Ryan Daniel Moran leads a Tribe Meeting with members including Sean Coyne and Kathryn Chung. They cover Amazon product selection rules: avoid anything under $20, aim for 40% profit margins, and focus on premium or consumable items. Kathryn reports from the Canton Fair and offers sourcing help to tribe members.
Questions this video answers
November 1, 2014.
40% (absolute minimum).
He generally avoids selling products priced under $20.
A $500 startup fee to source and negotiate with suppliers on behalf of tribe members.
About one-third of costs; Ryan/Sean suggest roughly $2–$3 per unit for some small items.
Chapters
And we're off.
We made it. Hey, everybody. Ryan here. There's a couple of you pouring into the call here as well as, well, about a thousand of you watching on the live feed. So everybody watching the live feed, I want to actually highlight the fact that there's a group of 12 tribe members all hanging out together. Special thanks, Brian, for putting together the tribe mastermind in Philadelphia right now. Can you guys say, hey? Hey.
Brian, why don't you for a second for the newcomers, for the new tribe members, talk a little bit about what you guys are doing down there.
So There's Dimitri is ASM2. I think everybody else is pretty much ASM3. At the live event in July, we were having our dinner on the last night. I was talking to Greg and Amy and a couple other folks and said, hey, we ought to get together and do this in a live event. What do you think about that? Almost unanimously, people said, yeah, that's a good idea.
I get a lot out of that.
It's been three months now. We've looked at a couple dates and booked a hotel conference room in an area which is close and convenient. We've been spending the day talking about each other's businesses.
Hey, everybody.
That is fantastic. Those of you who are new tribe members, that's the kind of. That's the kind of community that built here on the live feed.
I want to actually highlight the fact that there's a group themselves if they're watching the live feed, all hanging out.
Thank you. Okay, so in case you don't know, our neighborhood friendly Sean Coyne.
Sean's the chill one in the group. How do we define you? You're like official tribe coach almost.
He is the actual genius behind everything I do because he actually does it all. I just come up with the ideas. This is the detail guy. So most of the cool things that we talk about are a result of Sean actually implementing everything. So for those who are on the hangout, Jonathan, John, Kurt, Eric, have you guys gone through the. Have you guys gone through week one? What has come up and how can all of we support you in moving forward?
Yeah, I've gone through week one. Just went through week two yesterday. So it's all about picking the product now. So I've got a list going and I guess hoping to see sort of if you've got anything that you go above and beyond what they teach in terms of finding good opportunities. But I've got a list now and just hoping to see what you got to say about that.
Very cool. Yeah, we can definitely refine that. And Philly tribe, I'd like for you to confirm.
One thing that in ASM1, ASM2, something that, my goodness, how many Jonathan's are on the call today? Everyone on is either named Jonathan or Joe or it's all Js.
One thing that worked in ASM1, ASM2 was Amazon was so wide open a year ago, you could throw a rock at just about anything and have a successful product. Not that way anymore. We have to not even dig a little deeper. We just have to make a higher quality product. One of the things that we've talked about in the tribe, and Joe highlighted this in his post this week very well, which is what can you do to stand out from everybody else? There are people who are selling who a year ago put up any old Garcinia Cambogia product and sold buckets and buckets of Garcinia cambogia. Now it's a lot harder to sell in that market. But there's still people who sell tons and tons of garcinia. The difference being what are they actually selling on a surface level, the number of capsules there are, the potency of the product, the price of the product, how many come in a pack. So there are ways of differentiating yourself within even the most competitive markets. If you go into a competitive market, one of the things to keep in mind is a lot of questions will come up during the product selection phase.
I think about going to this market, but there's all this competition. The question then becomes, can you differentiate yourself from the existing market, from all of the stuff that is already being sold? But I do have a couple of rules that go above and beyond what Matt and Jason teach, which are I never ever sell a product under $20. I never ever go into a market that I can't immediately think of three to five additional products that I could sell and I think about a brand over a specific product. It also helps if you're in a market where top competitors have less than 1,000 reviews. Tribe members in Philly, Are any of you breaking that rule and still seeing success? Or would you all, for the most part say that those additional rules have helped you out?
Well, we're under $20 and we're still making. Well, we launched it six weeks or.
Eight weeks ago, but we're still making a decent amount of money on each one. So just to confirm, because it's a little quiet, you are selling for less than $20 and you're still doing okay?
Yes.
Cool. So my own personal rules Or I wouldn't sell for anything less than 20 bucks. Because I don't think the margins are there. There are people who do it. But those are my personal rules.
Ryan, I think that maybe you ought to speak. It's not just revenue, but it's also profit. Looking at your cost of goods sold and the cost of selling on Amazon, if you've got a $20 product where after Amazon fees and after cost of goods, if you're at $8, that's good. If you got a $30 product where after all that you're at $4, that's maybe not so good.
Right. The minimum margin that we look at is 40%. 40% is your absolute minimum margin. If you can't get 40%, if it's your first product, don't go into that market. If it's your third product, for example, Shawn. And my third product was a yoga block and profit margins are like 35ish percent. That's fine because it's an additional product. It's not our main product.
It looks like we're on chat roulette right now. We're leaning in. Like, what are you saying?
Better make these calls a little more.
Interesting than they should be. We should do chat roulette on one of our Friday dates. No, no.
Just a little bit. Sean and I have our Zen active yoga meeting Saturday morning. And Sean just recently moved to Austin, Texas, so we started doing regular Friday hangouts. I crash at his place and we have pajama Saturday where we work on our yoga business in our pajamas. We tried to come up with some fun thing to do the night before our active meetings. Last night we went to. This was very mature of us. We went to a trampoline park where they have trampoline dodgeball and we beat up 10 year olds. Except when the 10 year olds beat us up. That was kind of embarrassing. That was our evening last night. So for those of you who are. There's about.
A billion of you on the live feed right now. For those of you who are watching on the live feed right now, just mention. Have you gone through module one yet and are you starting to collect a list of products? Just give me a yes or a no. And if any questions came up during that process, we can go ahead and answer those. Yes, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Brian.
Brian, did you say something?
No, I didn't say anything.
Okay. Sometimes I just hear your voice and my imagination and get really excited. So I want to hear from.
I want to do that.
I want to hear from Godson and From John and from Jonathan about going through the training, have you had any questions come up so far?
Yeah, well.
I finished module one and I've just started going through module two. I said my question really is, if you're looking for a 40% margin, what actually should the cost per unit be before when you're actually looking at products in Alibaba? Because I haven't actually looked into how much shipping and how much fees for Amazon will be yet.
It depends on what ultimately you're going to be selling. But you could probably comment on shipping better than I can. Yeah.
So shipping, it really does depend. If you can get a supplier in the US or China, those are going to be huge differences in your shipping costs. Also, if you can ship something that's small enough to ship by air, as composed or compared to shipping by sea, you're gonna see differences shipping. So it's kind of hard to give you a set amount without having any clue as to what you'll be selling. For us, our shipping's probably a third. You'd say a third of our costs.
Yeah.
I'm not very good with math.
A third? Yeah. Ends up being like two bucks a unit. That sounds less. It would be less than a third, though.
Told you it wasn't this math.
It might be two, three bucks a unit, which would be, depending on the item, would be third.
Right. So for shipping, a couple things are going to add to the cost. The volume. So our yoga mat takes up a pretty good amount of space in a cargo container, so that's going to cost more. And the weight, which luckily yoga mats are pretty lightweight, but they take up volume. So a combination of those two things combined with the overall volume are going to contribute to your cost per unit. So really the best thing to do would be to get a guesstimate on the size of your order. And if you. I'll put the email out there, there's a guy that you can use. There's like a site you can use for an estimate estimate on shipping costs. You can kind of get a rough guess as to what.
It might cost you. In a perfect world, your product would be small in size, light in weight, consumable and expensive.
That would be in a perfect world. Now, you probably won't get all of those things, but if you had a magic wand, the perfect product would be light so that you could air flight it in. Like Shawn and I have talked about, we envy those of you who can do air shipping, because we can't. We have to go by sea and it Friggin sucks waiting two and a half months for things to get across the sea. So for those of you who are doing sea shipping, we do too. There's nothing wrong with it. Just know that you're going to hit a point where you're frustrated as heck because you're in module four of the training and all your products are sitting on a boat somewhere in the ocean and all these people are making money from having stuff on Amazon already. And you're going to be like, how did they get their stuff there already? Mine's on a boat. And it's just because they were able to ship by air. So we envy those of you who can do air shipping. And if it's small, then you pay less for storage at Amazon. If it's expensive, your profit margins are higher. And I don't remember what the fourth. Oh, consumable. Which means that people will come back and buy more. So that would be. In a perfect world, that's what your.
Criteria would be, which is why it's so popular for people to sell supplements. It's not that supplements are some sort of magical product and that's what people think that somehow supplements aren't. People get angry at people who sell supplements because they think it's the easy way out or something. No, the truth is they just meet those four criteria. They are light in weight, they're easy to ship, they're made to get shipped quickly, they tend to be expensive, so they meet all the criteria. If you can find something else that meets that criteria, by all means, please do that. By all means go that route. But very few products meet all of those criteria. Even yoga, which we're in, does not meet that criteria.
John, have you had any issues coming up with your list or anything or what's going on in your. I think module one is all about product selection, right? So what's going on in your. What are you planning for as far as product selection goes?
Hey, Ryan.
Ryan. Sorry, John, but it's Brian here. I think here in Philly we're going to drop off and let somebody else get in on the live one on one and let you guys get on with it.
Cool. They're too cool for us. They're going to actually work on their businesses. Everybody wave to the Philly crowd. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. Bye guys.
Go ahead, John.
Cool. Well, I've only actually just started module one this morning because I was busy yesterday, so I've watched all the videos, but I haven't really started going through selecting a product Yet. But I mean that was my reasoning was that I wanted to get something that's like small enough to be able to air freight or maybe I could ship a load via sea freight and ship in air freight if I actually get low on stock. But I was trying to think of something consumable which you can actually bring from China, which obviously people aren't going to intake. It's not going to kill them. So have you come across anything you.
Do not want to order a supplement from China? You'll end up with ground baby in.
Maybe pens or I don't know. What can you actually get that's consumable from China?
Well, people go through yoga blocks and I mean people end up using everything.
It's actually good. What physical products get consumed that aren't supplement? People do come back and buy our yoga products. People do come back and buy baby products. They do come back and buy kitchen products all the time. It's just not as. By consumable we're thinking of ingestible. I don't mean ingestible, I mean consumable. Like you use it up.
Yeah, I mean like something that uses up faster though, like month on month, like pens or pencils or something. I don't know.
Say your example again.
Like cleaning supplies, like car care, skin care.
Some clothing. But I don't recommend clothing as a product. Yeah, no.
Cool.
All right, thanks. Cool.
Anybody else want to go? Eric, Fraz, Gotson.
Kurt? Dad.
Okay, cool.
Is it on? Ryan, can you hear me?
Yo, what's up? Are you in a crossfit box?
I have a very small. I rent a third of a warehouse.
Okay, cool. Very cool.
So I currently garage sale on Amazon.
Awesome.
Some of my stuff is here.
My partner and I, or possible partner and I are looking at buying a business that's currently on Shopify.
But Amazon, is there anything that you would, would that be something that you would see as a good thing? Because the biggest thing I want to get out of this is being able to apply everything that I learned as we go along. And I know that for everybody out there the product selection is going to be this big hang up. That happens.
Yeah. So let me ask you this. Is the Shopify business, is it unique products or are they like a drop shipping store?
No, it's his unique product. They actually started in 2005 and it's just a guy that, he's just kind of burned out on it. They also got Google slapped a couple years ago for their product. So sales have just kind of dwindled. But he's since gone on and had a career, but this thing's just kind of limped on. So it's a product that he's been doing all the shipping out of his home currently.
Okay. So my only advice would be just to make sure that the products that he's selling meet the criteria that we talk about. If it fits in context of everything else we're talking about and the volume is there. And when I say the volume, I mean the volume for competitive products in that space. I say that sounds like a great opportunity. Some of the best advice that was given to me by somebody who's now my best friend in the world was sitting next to me. I was just an affiliate marketer and we were just meeting and he said, ryan, the thing that's going to explode, your income is going to be when you take whatever you're selling as an affiliate and start making your own products out of it. And he was right. So if you look at whatever you're selling.
Out of your warehouse, or you look at whatever you're dropshipping or whatever it is, and you start selling versions of your own product, that will absolutely explode, load you as a business. And that same rule applies for this business that you're buying. As long as it is a unique product line that has volume and it meets all of our criteria. I say it sounds like a great opportunity. Okay. Anything you need specific help with as far as seeing if it's a fit or seeing if that's a good opportunity.
Well, how much do we share on these calls? I don't know. So it's.
I guess it's always interesting what people want to share, but it's teeth whitening is what the product is and it's all us made. So he's done all the sourcing and all the product. The branding is kind of done. That's what's nice to get a lot of that out of the way.
I was just doing some research this morning. There is definitely some opportunities for teeth whitening on Amazon. Looking at some of the other stuff that's out there. So it looks good, but some of it is.
The highest price point of one of the products is like 165.
So that would be maybe one of.
The kind of flags. Okay, so a couple things to look at. Make sure that when you are comparing your products, you're not comparing yourself to Crest, because most of the people who are going to be buying that type of product on Amazon are just going to be searching for the brand name. So look for something that is not a major brand. And what you should be looking at as a baseline is, is their best seller rank under 1000?
Yeah, it is.
If they're greater than 1000. If everybody but Crest is greater than 1000, there's not a market for it on Amazon. But if there are people that you've never heard of before that the only way they've been finding them is going to Amazon and searching for certain keywords, then you're in a decent market. So my initial reaction to what you said was sounds like people would just be looking for Crest whitening strips and that's probably what they're buying on Amazon. But based on how you're reacting, I don't know if that's the case. But just be aware of that. To me, that sounds like a brand driven market that would have a harder time selling on Amazon than. Are you market researching right now? We're doing market research for you right now.
So it's like the whitening, like the trays, like the whole combination of stuff. So kind of going to the next level after the strips, I guess.
Okay, cool. Well, one other thing to think about. The most valuable thing that you will acquire in this business is the customer list. So if you get the customer list, you will own Amazon. You will beat everyone else who has been trying to fight in this market on Amazon. And anyone that you're worried about in the tribe watching these videos, thinking about stealing somebody's niche market. So if you get that customer list, which I assume you will, and I assume will be sizable since they've been selling since 2005, you will destroy whoever tries to compete with you. One of the things we talk about in some of the advanced calls and all of you who are like in module one, don't let this freak you out. I'm going to. I usually don't talk about what I'm going to talk about until people have a business for eight to 12 months. And that is when you start collecting your customer records, when you start getting your customer data via email lists and such. That is when you really can basically manipulate Amazon at your beck and call.
If you get that customer list, Eric, there are some really, really fun things that we can do on Amazon to basically beat whoever is trying to compete with you.
Got it? Thank you.
Yeah. Cool. Are you seeing any common questions coming in the chat box?
You'll all have to forgive me. It's a little bit of a balancing act between chatting on the hangout and getting all the, the chat box questions. So let's Go over to Kurt or Doug or.
If you guys want to chime in on your experience so far.
Do you have any recommendations like the guys in ASM say to be a premium product? And that appeals to me just because you know you can price higher and if you're smarter than the next guy, you can make the product a little bit better. I know you've been saying that kind of stuff. Make the tweak to make it unique and better. Is that where you angle stick? Is that what you recommend being the premium product?
I do recommend that. And if for no other reason than it basically eliminates a large majority of your competition. So if you've got. If everybody is trying to compete on price.
That creates its own pool of competition. Or when they're trying to compete on price, then you come out with a price that's two times the cost. All of a sudden you're in a no competition zone even though it's the same product. When everybody else is zigging, you zag into a higher priced product. If you can handle it that way, it makes it easier to get things off the ground. I know somebody who is in a market, the average sale is about $30 and they come out at 75 and they have a million dollar business. They're not number one in their category, but they have to sell one third the volume to do as much as the next highest guy. So as a result their profit margins are much higher than they have a million dollar business even though their volume is lower. I do recommend that you can certainly do well competing on price. I've done both. I have products that compete on price and I have products that don't compete on price. And it's kind of. It ends up being unique to find your own equilibrium. But if you can position yourself as a premium product in the marketplace, by all means do so.
I would take being a premium product over an inferior product for volume any day of the week.
Cool, thanks.
Let me position this for you in another way that you guys.
All understand. Selling $97 products, $197 products. And I was freaking miserable. A because the demand from that level of customer is extremely high and two, because you have to sell a whole bunch of product to even break even. Where now I sell ASM twice a year and have my mastermind. And that's all I sell within this business anyway. I have other businesses now, but I work probably 1/5 of the time on this business. I do. And the income has gone up because the customer level is up. They buy more and my life is a lot easier because it's easier for me to provide high value products than it is low level products. Now that's the mentality when it comes to.
That was the creep. That was the creepiest little Google hangout second that ever. I want Doug to come back. I don't know who you are, Doug, but I think you are terrifying.
Reminded me of the bouncer last night. What a cool dude. Doug, come back.
So higher priced products, they attract more repeat buyers, they attract a higher level of customer. So by all means.
If you can go.
How would you suggest somebody position themselves as premium besides price? If you could just make. You'd be surprised. Like I invest in real estate. If you buy a house and you paint the walls, it costs 200 bucks to paint the walls. But it creates $4,000 in value. So little tweaks in your product can result in much more impactful price changes. So if there's anything that you can do. How did you come up with the idea for the double sided yoga mat?
So for that. So before, let me answer your first question. I would say spend money on a good designer. You can tell if you look on Amazon, four different products. You can see the ones that were professionally designed and the ones that were not. And to me, the high quality pictures and high quality label. In my head I'm like, oh, high quality product, high quality label. So that would be my recommendation for our research on the yoga mat.
Right.
I just looked at lots and lots and lots of yoga mats and anything that I thought stood out, I put in a big pile. And out of that list we picked which ones would be cost effective and went with the two sided one. But there was lots of other neat little things we could have done around the corners, could have done different colors. But when we did the survey on Reddit, that wasn't.
What our customers wanted it to be. Non slip. And they associated different sides with different levels of grip, which got them to what they wanted, which was a non slip yoga mat.
The genius behind everything that I do right here.
Our neighborhood friend Kathryn Chung just joined us. She's our resident product sourcing expert. So she could probably.
Kathryn, I can see one of your eyes. It's a lovely, lovely one eye.
So little, little tweaks in your product can create monumental difference in price. So just if there's anything that you can do with your supplier to make things a little bit different than your competition, keep that in mind. I want to take one second because I don't want any of you who are New to asm, any of you who are new to the tribe to get overwhelmed with any of these details. If you're just going through the training, the only thing you need to be thinking about right now is, is what criteria makes for a good product. We'll get rid of all the other details later. I know we're throwing a lot at you and that's going to happen every week. But every week we try to have a theme of what's the one thing you need to be doing this week in order to get your business moving? And for you this week, if you're new to this business, it is what products do I want to be considering as the foundation of my business? And they are, if you can position them as premium, that's best. For me, it's over $20. Consumables are great. Or if it's not consumables, it's what can I have three to five of in that market that people buy as cross sells for one another. So these are the things you need to be thinking about. You don't need to be worried about design or anything right now. We'll take care of all those details later. But it is good to think, think about when you're considering your product selection.
We do have some questions.
Sure, let's take those.
So we have a question. This is from Anna. Someone anonymously asked a question that's not very nice. Is private label a good idea? For the first product launch.
A large minimum order is required. So I think this person wants to know if they should do a white label at first or if they should go straight to private label.
I say private label. Our strategy has usually been white label something first, customize it later. With the exception of our yoga mat. Our yoga mat, we customize from the get go because it costs the exact same amount pretty much to white label something that it did for us to make our own. So our supplier was a little bit different.
Than others because we could just customize it from the get go. But with most of my businesses, we white label first, customize later. We get things going, get the traffic going.
Today. I might actually say if you can customize from the beginning, go ahead and do so just because Amazon's getting more competitive. So if the big difference is I need capital of $1,000 to white label something, but I need $10,000 to create something custom, go ahead and just white label it, get things selling and when you have the sales flow coming in, go ahead and make tweaks to your product. But if you can do them both at the same time. Go ahead and customize it. The important thing is that you get moving quickly and you get moving in an affordable way so there's nothing hindering you from going forward. So it costs the same if all things are equal. Go ahead and customize. If it is faster and cheaper to white label, then white label first, customize second.
When you say white label, can you clarify? Does that mean the generic product or your product with your logo and label on it?
When I say white label or private label, I'm using them interchangeably. And I mean taking a product that's already held by the supplier and slapping your label on it and having it shipped to Amazon. So there's 50 other people also selling it on Amazon.
I just want to clarify because sometimes I think white label is a generic, unbranded item and that's not what we want. We want our branded item that hasn't been modified. You still need a logo, you still need a brand name, you still need a label. But the product is going to be exactly the same as the competition.
Correct. That's what I mean when I say that.
I missed Doug.
Yeah.
Another question. That's a quick little one. Steel Spirit asked, what is a customer?
I don't really know how to answer that one.
So I think he was confused. Who is the gentleman that's talking for about buying a company?
Is it Doug?
No, it wasn't Doug.
It was Eric. Eric.
So Eric before was talking about purchasing a company that was already.
Had some growth and they probably had a list of customers that they had sold to. Could be hundreds, could be thousands. And that would have been part of the purchase. So as the new owner, you would have all those emails or phone numbers or whatever that you could easily access. So hopefully that explains what a customer list would be. Literally a list of customers and their contact information.
Yeah, that's not something you get from Amazon and I believe that's Nicholas Steele who's asking. Hey, Nicholas.
It's not something you get from Amazon. What we were referencing was Eric's business that he was thinking about buying. We were wondering if it came with the customer list because that would give him a huge leverage.
Catherine Chung, why don't you give us an update from across the pond?
Yes, I'm in Canton Fair today, so it's really cool. Lots of people and there's like half.
A billion there, right?
Yes, it's the last basis. There have been a month in Canton where. So it is the last phrase for some other products in my niche. So that's why I need to go.
Kathryn, would you.
Would you tell those of us who have never been and well, I've never been across where you live. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what Canton Fair is and kind of the stuff that you're seeing there? Because this is actually really interesting.
Oh yeah, yeah. Canton Fair is the world's biggest sourcing fair. It's where the China supplier, the manufacturers and the obviously buyers meeting together. You know, it's the biggest fair so far. It's so huge and you never be able to walk all over there. It's bigger than any other fair or I don't know whether you. Any of you guys been the sourcing or whatever exhibition. It's so far it's the biggest. Even I'm based in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has many sourcing curve. But because in terms of size, in terms of variety, you can source any product. For example, when you will check with Alibarber, there are many products but in Canton fraid you can actually see those people, talk to them and touch the product. And that is a lot of different. This experience is completely different. When you're sourcing from the website. Yeah, that's something.
I have one question, Katherine. Are there funnel cakes and petting zoos at this fair?
Yes, they are.
They have a petting zoo. Okay, cool. We are going to the Canton Fair.
Just to recap.
Kath Dice, is it in Hong Kong?
Yeah.
Yes. Catherine, your forehead is lovely.
Oh, yes, sorry about that. Hong Kong.
It's in Hong Kong.
I think she's saying yes, her forehead's telling me. Yes. So the Canton Fair is the world's biggest product sourcing fair in the world with thousands and thousands of vendors. And Catherine, you can confirm this. I've heard that if you go there, the ideas that you get, your brain just explodes with all the different ideas and products that are out there. Is that right?
Exactly. You're not just because sometimes my first product idea is from Canton fur. Because sometimes when you are not able to design what product you got ideas too. Because from my point of view, I would base upon the quality as my primary criteria. If I source product that's not good enough in quality even selling in Amazon, they will be have any issues. Especially we like to sustain our brand. So this is my own choice to solve only the quality product. But quality product you must have really, you know, audit or you know, meet the person and know everything about the factory before you decide you're choosing the factory for me. You're not just Choosing the product, you are choosing the factory. That is my opinion because I'm a factory owner so that's why I'm speaking things from different angle.
Yeah, it's nice to hear because since we all went through the same ASM training, it's really easy for us to think about supplements, skin care, yoga and kitchen and baby and those are what everybody tends to go into. And then you go to Canton and you realize that there's 50,000 markets out there that no one's talking about. And it gets you re excited about it gives you a fresh perspective on stuff that nobody else is thinking about. Are you seeing anything cool like that you didn't expect or that like new perspectives at Canton yet or you still waiting on those?
Half of them. I still wait on those because there's so many things to check with.
There's a lot of first, yeah, you.
Have to have a brief insight and then you go out and then you come together. But one thing reminds every one of us you have insight. But don't forget you have to sell them. If it is a good idea but it's not good ranking in Amazon, I think I will have second thought as well. So it's a blending of all the criteria get together the insight for me is it a good sellable in Amazon. Then when you meet the person in Canton fur they can propose some modification of the sellable product. So you have good product to sell, you have your own unique design, you know what I mean? And this is how the value comes in. You are not copycat everything that you have your differences.
Kathryn, will you take one minute and tell the tribe actually I'm sorry to put you on the spot. Are you doing your service right now? Are you taking clients right now? Sorry to put you on the spot. I should have asked this beforehand but if you are, you can tell us a little bit. Or if you're not doing that right now, you can just say that too.
Kathryn, I think we lost your microphone. We can't hear you.
Oh yeah, I'm doing that.
You are.
I'm doing that.
Give us a one minute overview of what that involves.
About the sourcing.
Yeah. How tribe members can hire you to help with product choice.
Actually, that is to start with, you need to have an idea what product you have to source. Then you tell me the product and I can source it for you. I will give you a checklist of questions, you answer me back. I have a start fee of 500 since last time we talked and then I go out and check that for You, I negotiate the pricing for you. And one of the things secret, but I don't want to tell to the public. The thing is, the secret is when you get someone in Asian phase in Hong Kong or China, the culture that they will, they will give you. Give me actually, not you, a lower price. And then because I work for you, then you get a lower price. And every time it works, every time it works perfectly. And also you not only get lower price, the second thing you can get lower moq.
Today I have a couple of factory, they offer very high moq. Because I have a skill to talk, they lower the moq. So if I don't talk about that, they will never do business with you. They are big factories, so they don't care. But for some reason, I can negotiate a really low moq. So that is the part of my service you understand.
So for those of you who didn't catch that, Catherine, Kathryn just made joining the tribe worth every penny right there, which you just said. So this is why you're an idiot if you're not in the tribe, because Katherine Chung is in the tribe. So what she just said so Katherine runs a service. I'm sorry, when it zooms in on your eye or your forehead, it looks like you're spying on me.
Is based in Hong Kong.
She will for tribe members for a $500 fee, which is way too low. And we're going to work on that. At some point.
If you give her the product you're looking at, she will find suppliers, interview them, speak in the native language and negotiate on your behalf to get lower pricing and lower minimum order quantity so you can order smaller amounts to test products and you can get better pricing on them. Just because she's based there and she could do the negotiations for you. She can also look to make sure the factories are legitimate, to make sure that they're doing what they say they're going to do. So I've run this idea to Kathryn before and we'll probably work on this. There's a great business in there somewhere of negotiating, having this sourcing set up there. So there are beautiful things in Kathryn's future. And I would recommend contacting her through do it through the tribe, let her know that you're in the tribe so she's not inundated with requests from outside the tribe of hiring her for that service. So I don't think I've seen a more interested face, somebody who is more locked into a call than James face right now. James, you look locked in on this call. Right now. And I want to hear from you, where are you at in the training?
So I'm actually a part of ASM2 and as of right now, I've already, I've already put out three different products. However, the first two products, the first product actually sold pretty well, but because of, because of issues with manufacturing and quality, I actually got a lot of bad reviews and the products went away. I may end up pulling the product.
Away.
Moved to another product, and it was in the baby niche and actually it sold pretty well. But somewhere in restocking the product, there were some manufacturing flaws and ended up having to pull that product from the shelf as well. So now I'm on my third product and it's actually selling pretty well. I was almost at the 10,000amonth.
In revenue and I ran out of inventory. So I'm actually waiting for my inventory to go back into Amazon and it's actually processing right now. But the issue that I'm running into now is it looks like my rankings are starting to drop. I'm still first page on most of my main keywords, but.
I guess the delay in getting things back into inventory costing me rankings.
That's 100% the case. If you run out of inventory, you will drop in ranking. The news is once you have inventory back and you get sales flowing again, your ranking will come back very quickly. It won't be overnight, but it'll be about. In about two weeks, your ranking will go back to normal and eventually climb from where you were. But yeah, 100% of the time, if you are not inventory, you will lose ranking as far as your keywords all the time. Okay, congrats on being at the 10k mark.
Go get more inventory, ramp up those sales, and as soon as you're at the 1520 mark, it'll be time to look at what is the next synergistic product that that same customer base will buy.
Yeah, what I found actually pretty interesting just to kind of throw this out here for the tribe. My second product and my third product are pretty synergistic, but because I had manufacturing issues with the second product, it's like I have a mix of inventory that I don't know is good or bad. What I found was with the third product.
And this is kind of. I don't know if you want to call this gray hat or whatever, but what I did was that I put coupons inside of the third product that basically say, give us a review, blah, blah, blah. And so for giving us the review.
We would also like to send you out a new product that we are currently beta testing. And so what I've noticed is that that's really reviews and actually my reviews have been pretty good for that. Again, I don't know if that's kind of gray hat or what, but it's actually working.
Yeah, it is a little bit gray hat, but there's a difference between I guess gray hat and commonplace. It's fairly common. Your competitors are doing it and until Amazon cracks down on that, and they will.
I think you should encourage people to leave reviews as long as you encourage them to leave unbiased reviews. And if someone leaves you a negative review, still fulfill your promise of giving them a beta tested product or whatever it is. But I think that's smart of you to be aggressive in encouraging people to leave honest feedback. Right, Cool.
Cool. Congrats on your third one being a success. And I'd say the thing that is best about that is I know a lot of people get discouraged after one product doesn't work out for them. So kudos to you to be like, know I'm going to make this work. And number three has been really good. So nice work, James. All right, thanks.
Any questions?
I'm getting a lot of thanks and hell yes, you got A kudos from Mr. Nicholas Steele.
Cool. All right, anybody else on the live hangout want to take take a couple minutes to tell us where they're at or ask any questions about the selection process?
Hello?
Go ahead. Fraz, what's up?
How are you?
Good, man.
Yeah, so I'm at, I just signed up for asm, it's week two.
And I just choosing a product. I'm kind of confused but.
So I choose a. I was just looking on Amazon and I saw a product that is ranked maybe 100 something and the same product is from different account. Seller is ranked 2,000 something. So I don't know.
So you have one competitor who's ranked at 100, another that's at 2,000, is that correct?
Or maybe 20,000, something like that.
Okay, so there's a big, big difference between number one and number two. Yeah. So you're wondering if that's a good market to go into?
Yes.
Well, you know what's interesting is in my first product we are that guy who's number one that's ranked high and our competitor is way, way low. But what's interesting is we got into the market thinking that the people at number two and three was where it would max out. But we captured so much of the market that we do over 100 sales a day on just that one product. It's hard to speculate, but I would be looking at what's that guy at the top doing differently than everybody else? If you can do that better than that one guy, then I say you're okay. But if he's doing something different, if he's got 5,000 reviews, it's going to be difficult to compete in that space unless there's a suite of several products that you're going to be able to roll out pretty quickly.
Okay.
Anything else we can help with in that process?
Maybe not now. Okay, Right now we'll come back to it. Cool.
Thank you.
Yep. I think you should sell green pillowcases.
That should be your markup. Green pillow.
Okay.
Anybody else want to go?
Where's Doug? I miss Doug.
Next try meeting. I'm wearing a black hoodie. Stare at the screen and Doug and I will stare at each other.
Everybody else can talk. What? We'll be staring at each other.
Actually, Ryan, I was wondering, are there any niches that you think are really under serviced by the ASM community? Because some of them are really every part of each other.
Yeah, actually, let me stir on that one because.
I don't want to say one and not feel confident about it. So let me stir on that one and I will.
We'll do a session on that one at the next tribe meeting.
Actually, I'll give you one. Pet supplements is one. Yes. Bird supplements. Whoever made that sound pet stuff in general is fairly underserved.
Okay. Have you had any one from the tribe sell outside of the USA on Amazon?
Yeah, they exist. Most people. There's two approaches. Most people elect to sell in the us but there are some who sell just in Amazon UK or.
Any of the other ones that have fulfilled by Amazon in their locality and they seem to do fine because the competition is much, much lower. Lower. But the volume in Amazon US is so much higher. Eventually Amazon is going to unify all of them and they're going to have worldwide shipping. That is going to happen. But right now it's still a bit of a pain to get into different FBA setups. Why do you ask specifically?
Well, I was thinking if I'm going to launch one product, maybe it'd be easier for me if I ship the same product to multiple locations. Should I ship it to Amazon.com, amazon UK and launch simultaneously on both or launch one just after the other?
Yeah.
I think that's a great approach.
I think you uniquely position yourself if you're able to do that because very, very few people are doing outside of the US.
So I would encourage that approach.
And once you're in the uk, you can actually ship to Europe as part of your UK listing, included in the same listing. So if I get translated, I can ship from the UK to quite all the European countries with no extra cost.
Interesting.
FPA in UK.
Listing.
Sorry, not to get off track.
I didn't know this. The genius we looked into.
Ryan and I are here in the US we looked into selling in the UK and we have a listing for the UK for our products. And I don't really know how it got there, but it's identical to our US listing. So there must be some kind of sync between Amazon.com and Amazon.uk but because we don't have the proper registration for business in the uk, we don't have any inventory and I have never got.
Around to doing it. Okay, cool. So we have a listing.
Got it. Okay. Have any issue with that? Because you can just have them shipped straight to the FDA centers in the UK and then they'll fulfill to Europe. So I think I would encourage that approach because there's going to be. You're going to be dealing with 94, 5% less competition.
Yeah. My strategy would be, I think, to look on.com and try and get something that's competitive on.com because it's so much more of a competitive market. And if it can compete on.com, then it must compete in the UK.
Yeah.
I would again look at the same rules to apply.
Hello, Hello.
Hello. Look at the same rules to apply. Make sure that there is high demand, profit margins are there. Treat it just like the channel that it is in the UK market.
I'm going to mute you. You can unmute yourself if you want to come back. But I would highly encourage you to make sure you treat it like the channel that it is. Make sure there's demand for it inside of the UK marketplace, and then you can make the best decision for what you're going to sell.
Cool. Sounds good. I'll let you know next week how it goes.
Awesome. Sounds great.
Cool.
Anybody else want to go before we call it a day on our first try meeting?
Dotson's saying, yes, I'll unmute you.
The same rule. Apply. Make sure that they're. I had to mute you, Hakeem, because you had an echo going on.
Hakeem, mute your computer.
Mute.
You can unmute yourself. Thank you.
I'm trying to. Why can't I unmute you?
Why can't Godson now? I can't unmute you.
This is weird.
No, I muted him. Oh, there he goes. Now you're good.
Hello?
Go ahead.
Can you hear me?
Hey, Godson.
Yeah, I'm talking from Nigeria.
Wow, awesome. What's up?
Yeah, I'm fine.
I'm the new BNB in the Amazon amazing selling machine. I just started.
Cool.
And I'm just about. Yeah, I'm just about to open the Amazon account, but the issue now is how to select the products you as a newbie. I just got in through your postcard podcast and I'm trying to understand the whole concept selling right from Nigeria. But the word fest just gave me my account details just a while ago and I want to start opening the Amazon account. That is where the position I am now that I just finished the model two and I want to start researching for the model for the product to sell.
Yeah, so you're, you're in good company because everybody's to trying starting at ASM4 is at the exact same level you are where they're putting together a product list. So just ensure that everything you're considering matches the criteria that we've outlined on this call. And you don't need to know what it's going to be yet. You've still got a week or two before you get a good clear idea of what it is that you're going to be selling. But to keep the criteria in mind that we talked about on this call and the criteria that ASM gives you, and if you need to somebody to source it for you, you can hit up somebody like Catherine who can go look at the actual products in person and tell you if they're good to go for or not.
But what I want to know, is there any suggestion of product that you, the tribe, anybody in the tribe can suggest to me over here to start with. So also in the keyword search and all those things, maybe a guideline. I know you have given the guideline, but I'm still maybe a suggestion like you suggested to Mr. There was somebody you're talking about.
So, John.
I'm gonna put my, I'm gonna put my brain to work on this one and report back next week.
Okay, cool.
Hey, tribe, let me just do a quick browse of the, of the chat.
What about choosing products that are made by Chinese companies? Yeah, we covered that.
Yeah, yeah, that is the type. The sourcing from China is my main focus.
Yeah.
If you're not. Since you're not based in the US your best bet is just going to be sourcing straight to China and getting to either your local FBA or Sydney straight. Who is making bird music.
Okay, stop.
Is that.
Wait, is that an actual bird?
Huh?
Is that an actual bird?
No, no, no. It's just my. It's not the communication sound.
Got it.
Sorry about that.
That's funny. All right, Chuck, I'd say this is a successful first meeting. Let's just recap what we've covered today.
We talked about the criteria. My personal criteria is expensive products, light products and consumables. You probably won't get all of those, but the better criteria you can get.
The higher chances your success are you have a representative over in Hong Kong who can look at products for you within the tribe. You can contact her through the tribe. We've talked about product selection. We've talked about where you should be. Next week, we'll go a little bit deeper into types of products that are underserved. We'll also answer specific questions about your business and where you should be as far as the training goes. And we'll probably start talking about listing creation if the tribe is ready for that. So by the end of this next week, you should have a list of products that you should be considering. Bring them to the tribe meeting so that we can go over them if you want to and we can actually start pinpointing the best markets to go into. It should also be completed with module 2. And it would be helpful if you start doing some experiments with looking for suppliers, either through contacting Kathryn, playing around on Alibaba or just searching on Google for potential suppliers. Play around with that this week. So next week, come to the call with a list of potential products. You don't have to choose them yet. Just come with a list of potential ideas, go through some samples or go through some suppliers and just experiment. You can contact them if you want. Just play around and get comfortable with the process of looking for suppliers so that we can tweak that process. So thanks for coming, tribe, and we will see you next week.
Say bye to our neighborhood partner, Sean Coyne.
