Building Your Amazon.com Store - Tribe Meeting 5/23/2015

Hey, what's up, tribe? No, that's not. That's not us. Oh, hey, tribe.

Ryan Moran here with your neighborhood friendly Sean Coyne, and we are drinking the official coffee of the tribe. It's called Coffee Cult. K O F F E E K U L, T. I don't know why I'm in the mood to do a commercial for Coffee Cult, but it's the official tribe coffee. The official coffee of the tribe. Our tribe. Not the Cleveland Indians. We are.

We have an official yogurt.

What?

Someone just had an official yogurt. NFL official yogurt of NFL.

What the hell? How do you have a yogurt that's official? I love yogurt.

Okay, so actually, on a sort of serious note, there is a tribe member who produces coffee called Coffee Cult. It's the best coffee. We drink it every week. When you see us drinking coffee, we're actually drinking it because we like it. So it is kind of the official coffee. We've never talked about it. So. Coffee Cult. The official coffee of the tribe. 2K's coffee cult. K, U L, T. I had something smart to say to kick things off.

We already messed that one up. So let's just jump into a topic I wanted to talk about today. I got a lot of messages from y' all this week with product ideas, which is really cool, but I also got a lot of bad ones sent to me. So before we go into talking about, wow, coffeecault has a bunch of different ones now. They must really be expanding. Anyway, there's a few things I want to talk about regarding product selection and product creation, because there seem to be some misconceptions happening. I think I've said it 1001 times, so today's going to be 1002. You are not building a Amazon business. Yeah, okay, well, yes, that's true. You're also. So let's go smaller, more Microsoft. You are not building a house.

I don't know what you're looking for.

It starts with a P. Okay, you're not making. Thank you, Ralph. Ralph is not selling a product, okay? You're not selling a product. You're building a business, okay? And a business usually has multiple products. Thanks, Ralph. You're with me today. Can you come over? Can you get to Austin, Texas, like Sky stat to help me run this?

So listen, if you can't think of.

At least.

4, 5, 3 to 5 products. If you can't think of at least 3 to 5 products in a market, don't go into that business. So there's people who. This happens every round. So if this was you this week, don't feel bad, but this happens many, many times. Every round is somebody will send me an email or a message and it'll say, hey, what do you think about stamps? And I'll say, no, that's a bad. That I wouldn't go, that's not a business. And they say, okay, how do you feel about sticky notes? I know it's not a business. You got to think broader than this. Okay, how do you feel about.

Remote controls? And it's just like, just random product after random product after random product. So here's the question. Here's the question. It's not what product are you selling? It's what person are you serving? So I used to do an example where, when I taught information businesses, we used to take the example of the dating market. So let's say that you sell a dating market. You sell a dating market, you sell a dating product. So it's for guys looking to meet the love of their life. Let's just go with that. That's a product. So what else might that person buy? They'll buy.

Anybody.

They'll buy dating, they'll buy online dating stuff. They'll buy fitness stuff. They'll buy making money stuff. They'll buy looks stuff. They'll buy stuff about.

Okay, teeth whitening. There's a whole list of things that help them along their path of what their goal is rather than just handing them the one thing and saying, this is your product. So you've heard me use the word consolidation a hundred times. It's this big, scary word. Amazon has consolidated. For all intents and purposes, it's consolidated. The consolidation is still maturing, but it has consolidated. Profit margins are slimmer. Competition is more fierce. You can't compete long term anymore unless you're thinking like a business. It's just what it takes. Now, that's what happens on channels. So if you don't, if you're thinking product to product, you've missed it. You have missed the boat. You have to think about who it is that you're serving and how you can serve that person with multiple products. And that is the only way that you build this business, the only way that it survives today. That's the only way that it exists. Even something like, let's use the coffee as an example. Now, this is a big operation they have. I mean, they're roasting it in house. They have a bunch of machinery. They're a bit of a. They're not your Standard type of business that we all talk about. This is kind of an exception. They're more in the tribe for the marketing piece of it than they are for the product creation piece. They've got that piece. They've been doing that for a while. And for them, their business is you buy one, one coffee you like, they've got a whole line of other different kinds of flavors and roasts, and at some point they might come out with a different food item that they'll make in house. So you've got to think bigger than just one type of product that you're selling. And I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I got a lot of messages this week that were you shaking your head. Do you get these two? What do you think of this one random product? Because I found low competition and decent volume. Okay, what are the four other products? Well, I don't know yet. This is my starting point. Okay. Answer the question of who you're serving first. Then the product piece becomes really, really easy. So newsflash, tribe people.

Our conversations are going to move far beyond Amazon and far more advanced than the people who are scrambling for the scraps on Amazon soon. That is just as a community, we are already talking about going for the blood that nobody is going for off of Amazon. That's just where.

The next frontier of opportunities are. So in order to make that work, you can't just be thinking about.

The little.

Sub niches on Amazon. We're talking about building a business which requires going to outside traffic, which we'll talk about in coming weeks. Would you add anything to that, Sean?

I would say it's not even Amazon specific, that's just business specific. Like you do not start a business to just sell one thing. Like think about like let's say Tesla. Tesla has a great market. Like Tesla is looking for a person that's interested in technology that wants to be on the cutting edge, that wants the newest, the best. Every time it comes out we were talking about that, their model just gets updated. They're not trying to target to mom and pop in the Midwest because that's not their market. So while they're selling really cool technology, it's all to the same person. The person that buys the Tesla probably wants Tesla Wall. The person that buys Tesla Wall would.

Love to have a Tesla. Actually, that's a fantastic example because five years ago, Tesla rolled out their first model, which was the Roadster. The Roadster didn't make money. The technology wasn't there yet and everybody was like, this company has no legs. They're not going to be profitable. And Elon Musk is like, the point isn't to be profitable. The point is to get customers. And so they started getting customers and they rolled out the S and they still weren't profitable. And then they sold enough of them and had enough back orders that they started to become profitable. And what happened to the stock price from $30 to $200 basically in a month? Because all of a sudden everybody's like, oh, I get it. Now they're going after customer acquisition, they're serving a specific person and their plan was first going to roll out the, the sports car. It's going to target this many people, but that's what we're going to do to get our foot in the door. Then we're going to roll out the luxury sedan. Then it's going to be the Everyman's model, which is the X, which comes out later this year. And then they said this 10 years ago. Then we're going to roll out solar panels, then we're going to roll out custom charging stations. And you see it all happening. They said 10 years ago they had a 10 year, 20, 25 year vision for this business and now they're only profitable 10 years in. Now our horizon is products. Businesses obviously is going to be shorter than that. It might be 10 months. But what is that leading product and then what are those other products that are going to surround that? When you answer that for the person that you're targeting, then you get it. Then you have gotten.

There's a really great. I don't know if you know Simon Sennick is like a motivational speaker, but one quote is people don't buy what.

You do, they buy why you do it.

I think that's exactly what companies like Tesla, Apple, any company that has a cult following.

Like Coffee Cult.

Like Coffee Cult.

Yeah.

And one of the big mistakes, and if you've got an up and running business at this point, if you're not getting started, this is a writer downer. The one thing that you need to be focusing on once you have consistent sales is turning those consistent sales into a cool following. Because that is how you stand out among everybody else. No matter what happens in the economy, in Amazon, in rule changes, it's taking that group of sales and bringing them into a rabid following and repeat buyers. That's how you until you really, really stand out long term. In the yoga space, before we sold, we were doing it through, we were starting to build a blog, we were starting to Put together a podcast and we had the Facebook page and we shared a lot of content on that Facebook page we had started. If we still kept the company, we would have put a lot of effort into it, but we sold the company. So it runs it now is doing that. But that was kind of our focus as we were transitioning. As we were making sales, we were moving over to building a full following on the Facebook page through an email list, through blog, through a podcast. All these ways that we were going to connect with these customers outside of the channel that everybody is scrambling for, which is Amazon, and then instead creating a group of cult followers that will then send to Amazon when we have a new product, we have a new sale, we want to spike sales or whatever it is that's building a real company. Now, I want to deviate from our standard model today because I want to make sure today that everybody who's on the chat box, everybody who is with us live, is caught up as far as action, items, steps before we move into where we're going next. So if you're on the hangout and you want to unmute yourself, I'd like to hear where you are in the process and anything that we can do to clear any hurdles for you going and catching up to having products ordered, having a market chosen. Is there anything that is holding you back? I really need your feedback here in order to serve you best moving forward in the Facebook group through email. So if you're on the chat box, please say where you are in the process. For those of you on the hangout, if you're willing to share where you're at, the process, if you're new to this business, few of you that have been at this for a while, I know where you're at. But I'd really like that feedback.

Yeah, I'll go first.

Sure.

I've narrowed down to two suppliers which I've ordered samples from and I have paid them and they are on their way. So I'm sort of in the process of waiting to review those and then place an order. So my task list for this weekend is to set up a sort of draft listing.

And do some of the product code, the barcode and stuff like that, get things like that sorted with Amazon and get.

Approved for FBA shipping, things like that. So that when I have the products and can place an order, I can sort of turn that around quickly.

Good. Is there any points of confusion that we could clear up or do you feel pretty well on top of things at this point?

I feel pretty well, on top of things.

Yeah, I'm sort of just waiting on reviewing the products and then need to talk a bit about design and stuff. But no, I think I'm pretty on top of things. I'm just sort of waiting.

Okay, cool. There is this point at which you've done all you can and there's the waiting game. We'll talk about what to do in that waiting game. We'll do a lot to kind of prepare for when things hit the shelves. But the waiting game is. It can be brutal. That month or so when you're just in between. Yeah, it'll be the longest four weeks of your life. Was it Danny that was just about to say something?

Oh, it was Gavin. Go ahead, Gavin.

Yeah, cheers, Rowan. Mark Quindry is decided on product again. Samples are on the way and I'm working on my listing.

My product is more compared. If I look at ranking and my ability to rank.

I should be listing it in automotive. It can fall in automotive or outdoor.

Automotive being restricted, I have to have a full E commerce site on the back end of it. But looking long term. I'm trying to decide.

Is it worth.

Trying to establish myself on that platform? Because I believe now Amazon is also not allowing me to add a second category. So it's kind of the category I land in now is the category that I have to stay in. With this initial product.

I have identified my next four to five products. So I'm not going after a single product. And most of these products will straddle automotive and outdoor. So that's kind of where I'm sitting. Do I kind of dig down delay and get something just to get into automotive because it's less competitive to rank or just get selling and get into outdoor?

Well, so the question is not so much what the product is, but what category to put it in, Correct?

Yeah.

Well, good news. It's really, really easy to change categories. So go put it up.

Even though restricted. Even though I'll be moving back into.

I understand. So put it outdoors where you can get up and live tomorrow. And then if you want, you can start the process of getting approved for automotive. Because that process is there advantage to that? Well, the advantage is that you'll have less competition for number one seller tags or for positioning in certain categories, which might give you some additional exposure. On a macro level, not a huge advantage. But less competition in certain categories can give you more number one seller tags and a little bit extra exposure. But overall, is that going to hold you back? Not really. But if that's a route that you wanted to go. Getting around those restrictions is actually fairly straightforward. Actually.

Their limitations on getting into those categories is much lower than they may make it sound. Having an E commerce platform means you basically have a dot com with a storefront to it. It's very, very simple to get around.

Yeah. Because I've hustled and kind of built quite a rudimental e commerce site in a couple of days.

But I don't know if they try and audit through the platform and see if there's any back end to it or.

No, no. So.

In the supplement they don't do.

Like an audit, right?

They don't KPMT doing an audit. No.

In the supplement space they ask for things like receipts from customers and people will just forward receipts from their manufacturer. Like the order. The order receipt. Amazon, like great. A receipt. I mean it's like a receipt. Yeah, I mean it's like forward as an invoice that you're taking from customers on your E commerce platform. Here's. Well, I bought this from myself. Here's the receipt.

Right.

You're approved.

It's very simple to get through. It's more to slow down the number of people entering into a market than it is anything else. Cool.

Because I also see the referral fee between the categories is quite considerable. On a percentage basis. You're talking about probably a 20% more referral fee.

In outdoor versus automotive. So.

That again is another. I mean, you put that onto the bottom line. Extrapolate that. Over a thousand units and this does make a difference.

I didn't know that. So you got a couple coaching clients in automotive you had on the client.

Oh really?

Oh, I thought you did.

I said in health and beauty that's restricted, but not on those.

I thought you had. He had a point in that. Anyway, maybe you had some insight in there, but.

Gavin knows more than both of us combined, apparently.

Cool.

Thanks for your help.

Yeah, sure. So, anybody else want to share? If you're just launching your business kind of where you're at and what we can clear out of the way, I will.

Hi guys. Mine's regarding packaging, actually. So I've already got a brand, I've chosen. I've got quite a few products that I can launch. I've chosen my first product that I'm going to go with. I've got some samples, I've chosen a sample and I've got a manufacturer lined up. Now I've got a designer that's designed my logo and I'm at the point now of trying to sort out my packaging. Now, I've heard of quite a few people getting hijacked on their listings. And to go with frustration free packaging. Now is that something that you've had experience with or would you still go down, say, the packaging route rather than frustration free first?

That's a great question. We have explored frustration free packaging and have never really found it to be.

Like that.

Big of a deal. Yeah, it's just hijackers are just an annoyance. They really don't mean anything to your business. We hear a lot about them, but here's why we hear a lot about them. Because there's 10,000 people in this business that 90% of them, when they hit their first hurdle, want to bitch about it or quit. I mean, that's what it is. There's 10,000 people who hit a roadblock. Like, someone hijacked me. Great. It means you're making enough noise for someone to try and copy you. One stern email usually takes care of it. So there are exceptions to this and there are a very, very small percentage of cases in which hijackers become a serious issue. But most of the time it's just an annoyance thing. It really means nothing. But I understand the. So Gavin asked, can you explain hijacking? Hijacking is when somebody lists your product on their own store and grabs the buy box from you. So they'll grab your product, they'll buy it from you, or they'll list it for a lower price but with higher shipping to capture the buy box from you. So it's not coming from your store, it's coming from their store. In most cases, in the vast, vast majority of cases, it is something that is a very short term annoyance. Now to take care of this, we've sent one nasty email that makes it go away, or we've bought the person their one item and then sent it back to Amazon and the hijacker went away. And then we sent an email saying, don't do this again. So the frustration free packaging is.

It sounds cool, but it doesn't really make that big a difference. My business partner Matt and I, we bought some of our competitors products that had frustration for packaging and it wasn't that different, it wasn't that great. As a buyer, it didn't leave an impression on me. So we decided not to pursue it because we didn't feel like it was worth it. However, the product that we ordered was caffeine pills. So that was the night, remember when we played dodgeball and I was bouncing off and you're like.

I'm like, we bought this product on Amazon. I was like, I feel great. I feel great. And an hour later I was dead. Because they were caffeine pills. But I hope that answers your question. It's just, it's not something we ever found was valuable enough to pursue in any of my business or anyone that I've advised. And there's a very, very small percentage of people who say we did it, it was worth it because we had hijackers on our back and we needed to get rid of them because they wouldn't go away. But that's a very, very rare situation in my experience.

Okay, thanks. Because what I'm thinking is actually starting with my premium packaging, getting that done, and then if I get an issue later, then maybe change it to Frustration Free in the future. My other question.

I'm sorry to interrupt, but one comment. If it delays you from taking macro action, save it for later. So I think your approach is perfect.

My other question before I let someone else have a go, is about the barcode. I've got upc. Now, do you put your UPC on your packaging or are you actually putting on the Amazon FNSKU to save you your 20 cents a unit on your final three?

Can you comment on that? Yeah.

So for.

The yoga company, at first we just put the UPC on. We paid Amazon the 20 or 30 cents to do the FBA labeling just because at first it was a lot easier. After that we registered our brand and qualified for a commingled inventory. I believe that's the verbiage they used, which means you don't need the FBA label, you can just use upc. Problem with putting UPC with the FDA label is every order it's going to change. So you're going to have to resend a different label to your supplier if you want to have that put on there. I didn't feel like dealing with that. So we just put the UPC on at first just to get going. Had Amazon put the FDA label on, they'll charge you, I think it's 20 or 30 cents. And then you can register your brand and become exempt from that. And then you don't have to do anything except for the upc.

Cool.

I didn't realize the FNSKU is going to change each time you place an order, so that's cool.

Thank you.

That number doesn't. But the barcode that they want to see changes per order. The FNSKU will be on there, but it'll be a different bar code for I don't know what their key is. FBA shipment ID maybe.

But yeah, that label will have to change every order.

Cool.

Thanks guys.

Anybody else have no idea what they're talking about?

Okay, I'm the only idiot on the call.

Keep it simple. When you first start, you should just put your UPC on your product and pay Amazon due to this.

Perfect.

Then once you get off and running, you can worry about this on your second order.

Okay. I remember, I think it was a textual conversation when you were like, hey, I just saved us 20 cents on, on each unit.

And I was like, cool, awesome. Keep doing that.

There's a lot of really good questions coming in. One of them was, if money was not an issue, would you launch multiple products at the same time? And.

I'd say yes if I ever saw it happen successfully. Philosophically.

Go for it. Practically, you're going to have a hard time. So one of the ways you can do this is order them all, get them on Amazon, but then line them up from a marketing perspective and pop, pop, pop down the list. So if you want to order them all at the same time, great. But getting reviews for them all at the same time, Pain and a half. Getting them all ranking at the same time, two pains and a half. So from a marketing perspective, you're going to have to go one at a time. Unless you've got a team of people that you can divide this among. But go ahead and order them all and get the process started, that's fine. You're just going to have a hard time marketing them all at once. Can I share the hijacker email as a template? Yes. It goes like this. You are not authorized to sell this product. Please remove this listing and do not do this again.

Something like that. Just be stern and to the point.

Would you summarize this one? Tldr.

That means Too long. Didn't read.

Okay.

This is talking about entering a super competitive market. One where the competition has thousands of reviews.

If they should or shouldn't move on.

That market, depending on how big the market is, I mean, if the market is large enough to withstand several big players, go for it. I mean, that kind of is the nature of things now. It's finding a market with only a few hundred reviews on the top product. That's. I mean, you're needle in a haystack at this point. So it's more about who are you serving, if you can identify who you're serving, and three to five products that that person will buy. I don't care about competition. Anymore unless you're in a dying trend. If it's in a dying trend, like garcinia cambogia, don't do it. If you're in a stable and or growing trend and the market's big enough and you've got a defined person that you're targeting and you can go after three to five products, I don't care about competition because I'm going to out hustle them. I'm going to out beat them. And if it's a growing trend, my market share is going to increase over time. I don't really care too much about that competition.

Anything else interesting in the chat box?

A lot of Texans here.

Two right here too.

Cool. Anybody else on the hangout want to go over where they are? I did this like, I don't even know if they. They can't see my. Hi, Ryan.

When we do this, are we actually going over everybody's boxes? Is it the same for you? Yes. Can you mute the people? Yeah. Is it in the same order?

Madhavi's right here.

No, I'm over on the complete right side.

I think on your own, you're always to the right. So, like we are right here, but they're all seeing we can just do this and everyone thinks we're pointing to them.

So pay attention. Hello, Magali.

Hey. Okay, so, all right. So I'm Madhavi. And so actually you had a tribe call a couple times ago where you were talking about that product monavie, and I kept hearing my name.

Stop saying it.

Stop saying.

Hilarious.

Yeah. So the accent's on the first syllable. Monavie. We are picked a product. The product is currently being produced. I'm finalizing the label. We've got the product listing up, but not live.

And we have in mind the other complementary products that go along with the brand. We've established a website. We are probably ready to launch in about three to four weeks.

Cool. So are there any sticking points at this right now anyway, that you can't see the clear other end? Is there anything standing in your way right now?

Right now. And we're going to be thinking about this a lot more in the coming week. Our exact launch process. There is also we just like on the very tail end of putting the product description together. We've got the 2000 character.

That limit. There are some competitors in the space that have put up a lot of graphics and things that have gone over that. It's pretty impressive. Very black hat and it's hard to compete with. So we don't want to Know, like, how.

Will Amazon slap them on the wrist? Is that just a chance that I have to take?

Where do we fall in in terms of wanting to stay white hat when our competitors are gray, grayer and black?

Yeah. So there are actually a couple schools of thought on this, but let's talk about the launch point first, because that's going to have the biggest impact on you. And then let's go over the gray, gray or black thing. That's actually a fun conversation.

Because we've done them all. Let's talk about the launch plan first. From the way we approach this, Sean and I at least like to believe that we pioneered the launch process and it came from one Saturday call where we simply ask the question, okay, what can we do during this month when we are waiting for product to set it up so that when the day inventory hits, we can start taking sales? This is before Zonblast existed.

This was during ASM1. So this is before any of the tools ever existed, when giving away 50 units of a product was like super aggressive. So we just decided we would build up a following on Facebook that we could launch our business to. And most of you have seen the presentation that I gave at one of the Amazing.com events where I outlined this exact process and then everybody copied it horribly. It was actually pretty hilarious the way people copied it.

People just missed. I missed the point. But it was like, I love the amount of I love pages that went up after the I love yogurt. It was like, I love vegetables.

I love wearing pants to the office. Nobody's liking this page. What? Anyway, so we just decided to build up a list, our market. Now, there's tools for that like Zonblast, but they all still work. The point is, how do you go to an audience that you can build up or leverage to launch to? So there was an individual on the tribe calls last round. His name was Kurt. He had a blog in the market that he sold to that he was building a physical product specifically. So he had traffic and a list in that audience. Perfect launch plan. We developed a very specific launch plan to that audience and it served him very well because he already, for some, they'll use.

Somebody else's list. They'll make some sort of relationship with other bloggers, other people who have lists and Facebook pages. Some people will use Zonblast, some people will use thomason.com some people will use a Facebook audience, some people will build a list. It's just a matter of what can you do now to set yourself up to have an audience that you can launch to and if it's nothing, then use outside services like Zomblast. Would you add anything to that? No.

Maravi, do you want to clarify anything there?

No, it's pretty clear. We do have a base audience and I have connections to build it from there. So I'll do that.

Great. Long term, this is why you want to take your customers and build a following out of them because it gives you a lot of flexibility when you can launch anything to a list of several thousand people who have bought from you. We talk about that for hours and hours on men at the next level about how to utilize that and leverage that for products you didn't think you could launch. So we talk about that pretty deep at the next level events. Now let's talk about the gray, grayer black stuff. So we have experimented with gray and black things, but we take a rule in all my businesses to stay way, way, way above four. This long term black hat stuff.

Is not going to serve you. Because if in the event that you are taking away from customers or you're doing something you know you shouldn't, that long term is not going to serve you. Now, little things like having on our yoga business, we had.

Demonstration prompts and we made that our front image for a while and it increased conversions and Amazon said, you can't do that. We eliminated this image. Okay, fair enough. Was anybody being harmed by having a demonstration image be the front and center? No, I mean, it was just a nice picture. Yeah, it was a nice picture. Technically you're supposed to have a white background and we didn't. Was that gray?

Grayish Probably. I guess having.

Additional images that are banners, is that against terms of service? I actually don't know really. Can have any text. They sure do look pretty though.

As a general rule, if you think like, is this helping the customer or is it hurting the customer? Amazon, hand in hand or time and time again, will pick the customer over the seller. So if you're not hurting the customer, then Amazon FS is going to be like, hey, stop doing that. Most times that we've had things like that happen, they've just sent us an email. It's not even anything official, but just like, you should stop. And then we do.

I wish Amazon enforced their own rules better. I wish they did because then we'd have clearer answers to these types of questions. But unfortunately, Amazon is terrible at enforcing their own rules. So we kind of have to forge new ground. Now. There are certain things, like we have competitors that Just fake reviews. And you know, they're faking reviews, they're buying reviews, they're paying people for reviews. We know it. So that's just black hat. And we won't go that, that's lying to a customer. So we don't do that. We report that activity and we see people get kicked off for that activity. Are people getting kicked off for having text in a banner? No, they might have an image removed, but no, they're not going to be kicked off or something like that. You have things like images and in your description area. There are also legitimate ways to have images in your description area. By applying for one of you can. You can apply to pay Amazon to have it have images in your description. It's called a content. So there are legitimate ways to do that. There are. I mean, even having a headline with a benefit in it is technically against terms of service. Everybody does it and Amazon doesn't do anything about it. Is that gray hat? Amazon apparently doesn't seem to think so. So this is. I wish I had a better answer for you, but it's more, it's more. Is this helping the customer or is this hurting the customer? And as long as you're not hurting the customer, you're not going to get kicked off of Amazon. You're just going to have Amazon maybe tell you need tweak something or lock your listing until you make that change. But I wouldn't worry about, unless you're doing something that harms the customer, I wouldn't worry about.

Negative ramifications. Okay.

I can tell you are not going to be doing things like faking reviews and lying about your products. If you're worried about things like banners, you're probably not going to cross the line. So I think you're going to be fine. The things you worry about are when.

People are doing things that are obviously misleading. For example, there's one loophole right now we've talked about before where you can have, you can list your other products as a parent, child relationship. We talked about this. Right. And you can thus leverage the authority of one listing. And it looks like you've got thousands of reviews on all your products. It's a really, really cool loophole that we don't use because it's misleading the customer. And I believe that those people are probably going to get their rear ends handed to them by Amazon once Amazon catches on and closes the loophole. But it's actually pretty ingenious. It's a black hat. It's really cool. It's something we don't do. So that type of stuff where you're misleading people, don't touch it. If it's just making your listing prettier, I mean, I have no problem with it. I personally have no problem with that.

That was such a long answer to your question, Madhavi.

It was very helpful.

Thank you. Cool, I'm glad.

So I have a quick question.

Yes?

So maybe it might be for Sean, but it's about parent child listing, just like you said. So let's use the yoga mat as an example. You have a black yoga mat, and let's say you launch a green yoga mat and you combine them with the parent child listing. Is it possible to have the black and the green ranking for the same keyword? Let's say thick yoga mat. Or will one disappear because you have one listing? I'm still trying to figure that out.

I don't know. But if you ask me again in a couple weeks, we'll have a second color and then I'll be able to let you know.

I think you can rank for both because you can have both children rank on odd things. So I don't know why Amazon wouldn't let them rank on the same thing. Okay, well, if you could, like, fill up the whole trip page.

No, because I have seen many competitors, well, not exactly my product, but I've studied that with different products and I realized that let's say somebody has a towel and they have many colors of that towel. When I go on their listing or on their brand page, I cannot find the different colors separately. So I figure, okay, maybe it's just one listing with all the different colors.

Say that part again. You can't find their listing with the separate colors. Say that part again.

So I assume even if they're combined with the parent child listing thing, that if I click on their brand, let's say I click on your yoga mat brand. What was it again? Zenactive. When I click on zenactive, I can see the list of products. But if you have the black and the green yoga mat in the parent child, for those people, the green wouldn't show up. I would have to click on the black and then open up the listing where it shows me the black and the green.

Correct? That's right. So my understanding is Amazon sees them as two separate listings. But you can. But the leading one will basically lead the ranks. So if you find one, the parent child will show up as a sub child of that main listing. But they can also rank individually of one. That's my understanding.

So I Can probably do a blast for each color, let's say.

Yes, but I wouldn't. So, for example, if the keyword is extra long yoga mat, let's do something that isn't yoga. Let's say.

Iphone6 case. So let's say you wanted to rank for iPhone case and you had iPhone5 and you had iPhone6 as a parent child relationship, probably not the best example, because most people split them up. But.

If that's your market and the keyword you're going for is iPhone case, you would not want to choose on blast one to each listing. You would want to put all the firepower on one so that one ranks and they'll both show up. Now, if it was iPhone5 case and iPhone6 case, then yes, obviously you want to divert them because two separate keywords. But if there's one main keyword that encapsulates both keywords, then you don't. You do not want to split your firepower there. You'll dilute your results. So if we were doing white pillow.

I mean, white pillow and green pillow probably aren't going to be good keywords, but if it's down pillow, which is what this is, you would not want to put a blast of 100 on your white listing and 100 on your green listing. You would want to have 200 on one of them ranking for down pillow and then allow them to customize their colors.

So I had that thought. But my thinking was on page one, there are 24 listings. So let's say I'm getting 10% of the traffic. I'm only getting 10% of the traffic. So is going to be. Once they click on my listing, then that 10% gets divided in two between my products. So I figured if I have two products on page one, I'm getting 20% of the traffic.

Okay, so that was the reason that's not a parent child relationship then.

So he's asked if I search yoga mat, it'll bring up the red version of someone's yoga mat. But you could also search for blue yoga mat, and it'll bring up the blue version of blue yoga mat. What if I search for yoga mat, Will I see red and blue?

No, you will not see a double listing. You have to split them to get a double listing.

That was the usual question, I think. I'm not 100% sure, but I think.

Now that's why I err on the side of having different lists for our products. Unless it's something like a color change. A color change would obviously. But my Understanding is no, you would not get a double listing for a parent child. I could be wrong. If anyone has an example of a parent child ranking for double keyword, we'd love to see them because that has to exist if it is a thing. But I don't think it's a thing.

Oh, Ryan.

Yes, Kathryn Chung.

I just have my second product, Parent Child Relationship. So my example is very simple. Exactly what you're saying is that my product has different color. Blue, red, black, pink colors. So they are all under the parent. So they're all for me. It's only one listing. So when I do song blast, I only blast the whole parent. And no matter what color I will, you know all it's coming to the parents. So I gather all the reviews under one umbrella. So it will never show up as a second listing.

Okay. So it does not show up. You can't get a double listing as a parent child.

No, no, we can't.

Okay.

Yes, I confirm.

How is business, Kathy Chung?

Oh, yeah, it's good. I was excited. My first product have 180 units a day.

So it's cool. I'm doing exactly what I'm doing. So I'm very excited. It's to serve the market. It's worked really well. Now I'm launching my second product. It's in the same niche and serving the same group of people. Even I haven't done any song blast yet, but already have 20 sales a day because it's a very good seasoned product. But now I'm facing one problem that I wanted to ask you. That my first product recently, just two weeks has seen some drop in sales. So I don't know why. But now I observing might be the competitor. One competitor coming. So I just observing asking you to. I'm in my first product in home improvement and this is my primary category. And my second category is coffee. So I see my competitor, it's now listing in clothing. I just wanted to know should I swap so that my primary category should be clothing instead of home improvement, which you know, obviously clothing is a bigger one. Home improvement might be smaller one, I guess. So which one should be the primary main category?

Are you the number one seller in either one of those categories?

I'm the top in my keyword.

I'm top two right now in your category.

Are you number one in my category in home improvement? I'm almost top hundred.

Do you have a number one bestseller tag in either one of these categories?

Not yet. This is big category. I'm not. But in subcategory Yes, I have.

Okay. So stay in those that you're number one in a subcategory. Don't swap out. If it's swapping out is going to give you a number one tag, you have my blessing. If it's not going to. I don't think that you have any benefit to change or stay. I don't think that really affects your sales. The only thing that categories do is if you're going to rank higher in a keyword or in a category and get a little bit more exposure. Great. The effect overall though is very, very minimal on that.

Oh, okay. So go for a big category. Won't get me any bigger.

No, I mean that won't get you not a significant amount additional exposure. No.

All right. Okay. Maybe my drop in sales, I think drops in sales.

How long has the drop in sales been going on?

A week or two.

Okay. So it could be seasonal. It could be just lower demand for the week. It could be a bad review came in. It could be a competitor's coming in at a lower price. It could be a number of things. That happens all the time. In one of my businesses, we had like a 20% bump in sales this week. No idea why, but sometimes that happens and then the next week it'll be down and.

Don'T know why.

If it's a month, it might be a competitor a week. I wouldn't worry too much.

Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm observing my competitor and I guess it might be. So maybe I'll prepare. They are double, you know, two pack. They're lower price. I one pack, you know, selling higher price. But because. Yeah, I will. Yeah. Take your word and see how one month go.

Yeah, definitely observe the competitors, see what they're doing. But the sky's not falling just yet. Oh, yeah. Okay.

I'm more excited for my second product.

Good, good. Especially if you're doing 20 a day right out of the gate. That's great.

Yeah. I will have my Sun Blast next month.

Good. What's going on? Anything interesting in the chat box?

Yes, sir. Go ahead.

Sorry. Ryan, can I just ask a question regarding pricing? So the top breaker that I'd be going after, really low price point but inferior product by far. There is a second place competitor with a higher price point but not ranking as high. My product is still superior to that second place product. So to maintain the integrity of my product, I should price higher still. But now am I putting too much distance between myself and the top end ranker even though it's an inferior product?

Two Schools of thought. One would say, go high so that you're the highest in your market. And that sounds great. Philosophically. I had the exact same experience with one of our supplements. And we knew that the top seller far inferior. So we did both. We dropped the price. We were far superior. We dropped the price and made almost no money until we had such a large customer base that they were loyal. We had consistent flow. We had authority coming to the keyword. We had lots of reviews. And then we slowly raised the price until conversions weren't affected anymore. So we played the volume game until we dominated the market and then we raised the price. That's how we did that. Because coming out of the gate, people don't know that your product is superior. They have no idea that your product is super unless you've got thousands of reviews saying that your product disappeared.

Although the composition of the product, the actual chemical compound of which you can state, they clearly state what the compound of their product is or the material.

Should I say.

Without knowing exactly what your product is. It's tough because some people could say the same thing about something like the supplement. Well, my supplement is so much better. The formulation is so much stronger. Consumer doesn't always know that. Consumer just reads the benefits and the reviews. They don't know the chemical composition of a supplement. They want to know what did other people say? Did it give me the effect that I wanted? I don't really care if it's higher quality as long as it gives me the result that I want. If it gives me the result I want, it's higher quality. Even if it's technically inferior products. If you ask a scientist or a health expert or the car mechanic or whatever it is, we played the game of we tried to go higher price. We did okay. We did fine. But we made more money when we dropped the price and played the volume game. This is just one of those things that you have to test for your market. It's going to be different for every market.

Okay, I just want to say that if I were to compete with the number one ranker on the lowest price, my product would not be viable.

Wouldn't make financial sense.

So don't try to match his price. We didn't try to match the price of the lowest person. We just tried to be as competitive as possible. And as a result of our product being higher quality and being very modestly priced, we picked up a ton of volume. We outsold.

The competitors that were even ranking higher than us because we captured so much volume. Then we started increasing Our price. Now, that is not going to be the case in every market. That's just one of those things that you have to test. Okay, cool. Thanks.

We've got. In one of my other businesses, I've got somebody playing this game against me where I've got a higher. I think I have a better product. He's playing the pricing game, trying to get volume, and I think he's going to fail miserably because his profit margins aren't going to be there and he has an inferior product. So I don't think it's going to work in that market. But in this other market, it works for us beautifully. So it's one of the things you just have to test.

Just as an illustration here, he's at, say, 14. The next tier up is 17, and for me, I need to be at 19. So it's not. Is that massive discrepancy on a percentage basis? I know it is.

It's not huge.

Okay, cool.

The big thing, though, is going to be reviews, because.

That is going to make the biggest difference in your conversion.

Okay, cool.

Thanks for your help.

I love this question because we got this exact same one last week about five suppliers. Five suppliers is perfect. Somebody's asking, is five suppliers too many? No, five suppliers is great.

Worst case, you'll have a pile of yoga mats in your closet.

I like this. What's our ry?

A misspelling of my name.

This is what I do at work. People ask me about acronyms.

Let me Google that for you.

Rry.

Oh, wait, wait. What's Urban Dictionary say?

No, but I want a real acronym. This is a parody of really. But there's gotta be some company.

I have no idea what. Anybody know what RRY stands for?

Even Google doesn't know.

Nope. So, nope. We have no idea who asked that question.

Did they maybe hear ROI and perhaps mishear it as rry?

That's a very different acronym. R R Y. R R Y Real.

Then maybe if they heard it like they heard ROI and they were like, oh, maybe that's, you know, they thought it was rr. Maybe. Otherwise, I have no idea.

Or maybe they said, that's really Ryan yo.

Really Ryan yo. RRY is really Ryan yo.

Really? It's really Ryan yo. If somebody. If somebody says how handsome they are from stage, that's really Ryan yo. If somebody. If somebody comes up with.

Goofy official sponsors of hangouts, that's really Ryan yo. If. If you only trim your beard like once a month, that's really Ryan yo.

Roi.

I don't know.

Oh, by the way, ROI though is return on investment. If that is what you're actually looking into.

Exactly.

Alright, so I have a great market for those of you who haven't picked a product yet. Beard trimmers. Let me tell you why, because I go through about four a year and they're expensive. Expensive? They're like 40 bucks. So a week and a half ago I bought a new beard trimmer film. Yeah, it's already dead. Mine too. Really?

How do you feel about electronics?

Well, what's the sub market?

I have no idea.

No, I'm not going into it. I'm just saying is there any downside to selling electronics?

Yeah, they're expensive to produce. You've got brand name competition. That's the downside. I mean, you can't go out and make a video game console. So that's what I think of when I think of electronics. If you're selling things like accessories, you can make it work. But it's more a cash flow business than anything else. I mean, it's hard to build a real brandable business out of things like iPhones cases because you're dependent upon somebody else's brand.

There's very few people have done it like Otterbox has done a pretty good job.

But they've done it through having a very unique selling proposition.

Most people in our community anyway are going to have a hard time. If you have something more specific, I'd love to give you my feedback on it. Just electronics as a general rule is tough to make comments.

No, I just was thinking of the maybe, you know, too many bad reviews might come from, you know, people saying the battery didn't work or you know, things. Because I used to drop ship too and I did drop ship electronics and I had so many bad reviews because, you know, people saying the remote didn't work. A lot of different problems which really turned me off about electronic stuff.

And that's still just a cash flow business. It's hard to build a real scalable business out of.

But electronics are more risky than the other in my opinion. The fact is the quality is more difficult to control if you're just starting with Amazon. So unless you have very good one to make it sure or control the quality, otherwise you might, you know, lose money because of that.

I saw quite a couple of, you know, examples even myself some years ago before I joined Amazon. I lose money because I'm selling electronics because I don't have no idea how electronic products have so many problems before it comes into market. Even they come into market, they haven't got tested already and then so do you. And you take the risk of, you know, not fully tested product. It happens all the time. So that electronics is something that you have to be very careful before you jump in. I'm not saying every electronic, but most of them because electronic has PCB and, you know, more sophisticated. Unless you have very good manufacturers. But in your case, it's not as easy as you think to get those manufacturers in the channel that you are approaching.

I want to hear from somebody we haven't heard from. Danielle. Danny, I have a question.

Hi.

So I was wondering what you think about Facebook sponsored ads. What's your experience with them? And if you do use them, then do you link to a landing page and then only when the customer is ready to buy, it goes on to Amazon or do you link it directly to your Amazon page.

So I personally have never been able to get.

Linking straight to a listing to work to profit anyway. Unless your goal is not to profit, it's to blast. We love using Facebook ads to blast a product. I did a whole presentation of this, sending them to a discount code, blasting it to the moon, getting a bunch of reviews and a bunch of sales. Love doing that. I mean, that's how Zomblast started was they were building up a list of people buying their products and then they were like, hey, why don't we license this out? But from an ROI perspective. What does ROI mean again, Sean?

Trying to make one up.

Return on investment, man. I always wanted to know that from an ROI perspective. I don't know if you're mocking me.

Or if you're serious.

Either way, I'm not happy.

I thought it was somebody's. I thought somebody named Roy invented investment. Roy did it. Was it our accountant Roy?

Yep.

Was it our attorney Roy? No, we don't like him. We don't like our attorney Roy. We like our accountant Roy. We actually have an attorney and an accountant named Roy. Anyway, yes, from a Roy perspective, we have never been able to get Facebook ads to a listing to. Did you see Madhavi's comment? ROI means run.

What did I just say?

What did I just say? My apologies. I'll get it right. She says ROI is run out of inventory. That's funny. But.

We'Ve never been able to get it to work. From a return on investment perspective, we just haven't been able to get it to work. We even had a hard time getting in the short run getting it to go to a landing page. In the long term, if you do things like retargeting if you're building a list, you can get Facebook sponsored ads over to a sales page. That would be my preferred way of doing it. But getting it to just to Amazon. I personally have never been able to get it to work. I don't even know anyone who has been able to get it to work. I know they're out there, but it's been pretty rare. I would look at doing it indirectly. For example, having a video of a customer be your ad, having a review be your ad so that only people who clicked on the ad wanted your product. If there's more of an indirect way to do it, I would look at doing that because I've never been able to get our new yoga mat straight over to Amazon to work from a return on investment perspective. Does that make sense, Danielle?

Yes, definitely. I'll look more into that and see.

What will work for us. Us. But yeah, definitely.

Thanks.

Does Roy have any questions?

Roy does not have any questions.

Cool. Danny, since you're on the hangout, you haven't said anything, any way we can help you?

Well, I Facebooked you earlier and you kind of shit on my idea, so I kind of back to square one. So I'm just still trying to figure out a product to sell. But I got a market. But I just got a market you ran by me. Huh? Is it the market you ran by me? Yeah.

So yeah, I don't know if you.

Got the last Facebook message I got you, but.

So the question, you know who you want to serve, right? Yes, I do. Is there demand for it on Amazon?

Well, yeah, I'm trying to zag a little bit. So that's why I went for like a smaller niche market.

But I know the volume is not as there as like a bigger market, but maybe I'm doing it all wrong. It was a very growing trend. Wink. Right?

Yeah.

Well, I believe, yeah. The problem with yours, at least if I remember correctly, I told you I loved the market, but not on Amazon, correct?

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. So.

It'S a great market in a growing trend. My guess.

You are not going to know what Amazon or what legally is going to happen there. So it's a great market if you control the channel. But since what you wanted to do may not be kosher in Amazon's eyes, you're completely at their mercy. So you're in a tough spot in that market because if you had an e commerce store for that, I'd be like, go for it. Growing trend. Perfect.

Awesome. But on Amazon you have no idea what they are Going to decide from a legal perspective about that market. So at any point they could make a change and say, we're not going to carry this because there's legal gray area here. A good example for is something like nootropics. You can't buy nootropics on Amazon. You can't buy. You can, you can buy things like Alpha Brain, which some might call it nootropic, but you can't buy actual lab made nootropics, Aniracetam, Piracetam. You can't buy them on Amazon. Why? Because there's some legal gray areas there. So the market that you ran by me is the exact same way. It's a legal gray area. Great growing trend. But all of the business happens other channels because Amazon has no idea what to do with it right now.

Okay, I got it.

So last question about. It's about insurance. I know you guys said that the company who bought Zenactive wanted you guys to have insurance. If you guys ended up getting one, did you get product insurance or a general liability?

What did we get?

We didn't do anything because the company that bought us did whatever they wanted.

Oh, okay.

I'm not sure what our insurance is, but it, it is existent.

On my other business we have product liability insurance.

Okay.

General insurance, I think is for like the office and we have that too.

I think their main concern was if someone's using our yoga block and they break their wrist and they can sue us regardless if it's our yoga block's fault or not, you can pretty much sue anybody for anything. The insurance will at least cover some of the litigation.

The thing is, I was thinking, you know, product insurance covers if the product hurts the person in any way. But if you made a marketing false claim, let's say, then that doesn't cover that.

I'm not planning on making any false claims. But let's say somebody sues you for some marketing wording that you used. Then I was kind of confused.

If you make a false claim, there's really not any. There's no insurance that will cover you for lying. That's pretty much. Pretty much on you.

Danielle. You're getting some love in the chat box over on the spillover page.

Hi, guys.

On your photo.

Hey guys, can you hear me?

What's up, Maury?

Hi.

Hang on a minute. Sorry, carry on. Something just happened. Okay, the music is now playing in my ear. I'm just going to sort that out. Carry on.

Is it better to run something by us on Facebook or email? It is better to Run it by us here. This is why we do this. Run it by it here. This is what this hour and now hour plus is for for you to do it here.

So if you want to run it by it Mike, go ahead and run it here. Bye Elliot. Thanks for hanging out. He has a beer festival kit too.

Nice.

I want to go to a beer festival.

Can I come?

I can't have beer. Beer makes me not feel good.

It makes me not feel good beer. But usually it takes a lot more than one.

It's different for me food poisoning a lot Whenever I have beer, whenever I have like more than a dozen beers, I get food poisoning. I don't know what it is.

I'm gonna use that.

Oh, that's good. That's a stand up joke. Is it? Man, I came up with a stand up joke last night after. After we had that gin. Mike is typing. Okay, thank you for that.

I came up with a joke that was not funny at all. But in the moment I sure thought it was funny. I can't remember it now. I told it to Pam.

Look at your life.

Pam doesn't think I'm funny in general. Pam thinks I'm very unfunny which is really kind of a buzz kill sometimes.

This this rant has been brought to you by Ryan's primary.

We're waiting on Amore here waiting for you to get your music.

Danielle, this one fan of yours is starting a fan club.

Called the Anonymous 2115 Danielle Fan Club.

Nice, thanks.

Can we get this product liability insurance for products outsourced in China.

Most of the sites only provide for US made products products so the answer I believe is yes. It might cost you more. Catherine Chung, do you have insight on this? Can you get product liability insurance for something that's made in China?

I believe you can, yes. For those manufacturers who already bought insurance for example my factories they have one million US dollar liability because they're in electric space electric products so they're really you know that factory inside so they you know have bought already the liability.

So they already into the factory's insurance.

You can factories but you can, you know it's also you tie you up so you don't need to buy because this insurance also cover all out even to the state.

Interesting. Okay now there are some instances in which an extra layer of protection is welcomed supplement something where anything that is a consumable things like cleaning supplies. These are all things that an extra layer of protection can make sense and I still think you can get product liability insurance if you're getting it from China. If you want to keep on top of what you're manufacturer is doing.

You.

Can check your manufacturer first.

Yeah, that's a better idea.

Maura, you ready for us? Yeah.

Can you hear me?

I can.

Great. Sorry about that. Anyway, that was a good introduction. Hi guys. Nice to meet you. Hey. I'm in pet supplies, which is your number one hot niche from the last. So that's great. I've been going since February. I'm doing sort of 1216 products a day just in the US.

I've zomblasted up to page one. It's going really well, really enjoying it and I'm looking to roll out a few more products in the same niche. But what I really want to get into is pet supplements. Because my unique selling point from my point of view is I've got a whole bunch of veterinary surgeons who are friends who can help endorse me, help me research really good quality supplements. That's a long term bit. At the moment I'm just working on my first product. It's up and running. As I said, 1216 sales a day.

My question is, I've been zomblasting to get that to page one. Great, worked. I stopped zomblasting. It's all organic sales now. But I'm kind of stuck there and I don't want to branch into more products until I get a healthy 2030 sales a day. If I could get up to what Catherine's doing, that would be amazing. So my question is.

What'S the best thing for me to get more page views, drive more traffic?

What's your number of reviews right now?

200.

What do your competitors have?

They range from less than me to 3,000.

Okay. So right now you probably don't stand out much as far as reviews go. So it is a matter of, I mean it comes down to keyword ranking, conversion rate, which is really just number of reviews and additional keywords. On Amazon, at least that's where it comes from. That's your 8020 is those three things you can also look at outside of Amazon. That's a whole different discussion. Things like outside traffic channels, blogs.

Your own marketing. But on Amazon it is simply those three things. Those are really the only things that you can do. Now there's going to be a big jump between the guy who's got 3,000 reviews and you who's got 200 reviews. Unless there is some very strong differentiating factor, price, feature quality, that is enough for somebody to trust your 200 reviews over somebody else's 3,000 reviews. Until you have that unique selling proposition, you're going to have a hard time breaking into serious market volume with somebody who's got 10 times the number of reviews as you do.

Okay, so just to recap, Keywords, there's three things.

There's three things. Keyword ranking, number of keywords, conversion rate. But conversion rate really is going to come down to a unique selling proposition. Number of reviews, price. What makes somebody see you over somebody who's got the exact same product, but it's. They've got 10 times the reviews that you do. Yeah, I got you.

Okay. My conversion rates between 10 and 14% at the moment, but I'm just trying to build that up.

That's not horrible.

The question is going to be, why does somebody look at yours over the guy who's got 3,000 reviews? Because that's the first thing people see. This guy's got 3,000 reviews. So why are they clicking on yours and not somebody else's? If you don't have an answer for that, it's going to be hard to scale that. Even if it is, we have this problem in one of our businesses, so we drop the price just so they would see ours versus somebody else's, even though we made a lot less money. And that got us over the hump and got us hundreds of reviews so that we actually did stand out. Naturally. So what is the reason why somebody clicks on you versus the other person? That's a question you have to ask.

Okay, so do you reckon I should carry on zomblasting to get more reviews in then just build up the reviews. Build up the reviews.

No, I'd recommend you go to your existing customers to get reviews.

Build up your own internal, strong review systems. That is the best place to get reviews.

Okay. I'm already doing that with the trailing email tool and everything.

Great. I crank up the heat on your reviews and that's how I wouldn't. I do know people who use Enblast for reviews. That's not why it's there. So I don't.

More page ranking.

What's that?

It's more for page ranking.

Yes.

While I've done that, I'm stuck on page one. So that's good.

I'm stuck on page one. I can't get any higher than page one.

Okay, thanks very much.

Cool. On that note, let's wrap up. Are there any interesting things? Did Mike.

I had a quick question. Yeah, that's me right here. Oh, hey, Mike.

Go ahead.

Hey, how's it Going. A quick question. Have you ever run into an issue with a supplier? Let's say you're competing, someone with found the person on Amazon you're really competing with and you've come to find out that that supplier you're going with is making the product for them as well.

Yeah.

What's the issue with that?

Well, it comes into play. It's a very unique product. Product, because I remember, if you remember us talking, they were very high on their best seller. Rank was very high. But they had no reviews. And then out of nowhere in the last two weeks they've gotten 300 reviews.

The product is more or less custom. And it seems that they're only selling that one product to him. And the product that I'm going with, they're only going to be selling to me. So with my supplier, it seems we're the only two people in the US selling this product on Amazon through them. So it's going to be pretty stiff competition of who's going to get their supply quicker.

What's your concern then?

If you have a unique product through this manufacturer and your competitor has a unique product through this manufacturer, what's your.

Fear that his inventory is going to be picked over mine? Getting it made.

Okay, so what can you do about that to alleviate that fear? How can you work with the manufacturer to make sure that that's never going to be a problem?

Just sell more product.

Really?

How else? You could bring that concern to a manufacturer, you could bring that concern to a different manufacturer. Use that for leverage against the existing one. You can offer to pay to expedite your inventory. Wink, money always helps with speed of inventory. If somebody else is not ordering that, you can try to negotiate an exclusivity deal. You can try to develop a really strong relationship with your rep so that you get priority over that person. If it's a salesperson, you can offer to match their commission on whatever it is that they're getting so that you get priority. You, you can talk about how you can order more inventory over the long term so that we get priority. You can put a down payment on a much larger order so that it's bigger than the other person's A lot.

I mean, that was just me throwing ideas at you or you alleviate that as a problem. Because if that's a legitimate concern, that's preventing you from taking action. Great. So take it to your supplier and say, what can we do about this? Because I don't want this to be an issue.

Well, it seems that they're willing to Work with me on just about anything. So it's kind of nice actually.

Having a competitor share the manufacturer has served us in the past because one time we caught a cheating competitor with the same manufacturer as us. So we went to the manufacturer and said, look, we have a good relationship with you. This is what one of your other clients is doing. So they stopped supplying that person. It was a nice sword on the side of that competitor who eventually got shut down. But it was nice to be able to have a really good relationship with our supplier and say, look, if you want to keep our business, these are what your other clients are doing. You have to do something about this. Done. We don't want to work with cheaters anyway. Stop supplying that person. So just develop really good relationships with your suppliers in the event that you need some leverage or they do something that they shouldn't be doing or you want to compete with them at a different level that isn't so public.

Okay. Thank you.

Yeah, you're welcome. Any other thing we want to. Did Mike ever ask this question in the chat box?

That was me.

That was a joke. See, this isn't. Mike is right here.

That's why Pam doesn't think I'm funny. You all don't know when I'm joking. Anyway, what about Mike? Did he ask a question?

No, he didn't.

Mike didn't answer. No, he did. Max.

I'd like some listing. Let's go over some assignments for the week. If you haven't written your listing, write your listing. If you order your product and you don't know what other three products, long term you are going to switch source, start making that list. Doesn't mean you have to do anything. It just means what opportunities are you looking for. So have your listings done this week. Have lists of products ready and start to brainstorm. Just brainstorm. What launch plans are you going to be following? What launch plans are you going to be. Are you going to be utilizing? We covered a bunch. We covered briefly using Facebook, using Zomblast, using blogs, using your own internal assets that you've got, what launch plan so that when it hits Amazon store shelves, you can immediately start taking sales. What is your plan? Now we added additional layer on top of a launchpad plan. It is begging, borrowing and winking every friend that you've got to get your first 50 reviews and then turning on Amazon pay per click or some sort of outside traffic channel and doing some sort of a launch. That is how we kick start all of our products to get ranked, to get sales moving and flowing. So what is your launch plan come with that next week? We will start to talk about launch plans next week because all of you ordered inventory at that point. So we will talk about what launch plans look like next weekend. Cool. Thank you all for your participation today. It's really fun when there's enough participation that we can go over time. So that makes it really fun. And we will see all of you next week. Thanks, tribe. Bye. See you.