The Strategy For Success Keeps Changing Constantly

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. Alright, hope you really enjoy the episode. Hey, how's it going? It's Ollie here. So some awesome questions today and there's a theme again with some of the questions today and, well, we'll get into it as we start to answer them. So Jacob asks. It feels like the strategy for success keeps changing constantly. So this is something that I've encountered with a few people who are thinking about starting to sell on Amazon. I've had people express this fear before. You know, it feels like every month there's like a new thing you should be focusing on when building your business. It feels like, you know, things are always changing and I can't keep up with all of this information about how to get success. To be honest, Jacob, this, this sounds to me like the kind of fear that you have before you get moving. Now, I don't know, but I would assume that you haven't started building your business yet or you're in the very early stages. One piece of comforting advice I can say is it's way more complicated before you start taking action. Once you start taking action, once things are building and momentum is building, analysis paralysis becomes a thing of the past. I've got so many people who come to me looking to Work with me or looking to get started selling on Amazon and they're just stuck in this gray zone of not knowing which direction to go. They don't know which strategy to move forward with and they don't know what they should be focusing on. They don't know which product they should launch. They don't know how to set up their Amazon account. They don't know how to get a product to sell once it's in the warehouse. You know, there's all of these things that they want to have sorted out. They want to have all their ducks in a row before they feel comfortable diving in. And I think when people are stuck in analysis paralysis mode, they have the same fear as you. The strategy you need to take to get successful keeps changing because you get all these emails from all these experts saying, oh, you should focus on, I don't know, building great advertising campaigns. Oh, you should really focus on building a brand. Oh, you should focus on finding the perfect product or this doesn't work anymore and this is the thing that works now, etc. Etc. Etc. It's important to keep up with subtle changes and things that you can focus on to get results. But the core strategy always stays the same because all we're doing really is buying stock for cheap and we're selling it for a profit. It's as simple as that. And I think once you dive in and once you start looking for a product and getting it to sell gradually and ramping up those sales, building up the income, that fear of how everything keeps changing and it's really complicated, will slowly disappear. So my advice would be just dive in and that should solve your problem. I hope that's helpful, man. I hope that answers your question. Linda says, how do I get confidence in buying in bulk from China? So this is when we start to see our theme. Today, we'll a couple other questions. Right. So Jacob was concerned because he was feeling like the strategy for success was changing all the time. And Linda wants to know how to get confidence in ordering stock from China. Well, the answer is pretty much the same. To solve this problem and to get confidence, I would say dive in, do it right. But first there's a few things you want to make sure you get right with your strategy. So first of all, you want to find a great niche. Obviously that's important. So if you haven't familiarized yourself with the Smash IT product radar, how to find products and all that stuff, please look at the announcement post in the top of the group and you'll find everything you need to get started to find hot products, right? Get a good niche. Then to make sure your success isn't defined by, you know, whether you find a great product or not. You don't want to go ahead and dive in and order 10,000 units. You want to give yourself the chance to fail and not have the whole thing fall apart, right? So that's why we do a test batch. So we want to dive in, but we want to dive in in the shallow end first. We want to give ourselves room to make mistakes. That's why you do test batches. Then you can import from China with confidence, right? Because you have a test batch, hopefully you'll get that to sell and you'll see sales. And as you see sales, your confidence will only grow and you can continue to import more products as your confidence grows, right? So if you import a test batch, for example, 50 units, and they all sell out in four days, then you know, you've got, like, a ridiculously freakishly successful product. And by the way, this rarely happens, okay? Usually it takes a while for products to sell, but just an example. And then you'd go out and you'd say, yeah, I could probably order 400 units now and be super confident. If they sold a bit more slow and you weren't feeling 100% confident, then order 100 units next and then 150 and then 300 units and just go gradually. I think the key to getting confidence importing from China is to just do it, but do it gradually and do it slowly. Now, there's a few other things you can do to develop your confidence as well, like choosing reliable suppliers. And if you search in the group or if you're watching this on my website, my YouTube channel, you can search those places as well. And you'll find other videos I've done about how to find great suppliers. And all that stuff can help with your confidence as well. Things like paying through PayPal can help with your confidence because, I mean, it's protected, right? If anything goes wrong, you can just contact PayPal and they'll help you. Also, using Trade Assurance on Alibaba can be great too, because it's the same thing. If anything goes wrong, you can contact Alibaba. But those things coupled with, like, getting the theory right and just diving in and doing a step at a time will explode your confidence. And once you've got one product imported, the rest is, you know, it gets easier and easier and easier, and your confidence will just explode. And before you know it, you know, you'll be an import export expert. Great question, Linda. Andrew asks, what is a good product sector or specific product to start selling? So this is a great question and this is the question that so many people ask when they enter the group. So which product should I sell and what type of products should I sell and what do I do from the beginning? And the simple answer is there are literally thousands of different really fantastic products that you could sell. And the reason why I don't just say, hey, go and import this to like everyone in the group is because then there would be loads of competition on that same product. And what you want to do is you want to find a product that not too many other people have found. That is part of the key to building a successful Amazon business is going where there's a load of demand, but there isn't too much competition just yet. So loads of people want to buy this thing, whatever it is, right? But you've got a starving crowd. You've got a load of people who really want this product. But something's not complete in the niche. The customers are all complaining about something or there's something that they wish the product did and that's where you can come in and offer that thing that they wish the product did and that's where you grab your slice of the revenue from that niche. So because of that, because of the nature of how we want to find products, it's beneficial to you if you find your own product because you want to find those opportunities. But to answer your question about which sector you should sell in, I can go into a bit more detail about that. So we want to find products that are low hassle and that aren't going to be nightmare to sell. So I would avoid electronics, I would avoid anything that you consume or put on your skin. So no health and beauty stuff, at least in the beginning. I would avoid anything breakable. I probably wouldn't import like glass or very thin china or wood. I would stick to simple products that you feel as if you could make yourself. For example, there's no way I could make like an iPad, right? I mean, that is just so complicated. There's so much that goes into that. Even if I had like a thousand years, I don't think I could ever make one. But I don't know. Haven't got anything near me. Yeah, one of these, a coaster. I could make that probably if I had enough time and patience. And I kind of get how it's made. Same thing with like, I don't know, a spatula. I feel like I Could make a spatula. What you get a mould, you pour some molten plastic into it, you wait for it to set and it's done right. So find a product that you feel like if you did have all the time and you watch loads of tutorials and all the materials and everything that you could kind of make yourself, that's usually a good indication or rule of thumb that you've got a product that won't be too complicated to sell. Great question. Andrew Bray asks, should I drop ship from Alibaba, AliExpress or Dhgate US dropshippers or cross ship or Arbitrage from Target, Walmart, eBay, etc. Also, should I sell 10 to 25 top sellers or just concentrate on one high ticket item? So first of all, dropshipping from any supplier to Amazon customers can be a very tricky business and I've done a bit of this on my account. But the amount of stuff you have to keep up with can become a logistical nightmare because Amazon have very, very strict rules for you when you do merchant fulfilled selling. For example, if your items arrive late, they will penalize you. If you get bad feedback from customers, you'll get penalized. If you sell a product and then you go to the supplier and it's out of stock at the supplier, again, you'll get penalized because the customer won't be happy. So it becomes more about trying to manage and keep an eye on all of the different suppliers you're using to find products than anything else. I wouldn't recommend this business model as Amazon are getting more and more strict on it now and I think it's becoming more hassle than it's worth and secondary to that, the fact that it's complicated. Your second question, should I sell 10 to 25 top sellers or just concentrate on one high ticket item? Well, we all want to find those top sellers and we all want to find those high ticket items, right? The problem is with dropshipping. It's going to take you listing a lot of items before you find any hot sellers or high ticket items. You're going to sell a lot of products that just don't sell and that just, you know, make barely any profit before you get to the really hot ones. So that the strategy with dropshipping is usually like a shotgun approach. You try loads and loads and loads and loads of products and then you find out of every hundred there's one that does really, really well. And so you need to list like a thousand products before you get like 10, 15, 20 that sell really well, and again, this can be time consuming. The management of it can be a bit of a nightmare. The supplier can change the prices of the products at any time so you can wipe out your profit. You have to have spreadsheets managing all the suppliers and someone's going to have to check the stock levels daily or every other day. And I don't know, I wouldn't really recommend it as a long term business model. Think it'd be a lot better just to get a little bit of stock, send it into the FBA warehouse, see if it sells and if it does import more. And that's what I teach. And if you look at the announcements in the top of the group, you'll be able to find all of that training for free. So I want to say thanks for your amazing questions today. By the way, if you have any more questions then please post them in the group. I'm actually going to put a post in the group asking you for your questions for this week. You can comment below this video as well and ask any additional questions you might have. And if you're watching this video outside of the group, then please click the link above or below the video and you'll be able to join the Facebook group where you can ask questions and get them answered on these daily videos. Now, when you request to join the group, you'll see a box that appears straight away. Please post a question in that box. After you've done that, then I'll approve your request to join the group. I'm doing this just to filter out people who shouldn't be in the group because they'll just spam. I only want people who are going to join the community and who genuinely want to sell on Amazon. So just ask a question. Could be anything in that box related to Amazon or business or entrepreneurship or whatever, something you think I could help with, right? And then I'll answer it on one of these videos. Thank you so much for watching this video. Comment below if you enjoyed it. Like share the post and I'll speak to you very soon.