Ryan Daniel Moran and tribe members share Amazon FBA updates: sales figures, review counts, and inventory challenges. They discuss tactics like price drops and PPC experiments, Amazon issues including delistings and fake inauthentic reports, and plans for a new platform and in-person events. A recurring insight: hitting 100 reviews is a key conversion threshold.
Chapters
And we're live all both of us.
Sean is shouting at people in the chat box. So, Sean.
I got some weird news for you. So I was running some numbers and what do we say about numbers?
Math is hard and everybody knows that the tribe. Each round is 10 weeks together. Guess what week we're in? 10, 13. Oh.
Math is definitely hard.
Bonus points.
So we're going to do kind of a Q and a today and just take a roundtable and then we're going to have one more week. So we'll meet next week and then we're going to take a break for a while. Next week we're going to talk a lot about freedom fast lane live and we're going to make some plans for going forward. I wanted to give a heads up. It's not ready or even close to being ready but we have put the planning touches on what the tribe is going to be looking like moving forward. So after next week, I'll be working on the new tribe platform and setting up some stuff for what our group is going to look like moving forward. And it's pretty sweet. It's pretty awesome what we're doing next. So we're going to be bringing in outside advisors and investors and creating an incubator style out of the tribe so you can bring your business ideas, get it funded, get an advisor and just go. And we're going to be throwing in some other really cool stuff like in person meetups and events and some other stuff. It's going to be pretty spectacular. So teaser alert. We're going to be after next week we'll be starting to work on the new platform and I'll be keeping you posted on all the launch stuff going on there. Do we have anything to update or.
Report on.
At this stage in the tribe? It's always, it's usually like, well, I'm making sales every day. Good. Keep doing more of that. Keep doing that stuff and don't do bad stuff.
Do good stuff.
Do good stuff. Don't do bad stuff. Ralph, of course, will be in town tomorrow attending the next level. You guys are gonna meet up right.
Next week?
We need to figure that out.
I'll be here. Okay.
I can go anywhere.
I actually want to pick on model V.
Because Monavie, last week you said you were doing like 14 or 15 sales a day, if I remember correctly.
Yeah.
And we kind of went over that and I just want to hear an update on if anything's changed or if you've run into any challenges as you're starting to gain Traction and move forward.
We're at 26 organic sales a day now, 140 reviews. We've been powering through.
I had a question for you on Facebook.
Before you ask the question, would you say, what changed this week? So you had a 50% jump?
Yeah.
What was the difference? Was it just that you focused on grinding out those reviews?
What was the difference? Yes. I feel like once we hit around 100 reviews, I feel like the sales just really started to come in.
How are you feeling about it all?
Good.
I'm feeling good. Yeah. I was a little terrified because we were going to run out of inventory way faster than I anticipated.
Found a fix, and we're moving forward.
Welcome to the club. We've all had that where it's like you want to be excited, but I'm about to be taking no sales. I'm about to run out of inventory. So that's a rite of passage, I suppose, but it is better than the alternative of not making any sales and.
Having a lot of inventory sitting there. So what was the question you wanted to run by.
On your Facebook? You know, for your Facebook community? You guys picked I love yoga. You did not pick Zenactive. You also don't have a Zen active Facebook page. So how, if you have to go back and do it all over again, would you have chosen exactly what you had done, or would you have picked Zenactive and really pushed that?
In our industry, it's not really brand driven. People don't really marry a brand as much as in a lot of other industries. So for us, going with something very general was the right move, because people are more about the overall message of yoga than they are about picking a brand. There are some industries in which people tend to marry brands and they pick that brand and they stick to it. Like sports, drinks and food items. A lot of consumables, actually. People will pick. They're used to one brand and they pick that one or they get another one and they pick that one and they tend to stick with them for a long time. And in that case, we go more with a brand driven. A brand page. But the content is really the most important piece. You could get this wrong, but get the content piece right and it wouldn't matter all that much. On our yoga page, on my men's fitness company page, the content and the styles are pretty much the same. The only difference is one says, I love yoga and one is the actual brand. But the approach is almost exactly the same.
Do you want to dive into that any deeper?
No, that. That's Good.
So what's your. What's. What's next? What's next for Monavie and co? What is the. You're at like 25 a day. Where's your brain at? And where are you planning on taking this? And.
How are you feeling about it all? Because you're at a really cool spot. Like 25 is like, @ that point, you figured out the model. Because when I hit 25 a day, and of course do a lot more than 25 a day now. But when I hit 25 a day, that was when it was like, okay, my goal is 100 a day. So if I just duplicated this four times, I have a million dollar business. Which was how the 12 months to 1 million idea was born. And it happened a lot faster than that. But that was where I went immediately. So I was freaking out and was like, I need to get more of these as quickly as possible. So I'm curious where you're at and if we can help tweak that a.
Bit. Okay, so right now we're around the top of page two for our main keyword. So I'd like to see us get onto page one. We did run a blast this week. Whereas we see the numbers like the BSR and everything move, the actual page movement hasn't happened yet. So I was also curious to know how long it takes after a blast for you to actually.
Move. Usually four.
Days. Four.
Days. Usually three to four.
Yeah. Okay. Okay. We also, our price is really low and it's too low. And it's fine because we were launching and it's good. We gotta move our price up. So the question is when and how? And originally we were thinking to just wait a week after the blast and maybe start moving it incrementally up. If you have other ideas there, that would be good. But we're really low. We have quite a bit of.
Weakness. How fast have you climbed up the.
Rankings?
I mean, we've been in business a month. So we went from zero to where we are right now in. It's hard to see on the BSR because we just blasted. But before we blasted, we were in the 3000s in our main.
Category.
When you first started ranking for your primary keyword, where were you showing up in the grand scheme of.
Things?
Bottom of page.
Four. Bottom of page four. And in about 30 days, you climbed to the top of page.
Two.
Right. Okay. So my recommendation would be keep doing what you're doing, continue getting reviews that will keep your conversion rate strong and keep being aggressive with either blast or price until you're on page one and then start price experimenting. Then when you're on page one, assuming you're and give it a couple days to make sure that there's not a shuffle going on or somebody in the run of inventory and it's a temporary bump, make sure that you've got onto page one and that's when you can start incrementally raising your price or at least split testing different prices. That's when you can start padding the profit margins a little bit. If you see a steep drop off that means that you hit a price sensitive point and that's when you need to back off a bit. But that's when you're on page one. That's when you can start being flexible and testing out different profit margins. Does that make.
Sense? Yeah, that makes.
Sense. Cool. Are you at all thinking about.
Second products or second products is already in the works. Second product will be out probably by the end of next.
Month. Monavi, you are following the formula. Exactly. Very, very well done. I'm very excited for you. Can we talk about what you're doing to generate those initial sales? Is it pay per click? Is it?
Let's just talk about that. Where are you getting those initial sales from? Where's your grind to sales coming.
From? We do have pay per click.
On.
And.
That'S probably where they're coming from right now I'm thinking pay per.
Click and having enough reviews now to where it converts high enough.
That's the.
Formula.
Yeah. Always makes me happy. Always makes me happy. Because it's.
Like.
There was that hidden level of hitting 100 reviews and then things just kind of flipped. Is there another hidden level coming up? That would be good to know about at that.
Point. It's all relative. After about 100 reviews it is all relative to the rest of your product, the rest of your competitors products. Because if you're in a market that you know it averages 200 reviews then 200 views is the next hidden level. If it's a thousand reviews is where everybody is then it's a little bit higher. So at that point it is all relative to what your competition is.
I'm going to bounce over to Ralph.
Ralph, when you he's given. He gave me the one moment.
Finger. No.
No. Alright, cool. So Ralph, when we started this round of the tribe you were pretty public about where you were. You weren't just getting started. You had done really well. I'm curious what's changed. I'd like to just hear the RALPH update. We know we're going to do some really cool things when you're in town tomorrow, in the next three days, prepare. Take your alpha brain or whatever nootropic you take or whatever to get ready because Monday's a long day. But up until this point, what has kind of changed or ebbed and flowed for you as compared to 13 weeks ago.
When we started the.
Tribe? Well, when I just started with you, I only had one product selling about 40k a month. And since then I have launched my second product and my third product is actually on a truck right now to Amazon. It's been three weeks now since they have had it but we've been going back and forth setting up the shipment information which I was, I didn't know much about because they were actually pallets this time. I'm used to shipping boxes so we had some troubles here. So the, my third product is actually on the way. But the one, the bigger thing that changed was that I raised my price because I'm basically on the top nine on page one for my main product and I did raise my price by $2 because like I told you, I went very low at first. So I did raise the price by $2 to see exactly what you were saying if I was going to lose ranking and it did not. So because of that, that gave me a good bump in sales by changing nothing but the price. So second product is climbing very fast catching up to the second product. The second product is catching up to the first one in sales, meaning within 30 days when it took me five months for the first product. So when the third product comes in, I'm actually hoping to be able to ramp it up even faster. But now I'm at the 65 AK level.
So because of the $2 price increase, basically the sales have increased for me and the sales have gone up. Right now I'm selling about 60 units a day for my second product and about 180 to 200 for the first one. No.
Wrong.
I was going to say that's pretty good volume. Keep.
Going. In total, I'm selling about 200 to 250 a day right now with two.
Products. We are going to do some fun things for your business. Monday.
Tuesday. I'm.
Excited. I am the most excited. I don't know if I told you this group is the highest level group we've had where everybody is right around that million dollar point or above where it's going to be a really, really good one. So I'm pretty stoked for you Ralph.
Anything outside of I mean, you and I are going to be hanging out the next four days, but outside of that, is there anything that we can do on this call or anything that we can do to eliminate roadblocks that are preventing you from getting to 100k a.
Month?
Well, aside from the things I'm going to be learning from you, I know that one of the things slowing me down is a big influx of cash. So I do have some cash coming in. But because my product will do so much volume, I have to focus on buying enough inventory for that product number two, which can cost me for about 10,000 units.
That can cost me a good 30 grand or 40 grand. So I have had to hold off into launching my next product, which I have in line already, because I need to make sure I get enough inventory ready within the next month to sustain the volume of my second product, which is climbing pretty fast. That is my only.
Thing. I want to ask you guys something. If I could selfishly, I want to ask this. I asked you all publicly, what can we do moving forward outside of these calls to make this group the most valuable thing possible? And one of the things that I've identified is that there seems to be this second bump, I call it, or second hump. The first hump is you got your inventory, you do all this work and then boom, what do you do to start getting sales? And that's when we came up with the launch strategies and all these formulas that you can run to get through that hump. But there seems to be this second hump of I've got one or two products selling well and if it all goes away, I'm toast because I've got a lot invested into this. But I also am tapped out on what I can invest because all my cash is now in inventory and I'm waiting for it to sell. So in your opinion, where you are, and this is including in the chat box, you can, we can answer this question about how much cash from an outside investor would clear you of that so that you could easily move forward. And what would be like if you had a magic wand and you could be like, this is how much cash I need in my bank account. What would that number look like? And I asked this selfishly as we're fielding investors and they want to be a part of actually making that a reality. And I guess a follow up question, if that was available, if somebody came in and was like, I have that cash, I don't even want to know how this business works. I'll put this in and Come and ask. Debt or equity? I'm guessing equity, probably that's still being flushed out, but probably it would be an equity.
Position.
So.
Those details would probably be worked out privately, but how much cash? And what I'm thinking about is we're going to be fielding out investors and we don't want anybody that can't do several deals to be featured. So what would that look like? Someone in the chat box says 5 to 10k. What are the guys that you.
Say? Yeah, I was going to say, since none of us here are trying to stay small. With my first product selling about 200 a day, I order about 15,000 units, which lasts me two months about. And those 15 units can cost me about a little under 40,000. So I know for the first product I need 40,000. My second product is catching up, so I know I'm going to need 40,000 for the second product. So to be honest, not just to get the third product started, let's say for anybody, but in order to have the cash to sustain the growth of that product, I would say at least 20k.
For one. For one product, basically, in order to get it to a level where it's really making a difference, not just selling 5 to 10k a month for that one product, a product that can get to 20, 30k by itself. So if it were for me planning for the next three products in advance, I would have loved to have another hundred k in my bank account right now, to work on three products all at once right now and have five products.
Selling. But yeah, cool, that's good feedback. But I've been actually brainstorming this a lot and.
I'm in a position now where raising funds and raising capital is fairly easy. There's a lot of money being thrown around. So the idea of, I wondered, would it be helpful for members of the tribe to be able to go to sources and say like, I need 100k and then be like, done.
And that seems to be almost like a cheat code because everybody else who's trying to get into this game is usually working about five or ten grand. And if you can start with 100 grand, you can accelerate past them a lot faster. So we're actually. That's good feedback. Thanks. Ralph.
Clement, I saw your first comment. We've actually had a conversation just about that and that is where we would like to take it. But would you do me a favor and just. I'd like to hear you talk that out a bit and how you envision that when you mentioned.
That.
So I guess Like I come from a little bit of a finance background, but so I know that there are high yield debt funds out there. You can run them like a hedge fund. So the typical hedge fund model is a 220 type model where you collect a certain management fee. And then so this would be, I'm assuming on your side as an investor, if you can collect 2% on management fees and then anything above a certain hurdle rate, you collect 20% of the earnings for that. And because.
Money is so I guess it's kind of cheap, you can get.
There'S a lot of money sloshing about, but there's a lot of risk as well. And so there are some investors willing to put up that kind of capital to get higher returns but take on.
Greater risk. And so for something like where you have in something like the next level or something even pre next level, you would be able to sift through business plans or not even business plans, but get a good idea of how people are going and give them the inputs to get there. And assuming that you have a certain number of failures, you probably make it quite.
Well. Yeah, that's exactly what we're talking about. Putting that together is a little bit more complex than just taking somebody who has businesses doing on partnering with an investor and saying you two meet and go work it out and have at it. So that's kind of phase one. But selfishly, what you just mapped out is where I eventually want to take it. So really, really exciting stuff. I think in my opinion, just the amount of acceleration.
James, what's going on.
Dude?
Nothing much. Nothing much. So basically just to give you a quick update, Amazon still has not released my.
Product back into their inventory, back into their marketplace. I have a couple other products that I was using this product to capture my customer list, to basically advertise for my very next product. So this was actually going to be my Tripwire. Well, actually I turned it into my Tripwire to capture customers and lower the price for a lot of sales. And then this problem happening. Anyway, long story short, they told me another week I should hear something back from them. Yay or nay, that they got a whole bunch of more. They got a lot more material from me, from a manufacturer this week. And I'm just in a holding pattern right now as it relates to the other products. I was trying to hold off and getting more reviews on those before. I actually like throw, you know, throw a lot of advertising at it. But this being the case, I might as well, instead of just, you know, pulling my thumbs, might as well. Just go ahead and launch those products and get it out the.
Way. How much has your business been impacted by the fact that one of your products is in.
Purgatory? It's been impacted pretty much because again, I had the four products up and one product.
I had four products up, two main products. And one of my problems, the other one that I had, actually just ran into some more supplier problems as well. So everything is pretty much gonna. Everything is pretty much at a standstill right.
Now.
So the. Is the issue that you got reported or is. Remind me, remind me why it's.
In purgatory issue was the issue with this product was that they said that I got reported, but I got reported because they called my product inauthentic.
And again, I think most of you guys know one of my baby products is the one that we're talking about are just toddler pillows. And so they're saying that my product was inauthentic, which I'm trying to understand why. And this happened right after I kind of. I went on a kind of, you know, tat to tat with a customer who was dissatisfied with my product. So anyway, that's what.
Happened. Yep. We've had almost a similar related issue. It wasn't an inauthentic claim. It was a. I think it was an expired claim and exact same thing. There's a competitor who's trying to nip at us, is obviously cheating. And all of a sudden we're getting all of these reports that we're dealing with the exact same thing. The way we deal with that is we just keep on Amazon. We just keep reporting it to Amazon over and over. Not from like what our issue is. Like, our issue is we need to get this hurdle. So we keep communicating with Amazon about it, but at the same time, we try to go as high up the chain as possible to say, this is what's going on, this is a loophole in your system, and just keep bugging them. We've had some loopholes close as a result of that. For example, when we first started our business, we had a competitor who somehow found a way to get reviews deleted. So he would go through all his competitors and delete all of their positive reviews. So you'd wake up one morning and all your positive reviews would be deleted, as would everybody else in your industry, except for one person who had all of their negative reviews deleted or their positive reviews were fine. We still to this day don't know how they were doing it, except that they had just thousands of freelancers Reporting abuse on reviews. And we spent six months reporting this to Amazon until finally they were like, we found the loophole. We found out how they were doing it. This guy's been kicked off Amazon, all your reviews are restored and thank you for bringing this to our attention. How they don't find stuff like that, I do not know. Why Amazon is so behind the times, I do not know. Sometimes I've wondered if it would be worth our time as a community to do like an open letter to Amazon on all the loopholes that are easy to exploit and all the cheaters. I've wondered that sometimes. If any of you want to explore that, go ahead and put it in the Facebook group. I thought about that for a while. I wonder if we as a community would have enough collective impact to be able to initiate some change at Amazon.
Say something interesting.
Sean.
So to that point, I think.
There'S kind of two things that we.
Forget when frustration like this comes.
Up. One, Amazon as a whole is obviously very well run. It's been extremely successful. But it doesn't mean the department in charge of all of these sort of issues is well run. Like if you've ever worked with the mad boss, like there could be a really bad boss in charge of seller support or whatever.
But also that's not really. I don't think Amazon sees that as their priority. Their priority is the customer. But the customers are happy then. I think that's what they're focusing on. The sellers are unhappy and the customers are happy. They're still making money. Obviously it's not a good long term strategy, but I would think in their mind their focus is the customer and the seller becomes.
Secondary. They have to see that their core competency is under attack though. I think they do like that the marketplace is gamble and therefore their core competency is.
I think you're right.
A solid manager or a solid leader.
There. I think you're right that they don't see it, but that baffles me. Yeah.
Well.
Met people that do things that apparently one of them is growing seller support on.
Amazon. Fair.
Enough. There are a couple questions from Madhavi in the chat box that I actually thought were interesting and one of them had to do with margins. Madhavi, are you comfortable sharing with your low price point while you're just being aggressive getting to the top? Are you comfortable sharing what profit margin you're settling for at that temporary low price? If you're not comfortable, that's cool.
Like five bucks percentage.
Wise.
It's.
I don't know like.
10% or something. It's just, it's, it's just not sustainable. It's, it doesn't cover the promos, it doesn't cover our operating costs. It, you know, this is barely going to cover getting a larger inventory for the next.
Round.
Are you profiting five bucks on each.
Unit?
Yeah, right now we are. If it's a full price item.
Yeah. Okay, that's pretty good for a heavy. Like if you're heavily discounted and you're still making five bucks, that's pretty good. Unless, like.
There'S not much, much room to go up from that. But from the language you used, the way I interpreted it was you are heavily discounted for now. And if that's the case and you still have five bucks of meat left on the bone, that's pretty good. And no one expects for their sales profit to cover blasts and all these things that's going into the red so that you'll profit later.
Am I interpreting that right? Because if so, those numbers are pretty.
Strong. Yeah, you are interpreting that right. It's just also, our product is custom. It was custom right from the get go. Everyone else in our space is private label. At least everyone else on the first page that are smaller companies competing. So.
Our product.
Will appeal to a different market than a certain consumer that's educated about the product a bit more than just the regular consumer. But right now we have to compete in price with other stuff and it's just where we are. But I just, you know, when you lump, when you lump everything into a category, you end up with competitors that you just wouldn't really end up with if you were buying it from a regular.
Store. Yeah. Okay. Well, just from the surface, it seems like your numbers are really good if you can be heavily discounted and still make five bucks. So I think you're in a good.
Spot.
Okay.
Somebody wanted to know how much you gave away in a blast, but I don't think that's necessary because we don't even know what the results are.
Yet.
Right. We can cover that more when there's more of a case study behind it.
Somebody joined us while we're talking. Jason.
Jason, I'm going to pick on you.
Next.
Good.
Morning. What's up, man? How are you?
I'm still dragging for some reason. I don't know why because we drank a lot of water last.
Night.
I had a great week. When we last touched base, I was working on updating my feedback process and right after we spoke, I got back on and my reviews started Disappearing. I think a lot of people experienced that this week. So I started freaking out. I was at like 48, then with the 36 and 32, and then that kind of stopped. And then all of a sudden everything just went up, up, up. So now I'm in the mid-80s in reviews. I raised my price twice this last week and sales kept going up. So I don't know. I mean, it's like I'm kind of bracing myself because it's almost like things are going too nicely. But I got my second inventory run on the way. The keywords are kicking butt. I'm on the first page of my main keyword. So that was five blasts. Um, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's like my. My challenge is really. I. I don't. I don't know what else to do. Kind of every day, like, I spend a couple hours in the morning on it. I'm engaging with my audience a little more, and that's. Takes a little time, but I don't.
Know. All right, so what, what level are you at? If you're comfortable saying, like, number of units per day. You look like a kid in a candy. So excited. What. What is that makes you as far as.
Sales? I'm above 30. Organic sales a.
Day. Great at profit margin. Healthy. It sounds like since you raised your price.
Twice. My Profit margin's at 44% now.
And then. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's the reviews is the main thing, though, as those numbers go up and then I raise my price and then people like 10 more sales a day after.
That. And I.
Think. I don't know if it's the psychology there that people are just perceiving a higher quality product and they're seeing the reviews. And I've just been fortunate. I mean, people are writing great reviews and I've just always been nudging.
People. What you should be doing on a daily basis to break through. Yes, please. Okay, so there are. At this point, your job is to hit Madhavi's secret level in the video game, which is 100 reviews. Actually, we're going to trademark that. Madavy's secret level.
Of reviews. So if you're in the 80s, we need to get you to the secret level, because you'll jump. Seeing three digits in the reviews has a psychological impact. It's herd mentality. It is, it is how many people are buying this and how many people are talking about it. So when you get into the digits, assuming you maintain strong Reviews, Getting more 1 star reviews will not help you. But actually getting your first one star review can help conversion rate, which is interesting because there's a BS meter that goes off if you've got 200 five star reviews. So getting your first, getting it laid out, I find that like 4.4, 4.5 is kind of a sweet spot as far as conversion rate, but it's that profile of layout that helps anyway. That's beside the point. Getting above the secret level, Monavie's secret level. And then.
At that point, you'll probably get another jump in like 10 organic units a day as that climbs. And then it's time to think about product number two.
That is what it looks like for you on a daily basis. Those are the things you need to be looking at. I don't know where that puts you as far as total profit and sales, but you are right. If you follow that plan, you're right on that trajectory to get to that hundred sales a day mark with a couple products, which puts you right at about a million dollar business in most.
Cases. Okay, good.
Work. All.
Right. Thank.
You.
You look so happy.
It's.
It's been. I mean, it's like, it's surreal because it, as of, you know, a month and a half ago, it all kind of still felt.
Like.
Not.
Really. It didn't feel real. You know, it was like, okay, I'm just going through the motions here.
But.
Well, good work, man. I'm proud.
Thank you. Let's buzz over to Model.
Emily.
I'm having a lot of fun with this game, but definitely need help with maybe some advice and some guidance. So I'll just kind of run it over from the beginning. Did Zon optimize? Did Zon blast? I have my Facebook page at just about 5,000, which was my goal. I am up at about 80 reviews now. I am on page one for my main keywords. For my second choice of keywords, I am up at the top of page two.
Turned on pay per click really aggressively at 50 reviews, and now I am just hanging out with like two organic sales a day. I'm just hanging out. I'm still on page one.
I guess I'm just wondering. I also tried to do like my launch on Facebook and my interaction is extremely high. Lots of likes, hundreds of likes and shares, but no conversion.
So, yeah, I'm just wondering what I should do to tweak the process at this.
Point.
Cool. So as far as reviews go, what do your competitors.
Have?
This is interesting too, because it's almost every day. It feels like somebody's coming into the space with the same product but a different label. They look like tribe members, actually.
So the top competitor, he has I think maybe 500. And then everybody else is kind of about the same up close, near mine. And price wise, these aren't the prices, but if you were to say $100 was the top competitor, which is the most expensive, and the lowest price was $50, which is my next competitor, I'm priced right in the middle, about 75.
So, yeah, that's where I am right.
Now. Okay, so a couple points. You said you are driving traffic via pay per click. Right. But it sounds like it would be losing money if you're only.
Doing. Yeah, that's exactly what's happening. There's a couple coming through it.
But. So there's a couple things that could be happening here. One, you could have picked a keyword where there's no traffic, but that'd be really easy to find out tomorrow. I mean, you can log and see if you're getting traffic. So if you're getting traffic, then that's not the case.
You could have picked a market that doesn't have a lot of volume. But I don't think that's the case either, because I think you did your research.
Well. That's.
Right. This is what I would recommend. I would recommend. I always say it is better to make sales and no profit than it is to make no sales and no.
Profit. I'm into that. I dig.
It. All right, cool. So I would recommend either doing a copy refresh, an image refresh, and a price drop to shake it up to see what.
Happens. A copy refresh, A. Say that again.
Sorry.
Refresh.
Pardon? An image.
Image. Yeah, we just did that, too. Okay, I just did that.
Okay. And a price.
Drop.
Okay. To see what happens. So I've talked about this publicly. I've had a product that was really stubborn for a while, and when we dropped the price, sales exploded. And then we raised them back up, they stayed high, which to me makes no sense. But there seems to be this idea in the world that momentum is contagious. So when you're doing two, three sales a day, it can seem really, really daunting to get momentum there. But when momentum happens, it seems to continue on its own. And I take that philosophy when it comes to sales. So if I've got to drop the price to break even, I'll do that in order to get sales moving. And if I drop it to. To break even and I'm the lowest in the market, And I'm still not making sales. Then there's something else fundamentally that's wrong. Either with either my copy is terrible and the headline says broken product or something, I mean, something is obvious at that point. Or I'm just in a low volume.
Market.
So.
If you focus on just grinding for those sales, I think you're gonna find where the breakage point is as far as your audience goes. That's a little bit concerning to me. But my guess would be that there's something in your copy that is just not compelling enough to get them.
If you're getting hundreds of likes per post, but people are.
Buying.
Likes and shares and even some interaction and just.
I don't know how to, I guess evaluate it because of course we're all biased. From my point it looks fabulous and from all the likes and the shares, they think it looks fabulous too. And I'm practically giving it away for free. So it's just, I'm not. I don't know how to reevaluate it from an outsider point of view to see what I'm doing that needs.
Tweaking. What is the offer that is not getting.
Taken? So a regular retail at $67 around and giving it away for $1.95.
And you're not getting takers on.
That? No, no, I'm like giving it away. I don't understand. And likes, likes, likes shares.
And I've only targeted the people who have liked my page, which is up around 5,000 right.
Now. Okay, send me the link to your Facebook page because I'm actually curious about this because something seems obviously off here. Yeah, I want to take a look under the.
Hood. I'd really appreciate that. That's exciting.
And yeah, it's funny that you touched on the price drop because if I drop it significantly, which I'm more than willing to do, and I'm more than willing to go in the red, I embrace that.
I will lose a lot of money doing that. I'm okay with that just to get the sales. But like I had said, there's so many new incomers and I've noticed that when somebody drops their price, the next guy drops their price and it's a straight race to zero. You know, willing to do it, willing to try it. But it seems, I've noticed that that is a.
Pattern. Just do a three to five day.
Experiment.
Okay. Where you drop your price to just north of break.
Even.
Okay. So is $67 your normal.
Price? No, that's what it said at retail. And then.
That it Was listed for.
Just under 40 and then I dropped it.
Again.
Drop it to just north of break even. So you've got a few bucks of profit on.
There.
Okay. Just experiment with it for three to five days. And if it's still not taking. There's still not sales coming in. Something else is wrong. Either the keyword.
Does not have the traffic that we thought it did or your page. There's an obvious conversion point that's missing. And it could be reviews, number of reviews. It could be that there's some language that is turning people off.
But we'll find out when we do a price drop to see if people take.
It. Okay.
Much appreciated. Okay, thank.
You.
Now I'm going to look at the.
There's a. I mentioned in the chat box. It says price drops. We've been considering. We've been conservative with our pricing, being fearful of not making cash, but really need to boost sales from what's being discussed. We're at about 10 units a day, around 264 reviews and a fat profit margin of about 70%.
For a price drop. How far and how fast would you drop all at once or go down incrementally? It's a really good question. There's a couple different philosophies here, and it's important to note they're all appropriate. Like they all work for us. If we do a price drop and a price drop is like a last resort for us, we do this as either a way to inflate sales, grab a tag, penetrate a market. I said penetrate to boost conversion rate in order to get onto page one or to just experiment. And so most of the time, more often than not, it's been just to experiment to see what happens. I told the story where we dropped a product from 20 bucks to 13 bucks, which put almost no profit, but yet our daily profit went up.
It obviously depends on what your end goal is here for us. We just wanted to find the sweet spot of profit. So we dropped it and then we raised it incrementally to see where.
That connection point was, where the volume met the profit margin. We were drawing a line on a graph. We wanted to find the connection point. Like this meant anything to you guys? That was awful. So we will drop it significantly just to see what happens and then raise it incrementally. But there's not like a system or a formula here to dropping by percentage. Unless you're just trying to get data. Then I would just take a. Probably like a 10%. But there's different philosophies for different goals here and for us it's usually just trying to collect data.
Cindy Pahuda has joined us here in the chat box. Hi Cindy, we still have a we still need to have a call about your email sequences. Sean and I'll be around today if you want to shoot your text.
Someone asked how's the baby, Ryan? Well if you can hear in the background she's yelling downstairs and she was a painful one pain and a half last night. But she overall is doing way, way, way, way better. She had a little surgery.
Actually on the underside of her tongue that seems to have helped her feeding a lot. So she sleeps a lot longer now. She's up to about six hours a night.
Night and day difference.
You know what we haven't Clement you and I spoke a little bit but we haven't gone into your business so let's go there next. Let me get a little more you're at I know just to recap from what I remember you're doing a little bit of a unique product and kind of a unique space. So I'm interested to dive in here.
Yeah. So like I know that the volumes longer term won't necessarily be as large although like we figured out a few products that we can expand into. Our current suppliers can't do it but this means.
We'Re currently looking at helping develop a custom product but it requires spending a little bit of money which is fine.
And we so we're our last 30 days we're about a little over 15 now.
Thousand and so we've climbed pretty substantially over the last week. Most of that five is from that additional five is from this past week from launching our second product. I think we're going to get a lot more aggressive just thinking about the price drops. This is kind of our experimental brand. We'll do whatever to play around with it ourselves. Second brand which we want to compete in a much higher volume space will be coming out in probably the next 20ish days I'm hoping.
And that.
There'S it's a little complicated because we're having the printing done in Asia and then the production is done in Canada and then it needs to be shipped down to the so it's just a little bit of coordination.
There.
With you in a unique space. I mean there doesn't seem to be a lot of sound like a lot of urgency behind.
Around this product line. So what's the strategy and what can we do to help you move forward if you want to move forward with this brand, I'm not hearing like what, what the end point is, if that makes.
Sense. Yeah, I think.
So. I think it's an area where we can actually do pretty good volume. I think the barriers are mostly just I'd like to get videos up of the products and drive some additional traffic from external sources like Facebook.
So I'm just waiting or because of time I haven't had the chance to get the videos done. Getting a different spokesperson and everything like.
That. Amazon. Is there not a lot of internal volume on Amazon for this.
Product? There is. The primary volume is dominated by a few brands, but there's still some decent volume from non branded.
Purchases. And worried about videos and all this rather than keyword.
Rankings. So for, well, for our PPC right now we're kind of toying around with it in that we're getting some words which aren't getting impressions at all, which we should be getting impressions on. So we're not really sure why that is. So we're playing around with the back end keywords, we're playing around with restarting the campaigns just to see why we don't. So because it just launched, we're just still playing around with the data. We have to add all these things like the discounts for multiple buyers for people who cross by and all that stuff. And so there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. So I think it's a little early to say that we're not at a roadblock by any means, but we're just kind of edging it forward and I think we'll be aggressive on price after we do some type of blast launch or.
Again.
So you're just still kind of at the liftoff point and still kind of getting data on paper flow and at that point then you can kind of.
Adjust.
Hey Ryan, can you hear me?
Hello? Can you hear me? Yeah, I can hear.
You. Oh.
Awesome.
Hey. Hey, my name is Gary. I had a question for you if you came across this sort of scenario. I'm relatively new to Amazon. I had my product up about since May and.
Definitely I'd say I picked a winner and been slowly getting sales going up since May.
About 15 to 20 units a day.
I literally went on vacation like last week, came back and my listing was gone. And of course that's disheartening once you build up that momentum. And so I talked to Amazon, I called Amazon and they told me several things and one of the things that they said was that, oh well, there seems to have been, you know, either some sort of glitch where my variation, the link, I guess, had broken. How that happened, I don't know. And so that a technician, I guess their tier three level technicians, were looking into it to figure out what could happen.
Another notice that I got was that I was infringing upon somebody's intellectual property.
But when I talked to two other reps, they said that that can't be the case because I have no flags on my account.
Regarding any type of intellectual.
Property.
You have a troll, my.
Friend.
Whoa. I do? Yeah. That's usually a competitor buying your product and reporting it in some way as a way to try and get you delisted. The good news is, once you come back from this a couple times, Amazon tends to leave you alone and they realize that you're not doing anything wrong. But that is a lot of times that is a competitor trying to play dirty against.
You. Wow. So. Wow. So can you can explain this troll situation? Because this.
Is.
Yes, I know the guy personally. I can call him up.
No. So I guess what you're saying is. So you're saying somebody has bought my specific product and is trying in some way convince Amazon that I'm the one that's in the wrong here. Is that what you're.
Saying? I'm not. I obviously am no.
Psychic. Oh, right, right.
Right. Although Sean and I did watch a really cool documentary on Psychic last night about the Amazing Randy. Very highly recommended on Netflix. It's called An Honest Liar.
Although watching this documentary did not give me psychic powers, I have experienced similar situations to what you're saying, and it sounds very similar to when myself and a lot of other Amazon sellers have had a troll that was reporting them in an attempt to play dirty. I don't know that that's the case, but that is a common thing that happens. A lot of sellers have had to deal with. And unfortunately, like we talked about at the beginning of this call, Amazon's checks on this are pretty poor. So they will err on the side of there being an issue where, you know, they see.
An.
Intellectual property infringement, even check into it, they just turn it off. So it's pretty common practice for that to happen. But it's also common practice for you to overcome it by just showing the correct documentation that you need, like orders from your manufacturer, a letter from your manufacturer, and having your brand registered, showing your company documents. All of that can.
Help you get around that. But it's a pain and a half and it's something you kind of have to go.
Through. Okay. Okay, thank you. I appreciate that. The One thing too that concerns me is if you do, from your experience, know this. When I do come back, do I lose my ranking that I work so hard to get up there on Amazon, so, you know, or do I have to rebuild that back up since I've been.
Off? That's a good question. Because when you run out of inventory, you do lose rank. It comes back quicker, but you definitely lose rank when you run out of inventory, when you get delisted.
That I don't know. It's been a while since this happened to us. We had a mild D list, we had our FBA removed, but we were able to still sell FBM just this past week because of this exact situation, basically. And we did not lose rank because of that. So I don't know. To be honest with you, the most important thing is that you go get back in stock or you go get your listing back. If you have a drop, you know how to get it back. And it happens pretty quickly because your reviews stay, your account history stays. Getting that to climb back happens pretty quickly.
Right. Okay, appreciate that. Thank.
You. So let's, let's talk about something else. So you've been at this since May still. You're doing about 15 units a day. What do you have to do in order to break through that.
Barrier? Well, a lot of it was. So I'm up here in the Philadelphia area and I'm in the outdoors and sports niche. And this is a good area where everybody's pretty much in that self improvement state. Everybody wants to get out there, do some things, improve themselves health wise. There are a lot of events out here that go on almost every week. And so honestly, I'm really out there. I have a lot of my product on hand and I go out there and I basically promote my product physically to these individuals and say, hey, here's my company. This is what we're doing. You can see us out on Amazon. Here's a product for free. Or also, again, we'll give you another one if you can go on Amazon. Here's a promo code. Put it in. I'll give you one right now. Write a review. I do that. That hands on approach.
That's really helped me to get the reviews that I need. I think also what that does is it spreads the word amongst that population here. And of course they'll tell their friends and family members. And I think that's how it kind of spread it out for me because then I started recognizing, I started getting sales from getting outside the state, you know, because these events Again, people, come.
In. I'm gonna interrupt you because what you're doing is great, but right now you're on the freedom slow lane.
Let's kick that up onto the fast lane because you hustling these reviews at, you know, three months in is not scalable. So how many reviews do you have at this.
Point? Well, if I can remember.
I think it's probably around.
Don't quote me on it. Maybe like about 80 to.
110. Okay. So not bad actually. Right. How is there volume? Like, do you have competitors that are doing a lot of volume.
Space? Come.
Again? Do you have competitors that are doing a lot of.
Volume? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. I do. I recognize the competitor that had came in maybe about three weeks or a month ago and, you know, within like their first week up, they probably had about 150 reviews.
Yeah. Okay. And what are they doing volume.
Wise?
You mean as far as their.
Sales?
Yes.
I couldn't quote. I couldn't tell you specifically. It seems that they were doing somewhat.
Well. Okay. So.
I'm hearing a lot of lack of clarity around.
How big your market is. So therefore it's hard to say how aggressive we can be. Are you running pay per click? Are you promoting your products.
Online? Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So again, I mean, outside of actually doing these events, I am using.
Some pay per click methods. I am doing some, you know.
I guess daily deal promotions.
You know, coupon promotions on all these coupon sites. Facebook.
Twitter, Instagram.
So, you know, I mean, it's multiple.
Avenues. Are you ranking for.
Keywords? Come.
Again? Are you ranking for.
Keywords? Yeah, yeah, I.
Am.
Do you care to.
Clarify?
Oh, wait, you're talking about as far as on.
Amazon.com?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I may not be understanding the.
Question. Are you ranking for your target keywords and.
Where.
I don't understand the question.
Maybe. So I think what Ryan's trying to ask is, let's say your target keyword is yoga mat. Where are you ranking for yoga.
Mat? Oh, oh, okay. Got you. I'm.
Sorry.
Okay.
Yeah. So I'm far. My primary keyword ranking. I'm ranked well before it got off. I'm ranked number five at least the last time I.
Speak. Okay, great. So the only thing stopping you from. From going from 15 sales a day to 30 or 40 sales a day is your conversion rate, which is probably number of reviews and pricing and getting all that optimized or turning up pay per click or these other sources of Amazon's traffic, which is ranking for Other keywords in Pay per click, basically. Next step for you is optimizing that listing through more reviews, through Wake up, Shawn. Through optimizing reviews, through optimizing your listing, optimizing your price, and then turning on other keywords. That's the only thing that's standing in your way from like 15 sales a day to 30 or 40 sales a.
Day. Okay. Okay. And.
So when you. When you're mentioning optimizing my listing.
You'Re talking about more about. I mean, more outside of just, you know.
You know, I guess the aesthetic appeal of the pictures, even the descriptions. I mean, outside of.
That. Yeah, I mean. I mean, your copy. Your copy. Okay, gotcha. Like tweaking. Tweaking your copy. Sometimes we'll just do complete rewrites of our listing to try and get them better. So when you're first starting tweaking, those things can be the difference in 10 sales a day when you're starting is obviously a big deal.
Right?
Okay.
Absolutely. Anything that we can do to help to clear any roadblocks to get you growing, or is it just you got to get listed.
Again? I know. Obviously, that's my primary concern right now, is to get listed.
Again. Yeah, I hear.
You. Hopefully I can get that up and going sooner than.
Later. Yeah. So gather as much documentation as you can. Even if you've got documentation, gather it. And I assume that you have an Amazon cake that you're submitting responses to. Upload of it there.
Right? Yeah. Yep. Yep. There's a. There's a case open, so I just, you know, again, just continue to reply through the case.
Log. Yeah, My. My heart goes out to you.
Buddy. I appreciate.
That.
John. What. What brilliance are you staring.
At?
Brilliance, My surroundings. No sense waiting for this coffee to kick in. I don't know why I'm so tired right.
Now. I think this is. There's a lot of coffee. I think we drank a lot of wine. I think that was.
It. Hey, Ryan and Sean, I had a question.
Actually. Go ahead. Is your. Is your question. Does coffee cancel out.
Wine?
I have. I'm looking at expanding my colors, so going from two colors to four colors. And one of my main competitors does. Has a lot of listings. Like, they'll have a black, a blue, and then they'll have a listing for a black and a blue, like a.
Two pack. And I was wondering, is that something that happens, like, post shipment, or do I have to. Do I have to arrange that prior to shipment so I'm packaging them together? Is that something FBA.
Does?
Yeah. You have to have it already set up for.
Them.
Okay.
And I have a question as well. I know that Jason also touched a bit about that, but I guess this last week saw a lot of people on a lot of groups talking about how Amazon has been pretty aggressive about removing reviews. And it seems one of the common patterns is.
That any discounted product given away where people don't disclose that.
Gets dinged. Have you seen anything like that? And do you have any strategy with respect to, I guess, when you now contact or ask lunch product, do you ask people to say that they got that product for a.
Discount? So I do see that as the common thread among all the reviews that are getting deleted. And the way that we're combining that is being more aggressive in building our own list and running our own offers to our own list. Unfortunately, there's not much we can do about the sales that come from outside services like Zomblast. So that's on. I mean, they're tweaking their systems for that type of a response. But for us, when we do an internal promotion, we'll try and do.
When we do a promotion, we're not often saying.
Do this in exchange for a review. It's often to boost sales. So our strategy is just to tweak how we're communicating with our list and to be more aggressive with the number of emails that we're getting from our customers so that we're more in control of the process. With outside stuff. You obviously don't have any control of that, and that's just a matter of who gets their systems dialed in.
I have a question for you, Clement. You're in Toronto.
Correct?
Not exactly right now, but I'm just.
Traveling. Okay. But you're based in Toronto, right? Yes. Are you a Blue Jays.
Fan?
I.
Can'T. Well, trick question.
If you were a Blue Jays fan, your face would light up right now because the Blue Jays had the most amazing week in baseball.
History. So I've heard from basically everybody around.
Me.
Yes. Yeah, it was. I mean, as an Indians fan, I wish I was from Toronto right now. I mean, it's just the week they had. They acquired David Carson and Troy Tulewitzki. Oh, my God. In the same.
Week. I forgot who those people.
Are. That's crazy. They acquired Troy Tulowitzki. I mean. Oh, that's amazing. It's gonna be Houston and the Blue Jays. Who saw that come, Sean? No one saw the Blue Jays or the Astros making this climb. It's amazing. It was an exciting, exciting week in baseball.
And Emily made some offhand comment, if that was my.
Question. Emily's in Toronto as.
Well.
Oh. Are you a Blue Jays fan? Sure.
I don't believe you with that.
If you're a Blue Jays fan, you'd be jumping up and down right.
Now. Yeah, it's okay. I'm so stuck in my business. I don't know what's going on in the real.
World. That's sad. It wasn't excitingly.
Sean, any exciting final words? I should remove that picture of me on the chatbot. I didn't even know that was there. That looks really.
Goofy.
Why? Which one? I don't know. It just seems kind of out of place and weird that I have a. I have a picture of myself on our broadcast page.
Fine. I have no final words. I'm still haven't.
Vulcanized. It's gonna be a rough. We'll go get breakfast or something.
All right, so here's the plan moving forward tribe. We're gonna have one more call next week. We're gonna talk about freedom fast lane live. We're gonna talk about a little bit what the tribe looks like moving forward. And then I'm going to go into the hole and start building a new platform, actually hiring people to make the new platform and coming up with the systems of what it's going to be looking like next. Facebook group will obviously still be maintained. We'll continue growing as a community until that platform is live. I don't have target date on it yet because all the systems are not finalized yet, but that's when we'll be rolling out the new system and we'll probably have some sort of a launch point party as well. There obviously is going to be bonus day in November for those of you who are going to go to the event in Vegas. That'll be the day before the event. So make sure that you fly in a day early so you can come to that event and I'll have details for you as soon as that is finalized. As far as time goes. But we usually go from like 11 to 6 and then have dinner is usually how it. How it shakes out. So put that on your. On your schedule if you haven't planned your. Your trip yet. Cool. Well, we will see y' all next week. And in the meantime, we'll see you in the Facebook group. See you guys. Bye, everybody.
