Tribe Hangout 5/17/14

So I'll be waiting for that payment in PayPal.

That $50,000 payment. Hey, everybody, sorry for the delay. I had to run up and get a charger from a buddy of mine. So we should all send Bill thank you cards. Actually, Bill has an awesome podcast called Forever Jobless. If you guys like podcasts, he has a fantastic one called Fire Travels. For a while was the number two podcast, like beating Pat Flynn, Beating everybody was just behind Dave Ramsey. He lives upstairs in my building. So you can post a review on his itunes and say, thanks, Bill, for lending us the charger. So let's do this. Did you get any religion while you were gone? What's that?

Did you get any religion while you were gone?

Not while I was gone, no. Thank you, by the way, for all of you who helped me with that. We actually jumped in and didn't know where the result of those reviews. So thank you for that.

You're welcome. Let's do this. If you guys have specific questions, I'm going to go into a little bit of stuff that's been working for us lately. But in the meantime, if you guys have questions, do me a favor and type them in the chat box or if you're watching the livestream, please post them on the page. Let me actually pull up that page so we're all on the same page. Post that in the chat box. On the Google Hangout. If you have specific questions from like what's going on this week or whatever, just type them in the chat box. So let me. Sean, have you met everybody or should we do a big intro?

No, we should do an intro.

We should do an intro. Okay, so Sean is my right hand man he's my partner in crime he is my devil in sheep's clothes. He is the fiddle to my widdle he is the song in my bonnet he is the jelly to my peanut butter he is my partner on Xen Active. This got weird quick. Sean, why'd you do that?

He's my partner on Zenactive, our yoga products company.

We launched that company along with ASM2. So we did that as kind of a follow along for the people who got in through ASM2. And it's been about. What was that six months ago? Eight months ago. Sean, where are we at?

It sounds right. 8ish.

Eight months. And we've kind of had highs and lows. It was a little bit of a different business since we were ordering everything from China. It was my experience doing everything from China and it wasn't a consumable. So it's been a little bit of a different process for me and Sean's first real business on his own. So we both went through a bunch of learning curves as a result. But now on the other end, we've seen it all, we've done it all, and we're finally at that point where we're consistently profitable. Finally, we're at that point where we are consistently and regularly profitable. We're rolling out products two and three. They're on a boat somewhere right now or in a factory somewhere. They've been ordered and paid for. So Sean is the go to guy when it comes to anything technical or anything about how systems and operations get done. So if you have questions about that, post them in the Facebook group or post them here in the chat. My specialty, of course, is ideas. And our kind of relationship is I come up with the ideas and Shawn makes them happen. I don't know how he makes them happen. He goes into a lab somewhere and hooks up something and it gets done. I have no idea. He's just magical. I have no idea what he does. So there's a lot of appreciation there. So one thing I want to talk about, especially for you, Marcia, is when you're looking at partners Sean and I, Sean is the first really, really successful partnership I've had as far as implementation goes. Because one of the biggest mistakes you can make in business, and I only know because I've done it at least 4,000 times, is partnering with somebody who is just like you. You meet somebody, you're like, hey, this is going to be fun. I like you, you like me, let's go into business together. Or you say, hey, you got this idea too. Let's do this. You want to do this together? Great, let's do it together. Or you have a family member and you say, hey, we know each other well and we trust each other. Let's go into business together. The only way business partnerships will work is if you are partnering with somebody who has completely different skills than you. So Sean and I, I love to come up with ideas to get things started and to be on stage. Sean would rather put a bullet in his foot than be on stage or come up with business ideas. But he is a freaking master at getting things done. I can't get anything done because I'm coming up with new ideas all the time. So if you are, you have to partner with somebody who is complementary to you or one of you is unnecessary, completely unnecessary. There's a great test that you can take that will give you a nice Little bit of analysis if somebody is a good person to partner with. It is called the Kolbe Index. It's K O l v d e dot com. I think it's.comcolby.com It's a test that takes about 30 minutes, and it gives you a readout of how you get things done. It gives you four categories, and it's kind of like Myers Briggs. There's no right or wrong or good or bad. There's just what's custom to you. So my Colby is 5, 6, 4, 2. Sorry, 5, 6, 7, 2. And what that means is that in quick Start, which is the third one, I'm a seven. And that's my strongest one. That's my highest one, which means I take really fast action, but then I need people around me to support me. Sean is an 8 in follow through. So that means he gets things handed off to him or ideas presented to him, and he goes chick, chick, chick, chick, chick, and he gets them all done. And I have no idea how he does that.

How did you find him?

Sean and I have been friends since we were in middle school, and Sean was kind of following along some of the stuff that I was doing back when I was writing on ryansreview.com and Sean was. Sean, why don't you tell the story about that first little business experience you did?

Well, I'm still doing it. It still makes money.

One of Ryan's articles on his website talked about drop shipping. And so I started off on. I would just find things on sale on, like, Newegg. Being a pretty solid computer geek, I knew what was going to be, you know, hot and worth looking into. And I would just buy them and then ship them directly to whoever purchased it, either on ebay or Amazon. And then I came across inflatable movie screens on Target. And then I have a 5% off gift or debit card, so I get 5% off the price. And I would sell the movie screen. Well, not. Would still do on Amazon and ebay. And each one that sells, I make probably 30 to $40, depending on where the shipping is, and takes me about, I don't know, 15 minutes of time. And at one point, I mean, it was helping pay off my college tuition. Now it's more just because I don't want to stop. I'm not going to throw away $30.

So I was telling Ryan about this, and his face looks similar to now. Like, what are you doing?

What do you mean?

You're spending 15 minutes processing each order. And we got to Talking about Amazon and ASM and how we could kind of.

Combine our talents together to make what is now Zen active happen.

Yeah. So I can't imagine taking 15 minutes to process every order for 30 bucks. Like that would just drive me crazy. I could come up with the idea for it, but to sit in there and be at the computer and come up, no.

I would rather have an ice pick shoved under my fingernails. Sean and I knew pretty quickly that we were going to be complementary of each other. The way that we set things up was I was like, okay, great, we're going to treat this like your business and I'll be your advisor, but I'll help fund it. That was kind of our arrangement was it's your business. And I said that because I didn't know how Sean and I were going to work together when we started. Now I'd trust him with any of my businesses. I'd trust him with my life. But when we started, we didn't know how we were going to work together. So it was like, alright, this is your business. I want you to take ownership of this. I'm going to be the idea person. Which worked out really well. So now whenever I have a partnership, I kind of phrase it that way to start, just to set.

The relationship with. Now Sean and I are both kind of interacting in the business, but that's kind of how it started. Anthony, I saw your comment, you saying, so you wouldn't do this on your own. No, you can do this on your own, no problem. Having a partner can help if there are certain things that you are not good at that you know you need help with. When I started my first Amazon business, I partnered with Matt, who you'll probably meet in Vegas. He's going to try and make it out. He doesn't, he doesn't always come to these meetings, but sometimes he does.

Matt and I partnered on the men's fitness company and I knew that I was not going to print out the labels. I just knew I was not going to go find the labels. I was not going to do those little details. And I knew that. I just knew I would quit if I had to get those details. He's a detail guy and a research guy. He's not a fast starter. So since he's good at researching, I knew that us partnering was going to. He would get those details done and I would work on ideas. And that's why I took on a partner with that. Marcia put it well when she said, it's better to have half of a really Big pie than nothing or than a big part of a pie that doesn't even exist. So I totally agree with that. Marcia, are you kind of an idea person? Are you like a quick starter? Is that your.

I am an idea person and a quick starter. Starter. It's one of those things where someone has told me I have the ability to see the forest and the trees, but if you make me be in the trees, I shut down.

I know exactly what you mean. I know exactly what you mean. And, Sean, you'd be like, what are you talking about? I'm in the trees. What are you talking about? I can't see all the forest. I'm in the trees.

I don't know how many bad partnerships. The one that is going really well right now in my other businesses, I'm in partnership with two other people. And it's like, I realized at that point, because I tried the VA thing and I just had horrible success with it because I was always having to manage somebody. And when I found the right partners for our business in Vegas, where they just own whole chunks of something and I never have to touch any of the details of it, it's like, I don't have to program a database and spend hours that I don't have to do xyz, and it just flows so much better.

Yeah, I hear you. Now, the ideal scenario would be if you could find an employee that was just as good as a partner. That would obviously be the best scenario. But when you're starting out, first of all, that costs money, and you don't always have money when you're starting out to do that. And second, it's kind of hard to replace somebody who has a financial incentive to grow a business. So if you guys are looking at partners, I don't recommend everybody do partners, but if you're looking at partners for this business, just please partner with somebody who is complementary to you.

Sean put it well, he called it two plus two equals five. And that's kind of what a good partnership is like. A bad partnership looks like one plus one equals two.

I was going to say one plus one equals negative two.

Yeah.

You get in each other's way when it's not a good partnership and less.

Gets done or something doesn't get done at all.

Right, Exactly. So avoid partnering with people who are just like you. I've made that mistake many times, and it has never, never been a good thing. It's taken me that many failed partnerships and that much lost revenue in order to learn this lesson. So please take the Lesson from me. All right, Tim, let me get to your questions here. When you first launch your yoga mat, how many sales approximately did you make in the first day, first week? What percentage of those came from Facebook? So if you're referencing the launch, we did like a.

50 person launch, meaning we gave away 50 Macs, but we gave them away. And from there.

I mean, we were up to like 10 sales a day within a couple of weeks. I hope that answers your question. How much does shipping cost? Customers cut in your margin when shipping? Great question, John. This is actually, I would like for you to address this because I, you know the specifics. How much does shipping cost cut into your margin when shipping from overseas? Speaking specifically to your product, yoga mat, did you ship your first order to FBA or did you ship it to yourselves first so you could inspect the quality? I obviously know the second part. Would you answer the margin question?

Sure. So like most things, there's economies of scale. So the more you order, when you can start filling up entire shipping containers, you'll actually be paying about the same that you would for a four through shipping container. Because they have to load it up, put it on pallets, they have to get all the paperwork ready. So how much it costs as far as margins depends on how much you order and the size of your product. So yoga mats actually take up a pretty good chunk of space as compared to something like, I don't know, a calculator. But they're also not that heavy. Our orders are usually close to 2,000 pounds depending on how many mats we order at a time. So the long answer is it depends. The short answer for our yoga mats, I think it ends up being somewhere between five and six dollars per mat. So.

Percentage wise.

Five percent, five percent of our profit or our revenue goes to pay for the shipping price is.

Low, Sean, isn't it?

Is that low? I'm not very good with math.

That's okay. Well, we sell them for 35. Our profit on that is about half. But about $5 a unit goes to shipping, doesn't it?

Yeah.

So that's like 1, 7 or like, or like 1/3 of our profit. 1 of like 1. A quarter of our potential profit gets eaten up by shipping. But what we do here, this is, here's your rule of thumb. What we do is we take our total costs times them by two, and that's where we start pricing. It's where we start pricing. We don't always start that way, but that's where you start is total price times by two and that's where you start pricing your product for sale on Amazon.

Thank you.

Oh, and regarding the. Did we ship it to ourselves first? What we did was we had samples sent to us. Actually, let me rephrase that. Sean had samples sent to him and then he showed them to me and we rolled with that. So Sean actually collected samples from a few different suppliers, found the one that we like best, ordered a product, had one sent to us, and then we placed the unit. That was about two, three months of back and forth, which I honestly wouldn't recommend. I think we did that a little too conservatively. And if you're okay with just rolling, like I'm quick start. So I'm like, let's just rule everything out. Let's just go. We'll make mistakes and we'll figure it all out. That's me where Shawn is a little bit more calculated than I may be. So my style. Yeah, a little bit. So my style would be to just be like, let's write a check, let's roll it out, do a big ass order, and we'll get 50,000 units going. And that's me. Whereas Sean was a little bit smarter. But I think we were a little bit, in my mind, we were a little bit too conservative because we put ourselves back a month or two. And I know you guys are anxious to get started. We did have everything shipped to us and inspected. It adds time to it. But if you think the quality is that important to you, then that's what you have to do.

Before I take questions, I got one question on the Facebook or on the Hangout page. It's from Sam.

Figura. Is this Hangout Live? No. Sam, I have gone into the future and I have read your comment from the future.

And that is what's happening. So congratulations on our experiments to be in the future.

Do you guys have any questions based on this process so far?

I do. I apologize. I can't write in the chat box. I don't know how on this iPad. So my question has to do on shipping. Are you aware of anybody getting two shipments on their first order from overseas? What I want to do is ask them to ship me one.

Package or.

One carton and ship it as soon as it's done, the remainder of the order to be shipped later. That way I'd get stocked to Amazon faster.

I don't quite follow your reason for doing that.

Well, instead of the factory having to wait to get say 500 or 1,000 units done and then ship it all at once, fill up one carton of, say, 50 and ship it right away, the remainder to follow later.

Are your products really big?

No.

Okay, then. Unless you can airlift them out of there for an affordable price, you're going to be paying an arm and a leg for two shipments.

Okay, so I'll price what a carton would be to ship air freight.

I'll price what it is to ship a carton of it. But my product is seasonal, so that's why I want to get a product there quickly.

Got it. Okay. So if you can find it affordably to airlift it, you have my blessing. Cool. If you're doing it via boat, it's going to be. That's going to be. It's going to eat up all your profits.

And last point, you have such an awesome radio voice. I want you to follow me around and comment on everything.

I'll go with Anthony and get the $50,000 fee.

Well played, sir. Well played. I want to hire you for the intros on my podcast.

Cool.

I work for coffee.

You work for what?

Coffee.

Oh, okay, perfect. I believe that I make the most delicious morning coffee ever made with my. Have you guys ever done bulletproof coffee?

No.

Any bulletproof coffee takers? Okay, so I do a modification of the bulletproof recipe, which sounds weird, tastes amazing, and it is. Like, I find the best beans I can find. Like the highest quality beans I can find. And then after I brew the coffee, I put it in a blender with a tablespoon of grass fed butter and coconut oil and maybe a little bit of coconut milk, and I blend it and it makes the most delicious coffee concoction you've ever had. It is out of this world.

Sounds yummy. Especially on a cold day.

It is banned. It'll light you up. It'll light you up.

All right, Greg, is it worth experimenting with a sale price on Amazon? Would it be simpler to start with a domestic supplier? When getting your feet wet, does Amazon have a way to automatically raise the price when your inventory gets low? The answer to your third question is no, but you can. You have full control over your pricing. It updates in like 10 minutes, so you have that option. I do recommend raising your price when your inventory gets low. If you need time to wait to fill that gap, I do think that's a good strategy. Would it be simpler to start with the domestic Safiro and getting our feet wet? Only if the profit margins are there. If you can find a domestic supplier with good margins. Please do that. Please do that. I've only seen this work with supplements, which you do not want to get overseas because you want to put ground baby in them. And with some pet products, I've seen that work. And I want to say some kitchen products.

Oh, cosmetics also work like in beauty, like creams and stuff like that can also be done domestically. Consumables, anything that you're putting on or in your body can be done us pretty easily. With domestic suppliers, stuff is harder to get domestic. If you can find it, by all means, please do us based because they are so much easier to work with. But I rarely see that happen. I rarely see that possibility. Is it worth experimenting with a sale price on Amazon? Yeah, it's worth experimenting with if you want to get the ball rolling in order to get sales and reviews coming in. Absolutely. It's worth experimenting with. After you've done a launch or a giveaway or a discount, it makes sense to raise your price where your profit margins are there. But I do believe that it is a good idea to kind of push things along if you can sacrifice profit margins for volume for a while in order to get reviews, sales rankings, repeat customers, I think that is all fine and well.

Any questions on that?

I think, Ryan, one of the questions I had on the sale price was my understanding is if you listen, a price as say, 40 bucks, but you offer a sale price for 25, you're still getting fees based on the $40, so you're paying a little bit more. So that was really kind of my question was, is it worth paying the additional fees? Because there's some psychology that somebody's getting something on sale, you'll get more conversions.

So. Hey, Brian just joined. What's up, Brian?

Hey, everyone. Sorry I'm late. I was actually watching it and then decided to join the hangout itself.

You deemed us worthy. Greg, what you're asking is say what you said again about the fees.

Well, my understanding, from what I've read, is if you have a price that's listed, say at $40, but you offer it as a sale price for 25, Amazon's still charging you fees based on the $40 list price. So I've seen some other forum comments on ASM asking, hey, you know, is it worth paying the additional fees to have a list price where you're actually offering it at a sale price, if that makes any sense.

If that is true, that's news to me, okay?

That's why I wanted to bring it up.

You know.

I don't think that is true.

Your fees are based on your selling price. What the item actually sold for in My experience, that was my understanding too. And if it's not true, then, boy, I've lost a lot of money. Yeah, you and me both.

Yeah, you and me both. Because we do that for sure. We'll list the retail price at much higher and then the Amazon price in order to get that sale price. Did my video just disappear? No.

Disappeared on my end. But yeah, we do that all the time. So I'm with Tim where if that's the case, a lot of money do.

Cool.

Just one quick follow up on the overseas supplier. They really, the ASM training wants you to communicate via phone, at least with your initial order. So how likely is that if you're ordering from China versus, you know, just doing it through email?

We've done plenty just with email.

Okay.

Don, have you ever talked to Cynthia on the phone?

No. We usually do Skype chatting. I mean, I guess it depends on your supplier if they're comfortable speaking in English. That may be something that is difficult for them. But we use Skype chat to talk and I've never really had any, any problem. I really like talking on the phone anyway, so it works out.

Or being on the stage.

Right.

I'm just going to call you out and have you come up on stage with me in Vegas.

Well, I don't know if I'm going to be able to come to Vegas.

You're not going to be able to come to Vegas.

We'll have to see what happens on Wednesday. If I get a new job, I can't take a week vacation the first week I start.

Yeah, that's true. So Sean is desperately trying to move here to Austin and just got a. Has an interview down here. So hopefully we're fingers crossed over here.

All right.

Joe, in one of the other Hangout videos, you talked about using an outsourcer to all customers to see if they like product, also to get the reviews. Do you still use that method to get your reviews? Yes. Did you supply the caller with a script? Yes. It looks like this. You get your product. Did you open it yet?

Was it what you expected? Can we send you a coupon or a gift card or a bonus? Can we give you something as a thank you for taking the time for sharing your experience? Great. When I email it to you, can I also leave the link to leave a review for us? They say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. At four yeses, they're psychologically programmed to leave a review for you. We've been modifying this. We have it working like gangbusters right now. It's just A matter of. So Amazon requires that you.

If you contact your customers, it must be to complete an order. So our first question is, did you get your product? Oh, good. Because you know, with Amazon we never know since we're not controlling and the shipping process. Glad to hear that it arrived on time. Hey, by the way, did you try it? What's your experience been? Oh, you liked it? Great. Hey, thanks so much for sharing this feedback with me. If it's okay with you, I'd like to give you something. A coupon, a gift card, a bonus additional product. Give them something. It can be a digital product, it can be a coupon on a consumable product. Coupons work just fine.

And then it's great. Where should I email that to? And when I send this to you, is it okay for me to leave a link for you to leave a review in that same email? And they always say, yes. Nobody's ever like, sure, you can send me the coupon. No, do not include the link in the email for the review. No one ever does that. So then we email them and follow up, have that va follow up with them. Hey, send the gift card over to you. Would you do me a favor and pop this review up there? And that's kind of my primary strategy for getting reviews.

That is how we have out reviewed everybody in our space. Every. My first product, when we started one of our main competitors.

The number two person had a hundred.

Now maybe it was like 95 reviews and we had zero. Now we have 200 reviews on the nose and he has like 130. So we have outpaced him six times just by calling customers and doing giveaways.

And stuff like that.

Do you guys have any questions about that process?

Well, in other words, you don't give.

Them the link for review until you got sent them email giving them the coupon.

Correct. Am I right about that? Correct. Do you guys want to go over some other review strategy right now or is that too ahead of where some of you are?

No, let's do it.

All right.

Stand by.

Hey, Ryan, I've got the one I ran by you on hiring photographers.

Yeah, sure, go for it. What was your question?

Well, it's not a question, it's just my review strategy. To start out, I need photographs of different kinds of people using my product. You know, big people, young people, kids, mothers, students. And to get that, I thought, why not put out for a lot of photographers across the country, say, hey, I need to hire you to do this. You need to be interested in my product. I need creative photographs.

Once they apply to me and I accept them, I send them an Amazon gift card to buy my product. I get a sale part of the process. They take the photographs for me and they leave a review. Something else that I can piggyback on that is if their models like my product, gee, I'll send them a coupon code. So that way I can foresee getting a quick.

10 to 20 reviews and sales from across the country. Not all of them. Last name of Piper, which is my last name.

So the only issue I have with that is you have to be really careful that you're not paying people to leave reviews.

Well, I'm paying them for the fundamental photograph. So would I have to phrase that differently?

No, I think you're okay. It's just, it's just a concern I have if they think that you're paying them for the review. So just be careful in that process. Okay? Get things started.

Vacuuming. Mute yourself.

Vacuuming.

Rico. It was Rico. Your microphone sounded like it was vacuuming. Anyway.

Look, to get things started, get those first 10, 20, 30 reviews. We just do big giveaways. Tell all our friends and family, get everybody to leave reviews. We hammer that. But there's some other ways once you're making sales to be getting reviews too. One of the best ones is really, really simple. Is one of your first email follow ups from Amazon be.

What did you think of the product? Just an email like, hey, we saw you ordered, it's been a couple weeks. What did you think of the product? And the people who reply and say it's been great. You follow up with them and get them to leave a review. Hey, thanks so much for letting me know that you like it. Would you post this on, on Amazon? Here's the link to do that and you give them a link to leave a review. That is so simple. But it has worked really, really well. That combined with calling people, combined with doing regular giveaways. I'll do a giveaway to anybody who will listen. Anybody who's like, I give our coupon code away liberally. People when we're talking about our products. Anybody who's like, yeah, I'll leave a review. There you go, have one. We are very aggressive in collecting those reviews. So those are kind of our primary strategies. We sometimes do like forum giveaways. Tim asked, do you guys use FeedbackFive? We have used FeedbackFive. We've replaced it with Seller Labs. Seller Labs is a company that does the same thing. It's just a little bit more robust. We think. I am of the opinion that seller feedback is just as important for the ranking algorithm as reviews are. Maybe more so. I'm of this opinion just on things that we've tested. So doing things like Feedback5 or Seller Labs in order to get seller feedback, in my opinion is just as important as getting reviews. As far as the algorithm goes for where people rank on Amazon, does that make sense?

Rico asked about putting the process in writing. What would you like in writing?

The call that we have is we just say, did you get your product? Is it what you expected?

Can I send you something for free?

Will you leave a review? Basically.

Yeah.

Can you hear me?

Yep.

Now, when you mention that process, are you emailing the customer or are you. That's what I'm a little confused on. Are you emailing one email asking those four questions? We're calling them.

Okay, we're calling now. We will do an email follow up. But that process is a little bit different. It's the, hey, what'd you think of the product? And if it's positive, we reply to them and get them to leave a review.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Perfect. Cool.

Thank you.

And sorry about the noise earlier, guys.

Hey, I forgive you. You know, somebody's got a vacuum.

Glad your house is clean.

I'm actually not familiar at all with.

This whole seller feedback process.

That's like a whole different set of reviews on Amazon. And if so, how do you get those?

They will come in naturally. Excuse me for eating in front of you.

They will come in naturally because Amazon follows up with your customers for you.

But it's obviously if you work it, it's better. It is a feedback about your seller account as no one sees it.

I'll show you guys a link. Hold on, let me find it.

So no one sees seller. Well, you can see seller feedback, but it's not on your listing. So if you guys go to Amazon and search for Zenactive.

And you click on our listing.

And you scroll down where it says in stock under reviews, under the price.

It says sold by Zen, Active and fulfilled by Amazon. Click on ZenActive.

And it brings you to this page.

Put it in the chat box.

This page.

And you can see this is where.

He is murdering a bird right now.

Who is repeatedly striking a bird in the face.

I had three crowds come over vacuum.

Am I the whipping boy?

This session I've got the vacuum and the birds.

So you can see some of our feedback on the right side. You can only leave seller feedback if you ordered a product which is different than Reviews where anybody can leave a review.

But the seller feedback is kind of, in my opinion, if you've ever done SEO, it's kind of like your domain. It is the authority of your account.

The higher that is, the faster you rank.

I just discovered this in one of my other businesses. Sean and I just started making it a priority. So ours are pretty low.

But I'm of this opinion based on some tests that we've run, that seller feedback plays a huge role in where you rank. Huge role. That's why you can see some people have six reviews. But you're on the first page, you're like, why the heck are they ranking? And I'm of the opinion that it's because they have a ton of seller feedback. I'm of that opinion.

So do you have a strategy for collecting good seller feedback?

Yeah, we use. We'll often use. Like right now we're just focused on using email for feedback and phone calls for reviews. Before, it was all reviews. Now we just do one or the other. And a surprisingly good amount of feedback comes in somewhat naturally.

But we are working on that, like working it right now.

Does that answer your question about seller feedback and how that works?

It does.

Thank you very much.

That gives me a really good idea of how I should approach it in the future.

Cool.

What do you do if you get any negative feedback?

Most of it can get removed because most people like Amazon's doing your fulfillment. So very few people have complaints. But if you do get a complaint, like it was late, it was damaged, it never showed up, guess who's at fault for that? Amazon. So every single one you can dispute and almost every single one Amazon takes responsibility for and it gets deleted. But you do have to manage them that way otherwise Amazon won't see it. But you can dispute one and Amazon will pull it within a day.

That's just for the seller feedback. Getting the actual review removed is way harder.

Way harder.

Possible, but way harder.

Ryan asked a fantastic question.

I'm just going through all the questions.

Sorry, guys. The thread today is very, very active. So that is awesome. Ryan asked a great question while he's drinking bulletproof coffee. Good call.

He said, I have a very similar personality type to you. I have an 8020 type principle question. Can you give us a little guidance on what aspects of this process to focus on mastering and which aspects are easier to outsource? Yes. Fantastic question. Best question I've been asked on a hangout, maybe ever. The.

Temptation when you're new in business. And I think a lot of you are guilty of this because I've been guilty of this. Is trying to do a lot, a little bit of everything. My one beef with ASM is that they throw a lot of different promotion strategies at you that I don't think are very effective. Like doing three press releases a day, kill me. Doing a YouTube video every day, kill me twice. These are things that I personally don't want to do. We do one video.

We do one video per week and we outsource that and we don't really see a whole lot of activity from that right now. We do have a plan. We're going to advertise those videos on YouTube ads at some point. But my one defect with ASM is that they throw a bunch of different strategies at you and don't highlight this very well. So let me clarify what I think are the biggest leverage points. 1. Be very aggressive with Amazon ads. As aggressive as you can be.

Spend as much money as you can on Amazon ads. As long as you at least break even. Obviously don't lose money. But if you can at least break even, spend as much money on Amazon ads as they will let you have. Now, this is assuming infinite inventory. Now I realize that this isn't the case always in the practical world, but if you had a regular flow of inventory, then spend as liberally and aggressively as you can on Amazon ads. What is more valuable, Facebook marketing or Amazon Ads? Amazon ads are the number one way to get regular sales. However.

They are basically worthless if you don't first have a good amount of reviews. Which we used Facebook to get our first collection of reviews. Which is why my whole launch strategy was Facebook based, because it was just an audience for us to do a bunch of giveaways so that we could get reviews. Then we turn on a ton of Amazon ads. When you are first starting out, once you have found a product, once you have secured your supplier.

The only job you have from that point forward is getting reviews. Until you have 50 to 100 reviews, you have no other activity that is required. When you have 50 or 100 reviews. Now you can run Amazon ads while you are building reviews. That is all fine and well, but until you have 50 to 100 reviews, no other promotion strategy is necessary. 0, nothing, forget about it. Just do Amazon ads and collect all your reviews. To be quite honest with you, I'm almost a year into this business. We took Our first sale June 5th of 2013 between my three businesses are doing.

Almost a quarter million dollars a month in sales and those are still our primary activities on Amazon now we are doing some other processes like we're building out a funnel for our stuff. Totally advanced. Step 4 For most of you, not necessary for this business model. We're looking at retail at this point. Again, way ahead of where you're at. You don't need to be thinking about right now as far as Amazon is concerned. We pretty much focus all of our attention on reviews.

Feedback.

Customer experience.

Improving our product, spending more on Amazon ads.

That's it. I've never run a single press release for our products. We have a couple YouTube videos, we've done some Facebook advertising. But the 80 20, to answer Ryan's question is Amazon ads and reviews. I often get some pushback from this at first and then people relax and they go, oh, it's so damn simple. Yes, it is so damn simple. Be aggressive with your Amazon ads and be very aggressive with your review collection. Get as many reviews as you can. Be out there hustling reviews that will differentiate you from every other competitor if you can hustle your reviews.

Ryan, did that answer your question? Please let me know. And since the thread has a 40 second delay on this, he'll let me know in 45 seconds.

What other questions? Do you guys have.

Any advice for recommendations with the pictures that go along with your product?

Shawn, I'd like for you to comment on this actually, because I made a suggestion and you overruled me and I think you were right.

If I'm thinking about the correct suggestion. So if you guys see the photos on our Amazon page, I actually took those photos with my iPhone against a white sheet in my bedroom and then Photoshopped them. Now, if you don't have any experience in Photoshop, that's not the time to learn. You can pay someone on 5 or $5 to do it and they'll make your iPhone photos, as long as you have the lighting pretty good, look exactly like ours do on on Amazon. That being said, on our list of to do someday is to get professional photo. So maybe if you know professional photographer or even an amateur professional photographer, if the price is right, that might be the way to go. Otherwise I would say as long as you have a newer camera phone or an actual camera, just take the picture of yourself and then pay someone on Fiverr to Photoshop the background out.

Yeah, that's my suggestion.

That's what I've done for all of our products, excuse me, is pay somebody on Fiverr to make them pretty.

Take a shot of it. Pay somebody on Fiverr, he or she makes them pretty. We're Done.

Cool.

Thanks.

Now, on the same topic, I notice a lot of private listing images with, you know, people using the product. You know, whether it's professional models or, you know, just the product owner. Do you guys see any advantage to going that route or like, you don't really need.

Yeah, as many as you can fill as possible. Like, if you could fill. How many do you get? Nine. You get a total of nine. If you can do all nine, do all nine. Now, there's a company. Check out their listings. It's called Abundant Health.

Labs. I think Abundant Health Labs, if you search for them on Amazon, they do a great job with images. Now get this. Some of them are pictures of three of their bottles, three of their products. Some of their pictures are people, like, holding it like there's a photo. And then get this. Some of them are banner ads that just have copy on them. And they'll swap out different banner ads as images.

Just as a rule, more images will increase your conversions.

So I totally recommend using all nine and doing any filler that you can, even if it's just to fill a spot. Banner ad copy, swapping out faces with the same copy. I recommend filling all of them.

Videos you see on sometimes, some of the listings.

Sorry, you cut out, Ken. Say that again.

The videos, sometimes that you see over there that you can play, is that.

Worth looking into the video that you can play on a list?

Yeah.

So when you see the ads down or the pictures down the side, some of those are actual clickable videos.

You have to have a special account to do that.

Okay.

Yeah. Which I am not cool enough to have you.

That'll change.

We are starting to look into retail, which is kind of exciting.

In one of my business. Not Shawn, in my business, but we're starting to look at retail, which is exciting. We're at the point now where we are outselling our biggest competitors, sometimes three to one, and we're outselling major brands all over. So as a result.

That gives us a nice hook into retail. I didn't know this. I was talking to somebody who's big in retail this week, yesterday, actually, and they were telling me that one of the first things that retail people do when they're looking at new products is they look at your Amazon listing. Interesting. They look at your reviews, they look at where you're ranking. Now, it's not all of them, but a lot of them will look at. They will look at how popular your listing is on Amazon to see if it's an attractive thing they want to have in their Store. Isn't that cool? Crazy that they look at your sales page to see if it's something that they want to carry.

Kind of silly.

But it's good news for us because we know how to make an awesome Amazon page.

A little bit of crystal ball looking into. Word on the street among some higher ups that I've connected with is that there is, there is subscribe and Save coming to Amazon soon, meaning for all prime members. So if you use fba, rumor is that you will soon be able to have the option of having subscribe and Save on all of your FBA listings. Which means if you have a consumable product. Oh boy, that is an enormous game changer.

It was, yeah, it should be less than 12 months. Rumor was by the end of May, but now you know, we're midway through May, it hasn't happened. So I don't know. This is total rumors. I'm friends with some of the guys over at, actually, I probably shouldn't say, a very, very big company that you would all recognize that is a huge Amazon presence. And so they have their own Amazon rep. And he, he said that rumor is.

That that subscribe and Save is coming to Amazon or FB for FBA products. So I hope that he is correct. Also, I foresee some changes. We're already seeing this in health and beauty. We're seeing this in supplements. It getting a little bit harder for new accounts to get approved and I foresee that getting harder for people in a year or so. So this is the time to get in. I think it's going to be harder for new accounts to show up and sell in a year or so. I also think it's going to get harder to fake stuff on Amazon. I don't know how they're going to do it, but they are eventually going to get their stuff together and prevent people from leaving fake reviews because that is very, very prominent right now.

Kathryn asks, where is seller feedback showing up on sales pages for our products? It doesn't, it does not show up on your sales page. Ryan asks how many reviews before turning on Amazon? 5, but they should be running synergistically. When you have five reviews, go ahead and start running Amazon ads, but you should be turning that on as soon as possible and running them synergistically. Being aggressive with Amazon ads, as far as daily action means calling your customers, giving away lots of product, promoting it on a Facebook page, if you have a Facebook page, giving them out to as many people as you can, doing giveaways on forums. These are all ideas. I'm in Idealand. Really, it comes for us since we have. Since my main business is selling 200 units a day, our main daily action for getting reviews is refining our systems for getting reviews. Or if you're just starting out, your daily activity is giving them out to as many friends and family as possible and following up with them. To leave reviews until you have 50 reviews. When you have 50 reviews, you can slow down this process of giving them away, but until you've got 50, you are to do nothing else but to push those reviews. It will make a huge difference in your business.

Do the new seller restrictions and health and beauty represent an opportunity as many ASM members are now running away from this category? Yes. Absolutely. I probably would not say this publicly, but I think the fact that there are. I got so excited when I saw that there were restrictions in supplements now, because I think that is going to be a huge opportunity for people who are willing to bust their backside and get those.

The restrictions were. You need to show that your product has been certified. Get it from your manufacturer. You need to show business licenses. Okay, fine. I just went to irs.gov got a business license here. Here you go. Amazon. And there was one other. I think receipts from other sales, which I haven't figured out how you get around that yet. But I got really excited when I saw that there were.

That there were restrictions on supplements. I'm not in health and beauty, but the same is true in health and beauty. If you're willing to go the extra mile, it definitely opens up an opportunity for you.

Kathryn, I don't understand the question that you posted on the thread just now.

All right, any other questions before we call it a day?

How many suppliers would you recommend contacting before making your final pick?

Shawn, how many did you contact?

3.

3.

Do you have a backup supplier if your current supplier has a problem?

I do in my supplement business. Sean, do we have a backup supplier in yoga? I don't think we do, no.

I mean, we could always contact one of the other two that I got samples from. Yeah. So you've got a relationship with the.

Other two is what you're doing.

Yeah. I mean, I haven't spoken to them in months, but if we had to switch over, we could.

I do keep backup suppliers in supplements. Anything domestic is pretty easy to get backup suppliers for.

Joe, you have been quiet.

That's how I roll.

Okay.

Any final things?

Hey, Ryan, just share something with the group, if it's okay with you.

Yeah.

I had a shipment going into Amazon 72 units. They lost it. Surprised the heck out of me. They lost it.

Yep.

I used the UPS tracking. They confirmed it was received six days after the UPS delivered it. I opened a support ticket with them. They checked with the dc, it was lost. They took my selling price, less the FBA fees, what I would have had as profit and deposited in my account.

Thousand bucks. Easiest sale I ever made.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah, it was. I should have raised my price.

Ask him to leave your review.

It just happened last week. Blew me away. But it's great they took care of it rather than argue.

Yeah, yeah. I thought you were going to say that it was just gone. But that's good news.

Yeah, they took care of it. I don't know. That's got to be rare with all their automation and everything.

But anyway.

What do you think about.

Using like Slick Deals and Fat Wallet?

I think it is to get an initial boost.

We used Slick Wallet. We used Slick Deals. I'm not familiar with the Wallet one that you said. I think it's John, what was our. Do we have much of a. I don't remember us having a big push from Slick Deals. We did it, but I remember it being much very successful.

No, I think it was less than 5. We actually bought a Fiverr gig where someone manually went and posted it on a bunch of other coupon sites as well in that five. So I mean it might be worth trying. It doesn't really. Five bucks for five sales, That's a pretty good return. But I don't know if it's a good long term continual strategy. But if you've got free time and five extra dollars, probably worth it.

Okay, gang, we will call. Oh, Brian, just saw your question. Decent target range for a unit session. Percentage that is fairly crappy, which is usually a reflection of reviews. How many reviews do you have right now, Brian?

Four or five.

Okay.

Obviously that's a focus.

Yeah. So when you have 34 or 35, your percentage will automatically go up 10% and more. We have some that convert at 22%.

But reviews are huge.

I mean that's a product that has 200 reviews and averages like a four and a half star rating. And they're all real reviews. So that converts like 22 to 24%. So ask me again when you've got 3435 reviews. No problem.

Yeah, I was just asking because I don't even know where it sits in anything.

So that's why I ask.

One quick housekeeping question on the Sunday afternoon for that live event thing. How important is that? Looking at flights, or did you talk about that before I joined?

Historically, it's been kind of a relaxed day. The last day. The real meat is day one and two, and you definitely want to be there a day early because we're doing an in person mastermind the day before. Yep.

I get in Wednesday night, and Greg.

Is going to be bringing that cap that he just showed everybody.

He'd like that.

And, Ryan, you got to bring that too.

Ah, you beat me. I've taken mine off. You're the winner.

So be there a day early. You can leave on Sunday, unless you want a mastermind, because lots of good activity happens, like meeting people on Sunday, but really the day before, and then days one and two are the really important days for you to be there.

Okay, I got to be in New York on Monday for Mr. Ducker's mastermind session.

Ah, okay. Got it.

I'm gonna. I'm gonna leave it for. I could leave on a red eye.

But I don't want to do that. Yeah, I hear you. Okay, everybody, peace and love. Thanks for coming out, and I'll see you in the Facebook page until we meet again.

Thank you, Ryan.

Thanks, Ryan. Bye, guys.