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What's up, million-dollar seller listeners? This is Nick Shucet with my co-host, Ro Rosas, coming at you today. We have a great topic for you guys.
We're gonna talk about seven things to avoid in 2024 as Amazon sellers, and we're also gonna talk about three loopholes that have closed or are closing anytime soon.
Ro, thanks for helping me pick out this topic, man. Thanks for helping me pick out this topic, man. Let the audience know how you're doing today, man, and let's kick this thing off.
Yeah, let's do it. What up, what up?
Man, I'm doing great. We're taping this around the holidays, so I can't wait. I love taking some downtime and resting.
Anytime you can get a little break when it comes to having your fingers around all the operations around Amazon is a great day for me because you can rest a little bit.
Your mind can just float around, and do the things you like. Whether it's with family or avoiding family for some people. Especially around the holidays, you want to avoid maybe the in-laws.
I know some people, I was just talking to somebody today that's like, I gotta go to my sisters-in-law. I dread that. I was like, I see what you mean. I know a lot of people.
I got it pretty good, man. I get to go to the in-laws and they help out so much with the kids and I don't have to worry about cooking or cleaning.
Hopefully, I'm just chilling, eating turkey, and watching Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales go through the roof.
That's what we all want. That's absolutely what we all want.
All right, man. Well, I think we got some good stuff for the listeners today. I'll go ahead and let you kick off. Number one, man. Yeah, let's do it.
Let them know what we are avoiding in 2024 as Amazon sellers and then we'll roll into some loopholes that we think are done or going to be done soon.
Yeah, I'm game wherever you want to start
Yeah, got you. Let’s start with the top seven. I'll go first. We just bounce back and forth on this.
I would say the number one thing is to understand your account health status and what that means to your account.
Not paying attention to your account health can have some big consequences if you're not on top of it.
I'll tell you, for us, the recent story around that is that we learned a lot about account health and that that's an actual team that is separate from the enforcement.
What this guy was telling me is that the enforcement police at Amazon are separate from general support.
The first line of defense when you think about, my listing has gone bad or my images aren't updating, I'm trying to do all this catalog stuff, but that's not them.
They are the people that if you get a performance notification, that's the folks to talk to. Something has gone completely wrong in your account or somebody's coming after you with a complaint.
These are the folks that have that button, call me. It goes to them and they internally communicate with all the different stakeholders.
If it's enforcement police, if it's legal, they're going to be the folks that are there. They just started working two years ago as a team.
They’re fairly new in the Amazon world when it comes to this.
I remember they rolled it out in beta to some bigger sellers. Then now I think just about everyone has access to account health.
I think the big takeaway from there is you have to pay attention to that stuff. Don't ignore these programs that Amazon is rolling out. They're rolling them out for a reason.
If you avoid them, you're not going to be able to leverage them. Pay attention to that account health dashboard. Hopefully, you've got someone on your side.
The important thing there, Nick, that I was told is that you wanna pay attention to the score. Some people have a thousand.
I don't know a lot of people do but it's based on volume that takes into account part of the score. If you're selling one item a day and let's say you have 10 violations.
It's going to appear differently than if you sell a hundred items or a thousand items a day and you have those same 10 violations. Your score is going to be lower the less you sell.
Even though somebody may have the same number of violations. The higher the volume, the smaller the impact.
I was reading out some sellers had hundreds of suspected IP violations, but his score was still good because he had a high number of orders on a daily basis.
It reminds me, I don't know why it makes me think of this, but I started out as an FBM seller on Amazon.
Your ODR metric, your order defect rate, something we always paid attention to and your FBA orders used to impact your ODR in a positive way as an FBM seller.
It was just such an easy way to get your metrics looking better because those FBA orders went out and they got delivered on time. You got credit for that as an FBM seller. It was a loophole.
The more FBA orders I get, the better my FBM metrics look. Amazon of course closed that. Amazon catches up to this stuff quickly, man. They're, they're not stupid. They're not dumb. They're Amazon.
They've got more data than anybody. You ain't fooling them.
That's why you can't give away the secrets, man. That's what I mean. I've been told and I know this from being around for a while now that Amazon does pay attention.
I don't know if they do moderation from humans or if they just have automated bots that scour and scrape websites.
I know that they do have folks that are paying attention to social media. They are paying attention to what is said on podcasts.
They are paying attention to groups, particularly Facebook groups. They're paying attention to what's being said because if it's something that's costing them money, they want to close that loophole.
I know we're going to talk about closing loopholes in a little bit.
I think number two is my favorite on the list, which I'm going to go with bots gone crazy. Yes. Be on the lookout because that technology is just getting leveraged more and more and more in business.
If you don't understand how these bots can take down your listing, and how giving them the right input gets your listing back up, you will be stuck in this endless loophole.
Or this endless loop with seller support, and account reps at Amazon, none of them can override it because it's a bot in the system. You really gotta know that stuff.
Not all of them understand, which is my gripe. Speaking of bots going crazy, there are things that you get flagged on, but you call support. They don't really quite know why.
I know that there is a guy, my Amazon guy, Steven Pope, who put something out on LinkedIn this morning about it. He had almost 500 listings that became inactive and were flagged.
He called support in this post. He said that support had no idea, no idea why these listings were down. Although they were down.
Eventually, a couple of days later, he got them back up. That's so frustrating that bots are going crazy. It's happened to us. We sell private-label items and we also resell.
From time to time, there are trademark items that we are authorized to use. They appear on the listing. We have them the way as to fair use, compliant with or sold for or made by, and it still triggers a violation.
Whether it's the bots sometimes. Generally. Mostly as the bots or the brand themselves, somehow they're disconnected and they have a third party that's managing it and they file a complaint.
It's problematic sometimes to get somebody at a large company to realize, oh yeah, we are authorized. We're the good guys. We're not the bad guys.
Amazon can't fix that a lot of times, even though you give them what they need, it's just frustrating.
You know what, Ro? I'm going to go ahead and roll this one into number three because I think it fits perfectly.
Amazon sellers, you have to take full control and responsibility over what's going on in your business.
I've seen a lot of people across different categories get shut down and taken down because they don't understand the terms of service within their specific category. I'll just give a specific example.
We were selling tooth gem kits. One of our unique selling propositions was, hey, we've got glue that comes from a dental office. We have high-quality glue. We had dental glue in our listing.
I neglected to look at the category terms of service and we got taken down. No one knew why. I didn't know why. The seller support didn't know why. Nobody we talked to knew why.
Then I looked and I read the term specific to that category. It was like if you're selling anything that's dental, then it has to be registered with the FDA.
You have to have a certificate. We got that approval, got the documents they wanted, and then we submitted it, and then we could only sell to dentists. Now customers can't even buy our product.
Then I was like, all right, I'm just gonna take the word out now. I took the word out, I just opened a case and said, hey, we're not selling this, we changed the glue. Boom, it was fixed.
All of that hassle can be avoided. If you simply go into Seller Central search in the search box. Type in there, find the category that you're selling in and just read the fricking page. All that stuff can be avoided.
You know what makes it easier today? We've been using this a lot for those types of things. The ChatGPT or any of the chatbots that are out there.
Take the terms of service, bring it in, and paste it into ChatGPT or if you use the spreadsheet, there's a plugin that'll work just as well for that.
You put in, I sell whatever it is, the term, or even in this works for reviews as well. This review came in.
Here are the terms of service. Is this violating the terms of service? It will spit back. It's violating because A, B, C, D, E, F, and G or no, there's nothing here that appears it violates.
We've used that to successfully appeal as well as try to contact support and say, Hey, you've got to remove this.
Or, hey, we're doing the right things. This is what we're doing.
We've successfully been able to make our case when you can refer back to the terms of service, whether you're trying to appeal something or trying to win something in your favor.
Nice. Yeah. That's a great use case for that, man. I'm definitely going to give that a shot.
The chatbots are getting better. For me, I've been using ChatGPT for a while, but I have been really falling in love with Claude from Anthropic, which seems a little easier.
There's an easier back-and-forth. ChatGPT is really heavy on the engineering prompt. Claude seems more like a natural conversation when you're going back and forth.
Interesting. Can you get that on your phone?
I can't wait to see what they come up with now.
Can you get that on your phone, Claude? Is it an app? Yeah. Okay.
Oh yeah, there's an app. There's an app. ChatGPT also now has an app for mobile, for both Android and iPhone. For doing research, ChatGPT is just better.
It can go out on the internet, you can upload documents, you can give it a link, it'll scrape a video and pull the transcript.
Feature-wise, ChatGPT is still the gorilla right now. If you don't need the gorilla and you want maybe the horse, Claude is good.
Okay, all right, nice. All right, man, well, I think we're on number four. You wanna hit him on number four?
Oh yeah. This one, this is a new one. You've heard this before. Nick, go ahead and buy your competitor's inventory to just get them out of the way. They're on the listing and they're costing you money.
It's cheaper to just go buy the inventory versus trying to deal with support. All the other nonsense that takes time, tests buys, nothing happens in a day.
Just go buy the inventory. Hold on there. You may want to think fast about that one. That was the conventional old advice. Don't do that. You're going to get in trouble. They are monitoring this.
I know this from firsthand experience. You may get away with one, two, small purchases three. The fourth one you buy inventory from a competitor that's on your listing, it's going to get flagged.
In the performance notification, it'll spit that back out, that buying competitive inventory. The bots can go crazy on buying inventory.
Having an account where you're buying it, that's not connected, can avoid that, but not indefinitely. Again, like you said, Nick, Amazon's really good at putting pieces together.
One, two, three, four times you get away with it.
Ffth, sixth, seventh, you're not, because they're going to catch on. They're going to see, oh, that address and that address and this one you've shipped here before and that bleep, boom.
They’ll connect all the pieces and now you're in trouble.
You really have to be careful with navigating that intellectual property, copyright, and trademark law, because Amazon's taking that way more seriously. That's where the “buy the inventory out” came from.
If you have a competitor hijack your listing, you can buy out the inventory, maybe you start filing claims or something like that.
If you start to manipulate that system, Amazon is going to punish you because they can get in trouble with bigger authorities if they allow that stuff to happen.
People feel like copyright or trademark law is being abused through Amazon. They're going to lay down the hammer fast.
They don't care about you as one little seller at the end of the day. Yeah, they don't. That's why we pass that stuff off to a professional man.
We use ThornCrest for a lot of our companies, a lot of brands that we wholesale for and have a serious relationship with because they have a monitoring piece.
Then they have an enforcement piece and they're real lawyers.
Oh really?
We like to just let them make the recommendations on what we can and can't do and let them send the letters.
I used to do that stuff myself and get a co-branded letter from the other brand and stuff like that, but I'm not a lawyer. I was just sending one letter and hoping these guys go away.
If you really want to take that seriously, I think using a professional makes sense.
Okay, for sure. I think that's great advice. We tend to, as Amazon sells, be like, I could do it all. Probably not that.
Right, yes. Man, I've been trying to kill that piece of me, that I could do it all piece.
You know what? We all think we're a jack of all trades. A lot of folks start by themselves or with just one other person and they just grow from there. That mindset never leaves.
it's tough to get rid of, man. It's not easy.
All right, so don't watch yourself with buying inventory. Let me see if this works. That's right. Let's go to numero cinco, performance notifications. Don't ignore this.
This is something I learned from a conversation with somebody inside of account health. He said that as long as your score, I wanna say was 200 or 250.
Right on, yes. Be careful. Yeah. Let's go.
Don't ignore this.
Oh my, I'm trying to recall right now what that number was, but there is a moving target when it comes to account health. I've got my other screen up.
I'm gonna tell you right now. 250. As long as you stay above 250, you're gonna be in the save zone. When you fall below 250, then you've put yourself in jeopardy when it comes to performance notifications.
What happens is when you get a performance notification, this specialist over at Account Health told me that.
By the way, US-based account health. It wasn't anybody in India or the Philippines or any of that stuff. It was a US person who told me this.
You stay above 250, but what you've got to do is respond to a performance notification within 72 hours, especially if it's something serious.
A competitor says, hey, you're counterfeiting. That's really high up on the list in terms of egregious things on the Amazon side.
If you don't respond within 72 hours, then you put yourself in a position to get yourself suspended. Paying attention to performance notifications is important.
So important Nick, that internally now for us, what we do is we've created an automation around it so that I have somebody internally that handles compliance for us.
She gets the notifications put into ClickUp automatically with a bunch of pre-filled fields already pre-populated.
All she's gotta do is respond based on what was pre-populated as soon as those performance notifications come into ClickUp.
Nice. Great use case for ClickUp.
I'll just say that. I don't care if Amazon is listening. Seller Central sucks when it comes to case management and performance notification management inside of Seller Central. It's just horrendous.
They have AWS on the backend to do amazing searches. Apply that to performance notifications, Apply that to case management on Seller Central. Nothing to sleep on.
Say it louder.
You can fix that by sending performance notifications, as well as the cases, you can send those to ClickUp, and ClickUp is a beautiful way to keep track of all of that nonsense.
I'm a big fan of ClickUp as well and have a similar system set up in that. We do it for shipments as well. Great, great tool.
No, terrific. Do you want to roll into numero seis? Price fixing. This is a new one. Turns out that Amazon is on to this.
What's ironic here Nick is that if we were in the same category and we're beating each other up left and right because Amazon really does pit one seller against another.
Let's do it, man. We have price fixing. Don't do it.
Hey, Rolando selling it for a dollar cheaper on the listing. You're not in the buy box anymore. Go back and do something about it. The do something is to go below. You want to get in the buy box.
What happened to a few sellers recently was that they decided, Hey, well, let's not beat each other up. Let's make money. Sounds good.
The problem is on the other side of the equation, the law and the authorities call that price fixing.
I'm going to have to give this one a big fat uh-oh because it's one thing to be an Amazon trouble.
It's a whole nother to be in trouble with the FTC when it comes to price fixing because all kinds of really bad things can happen at that point. Yes.
Uh oh.
I noticed this happening more when remembering when it was maybe a year or two ago, Amazon rolled out, you've got to have your business address up to date and they put it on the accounts.
You can see everyone's official registered address. As soon as that happened, man, I would start getting emails.
I got text messages from other sellers on our listings, asking me to change my price, man.
Really? What?
It's crazy. I'm pretty sure they were international, overseas. They probably honestly don't care. Yeah, crazy. The boldness of that.
Wow. That's interesting. I haven't had that happen to us yet, but I do have other sellers contacting us for different reasons, but that's a first.
If I were to just air out some grievance, the whole buy box thing is really a mess. As a seller, I've had us happen where we put a listing on Amazon, we sell on Walmart, we sell on our website.
Amazon really encourages you to lower or maintain your price lower than other websites. Otherwise, the buy box won't show. You know what, Nick?
We sell products on Amazon at a higher price point compared to our competitors that are on Amazon. We still do well. You would think otherwise.
Amazon's argument has always been, that we want to protect consumers because we want the lowest price. That's great. Do you know what consumers also want?
Convenience. Some of them say price be damned. I need this tomorrow because it's at FBA and it's in my own city and they'll deliver it today even right.
I will pay the extra dollar or two or whatever it is because I want to be profitable at the end of the day, I want to make money. I have a higher price than other words everywhere else.
That's just the way I roll, but I shouldn't be punished and the buy box suppressed because my price is higher than anywhere else or higher than my competitors.
It's a tough one. It definitely sucks. I hate seeing the buy box get suppressed because it's on Walmart for a lower price.
Honestly, I think the best thing to do is, I talked to a couple of guys at Amazon Innovate, a guy from Simple Modern, and Allan Stevens from KOS.
They just have different product strategies per channel. They don't roll out the same product with the same UPC code and the same size on Walmart and Amazon.
They're doing a different size, same product, different size, and different UPC code, to avoid the problem altogether. I'm always a fan of just seeing how can I just eliminate this as an issue for me.
I really liked the strategies that they gave there. Obviously, if you're a reseller, a little different, you don't have control over what other brands and sellers are doing on other platforms.
You have to jump through more hoops. You'd have to almost do something different for Amazon in that if you're bundling something.
For example, if you're reselling, maybe you bundled something that's got one thing for Amazon and you bundle it a different way for Walmart so that it's a different price.
Or not bundling at all on Walmart. I don't know about you, but Walmart's still not getting there in terms of what we're seeing from a channel perspective, I just know it as a tangent.
I'm not seeing the growth on Amazon and the volume like I'm seeing on TikTok. I slipped in there, on TikTok, because we're experimenting there too, on Amazon. They are.
With all that money they have, by the way, they've surprised people. They have a lot of money.
Their ad sales are going through the roof, so they've got a big, big treasure chest full of money, and they're gonna deploy it to try to upset the apple cart when it comes to Amazon.
TikTok’s coming for Amazon, man.
All right, what do we get next here? Number seven.
We are at number seven. Lucky number seven.
We’re talking about not being obsessed with profit. We're talking about not being obsessed with profit. You have to be focused on this.
That’s a mistake. You have to be obsessed with profits. This is the only way you're going to win in 2024. I'm hearing it more and more. A good friend, Chad Rubin.
He’s got a company that focuses on being profitable by SKU level and stuff. I wouldn't call myself a financial expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I have to tell you.
I've had a lot more conversations with our CPAs. I've had a lot more conversations with folks in our ops team and looked at literally every SKU. Is it profitable? Is it plus or minus?
If it's too small in the margin, can we actually make a difference to bring that margin up, either price or volume of both? If we can't, then we just gotta get rid of it.
Then focus on the stuff that's really, where we're crushing it. That's what your options are left right now on Amazon because you're getting squeezed everywhere. That's just the bottom line.
When you're at a certain level, like a one or two or 3% difference in operational costs or landed costs of goods or whatever it is, is a big deal.
I think there are a lot of sellers out there who they're doing big revenue numbers and they're able to get away with not being profitable for a certain amount of time.
Oh, yeah Indeed.
It's gonna catch up with you unless you catch a lucky break, which can certainly happen, but do you really wanna be playing that game and rolling the dice in that way? No.
There are so many tools that make it easy too. You can get a profit and loss statement at the SKU level pretty easily. One other tip too for cutting down costs is a lot of tools like SoStocked and Data Dive.
They'll tell you if you change the dimensions of your product to this, you'll save this much. Yeah, so if you cut down 30 cents, 50 cents, a dollar, that's huge if you're doing thousands of units.
If you cut down 30 cents, 50 cents a dollar, that's huge.
Oh really?
I'll tell you what we've started doing. We've started to shrink-wrap. We do bundles, we do a lot of bundles. To that extent, shrink wrapping versus if you have a package, I wanted to see if I could show it.
If you have a package, here we go. If you have a package and just like this extra half inch, that could be, let's say that shrink wrap to that.
That's going to save you money. Especially on products where you're selling a lot of volume. Shrinkwrapping, making it tight so that you don't have any extra loose makes a huge difference.
If we're talking about saving a couple of extra points if this is more relevant, it really depends on those sellers, whether you've got high volume and you're bundling.
Or you've got stuff in packed, any extra packaging hanging out, if you have a way to wrap that or shrink wrap that during the fulfillment process, do it.
You're going to find yourself saving a lot of money and gaining a couple of points in extra margin on the FBA fees that you find a reduction in.
Nice. You guys also got a few tips on increasing profitability as well. Got some tips for profitability, how you guys can increase that, reduce those operating costs, and just be focused on it.
Just be looking at that daily. If you have a large catalog, trim the fat. Make sure you're getting rid of products that aren't contributing to your bottom line and save your cash for the ones that are really moving the needle for your business.
No doubt. Nick, do you want to roll into the three loopholes slash sketchy?
Let's do it, man. Yeah, we're gonna do these ones quick and dirty for you guys. First off, we got the Ajax link.
The Ajax link has been around for a while. You could see some internal annotations on your product, and potentially your account as well. From what I hear, Ro, you're saying that loophole is closed.
I haven't tried it in a while.
Yup. No way that is that's not happening anymore. They shut it down. Too many people got a good thing for a while and started talking too much.
None of these people, I shouldn't say none, but a lot of Amazon sellers would not cut it in the FBI or CIA. They lose slips.
All over the place. If you didn't know what this was, this was a way for you to check what flags are internally in the Amazon system by ASIN so that you can then go fix it.
There's a term that they don't like. No problem. There's a code for that and you could be like, okay, I'm going to go get rid of that term. All of that's been taken out of the picture.
It would be nice if Amazon had a way for you to self-inspect a listing. Or have a way for you to go through and identify those things on existing listings.
Or that you've had for a while and be like, hmm, which of these things are not kosher or are not helping me sell more?
Now they have something like this with the “improve quality” thing, but it doesn't really address some of those other things that are “flags” on the inside of Amazon that are on your listing.
I think all sellers would benefit if they could clean up their listings and things that are flagged internally so that Amazon doesn't view you as a bad listing.
Or that the hammer's gotta come down on you.
Yep. If any listeners out there have another solution for the Ajax link, you can send it to me.
Don't talk about it. Be quiet. Let's go into a group chat or something and let us know because that's not available anymore.
Hit me on Telegram, end-to-end encryption, and we're good. All right, the number two loophole that I think is going away is strike-through pricing, You hear people talk about this a lot.
They wanna get this red badge, the sale badge, the lowest price in 30 days badge, and strike-through pricing.
There are a lot of lawsuits out there going on where customers and consumers are pissed off about this stuff. They feel manipulated and lied to.
So the noise is coming from the customer side?
Yes. We've seen Kohl's has been involved in it, Bed Bath and Beyond has been involved in it, and HP has been involved in it. I think Amazon is starting to take note.
I'm seeing ways of getting strike-through pricing going away. I only expect that to get more controlled by Amazon as they close those loopholes.
Ooh, big names.
It's a mess. There's a bottom line. It's a mess. Anytime you're talking about pricing, it is a mess, because what's MSRP? What does that really mean?
Are you getting a deal if what I'm doing is really just, it's something that's called free, but I'm raising the price of buck to cover the cost of shipping. It is just a mess.
I see them just doing away with those fields in the back end. It's like, here's your sale price. Here's your list price. If you want to run a sale, here you go. I think that's going to be it.
They don't want to they don't want to be stuck with the liability. I thought of something but we'll go to the top three. I just thought of something.
Number three is the search-find-buy and the buying groups.
What the hell is going on with that man?
Honestly, a lot of people should know. Those are super risky and sketchy. Amazon is taking that very seriously for things like review manipulation or rank manipulation.
If you're doing things to try and get ranked for a certain keyword, Amazon has shut down a lot of loopholes for that.
Why would people have done this in the first place, Nick? For those that have no idea what search-find-buy or why would I even invest money and say, okay, do this for me.
X, Y, Z company. Do this for me.
If you're identifying search terms that you believe are driving sales to competitors for a product you want to launch, then some people have the idea.
Well, what if I can just manufacture sales for these search terms? Ultimately on the back end, you're increasing the conversion rate for certain search terms.
Amazon thinks you've got a product that a customer who searches for this wants to buy. You move up in the ranks. That was one of those things that just took off fast, man.
A lot of people talked about it. A lot of people made money off offering that type of stuff.
Is it really gaming the system? When you talk about search-find-buy, you're saying you game the system in your favor because somebody put in.
If you sold red t-shirts, and they went and bought yours, Amazon essentially favors your listing more than the others, because everybody's using red t-shirts to go to your listing and then buy. Hmm.
Boy. What happened? Do you know of people who made out like it was 1999 on these search-find-buys?
Oh yeah, I mean, it definitely made a huge difference. It would immediately work. It would immediately get your ranking increased, which leads to big money.
It also allowed people to plan their launches very effectively because Amazon gives you the data.
If you go in the backend, you can see a list of competitors and you can put the pieces together and see, okay, the market I'm competing in, it has this click-through rate.
This add-to-cart rate, this conversion rate, and you can manufacture that. Great idea, I love ideas like that, but they can get you in trouble.
Didn't they go after a bunch of Facebook groups that were, I don't know if they were all part of this type of thing, activity?
Well, I know they went, like, I heard the number 13,000 some time ago that they went after 13,000 Facebook groups that were collectively putting some muscle behind this.
Or had their own private groups that were doing this kind of activity.
Yeah, I heard a lot of things got shut down. Facebook groups, websites. It used to be common practice. Hey, get this product at a discount in exchange for a review. That's where it stemmed from.
Then those review groups also turned into search-find-buy groups. Hey, click this special link type of thing. That stuff just needs to go away.
Honestly, I love loopholes. I love breaking rules. I love all those things. It's cheating. Just have a good product, and know who you're selling to.
That's just an easier way to build a business. It's a fair way to build. Sometimes certain rules suck, and they deserve to be broken.
Oh yeah. Nothing is fair. Nothing here is fair.
Right, but this one, you're being a crappy person, a crappy business model.
I heard something that if I want to give big props to somebody here for a second, Leslie Pierson, she's a member of MDS.
She said something to me that is still in the back of my mind. I want to sleep better at night. If you're doing some of this stuff, that's right.
There's on the edge or slightly over the edge. You may be a little bit like, when is the party going to end or when are you going to get caught?
That's in the back of your mind. She's like, I don't want to do anything that's takes for my sleep at night.
I think that's a healthy way to look at it because if you want to be able to sleep at night, you want to be in this for the long run.
Maybe some of those things like a search-find-buy may not be the best use of your time.
Right, 100%.
I thought of something else that came if we want to add a bonus. Wait, where's this? Here's a bonus.
Let's do it.
Boom. People love bonuses.
Bonus: Prop 65. Do not sleep on this because there are lawyers actively going after both resellers as well as private label companies.
It turns out that so Prop 65 has to do with chemicals in products and those chemicals in the state of California. They want you to declare that on Amazon it does have lead or whatever the chemical is.
The warning shows up. Now there are some very aggressive lawyers going after folks on Amazon.
It used to be that Amazon would have to take on that responsibility themselves as a legal team to defend those suits.
That's not happening anymore and they're passing the buck on to the sellers on the listing even if you're not the seller that created the listing. Something to not sleep on in 2024 is Prop 65.
If your product has some kind of chemical or substance that would be within that category that needs to be declared, make sure you pay attention to that, and declare it.
It's on there, you'll sleep better at night knowing that these aggressive lawyers are not coming after you.
100% man. I think there's a lesson in there that can fix a lot of these types of problems for people.
If you see something coming from the Federal Trade Commission or the Food and Drug Administration or a state like California, which does a lot of things that other states don't do.
They have a lot of money and power behind them, that stuff trickles down and affects Amazon.
They don't want to get in trouble with those things. An easy lesson that allows everyone to be on top of these things in the future is just to pay attention to what's going on with things bigger than Amazon.
How that will impact a category, a seller, or a product on Amazon and you'll be able to figure these things out more quickly.
You know what, let me share a tip because I like what you just said because I've started doing that this last month myself, Nick. We're in the electronics category. That's where we hang our hat on.
There are companies that are way larger, big, huge, humongous multinationals. I've just gotten into the habit of doing two things. Going and listening to the investor calls for companies.
Let's say like HP. They're in the electronic space and they’re in computers. We don't necessarily sell computers, but we have devices that touch them.
When they report to Wall Street and their investors, they're going to say, you know what? We see PC sales going down for the next six quarters.
Just throwing it. Next six quarters, sales are just gonna tank....
What that does for us, which we're inside the electronics, it has an effect.
If their team of researchers, salespeople, and all that comes with their management team is telling them the next six quarters are gonna be dark.
We probably will see something similar in our space. They have a whole team. Then I'll go and listen to, let's see, HP is one, and Dell, for example.
Dell says the same thing. We got dark clouds coming real soon or about to descend upon us. I could use their teams, their experts, their investors.
Their teams that are forecasting and seeing because they have supply chains and all this other stuff that they have to take care of.
Now I have a little bit better of a crystal ball on what can affect my own little piece of that part of the pie because they've done a lot of research.
Thank you very much. I'm gonna use it and I'm gonna use it for planning. We're gonna have to reduce stock.
We're gonna have to buy more because they're saying the next two quarters have been, or they're seeing some activity in the enterprise space.
Or the mid-market or the e-tail side, and ding, bells start going off. Okay, let me use this to my advantage and put it into play.
That's a great tip.
That's so powerful, man.
You could also get a report from ChatGPT. If you don't go on the call, take the link, pop it into ChatGPT, and give me a summary.
It gives you a summary of that whole investor call if you don't want to listen to it yourself.
I love that tip because a hundred years ago that didn't matter. It wasn't a possibility. We didn't have the technology to leverage something like that.
I think it's gonna take quite some time for public education and regular life to catch up to the power of leveraging other things like that.
Success leaves clues. If you're looking in the right places and listening to the right things, just like you said you can have that magic crystal ball a little more dialed in and it didn't.
All you had to do was read an article.
That's it, or again, or take the link, literally copy and paste it into ChatGPT, summarize this, and how does it impact what I'm doing?
I put in what I do, and it spits out. HP is projecting two more quarters of negative growth.
Or HP is projecting two more quarters of positive growth fueled by the enterprise space, fueled by the consumer, fueled by you name it. Listening to Amazon investor calls, same thing.
I pop it in there. ChatGPT, tell me how this impacts the marketplace for third-party sellers. Whatever they've talked about in there if I didn't go listen to the call.
I've got all of the things they're saying. Yeah, we're investing in, uh, what are we investing? We're investing in seller support. I haven't heard that yet, but it'd be nice to know that that's what they're doing.
You're like, yes, or we're laying people off. Holy crap. Things are going to get really bad in the next couple of quarters. They're going to lay people in support off too.
Nobody's immune from that on the Amazon side. They laid off even more people more recently.
That's a good tip, man. I'm glad you dropped that one. All right, you million-dollar listeners, you got seven things to do not do in 2024.
You got some insights on the loopholes that have closed or are closing, but you also got a lot of good, actionable tips that you could take away for your business.
Let us know if any of that stuff's working out for you guys. Ro, always enjoy doing the show with you, man. Thanks for coming on.
It is. Another one. That’s right. I love it. Thanks for listening today. We'll see you, I guess, next time. Alrighty, thanks, Nick.
Another one. All right man. Next time.
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