty product that he makes from home. Since he makes it from home it is impossible for him to get ungated. However, by selling through Vendor Express he is now able to get past that since it’s technically Amazon selling it, not him. Vendor Express is making strides to improve the listings by making some of it available to the sellers to be edited. Some aspects, like the title, you may need to ask Amazon and jump through hoops for, but it is possible to optimise your listing. Get in touch with Anthony: He has written two books about selling on Amazon: Bootstrapping E-commerce: How to Import and Sell on Amazon Bootstrapping E-commerce: Advanced Amazon Tactics You can contact him at he publishing company anthony@reidandwrightpublishing.com Zonblast offer an optimising service which is a great place to start. You can get more information by emailing support@zonblast.com. Watch Amazon Marketing Services with Anthony Lee Part 3 of 3

Basic Launch Strategy for an Amazon Product Launch There are a few things to remember with an Amazon product launch. You need to get as much traffic and sales velocity for your product as quickly as possible. This is a given in any sales capacity. Also, you need to high rankings early, as in on the first page, using an important key word related to your product. Run a promotion when your product goes live which will get people talking and stimulate sales velocity. You can make your products even more visible by turning on the automatic sponsor ads. Lastly, go after some reviews and use family and friends, who will be sure to help your product out in the early days. Running a Promotion It goes without saying, you need to find the primary and most relevant keyword for your product. This is something that people will be able to identify and make the connection to you as the one selling said product. You should make sure the keyword(s) are in the title of your product AND inside the URL address. People can be very lazy so when they are looking for something they are overjoyed when they can find it with relative ease. You can run Facebook ads, external ads and even banner ads from Amazon Marketing Service. Aside from Anthony’s launch too, Zonblast, you can also use Keyword Inspector and Merchant Words. Spiking Algorithms in One Day versus Over Several Days This has a lot to do with the total views your product actually gets during an Amazon product launch. If you have a low number of searches in a month, say under 20,000, you could see sales velocity stimulation in one day, see some solid movement, as opposed to over several days. However, if you only spike with search hit one hour of each day, your average will be lower. It would be much better for you to spread it out over a number of days for better results. Anywhere from 4 to 7 days seems to be a good time frame in which to work from. It’s all about averages. If you can spread your views and sales over a longer period of time, it will average out to a total that will look much better to you as the seller and to a potential buyer as well. Product Manipulation, Spiking a Listing and Terms of Service Make sure you understand Amazon’s new Terms of Service. ‘Free’ sales or giveaways are now considered product manipulation. The big reason the Terms of service were put into place was to stop people from operating multiple accounts and thus being able to receive ‘sales’ of the same product anywhere from 50 to 100 times during an Amazon product launch. Specifically, Amazon are trying to stop buyers from receiving codes to allow them to do this for free. You can now have your product suspended for this. Always remember this and you’ll be fine: Real sales are unique sales to an individual. Reviews Can Help but Don’t Depend On Them Great customer reviews are always welcome but you should not depend on them to help boost sales of your product. While Amazon won’t remove or stifle a review if a customer got a discount on your product (remember though, no coupon codes for free) they can take down good reviews, paid in full by the customer, if they have been attacking the buyer accounts. There is also some unpredictability overall in terms of the reason or reasons why Amazon removes some reviews. All you can do is turn the review machine on, have a great follow up sequence in place, and get reviews as naturally as you can. The best way to success is to have a great quality product and then you can worry about everything else. Watch Amazon Product Launch with Anthony Lee Part 2 of 3

Optimising your Amazon listing basically means setting up your listings to get the most traffic and the most sales. This is especially important because you want to be set up in the best possible position for success. Optimisation does not happen instantly but it is a process emanating from having the right foundation set up. Your optimization before your first product listing is actually the laying of foundation for your products or business. Basic Elements for Optimising your Amazon Listing Your Images Your images are the most important part of this process. First, understand the direction to which you are driving. The first goal is to increase traffic and the image is the first thing that people see. It’s the image that causes people to click on your product. You want to use the best, most captivating picture as you main image. You need to optimise your image for all browsers and ensure it is captivating. On mobile, you want to use portrait images because they appear bigger on mobile devices. Use various shots from different angles. It is highly recommended that you use staged shots. These are the images where the product is shot where it can be found in real life. For example, if you are selling kitchen knives, have images of them in a kitchen next to a cutting board. Include images with people using the product because then the buyers can imagine themselves using the products.. Use infographics if you need to include complex information in a simple form. Title When optimising your Amazon listing, a good title has to be keyword rich and feature oriented. It needs to be keyword rich because if has to be found by the Amazon algorithm. But it has needs to be easily read by humans. Your title can give the targeted buyers a brief description of the benefits and what the product does. Ensure the most important information is captured in the first 80 characters as this will ensure this section shows in all browsers. Don’t be too specific if your product has multiple uses. If you are selling a cat brush, it is likely that it can be used on dogs and other animals. Rather than saying “Cat brush” in your title, use “Pet brush.” This will attract owners of all types of pets rather than limiting yourself to a specific type. Bullets and Description Description and bullets play an important role in SEO as they are indexed by Amazon. The bullets give details on the uses of the product. The first three points are always the most important since those are the one that show up in mobile. The description area is important; put the most important information in the first part as this is what shows on mobile devices. Description also gives technical specification and makes your listing more professional. Your Price Point As buyers understand the details of the product through the product image they become more comfortable with the price you set for the products. Ensure the image design justifies the price set for the products. Watch Optimizing your Amazon Listing with Anthony Lee Part 1 of 3

How to Become a Wholesaler It’s more than just growing your business on Amazon. You have to actively contact and cold call retailers in order to sell your products. It’s the next step in the process. You’ve sold on Amazon, you’ve diversified through other channels, and you’ve built up your brand. If you want to become a wholesaler, you have to take the time to build your brand. It’s not an overnight task. It takes a lot of time to build a brand. Approach Local Retailers It might not be a good idea to start large chains like Tesco or Wal-Mart. The better idea would be to find a smaller one in your area. Make contact with the owner or decision maker, and set up a presentation where you can make a pitch on your products. A fallback would be to create a PDF that goes over all the information. You can them email the document to them and follow up a few days later with a phone call. Go to Exhibitions You may not have the money to get a booth or a stand, but you can go as a guest. You can find local retails and get their contact information. Then you can send them an email and PDF where you talk about your company and make a pitch. One vital aspect, in order to become a wholesaler, is making these connections. Build Your Catalog You can’t go to these retailers and sell some generic widget. It needs to be unique. It also helps to have several products in your catalog before you become a wholesaler. Bear in mind that even though it may take a year or two for your wholesale business to get going, the payoff happens when retailer orders tens of thousands of products at once. Immense Potential The great thing about wholesale is the potential. It really is possible to to do great things with it. Whether you want to do it to make some extra income or make it into a large operation. Manuel has done this. He currently does about $300,000 on Amazon, and close to $1.5 million in wholesale. When you factor in his consulting and sourcing income, he is making around $2.5 million a year. The potential is there if you’re willing to put in the time and effort. Get in touch with Manuel at importdojo.com and get a free eBook and newsletter. Watch How to Become a Wholesaler with Manuel Becvar Part 3 of 3

Building a Brand Off-Amazon As we discussed in the previous episode, building a brand away from Amazon is a very good idea. Amazon owns you and your listing. They control everything. They can suspend your account at anytime. If you sell exclusively on Amazon, that puts you in a difficult situation. It’s a good idea to have multiple selling channels. That way, if any one goes down for whatever reason, you have other sources of income. Amazon only accounts for about 20 - 30% of Manuel’s income. Now, if something happens to his Amazon account, it wouldn’t shut down his business. Another reason for building a brand is that Amazon is a race to the bottom on pricing. If you come up with a new product, in a couple months a lot of sellers have copied it and now everyone is lowering prices to get sales. If you have your own ecommerce site or wholesale, you can dictate the prices as long. Off-Amazon Sales Channel When building a brand, there are several options when it comes to other sales channels. There is jet.com where you can signup to be a third-party seller. Wal-Mart recently bought them for $3.3 billion. You can also sign up to be a third party seller on walmart.com. When it comes to these these third-party selling routes, it's important to bear in mind that it may take awhile to be ungated. For those in the UK, you can use tesco.com. The downside to these platforms is that you are still a third-party that is subject to Wal-Mart or Jet or Tesco, etc. Shopify The best security would be owning the platform with Shopify. That way you control everything. It takes a lot more work than with Amazon as you don’t have the benefit of them shipping everything. However, the big issue is getting traffic. You can always find people on Amazon, but getting them to come to your site takes work, like all aspects of building a brand. You have to work on SEO in order to be found. One strategy is to go to other sites where your target audience is. You can find forums or go to Reddit and talk to people that are interested in your category. For example, Manuel is selling VR products so he goes to a Reddit forum about VR and talks to people about a new headset Samsung is releasing. This can drive traffic to your Shopify store which will help your Google rank. Ads are another way to boost rank and drive traffic. Google or Bing as are effective. You can use Facebook ads for conversion and email signup; not so much for selling products. It can be more expensive and it takes a lot of work. But if you have good content, good SEO and traffic you can easily rank on page 1 or 2 of Google. That is building a brand that has visibility on the most powerful website on the planet: Google.  Watch Building a Brand with Manuel Becvar Part 2 of 3

Importance of a Social Media Strategy Today on the show we have Manuel Becvar of Import Dojo. As Will Tjernlund mentioned during his interview, Amazon wants to increase their own private label operation. As Amazon become a larger competitor, you’ll want to establish your brand off-Amazon. Once you have a strong audience, this will not only help you sell more on Amazon, but give you the leverage you need if you wanted to sell on other channels. An important step to this, is creating a social media strategy. There are differing opinions on social media. Some people say it’s a complete waste of time while others say it’s the cornerstone of their business. Social media can be a huge driver of traffic for your listings. When creating a brand, it’s important not to overlook the critical component that is social media. Return on Investment It’s understandable that people may think that social media is a complete waste of time. You’re not going to get instant results. You won’t see anything in a couple months. However, if you stick with your social media strategy, and keep building your social media presence, you will start to see in impact in a year or two. Manuel Becvar doesn’t run PPC ads anymore because of the success of the success of his social media platform. Now he can take the money he would have spent on ads, and use it on continuing to build on social media, and put it into his products. You will have to invest in your social media. Whether that’s you putting in time, or paying someone to do it. Either way you decide to do it will still be beneficial. Even if you’re paying someone to put out content every week, you will still make more from sales than you would have if you put that money into ads. Immediate ROI If you’re creating a brand, then you might not have the audience for it to make much difference. However, you can always outsource it. There are sites, like Famebit, that will bring you together with influencers. These are people have have very large following on social media. You write up a campaign and get offers from different people. They will then review your product and send it out to there tens of thousands of followers. This can drive 2000 - 3000 people to your Amazon listings. Manuel Bacvar estimates that this led to 60 -70 additional sales in the first week. Well worth the $500 he spent on it because he wouldn’t have gotten that kind of return with PPC. You could even contact them directly. If you go on social media and look up people that have a large audience and send them a message. This will let you target those that would buy your product. Long Term Approach As much as we all love to get a quick turnaround on our investments, you have to understand that your social media strategy takes time. Again, you can outsource this if you’d like. You can hire people to run your social media accounts and they will post new content weekly and maintain it. There are a few techniques you or your VA can do to help grow your audience. The first step, obviously, is to post regular content. You need to be posting at least once a week on most platforms. Go onto other accounts that target the same audience to post similar content and follow their followers. The idea is that once you follow them, they will look at your content and will be more likely to follow you since they are already following a similar account. Finding Your Audience When planning your social media strategy, it’s important to target the right people. One way to do that is to target people that have purchased your products. This way you know they are interested in the category you’re selling in. Manuel has grown his mailing list to over 800 subscribers in 2 ½ years. It’s very simple. As we all know, we need to put information in the packaging. This way we can encourage buyers to leave a review on Amazon, or to contact us, rather than Amazon, if they have an issue. Manuel goes a bit further and offers an additional 6 month warran...

Maintaining Ongoing FBA Inventory There are many things that you have to take into consideration. You have to think of your lead time and everything that goes into it. Also consider receiving time at Amazon. It might take awhile for them to check it in. When planning a strategy for your FBA inventory, you should plan for the worst case scenario. There could be issues with it getting backed up at port or issues with your supplier. Using Software to help FBA Inventory Management A great thing about using software for forecasting, is that they can keep track of that, whether it’s Jeremy’s Forecastly or another piece of software. It tracks inbound inventory, current inventory, what you have in manufacturing, and true sales velocity. You also need to consider spikes in sales. You may have consistent sales every day, but a couple times a month your sales spike. This is why you need to build in a safety stock. That gives you a cushion so that if you get a surge in sales, you have enough stock to cover it until your next shipment gets there. Forecastly Forecastly has many business that use its service. The software can then use this anonymous data to make predictions about Amazon as a whole. It takes ASIN level data over the past 30, 60, and 90 days to makes prediction about future sales numbers. Their main focus is demand forecasting. It considers your recent sales including stock out periods. If you were out of stock, it can determine what you would have sold had the product been available. It also tracks the variability of demand which is something you can’t do in a spreadsheet. The main thing you have to be conscious of when managing your FBA inventory is, what do you need to replenish, when do you need to replenish it, and how many units do you need to replenish. Forecastly tracks all that while monitoring your inventory and will recommend your orders. Many sellers want to use a 60 day trend to determine their sales velocity which is a bad idea. If you selling in an upward trend, meaning your sales are growing, then your sales were much lower 60 days ago. This will make your average too low. Forecastly uses a 30 day trend to get the most up to date projections. False Rule of Thumb We, here at Amazing FBA, love a rule of thumb. Unfortunately, when it comes to FBA inventory, many sellers follow a rule of thumb that won’t help them, and could hurt them. It’s the idea that you need to have X amount of days worth of inventory. Whenever they place their order, they bring it back to this magic number. For example, if you wanted to maintain 90 days of inventory and you order monthly with a 30 lead time. When it’s time to make an order, you have 60 days of inventory. Based on this, you would order 30 days of inventory. You don’t need that much inventory. You wouldn’t need to order for another month because you have a 30 day lead time and you’re tying up cash in stock you don’t need. The rationale behind this method is security. The attempt to avoid stock outs by keeping a large amount of stock on hand. Future of Amazon according to Jeremy Biron Amazon will continue growing their own private label brands. So Amazon is now your competitor. International markets are growing. The European markets are booming. If you’re having success in the US, you’ll want to take those products to the UK and the rest of Europe. That isn’t as easy as it sounds. You have to come up with a separate replenishment strategy as well as deal with the tax regulations. There is an opportunity, though. Especially in Germany where 40% of the sellers are non-German, and very few are American. That means they are willing to buy from foreigners, but not many Americans are there yet. As Amazon grows, the more warehouse space they will need. They are investing in new space, but they don’t want to overdo it. You will likely see seller-fulfilled-prime see some growth as a solution to this problem though will come with its own issues.