Ryan Daniel Moran leads a Tribe Hangout on selling physical products on Amazon. Members discuss supplier communication, inventory management, and shipping options like Shipwire and DHL. They cover review tactics including outbound calling with hourly pay plus bonuses, email sequences, and Facebook retargeting for launches.
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Broadcast all that. So here we are. Now we're. Now we're officially live.
Now we're just being recorded.
To summarize, for people who are watching the recording, all we've talked about so far is Ken's making two to three sales a day and got his five reviews. So I don't need to pee on his lawn even though it's been drying his lawn and that would help him. We just voted on the favorite image of my girlfriend's new business. And I said put a cat in the photo. That was their advice.
Now we're just being recorded. Somebody's on a delay, so I gotta mute them for people who are watching the recording. There we go. Sorry, Catherine, you were on a nasty echo. So when you want to chat, just wave at me. Or do you. You look like you're fixing something. Anyway, Sean and I are super excited because we have. We are pumped now. Sean, why don't you talk about the samples you got?
I'm going to go get them too. So you can see we got our samples for our yoga towel and our cork yoga block today. I picked them up from our UPS box and they are way better than I was expecting. We had already had a sample of the block in the past, but they had some new technology. So they were previously like wood burning our logo on the block and now they are laser engraving it. So I don't know if you can see. It's like it's gonna be in a mirror, but it's really crisp, which is pretty cool. So I'm really excited about that. And we got our towels, which are real nice. And on the bottom there's. It's like a sticky. It almost feels like someone spilled like something on it. But it's really sticky. I like, I threw it on the carpet, take a picture and it picked up a whole bunch of dirt. So pretty cool on the stitching on here. I really like the colors we chose. So it's got like a gray and then like a. It looks a little bit more blue on my camera, but it's like a teal color. So. Pretty stoked about that. Bad news though. It's going to take forever to get here, so don't have to wait a while.
Well, the samples, how did they send the samples?
Ups.
Okay.
Usually actually this time it was free since we ordered so much. But in the past we have to pay like $60 for a package. But we ordered enough this time so we should get free samples from here on out. It's pretty cool.
Can we get a Thousand free samples.
I think we'd have to order, like 6 million yoga mats to get 1,000 free. Samp.
Ryan, you need to get the hustle on.
Yeah, really. What a slacker. Since we're not at 6 million yet.
Sean and I are super excited because we just did.
A little bit of background. I think I've told you guys this. We have an oversized item in our yoga mats. Because of that, we have to have nine weeks of consistent sales of like, 5% of our inventory or better in order to have our inventory restriction removed. So as a result, we've only been ever able to have 500 units in inventory. So this becomes a little bit of a troubling thing because we have to sell a certain amount for nine weeks straight, but we can only have 500 in inventory. So as a result of us going through this, we've actually had to limit sales per day in order to not run out of inventory so that we could get more inventory later because otherwise we're going to have to do this thing and we run out of inventory, get a new shipment, run out of inventory. And we've been doing that, and it was really hurting us because we have a month in between of no inventory and no sales. So we decided to bite the bullet and just limit sales for the next two months.
And grow slowly until we got this inventory problem removed. So we are two weeks away from having this inventory issue expanded, which means we're going to have more inventory. We're going to be able to make the full amount of sales, and at the same time, we're getting our towels and blocks in. And we did just some basic math, and we make about $20 profit per item. When we sell a map or a towel, it's a lot less with a block. It's like eight bucks with a block. But between towels and mats, all we need to sell is about 35 units a day for us to be making 20k in profit per month, which is really, really easy for us because we'll often sell 20 units a day while we're limiting our sales, while we're trying to keep things down. So we're very.
Very optimistic. Catherine asked Ryan, why don't you have the yoga mat stock in a warehouse ready for dispatch at any time? Or a warehouse. And yes, great question. We actually just started doing that on our last shipment. We did it for the first time. The only downside to it is that extra shipment from the warehouse turned out to be more expensive than we thought. But that is what we. What we have been Doing now is storing them. We would rather just cut that out and have them shipped straight to Amazon. But we do have that extra step now in case we need it.
Which warehouse are you using? Is it in the U.S. it is.
In the U.S. sean, what's the company?
An derringer. I'll post an email to the guy. But the warehouse we use is in Seattle.
So shipping across the Colorado Rockies ends up being a little bit expensive.
Yeah, I'll just throw something out here for you guys. And this will go to Sean rather than you, Ryan, because it's operational. The warehouse I use for. I had a Shopify storefront when I was trying to sell direct myself before Amazon. And my Shopify storefront tied into a 3 PL called Shipwire. They had API hooks. Okay. But what I've been doing with Shipwire is I can actually create my FBA inbound shipment, get my UPS labels, upload them to Shipwire, and use the UPS freight rates from Amazon to move the inventory from Shipwire to Amazon. It cost me 65 bucks a month to store my 4,000 units that I made for.
For the my own website. So check it out. You don't need a Shopify storefront or anything like that, but you just a Shipwire account. And they're good people too.
Well, I'll take a look.
Okay. Shawn, have we ever looked into you ship?
Yes and no. I think you and I had a chat about it, and then we didn't do anything further.
Did you ever look into it?
You had to. I just kind of looked at what they had available.
From what I recall, you had to, like, either put some kind of a payment down before you could do a posting. You couldn't, like, get, like, some sample feedback. So it might be something to consider.
Okay.
That might work better.
So that's not a very glowing review for it, but we actually had them booked to pick something up, and.
They didn't show up, so that wasn't good. But that could have just been the person that we chose. Brian, have you ever tried uship?
No, I haven't used it.
If you guys don't know what uship is, it's kind of like an ebay for shipping services. People can bid on your whatever and say you want to ship your dog to Austin and someone else just happens to be driving from Cleveland to Austin, then they'll just, like, charge you and take it, or make the trip on.
Their own and absorb Airbnb for shipping.
Katherine says she's ready to take up the sourcing supplier business.
That's Good. Start advertising yourself. You'll have clients immediately in asm.
Brian, I want to hear about your biz. Tell me about sales. Every week you're like, Well, I sold 100,000.
No, no, no.
No reviews.
Good, tell me.
I'm at 15 on the main product and 10 on the secondary product.
Okay, what have sales been like?
Double my expectations for Gin. I've been at 100 units plus 100 units on a 30 day lagging. And I just hit 100 units for the month of June. So from June 1st to yesterday, I'm at 100 units. So my products, $19.99. So that's two grand in sales. Thank you very much.
Awesome. Very cool, dude.
Yep. But I wanted to dig into a little bit. I'm calling, actually, I'm not doing it. I've got a guy working for me doing the follow up phone calls.
I've only gotten two reviews out of those follow up phone calls. And I'm using essentially the same script that.
You gave us. And my offer's $5 off. And it's a promo code for my products. Now remember at the beginning you switched that to just a $5Amazon gift card, something like that, and you saw a market increase. But I'm at two of my. I don't have the exact percentage in front of me, but it's under 5% of customers sold or given reviews. So if you got some words of wisdom in that, I'd love to hear.
Yeah, I got really boring words of wisdom, and that is Sean and I hired this gal and we had. I wouldn't call them similar shoes. We had decent results from calling people because we had. We probably had a hundred reviews before we hired Lori. Right, Sean? And less than that. We had less than 100.
Yeah.
Okay, so then we hired this girl.
What is it?
I think we had 83.
Wow.
Yeah, she's killer.
Yeah. So we just. We hired this girl. We posted a US ad. Somebody in Seattle answered on Odesk or.
Elance or something like that.
We posted on Austin Craigslist and someone in Seattle responded. Not sure how that happened, but she contacted us. And we're like, we had had trouble keeping people in this role. We had no problem getting people in the role, but we had similar results where it was like 5% of people would leave a review or the person would leave after a month or whatever. So this girl contacted us, we decided to do a test, and she's been killer. I mean, we've probably had.
400% increase in reviews. I mean.
It'S been absolutely crazy. So the biggest thing that we discovered there is a lot of it has to do with who's doing the calls. A lot of it just has to do with does the person connect with the call person on the other end, and are they doing a good job of following the script, and are they good on their feet when somebody says something off script and when you're not seeing the results, we just discovered that it was the person making the calls. And the girl that has been calling for us has been absolutely outstanding.
Who was making your calls?
A friend of mine.
Okay.
So. But, you know, he has no problem if we're not getting the results. We change something, and if it's the person that's doing the calls, that's fine.
We also compensate her per positive review we get.
So we'll give her. We'll give her a few extra bucks every time she gets a positive review.
And your experience is there without being sexist or whatnot. Male csr, female csr.
Thoughts on that?
We thought about this a lot in yoga. It's pretty simple. It's almost all women, so it should be a woman making the calls. With my men's fitness company, it's a little bit different. We couldn't decide on if it would be better to have a woman call and it be just a customer service call, because when a guy would call, they'd often try to use it as like a fitness consultation. Or would they rather have a guy calling in order to connect with them more? Because it's mostly men, we ended up sticking with the male just because he's been doing a pretty good job. I actually think that having a woman in that role would probably be better.
Yeah, that's. I'm thinking that as well. You know, obviously, you know, my product in the product space, it's men using it, you know, having a nice voice on the other end of the phone.
It's harder to get mad at a woman calling. You.
Just is. Dude calls you. It's easy to get upset. Woman calls.
Unless that leads a wife or significant other.
What's that, Ken?
Then unless the woman is your significant other.
Then it's easy to get angry sometimes. Yes.
Fair enough. I want to hear from Joe. Joe, last we heard you launched, then you were out of inventory. Are you still out of inventory or are you taking over the world yet?
Almost there. Almost there. No, I got back in stock.
Monday or Tuesday as I had planned. I did another launch. Basically just a carbon copy of what I had done before. Wound up giving away about 300 units. Pissed off a competitor who tried to attack my page.
That was a whole fun experience and.
I basically duplicated the results. As of last time, I spiked top like 50bsr. I still have the number 3 bestseller badge.
So I'm expecting.
If the same amount of buyers convert into reviews, I'm expecting maybe another 20 to maybe on the high end, 30 reviews, which would put me at 70 to 80 reviews total.
Awesome. What have your natural sales been looking like on a daily basis?
I haven't bothered to analyze the days that I was running the promo because.
I was just running.
I wasn't using an Amazon affiliate link for that. But Yesterday was the first full day. Did 20 sales conversion rate was a little lower than it had been prior to going out of stock. It was at 9%. Could have just been a Friday. Could have just been, I don't know, something random. It's only one day.
But 20 sales yesterday at a normal conversion rate that would have been like 30 sales. 30 to 35 sales.
And those are natural sales or those are launch sales?
No, they're all natural sales. I am running Amazon ads, but I don't wind up spending more than like $10 a day. And I am running AdWords again.
You got a full time business already, dude.
Nice work.
Have you raised your price yet?
I have.
I am highest among the asmers on the first page. I'm not higher than the highest.
And I'm just gonna. I'm gonna leave it where it is. I basically raised it about 25%. I'm gonna leave it where it is and get some data and go from there.
Okay, so I gave you a recommendation on where I think you should price it. Yeah, I stand by that recommendation. When we were first starting, we faced this problem. This is my partner Matt of where do we leave pricing? Do we go volume? Do we go for expense? Where do we go for. And what we finally determined was that we wanted to go volume. Low pricing. Excuse me. Until we were at the level that we needed in order to hit our goal and then we would just go for profit. And Matt was looking to quit his job. I obviously don't have one.
But Matt was still in a job and was looking to quit that job. So we wanted to be at full time profit as quickly as possible. So we made that change when we hit the volume that we wanted.
When you made that change, did you experience any shift in ranking due to what I presume would probably be a lower conversion rate or conversion rate stayed.
The same because we had spent all that Time building up all these reviews. So we had, I mean at this point we had hundreds of reviews and we had the number one tag.
And.
We'Re number one seller had all these reviews. So we had all the proof that was necessary for a little bit jump in price to be unaffected.
I mean it did not affect the conversion rate.
Ryan, I want to share one other thing for Joe that if you're not doing it, you might want to start in Facebook. When you create an audience, you can get.
A script visitors to my website to retarget and if you incorporate that into your landing page, if people click through and end up on your landing page or your website, you can then start retargeting and giving them ads either in the news feed or on the sidebar. But start grabbing those guys because you got to have. I don't know what the minimum is. I think it's about 100 before any of your retargeting campaigns will start working. I just started it this week. So anybody on my website and I put in the landing page for my Facebook promo that I'm running today.
Yeah, I've used Perfect Audience in the past which does what I think you're talking about. But yeah, I didn't do it for either launch. I will next time though. It's going to be a little long.
Before I do another launch.
It's a good idea. Perfect Audience is a good resource for that. We've used that too.
I've got one other little ninja thing I'm doing and I don't know what the results are going to be yet. We'll see.
My competitors listings on Amazon I went through and any reviewers who had their first last name in their city. I had somebody look up their Facebook UID and I built a custom audience out of those guys.
You built a custom audience out of those individuals?
Yes.
So like 100 people? 60.
That's all. Because when you post a review it doesn't always give first name last name. In fact it rarely does.
So first name, last name city, just use the spotlight lookup on Facebook, look up that person's name. Usually do it by state because sometimes.
The city is different.
And then get their Facebook UID throw it into a text file. I got 60 people in my custom audience.
Have you actually seen respond from those 60 people?
No, not yet. I've only started this this weekend.
They're a.
Separate ad set in my launch campaign today.
I'm going to guess that you're going to have better results messaging those people than targeting them with ads. I Think it's pretty ninja that you found the people that are leaving reviews for competitors. That's pretty cool.
So we'll see how it works. I'll let you know.
Katherine, Ivan posted in the chat and Ivan's with us, so you guys can work this out. But he said he's ready to hire your services. So there's your first client. You guys can work things out yourself. By the way, Ivan, I don't think you've joined us on a call before, have you?
Maybe.
What's that?
I said this is your first time joining us on a call, isn't it?
Yeah, I'm always watching. I just never joined before.
Is it Ivan or Yvonne? Ivan. Ivan. It's good to have you.
Thank you.
How's. Tell us, tell us about your biz. Let's mastermind you for a second.
So so far I placed my first order from China and it should be here next week. And I did that already. Couple weeks ago I had my first product selected. Now I'm already going to my second product. Since I have the capital, I figured might as well go for it. And kind of looking into that. A big thing I was seeing is how much like you were saying, with oversized products and most of the packaging for my product, it ends up being oversized. But I saw that if I can have them repackage it with different dimensions, I could be within Amazon's regular size dimensions. But then I was seeing with product weights using the Amazing Academy tool where it lets you calculate. How accurate is that? Because when I do 8 pounds in product rate, my FBA fees like shoot up.
I have no idea how that car is.
8 pounds. It's $5 and 70 cents is my fees.
That's that. I don't even blink an eye at that. That sounds low to be honest with you.
Okay.
Well that's just the FBA fees. The Amazon selling fee is 465. So.
Okay. For an eight pound item that doesn't, that doesn't surprise me too much.
Okay. Yeah. My first product is really light. So this one I was like, oh wow.
Yeah.
Yeah. So the second product is kind of what I would like to source because I'm having a hard time finding a good manufacturer for it. There's so many. But would be nice if Katherine could help with that.
Yeah, we have an in house resource for that. Its name is Katherine Chung.
Hi.
And she just calls up the president of Alibaba and says give me your best person.
And she's magical like that.
So you guys can probably work out an arrangement outside of it and let us know how that goes.
Yeah, would be awesome.
Cool.
Hello. We have a visitor.
Is it your model?
This guy is starting his own little Amazon business.
I'll see you later.
Okay.
So, Ivan, you got your product on a boat somewhere in the Pacific Ocean on its way to warehouses.
I actually have my first one since it's so light, I just did it through air.
Good.
The production is finished and I believe it's sending out next week.
Cool. Are you. Are you going to be doing a launch? What are you going to be doing to get things off the ground?
Well, I have a list of about 30 something family members and friends that I know if I bug the shit out of them, they're going to eventually do it. And then I have a launch idea using Facebook.
And.
Yeah, so I got a little launch going on with that.
Okay, awesome. You're doing all the right things then. Good work.
Thank you.
Kathryn. Yeah, we already know that you got like 900 clients that want to be sourcing through you. But tell us about your physical products business.
Okay.
I just. Since last week I checked with you and I worked out. Although the product is 10 bucks or 13 bucks, but I can do margins, 40% margin because I have sourced a really pretty good price for air shipment from Shenzhen to us. So that is the big.
Update. My own achievement so that I don't have to worry about the shipping cost so I can move forward. In the coming days I'll visit China to order the inventory. So I think I can do both things at the same time. If I can help you guys, I will try friends to source the product and I can.
Maybe five members and I can help them at the same time. I can visit China at the same time. So I can do the visit and source the product for them. And the good news is I have these five members to start with. I am really wanted to go to Las Vegas to meet you all as well.
Awesome.
Does that mean you're coming for sure?
Yes, if I have five.
If you have five clients. Okay.
Yes, I would.
Well, you just gotta make it a contingency where they have to leave you a glowing video review so that the rest of ASM can join in.
Yeah. Kathryn, I'm serious about this. If you get a couple people to leave you a couple video testimonials and you put them on a page somewhere. This is embarrassing right now.
What did we do in Las Vegas when I joined?
If you get a couple of video reviews and you put them on a website, I'll promote You and make some sort of mention of that. And I can do it from stage. I mean, you'll be busy for a year.
If I mention it from stage. But if you put something together, I'll certainly help you get some clients.
Oh, yeah. But the first day is just to get some few five members or so so I can get started.
I would not say too many the very first time.
Sure.
So I would love to meet you over in Las Vegas.
Well, post it on the now there are three cats in the shot.
Wait till you meet 4, 5 and 6.
So post it in the tribe Facebook group, I'd put together a small web page, small webpage saying exactly what you're going to do and what your costs are and how you're doing something special for tribe members. But go ahead and post now in the Facebook group of what your service is going to be and what the price is. You'll probably pick up a few people right away and then put together that webpage. And I think what you're doing is very, very helpful to people. So I'm certainly happy to get the word out for you.
What's the point of having a webpage?
So that people who haven't been on these calls and people who want to know more information and a place where you can take video testimonials like Ivan and and put them on your page where you can compile everything so that people have an easier time seeing what the services are and have an easier time getting connected with you. All right, for your first few, yeah, you can just post it in the tribe, but as soon as you lock them up, I'd be working on a page right now about it.
All right. Yeah, I just am ready first. Cool.
Cool.
Ron, I'm so excited for that business.
So, Kathryn, in order to leverage what Ryan's offered for help there on stage, if you have just that, a landing page where he can give a URL, you know, Chung sourcing or something, whatever, dot com, and have just grabbed on that landing page, grab their email address. How do you get in touch with them?
Yep.
All right. Okay, I see if I can get a page.
You can get a page. When you have five people email me, I'll make you one.
I'm so excited for this business, Kathryn, because I really think that you're okay. So here's a little bit of a crystal ball for you.
About five years ago, all the raid was building SEO sites and getting them to rank for search keywords and selling affiliate products on those pages. That was all rage. Five, six, Years ago. Was that Ivan Wealthy affiliate? Yeah, right. That was all the rage five, six years ago. And then all these people came into the market because all these people were teaching it, of course, and all these people were making money doing it. And as a result, people started looking for easier and easier keywords which they found out were local keywords. And all of a sudden all the rage became instead of doing your own SEO, you'd go to other people who needed local SEO. And it was really easy for all these people who had been doing it all on their own. And then this whole new market got built of people doing local search engine optimization. We're seeing the exact same trend right now with Amazon, where right now keywords are easy to rank for the market. Is the market competition is fairly low. People like Joe can walk in, snap their fingers and be selling 30, 40 a day in a couple of weeks. And Brian is two months in, has been selling thousands of dollars worth of products. This is going to go on for a while, but the barrier to entry is fairly low. What's going to happen is as market consciousness continues to rise, I am very sure that there's going to be a new industry that gets built which is service oriented for Amazon, which means there's going to be services for people to find suppliers and there's going to be people taking on clients saying I'll put your products on Amazon. Those are going to be the next two sectors of this market. People saying for $2,000 a month, I'll promote your products on Amazon and they'll keep four clients at a time and that will be their full time business. And then there will be the people who say I'll find suppliers or I'll do manager, shipping or whatever it is. Those services are going to pop up in, I'm going to say nine to 15 months. So Kathryn, if you can be the first to market that says I'll find the supplier and set everything up for you.
I think you're way ahead of it and you have a full time business really, really quickly. I've been telling my girlfriend Pamela that if she wanted to go full time really quickly, that an easy way may be to contact people and take them on as clients in order to take $2,000 a month from each client, keep three or four and just put their products on Amazon since she knows the whole process and she can continue building up her own business. So those are going to be the next waves of this business. Just watch for it.
Interesting.
So just a heads up that I think that's where it's going, Kathryn, and I think you can be ahead of the market on that by leaps and bounds.
I agree wholeheartedly with you, Ryan, and I want to just emphasize that one more point. Like the company I work for today doesn't have a clue about how to sell products online. And that's a whole other bevy of potential online business management clients. Existing brands that are out there that just want to pay somebody two, five, ten grand a month. You take care of it for me. I want to focus on my traditional trade channel.
Yep.
Sean and I have had conversations about do we do a how to sell on Amazon product? Do we not do a how to sell on Amazon product?
Because I don't really want to. I'm not anxious to be in the products business again, and I don't really want to do something that somebody else has done. But one thing I've thought about is we could kind of have a different angle. If we went to market with this idea that you could have clients, we could still talk about the business side of it, but if we want, if we went with the client angle kind of like Kevin Wilkie did with the marketing angle five years ago and did really well, we might have. We might have a different angle that we could spin. This is all beside the point. This is just fun to speculate about where the market is going, but I do think that's what's going to happen next.
That's kind of why I think a big part is just trying to dominate a specific niche like you guys are now doing with yoga, because then you're really establishing yourself. I think it's gonna get a lot harder to get into different markets real quick. Within a year, it's probably gonna be really hard to get into new markets. And you want to kind of cement yourself in at least a market or two. So you keep growing.
I think you're absolutely accurate.
Our job, once we are set up, is really to stay ahead of the curve. So what? So after we're all on Amazon, what's gonna be popular then? Retail. And what's going to be popular after that? Having your own funnels. So.
If you can be a year ahead of that curve and dominate Amazon now and then go to retail a year before everybody else, then you have a business that's big and you have one that's very hard to take down.
Matt posted the results of the GoPro IPO this week where GoPro is just video cameras and they were first to market. Now there's a bunch of HD cameras like it but they were a little bit unique at their time and they just went public and they're valued at $3 billion. That is six Cleveland Indian teams for anyone who is counting. So they went public, they're valued at $3 billion. And no one's going to take down GoPro for years. Now, we don't have to go the IPO route, but we can look at that as an example of being first to market, having really, really happy customers and having good sales channels and good branding results in a profitable business. That is what Sean and I are going for with yoga. We are slowly building a business that we believe in five years we're going to sell for millions of dollars and we believe that's going to.
How are you doing in retail now?
How are we doing retail now?
I mean, I remember you mentioning you had some product already going into retail.
This is not in our yoga business. We're not focused on retail yet. Our plan with this is to go. So again, we have this inventory issue. I don't know if you're on the call for this conversation.
But once we break through that, we'll be balls to the wall getting to number one in our category. And when we're number one in our category, then we'll be looking at retail. But our first opportunity is to blow up Amazon as a channel.
Alright, now I want to hear from Greg. Greg, tell us about your biz.
Sorry I was a little late to the call, got sidewinded getting home.
We got some product samples in and they were cool. So we're happy. And we placed our order which is in manufacturing right now. And they originally anticipated the middle of July before it was going to be ready. But I got a Skype message last night that said it would be ready by July 5th because of shipping costs, we've got to do it by sea and we're looking to have it probably sometime by mid August. So not at the rate we want to go. But slow and steady is better than none at all.
Yeah, well, we had the same exact thing. So when we started our yoga business we did the exact same process. So I feel you on that delay. Ask them if there's anything that you can do to expedite production or expedite shipping every once in a while. The answer is yes.
But you may be sitting on your hands for a bit in the meantime. If you're sitting on your hands, what you want to be doing is building up a launch list.
Yeah, we're actually working on all our marketing because there's a lot of stuff that we can do proactively instead of waiting until we get our supply. And we were kind of fortunate because the colors, we're going after two products initially and.
Because they kind of match one another. And we were fortunate to get the colors that we wanted because originally they said, well, your MOQ isn't going to allow to get whatever colors you want. But then they said that they got another buyer for this particular color. So they said, we'll just piggyback on them. So it worked out.
Oh, good, good.
Anything that we can do to help you in kind of the interim while you're waiting for inventory?
I got one question, and maybe it's really for Sean.
I love it when that happens. And they're like, I got a question about something that actually matters. So, Sean.
It'S a mechanics question. Right.
So what do you do?
Like the initial product, we're getting them to be able to put our own barcode on it, but we're not going to be giving them private label per se, to where it's got our own logo and whatnot. But you launch this product, it's under their brand, which nobody on Amazon is selling that brand right now. What happens when you do the MOQ that they're requiring to put your own brand on it? How can you convert the existing, I'll say, generic brand to your own private brand, but not lose all your reviews?
So I think.
Are you keeping the same UPC number?
Yeah, it would say the UPC number would stay the same.
I think you can just change your pictures and change your copy and Amazon will be none the wiser. You'll just have. You'll have to make sure there's gonna be kind of a layover there where they'll ship whatever they. They don't do first in, first out, or last in, first out. They just randomly grab inventory. So if you still have the old stuff in stock and you have pictures of the new stuff, you know, people might get it, the old product, but they might not care. I mean, I guess I don't know what you're selling. If I ordered a yoga mat that looked totally different, I might be upset. If I was ordering, I don't know, nail clippers and the package was different, I could care less. So that might not even be a problem, but it's definitely something to be aware of. Your option might be to either a. If you have enough inventory, you could either buy it all or ship it to yourself and then deal with it that way. Or you could just sell out before your Second order comes in.
Really, the only difference for this product is the label that's going to be on it. There's really no packaging. It's just a label on the product.
Do you think your customers would care if they got the unlabeled one?
Well, it would still have a label. The label would look different. The only thing that would be common would be the size and the UPC number. The colors and the logo would be different. But no, I don't think so. And we are going to have it shipped to us initially. Just so I've got a comfort of knowing what I'm sending on to Amazon is the same thing that we originally ordered for a sample.
And actually, what you could do is ship it to Amazon before you change the pictures, wait till you sell five or six or however many you had left in stock, and then you can be pretty sure everything in stock is the new layout. And then you can update your pictures and copy and whatnot.
Then the other question I had is, what's the difference with just Googling some local freight forwarder that's local to us versus using dhl?
I mean, it would depend on their pricing, really. That's what it comes down to. If the freight forwarder can get you a better price, that's who I would.
Go with.
Experience this week, getting a quote for shipping by sea from dhl.
So I just. This whole shipping and importing, you know, I think of Costanza on Seinfeld being a. I don't know if he was the importer or the exporter, but I'm going to be the importer. I'm trying to figure all this stuff out.
The one nice thing about having a freight forwarder is, I mean, DHL might have customer service like this, but we can do stuff wrong and they'll catch it for us. They'll say, well, you need this form. And if they hadn't, you know, that might have slowed things down. Or they'll say, well, you know, we can put it in our warehouse. We'll take care of all the arrangements. But you pay for that luxury. So they handle more stuff without me having to interact. But it's more expensive.
But DHL might have that same kind of thing set up for their sea shipping. I'm not familiar with DHL's, you know, Ocean transport.
Yeah, we're gonna get a couple quotes, so we'll see how it goes. But you guys average like 30 days to get it by sea?
Yeah, about what it is.
Okay.
What's that, Ivan?
Do you need a freight Forwarder, like my first shipment, I'm just gonna do it FedEx Air and they quoted me directly to the warehouse. Would I still need a freight forwarder?
No.
Right.
I don't think that.
Air is a different game. Those of us who ship by sea are very envious of you who can do By Air.
It's only the first product, thankfully, how small it is. Second one, I'm screwed.
Pretty much would be almost on the same boat as you guys with the yoga mats.
Possibly literally on the same boat as usual.
As far as reviews go, I'd like to know for those of you who are selling regularly, what your strategies are for collecting reviews.
Because that's such a driver of sales. I would like to have a conversation about those different ways because I use a variety in my different businesses. Just a recap. We call our customers. You guys know the script I use. We also email all our customers using feedback 5 and is it seller Labs, Shawn? Yes, Seller Labs. We on one of my businesses send an email that just says, hey, we're looking for honest feedback. Reply to this email and let us know how your experience has been. And if they reply positively, we follow up with them.
We keep a. We're starting to build a VIP review list through inserts in our boxes in one of my businesses. And of course, we'll give away product, whoever will leave a review. We're really aggressive about that. So anybody who will leave a review will send free product to.
We also, as you guys already know this, are just obsessed with getting negative feedback removed. By sending them free product, refunding them, calling them, whatever it takes to get them to take it down, we get about 30% of our negative reviews removed.
It's really just about being really aggressive with giving away and just unbelievable customer happiness. Shawn and I are going to have some cool opportunities opening up to us because we are getting products number two and three. It's going to open up some creative flexibility for us to.
Send out different products in order to encourage reviews.
Somebody.
Agrees to leave a reviewer like, great, we just shipped you a free yoga block just as a thank you for being an awesome customer. Now they're a thrilled customer. Or instead of offering a $5 coupon, we ship them something else. There's some creative flexibility now that we have multiple products of what could happen. Also, the idea of a coupon code is a lot more attractive when you have more than just one product. When you advertise a yoga mat that's durable and lasts forever, and you offer a coupon code that's not really an attractive hook, but if it's a $10 off coupon for a block or a towel, it's more attractive for them to use and it's more attractive for us for them to actually use it because we get an additional sale out of it. So I'm excited to see what creativity comes up as a result of us having multiple products as well. I think, I think. You know what, is there another cat? Oh yeah, there's. In my experience in my first Amazon business we had business double, even triple once we released our second product because we had, first of all, the market was a lot bigger in the second product and also we had repeat buyers who were buying the first product now buy the second product and we were getting things to show up that said frequently bought together these two products. So we had an exponential growth in that second product because it wasn't just a doubling of business. Now we had shared customers buying each product product and repeat buyers starting to come back. In our yoga business I'm expecting to have a similar experience where we have towels and blocks go live and now we have an exponential growth happen where I think we're going to be in a special place three, four months from now.
I don't remember how I got on that train but.
You wanted to talk about review strategies.
So what are you guys using for reviews right now? If you're willing to share, we can tweak your strategy.
Right now the only thing I'm using is the ASM email tool and sending out three different emails in sequence.
Okay, cool.
Has anyone ever, I mean especially you Ryan, since you've always been with email lists and stuff, have you done any launches to let's say a yoga list, yoga blogs to get reviews with big discounts, stuff like that.
We've gone to blogs, we've gone to blogs and asked them to do, paid them to do a review, paid them to do a post, paid them to send out to their list and we've.
Seen.
We'Ve seen minor results with that. They're kind of slow but steady. So we haven't done a launch with that. But in my supplement business we've done going to blogs and asking them to do write ups and paying for some exposure and seen a little bit of.
A response from that in regards to the reviews. Have you had Amazon? I posted on the Tribe and I had some people I gave coupon codes to and one member said that Amazon blocked them from getting giving me a review and not sure why. He says he's thinking maybe Amazon knows He got a coupon code and got it for free, but I don't know the details of why it was blocked. Have you guys experienced anything?
Yeah, we had that. Amazon doesn't care if you use a coupon code. Right. With the owner of the product.
I think they determine it based on IPs. If you've logged into their IP before with your seller central account, they can tell. Or if there's really. I'm not quite sure. I've had it happen in my own life. I've had it with family and I've had it happen with Sean, and Sean and I have. We share a seller central account, so it's pretty easy for them to see that we know each other.
Yeah, I don't share anything with this tribe member.
I mean, I'm not 100% sure, but I have seen it happen. It's rare, but I've had it happen several times.
Okay.
Yeah. I asked him if.
I sent him a PM just a little bit ago because I was curious if Amazon let him write the review and then when he went to submit it, if it got blocked or if Amazon blocked before he even had a chance to write it.
I've never seen it happen before he had a chance to write it.
Okay.
So I'm just wondering if maybe if he rewrote it and wrote in there he received product free for review purpose, if maybe then they'll allow it through or not.
I doubt it.
Okay.
Any. Any other review strategies you guys want to go over?
Ryan, looks like Catherine had a question about reviewing in her message. Kind in the middle.
I don't see it. Would you read it?
Yeah.
She says are you hiring per hour or per month?
Regarding the person selling. Yeah.
Or the. Yeah, the caller.
Yeah. We pay per hour plus a bonus for each positive review that person receives.
How much is the bonus? If you don't mind sharing?
Is it 5 or 10?
Sean, $5 for a 4 or 5 star review and then we pay. We pay. She's in Seattle if we pay her $10 per hour. So she usually gets one or two four or five star reviews per day.
Which is well worth sales volume should you look at before you look into hiring somebody like that.
How much? I was talking over you. I apologize.
Yeah.
How much sales volume before you hire somebody? I say as soon as it makes sense for you to do so. I mean those first initial sales, you need to be like reviews need to be scraping and fighting and clawing for hiring someone full time. I think you need to be at least 15, 20 units a day. But I think somebody should be crawling and clawing those reviews as soon as possible.
And you guys, you do the same email strategy, but you also call, right?
Yeah, we do both.
Handling the phone calls.
How am I handling phone calls?
Well, she's the person you hired is handling the phone calls. And you guys have the system of the email system already in place, right?
Correct. Okay, Ken, you. You got cut off. Were you about to say yeah.
How do you have her set up? Is she an independent contractor, like a 1099?
Yep.
Okay.
Getting people on payroll is scary.
Time for this is one of those things that Washington doesn't understand as they're like, demanding raising of minimum wages and trying to get, like, doing things with payroll taxes. What they don't understand is that the trend is as a result of that activity, they're pushing more people to be 1099 employees, which is what all of us do, all Internet based businesses do. It's very. I've only one time, besides myself, put someone else on payroll one time, and I regretted it because the taxes, the burden, the difficulty of getting them removed. The firing process was a lot messier when that person was on payroll. So.
The whole world is moving towards just 1099 ing everybody. So don't even worry about payroll, especially at this point in your business, does.
Minimum wage still apply to 1099?
No, it doesn't.
Independent contractor, they can charge as much or as little as they want as long as you agree that's that.
Okay. Like if I found someone on Craigslist and only pay them $5 an hour, $10.99.
That's.
That's perfectly fine because it's technically their business, right?
Yeah.
Brian, can you just. Do you. The person making the calls for you, do they have access into your seller central account? Do they just put notes in the person in the order record or. How do you manage that process?
Shawn? I think she has access to our seller labs. Correct.
Stitch Labs, which is our customer resource management.
She has access to a bunch of stuff. We started off slow, and then as she's been more and more awesome, she's done more and more things. So she has access to Amazon to give refunds, so she can give them a refund on the spot if they're unhappy. She uses Stitch Labs, which imports every Amazon order, Their address, their phone number, their name. And then she can like, list what happened. So she can say, like, called, left voicemail. You know, called, didn't leave voicemail. That way she can keep track of who she's contacted.
I think that answers the question.
Okay, so you're doing all that within Stitch.
Stitch Land? Yeah, yeah. That link that you.
It's like a tiered based payment plan. So when you're smaller, you pay less and as you grow, you pay more. But even as you grow, it's like, it's super cheap. It's totally worth it.
Yeah, I've got it. I know what you mean.
Yeah.
Is that a tool that you have to buy to get their telephone number or is the tools that ASM provides you get you the telephone number to get started?
The telephone number for your customers? Yeah, Amazon should be giving you that automatically. It's not formatted like a telephone number. It's just like a bunch of numbers in a row. But you should be able to get that through Amazon, just through your seller account. But then Stitch Labs puts it in an easy to manage kind of layout.
Where do you find the phone number in Amazon?
Just by clicking on the order id.
On the order id?
Yeah.
Okay, so I haven't seen it there, but I know in the ASM email tool, it's been showing me their phone numbers there.
But I haven't found it on Amazon yet.
You just click on their. On their fulfilled order and it shows up. It won't show up until the order has been fulfilled, though.
Okay.
Anyone else having. I've been seeing on, like the Facebook page, everybody's having trouble with hijacking and whatnot. Are a lot of you guys experiencing that too?
We've experienced it. It's really easy to make it go away. We just send them a nasty email that says, you're not authorized to sell this product, and they're usually gone within 24 hours.
Brian, I don't think I told you this either, but I got a couple ebay postings taken down and then that Sears listing, Sears took it down, which is pretty cool.
So do you guys. Does having a trademark and all that stuff help get those things taken down easier?
We don't have a trademark for Zen Active at the moment.
So I was wondering that's like, if that was an investment I should make as quick as possible or just wait until the business gets going.
Sean, what do you mean you got an ebay posting taken down in a Sears posting ticket?
Now, there were two sellers on eBay selling our MAT and then one seller on Sears selling our mat. They are no longer selling Armat.
I did not know about this.
No. That's interesting because I forgot to tell you.
Fair enough.
Fair enough.
Okay, Tribe, it's time to call it a day.
Congratulations again to all of you. I say this a lot but I'm consistently impressed by the action level and the success level of everybody in the tribe. So congratulations and I will see you guys next week and for some of you, I'll be seeing you in three weeks.
Do you have.
Time and venue for the mastermind in the afternoon yet, Ryan?
Yeah, it's the day before, starts at 1pm if you get in after 1pm Just come to the room anyway. They'll be. You could just ask for the room in the hotel reserved for the tribe.
Mastermind at the Venetian.
Yeah, and.
It always happens that there's like a handful of people right when we start and then throughout time then the room gets filled. So if you, if you arrive after one o', clock, no problem. We'll go to dinner about eight.
Okay.
I get in Wednesday night so I'll be there on time.
All right, guys.
Bye.
