[Podcast] 3 Ways To Go Beyond Amazon

Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. So this week on the E Commerce Freedom Podcast, I thought we'd do something slightly different and film it, right? So you can also watch this over at YouTube if you like. Just go to YouTube, search for my name, Oliver Daniel, and you'll find the exact same episode as a video as well. So I'm getting video and audio for these episodes just in case, I don't know, you want something to watch instead of just listening. So this week we're going to be talking about other ways of making money besides selling products on Amazon. What other options do you have later down the road when maybe you want to expand and sell your products on other platforms? Maybe you want to use this business as a springboard for other opportunities, or maybe you decide you don't want to run a business anymore and you want to do something else. What other opportunities could selling on Amazon actually provide for you? What doors could it open up? And I think by listening to this episode, you might get some pretty insightful ideas about just how amazing it is when you do have some success on the Amazon platform. That is bigger than just having a few products that are selling well. Actually, this thing can enrich your life in many other ways as well. So first of all, I want to tell you about the number one way to expand, right? Let's say, look, first of all, you shouldn't worry about any of this stuff until you make six figures on Amazon, minimum, right? And by that I mean ideally six figure profits, right? In fact, six figure revenues on Amazon is the absolute minimum you should be aiming to make as like an initial milestone. So 10k a month in sales, if you're making less than that, you don't really have a business because the profit margins on Amazon, a lot of people say they're 33% profit margins, 33% profit, 33% product cost, 33% goes to fees. But actually, what you'll find a lot of cases is a lot of Amazon business owners have lower profit margins than that. Some make barely any profit at all because they're managing their businesses terribly. Others, you know, make 10%, 15%, 20, 25. And if we're being conservative, that's actually quite a good goal to go for, right? And you know, that being the case, therefore, obviously you would want to make at least 10k a month because then you make at least 2k a month profit and have a real income from the business and then you can expand to whatever level you want, right? So we want to get there first. And you shouldn't be thinking about other platforms in any way, shape or form until you've got there. In fact, building a business on Amazon and getting to six figures, it really isn't that difficult. Like in terms of like the business world, you know, Amazon's a very simple business. It's a simple business model. If you compare it to, you know, launching a software or something, where you have to employ a team of developers and beta test and have this thing called a burn rate where you choose how much money or estimate how much money you're going to spend each month on the development, they actually call it a burn rate. It's usually like 30 to 40 grand a month, something like that. They flat out say, yeah, you're basically going to be burning cash for like the first two years, right? That's the difficult business, buying stuff cheap and selling it for a profit on Amazon, much, much, much easier, right? So get there first and that should be your number one goal. But then obviously it's good to think about the future as well. It's good to think about, you know, what's next. And there's many avenues. So the number one, the number one way that most people decide to expand once they've got a six figure Amazon business is by selling the same products on other platforms. Okay? Selling the same products on other platforms. So there's one really good way of doing this where you open a Shopify account, okay? And basically it's really simple. You get a template. I've done it before. And Shopify is just a great tool really. They give you templates, you can choose ecommerce templates and you get your products that are selling on Amazon. You list them on your Shopify store, you run traffic to it. And when you get sales, you can actually get Amazon to ship the products to the Shopify customers and you can automate this entire process. As soon as you get a sale, you automatically get FBA to ship the products to customers. So that's one way you can begin to expand. And you know, the good thing is if you have say 2,000 units of the product in the warehouse already to sell on Amazon, I mean, selling it on Shopify is easy because click a couple of buttons and you're selling it on both platforms right now. Another thing you can do is you can actually get a separate fulfillment company, separate fulfillment service to do this stuff for you as well. So you can get someone like Shipbob, who, Google Shipbob, you can actually get them to fulfill the products for you instead of Amazon, which can be a bit better in some ways because you get a little bit more control. You don't have to deal with Amazon's policies and stuff. And I think it can actually work out a bit cheaper, although you will have to do the maths to verify that in your situation. But yeah, that can be an amazing way to expand. And then now you have an Amazon business. You also have a Shopify business. So for some reason your listing on Amazon gets compromised or if your account gets suspended or if anything were to happen, maybe the rules change, maybe the fees increase or whatever, now you have another avenue, another stream of income to continue making money. You can keep going even though Amazon isn't working out. That's one way you can expand and that can lead to whole hosts of other opportunities. If you're selling on Shopify now, you can build up an entire brand. You can keep your customers contact information, you can keep their email addresses, which means now you can get into email marketing, which is the holy grail of cash online. When you have someone's email, it's the most incredible thing ever. The reason you're probably listening or watching this podcast, because I have your email so I can communicate with you, I can send you cool updates, content offers, things like that. So you can have this kind of relationship with your customers. And you can build a whole ecosystem around being in constant communication with your customers. And that's something you can't do with Amazon because obviously they want to keep hold of the customers. When you sell on their platform, you're serving them rather than getting your own customers that you can keep. So it's good to transition to that at some point because then, who knows, you could sell digital products alongside your physical products. You could offer other things, you could go into affiliate offers to send to your email list. Endless. The amount of stuff you can do when you have control of your customer base. So that's idea number one. Number two is if you wanted to, you could go into some kind of coaching. If you've got success, like real success selling on Amazon, maybe you're doing six figures, then what's to stop you teaching people how to do it? If you have a skill which is extremely valuable and it's changed your life like it did for me, then you have the option to charge people for your knowledge, for your information. That's something you could do in addition to the Amazon selling. And that could be a way for you to have an additional stream of income to support the Amazon business. You know, that's something you can do. That's certainly what I've done and I get so much fulfillment from it. Like I, you know, the feeling when someone gets results because you've helped them is, is very different to just selling a couple random private labels on Amazon, right? It's, it's a whole new experience, right? And you can't get that from an E commerce business. So yeah, if that's what you want. I mean, some people never ever, ever want to coach, right? They like it be their worst nightmare having coaching clients and that's fine too, right? But if it's something you're interested in, then that's certainly another avenue. And then finally another thing which might be relevant for you is that if you have built a six figure, multiple six figure Amazon business and this has worked out really well, then the amount of skills that you would have picked up along the way just make you a way more valuable person economically. It just makes you so much more valuable. Think of all the things you have to learn and master in order to get your Amazon business off the ground. Number one, product research. The amount of companies out there who need to research new products and need help entering into new niches and finding gaps in marketplaces. You know, it's unbelievable. If you have that knowledge and that skill set of how to do that, all of a sudden you become way more employable. Equally sourcing. If you can communicate with suppliers, if you can negotiate, if you can build relationships, you know, if you can do that for your own company, then you can do that for other people's companies as well. Who knows, you could be a freelancer for sourcing products. You could work for a sourcing agency, you could get a job sourcing products for other companies. Also marketing, right? To get stuff to sell on Amazon, you have to learn advertising, you have to learn copywriting, you have to be good at visual stuff. Not necessarily photography, but graphic, a little bit of graphic design, or at least outsourcing it, a little bit SEO, a bit of keyword research, things like that. You know, all this stuff has to be in place for your products to sell. And if you can say to someone, look, this is the result I got from my marketing skill, then it's much more likely they're going to want to hire you than someone who's just done a course on it and hasn't got any black and white proof to what they do works because ultimately in the job marketplace, right, companies want people who can get results. It's the end of the day. That's it, isn't it? I Mean, if someone's going to pay you whatever, four grand a month, then you better be making the company 20 grand a month for it to even be worth you being in that position. Because after taxes and all their other expenses, like, they don't just have employees for fun, right? They're doing this for a reason. So, so if you're more employable because you have black and white proof, your stuff gets results because you had a business, all of a sudden you're just unbelievably more employable. So here are some ideas. This is some stuff you could do beyond Amazon. And to me, this makes Amazon selling a way more exciting opportunity. And sometimes as you're going through building the business and going through some of the hurdles that you will encounter, sometimes from as early as setting up the account, sometimes as early as that, you'll run into roadblocks to go through those things. Sometimes you'll feel a little bit disheartened and you'll be like, you know, is it really worth doing all this? You'll be thinking, you know, it is tough, right? Having a business, right? Of course it's a challenge. And knowing what could happen next and knowing the doors that this could open for you, to me, that makes the whole thing way more exciting. And I had absolutely no idea of all the things that I could do next after my business began to take off. It's crazy. It changes everything. In fact, there's one more thing I have to mention that, yeah, it is more powerful than any of those three things I mentioned. This is one thing that Amazon, if you have a successful business, that it will do for you, that you really didn't expect. And that is, it transforms your sense of self esteem and self worth. When you see a business go from nothing to all of a sudden you're making a grand a month profit and then two grand a month, then four grand a month, ten grand a month beyond. It does something to your sense of self belief. I think that in itself opens up more doors than any of the other stuff I've mentioned before. Because when you realize what you're really capable of through building a business like this, and you persist and you have to hustle, you have to learn new skills, you have to deal with new challenges, you have to do self development. All this stuff like when you go through that and come out the other side, you've got an income, got a business, you start thinking, well, what else am I capable of? What else can I do, right? You start thinking of other things you didn't think you were capable of other things that you thought would be too hard or that weren't possible based on old beliefs that you had which were installed probably by other people around you. And all of a sudden you start looking at them in a different way. Oh, maybe I can go and take this opportunity, right? Maybe I can try this other thing that I didn't think I was capable of. Maybe I am better than I thought I was. Generally, I think that is, to me, the most powerful shift that's happened since the business took off. So if you want to get started, go to ecommercefreedom.com go to the top of the page and you'll see a link for an Amazon accelerator call. You can fill out a quick form, have a chat with my team and I can help you get started and build this business and we can answer your questions, come up with some goals, figure out how to hit them, and, you know, give it a year. Who knows what could happen this time in 2021. In fact, by the way, now is one of the best times to get started because we're just about to head into quarter four. We're about to see an absolute spike in sales. And that's just an amazing feeling when you're getting your business started. So it couldn't be a better time to get moving. And yeah, there's also some links in the description of this video if you're watching on YouTube that will allow you to learn more. And if you're not watching on YouTube, if you're listening, go to ecommercefreedom.com there's tons of links at the top, top of the page to help you along your way. All right, thanks for listening, watching, and I'll catch you very soon.