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Hey, what's going on, Million Dollar listeners? Coming at you with Ro today. We have a great topic for you guys. I'm excited to talk about how to sell on Amazon.
I think we got some good stuff for you guys here and excited to share this knowledge with you guys that we've learned over our many years of being Amazon sellers and what it's like to still be in today's landscape in that marketplace.
Let's do it, Ro.
Nothing stays the same. I think great sellers are those that have not just their ear to the ground, but understand that whatever you did two years ago, probably needs a little dusting off the playbook.
Sometimes it's small changes. I've heard, I can't remember the name of the author, but the Atomic Habits, it's all about that 1%. You make the small changes.
I recently heard somebody say that small changes can have an outsized impact, especially if we're talking about this in a business context. You don't need to completely wipe listings and make all kinds of wholesale changes to see a big impact.
I'm hoping that some of these examples that we talk about today can at least affect some of the sellers and people listening in brands so if they even make a small bit of change, they'll see big returns on their end.
I think we'll do a good job of making sure it's relatable to everyone. If you're doing private label or if you're reaching out to brands to buy wholesale from them to resell on Amazon, which we'll call wholesaling for this conversation.
Even though as Ro mentioned before we got on the call that on his end, wholesale is B2B business, reaching out to other businesses to do business with them. There's that avenue as well.
Then there's always good old arbitrage, which is how I got started. I think it's an interesting business model.
The Gary Vee way, that's the way to do it, Nick. That's what he says, go on the weekend, go drive around. He likes driving around New Jersey and filming himself, beating people down for 50 cents on a mug, and then putting them on eBay kind of thing.
I think it's important that there's a context here. It depends on where you're at in your business, what your goal is, and where you're at at the moment. I think that's always important. Keep that in mind as you hear advice from us and from other people.
Let's go ahead and just kick it off, man. Let's just briefly touch on these different business models and if there is anything unique that they face because otherwise, I think a lot of this stuff can be grouped together.
Then certain things can be applied to individuals based on where they're at and what their goals are.
Sure, absolutely. Go ahead, lead the way, I'll follow you.
Let's just start with private labels. Quickly define this. This is the idea of creating your own brand, ordering something from overseas at a cheaper price or domestic if it makes sense.
Basically, you're putting your label on a product and reselling it or selling it on something like Amazon, your own website, or another marketplace. I think that definitely comes with its own challenges because let's say arbitrage and wholesale, you can do that domestically.
As soon as you go international, you have things like customs and other taxes and duties and freight forwarding and quality inspections and storage. The first time you get a bill for a container sitting in someone's lot, you're like, holy crap.
Maybe you had some idea of what it was going to cost, but it still stings a little bit when you learn how much that really costs.
Well, especially if you were ordering products that came in containers through the pandemic, through the height of the pandemic, they were through the roof, never seen before. $20,000 a container or more.
I know that several companies, including Amazon, and decided I'm gonna go get some boats myself. Several big companies that were not in the ocean freight business went and got their own boats because it was too damn expensive to send it via container.
Whereas before it was the cheapest.
Going from $1,600 to $20,000. That was crazy.
Almost 15 X. That's 10X, 10X to 15 X.
Welcome to Private Label. Right. That's a unique thing you're definitely going to face in there. I think we could wrap that one up nicely by saying it's logistics and supply chain.
It gets even crazier when you try to go off of Amazon and then you realize how much Amazon is really doing for you when it comes to lead generation, and attracting customers.
Don’t they don't they have something like 300 million prime customers and that also includes businesses that are part of that number?
Amazon sellers always underestimate the cost of doing business when you try to go off Amazon. I see those conversations and I've been there myself.
It's hard. I heard somebody say something along those lines that the conversation for the last four years has been about going D2C, direct to consumer. It sounds good. The problem is that you have to lead that customer to your website.
In today's multimedia world where there's more than just Facebook. 10 years ago, it was one Facebook or email, pretty much, or a phone. The world is so different.
Going off of Amazon, because you're not guaranteed to have millions of customers on that platform, on that website every single day, Amazon does, some days more than others.
This particular person that was writing about D2C, direct to consumer, was saying that, hey, you know what?
Maybe we've overplayed this hand about direct-to-consumer and they were saying that they're going back and investing in Amazon because it just makes more business sense to do that.
I think everybody that's selling off of Amazon always needs to look at Amazon and how to maximize that channel.
I think that’s the keyword Ro. It’s maximize, which I think really comes down to another business principle I think of. We touched on the supply chain and its operations. How do you want to operate as a company to achieve the goals that you have in mind?
If you're a solo guy doing a million 1.5 to maybe up to like 5 million in revenue. Maybe there are two people there. It's different. If you want to scale things, you have to be good at lead generation, you have to be good at supply chain.
You got to be good at this way of operating and you got to be able to scale it. You have to be good at ads as well.
You gotta be good at ads. That's the hardest part. I think you could find some success as a solopreneur. You're doing your thing, maybe like what you're saying, take a page out of Gary Vee and hustling, and selling whatever mugs, shoes, arbitrage, whatever, clothes, it doesn't matter.
You can find some success hustling, but when you wanna take it to that next level, scale is hard.
Just ask the aggregators. It's no secret that all of them have had a massive amount of problems. Some of them have just gone out of business.
They were supposed to be the guys with these super spreadsheets on steroids who know how to scale. I think they've run into a massive issue multiple issues. The word scale is at the heart of all of that.
How do you run an operation in a way that still generates profits? In their case, they're looking to increase profits, not just make profits, but increase them after acquisition.
I think no matter what, so let's say you're in one of these groups, private label wholesale arbitrage, no matter what. I've had experience. I got arbitrage up past a million. I've gotten every one of those businesses up past a million managing seven million.
Thank you. It was fun doing the arbitrage.
Yes, that's no small feat. Clap that up, baby.
Those business principles come into play of you have to be able to generate leads. Let's lump it into business development, lead generation, qualifying, and sales, closing the deal, whatever that looks like in your business if you're looking at arbitrage.
Let me ask you something about that, Nick. Not everybody is a gifted salesperson like yourself. What does it mean to somebody to want to go into, maybe they're a teacher, maybe they weren't in sales in their prior life, or they were doing some other form.
Maybe they were back end doing some non-sales function. How does somebody overcome the challenges of jumping into the sharky Amazon waters with a non-sales kind of background?
Maybe you didn't do the Gary Vee retail advertising going and buying. Honestly, how do you overcome that?
I think it depends on the type of selling you're going to do. Are you talking about selling a product page, selling to a customer that's navigating amazon.com or are you talking about negotiating a deal with a brand that you want to buy and resell stuff on Amazon?
I think it to me, I know it comes down to the same things because of the training and experience that I've had. I think it's important that whoever asks that question, ask themselves, what type of selling am I looking at doing?
Then figuring out how to add value to the other person by identifying the dominant buying motive. If you were to turn this into a process, how to sell turned into a process, the dominant buying motive would be in there.
You're going to have a process for identifying that motive.
Okay, process. The process is important. Systems are important. Absolutely. That's something that for the last two years, as an organization, we've been hyper-focused on systems and processes.
As you scale, that becomes even more important, so that all pieces of the organization are on the same page. Otherwise, Sally over here is doing something and Joe's doing something and you get this going on.
That's going to be important everywhere. No matter what type of business model you have going on, it's going to be important that you try to identify the motives of the people you're doing business with.
Hopefully, you identify your real motive and you guys can just add value to each other based on what you bring to the table versus being sales-y, you know what I mean? Yeah, nobody wants to be sold to.
There's some good training out there on that. I went through some training where I did a lot of role-playing and actually used that method to sell things in the 16 to $50,000 range.
Yeah, nobody wants to be sold to Nick. No, nobody wants to be sold to anymore.
It was a two-hour direct sales with a family that had come in to sit down and we had two hours with them and we had a whole 16. I have the notes.
Dang, wait, you're saying that's how much money you spent?
No, no, I didn't spend any money. That's how much the packages were that we were selling. I keep all those notes right here in this binder clipped together just because of how good they were.
Just lots of role-playing and stuff, good quality work. That was good for me.
Oh my goodness, you know what? Let me give you that. That was a great one. Who's over here? There he is. Another one. That's right, another one. Another great tip, love it.
I think that's a good one. I could talk a lot about that actually.
Getting out of your comfort zone is definitely key if you're taking this from a solo activity and beyond. You gotta push the boundaries on what you think you could do sales-wise.
I'd say if you really want to grow a business in any way, you've got to be willing to push your own boundaries no matter what that is and where those show up in your business.
Do you want to jump into one of the other aspects? Retail arbitrage?
If we talk about something unique to wholesale. Arbitrage is obvious, just unique in its nature. The idea of going into stores and buying things at a discount, understanding discounts, and being able to scale that by generating leads for discounts.
If you take it back to a sales process, it's lead generation, then you have to go in and qualify things in the store by scanning them.
Imagine you don't use an app like an app specific to Amazon selling that calculates a good buy or a bad buy. Scoutify comes with InventoryLab.
It's been a couple of years, but the way I was able to do it was by using that app, setting up what a good buy and bad buy are behind the scenes, and then showing people how to go in and scan stuff and just say, hey, add that one to the buy list if it gives you the thumbs up.
If it's the thumbs down, don't. Then if you want to, you can qualify that work, have someone come back and look at the history of what's been scanned to see if you missed anything or not.
It's always the idea of continuous improvement. Even the idea of missing something to me, that's a positive thing, because now I'm getting better. I'm refining my ability to scale my business.
What did you find most challenging about retail arbitrage?
At some point, you run out of cash. It's like cash to buy the deals. I have all these deals and I need more money. That can be a fun problem to run into. The other one is scaling it for sure. You have to have people going into stores and negotiating and scanning and shopping.
The people who were able to do that job successfully were unique individuals, good at negotiation, and very open-minded, friendly, and respectful people.
Wow. It's something that you can develop with time, but if you're really afraid to talk to people, or in this case, probably some store managers, they're like, hey, I see that on your shelf you got this, can I buy the entire lot or can I buy 10 of them?
Sometimes brands will limit three per person or something like that.
I know from going into, in my prior life, going into supermarkets, because I was working for a consumer brand company, managers have wiggle room, especially independent stores.
That when you get to the large chains, Kroger's and Walmart, there's a lot less, because their hands are tied by a corporate. In the independent stores, they can do whatever they want. The manager is usually the owner.
They're business people and you say, hey, look, I see that you got 20 of this in black, and it's already discounted. I'll take all of them. Can you give me another dollar off? That means an extra couple of points for you in terms of margin when it comes to selling it online.
Everything's negotiable. I think that's a standard you have to adopt. I certainly wasn't raised that way. I had to become that way. I had to go against my nature, and the way I was raised and become that person.
It's like that in most parts of the world outside the US, Nick. They love haggling and bartering. If you've ever been to a market overseas, it's the norm. It's no big deal.
Yes, yeah, it puts you at a disadvantage if you're not actively exposing yourself to those situations. There's a lot of stuff like that, that you just really have to change about yourself if you're serious about scaling this business.
Whether it's for money or if it's for having your time, getting your time back, buying your buying back your time. Mr. Dan Martell. Go ahead, because everyone talking about that book now. That's why I became an entrepreneur.
I didn't want to go to work and someone told me to. Maybe that's why you want to get your processes in your systems and set some standards, some boundaries. I think boundaries are a great way to describe it because you're just saying, hey, we need to we need to stay in here.
We can go anywhere we want, but don't go out of here. If you're skiing, don't go off the cliff. I think boundaries are a great way to think about applying scalability to a business because they're meant to help you.
They're not meant to be processes, systems, and SOPs. That reminds me of school. It reminds me of somewhere I don't want to be.
It's not glamorous. It's not fun. I heard somebody, this was years ago, say all those things you just mentioned, they take time, they take effort, they take focus and concentration. Like you said, it sounds like school.
To some extent it is. The beauty of that is, Nick, that today there's way more information available, especially on the Amazon side and how to use SOPs. People have templatized a lot of things.
Then adopting them for your business than it was 10 years ago or even five years ago for that matter. I can't stress how important that is because it is a choking point as you add more SKUs.
Think about the problems you have when you go from, let's say, one SKU to 10, and then from 10 to 100 SKUs. For our line of business, we have a thousand SKUs and the challenge that comes with that.
If I closed my eyes and said, boy, I'd love to 3X my business, and that happened, most sellers are not ready for that. They are not ready to handle extra returns, or extra emails that come from customer service, that you have to, within a certain timeframe, respond to.
Extra cash, as you said, that comes with now I gotta replenish, extra planning to make sure the pipeline of product keeps flowing. All of those things add, I would say, pillars or pieces of the pie that come immediately if the pipe of sales just immediately exploded and just started growing.
This also means you have to be good at hiring too.
Yes, you sure do. There's a lot of blind spots there if you've never done that in your life.
It's not easy.
Tell me, give me a tip. I'm about to hire, I need to hire two people in the next month. What have you done, Nick, that's worth its weight in gold? If somebody came to you and said, Nick, I need to hire two more people this month. What do I do?
I have a good hiring funnel that I'm proud of. Set up an ad on LinkedIn. You can target anywhere as long as you have a business page on LinkedIn. Let's say you want to target Latin America.
You can go in and pick a specific country there. If you want to do multiple countries, you have to set up multiple ads. That's lead generation. You set up your job post and description.
Alright, let me hear it.
If you want to get good, have a copywriter write your job post. My process for qualifying leads, in general, is getting rid of the junk first. I want my job description to repel a lot of people.
I want them to read that job opportunity and be like, Oh shit, I'm not their guy. I'm not that good. I want to attract certain people. Then I'm going to qualify those people, whether it's a custom form that I created, a test that I want them to take, or a DISC.
Then I can patch in, which I have done before a video, one that they do on their own time where the questions pop up on the screen and they answer them so they can do it on their phone very easily.
Then I can watch those recordings. Then an interview. I used to just do one interview. Now we do three interviews with other team members and we have a scorecard and then everyone scores them based on our company values and what we're looking for in the role.
How has that changed your organization now that you have this process? What does that mean?
It just means we can feel like we're doing everything we can to make a good decision for a hire because a hire that doesn't work out is a very expensive decision for a company. That's something you just have to take seriously at some point.
I like my process, but I honestly don't have any big wins in the book for hires.
We have some people who were training that have already been with us. We're doing more leadership stuff. I feel like we're making some progress on up-and-comers in the company. We've also let go of a lot of people recently who just weren't a culture fit anymore.
That's where we're at right now in business. I think the key is it gives you when you just want to say, hey, man, I put all this effort into this hire. If it doesn't work out, at least I know I put a significant amount of energy into getting it right.
Is there a particular region, you said Latin America, I know that the Philippines is a very popular destination with sellers. Are you finding something in Latin America that's different from the Philippines or in the way of the work and culture or time zone?
The time zones are better. A lot of my outsourcing has been in the Philippines. I've done some other places a little bit here and there. Africa, Eastern Europe.
I know Eastern Europe's kind of popular with some sellers as well.
Yep. It's a little more expensive from what I've seen, but I did hire one person from Eastern Europe who's still with the company I hired them for. I honestly think if you want to do it yourself, it's lead generation. You write good copy. Throw it out there in as many places as you can.
How did they go? Okay, that's cool.
You have a funnel that the applicants go through and you only put yourself in when absolutely necessary. Don't micromanage it because you can automate everything up to getting an appointment scheduled on your calendar for a meeting.
You're just reviewing the test they took, the recording, okay, they passed the test. Now, you want to move down to the next step of the funnel for you as the reviewer or the hiring person.
If they don't pass the first stage based on your mental checklist, then you're not going to waste your time. It's an efficient process on both ends.
Well, I like that. I learned a couple of things there that I think we can incorporate into our team.
I have that posted in MDS. If you're an MDS member, you can go find my LinkedIn post where I did a screen recording as well. You can see exactly how to set all that up.
Hiring, scaling, leads, getting out of your comfort zone. What else did you want to go through? I wrote down a few other things that we talked about.
I think a good way to wrap that up for the listeners is to know the functions of business that apply to everything, no matter if it's private label, wholesale, or arbitrage, if you look at it through functions, there are probably three to seven.
If you get past seven, you're probably off track and have too many. Just know the functions of your business. That'll allow you to have some things to focus on. Every model has its unique issues.
The best way to deal with those is by figuring them out yourself or belonging to a community of people where you can ask a specific question and get a specific answer that directly applies to what you're trying to figure out.
Did you want to go into that? We talked about the example of one of the brands that I spoke to. Did you want to talk a little bit about that?
If that's a unique one to wholesale or what I would call wholesale from my background, is like representing a brand on Amazon and just how disconnected they can be from it and not knowing the potential of it.
It's like something they're just not looking at or they feel it's like, oh, it's good enough.
I've had quite a few conversations with brands. That's my take, is they just really don't know. They either don't know what's going on or some of them have it together and have a guy focused on Amazon, which is the key.
All you do is Amazon. You said you've talked to a couple like today or something.
Right. Yeah, talked to one today. We were just talking about this before we came on and started recording. I am shocked. I was shocked. I was completely stunned when they said they're one piece seller.
They're selling directly into Amazon. They're a large multinational electronics brand household name, and they have it on autopilot. He compared that to the movie Airplane where the doll pops up and that's what's flying the plane.
This person admitted to me that they recently had a global meeting about cost-cutting and organizations and where they're selling and they admitted that for them, Amazon, this guy told me, he said Amazon is just not as profitable as they hoped it would be.
The brand admitted to me that they're not as profitable. Quite frankly, you can't be profitable if you're phoning it in, which is what this big brand was doing. They have an operations manager, one guy in charge of that effort, and basically sending products to Amazon.
They don't have visibility into a lot of the numbers that you would be as a 3P, so third-party seller. They don't have somebody looking at the listings, auditing, doing the processes that you're talking about, the challenges with scaling.
This particular brand has thousands of SKUs. The nightmare of trying to manage all of those and moving them around and logistically, you imagine one person doing all that. Imagine that. Then we'll have it on autopilot. You know just as well as I know.
You're not doing anything else. That guy has no friends, no family, and is in his basement in the same clothes he woke up in. I think we've all been there. We've all been that guy at some point, but that guy, you have to not be that guy to scale your business.
You cannot be that guy. For them, there's a really large company. A lot falls on the shoulders of this one guy. You know what, Nick, that's not uncommon with very large brands.
I've talked to very large brands where, you know, we have, we're a small fraction of some of these multinationals in terms of sales, but we have bigger teams dedicated to selling on Amazon than a larger brand.
I think it's because of the way they manage the business that a lot of things fall, especially if you're selling through different channels.
The mindset of selling on different channels is that the responsibility of moving product falls on the wholesale, falls on the agent, falls on the rep, and falls on the account manager.
In a way that's different when you sell on Amazon where you know you gotta be able to have all those functions that we talked about earlier to succeed.
When you have that mindset, you say, we got a guy or a girl, or a guy and a girl, both dedicated to this effort as a large brand. It is a ginormous task because things change, listings change. All of a sudden, the feature that was on is gone.
If you're depending on, what we were talking about earlier, we could put a nice little green check mark on the main image. Amazon said, nope, you can't do that anymore. Now if a ton of your listings had that, suppressed or suspended listings.
If you're phoning it in, you don't know that that's happening and your sales are dropping.
You have to be paying attention to stuff. You do need someone daily on top of it, which again comes down to a lot of context. Someone like me, I've got to have someone else available for that stuff.
It's not going to be me. When I got started back in 2015, 2016, it was me for a little bit. Plus, I'm not very good at it. Even when I was that guy, not very good at it.
You try to get people that fill the holes and the things that you're not good at or don't like. For me, I don't love spreadsheets. I can do them.
I can do them all right, but I'd rather have somebody like you said that's in it and I can say, hey, look, here's what we're looking for.
Let's set this up, and boom, somebody else fills in all the holes and information for a spreadsheet, and then every other week or once a month, we're talking about whatever we need to, whether it's strategy or numbers or whatever.
Then we could take action on that, but you gotta have that as part of your playbook. Somebody who is operationally in the trenches every day.
That's how I would say it. If you don't have someone or some people doing that, boy, things could go, think back to the end of summer when they had the whole Amazon, verification thing where you had to get very re-verified as a seller.
Imagine putting that on autopilot and how long that would have taken. I'm not looking forward by the way to next summer. Hopefully, they figure that out. Don't we have to do that every year now?
I don't know. Oh my God. I hope not. Jeez. Well, fortunately, all that stuff goes to our warehouse and I don't have to deal with it. We didn't have any problems with it. I know a lot of people did. I had to do it on a few accounts.
It was easier on Walmart, by the way. Walmart was two clicks, from what I was told by my operations team. Two, or three clicks and that's it. Nothing else. Amazon on the other hand, you got some work to do there with that process and it could have been smoother, to say the least.
It's a topic that leads to more questions, based on the answers that you get. I think the key takeaway is when it comes to selling on Amazon these days, certain foundational principles are going to apply to things.
Let's call those functions of a business. There's a great book. Scaling Up. Scaling Up does a really good job of putting, yeah, that's a good book that puts it into perspective. You just have to get good.
If you're just starting, you've got to get good at lead generation. I remember some people send out five emails a week. We were sending out a hundred emails a week when we were doing a wholesale outreach.
I have a huge funnel for lead generation, wholesale, and brand management.
Whatever you're doing, do way more. That's one of the first levers you want to pull. Then next is how you qualify leads as well. Don't try to qualify while you're gathering. You want to gather, and then qualify later, and then close the deal. Breaking it up a little bit.
Alex Hormozi just released a book on exactly what you're talking about gathering, lead generation, and output. He said, somebody asked him the same question. He's like, yeah, we're talking about stuff on social media.
I want more followers. The person asked him, well, how many pieces of content are you putting out a day one? He said, no, you need to do 10.
He was like, what? Then he went and hired four editors so he could do just that and his follower count and views just exploded, but it's the same thing. You have to 10x your output from what you're doing and the only way to do that is to know how to scale.
That's why I wanted to come back and say that.
Then you're going to run into a lot of great problems along the way that allow you to level up as an entrepreneur. The rest of it is to just enjoy the journey, I guess.
If there's anything else listeners want to know about selling on Amazon, if you're a current seller on Amazon, or if you're running into specific problems, we'd love to help you guys out.
Yes. Yeah, absolutely. Why not?
Just drop a comment and hit us up, and we'll share some knowledge with you guys. I think that's just a great time to mention how important a good community is.
I know MDS has been a valuable part of my journey as a seller, but also just as a person and the people that I'm surrounded with these days and the events that I get to look forward to.
It's why me and you are sitting here doing this podcast as well. That's another big thing as you level up and you have money to invest in being a part of a private community like that. It's a good investment.
If you're active, it'll be one of the best ones you make, in my opinion.
I agree. There's a particular person in mind that was just fabulous to me over the summer when we ran into an enormous problem on Amazon. Leslie Pearson. You know who you are, Leslie.
She is awesome. Helped me with something that we were struggling with and it was something that was really out of our control after weeks and weeks of trying to do it the right way.
Leslie, we love you.
She knew who the right people were that were going to move the levers. It was amazing. The day after she got this person at Amazon to send out an email on my behalf, on my company's behalf, the people on the other side immediately took action.
Saving us probably another two or three more months of back and forth and probably tens of thousands of dollars that could have been wasted in terms of time, money, and effort.
It's a game changer for situations just like that, where everything's on the line and you just need someone else to talk to on the other side.
Oh yeah, every day.
Yes, walk me off the ledge Leslie and she did just that too. See, I'm about to jump without a parachute.
Well, shout out to Leslie and shout out to MDS for putting something together that can allow those relationships to have that opportunity to grow.
That's why it's so great and such an integral piece of our business because we make sure we hit up the MDS events for sure because I get a lot out of those.
Indeed. Anything else, Nick?
All right, I think that's it guys. Again, just let us know if you have any questions on something you're facing in your business or questions in general that you have. I think we've got a lot of experience between the two of us and should be able to help you out.
Hit us up if you have something. All right, see you next time.
All right, see you next time.
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