Episode #24 - Is your product seasonal?

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, how's it going? It's Oli here. Very, very warm welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast. So in this episode, I want to talk to you a little bit about how to tell if your product is seasonal. And in this case, I want to walk you through an experience I had about 16 months ago, 18 months ago, with the product when I realized it wasn't seasonal a little bit too late. And what happened with that, how I overcame it and also how you can avoid that ever happening to you because you really don't want that experience. It's so easy to avoid. It's so avoidable. So let me talk you about this product, right? So this was an amazing product opportunity and I found it like any other product, right? I'm scouring through Amazon and I've got like a kitchen and home brand, right? So I've got a brand I sell on Amazon and most of the products surround kitchen and home. We also do some baby stuff and this particular product was to be used in the bathroom, right? So I noticed that the niche was perfect, right? I always talk about my smash hit product radar and that includes products that are very, very high demand, very low competition, products that are low hassle, so they're not going to break in shipping or cause you pain when you're shipping them to customers. And a gap in the marketplace. And this product had all of these things. The marketplace was, there was a lot of sales going on. There weren't too many sellers, not too many reviews. And there was some problems with the most popular products. I was like, okay, I can solve these problems, offer something better, something different. My product will stand out and the volume is there, so we'll get a ton of sales. So it was a really, really hot opportunity. So I actually imported my first batch in September of, I believe it was 2016 for this particular product and we got them sent into the Amazon warehouse. Now I was pretty confident it was going to sell, had a little bit capital behind me as well. So I wasn't, you know, it wasn't in the beginning of my journey. So my initial batch, or my test batch was relatively large, 500 units. And my aim was to make profit with this initial test batch. I wasn't just going to try and break even to validate the product and just to see if it worked. I Wanted to make profit. And long story short, it made a ton of profit. Like it did really, really well. And I think we got them into the warehouse. It was either late September or early October, shipped over by air because there wasn't too many of these products. And, you know, air shipping was cheaper. Much faster for us to just get it into the warehouse and get it to sell. So it was going crazy. This product was flying through the shelves, you know, 20, 25 sales a day, and things were looking awesome. And they sold really, really well throughout Christmas, January. And it got to the point where I was running out of stock and I was like, man, I've really got to get some more of these things and as soon as physically possible, right? Because I don't want to run out of stock and I want to keep the momentum going. And, you know, once you've got a decent private label product in, it pretty much sells almost by itself. You need to manage the marketing like 10, 15 minutes a day, check your pay per click, maybe do a few more promotions if you want to give it a boost, tweak the listing. But it's relatively cells in the background, you know, on autopilot. So I was, I want to get more of these in so I can keep the flow going. So I was talking to my supplier and I was trying to decide how many units I should order in order to save money, get a cheaper per unit cost and also increase my profit margins, right? So it's like, what's the threshold where it's going to be cheaper per unit so I could get more profit per sale. And they actually said that I ordered 500 last time if I wanted a significant discount, that I need to order 2,000 units. Right. And last time as well, I'd got the boxes for the product made in the UK and I'd got one part of the product from China, the other part from a warehouse in the uk. So it was like a bundled thing altogether and it was assembled in the UK and then sent into the warehouse. So I figured out that actually it was much cheaper to get the packaging made at the factory, order 2,000 units and then get the other product bundled with it in the UK and then sent on into Amazon. So I was really excited. I've been selling really, really well throughout the whole of the winter, from about October to January. And so I was like, yeah, I'm going to pull the trigger on this 2,000 units. And it was going to cost me about $20,000, including shipping and everything else. So this was my plan. I Was like, man, this can keep selling. It's going to be amazing. So I ordered the 2,000 units. They came on a boat, right, because we wanted cheaper shipping and just worked out that way. We had to wait like four or five weeks for it to arrive, sent it into the Amazon warehouse. Then once they arrived, we started to notice that the volume of the product wasn't quite as good as it was back in the winter. We realized, hang on a minute, this thing is slowing down. Something must have happened here that's affected it compared to how it was selling in the winter. And it's kind of crazy because, you know, the competition is the same, the levels are the same, the demand is still there, people still buying it. There's still a gap in the marketplace. We still fill the gap, offering a better product than everyone else. We bundled it with some other stuff and we were a premium price that we were charging more than everyone else. But it's because our product was better, that's why it was selling. So I was like, what is the thing that's affecting these sales? And then I had to think about it. I was like, what time of year do people usually use this product? I mean, just from a common sense perspective, I kind of realized, actually this product will probably be used more often in the winter, like when it's cold. So I was like, hmm, how can I test this theory? And I went on to a website called Google Trends, right? So this is what you can do if you want to check before you order 2,000 units of a product, seasonal or not, actually see proof that your product sells all year round, or if it only sells at a certain time of year. And so I typed it in and sure enough, there was a big spike from around about the autumn to the end of the winter, from around about September all the way till about February, March. That's when the products sold the most. And then the other months, the warmer months of the year in the uk, this product sold less. So I basically done all this stuff backwards, right? And I realized this after I imported a ton of products and I imported these at literally the worst possible period during the year. Now, luckily, I mean, it wasn't the end of the world. They still sold, right? Just not at the volume they were selling. So from a cash flow perspective, it was a bit annoying because, you know, I just spent 20 grand and I wasn't gonna get the money back as quick as possible. But that wasn't all my money at the time, so, you know, it was fine. And come September, they were selling really, really well again. And, you know, the problem corrected itself and now it's, you know, still one of my really, really hot performing products. So word of advice for you from experience. Before you import any product, go to Google Trends, type in the product and what you'll see is a graph, graph of the search volume on Google how many people have been searching for this product at different times of the year. So you can see like, you know, over the past five years there's been a spike in, in February. Well, then you'll know that if you do want to import this product, then definitely time it so you've got lots of stock around February. Now, some people say that you should avoid seasonal products altogether and just stick to evergreen products. Products where the line is flat and it sells, you know, January through to December because then you'll get consistent sales all year round. And, you know, that's awesome. And to be honest with you, if you can find products like that, it makes your life easier. However, don't be scared to do seasonal products. Just the key thing with like any aspect of business is knowing the truth, right? Having the data available first before making these decisions and making your decisions based on evidence rather than things like hunches and like praying that it's going to work. Right? So this is one of those things you can do to get more data to get to understand the truth of how your products could work. Then you can be prepared. You know exactly what's going to happen, they're not going to be nasty surprises and you can make an informed decision on how many units to order, when to order, how to time it and all that other good stuff. So I hope this cautionary tale has been helpful. Hope you use that tip next time you're thinking about importing something. And yeah, hopefully I'll catch you in the next episode. Cheers. Take care and I'll catch you soon.