Episode #12 - How to test ten private label products at once (spending less than $100 on each)

Within a month validated my hunch for this set of dominoes. And I'd only spent, like, a couple hundred dollars initially to do it. So it completely debunks that myth that importing products has to be scary and you have to throw thousands at it right away.

Welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast with your host, Oliver Denier. Learn the practical steps you need to take to build a business you can run on your own terms. Escape the 9 to 5 and work anywhere in the world.

Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. Very, very warm welcome to the Ecommerce Freedom Podcast. So, in today's episode, what we want to talk about is how to test 10 private label products at once. And each one of them is going to cost no more than $100 for your initial test batch. So before we get going, I want to tell you a quick story about why I decided to make this episode and something that's been kind of bothering me for a little while. So whenever you're trying to get a business to work, one of the most important things to do in the beginning is to validate it right before you move forward with a business idea. It's a really good idea to actually see physical sales of the thing that you're thinking about building before you invest a large amount of money into that thing. Right. And a lot of the time with building a private label business, a lot of the way people have been taught to do it is to do a bunch of research on Amazon, make sure your products, you know, got high demand, low competition, all that stuff, then go out there, find a supplier, and you're expected to make these huge initial orders. We're almost expected to skip the validation phase altogether. So I want to break this expectation. I want to trim down the time it takes to get products imported. I don't want to be waiting two or three months before things are in my account selling. I want to move as quickly as physically possible. So today's episode is all about this. Now you don't have to launch 10 products at once. This is an example of something you could do. This is actually something I will be doing very soon. But you could just start with 1 or 2 or 3. Whatever you feel comfortable with. The principles all remain the same. So just before I get into the steps of how to put this into practice, the reason I'm so excited to tell you about this method is because this is actually what kicked off my private label career. My first import was a validation, just like the stuff I'm talking about. Today, I had a hunch that dominoes, set of dominoes, would be a really, really good idea to import and sell over Christmas. So I started off with a really small order of 40 that I found on one of the suppliers I'll talk to you about today. And long story short, within a week, I'd already made five sales, and the rest went on to sell within a month after ordering the initial batch. And I went on to order another 150, and those sold throughout the Christmas period a couple of years ago when I got started. So I had, within a month, validated my hunch for this set of dominoes, and I'd only spent, like, a couple hundred dollars initially to do it. So it completely debunks that myth that importing products has to be scary and you have to throw thousands at it right away. So let's dive in. I'm going to give you a few steps to put this into action, and you can start getting products selling on your account within the next few weeks. So step one in our 10 product validation test is to find products that look like they're going to sell. Now, if you've ever been on a webinar with me or you've seen any of my other trainings, you'll know that really, it's not too difficult to find products that look like they're going to sell. We want to use software such as Jungle Scout, Ace Inspector, Unicorn Smasher to find products that are generating a lot of revenue right now. We want to go where the money is, where customers are spending money, right, where there's a very high demand. Once you find a product like this, next you want to check that it's got low competition, so there aren't tons of national brands competing, tons of other sellers with loads and loads and loads of reviews. Want to make sure there's room for an individual seller like you or I to actually fit into the marketplace and offer something new. So that's step one. Find a product that's got great demand and not too much competition. So step number two is to make sure this product isn't going to cause you a ton of hassle. We don't want to be importing electronics. We don't want to be importing things like health and beauty products or groceries. This could be stuff you could import later down the road when you're more experienced. But to be honest with you, this stuff is always a lot more complicated than importing, you know, a spatula or another plastic or metal or wooden product, which just is very simple. And easy. So stick to the easy stuff. Low hassle, small, light products. So step three, once you've found a product with looks like it's going to sell and it's not going to cause you a bunch of hassle, is to go ahead and find a supplier who is willing to give you a low minimum order quantity. This product. Now, this isn't always easy. A lot of the manufacturers on Alibaba can actually be very reluctant to give you a very small minimum order. They'll say something like, you have to order 500 or a thousand units with us in the beginning. But I don't want you to get disheartened or give up here because I'm going to give you a few strategies you can put in place to get smaller orders of your initial test batch. So let's go through a few ways you can order small quantities of stock. So, first way is to source your products from Alibaba. So if you haven't heard of Alibaba.com, it's probably the biggest platform out there for contacting Chinese manufacturers. There's literally hundreds of thousands of suppliers on there. So if you just search on Alibaba.com for whatever you're looking for, try and find a product that looks like it's going to add value to your marketplace, something better, something different than what's already on offer, and start messaging the suppliers. Now, initially, they might say that they have high minimum order quantities, but what you can do is with your initial contact with them, make it seem like you're very serious about building a relationship with them. Introduce yourself as perhaps the vice president of your company, or maybe position yourself as not the owner of your newbie sole trader Amazon business. Instead, maybe just make it seem like you're part of a bigger organization. By positioning yourself like this, the manufacturers in China will take you more seriously. It really helps if you've got a limited company or something that you can introduce yourself as. But if not, it doesn't really matter. The point is just to to prove to them that you're serious. So one way to do that is to start off by discussing large order quantities of stock. Start off by getting a quote for how much 2,000 units would cost. Talk in big numbers. Then, once you've built a slight relationship with them via email or via Skype, you can start to introduce the idea that the way your company usually approaches importing is by importing a small quantity first. So by introducing ourselves as someone serious and then coming down to the small test batch idea, suppliers Going to take you more seriously and be more willing to actually do that for you. So that's something you can try. Start feeling out the Alibaba suppliers. Find if you can get a small order quantity from there you might find that this doesn't really work. Maybe the type of product you want to import, it just has to be manufactured in large numbers to really work properly. Well, all is not lost if that's the case. There's some other ways you can do this. So one way is to go over to a website called AliExpress which is actually a business to consumer website. It's like a just a e commerce store but everything is located in China. So you can actually have a look on AliExpress for products very similar to the one that you want to private label and start to import products with a minimum in order quantity of one. So this is really, really powerful. Now you're not going to find products for necessarily as cheap as the products in Alibaba. Quite often the products will be almost the same or similar price to what they're selling for on Amazon. But we're not looking to make a bunch of profit with this exercise. We're looking to just validate your product to see if it will sell. If you can sell say 10 units of your product then you can sell a thousand. So have a look on Aliexpress. Very, very simple, safe atmosphere for importing products. You've got their guarantee, you can pay through their payment processor. It's kind of like ordering from ebay where you're covered. And most of the products on there are actually, they actually come with free shipping. So this is really, really useful when you want to make small imports. Another website you can use is Dhgate. If you just go to Dhgate.com it's kind of somewhere in between Aliexpress and Alibaba. Alibaba is like big manufacturers getting stuff made, custom made. Aliexpress is business to consumer. Dhgate is more kind of somewhere in the middle, maybe wholesalers, things like that. So you can order very small minimum quantities from dhgate as well. And don't just abide by the price and the minimum order quantities on the products listing message. The suppliers, have a chat with them, see if they can give you a better offer, see if they can give you faster shipping, see if they can give you bulk discounts if you order slightly more than what they're offering. So once you found a product, you found your supplier that you can order it from. Step number four is to get your small quantity of stock shipped over from the supplier to your country. So you can talk to your supplier and ask them what their rates would be for express shipping. Usually they'll use companies like DHL which ship internationally. And the shipping is very, very, very fast. You can get stuff shipped from between three to five days. Like it's insane. It's almost faster than ordering stuff locally sometimes. Now obviously it's much more expensive than ordering sea shipping for huge amounts. Like the cost per unit is going to be higher. But it's very quick, very easy and you don't have to worry too much about getting freight forwarders involved or drawing out some long waiting times for for shipping stuff by sea. Very, very simple. Now the order will get delivered to your country, you'll probably have to pay duty through the DHL website or whichever express carrier is used and then the stuff will get forwarded on to your address. Then once it arrives with you, step five is to ship the products into your Amazon account, get them listed and ship them into your Amazon account. Now if you're looking for a tutorial on how to create an FBA shipment, how to create your account and all that stuff, you can go to info.ecommercefreedom.com fast start guide and grab. My Fast Start guide gives you four videos there. How to create your account, find profitable stock, check that it's going to sell, and then create FBA shipments. And that will teach you how to do that. Awesome. So now you should have some stock in your account and you can do this with as many products as you like. As I mentioned earlier, soon I'm actually going to be doing an experiment where I import 10 products at once just to see how, how it all pans out. Using this method to import stock rapidly. But you can start with one if you want. And once the products are live in your account, you can let the validation begin. Okay, so how do you validate a product? How do you tell whether it was a success or a failure? Well, what we want to do here is first of all encourage your product to sell. In the beginning, we want to make it more visible in the search results. We want to put it in front of the right customers to see if they're willing to actually give you money for it or not. It's great because it gives you black and white data, solid proof of whether it's going to work or not. And the best way to make your product visible is to use some sponsored ads on Amazon, right? Pay per click advertising, some people call it sponsored products. You create a campaign inside your Amazon account. Advertise one of your products that gets it appearing on page one. If you bid high enough and run those for a few days, spend whatever amount of money you feel comfortable, maybe $5 a day, 5 pounds a day and see if you make sales. It's quite simple. If you run the ads for two weeks and you make no sales, then it looks like your product might not take off. It's worth tweaking things, tweaking the listing, tweaking the ads to see if you can get sales. But it looks like it might not take off. And that's okay. We only spent say $100 on the import. However, if you ran sponsored ads for two weeks and you made say three or four sales with no reviews, no listing optimization, no decent branding on your product, and a terrible product listing, then imagine how many sales you're going to be making when you have all of that stuff, plus a better quality product that you've ordered in bulk. So that's how you tell whether your product is going to be a good fit to private label or not. How you get this stuff done in really a matter of weeks. And I can't wait to hear stories of how you've put this stuff into practice. Hope this has given you some ideas to get moving. So look, if you want the show notes for this episode and you want to download my rapid validation cheat sheet for free, then go to ecommerce freedom.com forward/12. That's ecommerce freedom.com forward/ number one, number two 12 and you can get the show notes for this episode, the transcript, and my rapid validation cheat sheet which is the PDF that walks you through this whole procedure so you can actually carry it out. Get importing some products and start rapidly validating new products for your account. Thanks so much much for listening. Hit subscribe on itunes to get future episodes. Can't wait to catch you soon. Oh by the way, just before I leave you make sure you check me out on YouTube. I'm going to be launching a lot more consistent content on there now because I think it's just an awesome platform. So just type Ecommerce freedom into the YouTube search bar. Find me on there. Subscribe for future awesome episodes. Thanks so much for listening and I'll catch you next week.