Selling Private Labels withou FBA

Hey, how's it going?

It's Ollie here.

Welcome to the Ecommerce Freedom Podcast. Before we dive in with today's episode, I've got two cool resources for you. The first one is my new E Commerce Q and A group on Facebook. So in this group, the point is, you ask questions in the Facebook group and I answer them with daily videos, okay? So you can get your questions answered.

Really, really, really quick.

It's a great resource. If you go to ecommercefreedom.com and look at the top of the page, you'll see a button for the Q and A group. Click on that, it will take you.

To the Facebook group.

Second resource I got for you is an Amazon accelerator call.

So what I'd love to do with you is talk about your goals, talk.

About where you are now, and talk about the stuff that could prevent you from hitting your goals right together on a strategy session, we will come up with a plan for you to replace your income with an Amazon business.

If you'd like to book a call.

Where we can do this, go to ecommercefreedom.com, look at the top of the page and click Amazon Accelerator Call. You'll be taken to a very short application page. You can fill that in on the next page. You should be able to book your call. All right, hope you really enjoy the episode.

Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. So, had a lot of fun on yesterday's product research masterclass. I hope you were there. I hope you enjoyed it. And yeah, we got loads of good feedback. Tons of people showed up and I think some of you got a lot more clarity on how to find products. Now, if you missed it or you're still not sure how to find private label products and niches and how to do product research, make sure you go to the group, Facebook group, Ollie's Ecommerce Q and A group, and go to the announcements at the top of the page and you'll see some resources to help you get clear on how to find hot products. So today we've got some great questions from quite a few people. And a couple of these questions revolve around Amazon Australia, which is awesome. There's a lot of people realizing that Amazon is open in Australia recently. You can sell on the platform now, and it's starting to grow and gain popularity. So Dale Jackman asks, what is your opinion on relation to using Amazon in Australia for an E commerce business? So here's the thing about Amazon Australia, right? It's a new marketplace. So what that means is there's huge pros to entering a new marketplace and there's also some cons, right? There's some benefits and there's some things you need to be concerned about. For example, early adopters in any new marketplace have the opportunity to establish themselves in that marketplace, alright? So you get the chance to be one of the private label sellers in Amazon Australia who has been there from the start. And if you start to gather sales and reviews on your products now, then customers will go to you in future because you have way more reviews, way more social proof on your products compared to all the other new sellers that come into the marketplace in a couple years time. So there's a lot of opportunity there. I mean, you will probably be able to enter niches with products, you know, without adding too much value with your product because there's less competition and you will make sales. If you look at it say maybe eight years ago, Amazon America, right, Amazon usa, it was easier to launch a private label product. I mean, you could pretty much just slap a private label or anything, chuck it on Amazon. As long as there was a bit of demand, you could get some sales and you could have a great margin. Then what happened obviously is people started to see this as an opportunity. So loads of people entered the marketplace and then the prices started to drop as the price wars started to happen, right? Like in any economy, this happens when there's a big margin. Sooner or later it gets reduced just because people spot the opportunity. And now we're at the point where, you know, you have to add a lot of value to the marketplace because there's a lot of people competing and you have to do something different to the other sellers and obviously still a big opportunity, but in Australia you don't have that challenge yet. So that could be a really big pro towards selling on the platform. However, there might not be too much signs of demand on the Australian platform right now. So what you probably have to do is go to the us, see which products are doing well in the US and then mimic that in Australia and you could test those products in Australia and see what performs. The only risk that you have is big brands coming in and competing directly with you once they start to get their products on to the Amazon marketplace. So it might be worth having a look before you launch a product, having a look outside of Amazon, maybe just googling and seeing if within that niche you want to sell. Are there any big brands in Australia which might just all of a sudden come onto Amazon, compete directly with you? And obviously they're going to be a little bit tough to compete with because people already trust these brands. If you can avoid those pitfalls and apply the same stuff that American Amazon sellers are using, then Australia could be an unbelievably powerful marketplace to get started on. I think once it grows, it's going to be similar to the UK marketplace in terms of the way it looks, maybe a little bit smaller. I'm not entirely sure the population numbers of Australia, but if you want to get an idea for how many sales are going to be generated on the platform, then have a look at the UK marketplace. Also, I have a feeling that Australia Amazon will probably get orders from Asia as well because it's nearby and that could add some of the volume, so that could make it bigger. All right, so Haj asks, hey Ollie, do you have to get pre approved by Amazon to be able to sell in Australia as it's a very new platform. So as far as I'm aware, you don't have to. You just go to sellercentral.Amazon.com au okay, so sellercentral.Amazon.com au and that takes you to the page where you can register to become a seller in Australia. I think you just have to click the register button, then the start selling button. You can even become an individual seller or a professional seller for I think it's 50 Australian dollars per month you can get started. It looks to me like there's no pre approved stuff going on just yet. So yeah, go check it out, man. You could probably sell an account. Another thing you can do if you want to sell in from Australia and build a business from Australia is you could build a business in America because there's a lot more products on the marketplace. You can do more accurate product research and you could probably spot more opportunities in that marketplace. So it might be worth doing that. I mean, you have to make the decision, do you want to try Australia or do you want to try America? Both are viable, but you have to pick one and see. One thing you can do is sell a product very well in America and if it's selling very well, you could also sell it in Australia and you could sell it on both platforms and get the revenue from both platforms. So that's another option that you have to sell well in private label. Do you have to use fba? Do you have to use Amazon fba? Great question, Sergio. So the simple answer is no, actually you don't have to use FBA at all. There's several other things you can do. You can sell on Amazon and you could use Merchant Fulfilled. So you know, if you have a cheaper way of fulfilling products to customers without using fba, or have you found a way that you can get products sent to customers outside of fba, then you should probably do that because you will save money, you will get better margins and you'll be more competitive. When you've got better margins, you can be more aggressive with your marketing, you can grow your business faster because you have more cash in the bank. And you know if you can save money by not doing fba, then it's a good idea. So you have that option. You can do it with Merchant Fulfilled. Also, you could build your own website and sell products on your own website. But again, remember, you're going to have to have your own storage, your own fulfillment. You have to ship stuff to customers and deal with all the customer service. And you have to build the site, you'll have to design it, have to make it look great. And you also have to send traffic to the site as well and make sure that's happening profitably, whether it's advertising or whether you use SEO or content, whatever it is, to drive traffic to the site. One of the great things about having your own website is you can keep your customers information, right? So when they enter their email, you can put it onto an email list and you can keep marketing to your customers and letting them know when you have new products coming out. And you can just keep in touch with them, build your brand, build a connection with them, learn more about your customers and that becomes very, very, very lucrative. Like having an email list is an unbelievably powerful asset. And what you can do is you can go into more advanced marketing strategies like having a couple of products that you sell just to get the email address. So you could spend, I don't know, ten grand a month on marketing, say on advertising. That ten grand per month makes you ten grand in sales. Okay, so you break even on these products and these are like your front line of products. All you do with that is to get the email addresses and then what happens is to get follow up sales and to make your profit, send emails to your email list. Whether it's a sale or a coupon, or just announcing that there's a new product that you've launched that will be where you recoup your profit. This is how a lot of ecommerce stores actually drive traffic to their websites and make money. They break even on a few products, just really good deal and then they will market to their list and make the profit with the follow up sales that the customers buy after the initial ones, then you have more options you can do like subscription services you can do. You know, there's so much more you can do when you have your own website. However, it adds a lot of complexity to your business. I mean you need to be able to engineer all this stuff. You have to split test everything, you have to fulfill all your own products and it can be a logistical nightmare. So before you decide not to use fba, make sure you're clear on why you're doing it and make sure you can and make a clear decision. I mean what you could do is just use FBA in the beginning just to get started and test stuff to see if the products will actually sell, if it will then go to all the trouble of building your own website and stuff. Tay Noel asks what's the most important thing you need to know to keep your Amazon store popular and converting daily other than just picking good products? So this is a great question because so many new sellers just focus on which product to pick when. Of course that's only a third of the business. Okay, so there's three areas to your business. First area is product research. Okay, it's about third the business. Second area is sourcing. Okay, so finding suppliers, getting good rates on shipping, make sure you're adding value to the marketplace with your product, modifying designs, adding logos on etc etc. The third area is marketing. So getting products to sell, giving products away for free in order to boost your product ranking, using advertising, getting products ranked, creating a really fantastic listing and understanding what your customer really cares about and putting that information on the listing. It's surprising so many sellers don't understand their niche and don't understand why their customers really use their products and what they really care about. If you don't know what your customers really care about, you can't write a good listing because the information won't be there and they won't be convinced to buy it.

So this is all the stuff you.

Need to know other than finding products. Right? So you've got product research, sourcing and marketing. And each of these three things is equally as powerful as the next.

And then you have all the other.

Stuff that is as important within those three things, such as inventory management. You don't want to run out of stock, so you have to make sure you time your shipments properly so the next shipment is coming in before your stock's going to run out. You have to make sure your communication with suppliers is good. You have to make sure you're not running at a loss. A lot of sellers end up selling a lot of stock, making a lot of revenue, but the profit margins disappear and they go into the red. So managing your finances and your margins and your profits, all of this stuff is super important that will determine whether your business is successful and you're getting loads of sales or whether it starts to tank. Right. So lots of stuff to think about. This is why it's helpful to be following some kind of system, proven system and get some help as you grow your business because there's just a lot of stuff that you need to keep track of. Awesome. Alright guys, so some great questions today. Really enjoyed answering them and it's really nice to speak to some sellers who want to launch in Australia as well. And I encourage you to do it.

And try it at least on a.

Small scale because it will be a very lucrative opportunity. All right, thanks so much for watching this video. If you've got any questions, comment below and I'll get to them on a follow up video. And if you're watching this video outside of the Facebook group, look for a link below or above the video. I should be able to click on it and you'll be able to join the group. And as you enter the group you'll be asked to ask a question. Alright, you can leave a question there and once you've asked a question then I'll approve you to join the group and then I'll answer the question on one of these videos. Alright, thanks so much for watching the video and we'll speak very soon.