How to Sell on Amazon The Right Way, with Ryan Daniel Moran

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Hey Fastlaner Ryan Daniel Moran here with a special episode of Freedom Fastlane. Welcome to the show. For those of you who are new to this show, today we're going to be talking about getting started, building a business, a physical products business specifically, and putting it as a starting point on Amazon.com now for those of you are regular listeners to the show, you might be wondering why I'm backing up on this topic. Because I tend to talk about very advanced ways of building businesses. So getting started on a channel like Amazon, Amazon is a little bit of a step back as far as the sequence of things. And if you are more of an advanced listener of Freedom Fasting, if you've got a business that follows these guidelines, you can probably skip this episode because I want to specifically address those of you who are getting started and it's for a very specific reason. My business has moved far beyond past the getting started point and my businesses are pretty advanced. We're now moving from Amazon into other channels. We've already hit the multimillion dollar point, multimillion dollar profit point. We're now looking and getting into retail. We are building our own channels. Heck, we have celebrity spokespeople that have our products at this point. So we are far beyond the getting started point. But yet on Freedom Fast Lane, more of the questions tend to come in about the getting started point. So I wanted to dedicate an episode to the getting started portion of building a physical products business so that we can get it out of the way and not address it moving forward. So this is there for you. For those of you who write in a lot and ask for materials about getting started and then go back and listen to all of if you're getting started, after you listen to this, take the steps that we'll talk about in this podcast and then go listen to all of the more advanced stuff as well. And this way as a community, we can move past the getting started phase and we can move into more higher level conversations, which is where we want to take things. So I want to kick things off by mentioning a point that I have to beat into the head of people who are getting started, whether it's one of my consulting clients or someone in the tribe and I have to repeat this over and over again. So let's just get this one out of the way. You are not building a product, you are building a brand. And Amazon is not your business. Your brand is your business. If you get those two points, you are far ahead of most people who are getting into a business like this. Because a mistake happens when most people are going into this business and they think, whoa, what product should I sell here they've missed the point. At that point, they have completely missed what it takes to build a business. The question is not what product should I sell, it is what business do I want to be in? When you ask that question, you got it. When you ask, where would there be a good opportunity for me to sell something and make. You've missed it, you are, you are toast. So if that is your question, like what, what, what product should I sell? Stop. Just stop now go, go do something else. You will get your shirt taken from you if you approach it with that mentality. So the question is more what business do I want to be in? Because you can come up with a line of products in whatever industry you in. Who is your target market that you're serving? That is a much better question to ask. So if we ask that question now, we can start things on the right foot. What most people will do is they will just browse through Amazon to see what is selling and hot and then go sell that one product. And then a thousand people enter the same market and, and everybody complains that the pie is not big enough. That's when competition is too fierce because you have thousands of people trying to sell one product. That's exactly the same friggin thing as everybody else is doing. So what market do you want to be in? What business do you want to be in? Who do you want to serve? Is a much better question. If you answer that question, then it's really, really clear what products and services you want to sell in your business or any business. One of the ways we can identify them and it's a getting started way. At my next level workshops inside of the tribe we talk about some more advanced ways. But one of the getting started ways to figure out what products you should start with when you're building your business after you've identified who it is that you want to serve is by looking at volume on Amazon. We identify how something is selling on Amazon simply by browsing the best selling categories. So if you're going through Amazon, if You actually, if you go to Google and you type in best selling kitchen, whatever product is you're thinking about selling, you could just say best selling kitchen utensils and it will come up with the top 20 and you can keep going. You can go as deep as you want. The top selling products on Amazon and you'll then want to. If you see something coming up multiple times, it means that there's a lot of volume going around that product, around that type of a product. That is point A. What business do I want to be in? What products frequently come up on sites like Amazon and we use Amazon as a launching platform. If you forget that Amazon is a launching platform, you will approach this business incorrectly. A lot of people getting into this business look at Amazon as the end goal. It is your starting point. If you want to have a long term business, then we have to think beyond just our channel. We are not trying to manipulate a channel, we are not trying to game a channel. We are simply looking at what the channel is doing volume wise. So that can be a launching point. As far as customers volume and cash flow, those are the things that we are using this channel for. If there's a lot of volume around a specific product and the profit margins are high, then it's something that we want to go into. And that is a nice segue into how to then look at competition and look at how to qualify a perfect product. So once we've identified the market we want to be in and then products that keep coming up in that market, there are a few qualifiers to test if we're warm, if we're onto something. The first is medium competition. We don't want super high competition, we don't want super low competition. Our sweet spot is medium competition. And that usually looks like sellers who are have less than a thousand reviews that are not brand driven. For example, you wouldn't want to sell headphones if your main competitors are Beats and Bose, that's the other big competitor. So we wouldn't want to go there. We'd want to go into a market that was not as brand driven as that people weren't buying a brand, they were buying an actual product. They were buying features of a product rather than a status symbol in the form of a brand. We want to avoid that. And as far as like the perfect product goes, there's a few criteria. They're not all inclusive, meaning we don't have to have all of these. The perfect product would have all of these. But if you don't have all of these, it still can be a good product. And it looks like this. Over $20 consumable or people buy more than one, lightweight and small, preferably under a few pounds. And if we wanted to be absolutely perfect, made local to where you are now, here's why these are important. Shipping plays a huge factor in the getting started phases of this business. Shipping costs go up the further away the product is made from you and the heavier it is. So we can cut down on our shipping time and our shipping costs if something is light and it is small and it is local. Now, most people don't source things locally or in their own country even. We'll go into that. But in the perfect world, everything would be made around where you live in your country and it would be easy to ship. Most people don't have that benefit. But this is one of the reasons why product lines like supplements and beauty lines are really popular, is because you can source them within your own country. They're fairly lightweight and they're consumable and they can be sold at a premium based on how you do your marketing. Now let's talk about the consumable part of things or the repeat buyer. If you are targeting a specific market and if you are 10 minutes into the show, hopefully you've identified the fact that you are going to be going to a market, not a product, then that customer base is hopefully going to return for more. You want to be able to give them an opportunity. Somebody who buys a glass kitchen utensil won't have the opportunity to come back and buy more unless you've got other products. So in an ideal world, it would be something that would be used up, a consumable or something that people buy several of over time. The other way around, this is simply something that is a nice gateway into a bunch of other products. So if you're buying a pretty generic kitchen utensil like a spatula, and it's got some sort of special feature about it, and that is a nice segue into other products that can be sold. That's another way that you could check this piece of criteria off of the list. Those are my criteria for going into a business criteria for picking your products. Let's talk about getting it made and let's talk about customization when it comes to getting a product made. And at this point we're going kind of fast, but we've assumed that you've identified a market you want to be in. You have an idea of what products you want to be selling based on just what the market is Telling you is there based on volume and we know some criteria of what makes a good product, we can then start looking at suppliers and comparing profit margins on each of these products. If you are sourcing something consumable, please by all means get it sourced locally. You do not want ground up baby in your supplements and beauty care products, so get them made in your own country, please. But if you're getting something that is not a consumable, if it is physical product, we'll keep using Kitchen as the example. That's something that can be sourced overseas fairly easily. And we do that simply by looking for wholesale suppliers. And most people end up going to alibaba.com now, if you listen to the podcast I did with Sean Coyne, he's my business partner on the yoga business that we sold, he goes into a little bit more detail on what it looks like to work with Alibaba suppliers, looking for suppliers, shopping around with suppliers, price comparisons so he can give you more details into that. So go listen to that podcast with Sean Coyne. It's called Step by Step to Six Figures on Amazon. He also does some coaching, by the way, if you want to look him up and shoot him a message and see if he has rooms for some clients. So the place that most people go is alibaba.com that's a very fast growing marketplace and it's a publicly traded company now, so they've got plenty of reputable suppliers on there. The important thing though is that you get multiple quotes and multiple samples from the suppliers there so you can order samples. And Sean goes into this in a little bit more detail in the podcast that we did together. But you can go through the process and actually get samples from each of these suppliers and test them. So one thing that we did was we got multiple samples from a couple different suppliers. We also weighed that with communication time and then continued sourcing different ideas and different products from the suppliers that we were finding. Until we found one that communicated well, was able to make the modifications that we wanted, their price was reasonable and that was it. That's really the process. Up until this point. You're spending little to no money. It costs zero money to research. It costs very little money to get a sample. It can be, you know, 20 or 30 bucks to get something airlifted over to you, maybe more. But you can then have samples in front of you that you can test and give to people. I think I went to Starbucks and went up to people and was like, hey, what do you think of this? You know, do you do yoga here, try this out. And by doing so you get a feel for what it is actually that the end user is going to be selling. You can also be looking at domestic suppliers, although unless it's a consumable, you're gonna have a hard time getting the economies of, say of scale to make sense. Suppliers in China just make things cheaper than here. So unless you're gonna go as an American made company, then you could go US based. But the profit margins on Amazon are gonna be extremely slim at that point. Now, when you are comfortable working with a supplier, they're going to send you a minimum order quantity and most of the time that is going to be at least 500 units. It's going to be at least 500 units to get started, to get it shipped and to go over to Amazon. That's where the main cost comes in. And that can be a few thousand dollars based on what it is that you are selling. That is the investment piece plus shipping. Now again in the podcast I did with Sean Cohen, he goes into more details about the shipping process. You basically will hire a freight forwarder who will pick up your goods at the port and take it to Amazon. Sean again will have more details for you in that episode. But that is what the process looks like. You will order them, they send it to the port, your supplier will send it to the port, then you hire a shipping company to pick it up at the port and take it over to Amazon. And that is the process of identifying, finding and getting a product moving looks like. Now there is one question that comes up and this is the hard part. I call it the hump. It's where you put in a bunch of work at the beginning and you are sourcing products. You put them on a truck somewhere or a boat somewhere, depending on where you're ordering them from. And then you've got this dead time where you're waiting for a product to arrive and there's nothing you can do. You cannot fly over the ocean and push the boat to make it go faster. There is nothing you can do. And there's usually about a two month lead time to have the product made and have it shipped over to Amazon. What do you do with that dead time? So what Sean and I asked ourselves when we were starting our business was, okay, what can we do with this dead time to ensure that the day it goes live for sale, we can take orders. This is called a product launch. So we started identifying places that we could go where we could have people ready to buy our product. Once they hit order store shelves. This comes in a couple of ways. This can come from a customer list you or someone you know has. So if you have another business in a certain market, by all means, start with that market. If you've got a blog with an audience that will buy your stuff, that likes your stuff, go there, Start with that. It could be identifying bloggers or joint ventures that you can partner with during this process. It could be going to people who have followings on Instagram and asking them if you can send them a product for review and they'll share it on their Instagram page. The important thing is that you find an audience of ready buyers so that when it hits store shelves, you can start off with a bang. There are services that can help with this process, and we've interviewed Joe Gianfola on the show. He runs a service called Zonblast.com that will syndicate your product out to thousands of Amazon buyers. So you put your price at a discount. All these people come in, they try it, they test it, they tell their friends. A lot of them leave reviews. You feed the algorithm what it wants, and that's another way that you can do it. But when you're first starting, I recommend going and using some sort of a launch process to get things off the ground. What we decided to do was to spend a few hundred dollars to send traffic to a Facebook page and build up a following of. I think it was about 6,000 people when we started. So about 6,000 people. We got to like a Facebook page called I Love Yoga. And that was simply to build up a list of people who like yoga. So that the day that our yoga products hit the shelves, we could kick it off and have a bunch of sales coming in. And that's how we decided to kick off our products. So the important thing, again, is just to have a list of ready buyers. And if there's a way for you to move that forward in that two months when things are on a boat somewhere, that is the way that you can really kick off this business. Now, there's a couple of things that I did haven't touched on as far as details go, and one of them is getting set up on Amazon. So once you have your manufacturer, actually the process has started as far as making the products, and you've paid whatever it is that they require up front, which is usually 50% up front and then 50% when they ship it. So if it's a total of $3,000 worth of costs, you'll have to pay $1,500 up front and then the rest when it's done. The first thing you've got to do is then go set up your store and your listings over@Amazon.com now, this is a process that I confess that I have never done myself. My business partners have always done it. But basically you would set up a seller central account over on Amazon and you're going to elect to have your products listed for fulfilled by Amazon. This allows you to have Amazon store, ship, package, take orders for, do the customer service for all the entire process. You ship your product directly to Amazon. They handle everything. That is really the sweet spot that makes this business so successful, so hands free. Because all you have to do is identify the opportunity. You identify the opportunity, go have the product made and then zip it over to Amazon. I want to talk about that point too, about having the product made. Do you go with a generic product or do you customize your product so that it's a little bit different than everybody else? I recommend the latter. I recommend doing something to your product to differentiate it from somebody else. The common knowledge is that you should do what has already been proven to be successful. So what happens is you have a bunch of people find out about this business model and then they go out and they copy everybody else. So everybody is doing exactly the same thing. When that is happening, then the first person to zag when everybody else is zigging usually wins. So by all means, if you can, I recommend making some sort of change to your product. What that change is will depend obviously on the market that you're in and what your customers ultimately want. With the podcast that again, I did with Sean, we talked about how we went to Reddit and we asked Reddit users who did yoga what they wanted to see in a yoga mat. And that was how we customized our products. So this is the process really from zero to getting started. It is identifying the market, looking for the opportunity, looking for suppliers, getting the product made, sending it over to Amazon. And by the way, the way that Amazon identifies this is inside of your seller central account, there is a shipping label that they'll send you and it will identify whatever comes in with that label as your product. So it'll give you a barcode, you'll send that to your manufacturer, your manufacturer will put it on your box, they ship it over to Amazon, Amazon gets it, scans the barcode and says, oh, this is your product. And they put it on the shelf and add it to the listing that you've set up. That is how you get A product from Idealand to Amazon's shelves. Total costs for this product are a few thousand dollars for the product it is that you are manufacturing and then save about 1,000 to $1,500 for shipping more if you've got a heavy product. That's what the total investment in this process is. So figure about $5,000 to get your first shipment going. The real work comes in next. What do we do to get this product selling? Now I have a YouTube video. It is called 12 Months to $1,000,000 on Amazon. I would recommend that you watch it. I detail the exact marketing strategies that make the biggest impact when it comes to marketing a product specifically on a channel like Amazon. But I'll give you the Cliff Notes. It's simply three things. It is begging everyone you know to try your product and leaving an honest review until you've got 25 people. Once you have 25 people run Amazon Pay per click number three, run a Zonblast. Zonblast.com, they'll syndicate your product out to thousands of people. Those three things together have worked over and over and over and over again to get products moving. Why? Because they grease the wheels of what Amazon wants. It wants sales and it wants reviews. That's it. That's what's important in this business in order to get things converting. Now we can expand on that in more advanced topics, which we've done with people like Joe Gianfolo, where we theorize about how Amazon's algorithm worked. But that's what it comes down to, because 80% of the profits when on a channel like this come from ranking for specific keywords. How do you rank for specific keywords? You get sales through those keywords. So we do that with Amazon pay per click. We do that with outside services like Zonblast and running promotions to whatever resources you have internally, be it a blog following, be it an email list, be it a social media following, be it a Facebook page, what? Wherever eyeballs are, that's where you want to turn on the eyeballs and send them to your listing. Because we are now greasing the wheel of Amazon's algorithm with sales. And that's how we get this business moving from a dead start into getting profitable sales. That is the getting started process of this business. That's the 101 to how this business works. And I know it sounds incredibly simple. And that's part of the beauty and the frustration of this business because it's so simple that people tend to overcomplicate it. With a bunch of other marketing tactics that don't really work or they don't believe that being that simple can really run a successful business. And the fact is that we have hundreds, we have thousands of case studies to show the opposite. We have countless case studies of being extremely successful with this business. But the real magic, like the more advanced stuff comes once you're off the ground and running. Because when you're off the ground and running, we can start talking about releasing second products, third products, four products. When you have done this process several times and you've got a slew of four products that are each selling 15 to 25 units a day, then we've got a business that serves a specific target market and we've got 80 to 100 sales a day coming in. And if our average product price is 20 bucks, 25 bucks, then there's 2,000 to 2,500 bucks a day coming in in sales and 15 to 25 units a day being sold is fairly low. If you've done your market research correctly. If there's a medium amount of competition, you follow the marketing steps that I just lined out for you that 15 to 25 sales day. Pretty easy to get to. When we duplicate that over several products, this adds up really quickly. And it doesn't tend to grow linearly. It tend to, tends to grow exponentially. Because people who see product number two come back and they buy product number one and vice versa. You get repeat customers, you get people who run out and come back for more. You get people who bought this product and they bought this product, they tell a friend about it. So you get this exponential increase in your overall product sales. So when you've got 100 to 200 sales coming in, you've got a million dollar business. And it happens really, really quickly. It happens over four to five products, each doing 20 plus sales a day. And you repeat the process until you are at the point that you want to be. And then we start to complicate it. That's when we do fancy things like we start looking at customer data, we start growing this business beyond Amazon. But we're not talking about that today. That, that I've outlined you in the last half an hour is really the crux of this business. If you listen to this and you do those steps, that is the exact process that people go through in order to see success here. Now there are courses out there that will show you the nitty, gritty, intimate details of this and communities that can give you the support for. And I think that they are all fantastic. But as far as strategy goes, that is the 101 of this business. And the reason I am revealing all this to you today for free is because I specialize in taking people who have run this process and taking them to that next level. I run workshops called the Next Level. You can go to event.freedomfastlane.com and apply for the next level. And I work with people who are doing modestly well and we tweak their processes so that they're doing extremely well. But that is the 101 for this business. I also happen to run a mentoring group for people who are either getting started in this process or want to be a part of a group that is growing these businesses together, a larger community. It's called the Tribe. And the Tribe is only open some of the time. It's only open on a periodic basis. You can find out all the details about that, about my mentoring group, about how we can help you, about the community that has had many, many millionaires come out of it by being a part of this community. You can find the details for that@freedomfastlane.com tribe. This was a simple podcast that was all you need to know in order to get started in this business. If you do these steps, you see results and then we can talk about making it bigger from there, about expanding beyond what you've built. But that is how you get things kicked off and that's when we start looking at scaling beyond this point. So I hope this was helpful for you. For those of you who are thinking about going into this business, just know a couple of things. This is a long term game. This is not a overnight thing. Part of the success of this business is outlasting the next guy. It is out marketing the next guy. It is being a better copywriter than the next guy. And by copywriter, I mean the person who is writing the sales page of your Amazon listing. It is out hustling and out getting customers than the next guy. The people who fail this business are the people who quit at the first ounce of adversity that they feel versus the guy who is really successful is the one who is willing to sacrifice short term profit margins for winning the game long term. Those the people who do extremely well. If you want more clarification there, go listen to both of the podcasts that we did with Joe Gianfola where he talks about why he's willing to go into the negative in order to acquire a customer because he knows that that is going to bring in more customers. Long term. If you put this episode with those episodes, you know more than most people who try to go into this business. It is a fantastic business model. It is a mostly hands off business model and it is a very scalable business model because it is the seeds of the business working on Amazon and then we can branch out from there into real branding and real business building from this point. So I hope this gives you the adequate launching pad you're looking for to get into this business. And once you're at the level that you want, preferably right at about the million dollar point, which sounds crazy to a lot of you who are getting started, but it's really about eight to 12 months after you've started this process and you've duplicated it over several products. Then come back and look at our workshops, look at our trainings, and if you're just getting started, I would recommend seeing if the Tribe is open@freedomfastlane.com tribe so thank you for listening to this episode. I know a lot of you who are listening to the show are new to the show. Since you found this episode, I want to welcome you to the Freedom Fast Lane community and I look forward to seeing you on a future show.