Ryan Daniel Moran walks Amazon sellers through finding niches like pets and supplements, picking products by trend direction and reorder rates, and launching with giveaways and reviews. He covers vetting factories properly, not just samples, and answers questions on inventory and brand registry.
Chapters
Week two. Welcome to week two of the tribe.
A couple things to update you on from last week. Last week we gave you a couple assignments and they should be that you have a few products that you are considering and hopefully you started to tinker around with some suppliers. You had one other assignment and it was to bring your scary hoodie for Doug.
So if Doug is watching, he can feel in good company. Unfortunately, it was just Brian and I who remembered that assignment. So, Brian, thank you, you, tribe member of the week this week.
Oh, thank you.
Oh, boy.
Can you hear me better this time?
I can hear you loud and clear now.
Okay, let's get rid of the hoodie.
If Doug joins us, we all put up our scary hoodies to scare Doug. Okay. So if you are a little bit behind, I was called out by one tribe member who can you give us some niche markets that look wide open right now? And so I want to give you those right now. I have three niche markets that I think are wide open for the taking.
Actually four, but two are really similar. I'm going to give you four markets that you can go into if you're a little bit behind. The first is pets. My favorite is pet supplements right now. That's about my favorite market right now. Yeah, Brian, that was my thought at first. But the volume is there. The volume is there. The competitiveness is there. Meaning it's pretty easy to rank in. And there's a whole bunch of products you can sell that have volume. It's a very interesting market and it has recurring revenue because people.
Eric, who are you saying should hit mute?
You saw your message. You mean me? No, Somebody's got their. We're hearing the feedback. Okay. I wonder if it's from me. I don't know.
But anyway, if you guys are hearing feedback and it's from me, let me know and I'll try and address something. But the pet supplements are my favorite because they meet all of our criteria. Over $20 per unit. It is something that people reorder. It has large volume. The competition is really low. The second that's kind of similar to that is there's a lot of opportunity with just about anything in pets as long as it meets the rest of our criteria. So if you can go like high end litter boxes or my girlfriend sells cat scratchers or if you have pet shampoos, anything that is pet consumable or that you can sell as a high end product. I would avoid pet toys or chew things because they tend to be very.
Low margin unless you can source them. For really, really cheap, your margins are not going to be there. But if you can go for higher end stuff in the pet market, there are a bunch of opportunities in pets.
I had this conversation with a friend recently where we said if we were to start a new business all over again, we'd be really tempted to look into a supplement line just for women, especially prenatals. There are a lot of opportunities in prenatals, women's multivitamins and this is kind of similar vegan supplements. There's a large opportunity for all vegan supplements, things like Omega 3.
Most of them are fish based. There are not a lot. I think I only found one or two people doing a really good job of selling vegan supplements, specifically vegan fish oil. My girlfriend is vegan and she has a really hard time finding supplements. For that reason I started to look. The ones who were doing that were doing decent volume even though they're marketing, wasn't that great. The third market to go into that recommend is anything in travel.
I was sitting in a room with some of the people in the 50k group this week who one of them said, hey, you can take this product idea and you can give it to one of the tribe members. And they said, packing cubes. Now, I don't quite understand the idea behind packing cubes. They seem a little bit silly to me. And they said, you don't understand how awesome they are until you try them. I was like, okay, apparently packing cubes are things that you use to compartmentalize your travel. Brian is shaking his head. Yes, they're that awesome. Eh, they are.
And Kathryn's smiling as well.
Awesome. Okay, cool. So I don't quite get them, but Jim and maggie in the 50k group said they're fantastic and they sold like hotcakes. They just had another business grow much faster than that one. But when they were selling packing cubes, they sold very, very quickly and they ultimately went into another direction. But anything in the travel market. So you can use packing cubes as a product idea for your research, but anything in the travel market, if you want to do backpacks, if you want to do packing items.
Travel people tend to be high end people because they have the money to travel. So if you want to do a higher end.
Traveling products business, that is something that I would encourage you to look into. And this is a bonus fourth one. It's very vague, but I have always had good success looking in sports and outdoors. Just because there's not a lot of competition there. There's not as many. It's not as asm packed to look in sports and outdoors. I have a yoga business in sports and outdoors. Just know that the volume is a little bit lower in the sports and outdoors category, but there's still plenty of it at the top of those categories. So there's. I know that's a little bit vague, but I find a lot of decent to good niche markets in the sports and outdoors category. Now I want to call to your attention something that came up on a coaching call I had with a tribe member this week and that was he asked the question about how good does a market need to look in order to move forward through that market? And he said that he was looking at something that met his criteria. But he said it looked to be. What did he call it? He said it was decent to good. It wasn't great, it just looked okay. So I told him a little story and this is kind of how I came up with my criteria for what we've all talked about on these calls for choosing the question product and that is this. My first product on the first initial sniff test looked to be not even good. It just looked like decent. The reason it looked like decent was because there didn't appear to be the volume on Amazon and there wasn't a lot of competition for this market. So it looked like it was a smaller market. We went into it anyway for one reason and I'll tell you what that reason was in a second second, let me tell you the results first. The result was since it was a smaller market, we hit number one in our category after doing about 25 to 30 sales a day. Which is great because it's nice to be number one in your category but also just slightly frustrating that you can be number one in a category and only sell 2530 units a day. That's okay money, but it's not change your life kind of money. So we were like, alright, well I guess based on these numbers we're going to have to roll out four products in order to hit 100 units a day, which will be a million dollar business. That's simple math. That's easy to do. Four products at 25 a day is fairly easy to do. You have about a million dollar business depending on your price point. So we rolled out product number two when we were doing about 25 units a day. And it was at this point that we hired our first part time employee. And when we hired this part time employee, we rolled out this second product and we told this person, we were in a conversation about this Product. And we went out of stock on that first product and we started to sell the new product and it was starting to grow. And she said, how many units a day does product number one sell? We said, well, when it restores to its full, full potential, it will max out at about 25 or 30 units a day. Okay, great. So that's what we factored for. But when it came back in stock and hit full capacity, the product sales doubled and we started doing 50 sales a day. Now, until that point, no other product in that category was doing anywhere near 50 units a day. So how in the world did we start selling 50 units a day when previously the number one person before we entered the market was doing like 15, 20 sales a day? What was the difference there? Well, it didn't stop there. Once we continued to roll out products and kept getting reviews, we now average, if we average 100 sales a day on that one product, it's a slow day. So we do well over 100 units a day on that one product alone. Even though previously the people doing number one in that category were only selling 15, 20 units a day. So what's the difference? It's a few things. One, we did so well with our reviews and we had such a good product because our product is absolutely the best in the market. We captured a very large amount of that market. We didn't just beat the guy at number one, we beat him, took all his business, all the guy at number two, all the guy at number three. We just completely owned that market and no one will ever touch us. I don't care who gets in. We will own that market because we own such a large amount of that market. The second reason is because when we rolled out product number two, we had crossover sales, we had reorders, we rolled out number three, and we had people come in from there and buy product number one. So we grew as a company, which is why I say if you want to really evaluate this business, you need to evaluate it on brands, not on products. So if you're looking for the one product that looks like a wide open market, you're going to have a hard time. But if you look at markets and what market you're going to go into, and you can identify three to five good products that you can comfortably roll out under this product line, then you'll be in a much better position to grow a million dollar business than somebody who is looking for the product, the one product that they can blow up. I don't care about one products. I look at what is a sellable company. What is a company that we can build and sell or build and grow that is incredibly profitable that is going to make the difference between you and 10,000 people in ASM. Because most of those people are very product minded. They obsess over the product. Whereas where your obsession needs to be is what market am I addressing, what group of people am I giving products to? And that's why you don't necessarily need to obsess over every single product. And that's why you should never go into a business that does not have a very defined target audience. If you are going into.
A business that only has one product, it's easy to think I'm just going to sell some random whiz bang product that has no target audience. But when you have a brand, you have to narrow down into who it is that you're serving. Because if you want to roll out a line of products, you want that second product to be something that the first buyers would also buy. Because you have brand equity now as a result of selling that first product and you want to give them something that is going to carry over to sell to product number two. The worst mistake you can make, and I see it done all the time, is is to roll out a cat scratcher and then a muscle building supplement. Makes no sense. They're completely different markets. And yet I see people do this all the time because they're looking product, they're looking at products rather than building a brand that is going to grow beyond them and beyond just being little products that make a little bit of money in each of their markets. Have I belabored this point enough to where we understand we're looking at markets, not at products and that makes it easier to not have to obsess over every little product. So it's okay to look at products that have decent to okay metrics or decent to good metrics and then to roll out four of them because your brand exposure will grow with each subsequent product that comes along. Do you guys have any questions about this? And I'll man the chat box as we're doing that.
No questions asked.
You've trained everyone well.
I want to say, hey, the people that are watching on the chat box, Darren Thomas, Victor Godson, Daniel, and all of you who are logged in on Anonymous as well, thanks for your comments in the box. Victor had a question. If one already has five to 10 products for a whole line of products, is it best to list them all or to drip them one at a time? So he's Asking if you already have a line of products, would it be best to just dump them all on Amazon or to do one at a time if you've already got them listed? If they're already on Amazon then I would just line them up and go, just pick one, launch it, go pop, pop, pop down the list where you put all your energy behind one.
If you don't have them on Amazon yet. My approach has always been to do one at a time. The reason for that is because I'm a dude who has very single minded focus and I have a hard time multitasking. Ask any woman. I know.
The approach that some people are able to do of listing them all on Amazon and doing them all at once. I personally am unable to do that, but I know people who can and there's some advantages to doing that. I just know that I am unable to do that. So I've always taken the approach of doing them one at a time and if I've already got them on Amazon. In fact here I just had a. I just had a conversation with my business partner Matt yesterday where we were talking about how are we going to take the products that aren't selling that well and get them to the point where they're selling 100 units a day. We realized that we had been really aggressive with our first two products but not so aggressive with our last three. Just thinking that if we listed it it would start to sell because we have all this brand equity now and it's a multimillion dollar business. But what we realized is that we needed to bring back that aggressiveness. So we picked up one of those three products that wasn't selling that well and we're going to put a lot of aggressiveness behind it until it's number one in its category and then move on to the second one. Put a lot of aggressiveness into it, bring it to number one in its category, move on and repeat that process. I favor the one at a time approach from Darren when looking at products. I started to focus on a product and lost sight of the brand idea. Happens to everybody. Just go back to thinking what do I want my business to look like, not necessarily what my product is and that frees you up to not obsess over every little thing from Shane. I have several products that look good, but the one I'm most interested in, which is a consumable, has a very low BSR in a very popular category. There are 166 pages of products for the primary keyword. I'm concerned about too Much competition and taking a long time to get to page one. Do you think I should start with a lower competition product? It sounds like you're going into Garcinia Cambodia. And if that's the case, you're right. You're dealing with a whole. What is the technical term? Hoop load of competition. And I would not recommend that, especially as a first product.
For your first product, yes, I would not recommend you go into the most competitive market on Amazon, which is Verceni, Cambodia, if you all would go on a little field trip with me. Pull up your browser and let's go to google.com.
Trends. I don't know if ASM teaches this in their new content, but let's do a little field trip together.
Just type in.
For a baseline whatever product it is that you're considering. So if I type in yoga.
It.
Will give you a trend of interest. And it bases this on the number of searches and related searches that are coming into its search engine. So what we're looking for is a growing trend. So let me see if I can switch over here.
See my computer? Stand by. One second.
The last time I did this, I accidentally hung up on everyone.
So you guys should see my screen right now. You see this? Yep. Okay, cool. So do you see how this trend for yoga is going up? That is a good. That's a good sign. Whereas we can compare this to something else, like Zumba. That's how you spell Zumba, right?
So Zumba was this really hot trend that everybody was saying was going to be this incredible thing. And look, it peaked and now it's going down. And how many of us hear about Zumba on a regular basis anymore? It's not as popular as. I've never done Zumba, but it's not as popular as it once was. It's not to say it won't come back. Plenty of things will go up, go down. You can see just in yoga here that it's come up. It's come down. It's like the stock market. What we're looking for is the overall trend to be up. And that's the case with yoga. Now let's take a look at some of these hot Dr. Oz things like Arsenia Cambogia.
Look at this guy. Now this here at its peak is an incredible amount of volume. In fact, let's compare it to something like one of the things my supplement company sells, which is fish oil. Fish oil is something stable. I mean, people take fish oil forever. Look at the difference in volume. At its peak, Garcinia Cambogia was doing almost four times the volume of fish oil, which is. Fish oil ain't a small market, it's a very large market. So at its peak, Garcinia is doing a ton of volume. So if you were selling here, it'd be one thing to say, okay, there's 167 competitors, or 167 pages of competitors. Awesome. There's enough volume to support that here at its peak. I don't care how many suppliers there are, there's so much volume here that if you go in and capture a piece of it, you're doing pretty well. But look at it now. So you have all these people pumping into the market, but you have this big dip here where it's doing half the volume that it was at its peak.
So if you can sell a product like that and get into it here, that's awesome. But once it's here, you can't build a business around this anymore. If this trend continues, you're going to have a hard time. Now, there's a couple caveats to this. Let me switch my camera over. Now, there's a couple exceptions to this. The exceptions are if you're already an established company, you can go into competitive markets like that, or if you have $100,000 in cash reserves, you're more than welcome to go into that market because a market like that is going to be all about who can outspend the next person. So if you go in and you outspend everybody else to get volume reviews and sales, you'll be fine and you can compete. But if you can't do that, then you're going to have a whole bunch of inventory and a whole lot of people outselling you because the trend has come down. You've got inventory, volume is down and the people at the top are making all the sales and it's going to be hard to compete with them. Does that all make sense about my answer for competition? If it's a growing trend or if the volume is just insanely high, then competition shouldn't scare you because there's enough volume to sustain it. But if the trend is coming down, I would not recommend you go into a highly competitive market because you're going to have a hard time capturing enough volume while competing in order to make it worth your while. Does that all make sense?
Brian says yes. Thank you.
Manning the chat box, Shane. Oh, Shane says it's not varsity in Cambodia. Well, that's good.
All of the principles that I just outlined remain the same. So I don't know what your product is. But if it's a growing trend, I wouldn't be afraid of competition. If it's a shrinking trend, I would stay away. I'd also be looking at again, how much volume is there to the people who are on the entire first page? Because getting onto the first page isn't all that hard. But what's the person at the bottom of page one doing? Is he doing enough volume? A question from Graham. If you launch another product in your brand, does that product get any momentum in the rankings as you already have started to establish a brand? And the answer is yes.
I have seen this happen many times where somebody who launches a product from the get go has a harder time ranking than somebody like me who's been around for a year and a half and is doing a lot of volume. The reason for that is because Amazon bases in its algorithm your total number of sales.
Per account. So if you're doing 500 units a day in your account, you can roll out just about anything you want and it'll start to rank very quickly. Whereas if you're a new account, you're going to have a harder time. Which is why it's so important when you're building this business to have regular flow of sales coming in however you can. This is the grind stage. You've got to out grind the people around you by doing giveaways, getting reviews, doing discounts, and really marketing those products hard in those initial stages.
What happens if you sell a food product that is sourced only from one country like South America, and they don't offer packaging? Do you have to get it shipped somewhere for packaging? Well, I would be hesitant to put food products from anywhere that are overseas. However, no matter what you're ordering, you don't have to have packaging as long as it's going over to FDA in individual units. So you don't have to have packaging at all.
Anybody on the hangouts.
Want to comment or ask a question about what we've covered? Pierre's computer has frozen so it looks like he is just downing that water bottle. He really likes having his mouth on a water bottle. Or it's the never ending soda.
You don't see me?
Nope. We just see a frozen image of you sucking down a water bottle and it's ad.
You don't see a flow image right now?
No, we just see a second. Just an image of you.
Having your mouth around a water bottle. It's really cute.
I'm going to update it.
Okay. Any questions about what we've covered so far, for those of you who are.
On the hangout, Ryan, if I could maybe just add one thing about the listing and ranking and the competition above you and this was a thread in the Tribe Facebook group this week. If the competition above you are large brands.
Who maybe aren't paying attention to what they're doing on Amazon, don't let the fact that they're large brands scare you. Look at it as an opportunity because you can work around them fairly quickly.
Yeah. Would you clarify that a little bit on what it might look like as far as an example goes? I know what you mean, but we've always heard if something's very brand driven, we should go.
You mean it in a different sense. You mean if they're not doing their marketing correctly.
Correct. So you've got large multi million, multi billion dollar companies who are looking at Amazon as an ancillary channel, looking at retail distribution as their primary. So they've got some products on Amazon, likely they're going to be sold by and shipped by Amazon. Because these are big companies who have reps who deal with Amazon. They don't deal with Amazon directly. And it's simple that nobody is actually watching that listing or managing reviews or doing anything to rank. They're looking at it as gravy business. The big brand might have an intern, a summer intern doing something, but Amazon surely isn't having the personal touch. But don't get worried if you see everybody above you being a large multi billion dollar company with a product, look at that as an opportunity to kind of move and jig against those big brands.
Yeah, there's a big difference between trying to compete with brands that aren't doing their marketing well and trying to sell a knockoff Apple Charger. There's a big difference. For example, I know lots of people who, eight years ago when I started teaching Internet business ideas, people were in love with the idea of dropshipping. It was a really cool business model. It still is. But the number one thing that people wanted to sell was Apple products. It was the number one thing that they wanted to sell because everything was hot. This is when Apple was just coming on and selling. There's tons of ipods and that's what everybody wanted to sell while drop shipping. So there's this mentality of I'm going to sell whatever is hottest, even if it competes with a major brand. Well, there's one thing to say, you want to sell like a knockoff and actually compete with the big guy directly. And then there's this difference between I'M going to go into the same market as the big guys because they're not doing their marketing well and I can do their marketing better than them. It's a canyon of a difference. Hey Brian, if you would, would you give us a little bit of an update of, I think you called it Zoncon.
The meeting that you had of tribe members, what gust and how people.
Are doing actually very well. Did you get the email I sent you?
I confess I'm way behind on email because I'm moving this week. So I am behind on email at the moment.
Well, I was asking for your permission to promote it within the tribe.
Okay, there we go. I promise I'll get back to you.
So the event in Philly, we had nine business and we had a nice keynote speaker, Liz Brazier, about time management and we did something that you and I did in the Philippines. It's 30 days from now and to hold everybody accountable. So we're going to have a follow up Google Hangout. I've got it scheduled for early December and I was able to get a couple testimonials from some of the attendees and probably a couple are watching and listening. But all of the feedback that I got was great. And I've kind of coined the phrase spend a day working on your business rather than working in it. Yeah.
Good.
Tell us a little bit how the people that attended are doing because it's mostly people from the last ASM group. How are they doing?
There's. Well, one of the guys of course that was there was Master Joe.
And his mom. So that's an interesting dynamic going into business with your mom. I don't know if anybody's tried that, but I haven't. There were one or two guys who were ASM2. Pretty much everybody else was ASM3. Everybody is in either phase one or phase two. A big chunk of people are in the grind.
Myself included. Although I'm getting very close to phase two.
It's people who five months ago weren't selling anything on Amazon. Today they're doing anywhere from $1,000 to $50,000 a month.
The great thing out of it was the peer support. Individuals who are in the same situation helping other individuals in the same situation.
We had a similar one.
It's called the Tribe Mastermind, but it's starting to be known as the 50k group. People doing 50k and above flew into Austin this week. I'll tell you this, that the number one differentiator between everyone in that room, people doing 50k and up, and everybody Else the big differentiator was everyone in that group believed in being highly aggressive when launching a new product to, as Joe put it in a thread once, bully your way to the top. That was the number one differentiating factor between the people who are. Differentiating isn't the right word, the common factor between everybody who is at that table, the dozen people or so who are doing at least 50 grand a month, all believed that they would bully their way to the top and they would outspend out, hustle out, market everybody else.
In their space. And it was not. There was only one guy there who had a large team. Most of the people there were one man shows and a lot of them had had full time jobs when they started their business. So it's not a matter of how much time you have, it's more about how much volume can you comfortably sell even at a loss in order to outrank everybody else? Alex, that is the baseline is you have to be doing at least 50 grand a month in sales. Most people in that room are doing much, much more than that. But that is the minimum in order to qualify. To get there. A good question came up on the chat and it's from Louis. If we're shipping our products from China directly to Amazon, how do you ensure the quality of what you're sending to Amazon? And the answer to that is get a sample from your supplier before you send them over to Amazon's fulfilled warehouses. That's how you make sure that the quality is there. Or you can hire our neighborhood friendly Katherine Chung, who goes over and inspects the suppliers for you and makes sure that the quality is there. Kathryn, since we have a little bit more time this week than we did last week, would you remind people how they can hire you to make sure to go inspect their inventory?
I wanted to make a note of it, an emphasis, make some emphasis and to correct something that you mentioned. I'm sorry about that. To make sure the quality product to sell in Amazon is high quality, you need to start from qualify your factory instead of qualified products.
In China it's common for them to give you really good samples, but at the end of the day they ship you cheap product or crappy products. I know that well, I have a factory, I have many factory brands. So it's a risk behind might happen or it might not happen. But if you qualify the factories, you save a lot of troubles because good quality factories always produce good quality products. Does that make sense?
Yes. So what you're saying is that.
If you're buying from a Crappy factory, they may rip you off in the sense of sending you good samples, but when it comes time to ship a lot of products, they might send you junk. But if you qualify the factory, the factory is going to do things right. So don't qualify the product. Qualify the factory.
That's what I do. Yes. So yeah, only the factory can give you a sustainable and long term guarantee on the product quality. That is what my experience. And seeing those, especially for those items, it's really demanding on quality as well.
And what's your process for somebody who wants to hire you to inspect the factory for you? How do they get a hold of you if they want to do that?
It starts from the sourcing instead of inspection. So when I help them source the product, I include the service to qualify the factories. I will personally call the factories, the people, the overseas manager. Because on the telephone conversation I can ask a lot of questions that they need to ask me. Sometimes through the email they will answer a lot of things.
And should they just send you a Facebook message if somebody wants to hire you for that service?
Oh yeah, yeah, they can ship me your Facebook message.
Okay, cool.
From the Facebook chat.
Question. Oh, Master Joe was among us and he's having a conversation about.
Zon blasts he mentioned. He's saying in the chat box that he can do a couple of blasts and basically goalie his way to the top in a lot of cases. One of the things that's that we have found in our group and credit to Master Joe for.
Basically cracking this is.
If you do these large giveaways that we have become popularized especially within our tribe. A few of them are often enough to bully your way to the top. So to clarify what I said earlier about.
Bullying yourself at the top, about out marketing and outspending everybody to get to that level, it often can be done with a few large giveaways of. When I say large, I mean a few hundred units. A few of those will often be enough to bully your way to the top. Especially if you have good systems in place to get reviews from the people that are buying from those. And we test a lot of that and I'll be able to clarify more when we have some more test data from some things that we're experimenting with right now. But we continue to go back to good follow up sequences and good follow up calls being the key to getting those reviews. In addition to that stage one nucleus of reviews that you get from family and friends.
It'S your nucleus of friends and family plus good systems from follow up sequences and phone calls that really set apart you from other people in order to get reviews. And then there's some other extra nice things that you can do further down the line. But those are the really, those are the foundational things that you need to have in your business.
Before we go on, are there any questions from those of you who are on the hangout? Hakeem, I see your question. Yeah.
When you talk about giving away units, I know you should focus on just one product at a time, but I have an account on Amazon Affair and amazonlab.com.
So for my Amazon Affair I just order like 50 units because the item is, is more expensive. And for the dot com I ordered 150 units. So for.com I'm probably giving away 100 units. But for the FR I order 100 units. But I can't give away 100 units at the EFR account because otherwise it will sell out and I'd be out of inventory. So I was thinking of only giving away 50 and I was wondering if that works out a little or it's just not worth it. Might as well do 100 and wait.
Okay, so you're asking, you have an account on Amazon.com and an account on Amazon.fr and you're wondering should you do how much you should give away since you have your inventory split?
Yeah, basically I was thinking because you said it's more to give, the best is to give away as many, like a few hundreds. But I was thinking since if you can start out with a few hundreds at a time, is it still worthwhile to start with 50 and get a few sales a day and then start two weeks later with 200 late or it's not worth it. You should do it right from the beginning.
Well, we personally don't do a giveaway unless we can give away at least 100. Now if it's on Amazon.fr I don't know what the competition is going to be. My guess is going to be much, much, much lower. So 50 might be enough to kind of kick start that process. But I don't have any experience over there. We do everything on Amazon.com and as a result of that we don't do anything unless it's at least 100 unit giveaway. Okay.
Say that again here.
I have all the 150 because of the case. Back on FBA I was like, oh, I don't want to get confused. You know, they limit this stuff to 150 units per parcel. So I just, I wanted to go with 200. But I say, okay, 150 would be enough. I will be giving away 100. Let's say it works out and the 50, they sell out afterwards. I've heard, like, when you sell out, you have out of inventory. Rankings go down.
Yeah, that's true. So for you, I would not recommend doing a large giveaway. You have too few units to do a giveaway. The only thing you should do is get a nucleus of reviews from friends and family of 25 to 50 people that you know will leave reviews. You should not do a big giveaway right now. You do not have enough inventory. This is partly why I recommend getting as much inventory as possible when you start. I wouldn't recommend doing a big giveaway when you've only got 150 units, because you could get a spike in the algorithm and go up, but then you'll lose the inventory, which means that you'll go down and they'll even themselves out and you won't really move that much. So I'd get more inventory before I did a large giveaway. It's hard to hustle your way to the top with only 150.
Yeah, but I don't want to get to the top.
Right?
Just. I just want to be like. To get to, like, I don't know, five sales a day, just to get started.
Then don't do a launch, then only do a nucleus of reviews giveaways, meaning you have 25 to 50 personal friends and family that you give your product away to that you know will leave the views.
Yeah, but for the Amazon.com, i don't know, my family's in France. So, you know, after we do the Facebook.
Well, then you go to Facebook pages that are your target market. You go to blogs that are your target market. You get tribe members together. You hustle your way to get that nucleus of reviews. It's. It doesn't just have to be personal friends and family. It can be any group of your target market. Blog owners, Facebook page owners, website owners, people who have lists, people in the tribe, Facebook groups. You do an ad on Facebook and drive them to a squeeze page about getting a group of people who are your target market in one spot that you can give them away to and follow up with them in order to get reviews.
Okay, so.
Reviews are.
Not enough to spike the algorithm, but it's still enough to get some sales running. So that's what you confirm.
Yes, that's what I'm saying.
Ryan, do you mind if I share a observation here for Pierre Pierre, I know it's tempting to try to sell on the Amazon French website. It's your home country of course, but something to consider might be that Amazon.com is 20 times the size of the French website. And by selling on both sites you're in essence running two businesses. You've got your customer support, listing management, inventory management on the French website, everything else on dot com. You might want to consider choosing one of those two to focus on to get started to get yourself a baseline business going with some cash coming in. But before you try to do two at the same time.
I happen to agree.
Just one last thing. You talked about the vegan product.
I just want to show this that I just to give someone example.
I like the packaging. I think it's if someone's doing supplement they should inspire themselves from this brand because they do quite a good job.
So.
Interesting. So you actually have vegan digestive enzymes. Yeah. Very good, very cool. Thanks for sharing that. A couple questions from the chat and. Ah, shoot. Where did it go? Oh, someone is asking about capping the number of giveaways. How can you control the number if you do a blast for something or if you're doing a Facebook giveaway? There are some.
Complex ways to limit the number of coupon codes that go out. But for us we just keep a keen eye on any of those coupon codes that are being used and turn off the coupon code when we're getting near the limit of what we want to be giving away. I know that's not perfect, I know there's nothing scientific about it, but we just monitor that coupon code and when we're getting close to either the number of leads we want or the number of sales through that coupon code that we're giving away, we just turn that off and move on and then get some data again. I know it's not perfect, but we do what we can.
Forgive me, I'm going through the chat questions.
Here's a question for Catherine Katherine.
Yes.
Is it enough to depend on the gold supplier badge that the supplier has in Alibaba to know that they are selling high quality products? Is the badge and the feedback on Alibaba enough to qualify a supplier?
The.
The gold supplier batch information? As far as I know it's shortage of some critical criteria that I set to qualify the factories?
If you are really concerning on the high quality. So they are not disclosing some secrets that you would never get there unless you talk to them over the phone, it won't publish. That is the Thing that you can't and that is the thing that why we need to personally contact them to get this information because this is a business secret that they would tell you for that some reason. Yeah. And the gold supplier have some basic information.
Which I think is at that level. But my personal experience with the gold supplier doesn't give me enough.
Choices for the supplier for sourcing items. So what I find is even when you go to the gold supplier but they are missing a lot of goods quality supplier within the gold supplier.
So I don't know working it just. It's not perfect.
So you're saying that somebody who has a gold supplier badge on Alibaba, the risk is down for sure of anything going haywire. The risk is definitely. It definitely helps. But you personally feel most comfortable with some other criteria being sourced that you can only do if you're talking to them or that you go see them in person.
Yeah, that I feel I found that it's the best way which many, many multi million branded company they hire people to not just inspect and everything and then place order that's any brand of company would definitely. But now for me because it's convenient, I think it is really good to help track members to do so. For example, I found one tribe member sell really well but have quality problem afterwards. So it's the reason that the source product is from a wrong factory. So that's the answer.
So the way that I would answer the question that was asked is.
In.
Most cases if you're following somebody who is coming well vetted on Alibaba, you're at least going to do okay. You're probably not going to run into a lot of shady business. If you are risk averse and you want to be sure of the quality of your product, then I would go the extra mile of talking to Kathryn and have her call the factories and do the due diligence for that.
If you're risk averse and you want to be sure I would do the extra mile of what Kathryn is talking about. But if. But working with only people who come well vetted on Alibaba will surely certainly allow you.
To risk of dealing with anybody who's going to rip you off or send you poor products. I want to take a question from Hakeem who said I was about to do a huge giveaway of my product of 300 or 400 units. But I ended up creating a removal order because I was not satisfied with the quality of my product. I was scared about getting getting bad reviews and bad feedback. Did I make the right decision. When you say you did a removal order, do you mean you pulled your product out of inventory? Is that what you mean?
Okay, he says yes.
What was the reason behind the fear of the quality of product? So if you had 400 units of a product in stock, what was the reason? What suddenly changed that made you want to remove that product? Can you hear me now? Yeah. Okay, good. The reason why? Because I checked the product, but I used it and I was not satisfied. And I just thought that maybe people would just leave bad reviews. So that was my wrong call when I chose my suppliers. So I, I know that I probably did not pick up the best product.
I probably would have handled it differently than you. I probably would have liquidated that inventory through a giveaway. For example, in my supplement business, we have one product where.
We found out, like what you said, that our supplier wasn't as high quality as we originally expected. We, we found a new supplier that we really like, that we really like the product a lot. So.
Here'S what we a new order from the supplier and then we're liquidating the rest of the product that we don't want through either a dollar giveaway or doing a half off coupon. And we're getting that spike in sales just in time for the new inventory to arrive. So we're looking to spike our ranking and spike our sales so that the organic sales come from the product that we really believe in. But we still do continue to follow up with the people who bought the inferior product in order to encourage reviews. Yes, Ryan, I thought about the same thing. I said, you know what, I'm going to go for this product, do a huge giveaway, and then I already have a similar supplier with better quality, but I was just scared of getting a lot of backorders and a huge default rate. So what do you think? So what should I do? I can cancel the removal order and do it.
This is tough.
I am risk tolerant, meaning.
I'm a risk taker. So.
I would liquidate that inventory and not worry about the bad feedback. Now I know not everybody is as risk tolerant as me. Some of my partners are not as risk tolerant as me. So my risk tolerance would say, I'm going to liquidate this inventory. If anybody leaves me a bad review, I'm going to fight the review because hell, I gave them a dollar. A dollar product and I'm going to call me, look, dude, you got it for a dollar. Just remove your review. And some of the times they will.
I would just be careful over who you give away the product to. For example, we did a giveaway once and we did it specifically to an audience that is very critical, meaning they are.
Godson, please mute yourself. You're echoing.
We did it soon.
There we go.
So we did it to an audience that was very mature and very intelligent and very picky on the type of product they got. And it was a disaster because even though we gave it away for a dollar, they ripped us apart. Whereas if we gave it away to a mass audience that wasn't as particular about one little bit of it being different.
That would have fixed the problem.
That would have resulted in us not receiving all that negative feedback and people would have been happy to leave a positive review just because they got it for a dollar. So just be careful over the audience you give it away to. But myself, as a risk tolerant person.
You're echoing terribly. And I gotta meet you, man.
He decided the inventorian would continue to make that decision just because I happen to be risk tolerant.
Okay, thank you. Does that make sense? Yes, makes a lot of sense.
I will do as you say. I will cancel the removal order and I will do the product launch and take the risk. Yeah, that's what I would do. Again, not everybody is as risk tolerant as me.
Come with me, man.
Sorry, I was a little distracted there. Godson, you're echoing terribly when you take your audio on.
Any other questions from those of you who are on the hangout?
I'll hop over to the chat.
If someone doesn't have any question.
I have one.
Yeah, go ahead, Pierre.
I mean, I have several, but I won't ask all but brand registry, I know it's not priority. You can do it later. But.
When you register like a month later or two months later and your product has already quite a few sales a day, do they like make use, delete your product and create another one with the brand, or do they evolve the product and keep all the history of the rank on Amazon and stuff? Because when I got the employee on the phone, she told me that you'd have to delete your listing, create another one, but you keep the same asin, so you get the reviews on the old one that I told her Yemen, what about the sales history on Amazon? She said, all that will be deleted. So I was like, that's why. Maybe it's worth it to create a brand right now. But you know what I mean.
Are you asking if.
Oh my goodness, that's retail. Amelia.
You'Re asking if someone, if you have brand registry.
Will that.
If you add registry to a product, will that delete the product from Amazon and require you to start all over? Is that the question? Yes. It cannot. I mean, it should not.
If somebody on Amazon told you that in order to add Bread Registry to your product, it would delete your existing products, they were sorely mistaken. That is not the case.
Okay.
Does anybody have a different experience?
Brian use brand registry, don't you?
Yeah, I was trying to think back through. I registered my brand before I actually created the listing and sold anything. So it's not quite the same situation Pierre has. But I did go through this when I converted to stickerless commingled, and Shawn.
Helped me a little bit with that.
Listing.
You've got your listing, which is separate from the asin. The ASIN is actually the details of the whole product and the images, etc. And then you've got.
Your listing, which is uniquely identified with the fnsku. Now, if you're doing stickered inventory, your FNSKU starts with an X. If you're doing stickerless commingled, your FNSKU is your asin. So, Pierre, what the Amazon person might have been talking about was your FNSKU.
Listing within your account, which is different than the actual asin. If you have your brand and you can get a brand registered before you start selling, that's the easiest. If not, you'll just have to work through seller central. But your reviews and whatnot will carry over my sales history. When I created my new fnsku, when I converted, the stickerless commingled did not carry over. But the reviews is the important stuff.
My brain hurts from that number of details.
But I'm looking at the chat box and our neighborhood friendly. Sean Coyne, my partner on Zen Active, our yoga business is saying that we did have to delete our yoga mats to add Brad and registry. Sean, could you clarify in the chat box? Because I know we didn't redo the listing, and in one of my businesses, we added brand registry much later. So, Pierre, I might have to do some research on this one in order to give you.
A proper answer to this. We are running out of time, so I'm doing a sweep of the chat box. In the meantime, if anybody who hasn't had a chance to speak up on the hangout itself wants to ask a question, feel free to to do that.
Forgive me while I go through the chat box.
Interesting question from someone who says they're researching suppliers for the product they want to start with. And most of them are in Pakistan. None of the suppliers are qualified on Alibaba, which makes me nervous. Do you have any knowledge or experience with suppliers in Pakistan? I personally don't. That is, I'd consider it a higher risk supplier country doesn't mean that they're all bad. It doesn't mean that something bad is going to happen. But I would consider that a higher risk area because it's going to be harder to vet them. It's going to might have a lot larger language barrier and there's not as much volume going in and out of that country. So I would be hesitant if you could find another supplier in a place that would be easier to vet. I would recommend going that direction, but that doesn't mean it's a bad idea. I've had actually employees who lived in Pakistan before and they were fantastic. It's just a higher risk area. There were several questions that came in about the live event in Vegas, the chat box and Pierre just posted one here at the Hangout.
Our meeting is going to be the day before the conference. So that entire day will be us meeting in person and then us going to dinner that evening. So you'll want to arrive as early as possible. The day before the conference, we'll probably.
Probably at noon. So if you. Now. If you can't get there till later, no problem. It's.
Very rare once anyway. So last year we had. Or last round, we had people who were.
Who got there right at time, but most people kind of trickled in as time went on. And then we all go to dinner as one big group. So get there when you can, but definitely get there as early as you can the day before the conference. Some people flew in the night before, which was really cool. And that meeting will be at the Venetian.
If rooms are booked at the Venetian, there's tons. If you've never been out in Vegas, there's tons of hotels in the area and you can either walk there or take a cab there. I mean, there's. If you want to save some bucks, you can stay at one of the cheaper hotels and take the cab there every morning. That's fine. But we'll be in the Venetian. I'll be staying in the Venetian. Most of the tribe stays there. And the meeting that we have will be in the Venetian before we go to dinner that night.
Cool.
Any other final questions before we call it a day?
Sorry, I have talked too much, but I have just one last question.
That's fine, go ahead. I'm just reading the chat box while you're talking. Go ahead.
I have sent the shipment from China to the US via dhl, but I just realized I don't have an account there. So how will the customs work? I know it's specific to each product. You know it's not the same for each type of product. I can't say what is my product. But still, will DHL collect the tax and send them to Amazon and Amazon will make them pay later on.
So do me a favor and bring this up on a future call because this takes a little bit of time to explain and we're getting a little ahead of ourselves. So we'll address this on a future call.
Here are your assignments for the week. Last week.
You should have been making a list of products that you were interested in and at least in experimenting. Here we go. Put on your scary hoodie for Doug, who's probably watching. Doug, we missed you this week. If you're not watching.
You'Re supposed to make a list of products you're interested in and start experimenting by talking with suppliers. This week, you should narrow down your product list to a maximum, a maximum of three products or three business ideas that you're going into. If you've got more than three, by next Saturday, you're behind. And the second is to further get into your conversations with suppliers. And that means possibly ordering samples, means possibly talking to somebody like Catherine to bet that supplier. It means possibly even. Well, you should definitely do this. Be looking into what their minimum order quality is. Quantity is their minimum order quantity and looking at what the pricing is going to be. So you should come to the next hangout with a maximum of three business ideas or products along with what the minimum order quantity is going to be from the suppliers you're looking at and what it's totally going to cost you to get into that product or that business. And the third piece is, if ASM hasn't told you to do this yet, you should go sign up for your seller central account if you haven't done that. So next week you should have your business ideas narrowed. You should know what your pricing is going to be. You should have the minimum order quantity you're going to need for each of those and you should have a seller central account set up. Those are your assignments for this week. If you're on board, give me a thumbs up. The Google hangout.
Cool beans. All right, guys, thanks for coming and I will see you next week. Thanks, guys.
