Ryan Daniel Moran and others discuss Amazon private-label tactics: how to collect reviews aggressively, handle negative ones from competitors, choose between air and boat shipping, optimize PPC spending, and use brand registry to avoid FBA fees.
Chapters
Good morning.
There we go. Hello, everyone.
For Robby's wife.
See, I had myself on mute, but I could hear you guys loud and clear. Talking about me.
I was not talking about my wife. We talked about Malta.
I heard that your wife is Thai.
Yes, that's right. Saudi crab.
Saudi Arabia.
Biting my.
You know, it's good.
Correct.
And I heard last time, I remember you said you love Thailand, right? You love going to Thailand.
You don't speak any Thai at all, do you, Robby?
I say one word, which is the most important. Krab, Kabun kab. Kabun kab.
I speak more Thai than Ravi does.
Everybody. Hey, Brian, Jean Marc. It's good to have you on a call, man.
Yeah, first time, first good.
Google.
Hi.
Bonjour.
I know you speak some French, you speak some Italian, but where do you live?
Speaking to me?
Yes. No, I'm speaking to the other guy who speaks Italian, French and English. No.
No. I am from Malta. You're from where?
Malta, Malta.
Where is that?
So let me explain. It's in Europe. It's under Sicily.
Okay. Beautiful.
It's a small island, 400,000 people.
Oh, wow. Sounds awesome. Can we have the next tribe meeting there any day? Awesome. I'd love to visit there. And we're joined by our neighborhood friendly, Sean Coyne.
Hi, everybody.
Hey, Sean.
What's up, Sean?
And forgive me if I butch your name Tarawa.
Maybe?
Nope.
Okay.
In case you didn't know, Sean is. Sean is our implementation specialist, if you will. If you have any questions about implementing the ideas that I talk about, he's the guy to go to because.
I do all my work up here and that gets in my way. That's why I partner with people like Sean, who are really good at implementing. What's up, Nelson? What's up, Jesse James Ayres.
What's up, buddy? How's it going?
Good man.
Jesse James.
You look alive. Alert and enthusiastic, my man.
And unresponsive.
He's on mute, probably.
No, I can see. I see him loud. I see him. Who are you talking about?
Self mute.
Slow bandwidth, I guess.
Yeah, maybe. Alright, so what I would like to do is update you again. My job here.
Both to answer your questions and to give you some perspective from where things look about a year into your business right now. The things that we're working on are completely different than what they were a year ago. And sometimes I look at them like, I can't believe that a year ago these businesses didn't even exist. So.
The first company that started in ASMR. We took our first order June 5th of last year. So that was almost exactly one year. Almost exactly. And today we're doing 150 to 200 sales a day. We just like today, this morning, our third product went live. We're getting retail deals. We have distributors who are contacting us to take us to retail.
The thing that's important there is to realize that everyone who wants to carry our products in retail, every single one of them.
Looks at our Amazon listing first. So they look at our reviews, they look at what our description is. That is important. They look at Tara, I'm muting you because you keep coming up. I think you have an echo on your end, so the echo goes away.
So they're looking at our description and our reviews as like the first gateway to see if they want to carry us in their stores. So one thing, I've beaten this into your heads over the last few weeks and I know most of you don't even have products live yet, but you still, your primary job is to collect and manage your reviews at this point. So for the next, basically for the first three to six months of your business, your entire job is to collect and manage reviews. Sean, I would like to have a banter back and forth a bit about how we manage negative reviews when we get them. And they're very rare.
We very, very aggressively collect reviews. And then would you talk a little about the system of how we manage our negative review when we get it?
Sure. So the first thing that I do when I see a negative review is I'll log in as my seller account so that when I leave a comment it says Zen Active and not my name. And I'll leave them a comment saying our customer service will be in touch. Your satisfaction is important to us. Something along that lines just kind of a heads up to them and to anyone else that might click on that comment. Then I'll go on Amazon and refund them before I even talk to them. I'll give them a full refund and then I'll send them an email at their Amazon email just stating that I saw they were unhappy. Whatever kind of problems they experienced, I'll let them know that we're looking into ways to fix them. Kind of offer any customer service I can and then let them know that their order has been refunded in full. If they have any questions or comments or whatever, they can contact me. And then I assign it. Usually I assign my name and like chief Operating officer, but you could do like president or whatever you want. To call yourself.
And I would say 50% of the time they'll change it from a two star to a five star. The other half I just never hear back from them. Sometimes people use an Amazon email they don't actually check. And then if you have stitch lab, you can follow up with a call to them, which I'll have Lori, our customer service rep do. And she's had pretty good results with getting actual feedback. So we can improve our product. But usually just sending them a refund immediately and then contacting them through Amazon is all that needs to be done to take care of a negative review.
Yeah. And what would you say we probably get like 30% of bad reviews removed? Maybe a bit more.
Yeah, not necessarily remove, but change to a higher level. Yeah, yeah, it's probably more than 30. It'll probably be closer to 50.
Yeah. Okay.
And I usually a two or a three star. We haven't really had any one stars, I don't think. Well, maybe we had one, a two or a three star. I'll give them a full refund. If it's a four star, then I'll usually either contact them if they had a concern or if they didn't list what they were upset with. I'll just, I'll just leave it and let it go.
So we are really aggressive in managing and collecting reviews because retail people look at that, customers look at that, and that is basically your, that is your lifeblood, is those reviews. So your full time job in the first six months or so in this business is collecting and managing the reviews that you get.
And until you're at about 50 reviews, you have no other job. Jesse James Ayers is so tired.
That his job is to collect reviews. I think he's going to jump through the screen and choke me.
But that is the central task that all of us need to focus on until we have about 50 reviews. And once you have 50 reviews.
Then.
Sales have really kicked in. Unless you're in a really competitive market like Sean and I are in, in yoga where we have to just.
All right, everybody turn vibrate off their phone. So whenever somebody makes a comment on the Tribe Hangout page, it's not buzzing, which I should probably check so that I have.
Oh, we just lost Jesse James Ayers.
To add one more thing, Ryan. I forgot. So I have Lori, our customer service rep. When she calls people, if they're unhappy with it, she'll refund their order right then on the phone and tell them even though you don't want to return it, we're giving you a full refund anyway. I think that's prevented a lot of negative reviews even occurring to begin with.
Yeah. So if you can prevent them from the get go.
Obviously that is best. So all of this to say your job is to be collecting reviews. Now, most of you, most of you have a product picked, you have a supplier picked out and you're kind of in this in between period where you might have placed your first order. Would you guys wave at me? If you're at like this in between place where you have your supplier picked. Do you have your product picked? You're kind of waiting on shipping. Okay. About half of you.
If that's the case, then what you can be doing in this interim period is starting to build a list of people that you can collect reviews from. Friends, family, Facebook pages. You guys have seen my presentation at ASM Live on building Facebook pages forums that are about your niche market.
Start collecting places where you can start to get the word out in order to get that first set of reviews. Because your strategy is going to be get 15 to 20 reviews, then start Amazon PPC and be off to the races. Get good systems in place to follow those customers. That is the next three months of your business getting those first selection of reviews.
Putting up Amazon PPC and good systems in place to follow up with your customers, to get reviews and to manage the reviews that are coming in. Are there any questions about that? Because that is your business for the next however long.
Right. Can I speak?
Yeah, go ahead.
The thing is, I just realized that watching module five that.
EU customers are not accepted due to shipping. Amazon are not allowed to ship internationally from Amazon.com so the only option I have with regards reviews is looking at forums, groups related to my product. Because I had a list of 40 people to give my product to my country. But these reviews are not accepted. I realize now.
Do you have friends and family in the us? Nothing. Not at all.
Not at all. No contact in the us.
Are you willing to say what your product is?
It's a weight loss supplement. And the thing is now after this thing of knowing that I'm not allowed to give 40 products samples to my friends and families, I'm a bit now not sure if I should enter this industry because it's already competitive and I knew that I would make within three months I would have gained 50 reviews from friends and families because we're quite a big family over here, you know. And the thing is me cutting that off now, I don't know where I have to go like the only option is forums I was thinking of.
Okay, well, there is another option. This is a little bit. So what I'm going to tell you, you can take as gray hat. It's not supposed to be gray hat, but some people will take it as gray hat. You can have people leave reviews no matter where they are in the world. You just can't ship them your product, whoever they are in the.
You understanding what I'm saying?
Can I repeat that again so I understand?
Anyone can leave a review. Anyone anywhere in the world can leave a review. Amazon doesn't ship anywhere in the world. Okay.
Hey, Ryan. To leave a review on Amazon.com the account holder for that account had to have bought something off of Amazon.com because I had that issue with some friends I asked to get reviews for me. I gave them a free sample and they hadn't bought anything off Amazon.com so I think for JM he needs to somehow find a group of people who have bought off of. Even if they're friends in Malta, if they had bought off of Amazon.com, they can still leave a review.
My understanding was it was even more liberal than that that you could actually leave a review no matter where you are in the world for any product. You don't have to buy a product in order to leave a review. Brian, are you just saying that you have to have bought a product at some point in order to leave any review?
Yes, any product, not the one you're selling, just any product off of Amazon.
Does that help?
Now, as you were talking there, Ryan, something else hit me. I don't know if that extends to other sites. For example, if somebody bought something off Amazon.de. can they leave a review on Amazon.com maybe?
Sure.
I haven't tried.
I believe that you can.
Because we've had. We've had like we've actually taken product. We've had. I've had friends in Canada who want to leave reviews. So we'll ship a product to somebody that we know.
Or to ourselves and then ship it manually out to them. So it won't come up as a verified review, but they still can go in and leave a review on Amazon.com even though they're usually buying off Amazon CA so JM A. If people have bought from Amazon.com, they can still leave a review even if they don't have your product. So you can have it have some shipped to you and hand them out manually. It won't show up as a verified review, but it'll still show up as a review.
Or I still think you should be collecting some sources to get reviews out for your existing product. I think weight loss supplement is fine. Just know that there's a ton of them out there. So you'd have to hustle those reviews. But look on forums, giveaways, we've even paid media to go to. We've even bought Facebook ads to a free giveaway page. We've done that before. So we've been aggressive in collecting our reviews. We will fight and claw and push for every single review that we can possibly get.
I have a question.
Yep.
I also have I just now heard from jm. This is probably the same regional problem because in Israel I guess you cannot ship Amazon not shipping to Israel, any product. But I was thinking for my supplier in China to ship here something like 50 units and to go myself between friends and.
Acquaintances and just ask them to write a review. What I'm not sure about what would be the difference in the buyer position between verified review to any review, how he can defer them and how effective.
Is it from a buyer's perspective? Nothing. From Amazon's algorithm perspective it matters. But that doesn't matter to me because all you really want are the reviews so that people are convinced to buy and that will feed Amazon's algorithm.
Actually buys is legitimate.
To work better on Amazon algorithm and get more traffic. Right?
Sorry, I'm not following your question.
Why is it necessary that it will be verified so Amazon algorithm will start.
Moving traffic to you?
It's not necessary. It's not necessary.
Not.
It's not necessary though.
Okay, so is it advised to send products to people here even though it was not going through Amazon just for them to have a physical experience with this product and then leave a review? Will this be practical?
Yes. Okay, makes sense.
Is anybody else seeing a bunch of dancing Nelsons appearing?
Yes, many.
Yeah. Okay. Nelson, I don't know what you're doing, man.
Oops.
I think I just accidentally blocked Nelson.
Sorry, Nelson. Well, thankfully I only blocked one of you.
Two more of you.
I don't know what. Nelson, I don't know what's going on with your account. If you can comment, please do so.
I would like to give you guys a little bit of warning, if you will, that this business is not all roses. I had a fairly stressful week.
With our business this week because we have a competitor.
When you're at the top, everybody is gunning for you and we have a product that is number actually on my main business. All our products are number one. In their category and it does extremely well. We can do 200 products per day plus people are finding us.
Retail stores are starting to demand us. So it's been growing really quickly. But because of that we have competitors who come in and try and knock us off. Which means that they come in and they. Hello, Dancing Nelson.
They come in and they leave negative reviews on our listing. They come in and they fake their reviews. They come in and buy reviews. They come in and.
And try to compete directly with you and it's nasty. So it was very. Sometimes.
My full time job is managing people who are trying to knock us off, which is really frustrating. So I wanted to go over, first of all, I wanted to give you that, let you know that those problems exist on Amazon. My prediction is that Amazon is going to make it harder and harder for people to cheat that and they're going to start curbing allow to sell on Amazon. Which is why it's good that we're all in now the way that.
A crystal ball this might happen to you. Here's how to handle it. The temptation is always to try and battle that person. And I'm very much of the opinion that the same level of thinking that caused the problem will not solve a problem. This is the level of thinking that people are creating a problem. You have to think here in order to solve the problem. Nelson, I'm sorry. You are driving me nuts, man.
Standby.
Okay.
So we had a policy that we would never try to battle the other person. We would go straight to Amazon. And the problem with that is it was very slow. But now that we decided to make that, I have all kinds of awesome contacts at Amazon where I can just go to them and remove. So when you have problems come up in Amazon or really in any situation, remember that the level of thinking that caused a problem will not solve a problem. It takes you thinking, okay, how do I go to the source? How do I act higher than this person who's causing this problem and how do I solve this in a way that is higher level than what caused the problem. So always keep that in mind when things come up. The same level of thinking that caused a problem will not solve a problem. Sean and I have run into problems this week in the yoga business simply because we are selling too fast to keep inventory in. And it takes six weeks to get product on a boat and over to the U.S. it's taken us. When do we take our first sale? November. Sean?
Yeah. Black Friday.
Okay, so December, January, February, March, April. It's taken us six Months just to get our systems in place to where now we're going to be consistently profitable.
So for those of you who are in expensive markets that are shipping from overseas, six months is kind of your target before you are really consistently profitable. It's only now that we're like almost in the clear to have enough inventory to be consistently profitable and not be waiting six weeks for inventory. So this business is not all roses. It's been kind of frustrating for me. I've been exhausted all week.
But it looks like we're finally in the clear. So forgive my lack of enthusiasm. Business is not always roses. That's why I say that the longer vision you can have, the more successful you will be. The longer you can look into the future, the more successful you'll be. If you come into this business and say, I want to be making a ton of money in three months, you're going to have a hard time. Look at this. With a year horizon, a two, a three year horizon, you'll be insanely successful.
Question. I'm just going to call you T. It's all right. All right, T. To get reviews on Amazon, do your friends and customers need to have an Amazon account? Yes.
Tim, you asked a question before all the jumping nelsons.
Buried it.
How much do you spend on Amazon ads? Actually, great question. As much as possible.
I've never taken a loss on an Amazon ad, so I will spend as much as Amazon will let me. Actually, it's usually as much as my partners will let me spend on Amazon ads. So if I can spend 100 bucks a day, I will spend 100 bucks a day because it usually comes back as 150 a day.
Plus the volume on that. Amazon actually factors into their algorithm what keywords people use to see your ad. Click on it and buy. And that will help your organic rankings as well. So Amazon ads are extremely effective. Brian, the hangout on Air Q and A is similar, so I don't think people are going to ask me a question. Interesting. How do you know this, Brian?
I clicked on the Q and A icon over on the left and it says this feature is disabled. I don't know if it's just for us in the room or if it's everybody else that are just watching.
That's fair.
The only questions coming in are the ones that are there in the chat, which is just the 10 people that can get in for those, for the live banter.
There's people chatting on the page like.
Jesse and okay.
So there's another chat roll on the page. Fine.
Google does a lot of things well. Hangouts are just, they're just the wonkiest thing. It's like when I tell my girlfriend I'm good at a lot of things. Directions are not one of them.
And there's 20 different ways to do stuff in hangouts.
Yeah, Google is like, we're good at a lot of things. Making hangouts easy is not one of them.
Okay, so do you guys have any questions for me? That's where we are kind of a year out. We're looking at retail. We continue still a year out, even selling 200 units per day in my main business. And Sean and I just have products. We have products two and three almost. They'll probably be live in a month or so. And at that point we'll be having a. The cash flow on that business will be strong. Finally at that point, still to this day on both of those businesses, the majority of our time is spent thinking how do we get more reviews and how do we manage the reviews that are there.
Do you guys have any questions about your next three month window of product getting to Amazon, getting those first sales and getting profitable?
Ryan, Ryan, I got a question.
I heard Pat. Go ahead, Pat.
All right. I just had a labeling question actually with a supplement. Instead of paying Amazon the, I think it's 15 cents or so per bottle. Putting that label on there, can you put the, the barcode on the, on the label itself when you design it?
Yes, you can. Sean. We did this in yoga, but I don't know what the process was. Do you happen to know we actually.
Went a step further? So if you register your brand on Amazon, you can then use the UPC instead of that FBA thing so you can become exempt from that labeling process. You have to delete your listing. It was probably the scariest thing I've ever done with this business, rebuild it and it came back perfectly fine. All it did was change whatever Amazon's reference is in there. And then when we ship, we don't even have an option to select like self label or label. It just says like this product does not qualify and we save that $0.15 per however many products we have. But I do believe if you Photoshop that barcode type thing into your.
Product, you can then mark it as self labeled. But you have to be sure you get all the dimensions and stuff right because they have pretty strict rules on the size of that barcode and things like that. But either of those options can save you $0.15 per product.
So when you go through the brand registry what all do you need on that label then? Nothing, Just a regular label with your company name on it. You have to have a scannable upc. So, like a barcode.
Whatever the barcode is you put on the Amazon product, you have to have that label on your actual product.
Okay.
Cool.
But, Patrick, going through the brand registry, which I just did with my brand about four or five weeks ago.
It may vary a little bit category to category, but I had to provide information on my trademark, give an example of use my website, show them that I own the mark. I happen to be in a situation where I had applied for trademark registration, so I was able to give them the serial number of the application. That's not required, but it helps speed it through.
Okay, so it's not a super simple process. It's not just a form you fill out.
Yeah, it was pretty simple and it took a day for me.
Okay.
And the cool thing, just like Sean said with that is you can do the stickerless inventory, which is really sweet because you don't have to have your manufacturer put stickers on. You can put it right into your product artwork.
Okay.
Brian, was it you that also had a question when I heard another voice?
Yeah, that was me. Sorry. Last week you talked a little bit about Facebook and the group that you built, et cetera, and it started getting some wheels going in my mind. And can you just. Because obviously you said, get reviews. Manage reviews, focus for the next three to four months.
I know how to build a Facebook group and obviously grow page likes. So can you kind of step us through a couple examples of then how you converted those page likes into reviews?
Sure. You know what's funny?
We made a bunch of mistakes when we did this. The important thing was we needed to build an audience that we could then use as a launching platform for our business. So what we did was we just had a contest where once we had a certain number of likes, we released the product, gave away 50 units of the product, and then made it absolutely clear that the reason we were doing this was to collect reviews. And we called them, we emailed them, we bugged them until they left reviews. We just made it very clear. And it was in yoga. So to be honest with you, yoga has a very community feel to it. People who do yoga feel like they belong to a community, and we wanted to facilitate that because we pushed the fact that our maps were environmentally friendly, and that adds to the community feel. And people wanted to feel like they were doing something good by getting this free map that they had won it also, as kind of an ancillary benefit, it helped drive real sales because people who didn't win the contest were like, I still want this map. I'm going to buy it. And we gave away coupon codes for that. And as a result of that, our BSR went up, which gave us a spike in rankings. This was a nice launching pad for us to get things moving. Sean, you're smirking like I'm saying something wrong. That's usually your got something wrong. Thanks. You see this? I do see this. Yes.
That's what I'm smirking about.
Sorry.
There you go.
And that is my partner on my million dollar yoga business.
Randomize button. Yeah, the randomize is pretty cool.
Oh, boy.
I can't get it to go away.
Anyway.
That'S what I was laughing about, not anything you were saying. I apologize for being immature.
I forgive you. So anyway, our whole point to that was to drive some sales to get a spike so that we could get the snowball rolling faster. So we, all those people, we did email them. I think the smartest thing that we did was when we switched the process a bit and we said the first 10 people to email helpenactivesports.com will get a free yoga mat. And then we got the fast movers emailing in who are so excited, like, did I make it? Did I get it? Did I get it? And then we reply and say, hey, you're one of the first ten. Congratulations. Just so you know, you need to leave a review. Is that okay with you? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where's my mat? Where's my mat? Go ahead and take this coupon code, enter it in, and in two weeks I'm going to follow up with you and make sure you leave a review.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Okay.
Cool, cool.
They're the excited fast movers. They get their mat, they're like, I can't believe I actually won a free mat. Then they get a phone call, hey, leave that damn review. And they're like, okay, I think that was a smart thing for us to get the fast movers right away.
In order to increase those reviews. That was the first way. Now what's interesting about this is we have.
In one of my other markets and Sean, we should probably start doing this. We have a little bit of a syndicate mostly to. We are losing Anthony here. He is in love with that pillow about to drift off.
Busted. Anthony.
In my men's health business, since there's so much fraud that goes on in that space, we have a little syndicate where the good Guys all kind of band together and when we see somebody cheating, we all will report it to Amazon. We all keep a hawkish view on the marketplace and make sure that everybody's playing fair and square.
And there's like a group of us that all trust each other. So one of the guys came to the table and he's like, hey, just so you know, I perfected your face. He's an asmer. He's like, I perfected your Facebook strategy. He's like, I pushed them to a free giveaway page. That's an opt in. And I send them to an opt in page on Facebook. That's how they get a free one for them to leave a review. I don't know the rest of the process. He's promised me that he's going to reveal that later, so I'll report back on that if I find it to be valuable. But it seems to be working really well for him where he'll do a giveaway and he'll push them to an opt in. And when he pushes them to an opt in, then he's following up with them in order to get. I don't know the details of that process, but he says it's really working well for him.
It sounds to me like your first way was you put an email address in your post, boosted that post to your page audience and said, email me here. Sounds like he created a landing page, whether it was in Leadpages or somewhere else. Opt in page, grabbed an email address, physical address, etc. And then he fulfilled those samples himself.
That's correct.
Thank you, sensei.
Yep.
Brian, I would actually like to hear.
An update from you because you kind of had a head start on things and I'd like to hear how things are rolling for you because you've had some cool things happen.
Sure, Absolutely. I'll just give a quick 30 second of where I am and what I'm doing. I met Ryan back in March and it was him who really encouraged me to start selling on Amazon. I thought, yeah, maybe I'll try that. And I kept going along. My idea of selling my product category is in beauty, men's hair care, men's styling products, and sell it to independent barbers and barbershop owners. I got product on 1 April, launched a Facebook ad campaign to barbers and barbershop owners, spent $800 in Facebook advertising. I had a great sales funnel with a lead magnet, a tripwire, a core offer, a profit maximizer, and I had one free sample and nobody bought the core Offer. And simultaneous to that, I said, well, I got product. I might as well set up an account on Amazon and send them some product. And without doing a thing.
Pause, pause, pause, pause, pause. Before you get to the good part, I just want to summarize it in every man's language. Brian had a funnel where he was trying to take sales off of Amazon and it was not working. And he was spending time and money in a funnel that was not working. And then he went to Amazon and.
Yep.
And then within a week of having inventory. So sort of the second week of April, which is actually, what is it, six weeks ago, I said, I got four products, I'm focused on one of them, but I got four products in the line. I'm going to send them into Amazon, set up the seller central accounts, registered the brand, et cetera, et cetera, sent in, I don't know, 12 units of each of the products and without doing a thing, before ASM even started. I sold 7 units in April.
Without touching it. Yeah, I threw a couple keywords in the listing, etc. 7 units in May, I sold 20. I just looked at it before the call. I think it was 26 or 27 units. I've got 10 reviews on the main product at this point. That's why I was asking the questions about driving reviews and pushing reviews. And I'm going to build a Facebook community around the products and then actually maybe even launch the product.
Around the first of July.
Do you have Amazon PPC going?
Yes. 10 bucks a day max.
Is making sales. It is impacting sales. Yes. I don't have the stats right here in front of me, but the dollars I've spent have. The sales generated by the dollars I spent have more than covered the cost.
Your assignment this week is to up your ad spend on Amazon PPC and start creating a system for following up with those buyers in order to start leaving reviews. Because if you can get that snowball rolling, then every sale is worth more than one sale because reviews are goals. So if you can turn sales into reviews and the snowball starts to roll, that's where things get really special.
Yep. I also wanted to let you know that I am trying desperately to help you out. The number one guy in your space is the same guy who's been cheating and leaving negative reviews on our account.
Oh, really?
You've got him short shut down in the men's health space, but we are trying desperately to get him just banned from Amazon. So I'm trying very hard to get him removed and hopefully you can pick up some of that. I mean I'm doing out of vengeance. And also because if he can't sell on really, if he can't, not vengeance, really, it's really because if he can't sell on Amazon, he can't come back and hit us again. And he's already been removed twice. But as a result, it might help you out.
I'll take any help I get. The interesting thing is, and those of you that have been in the Facebook group have seen me use the term avatar product, kind of the product that you're modeling your private label after. It's interesting. My avatar product is one of these sold through professional local wholesale distributors and not actually sold online by the registered brand.
There's a fragmentation of sellers.
There's probably at least 30 people online selling my avatar product. So even though aggregated it's number.
Well, they have three products in the top 100, all related, aggregated. It's huge.
The competition is really fragmented. So I'm optimistic that that's an opportunity for me.
Great. If you guys look at the chat box for people watching the hangout, Jesse James Ayers just posted that he's up to about 12 sales a day just from Amazon ads, which is fantastic. Jesse, since you're watching this, you should be turning that into one or two reviews per day and then you'll really start to see things explode if you turn those into consistent reviews. But hats off to Jesse. When we started, when we first started, he was doing about $1,000 a month in sales and 12 per day. It's what, like 2,500, 4,000 somewhere between here?
Yeah, it's about 2,500. He sent a screenshot in the Facebook group the other day.
Well, congrats to Jesse. And that is only going to keep going up, my friend.
What questions do you guys have again about this window that you're at this like three month sprint, that you should be getting your product live, getting reviews, etc.
I don't want to detract from this.
Topic, but I did actually have a question specifically for your situation, Ryan.
Sure. How do you identify when people are fraudulently attacking your business, your competitor, and, and what exactly is the process of going after that person?
Fantastic question. It looks like this. If we start to get a surge of negative reviews, that throws up one red flag. But of course our process is we contact that customer, we refund that customer, and in the process we're looking at each individual order and we're saying, hey, why might this person have had a Negative experience. And in doing so, we find that sometimes those negative reviews come in within 24 hours of them ordering, which means the product hasn't even arrived at their house yet. That's another red flag. Well, they could have reordered. Well, will they reorder if they weren't happy with the product? Will they order and then say, this product sucks? Probably not. We also find a correlation between sometimes people order the same name, will have multiple orders, and then they'll leave negative reviews, like under different or the same address, but different names. That's somebody trying to use fake accounts to buy up our inventory to leave negative reviews. We also will look at the reviewers, other reviews. So if somebody leaves a one star review and they're like, this product sucks, and then we look at their other reviews and they've reviewed a competitor of ours with a positive review, or multiple competitors with positive reviews, we start to look at, is there a connection between that person's reviews and this account with that product? The answer is not always yes. We have legitimately unhappy customers who didn't like the product. And when we can find them, we review them or we refund them, we get in touch with them. We'll do whatever it takes to make them happy. But a lot of times we can't find the order in our system. It's an unverified review. And who would be, our product's not for sale anywhere else. So how would they have.
How would they have gotten our product without buying it on Amazon? Sometimes they've reviewed a competitor's products. We'll often find like 10 reviews with a connection to one other product. Now that's specifically for this one person who was cheating. So we would just reverse engineer. And hats off to my partner Matt, who is just a research fanatic who just looked at every review, started keeping track of where there were connections and going, this guy's definitely cheating. And we just took that info to Amazon. Now.
It started when.
We would go through all the proper channels of contacting customer support, getting blown off, contacting customer support, getting blown off, and me finally sending an email to Jeff Bezos and being like, this is the situation. I just needed you to know that no one's been able to help us and no one even listens. Jeff Bezos forwarded that to somebody who could help.
And that person was very responsive and very helpful and was able to stop a lot of that activity over time. As I network with other Amazon sellers, as I connect with other people who have reps, because as you become a higher and higher seller, you can get an Amazon rep and somebody put me in touch with their rep. And that rep has now been very helpful through this process. So it's been a long process. The important thing was documenting everything that was suspicious because all we really want is a level playing field.
And the other thing that has been helpful was just going to other people in our space and being like, look, I just want you to know I will never leave a negative review on your stuff. I will never hit you with anything fraudulent and I will always play fairly. And when you get people who say, yeah, me too, glad to have you in the space, you can build a little bit of a syndicate. You watch each other's backs. And that's kind of been our situation. We've really had one person who has just been an absolute pain in the arse and we've just worked really closely with Amazon on that person and been like, this is the situation. We don't want any special favors, but we would like for you to look into this person's activity and see if it's violating your terms of service. If that's the case, do whatever you normally do. But we want to let you know that something's cheating in our space and is really hurting our business.
So, Ryan, last week you said you got a letter from Amazon. Was this related to this whole subject and your nasty competitor?
Yeah, we got an email back last night that said we've reviewed your account and we concluded that you should not have gotten that warning email. Your account is now in good standing. So, yes, it was a competitor reporting us fraudulently.
You can see why I was exhausted. This week.
Is just managing nasty people.
It happens in the corporate world as well.
I imagine so.
Okay, can I ask a question in backtrack a moment? Can you hear me? Yeah.
Okay, you can hear me. The question is concerning registering a brand or adding the Amazon barcode directly to the labor label. Is that an and or? Either one would accomplish avoiding that label cost at FBA, or you would do both in order to avoid 15 cent per unit charge.
Shawna, it's an either or. Correct.
Correct. Yeah. Because if you do the way we do it now, when it gets to the buyer, there is no FBA label at all. All there is the UPC barcode. Once you register your brand, they then say, like Amazon thinks, well, this is a registered brand. This is their upc. Therefore this product is this product. Part of the problem with the labeling, I think, is they can't trust the UPC unless they can trust you. And when you register your brand, that, like, completes their little circle of trust.
So it's okay. Thanks. It sounds like to me that maybe the first step, the easier step anyway, the more simple step would be just to add the actual barcode onto the product label and then maybe follow that up with registering the brand, or either one.
That's what we did, actually. Our first shipment of yoga mats, we had the UPC on there to begin with, and we then had to pay Amazon the 15 cents to label it. I think it was someone in the tribe brought up the registration and we realized, well, we can save that 15 cents. So.
Going back, I probably would have done it the other way around. That way you don't have to delete your product. So if you can get your barcode on there now, if you have a website, you're going to need to show Amazon something. So you're going to need a website or some kind of proof that you're a real company. And then you can do that prior to listing your inventory. So that way, you know, if everything went bad, there's really nothing to lose. You could just relist your product, if that's making any sense.
I think so. And when we're talking barcode and we're talking UPC code, are we talking about that fl. UPC code that's specific to Amazon fulfillment centers that you're sticking on the label if.
No, the UPC code that you have to buy. So if you. I don't know if you've gotten that far in the.
You'll buy. I think the cheapest thing you can do. Well, you actually. You get a free one, so you can use that free one, but after that, you have to buy them in, like, sets and they'll give you the barcode and the number. And the barcode. All it is is the number, but it's encoded in a barcode. So when anyone scans it, then they can automatically connect that product to you as a seller since you've registered it as yours.
Okay, but now that's different from that $0.15 a unit labeling service that Amazon offers, though, right? Because what they're doing is they're putting their personal barcode on the unit, which costs 15 cents a unit. So the UPC code, taking it on that label, you're still gonna have to go ahead and pay that 15 cents a unit, right?
Incorrect. They are different barcodes. But if you register your brand, you can then avoid that FBA barcode because they'll just scan the UPC barcode. And since you're registered as the owner of that product, then they find that acceptable. So when your product comes in, as long as it has a barcode on there, they'll scan them all in. They won't charge you 15 cents to add that second barcode.
So if you were to not register your brand and only add the UPC code to the product label, that would not be enough. In order to save that 15 cents, you would have to do two things. Register the brand as well as add the UPC code.
Correct.
Okay. Bam.
If you were to send it without registering your brand, I think they just auto bill you for the labeling. They would have to do.
Yeah. Okay, cool.
Thanks, man. Thanks for turning that up.
This is why I thank God every day for Sean Coyne. Because I have. I never figured this out on my own. I don't know what I would do details. It made me want to jump off a bridge. So thank God for Sean Coyne.
You probably still have your license. Did you find it?
I did not find my license. I had for a replacement one in the mail.
Anything else, guys?
Yes, I want to ask. Can I, Ryan?
No, you may not ask a question, Ravi.
No, but I really want to. Look, I still.
Have. But you have to ask it in Thai.
In. In Thai. Trust me, I will ask it so fast it will sound Chinese.
Go ahead.
All right.
I have. I'm still sourcing. I'm not sourcing the product. I'm sourcing suppliers and I'm having very interesting journey with them. I probably emailed and spoke to more than 30 suppliers about my product. By the way, I changed the product category because the previous product was much more of customized product to deal with. And every inventory was expensive, expected no less than thousand pieces. So I said, okay, I go down from this tree right now. I put it aside and go for something I want to start going on. And I found this other product and many suppliers. But unfortunately there is this kind of delays first in the shipping, the samples and you know, all the prices in around the final agent to send to me. And this week already started recently two or three suppliers who will send me the product. The question is this. Like I found out that they will charge me about a dollar per piece. I mean, the product is this big. Until I will start sending 200 units to Amazon and start selling and working.
And I want more.
I will wait again 30 to 60 days on a boat or pay thousand dollars for thousand units. This is not making sense to me.
It's big expense to start working on it. I mean, how did you solve that? And the gap of time.
So what I think you're asking is it's really expensive to ship via air, the dollar per unit or it can take a long time, but it's cheaper via boat. Is that correct?
Yes, that's part of the question. But yeah, we can relate to that first.
Well, where am I not understanding? Just ask your poll question. Maybe I didn't catch it.
I'm trying to find out the cycle, like how to make this thing flow and not wait 1, 2 months for product to arrive. Or.
Out of no choice. I will pay much more money just to have product for my customers and maybe even lose money for that sense.
How much does it cost to ship a product via air?
Your product, I found out now, $1.3 per piece and you're talking about 170 grams.
Does that make sense?
That sounds cheap to me.
Cheap, is it?
That sounds cheap to me to have something airlifted out. Everybody's nodding their head. Yeah. So listen, I'm going to give you the secret about shipping. It's a bitch.
That's the secret about shipping. It is an absolute bitch. So Sean and I are in yoga. Our pieces are heavy and we have to put them on a boat and wait six weeks for it to get shipped.
If we could magically make all of our inventory appear, we would have a multimillion dollar business. At this point, our biggest setback has been waiting for shipping. So I wish I could tell you there was a magic button to not have this delay. The only thing that you can do is get good at managing when inventory is arriving. And you do that with good timing. If we could airlift our products for a dollar per unit, I would be over the moon, excited. I mean, I'd be dancing around the house. If we could airlift our products for a dollar per unit. Now, I don't know how much your product costs when it comes to listed on Amazon. Ours are 40 bucks. So we have the room to spend a dollar per unit. But if we could do that, I would have no pants on right now. That's how excited I would be. So if you could air lift things for a dollar per unit, dude, that's fantastic. I'm not quite. I don't understand. Where is your frustration with that?
Firstly, it's not.
How to say.
It'S not because it's a dollar per unit. It just sounds to me expensive to pay for such a light product for shipping. What I was thinking is divide the flow. Tell me what you think about it. Like from one hand to deliver two or three hundred products that will be on the flow. And selling what this will sell, I will order another 2. 300. And meanwhile, we owe the thousand or two thousand by boat. This makes a little sense to me and maybe equalize the expenses, but maybe it sounds cheap for a dollar per unit, but it's like, man, it's a thousand dollar for something weighs 17 kilos. That's crazy.
How much does your product cost? How much?
Like, it will be probably MSRP by them. I mean, like the maximum price will be 3.$5.
Cost to me.
Cost. Okay, what are you selling it for on Amazon? What are you selling it for?
Around $20.
Oh, dude.
You'Re doing fantastic. Your numbers look great. So if I'm you.
Here is.
From the future.
Shipping by boat is a bitch. So if you can. If you can do everything air, I envy you at this point. So my recommendation for you is to make a big order, have it shipped via air and get the next one ready and ship it out by air when you need it. I would avoid having this combo of a few units in the air and some on boat. If I'm you, I want to go all air. Believe me.
You will have such an easier time if you can airlift things out. If Sean and I could pay.
Anything reasonable, even if it was more and have it airlifted out, we'd do it in a heartbeat. So I would recommend what just happens lighting wise. I would recommend that you do everything via air. Do a big order up front and just do big orders. Don't do like these small units that are split up. I do everything via air. Sean, would you disagree with me?
No, just for reference, we pay $6 per unit by boat. By air, it was something same like $80 per unit. It was more than our product sells for to ship by air because we would literally fill up the entire airplane like the cargo hold with our yoga mats. So that was not going to fly. So $1 per unit by air. Now, when you start selling, I don't know, 20,000amonth. Yeah, ship by boat because you'll have the income coming in to do that. But for now, do it by air, because that's a heck of a deal.
For what you're paying. I will take it for you from China to the States.
All right.
It's like, okay, maybe it's my previous experience with shipping. Okay, it does make sense. But would you do it from the beginning? Because right now I'm testing out a product. So right now I really want to test a small quantity and then go on the volumes, Right? This is what you mean.
I'd go straight from the beginning. Doing air. If you could do air.
I'm doing air, but not 1,000 units. I'm starting with two. 300.
Yeah, that's fine.
That's fine. Okay. Can I have one more question?
Nope.
About the reviews.
One thing I didn't understand about the Facebook, although I watched it million times. The first ones you saw, you sent out before doing the contest, right? You said you want 50 and so on and so on. Did you ship them manually? You didn't let them go via Amazon?
No, they were all Amazon. They were all done on Amazon.
You mean you give them a coupon or something?
Yes.
Okay. Why can I not do this, like in my surrounding? I'm not talking about the US Non familiar people. And give them manually these things and do this around here locally.
Is it possible you can? Sure. The only thing is that then they don't show up as verified reviews. But that's what JM and I were talking about earlier. You can totally do that.
Okay, now about the contest. You said the first 10.
Will win a match, right? Yoga match. Right. So you basically could do that for 100 or 1,000 people. Nobody knows exactly the numbers.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Okay. And in your strategy, did you advertise the names of the winners to do some social proof or.
Yeah, we did originally. We didn't see. The reason we did that though, is because we didn't have inventory yet. So we were trying to extend the length of the contest to buy us some time. So we would like release 10 games a day until we gave them all away. But that turned out to kind of shoot us in the foot because after like a week of like a week later, people weren't as excited about their free map. Weird thing about human psychology. So what I would do is I would have 10 people email you and then release their names on Facebook. Then do 10 more names release their names on Facebook. 10 more names or at least their names on Facebook. Get people commenting like, I love my free mat. I'm so excited.
Okay, and regarding that one last thing, did you consider or did contact yoga instructors or clubs or anything like that to give them a mat or recommend people to go into your group or something like this?
Instead of that, we do blogs.
Blogs?
Yeah.
My product is from the kitchen category. I'm thinking to contact some chefs around.
Here if they have blogs. Look for cooking blogs.
Cooking blogs.
Sure. Thanks.
I got a question for Sean. Sean, are you familiar with uship?
I have heard of the site, but I have not. Other than that, I am not familiar.
Is anybody here? Just wave at me if you're familiar with uship.
No one? Okay. So I think they're an Austin based company here and from my understanding, they're like airbnb.
For shipping. So it's like you say what you want to be shipped and people come in and bid.
On the idea. I think we could actually save a lot of money shipping in the US if we did a U ship instead of using.
The company that we're using. I know they've been really helpful and really supportive, but we might be able to save a lot of money and just using uship rather than paying thousand bucks every time we want something shipped from California to the Amazon Center.
Yeah, I'll have to look into that. I actually have heard about the site. There was some stupid TV show on Discovery Channel where I think it went through one season and it followed people that use these sites. You don't have to be a full size truck. I could do it. If you wanted to ship a dog from Austin to Cleveland, I could come down there, pick up your dog and drive and be on U ship. But yeah, I'll definitely look into that, see if we can get a better price.
We just did it for Uber.
Did you just say Uber? Use Uber, Anthony. I said it's like Uber for shipping. That's crazy. Yeah, so we just used it for my men's health company where.
We had the retail order and they ordered 2,000 units. So we got a quote from a shipping company and they quoted us $4,000 to ship 2,000 units of our product. Then we put it up on uship and we had a bid for $750. Great. We just saved ourselves $3,000 just using uship. So I think we could probably save a significant amount of money if we did it on uship versus you doing it on uship.
Are you sure you're going to get your product?
Yeah.
You can look at user feedback just like you would look at it on eBay or Airbnb or whatever.
Yeah, I'll look at that. One thing just so everybody else knows, Amazon requires the less than truckload or full truckload carriers to be registered with them. And at one point that required them to have a carrier number which I assume comes from department transportation or something. So I'm not sure if that still applies or not. But before you, if you were to use U ship, you would definitely want to look in that prior to.
Sending your cargo with a truck that's going to get denied by Amazon.
Okay, tribe, we're over the hour mark, so we're going to adjourn for today.
Good to see you all. Sure, and I will.
Same time, same place, next weekend.
Thank you.
Bye, guys. See you next week.
