Episode #15 - 5 Myths New Sellers Have About Private Labeling Products

The thing. Do you know how many successful private label sellers I keep seeing pop up on the Amazon marketplace? Do you know how many of my clients who actually getting success right now selling private label products? Like things really haven't changed that much. For the people who are willing to put in the work to really find an awesome product, make sure it's set up properly to succeed, fill gaps in the marketplace, they're utilizing all the marketing techniques properly. Private label is still very much alive.

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 from anywhere in the world.

Hey, it's Oli. How's it going? Very, very warm welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast. Now, one of the things I absolutely love doing when I'm talking about Amazon, talking about business, interacting with you, is dispelling fear. Every so often, a number of new myths start circulating, a number of new rumors about certain aspects of the Amazon business. People actually genuinely start to believe these things. And I absolutely love distinguishing all of these beliefs, getting rid of all of these fears, and just calling out the BS that keeps circulating around our business. Because sometimes it can actually be the difference between somebody hitting a goal that they really want to achieve or just not bothering because of some silly myth that was tripping them up. So let's go through five myths that private label sellers, especially new private label sellers, believe right now and why they're just not true. At the end of the day, in order to get huge growth in your business and really get the ball rolling, you need clarity. Clarity is super, super important. Needs to know the truth about what's happening in your business and in the industry. So this is what this episode is all about. So first of all, there's one myth going around. I've seen this in a few places. Facebook groups and YouTube and stuff like that. Private label is dead or private label is too difficult. Now I can kind of understand why some people have this belief. It's just too tricky right now to actually launch products, import them from China and, and get them to sell consistently and build a real business doing this. Like, I can understand why people would think that. One of the reasons why is because private labeling is actually the hardest strategy to sell products on Amazon. If you compare it to selling arbitrage products, sourcing stuff from retail stores, putting it in a box, sending it into fba, creating a product, building a brand, contacting manufacturers in China, getting stuff imported Dealing with duty customs, VAT payments, getting packaging organized and getting a product go from no sales a day to 5 to 10 to 20 when you know you don't have a brand and all that stuff. Like there's so many more steps involved with private labels compared to other strategies. Wholesale is easier, arbitrage is easier. So I can understand why people think it's really, really difficult and they get tricked into believing that it's dead. But here's the thing. Do you know how many successful private label sellers I keep seeing pop up on the Amazon marketplace? Do you know how many of my clients who actually getting success right now selling private label products? Like things really haven't changed that much for the people who are willing to put in the work to really find an awesome product, make sure it's set up properly, properly to succeed, fill gaps in the marketplace. They're utilizing all the marketing techniques properly. Private label is still very much alive. Now if you want to be lazy and try and just throw up a product on Amazon, do everything kind of half assed, then yeah, private labeling will be dead for you. If you want to just quit while you're ahead, find a product and just not import it, then yeah, private label will be dead for you. But if you're applying this stuff properly, the strategy is very much still alive. And you know, huge companies are still using this to fill the shelves in their supermarkets. Companies such as Tesco's, Costco, Walmart, they all private label goods. And it's a strategy that's been going on for years and it isn't really going anywhere. So that's that myth buried in the ground. I'm still launching tons of private label products as we speak. Myth number two is that Chinese sellers will destroy Amazon. Now this is something I was a little bit concerned about recently because man, they are popping up everywhere, all over Amazon, suppliers in China, manufacturing their own products for literally next to nothing, there's no middleman and just shipping them over to the FBA warehouses in America, in Canada and all over Europe. Is this the end of the world? Are we going to be beaten by the Chinese because they can do everything so cheap? Well, here's the thing. While some areas of the marketplace will be affected by Chinese suppliers and by any competition, we are always going to have an unbelievable advantage over Chinese sellers. You know what that advantage is? We know our marketplaces so much better than they ever will as a resident of the US or of Europe. If you're selling products where you live, you understand the people of that country so much better. Generally, you get an understanding of people's desires, you get an understanding of what people perceive as quality, you get an understanding of people's issues and problems with certain products and how people like to conduct business and expect to be treated as customers. Now, not to say that Chinese suppliers won't understand this or come to understand this, but I think we really do have an advantage. So yes, they'll probably be able to beat us on price, but when it comes to providing premium products to the marketplace, building a real brand that people trust, I don't think that Chinese sellers will really have much hope competing with us on the marketplace. So personally, I don't really think it's anything you need to worry about. As I said, like competition is going to get slightly more fierce, but if you're smart about things, you can really make your product stand out in the marketplace and people just can't compete with a brand. If you build a brand identity on Amazon, then customers will trust you and your presence alone will, will allow you to continue to sell products really, really successfully. Myth number three, this is quite a big one as well, is that reviews are now really, really tough to get. So I think it almost must be a year ago now, Amazon actually changed their terms and conditions and they said, look, you cannot incentivize buyers to leave your reviews. You can't say, look, you can have this product for free if you leave me a review. And tons of private label sellers freaked out about this. They were thinking, well, if I can't do that, how on earth do I get reviews and what methods can I use to get reviews if I can't incentivize customers? And I think a lot of people still believe that getting reviews is too difficult. Well, here's the thing. I'm constantly getting between three to five reviews on many of my private label products each week. That's like on a bad week. Some weeks I get much more than that. Here's how you do it. You just message customers who have bought your product at full price and ask them to leave a review. If you're marketing your product correctly, you're doing promotions, you're doing pay per click, you've got a product that people want, then it's going to sell at full price very often, even when there's no reviews, right? So you can just message those customers, message them maybe two or three times and just nudge them, ask them very politely to leave a review. This is a very, very solid long term strategy for increasing the number of reviews on your products. Steadily over time. So something you can implement and it really works. Now, reviews are really, really, really important. But what's better than just tons of reviews is high quality reviews. I personally found that customers who've bought products at full price often leave better reviews than people who've got it for free. So I really don't think reviews is anything you need to worry about. Myth number four is that you need to use hundreds of different marketing techniques and be some kind of genius to get consistent sales on Amazon with your product. Now, it can be kind of intimidating when you first launch a product on Amazon, like it's just hit the shelves. You spent all that time speaking to manufacturers, getting the thing produced, getting it imported, and it's sitting there with a sales rank of like nothing. And you're thinking, how am I going to get this thing to sell? Like, how is this going to happen? So this is when newbie sellers go on like a wild goose chase to try and get their first sales. They're spamming their products all over Facebook, all over social media, getting their friends to buy it, Twitter, trying to put it all over Instagram, creating social media accounts, trying to run Facebook ads, trying to do content marketing, starting in a blog and trying to build an email list and all this stuff. The fact of the matter is you don't have to use tons of marketing techniques in the beginning. It's just not necessary. Personally, I opt for three main things, three main strategies to get my products to sell. They're very simple, they're very basic, they're kind of boring, they're not shiny objects, but they work. Here's what they are. Number one, listing optimization. Make your listing as good as you possibly can. That's like the foundation for getting your products to sell. Then secondly, I run sponsored ads, and I run those sponsored ads until I make sales. Once I've made sales, then I run promotions because then I know the promotions will get more sales. Because if you've got sales, it's proved your listings optimized. And I just do those three techniques and ramp them up gradually over time, and that starts to cause an upward spiral to get your products to sell. This is how you get your products off the ground. Then once you've hit your products potential with those strategies, you can start looking at outside marketing techniques as well. So it's a myth. You don't have to know hundreds and hundreds of marketing techniques in the beginning. You can just pick the three basic ones and run with those. Then myth number five, everybody will copy your products and the Competition will crush you, and there's absolutely no hope for your product to stand out. Now, again, this is a big myth, and as always, I can usually understand why. These myths start at the end of the day. What is to stop somebody from going to China, finding the same manufacturer as you who produced your product, getting them to completely copy the thing that you got produced and imported and importing it themselves and competing with you? What's to stop them? Well, here's the thing that could happen to you. That's pretty much happened to me with a few of my products. But every single time somebody tries to copy your product, you can always do something to differentiate, to make your product stand out, to make it different. There's always going to be something you can do to differentiate on the marketplace. So here's a few things you can do if somebody copies your product, tries to offer the same thing you're offering. Number one, is to optimize your listing even more. So go into the listing, have a look at the copywriting on that listing. Make sure the title is really, really powerful title with tons of high traffic keywords, putting a benefit in there that really sets your product apart that customers are really looking for. The more you research about what your customers actually want, and the more you explain how your products have those qualities on your listings, the easier it's going to be for them to buy your product. Right? The more magnetized they will be to your product. So you do all of this research, look at other reviews of products, see what customers really want in your product, and make sure you make it clear that your product has that other sellers probably won't bother doing that much research. So even if you have a carbon copy of another product that's on the marketplace, better copywriting, better listing, you can make your product stand out. Another thing you can do is just really increase your brand presence. Amazon, launch a bunch of products, get your brand popular, get lots of reviews on all of your products. Then if somebody tries to copy you, it will be clear that they are the copycat. You're the original, they are the copycat. Also, what you can do is if someone's copying you, they got the exact same product. You can actually bundle a load of other products with your product. So now the listing you're on is completely different to the listing that your copycat competitor is selling on. You're bundling your product with a load of other stuff, maybe some products that are very similar or go well with what you're selling, and then instantly you set yourself apart. So there's just a few ideas of what you can do if someone copies your products. It's not the end of the world. At the end of the day, you want to set out to sell in areas of Amazon that aren't very competitive. But you will get some competition. But there are definitely ways to deal with it. And either way, as long as your product is on page one and there's a lot of revenue being generated in your niche, you'll still create a ton of profit even if you have a ton of copycats. So I hope you enjoyed me dispelling these myths. I hope if you were worried about one of these things and it was stopping you from going out there, creating a crazy business for yourself, upgrading your lifestyle, hitting your goals, I hope I've dispelled it for you and made things a little bit easier. Anything I can do to help you take more action, get further along in your journey, I'd always want to do that. So here's the thing. I want to give you a free course. Now. If you haven't got it yet, you definitely have to grab this. It's my Fast Start guide to selling on Amazon. So go to ecommercefreedom.com 15econcefreedom.com 15. That's the numbers 15 and you'll get the show notes for this episode, you'll get the transcript, and you'll get a link to my free 4 part fast start guide video course. We'll teach you how to set up your Amazon account, find some hot products, check that they're definitely going to sell, and send in that FBA shipment into your account. Also, there's a ton of other resources on that webpage as well waiting for you to help you on your journey. Thanks so much for listening today. If you haven't done so already. By the way, go check me out on YouTube. My account is Ecommerce Freedom. On there you'll be able to see my channel. I've got tons of videos on there uploading some new stuff soon as well. So go subscribe and and look, I can't wait to deliver you some more tips and tricks to build the ultimate business that you love to run. That's going to give you more freedom. Thanks so much for listening today and I'll catch you very, very soon.