Episode #28: 9 Steps For The Perfect Private Label Launch

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 Ollie here. Very warm. Welcome to the E Commerce Freedom Podcast. So in this episode, what I'd love to do is give you a bird's eye view of how I launch private label products. Nine Steps to the Perfect Private Label Product Launch. Now, the reason I'm doing this really is just to make things super clear so you can form for yourself maybe a business plan along the timeline for the action steps you need to take over the next couple months if you want to get a product launched. Now. There's a few steps in my method that I apply, that I've been applying in my business for years now, that I've been teaching other people to apply for years. And you might not have heard of these steps before. In fact, you might find that my methods are slightly different to other people's when it comes to getting products launched. And here's why, here's why mine's a little bit different. I focus solely minimizing risk when it comes to launching products. What I really don't want you to do is go out there, find a product you think that's going to be really hot, and then import, say five hundred or a thousand units and send them into the warehouse and hope for the best. A lot of people teach this stuff and a lot of people actually do this stuff in practice from day one in their Amazon businesses. And the truth of the matter is, sometimes it works really well. The products perform, they're unbelievably profitable, they start to snowball, they get rapid amounts of sales, loads of success. But sometimes, and actually I think more often than not, the products aren't a success. Something goes wrong. Maybe the import is problematic, maybe the product that was chosen wasn't really as good as it should have been. Maybe you missed a trick or something. You miss a piece of criteria, something that's kind of almost like a nuance that you wouldn't notice unless you had some experience and therefore the product falls flat. Well, I really don't want that to happen to you. And that's why my process of launching private labels ensures that you move forward slowly and you start small. So let me walk you through the nine steps I take to launch private labels and hopefully this will really put things into perspective for you. So, number one, step one is to conduct Your product research. So here's what I do to find hot products to sell on Amazon. Now, I always look for products that meet the four requirements of my smash hit products radar. This is like the key thing for whether a product gets launched in my business or whether I don't touch it and I still click it has to meet the elements of my radar. Now I'm just going to skim over these, what these are and not going into too much detail, but if you want to get access to a resource that will help you learn what these four elements are, how to find products that meet all the criteria, what software to use, what steps to do, take what to type into the Amazon marketplace and all those really detailed steps of how to find these products. Then go to ecommercefreedom.com 28. You'll get to the show notes of this episode and there's a link to my handbook where you can buy it. It's like $7 and it walks you through the exact processes. And there's some bonus videos where I walk you through how I personally research products. But really, long story short, you want to use my radar. So the radar is basically four elements. High demand, low competition, low hassle, and you want to add value to the marketplace. Right. So what it means is you want to find products where they're already selling really, really well, but there aren't too many other competitors selling alongside you. Now when people begin their journey looking for products to sell on Amazon, quite often they get stuck with the product research phase and they're, you know, applying all the criteria. They're using my handbook, they're looking for products and you know, it's, it's good that they're getting started, but sooner or later they find they just can't find many products. The reason why is because they're being too strict with the criteria, trying to stick to it. Exactly. And also they're looking over potential opportunities they're, they haven't quite spotted yet. So rather than falling into this trap, here's what I recommend you do with product research. Go out there, make a list of 20 terrible products on the spreadsheet. Now why would I ask you to find 20 terrible products? Well, have you ever tried to come up with an idea for something? Maybe when you're trying to start a band, when you were younger, you wanted to think of the name of the band. Maybe you were trying to think of a name to name your company. When you're selling on Amazon, you're trying to think of a name. What's the first thing that happens when you try and come up with ideas, you have a mind blank, right? Quite often the reason why we have mind blanks is because we're trying to come up with the perfect idea straight out of the bat. Therefore, what happens is you don't allow the natural process of ideas to develop to enable you to wade through all the terrible ideas that need to emerge for you to then end up at the good idea that you actually stay with. It's exactly the same with product research. You have to wade through tons of terrible products first and look over them to find the diamond in the rough. This is why I do it. Go out there, find 20 terrible products that kind of sort of meet the criteria. You can see there's a bit of demand, but you know, okay, there's way too many reviews, there's way too much competition. Or maybe one product, you know, there's not too much demand, but there's really low competition. Maybe one product looks like it's going to be a massive hassle, but there's loads of demand. 20 terrible products that barely meet the criteria, put them onto a spreadsheet. Once you've done that, what you'll find is maybe one, two or three of these terrible products will actually be quite good. Right? I give this task to my clients all the time. I say go out there, find 20 terrible products, put them down completely, you know, miss the criteria of each one, and then highlight three that you think are the best of your bad bunch of products. Usually those three are actually quite reasonable. If you can't find three and say one of them fits or none of them fit, go out there and find another 20, rinse and repeat this process until you have three products that look like they could be good opportunities. So the number one thing that I look for when I'm trying to figure out if a product is a good opportunity is the revenue level. Right. Generally, the number one thing I'm concerned about is, does this product bring in money? So if you've got three products where the top three sellers of each product in the niche do at least three grand a month in revenue, generally I'd say they're pretty, pretty fair enough opportunities for products. So that's your product research. That's step one. Quite a lot of stuff in there. Now, as I mentioned before, go out there, grab my handbook. It will give you everything you need to find products. You may already have it at this point. If so, go into your inbox, dig it out, find it, download it again, and read through it. Read through the steps, carry out this process and you should now have three products potential that you can launch. Do they have to be perfect products? They have to meet the criteria in every way, shape or form? No, here's why. Step two is to import a test batch. So we're not going to go from product research to importing a thousand units and gambling, say £5,000 or $5,000 on a massive importance. We're gonna import a test batch in between. So what? A test batch is a very small amount of stock imported from China to see if our product has a chance to succeed. That's all it is. So we're talking maybe 50 units from a Chinese supplier. Get them in, get them shipped over, send them in to Amazon, see if they work. Now, we want to do this for two reasons. Number one, we want to validate the product. Is it going to sell right? Do people care about this thing? Number two, we want to check whether we're adding value to the marketplace. Is the product valuable? Do people care about the way that we have differentiated? Have we added something cool? Is there a reason for people to buy our version of the product versus all the other products on the marketplace? So we want to do these two things with our test batch. So what I recommend you do is go to AliExpress. You can order, say, one unit of any product from Aliexpress, or you can order 50, same as dhgate. Fantastic website to get wholesale stock and of course, Alibaba. Message customers, suppliers on Alibaba. And you can negotiate small batches if you persist like enough and try hard enough. So I recommend you message at least five suppliers per product, right? So you say you've got three products, message five suppliers for each one. 15 emails sent out to all different suppliers. Ask them for 50 units. Sooner or later you'll find a product that looks like you can offer something valuable to the marketplace. Remember, at this point, what we're trying to do is figure out whether the product we've chosen looks like you can get success with. Right? We want to know if it's really going to work. The only way to make a product work is to add value to the marketplace, to offer something better, something different to what's already available. So from the three suppliers you've chosen, or the three products and the five suppliers for each, you want to figure out which of your three products you can offer something better or something different to the marketplace. There's loads of ways of doing this. Maybe you could offer a new design that isn't available yet. Maybe you could Offer a bundle, right? Offer your product with a complementary product that comes with it in a bundle. You've added value by doing that. Maybe your product is better constructed than the other products in the marketplace. From chatting with suppliers, you can find ways to add value. Then once you've got a good quote, you've got a product you can add value with. You can ask the supplier to ship you these 50 units with express shipping. This is very, very, very important and really valuable. If you can get a product shipped to you with express shipping, this means maybe a carrier like FedEx, DHL, someone like that, it can arrive within five days. You don't have to use a freight forwarder and it can be shipped from door to door. So from the manufacturer directly to your doorstep. This is unbelievable because you can get stuff shipped over really quickly without having to worry too much about all the complexities of, you know, getting a freight forwarder or using Sea shipping or any of that stuff. And you can get stuff shipped over super fast shipped into Amazon. Test it quickly. Usually when I do test batches with my clients, I aim for them to complete the test batch in less than four weeks. That's get your product, get quotes from suppliers, get them shipped over, get it to sell within four weeks. I've just recently had a customer who sold all 50 units of his test batch within 15 days. 50 units sold in 15 days. Very good sign. Right now he's going to go over and import another hundred and just keep importing more and more of the product. So that's step number two, test batch. Now, very important thing to note. And I'll touch more on this later. With the test batch, we're not looking to make profit. Instead we're actually looking to gather data. We want to know, does the way we're adding value to the marketplace work? Do people respond to it? Do people care about the fact that we've bundled it with a certain product? Do people care about the variation we've added or the new design or the better constructed material or whatever it is? Right? That's all data that we need to know to figure out if it's a good opportunity. How much can you charge for the product? Right? How much can you charge if you've added more value, can you charge a higher price? That's important data. Want to answer all of these questions? How much do we have to spend in pay per click advertising to get the product to sell? That's important data. We're going to use this data later when we import our bigger batch. So once You've imported your test batch, you've got 50 units on Express shipping over to you. Move on to step three. Create your listing for your product. So when you're creating a listing, you always want to focus on the big four big four elements of a Amazon product listing. What are they? Photos. Title bullets. Description. Right. These are the four things people care about on your listing. These are the four things you can edit on your listing. This is what separates products that do 50 pounds a month in sales and products that do 10,000 pounds a month in sales. The listing is everything when it comes to Amazon. It's such a cutthroat marketplace, so competitive, there's so many sellers. If your listing isn't optimized, if it doesn't truly sell the value, the real value of your product, you have no chance. So get it right. So how do you get a listing right? Well, the whole point of your listing is to sell your customer on why your product adds value to the marketplace. That's the only purpose of your listing. It doesn't have to look pretty, doesn't have to be written in beautiful prosecution. It doesn't have to be complicated in any way. It just has to sell the customer on why your product adds value to the marketplace. Why is it better? Why is it different to your competitors? Why should you charge the price you're charging? Why are they going to be so satisfied with the thing they're buying? So what you have to do is convey this in every single element of your listing. The photos. If there's something incredibly cool about your product that the other products don't have, it should be very clearly visible in your photos, right? Your title. You should have keywords in your title that people are likely to type in to want to find your product. You should also include in your title the thing that separates your product to everybody else's. What is it that makes your product better? Remember, the title and the photo is the two things that people see in the search results that that gets you the clicks. If these two things aren't eye catching, if they don't have some kind of edge, you're not even going to get any clicks. And people aren't even going to read your description and your bullets. Your description should paint a picture in the customer's mind of what the product is going to do for them. What benefits is it going to give them? How is it going to genuinely improve their lives? Get them emotional, right? Get them feeling emotional about your product, even if it's something very arbitrary, right? Like a spatula in some way, shape or form, this spatula could genuinely improve someone's life. Convey that in the description. The bullets should be eye catching. You should be hitting on benefits, features of your product and again, things that the customer care about, ways you're adding value to the marketplace, and also ways your product is different to everybody else's. Remember, people don't read product descriptions from top to bottom like a book. They skim up and down. Once they find something they care about, they'll read very much into that thing they care about. Let's say a spatula is your product. The customer. You happen to find out that the customer really cares about the spatula having a strong handle. They don't care whether it's certain type of plastic, right? They don't care whether it's ergonomically shaped. They don't care if it's made for professional chefs. All they care about is it has a strong handle. You better have a bullet point in your listing that says extra strong handle. And you better go into a lot of detail about why the handle was so strong. How are you so confident? What tests have been done to prove that? How can you prove that your handle is stronger than other products handles? Right? That's what you want to do with every single bullet. Catch their eye and then go into more detail. Catch their eye, then go into more detail. So hopefully once you've created your listing, it should be very eye catching. In fact, one of the best ways to find out things that customers care about to do with products on Amazon is by reading the reviews of the other products. If you want to find out how to add value to the marketplace, look at the negative reviews of the other products. Sometimes people will say this spatula handle is weak as hell and it annoys me how weak it is. One star. Now you know people care about that. People might say, this blanket is way too thin. I was shivering all night long. Now you know they want a thicker blanket. When anybody has the energy to write a one star review about something that is a gold mine for you because you know that's something they care about. So therefore, if you provide that thing successfully, new customers will care about it too. They'll buy your product and they will love it. So use these things to figure out how to add value to your product and then really emphasize them in your listing. So that's point number three. Create your listing Number four, sell your test batch. Easier said than done, unless you followed all the previous points. If you have done great product research, found a product that Meets all the elements of the Smash IT product radar. If you have a test batch imported 50 units and they come quickly, if you have a great listing, then selling your test batch is actually relatively easy. Here's why. All you have to do is send your products into fba. So create a shipment in your Amazon account. You can use the listing you've just built. Then you send the products into Amazon. They'll pick them up from your house with UPS and deliver them into your account in the warehouse. Then you run Amazon sponsored ads campaigns. So I would run an automatic campaign and a manual campaign. Test them alongside each other to get your products to sell. The question is, do they sell or do they not? If they don't sell, then there's no demand for the product. Or maybe you've chosen some kind of variation that nobody cares about, or maybe your listing isn't optimized enough. But run the advertising, spend maybe 5 pounds a day, 10 pounds a day, whatever you can afford, whatever you can budget and then see what happens. One thing I always recommend when I'm helping people sell their test batches is when you run adverts advertising. Leave it for two weeks, right? Don't just turn it on for two days, not get any sales, freak out that you've spent, say, you know, £20 on ads and turn the thing off because it might just be about to optimize the campaign and then you know you've cancelled it. So run it for two weeks. Sometimes it can take a while for the ads to build momentum for the automatic campaign to figure out what keywords you need. And it's very important to let it run for a long period of time. Another thing you can do at this point is actually get some reviews for your product. So maybe get your friends to buy it, get them to leave reviews. This will help you to sell more units with the advertising. You can also test the price at this point, right? Remember before I said the whole point of a test batch is to get data about your product. How much can you charge? Right? Do customers care about the way you've added value to the marketplace? Do they respond to it? You're testing all your hunches. One of your hunches is how much can I charge? So I would usually start off by undercharging for your product when you turn on your advertising and then gradually increase the price over time, right? Because there's going to be a sweet spot where you make decent amount of profit, decent amount of volume of sales per day. That's going to be the Price you probably want to charge. So leave it for a couple of weeks. See the data. How much can you get away with charging? Where's the sweet spot price where you're selling lots of units and you're making lots of profit? Now, at this point, you're going to know pretty quickly whether the product is validated or not. If you sold even just one, your test batch has been a success. Because if you can sell a product without a fully optimized listing, without, you know, doing promotions, without spending tons of time optimizing your advertising, then think how many units you're going to sell when you have all that stuff, when you have reviews, when you have promotions, when you have your product on page one of the search results. If you can just sell one, it proves that somebody out there cares about your product. And therefore, if somebody does, other people will too. So hopefully you'll sell one. And if you do, keep the advertising running and you'll sell more, right? Sometimes the test batches sell really fast. Sometimes they take a while. Point is, if it sells, it's a success. Now if it doesn't sell, then you have to try and figure out why. Why didn't it sell? Was it the product you chose? Maybe go back, revisit, have a look at the niche itself. Is there enough demand? Is there too much competition? Think about, did you add enough value to the marketplace? One thing you can always tweak if your product didn't sell is your photos, your title and your price. They're the three easiest things to change to get quick sales. If all is lost and you've been trying for ages and your product just will not sell, maybe it's time to try another test batch. I don't think this has ever happened to anyone I've taught. Every single person I've helped has sold at least some products in their test batch. But it could happen. If it does, don't sweat. You haven't spent too much. Only a few hundred pounds. Few hundred dollars. This is why we test small. Go ahead, find another 20 terrible products, whittle it down to three and go through steps one, two, three and four again. But if your test batch is sold, you can confidently move on to step five, which is get quotes from suppliers for a larger order. So go back to your supplier, see if they can provide you with maybe 300 units, maybe 500 units. See how much it will cost. For that amount, you'll probably find it's cheaper. If you ordered from Aliexpress, you may have to switch to an Alibaba supplier at this point. Nothing wrong with that. The only thing is you may have to get a sample from them before ordering 300 units. Because it's a new supplier, you want to check the quality of the product and you just want to check that they are good to work with. And a sample is a great way of doing that. So get quotes, figure out everything that you might need, including packaging, other stuff like that. Maybe you want to put your logo on at this time and just try and keep the way that you added value to the marketplace. If you say, you know, had a reinforced handle on your spatula, right. Obviously you want to do that same thing again with the product that you order a large quantity of. You want to do everything the same because the test batch is proof that what you did worked. That's number five. Get quotes. Number six. Step number six, Create a plan to make profit on paper. Here's the thing. Anyone can import 300 units of a private label product and get it to sell. Very rarely do people import 500 units of a private label and get them to sell profitably. Do you know why that is? It's because they don't have a plan that works on paper. If you don't have a plan to make profit that works on paper, it's never going to work in practice. You're essentially gambling, you're praying that it's going to work. Really. We want to make this stuff work on paper first and then carry it out in practice. So what does this mean? Well, it means writing it all the numbers down, everything. So let me go through the list of stuff that you want to take into account when you create your plan to make profit on paper. And you can check you've got all of it. Number one, the price you want to sell the product at, right? This should be the sweet spot that you tested during your test batch. The price where you're making tons of profit and tons of sales. Right? If you charge too much, you'll make loads of profit, but not much sales. If you charge too little, you make tons of sales but not too much profit. Be somewhere in the middle where there's a sweet spot. That's what you want to charge. Let's say that's £20, right? Well, once you've got your price, you want to take into account all your costs. So they include your cost per unit for the larger order. So you've got your quote for 300 units or whatever, you know how much that costs. But per unit, say it's five pounds per unit, for example, Amazon Fees how much does it cost for FBA fees plus referral fees plus storage fees to sell one of these products? Shipping how much does it cost to ship the product from China to you, to the Amazon warehouse or to the prep center, whichever way you want to do it. Customs Import, VAT or U.S. import tax packaging costs Prep center costs if you want to use a prep center Pay per Click Advertising how much did it cost to sell one unit of your product in the test batch phase with pay per click advertising promotions are you going to give some of your product away for free? I'd Recommend Giving away 10% of your product for free, maybe 20% if you want to figure out how much it's going to cost for each product. So that's the cost per unit plus the FBA fee. Once you've got all of this written down, all the numbers written down, you should know exactly what your profit margin should be. In theory, when you make a sale, if there's still enough profit margin after all of these costs, then you can go ahead and order a larger batch. So do you see why we need this data now? We need to know the price you can charge. We need to know if things even going to sell at all. We need to know all of these, the answers to all of these questions. So after you've got all this data you have to ask yourself honestly, does it look like I can make a profit on this? If you can move on to step seven which is reorder a larger batch. So go to the supplier Alibaba usually ask for the order. You will want to ship it using your own freight forwarder. I wouldn't recommend letting the Chinese supplier handle the shipping. I would get your own freight forwarder. Just Google Freight forwarder. You'll find some near you. You can use them to organize all the shipping, all the customs forms, everything. Get it shipped over to you safely. I would iron out all of the details, packaging. You want your logo on the product if you can. You want every single detail sorted with the supplier. Place the order. Usually you'll pay something like 30, 70 terms. So you'll pay 30% before the order is created, 70% just before they ship it to you. It's usually how it works. Step number eight Do a proper launch. So what you want to do is optimize your listing more. Make it even better. Have a look at every single element of your listing. How can it be improved? How can you improve the pictures? How can you improve the title? How can you improve the bullets? How can you improve the description. If you've got some reviews at this point, people are saying what they really, really like about your product or maybe really don't like, use that as ammunition, right? If someone says that your product serves a certain benefit that you didn't know it was going to serve, add that into your description. I was once selling a pillow on my account and someone said in the reviews, this is amazing. It's helped my chronic back pain so much. I was like, that's interesting. I had no idea that was going to be a benefit of the product. So I then went ahead and added some information about how I think this could benefit you if you have chronic back pain, etc, etc, started to realize that actually this product really helped people who had chronic back pain and a lot of the customers did have this problem. So because I had written that on the description, it sold them even more on why my product was so valuable and increased my sales kind of thing. You can only know once you've got a few reviews and a bit of feedback from your customers. So use that as ammunition when you're optimizing your listing. Then again, run pay per click advertising. Remember, when we're marketing a product on Amazon, we want to do it in this order. Number one, optimize the listing. Number two, run pay per click advertising to see if our listing is optimized. If you can't make sales with pay per click advertising, there's something wrong with your listing. So go back and tweak it till you make sales. Once you've got a few sales with pay per click advertising, then go ahead and do some promotions. You can run something like AMZ tracker, right? Amztracker.co.uk is great for doing vouchers. Or you can use Amazon's own voucher giveaway system. If you just go into your account, there should be like promotions vouchers tab in there somewhere and you can give away certain amount of your products for free every week. Great thing is when you do this, it skyrockets the position of your product up the Amazon search results organically so you get more organic sales. Works really well in tandem with your pay per click advertising. And remember, on Amazon, sales create sales, right? When you make a sale, it increases your product search ranking, right? You get closer to the top of the search results. That therefore allows more people to see it, then more people buy it and then it gets even higher in the search results and then more people see it, more people buy and so on and so forth. So if you're doing promotions, pay per click and getting organic sales. Sooner or later, your product is going to get more and more sales per day. And you get to that magic 10 sales per day point, you should be able to ramp this up and increase this snowball within 30 days with a normal successful private label product launch. Now, every single time you make a sale, you should be messaging your customers, trying to get reviews. More reviews you get, the better. Keep doing this. And every time you get a review, use it as ammunition to improve your listing. That's step number eight, proper private label launch. Then step number nine, reorder before you run out. Here's the thing. Once your product has started to snowball, once everything's working the way it should, public advertising is generating sales, promotions is boosting you up. You're getting organic sales, you're getting say, 10 sales per day. If you run out of stock, what's going to happen is all of that momentum that your product has got is going to be reset. You're going to have to do another launch to get it back to where it was. And launches can be kind of expensive. You have to give away products, right? You have to spend a lot on advertising, have to kind of jumpstart the promotion of your product. Be much better if you could just continue the momentum it already had. And then you give away less, you spend less away on pay per click, and you just continue the momentum. So you really want to reorder before the stock runs out. So let's say you got 500 units in the warehouse. Then if you're selling five units a day, you know that, that in 100 days your stock's going to run out. So then you have to figure out how long does it take for your supplier to produce and send you the stock. It might take, you know, 20 days lead time for them to create the product and then another 10 for them to actually send it to you. So you're going to have to get the product ordered 30 days ahead of time to make sure it arrives well before your products run out of stock. So that's the first thing to consider. Then also, you want to manage your cash flow because for the next order, you want to figure out how much you can afford to actually order. At this point, you might be down in terms of money, right? Because you're waiting for your products to sell. So you want to try and figure out how long it's going to take for you to get positive cash flow. How long is it going to take for you to make enough profit for the reorder. Do you have spare cash that you can put into the business to order more stock in time. How many units can you afford to order? I recommend you have a look at how to put together a cash flow projection spreadsheet and actually figure out how long it's going to take for you to order the next batch and how many units you can order. Next thing is, if you order more units you could probably save money. You could probably order them with Sea shipping, you could probably get a discount on the cost per unit and there's loads of benefits to ordering more stock, but if you don't have the cash to actually do that, then obviously it's not a good idea. Plus you might want to order more products and test other products alongside this product. So therefore you want to put aside a bit of money for that. So these are all things it's very, very important to consider as you're looking to grow your business. Alright, so these are the nine steps to a private label launch. Hope you found this really valuable, really insightful. Hope you've picked up a few things that you know you didn't know already. And as always, if you're interested in getting some help to actually put this plan into action, go to info.ecommerce freedom forward/applications and you can book in a free call with my team. So we can actually help you to get moving, get some momentum and build a business launching private label products. All right, thank you so much for listening to this episode. Hope it was really, really helpful. If you, you know, really enjoyed this episode and you want more episodes like it, shoot a message to support@ecommercefreedom.com Send us some feedback. We'd love to hear from you and maybe I can record some more episodes like this about various other topics. Thanks so much for listening. Take care. Keep believing and I'll catch you soon.