Boost your Bottom Line: Top 10 Profit-Saving Tips for Amazon Q4

I see participants are still flowing in, so we're going to give a few more minutes to be for people to join and then we'll get right to it.

Sure. It.

All right. Thank you for joining our Kahoot and Seller Lockers webinar on how to boost your bottom line with profit saving Tips for Amazon Q4. We've got advice for from experts in the industry that have decades of experience and we're excited to have you with us today.

Hey Luke, thanks for having me.

Yeah, Joey, thanks for joining. I'll give you your intro and your time in the sun in a sec. Before we get to that, just get the boring stuff out of the way with the webinar housekeeping. Don't worry, we'll send a recording of the webinar after. So you don't need a camera, you don't need a mic, you don't need to be taking notes. We'll get everything down for you so that you get these tips afterwards and can really dig into them. But please do interact with us in one key way, which is by posing your questions anytime during the presentation. There's a little Q and A function in your Zoom account. And myself, I'm Luke from Kahoot. My colleague Aldi, as well as the presenters, Manish and Joey will be keeping an eye on the Q and A and we'll be capturing it as we go along. And afterwards, we love to answer questions. Please do put them in Fast and furious at any time. Don't worry, we are keeping an eye on it. Presenting today are Manish Chowdhury, the founder and CEO of Kahoot, and Joseph Abbott Bull, the founder of Seller Locker. Really excited to have them with us today. Maneesh. Before Kahoot, he founded and grew a successful, successful order management platform, Pulse Commerce, which is still today and doing great things for enterprise merchants. And he's been featured in Forbes Digital Commerce360 and other leading trade publications as a thought leader. Joseph is a founder of SellerLocker, but he's also been around the e commerce space for longer than he'd probably care to admit. Seller Locker is a leading Amazon reimbursement solution. So you know if you're selling on Amazon, which I assume everyone who sign up for this webinar is Seller Locker and Joseph are there to make sure that you're not getting ripped off. They keep an eye on everything fba and they're actually expanding to returns as well, which he'll get into to make sure that you're getting the most out of the platform and you're not leaving money on the table. I'm Luke and my colleague Rinaldi are also on and as I mentioned, we're monitoring the Q and A. So please do keep those questions coming and we'll make sure that we devote plenty of time at the end to Q and A. Our agenda today we have four kind of main categories and a few tips within each category. Manish is going to start us off by talking about FBA operational excellence. You know, FBA is a great solution for what it does, but it's pretty specific in what works well in FBA and what doesn't. So he'll be walking through all those watch outs that you need to know to make sure that you're optimizing and making the most of what Skus you're sending to fba. He'll also talk about why you need alternatives to fba. You know, the world's changing. I'm sure that you have experience, you're experiencing challenges with FBA inventory limits. Almost all sellers are. And he'll talk through the ins and outs of that and how you can make sure that you're still making the most money you can, while you can't necessarily put everything in fba. Then we'll flip over to Joey and he'll tackle two big topics. The first is how to fight back against overcharges. Now, Amazon does not get everything right. In fact, they get things, lots of things wrong. We were talking to him the other week and he was showing us hundreds of thousands of dollars that he wins back for single cut, single clients. He'll walk through how that process and what you need to know to make sure that you're getting the money back that Amazon overcharges you for. And then finally, and we're super excited for this, he's joining us to talk about how to minimize returns. Not just kind of the old advice that I think you guys have probably all heard before, but also about a brand new tool that Amazon has launched, the PLS tool that's all about stopping returns during the process itself. So it's not just about, you know, it's essential to analyze why returns are happening right and to incorporate that into your Amazon strategy. But now you actually have tools to stop them as they're happening too, and leave a happy customer. And we can't wait for his advice on that one. We think you guys will really like it. So without further ado, let's jump in. Manish, take it away.

Thank you, Luke, and welcome to everyone for joining and really appreciate your time. Let's dive in. We have some really good information here for you. Let's talk about what is FBA great at. You know, we all know that FBA thrives in small and light categories. Their shipping rates are incredible, the fees are low. So by design, Amazon has built its warehouses to align with the pricing strategy. Amazon warehouses are great at receiving large number of small units and then shipping them out efficiently. And that is reflected in the prices they charge. So if you look at this example on the left hand side, you've got a small cable, it's a couple of ounces and Amazon charges $2.70. I mean that is lower than USPS first class rate that you can get on your own, which means it's really hard for anyone else to beat that price. Then move to the center a slightly larger item. Again, not super large, it's 9 by 6 by 3, it's a little over a pound. And once again Amazon FBA does really well. And the shipping cost with fulfillment all in two day delivery is incredible. Then you just move over to slightly larger item which is a five pound and what is considered an oversize, which is greater than 20 inches on one side is Amazon's definition or 18 inches is Amazon's definition of oversize. And you'll see the Amazon FBA fees shoot up dramatically. And in this case the equation changes. If you were to ship this item yourself, you could probably do it for less. You could even achieve a two day delivery nationwide if you had strategically placed locations and still get it to the customer for less than fba. What's behind the strategy is very important to understand that Amazon has about 3 million sellers on its platform and all of those millions of sellers are optimizing for the very same strategy. Right? Most sellers are now looking at FBA is cheap. So let's get the packaging to fit within those FBA parameters so you can get the shipping cost low. But the problem with the strategy is that Amazon FBA is flooded with small and light items. Everybody is creating products like cables bringing in from China, which means there's intense competition. And because everybody's avoiding the larger items in fba, there's far less competition on what we call the oversize item. So this is an important point to notice that you could compete in the red ocean with lots of sellers, low margin. And yes, of course you can take advantage of FBA lower fees. However, you're also competing with several brands, several sellers. So if you could stand up an FBM strategy fulfilled by merchant and you could ship orders yourself, either through your own operations or using a third party logistics provider, you could actually conceivably have a better chance at succeeding. Making more money. So this is an important point that we wanted to highlight moving along. You know, this webinar is all about making more money. And because most of the time we hear about doing more sales, sales are of course important, but profits are even more important. And so we're going to focus on how do we make more money, how do we keep more of that in your pocket as opposed to Amazon's. So the other strategy that we would like to bring to you is think about the referral fees. A lot of sellers operate in multiple Amazon categories. They have diversified product portfolio and if you look on the left hand side, the product categories like jewelry, gift cards, clothing, accessories, watches, they're all very high, 16%, 17, 20. And if you sell any Amazon device accessories, anything to do with Amazon Alexa, Amazon Echo, anything, cables for those devices, devices or what have you, those referral fees are very high at 45% on average. You know, Amazon targets 15% referral fee on most categories. However, on the right hand side you'll see the categories that have far lower referral fee, like camera and photo, consumer electronics, appliances, computers, video game consoles. It's of course we recognize that those categories by themselves operate on lower margin because of the intense competition they have. But still Amazon takes a much smaller share of the GMV in terms of referral fees. So if you can optimize your product portfolio and you can sell within those categories that have lower fees, you could potentially benefit in the tune of at least 7%. So if you take 15 minus 8%, that's 7% extra potential margin for you. And that's something that you should be considering. The next strategy in terms of how to make more money, how to improve your margin, is think about bundling. This is very common in many product categories. You know, people want, you know, for example, napkins or even, you know, toilet paper or paper towels or even uniforms or anything, anything that people want to buy many off rather than selling them as each is, you could bundle them in whatever quantity that makes sense for that product, whether it's 10, 14, 20. Because Amazon calculates the FBA fulfillment fee primarily based on product packaging, dimensions and weight. And so what happens is when you add more number of units to the bundle and you prep the item and send it to Amazon as a unique asin, the total fee per unit, the FBA fee, which includes shipping and fulfillment, goes down dramatically. As you can see the difference between 10 pieces and 30 pieces is almost half on a per unit basis. And of course your product price doesn't have to reflect in the same way. You could be charging twice as much for 30 units as 10. So you actually get to make more money and keep more profits because the Amazon FBA fees are lower. So please keep those questions coming, we'd love to take them towards the end. The other strategy which I think is fairly well known and a lot of people know about this is using third party FBA prep service. Getting your products labeled correctly with the correct barcodes, making sure that the packaging passes the Amazon fault test and all of the requirements that Amazon has is very crucial because otherwise your products will not be received, they'll be receiving delays. Amazon, if you were to send the send the items, your inventory to Amazon Warehouse that is not properly prepped and labeled, then they will charge you the prep fee, which is pretty high as you can see from in different categories and the kind of prep that is required. You could use a third party. There are lots of third parties out there that specialize in creating and doing FBA prep and then they will send the inventory to Amazon warehouses. And especially in the current operating environment where folks are having trouble sending large amounts of inventory to fba, you need a backup inventory storage location anyway because you need to drip the inventory to Amazon every week, every second week. So this is a good strategy to find a partner that can do both prep in addition to storage and you can lower your cost that way. So now we want to dive into why do you need alternative to fba? Because I think most of the people in our audience today are potentially struggling with Amazon FBA inventory restock limits. In fact, two out of three sellers that I speak with on a daily basis are not satisfied with the amount of storage they have at fba. But it's important to understand that this is not a new problem. This is a problem that Amazon has been facing for over a decade. I'll just simply walk you through this decade long problem so you understand that one, how long has this problem been in place and what has Amazon done to cope with it? So if you go back to 2012, yes, it's about nine, 10 years ago, Amazon introduced for the very first time long term storage. So if your inventory is sitting in Amazon Warehouse for longer than 90 days, then it will get classified and be billed for long term storage. Then that wasn't enough to control the amount of inventory they had and the demand they introduced. Storage limits how much you could store and also introduced the IPI score, which is the inventory performance index, just a fancy way of how fast your inventory is moving and how fast it's turning over. Then in order to discourage sellers from keeping their inventory indefinitely in Amazon warehouses, Amazon introduced a long term storage fee. They increased the storage fee, made it pretty onerous so sellers would not keep their inventory idle in Amazon warehouse. And then of course last year spring Covid happened and Amazon was completely chock a block. So they refused to take in any non essential products in their warehouse and they were only prioritizing essential goods. You could not. And that went on for at least several months. And then to continue dealing with that problem, Amazon increased the need for IPI to 500 from 450 so that only the faster moving inventory, faster moving products would reside in Amazon warehouses. And then they added the ASIN level limits which was a big problem for anyone launching new products because you could only send up to 200 units at a time. And if you have a popular item, 200 units could potentially sell out in an hour. And then your product goes out of stock. And that's a big problem. Sales rank tanks and the problem gets even worse. But Amazon has been trying to solve this problem and they've been trying these different tricks and techniques but really it hasn't quite solved the larger issue. And then in April of this year, Amazon completely changed the way how they were allocating storage capacity to sellers by moving from ASIN level limit to storage type. You know, we have a really good webinar on how to improve your IPI score. So if you're interested please visit our website Kahoot AI and on the resources section you'll be able to find it. That'll be a clever way to make the most of the limits that you have. So Amazon, this is not a new problem and it is not going away. At least it's not going away anytime soon. So we recommend that most sellers should have an alternate fulfillment strategy. I believe we have a poll here, right Luke?

Yeah, that's right. It's the first poll about FBA limits that you should be able to enable. Manish.

Awesome. So folks, we have a very simple poll for you. So I'm going to launch it now. If you don't mind taking that poll, we'll leave it on for just a 30 more seconds. All right, I'm going to close the poll in 3, 2, 1. All right, let's see what the. So looks like a lot of people, about 10 of the 13 people that have taken the poll are not satisfied with the inventory limits and a small percentage don't have any issue. So that's good to know.

And Manish, I'm going to chime in with a question we got from the audience just because it's related to these storage type limits. As you mentioned, they changed to the storage type limits in April and someone asked, what are the options if Amazon identifies something like your footwear product as standard inventory instead of as footwear inventory? So they have a challenge where they're reaching their limits on standard inventory because Amazon's misclassifying their items.

Well, yeah, that's a tough one. You know, I think there's nothing that a seller can do but to work with the seller performance team making sure that their products are classified with the right asin. You know, they may want to try, you know, if it's a, if it's an ASIN that is already in Amazon's catalog, you can tie your SKU to the Amazon asin. And if that ASIN is correctly classified as footwear, that may be perhaps the easiest route. Otherwise, depending on, you know, how mature that item is, you know, it depends on the history of the item, you may want to consider a different strategy whether to, you know, pretty much get rid of the item. I don't know. Joe, Joey, do you have any suggestions for our audience on that?

So you're talking about the item is in the wrong tier of size or it's the wrong type of product.

Product.

How is it being classified?

Yeah, Amazon is misclassifying its storage type. You know, they have six categories, one of them standard, one of them's footwear. It should be footwear, but it's being classified as standard.

So that's I've seen many times, many times I've had sellers, they should be opening up cases. And then some people mentioned that you should respond in the claim saying, hey, please send this over to Amazon's captive team or try, you know, continue to keep opening up cases. It's really the only way to do it. I've seen many times we've done it for a few sellers as one offs where we've had, we've helped them move over to it. But it's extremely frustrating and there's really nothing you can do to prevent it. But you have to quickly, you know, react and try and take care of it as quickly as possible.

Thank you, Joy. Sloping on. So holiday season is going to make FBA challenges even worse. And the reasons are carriers themselves are facing massive capacity crunch. There is shortage of 5 million excess packages per day that needs to be delivered and carriers do not have that capacity. Carriers for the very first time are saying no and they are firing their largest customers, largest merchants and shippers. Unheard of. However, that is the reality, folks. Holiday selling is going to become going to shift a lot earlier. People are going to start shopping and merchants and sellers are going to be putting out deals in October. So holiday shopping season is going to be shifting earlier. So you don't want to wait till late December or mid December to launch your deals or to do your promotions. In fact, most people expect to be done with the holiday shopping, you know, sometime, you know, early December. And many people are going to shop much earlier. In fact, 30% of the shopping is expected to be done by Thanksgiving. And then Amazon restock Limits I mean, I know Amazon is about to release their Q4 limits for a lot of people. I mean, I know they constantly adjust their limits for sellers. However, a lot of the folks that rely on seasonal storage that are targeting the holiday season is going to be really tight and I don't expect any massive relief for sellers. So please be aware of that and you need to have plans in place in order to deal with that well in advance. One of the last tips from me and then I'm going to turn this over to Joey is if you have a lot of slow movers at Amazon and you're already at limit or you will be at limit, you want to do something about them. Because as per the new Amazon storage limits, your slow moving SKUs can actually hurt you because they are taking valuable space that could be occupied by your faster moving items. And it's also dragging down your IPI score which impairs your ability to replenish stock for the ones that are selling. So one strategy might be to if you have other channels like Walmart or Shopify or any other channel that you're selling on, you want to sell off those items at a discount and use the Amazon mcf, which is multi channel fulfillment, to fulfill those orders. It's essentially vacating that space by getting rid of that inventory. It is better than trying to remove inventory from FBA or to dispose because that is even more expensive. So it's better to do it at a lower margin and get rid of that stock than to ask to be removed or disposed. I think I'm going to turn this over to you, Joey. You've got some great material coming up, so over to you and I'll keep moving the slides for you.

Okay, awesome. Thank you so much.

Great.

Okay, so I'M going to start off with like Manish said, Amazon is huge. They're only getting bigger. There's only more and more people every single year going ahead to start selling on Amazon. And the companies that are doing a million dollars a few years ago, they're growing to four or five million dollars per year and everybody should continue growing. But that is creating these, you know, constraints. And on top of that, even within their fulfillment centers, there's now millions and millions and millions of products getting sold every single day. Sellers are extremely busy, constantly on top of, you know, besides for the typical headaches, now we have tariffs, carriers, delays with the factory, advertising getting more competitive. One of the things that nobody has ever wanted to do in house was start policing and auditing Amazon. That wasn't something that I wanted to do either. I was working for a very large company called Equity Brands and they were a very big Amazon seller. And the challenge that I faced was how do I continue doing my day to day work when a ton of the profitability that I was expecting to get back from Amazon was non existent. And it became my job to go ahead and bring, you know, raise that profitability within the company but continue doing my day to day work. So that led me to start building this software seller locker which was supposed to bring me transparency into the profitability and FBA fees, missing shipments, and create a way that I as a manager can do this all in a, not automated, but a faster way while retaining all the transparency that I need in order to succeed. And that's what we did. I'm going to request that I can maybe share the screen. It says that I should be able to. Luke, you want to see if you can turn that on for me? Yeah.

Hey Joey, we looked into it. Unfortunately we can't turn over to you in this Zoom webinar instance. So we'll just need you to go off of, you go off of what we developed.

No worries. No problem. Okay, great. So one of the many ways that Amazon can go ahead and make mistakes, we heard before how they can put you in the wrong category, but they can also mismeasure one of your products. So those products come into your fulfillment center, into Amazon's fulfillment centers and they have this machine called a Cubiscan. And as your product goes into this, I guess you can call it a scanner or you know, it's a machine that measures the length, width, height of your product that goes ahead and plays into the fee that Amazon should be charging you on every single order charged. Unfortunately, that machine you Know there's mistakes with that machine. And even the slightest inch, sometimes on the length or the width of the height can go ahead and lead to massive overcharges on a per unit. It's a per unit problem. So as many units as you sell, that's how many problems are going to be on your on, on your potential discrepancy. So if you have a thousand orders a month and there's a $2 overcharge, it can very quickly, over the next three to four months build up into a tens of thousand dollar overcharge. And unfortunately, sellers don't have the means in order to monitor every single day that every single order that comes through is proper very quickly. We've even seen that in times Amazon may have the correct fee in the morning, in the evening, the fee goes up a little bit and then the very next day it looks correct again. So it also, it's about the timing as to when you check these things. So we did with Seller Locker is we built a little tool, it's actually a very big tool that goes and monitors every single order that comes in to make sure that Amazon has the right fee on all of your products. And that was really the start of the Seller Locker company. Okay, you want to jump over to the next screen? So I think there are some slides missing. Luke, I really wanted to share my screen here, but I guess we'll jump over to the returns. But I guess to conclude with reimbursements, you know, Seller Locker does a bunch of different things. You know why Seller Locker as a reimbursement company, different than any of those on the market. Something that we truly specialize in. And Luke, can you check it? Maybe you have some of the other screenshots that I sent you?

Yeah, we've got some in the back actually.

Maybe we can just jump to those because this is a totally different talking point.

Manish, if you just go down a few more slides, you'll get to a screen that shows the reimbursements, the reimbursement screen and how Seller Locker tackles it. So one up. There you go.

Yeah, so this is the screen we.

Got for you, Joey.

This is just the only one. Or you have a few.

This is what we got for you on reimbursements. And then we got a bunch to talk about returns as well.

Okay, so this is the dashboard that we have couple slides missing here from the presentation. But how we differentiate ourselves from everybody else, transparency is key. So bringing in all this data into a dashboard allows us to go after a bunch More categories like the pick impact fees that we were just mentioning. A few different things that we do with pick and pack fees is a we compare what Amazon's charging you to what they should be charging you. So sellers feed us their product dimensions or we'll compare them with some of their other child asins. At the end of the day, we're comparing what Amazon has versus what they should have. And whenever there's any type of discrepancy, even if it's on one particular order, Seller Locker will go ahead and get that fee corrected. As you can see on this screen, this seller recovered about $30,000 with us that year, but $200,000 in additional profits. So it's not just about correcting the mistake and going backwards and getting all the money, it's about going forward. If you're making an extra 3, 4, 5, $6 per unit and you continue to sell a thousand units a month, you can potentially add, you know, 5, 10, 15% to your margins. And these mistakes happen so randomly, and if you don't have the right system to monitor and audit, that it can quickly add up. Another thing that we do that's extremely different is the ability to respond to cases. So Amazon always has responses. They're not, you know, just like any insurance company, you put in a claim, there's going to be a tremendous back and forth. And sometimes a seller can have, you know, maybe 50 or 100 discrepancies on their plate. And even for other reimbursement companies, it's very difficult to manage the responses from Amazon. So one of the things that Cellar Locker did, and I wish I can show you guys on screen, is we built a chrome extension that can respond to over 135 different responses from Amazon. I was just looking at a case today. We submit a claim for lost inventory. Amazon lost 10 units of an item in their warehouse. Amazon just has their automated responses. They shoot out a response and say, hey, we just did a check. These 10 pieces were actually reimbursed in the past on the spot. Our tool does an additional check, checks this report that Amazon goes ahead and tells us to recheck, takes a screenshot of the report and sends it back to Amazon and says, and again, this is our team that does this, but using the tools that we built, and in five seconds or less, our team is able to go check those reports, grab the screenshot needed, bring it back to Amazon and push Amazon and say, hey, Amazon, I know that you're making these claims, but in truth, these 10 pieces were missing and go ahead and get that reimbursement. Amazon many times does not even give you the full reimbursement due. So again, our Chrome extension could fight back, go back and forth with Amazon. We have over 135 cases that we can respond to, and that makes it very effective in getting as much money as possible for every single case, for every single seller. So if you'd like to do an audit, if you want to see what's missing in your account or to see where Celo Locker could have picked up, where you know, either you're doing it in house or using another company, sometimes you're just, you know, you're five yards away from scoring the touchdown. You just need to give them that one last piece of information that they need. And that Cell locker tool, the Chrome extension, really gives you that ability to do so. And it empowers our team to take each case from the beginning all the way to the end. So that's what we do. In the reimbursement space, we could. You can expect between 1 and 4% of your annual sales to be reimbursed. Obviously, the bigger you are, the closer that gets to 1%. But if you'd like to do an audit, you can definitely do so by going to sellerlocker.com and signing up and we'll schedule that audit. To jump to our very new tool called On Site by Seller Locker to.

Talk to Joey Joy, this is. Let's teach the audience and how they can do it themselves. What are some of the other ways that they can reduce and help? You know, the tool would be something that might be desirable to them, but I know you're going to talk about how, how can they reduce the return rate?

Sure, no problem. So there's a bunch of different ways that you can do. There's a bunch of different things that you can do. First, you got to start monitoring your returns. So you have to go to your fulfillment reports, click on returns, download that Excel sheet, there's a bunch of different YouTube videos. Create a pivot table and find out, you know, what products are having the most returns and what is the cost of that return. In your business, Amazon has the restocking fees that they charge you. They charge you that pick and pack fee to ship out to the customer. That dollar does not get returned back to your account. So it's important first to calculate how much is returns costing me on a per product basis. A lot of the times you'll find that it may take three or four other sales just to make up for that one return that happened, especially on heavy items. So the different things that you can do to go ahead and prevent these returns a if you're going ahead and you're seeing the reason for these returns are damages, obviously improving your product packaging, going ahead and reading the reasons for these returns and potentially updating your listings, figuring out what the issues customers are having and trying to solve them before they have that problem, ideally on the listings page. But again, it starts with data. So first you want to grab that information, try and learn as much as you can, figure out the cost, and then you'll end up starting to learn again. If it's packaging, that's something that can be improved. If there's misinformation, you definitely want to correct that on the portal. Those are the first two things that you could potentially do to prevent and reduce returns. Amazon also has this return issue. So just like you guys get frustrated when a customer returns a product, especially if it's not truly damaged, to Amazon's fulfillment center, that item now takes up space in the fulfillment center, especially if it gets marked as unsellable. The seller then has to decide, do I want to bring it home? Do I want to dispose of it? It ends up costing Amazon a ton of money too. So Amazon is also creating an initiative to prevent and reduce the returns that come back to their fulfillment centers with a program called PLS Product Lifecycle Support. And the goal is to reduce these returns with product education or with support. So Amazon released this program and right now what you can do with PLS is you can train an Amazon support rep to do product support on your product. So if somebody you know signed up for this program, which is an extreme, which is, which is in beta right now, and it's by invitation only, you can onboard some products with Amazon, give them some training material and let's just say for this microwave, if a customer tried to return a microwave instead of there only be if they went to their orders and they went to click on return or replace. Instead of there only being this return or replace button, there's now this added get product support button which will route the client to go ahead and start a chatbot or to call and ask an Amazon customer support rep in order to start troubleshooting this microwave. And Amazon I believe is charging a per minute fee and they're also extremely lenient with giving the customer back a return. So even if it's after 30 days, which is the typical customer support time for a return, I've seen in beta testing it that Amazon will even Give returns for 60 and 90 days. So it's actually a little bit risky. But on top of that, we were sort of questioning, you know, how can an Amazon rep, even with all the training materials in the world, get comfortable in troubleshooting these countertop microwaves? So Cello Locker proposed a different solution to the PLS team and that's what takes you to the on site program. So with on site, similar to how we support our customers with CellarLocker, we wanted to bring the ability for Amazon sellers to on the spot help or I guess instead of training, instead of training Amazon reps to go ahead and become microwave experts. How can we redirect these unhappy customers to a landing page, to a portal where the seller themselves can go ahead and educate, but also troubleshoot and stop the returns that are either leading to negative reviews or a ton of added expenses on their margins. So this is an example. This is a page that we created for Equity brands. They sell air conditions in season air conditions. You can imagine how many different returns that can happen on a portable unit. What we did for this client was we built this portal, as you can see here. And on top of that, we created this live chat support. We loaded the support page with 30 different troubleshooting tips, with videos, and at the end of the day, what happens now? We onboard the client, we upload the asins into Amazon. And now anytime a Amazon customer has an issue with a Black and Decker air conditioner, with that one click, it redirects them to a page which we built for them and they can either get the help that they need in the education center or quickly create a ticket or message, a support agent that equity brands had on their team. So this brought down returns tremendously on an expensive product, even if it's just 1%, that could be huge. But the key here was product education, which led tremendously towards reducing these returns. This is another client that we brought on. And what actually ended up happening with this product is there was an issue with the igniter on the oven. This is a pizza oven and the manufacturer was aware of that and they were desperately trying to go ahead and prevent as many returns as possible. So what Seller Locker did with this client is we created this announcement on their portal where with one click of a button, a ticket was created for the customer to get their replacement part, which went ahead. You know, they got in front of the issue, they educated the customer. So you have a very upset customer that comes in, you know, they have a pizza oven, they just spent a few hundred Dollars on and it's not igniting properly that Get Product Support actually took them to this page. With one click, they were able to get the support that they needed and prevent what could have been a disaster listing. With tons of customers getting to 12 star reviews, they're actually able to maintain their review count. And again, this is just another way. There's tons of different ways you can imagine. I guess what we do is we set up these strategy calls with every brand and we figure out, you know, what would you do if you had the ability to communicate with the Amazon customer. And for every single Amazon seller, it can be different. For example, we had a recent client, they sell these fog proof mirrors and there's very clear instructions in the packaging on how to set up your mirror so that it should be fog proof. However, again, the customers are in a rush. They open up the packaging, they throw it in their bathroom and it's not working. So for that client, it's one clear video right on the page with the QR code. The second the client gets the product, they scan the QR code, it takes them to this page or if they did not, you know, if they didn't get to that page, they go to Amazon, they click that, Get Product Support redirects them to this page. So every single client's going to have a different way to use on site. It's about figuring out how, you know, what would you do if you had the ability to communicate with the Amazon customer.

Hey, thank you, Joey. That was.

Sorry, Maneep. Before we move on from that, we got a few questions float in about that tool. So I was going to fire them off just while we were talking about it, if you don't mind. So, Joey, someone heard that you mentioned it was invite only is Amazon's tool. Invite only is yours. Invite only. Can you talk a bit about the invite experience and how a seller can get to be part of this?

So Amazon's portion is invite only to go ahead and onboard with their support reps. So if you're interested in paying an Amazon rep a permanent fee in order to start doing product support on your products, you know, we got that invitation initially. I don't know who else got that invitation. Our tool is not invite only. Anybody who's interested in getting early access to pls and specifically us working with you to create the portal, set up the live chat, support, the ticket submission, setting up a strategy in order to start reducing returns, that's not invite only. You can very easily sign up with us and we can figure out what the right strategy is for you and then get it all built out and set up over the next two to three weeks.

So to get set up with the tool on Amazon, a seller should go to Amazon support team and talk to them?

No, no, they should reach out to us directly and we would set up a strategy call in order to go ahead and like I said, strategize what the proper strategy is. Build out the pages and then we will onboard your ASINs with Amazon directly.

Got it. Thanks Joey.

Thank you. Thank you, Luke. Moving on, we've a few minutes remaining before we open it up for Q and A. Just as a quick wrap up, just an intro into Kahoot, what Kahoot is. Kahoot is a order fulfillment network. Our standards are very high, similar to Amazon fba. So if you are looking for a alternate FBA fulfillment strategy, which we recommend every seller should have, not just for Q4, but even going forward, Kahoot is a great option. We have nationwide warehouse coverage, one day delivery, two day delivery, whatever SLAs you wish to target. And unlike FBA and several other options, we do not have any Q4 surcharges. It's the same low fee all year round and the technology is really outstanding. It enables you to get online and onboarded very quickly and without any hiccups even if you have your own warehouse. So Kahoot's technology can be very inclusive to ensure that either we can augment your fulfillment strategy or we can pretty much provide a standalone service if you like. And we are five star rated on Amazon and also received an award from Fast Company earlier this year. So I think that's pretty much it. I think we can open up a Q and A in the last few minutes that we have.

Yeah. Okay. Looking at some of these questions, Maneesh, we have one for you about the FBA receiving delays. So if your products are, you know, you set up the inbound you sent them, but then what's that process look like when there's a receiving delay? And what can you do if you've got a bunch of inventory stuck and it's at the facility, it hasn't been inbounded yet. What are your options and how do you know when it's going to get unstuck?

Well, I wish I had a good answer for that. The challenge with that is your FBA limit restock limit is also it's inclusive of the inventory that you have currently sitting in Amazon warehouse and it also counts the inventory that is in transit or it's waiting to be received. So That's a really big problem in fba. I think sellers should be using an alternate fulfillment warehouse so that they can turn on the listing in FBM mode while the inventory is waiting to be received in fba. That's the best advice I can offer Amazon. Receiving delays are likely to get worse. Keep an eye on those receiving deadlines for Black Friday, Cyber Monday and also Christmas. And you want to get your inventory in well in advance. Do not wait till the last minute because receiving delays are very frequent right now.

You mentioned it related to another question we had on what are those limits this year? Do we know them yet? The delays or. Excuse me, sorry, not the delays, the deadlines for holiday receiving.

Yes. I don't have them at the top of my head, but I know. Rinaldi, you might be able to drop them in the chat. I think, I believe for. Again, I don't want to give the wrong information, but those deadlines were published earlier this week, I believe.

All right, thanks, Maneesh. We've got another for Joey on just the reimbursements piece. You know, you showed a screen there of what seller Locker can do it. Obviously it had a big top line number on how much it earned back for your client. What are the big buckets that people are getting back from, getting their money back from? What are the biggest drivers of reimbursements?

So the two biggest ones are really lost inbound. Amazon makes a ton of different mistakes in the receiving of their products, potentially because there's tons of different ship, it's coming in at the same time, all being received at the same time. And one of the keys is really having all the documents needed in place. So what Cell Locker does is we have this hub, we connect with a bunch of different carriers, FedEx, UPS, DHL to go ahead and get that tracking information needed to prove that information to Amazon. But it's also very important that sellers keep invoices to keep record of that they actually purchased this product, whether it's a receipt from a supplier or an invoice from their factory with those documents and with the proof of delivery. That is one of the biggest categories to go ahead and get reimbursements. And then it's lost and damaged inventory. So just the inventory that Amazon loses and damages within their fulfillment centers is huge, especially when they have over 100 different FCs and inventories constantly flowing back and forth between them. Those are the biggest categories for us in recoveries with regards to people's profits and, you know, and their margins staying on top of fba. Fees is huge. Just to make sure that Amazon is not charging you that wrong amount. It used to be that we can go back 18 months to go ahead and clean up all the pick and pack overcharges. So that used to be a very big reimbursement category and Amazon trimmed it down to just 90 days. So the amount of money we can get back for you goes down because it's only 90 days as opposed to 18 months. But that is extremely, it can be a huge hit on your margins if you're not on top of it.

Thanks, Joey. We had another question come in while you were talking about your pricing model. How do you guys do it for the different parts of your service?

Sure. So for the reimbursements, we take a 25% fee of whatever money we recover. Sellers can go ahead and create, you know, we can have a demo and jump on the phone and discuss, you know, what type of returns you can expect on your business, depending on the size. On top of that, for the returns for the on site program, we have two different price structures. If you commit to an annual commitment, the price right now is $249 per month. And if you go monthly, if you want to give it a Try Monthly, it's a 299 subscription fee per month. And we onboard your asins create the portal for you, we have that strategy call and we start reducing those returns.

Thanks, Joey. We had, we had one more for you. We answered a bunch live during the webinar. But one more I saw come in was about like the toughest thing to get reimbursed. Like what, what's really hard? What does Amazon, does Amazon, make certain reimbursements like way more of a pain than others are. Some, like, have a low success rate.

In getting reimbursed, so inbound shipment is the most rewarding. But there is a ton of work involved, especially as Amazon continues to require more and more documents. It used to be just on the big cases, you know, the $2,000 plus cases. Now it's even on the $15 cases. They want to see all the documents necessary. The category with the lowest success, and that's just because it has to do with their customers, is customer returns. So if a product, let's say an Amazon customer goes ahead and they say they want to return a product to Amazon and then they don't actually ship that product back to Amazon's fulfillment centers. Fighting with Amazon on those customer returns is extremely low because again, Amazon is always going to protect their customer at the end of the day.

That's helpful, thanks. And we have one last one. This one's from Aneesh. I was about the FBA backup and an attendee was wondering, is that something you normally recommend to do for separate SKUs from what you have in FBA or to have backup for SKUs that you have in FBA? How do you think about the mix there?

Right. You could create multiple. You can create separate SKUs for FBA and FBM and tie them both to the same asin and you can, if FBA goes out of stock, you can easily toggle to the FBM listing. And that's the strategy that we recommend so that you have your SKUs all set up and it's already linked to the ASIN that you wish to sell on. And as soon as either you're out of stock or you're having receiving delays, the whole purpose is to keep selling and not let these fulfillment related challenges influence the sales or affect your sales negatively.

Thanks. All right. And I'm looking and I think, yep, that's all the questions we've had. Manish, There was one more poll, although as I said that. Sorry, one more came in. As I was saying that. Manish, can you please give an idea about how our pricing system works? No worries. And it says, let's say we wanted to provide for SFP nationwide for, for one ASIN looks like it's an oversized one, 28 pounds, 28 by 8 by 8. I know there's a bunch in there, Manish, but maybe just a brief overview of how we at Kahoot do pricing.

Right. Kahoot pricing is very similar to fba. So if you reach out to us with the specifics, we can pretty much provide you a fee for whether you want to do economy shipping or if you want to do Target two day delivery. So please reach out. There is the storage fee, which is much lower, way lower than Amazon. It's one of the lowest in the industry for the kind of service that we offer. And then you have your fulfillment fee which will include the shipping cost if you're looking for an all inclusive pricing. So please reach out, we'll be happy to provide you the specifics. Luke, do you still want to do that last poll and we close out with that?

Yeah, let's close out with that. We have a last poll for you guys. Manish will launch it. It's just if you'd like to hear a bit more, hear a bit more from any of us on the topics we've covered today, please select all that apply and we will be happy to follow up with you. And thanks, everyone, so much for joining. Answer the poll. And that concludes our webinar.

All right. Another couple more seconds and then I'll close the poll and we'll also end the webinar. Thank you, everyone, for joining. Appreciate your time. It.