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Show Notes

There’s a big difference between an Amazon seller and a businessperson who uses Amazon. At least according to Dillon Carter, an Amazon wholesale success story. After listening to The Selling Family, Carter became entranced with the idea of building a business on Amazon. In his early 20s, Carter took the ultimate risk when he quit his day-job and dove headfirst into sales. While digging up a decent paycheck in retail arbitrage, Carter wanted more. Hoping to scale his business, he took yet another risk and switched his model to wholesale. Carter now earns six figures in annual sales and develops tools specifically designed to improve your business. In this episode, Carter walks us through his strategies for overcoming every obstacle wrapped in the Amazon package.

Laser-Focused To The Power of Time

Do you feel like there’s competition from all angles? Remember this: Amazon’s barrier to entry is ground-level but their barrier to success is sky-high. Only a fraction of sellers will become lucrative business-owners and the secret to success is focus. If your passion is wholesale, spend every day calling distributors.

Relationships Rule

Every new seller is overwhelmed by the prospect of establishing themselves. For success in sales, ditch your 400 emails per day and pick up the phone. Given that most sellers can’t make it past a generic email, taking the initiative to call immediately sets you apart. Not to mention, most distributors pre-filter Amazon emails. 

Nervous? Even if your first ten calls are a stumbling mess of rejection, the more you listen to a distributor’s problems, the more you’ll understand their needs and pitch solutions. Don’t let Amazon deter brands; emphasize your transparency and professional etiquette.

Above all, remember that brands are your clients. Focus on their needs and make them laugh! Likewise, ditch the anxiety. The very worst that can happen is an invisible stranger laughs and hangs up. You’ll survive. 

Managing Cash-Flow

How much money do I need to start selling? $10,000? $2,000? $500? Carter’s answer? Whatever you’ve got. Of course the more money you have to invest, the easier time you’ll have. But the best thing about wholesale is that relationships trump deep pockets. It’s not wealth that determines success, it’s the time you spend building rapport.

Vendrive & Aura

Having lived through the struggles of building a business, Carter is developing software tools that automate client management and repricing. Vendrive is a CRM tool that keeps track of every lead and reminds you when to follow up.  Visit amazonseller.school/vendrive for a 14-dray-trial and 25% off your first three months. 

Keeping your prices competitive can be a 24/7 job. Aura automatically keeps your prices in the buy box. Unlike Amazon’s repricing tool, Aura will reprice up to boost your profits. Check out amazonseller.school/aura for a discount on Aura.

Overall

If you’ve always dreamed of building a business on Amazon, don’t let the fear of failure scare you off. There’s less competition than it seems and if you’ve got the focus, obsess over your business and turn lucrative fantasies into an Amazon reality.

Resources From This Episode

• https://courses.thesellingfamily.com/
• https://amazonseller.school/vendrive
• https://amazonseller.school/aura

Outline Of This Episode

[00:00:20] Todd’s introduction to this episode
[00:02:16] Dillon’s story
[00:09:31] The importance of staying focused
[00:17:38] Why relationships matter
[00:33:00] Managing cash flow
[00:41:55] All about Vendrive & Aura
[01:02:35] Todd’s closing thoughts

Transcript

Announcer: 00:00:01 Welcome fellow entrepreneurs to the Amazon Seller School podcast where we talk about Amazon wholesale and how you can use it to build an eCommerce empire, a side hustle or anything in between. And now your host, Todd Welch. What’s up everyone,

Todd: 00:00:19 Buddy Todd Welch here from the entrepreneur venture and welcome to episode six of the podcast. And today I sit down with Dillon Carter. He’s a successful Amazon wholesale seller and also has developed a couple software tools. One of them is Vendrive, which is a CRM tool that helps you manage your contacts and manage opening your accounts for wholesale. The other one is our Aura, which is a repricing tool which helps keep you in the buy box. And we really go into a lot of good information like managing your cashflow, a lot of good information for new people, especially opening accounts, what to do to open new wholesale accounts, what you can expect when you’re on the phone, talking with those brands, trying to open up accounts to get more products, managing your expectations, managing sales, and just lots of really great information and make sure you check out the show notes for all of the links to the tools and other items that we talk about in this episode.

Todd: 00:01:34 It’s going to be amazonseller.school/6. That will take you right there. So with that, you’re going to love this episode, I’m sure. So sit back, relax, and let’s jump into this episode with Dillon Carter. All right, Dillon, welcome to the Amazon Seller School podcast. Really appreciate you coming on the show here. We’re going to talk about some Amazon wholesale as well as some tools, Aura and Vendrive that you have to help people with Amazon wholesale. But why don’t we start off just telling everybody a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you got into Amazon wholesale.

Dillon: 00:02:15 Sure. Yeah. Thanks for having me on the podcast too, man. So I got started. I think like the majority of us, you either hear about selling on Amazon, Oh, like a podcast or a blog, something you’re like, it’s in passing, right? It’s always like, that’s interesting. I’ll take a look and it’s just curious enough for you to kind of start turning your gears, at least for the majority of us. And I heard about it actually through the selling family. Jessica and her husband, the Pat Flynn’s smart passive income podcast, so he had an episode with them. I was like, that’s super cool. At the time I was a personal trainer full time and I always had this issue where I knew could not scale my time, right? The only way to consistently grow that type of business is to increase your prices. And at a certain point you just, you can’t go past that, right?

Dillon: 00:03:08 Like, I can’t charge $1,000 an hour for my time. And so physical products always had this alert to it. Just for that simple fact. And eventually, like most of us, you know, I decided to just test it. I was like, okay, I’m going to go to target and just scan a bunch of stuff and send it in. And I did and it was profitable stuff, but all I wanted to know was, is this real? Right. It’s kind of just like proving the credibility of this idea. And sure enough yup they sold money, got deposited back into my account with some profit and I was like, okay, this is cool thing. And so I would do this kind of just on the weekend, right? So just retail arbitrage on the weekends and eventually me and the GM of the gym that I was working at, I did not see eye to eye on a few things and decided to part ways.

Dillon: 00:03:57 And so I, I kind of had this weird moment where I had to decide what I was going to do. I had clients that were happy to go with me wherever I was going to go so I could create my own gym. That was certainly an option. I could just go find another gym to train through or I could do what I’ve been wanting to do, which was start that Amazon business at the time. It was kind of just me messing around, but I knew it could be a real business and that’s what I wanted. And I decided, I was like, no, this is it. I’ve got a little bit of savings. Not a lot, but I can make this work. I’ve got a very small runway, but worst case I’ll go get a job. Right? Like my risks not that high at the moment.

Dillon: 00:04:37 Right? I’m like young, 20 year old male. I don’t have kids. Great time. Right? It’s a great time to take a risk. And I did and I started spending eight to 10 hours, sometimes 12 hours if I could a day in targets and Walmarts and just grinding. And then coming home and, you know, S you know peeling the, the discount stickers from target, which are the worst, by the way. And I never bought a Scottie pillar. I don’t know why. I always like had a knife. It was not a smart decision and just shipping and just kept going and going and going. And I reduced my bills so much just to make this work. Mmm. And I did. And then I hit another issue, which was, you know, the point of this business for me was I, I needed it to scale and I couldn’t get RA to scale past me.

Dillon: 00:05:28 It was an issue. And so I said, okay, well I can go one of two routes. I can either go to the private label route or I can go the wholesale route. My thought process at the moment was, well, private label is pretty cool. It’s kind of awesome. Right? But it’s going to, in my mind at that time, it’s going to take me 12 months to get to a point where I can pull cash out. Right. I think that makes sense. If we’re being conservative business owners, we’re approaching this correctly. I think that’s how this works. But wholesale was a little bit different. Wholesale. I didn’t have this whole onboarding process or ramp up period. If I could purchase inventory and I can sell it in two weeks while I get my money back, plus profit and I made another smart, but at the time, not smart decision.

Dillon: 00:06:17 But it played out luckily, which was I’m going to back myself in a corner here. I’m going to go wholesale. I like constraints as a person. I like limitations for whatever reason. Limitations are fantastic. They really make you creative and innovative. And so I said, okay, you know, I’m paying my bills with RA and I’m having to do it. I’m having to chase this paycheck time and time again. I’m going to make this painful, right? I don’t like pain. I want to run away from it. So let’s, let’s use that to our advantage here. And I knew I had three months at three months to make wholesale work and I set a rule. I am not allowed to purchase any inventory regardless of how profitable it is, regardless of the ROI, doesn’t matter unless it’s wholesale.

Dillon: 00:07:01 And for three months I struggled and then eventually understood what I was doing enough just because I had gained so much experience. Although it’s only three months, but when you’re calling at least 10 suppliers per day, you’re just going at it and you’re learning and you’re iterating. I figured it out and now all of a sudden I have the scalable business that I’ve always wanted. I’m able to run it from I, I remember I went to, I took my then girlfriend to Paris for a week and I took a little, little a, I think it was a Chromebook. It was like a $200 Chromebook. And I was like, no, I need a, you know, I have prep centers that handle all the inventory. I’ve never seen my wholesale inventory, which is pretty cool. And I had to send a few emails and I was like, all right, I’m done. And that was it. And you know, in a short period of time I really, I really figured things out and clarified a lot and then we got to software and started the whole thing all over again.

Todd: 00:08:03 Yeah, for sure. So it sounds like your journey is very similar to mine except for I did go the private label route after retail arbitrage and had a couple of failures there before really getting into wholesale and I’m still trying to get the private label thing to go, but basically funding that with a lot, some of my profits from wholesale. So it’s, it’s really a good, good area. And I like how you said that you focused 100% on wholesale because as entrepreneurs, anybody who’s entrepreneurial, you probably have a mind that races a hundred miles a minute, always having new awesome ideas that you want to do. So you really do need to focus on something to get it going and at least get that ball rolling downhill before trying something else. So I really liked that you did that and now you’re shifting to the software, which we’ll definitely talk about that quite a bit more later here. But I just want to touch on a little bit what everybody seems to have issues with is a lot of people say that it’s too competitive now, Amazon and things like that and there’s big people in there. Amazon themselves is making all their own products and selling everybody’s products. So what do you say to that to someone who is just starting out right now? Is it worthwhile jumping into wholesale and going forward or what are your thoughts on that?

Dillon: 00:09:31 Sure. There’s one thing I want to touch on before we jump into that. And it’s something you mentioned, but I think it’s super important. It’s something I learned like in the last two years and it was a game changer. It’s, it’s, it is very easy for us to jump around, right? This is why you see a lot of people go from business model to business model to business model and there’s really no progress here. And I realized in my humble opinion, the, the, the equation to success is relatively simple. It’s being laser focused, raised to the power of time, right? So how focused can you be on this one thing and for how long? Yup. So I love challenging people when they’re like, I want to do wholesale. Great. Don’t do anything else. Especially if you’re new, right? I mean if you’re not paying your bills with this, double down on that and commit a year re regardless of the outcome, regardless of if you succeed or fail, commit a year for me.

Dillon: 00:10:25 Cause if you can do that, we can at least increase the probability of you succeeding. Now in regards to the comp competition, it’s always been there, right? It’s, I love talking with people who have been doing this for 10 15 years and they’re like, yeah it’s more competitive but it’s always been competitive. But here’s something to keep in mind. This is a, and just Amazon in general is a business model that has a very low barrier to entry but a very high barrier to succeeding. So are there a ton of sellers or is there an increasing amount of sellers a year after a year? Of course there are. How many of those are actually competing at the level of which is demanded to succeed. This is super important. It’s easy to say, well I see new sellers all the time. I mean our Facebook group has almost 10,000 people in it, but I can count on two hands the amount or the number of people in our Facebook group that is operating at a very high level.

Dillon: 00:11:23 There’s a difference between being an Amazon seller, quote unquote, in a business owner who happens to sell on Amazon. Vastly different the decisions you make, your professionalism, how you approach every single conversation or decision. It’s completely different. So when people like, you know, it’s just too, it’s too competitive. I can’t make progress. I’m like operate higher. I know it sounds just like an easy cop out, but that’s really what’s required. I mean it’s something that we deployed when we launched software because yeah, I mean there was other tools that launched it, you know, was going into the same space that we’re in at the same time and they’re not around anymore cause we deployed these things. Right. So it’s easy to say that. But if you take it serious, what does it matter? Right? And it’s one of those things where it’s kind of like you have to have that drive.

Dillon: 00:12:17 Don’t pick a business model that you’re like, I just think I can make money with it. I think that was my biggest issue with retail arbitrage is I didn’t love it. Right? I just, I knew I could make money with it and I couldn’t grow it much farther. But once I got to wholesale and I really understood it and I began to enjoy it, everything changed. And so that’s super important. Right? So what was the old saying like is the best time to get into something yesterday was the next best time today that’s always going to exist. That’s always going to be the case. Does it get harder over time? Of course it does. Every industry is going to mature, but that’s not a bad thing. Right? what’s cool is Amazon continues to grow their sales, but if you, if you’ve watched them over the past three to five years, they’ve shifted a lot from putting their money into inventory and using that money to acquire other software companies.

Dillon: 00:13:09 Why the ROI is much higher, plain and simple, right? If I can go acquire this AI company, I’m gonna have a far higher return on my investment than buying these wholesale products, even though I can buy truckloads of them. So you’re seeing them shift, right? You’re seeing them shift to where they’re like, Hey, we want more third party sellers but we want more legitimate third party sellers. So they’re tightening the, the are constraints here. But again, constraints are awesome. It’s a good opportunity. So don’t let, cause you’re going to have that in any industry by the way. Anything you go into is going to have something like this. But if you can understand it and come to terms with it and say, that’s actually a huge opportunity. Awesome. You can do so much better. For sure. I agree 100% and I think the wholesale is still the most accessible versus a retail arbitrage and private label are getting exponentially a lot more difficult faster.

Dillon: 00:14:08 So I think if you’re looking to go into those games, it’s probably, it’s not never too late, but it’s going to be a lot harder than you were. Wholesale is still a lot more accessible just because as you know you’re selling products that already sell well so you’re eliminating a lot of the risks that’s built into the system. But yeah, you can totally see where Amazon is going and I can definitely see there they’re already starting to drop off some of the smaller products that they sell. I’ve seen a little bit of that and I think we’re going to see a lot more of that this year in the coming years. And then also the closing off of potentially newer

Todd: 00:14:52 Sellers because Amazon really has to weigh that, you know, we want to offer the cheapest products, but they’re also starting to get a lot of scrutiny from governments and bad press for people selling cheap products or you know, knock offs and things like that. And they’re going to have to do something about it. They’re not going to have any choice. They might eventually be legally, they’ll have to do something about it as these lawsuits and things are starting to happen. So it’s, we’re in that period where it’s definitely not too late and it’s ideal actually to get in right now because then more than likely you’re going to be grandfathered in if and when eventually they close off opening up new sellers or make it really a lot more difficult to become a new seller. So yeah, it’s, it’s definitely an interesting time for that for sure. For wholesale, what kind of things would you recommend for someone who’s just getting started? How cause it’s, it’s easier for us cause we’ve seen it, people who have never even opened up a seller central account before, where would you recommend that they start?

Dillon: 00:16:06 It’s incredibly overwhelming. Let’s just go ahead and clarify that. But you’re not alone in that. Something I’ve done is every Tuesday I do a Facebook live and I do live sourcing and it’s kind of evolved to where it’s less sourcing cause you can only do that so many times and more just like Q and a stuff. And I love seeing people. There’s a couple that I’m helping right now. And I’ll do coaching or anything like that. It’s just, it’s fun to do. But, but it’s fun to see people say, I want to do this. I don’t care what it’s going to take. And then to be able to clarify a lot of the things and watch them go through it and say, Hey, I remember when I told you you were going to go through that. And like, yeah.

Dillon: 00:16:48 Like, okay, it’s not a big deal. Right. And like, okay, it’s not so here’s how we clarify it. Why don’t we need to clarify what you are actually doing? This is super important. I’ve realized in the past like six months, labels matter tremendously. I don’t know why, but they really do. If you get rid of the fact that we sell on Amazon wholesale is, it’s really not its own thing. We call it that because that’s what we’ve grown accustomed to. But what’s interesting, here’s where a lot of people get stuck with wholesale. It’s not a transaction. Retail arbitrage is a transaction. Wholesale specifically is B2B sales and relationships. This is really a hard transition for people to make, but if you can do this early on or if you’re just brand new, go into it. Understanding this, you are not placing a purchase order, no face.

Dillon: 00:17:38 It’s all relationships. And so if you could get comfortable talking on the phone, all it is is B to B sales. Don’t let the word sales intimidate you by the way. Cause what’s odd about saying it’s B to B sales is you’re selling somebody to allow you to give them money. It’s completely backwards, but that’s all it is. So why do I say that? A lot of people want resources. Resources are important. The mechanics of how to do wholesale or simply that they’re mechanics. They’re not the underlying business principles or foundations, but B2B cells can be, and so what you can do is you can go read five, 10 books on just B2B sales. That’s it. Business to business sales books. If you do that, you immediately have a leg up because the hardest part of wholesale is that the capital, it’s not the analysis, it’s none of that.

Dillon: 00:18:31 It’s simply calling somebody who’s never talked to you and getting them to approve you to sell their products when they probably have a strong disposition against Amazon sellers. Yup. That’s the bottleneck here. And so what I tried to get people to understand, it’s not PPC, it’s not listing optimization. That stuff’s actually the easy part. The hard part here is the most uncomfortable part. But if you can solve that one major bottleneck, everything else is easy and comes with it. And so when I first started calling suppliers, I kept getting rejection after rejection, after rejection. Eventually I just got fed up and I was like, listen, why do you hate me? Why do you not like Amazon sellers? And what’s funny is they just laid it out because they’re sick of it. They were sick of, of Amazon sellers, quote unquote, I’m not treating this business with respect or, or being professional.

Dillon: 00:19:25 They come from that kind of environment. And they told me, you know, we don’t like when you have bad communication skills, right? You, you don’t want to jump on the phone with us. You don’t want to have open lines of communication. You’re not willing to share anything. You feel like you have to hide a bunch of stuff from me. I don’t, it’s really not what I want. I want transparency. Okay. That’s pretty good. You don’t fall in map. So minimum advertising price. Super important with wholesale. Okay. That’s an easy one. You negotiate very aggressively to get 50% off our wholesale costs and then place two to $500 orders every single month. It doesn’t add up. And so I was like, okay, so I’m writing all these down and I’m like, you know what, I’m just gonna, I’m going to call the next supplier and I’m gonna mention all these.

Dillon: 00:20:11 I’m going to go ahead and create a solution. And that’s what I did. I said, listen just, you know, before we get into the details, I am an Amazon seller. But I want you to understand like we work directly with brands, we have relationships with brands. What I really don’t like to do is just, you know, send you emails and hope that works. Like we actually build real relationships, long lasting relationships with the brands that we work with and we actually work with you, not, we don’t just purchase from you. We don’t view this as a transaction. We view it as a relationship. We want to know what you want out of this brand, out of this product in the next two to four years. So we can be a part of that map that’s not a, we actually prefer map enforcement and we’ll actually help you.

Dillon: 00:20:49 By the way, if we notice this, we’re more than happy to reach out and let you know. And you just systematically go through that. And what’s cool is because I understood that was the biggest bottleneck for that business to grow or succeed, period. And I directly attacked it. I just, I created clarity and I knew how to overcome these objections because again, if we can clarify the fact that all I’m doing is a cold sales call, well what other aspects of that happen? Well, there’s objections. Okay. That’s pretty easy if you know what the objection is and you can sit down when they’re not on the phone with somebody. So you know what, if they ask me how I feel about map, what should my response be? And you think that through you put thought into that response. But what’s cool is when you get asked a question and you don’t have an answer and you’re like, I don’t, you don’t know.

Dillon: 00:21:40 You know, I’ll have to, I’ll look into that and follow up with you immediately after that phone call. Create a solution, right? A thoughtful response. And in the next phone call, you get asked that question, you answer with a thoughtful solution and they’re like, you’ve been doing this for years. Like, I literally learned this 30 minutes ago, but I’m solving problems. Right? this is a weird thing where wholesale is so counterintuitive. One, it’s B to B sales too. The people who purchase your inventory are not your customers. This is really counterintuitive. The brands you work with, and I’m a fan of working directly with brands, not necessarily distributors, although I can’t do that, but this still applies. Now they are your clients. Why they require more of your time. They enable your business to continue or discontinue by doing business with you, kind of sounds like a customer.

Dillon: 00:22:36 And if you can solve their problems and understand their needs, you went, no, that’s it. Everything else is automated and easy. We know if we feed the beast, we’re good. Right? If we throw inventory into Amazon FBA, we can get sales. That’s not the problem. The problem is to get the people who, who understand and believe in what we’re doing and they can get behind us. Yeah, that’s hard. But if you understand it, you can, you can absolutely do that. Right. But again, counterintuitive to what we’re taught about wholesale, which is just send a ton of emails and it’s a numbers game. If you approach this as being a real business, not an Amazon business, the real business who happens to sell on Amazon, it’s completely different in those conversations go really well because you’re actually asking questions

Todd: 00:23:21 For sure. Yeah. And I totally agree with everything you said there. And one thing that is really important to remember is with sales is a lot of people get scared of that word. Are they like a bad word, dirty word? And it’s, it’s really, I mean, your entire life is sales. You’re always selling yourself, selling someone else. You know, if you’re talking to your kids about going to bed at a certain time, selling them, well, maybe they’re selling you on the way. Exactly. But you’re selling them on going to bed at that time and why it’s good for them, why they need to do it is that everything is sales. And so if you throw out the idea that sales is some dirty word or something that only salespeople do and get past that and not be so afraid of it, and it’s really just a conversation, you know, it is like the worst thing that they’re going to say is no, and don’t call them.

Todd: 00:24:21 It’s a no. So you’re basically not losing anything by calling them. You might feel a little uncomfortable. You probably will feel uncomfortable first get started until you figure it out and you stumble it through. But you just gotta do it and learn it. And you’re probably going to screw up the first 10 phone calls, but then you’re going to get better and learn from each one. That’s how everybody does it. That’s how every business is built through the years. Always learning on your fails. One quote that I like is the master has failed more times than the student has ever tried.

Dillon: 00:24:57 That’s it, right? I mean, here’s the, it’s funny you mentioned like the first 10 aren’t going to go well. So here’s a thing I started to do, cause you know, in, in the Facebook lives, I start to kind of work with kind of people one on one every single week. And I like drilling down, what’s your problem? Like what, like what’s the, what’s the hurdle for you right now? And I know making that first phone call is so unnerving, it’s incredibly uncomfortable. I’m like, you know what, here’s a solution. I want you to commit to calling 10 for me but have zero expectation, get nothing. The point, the call, the first 10 is simply to get a baseline of how the conversation will go in every single time you get better. Because here’s the cool thing. I love doing this with people too that are like, I just, it’s hard for me to overcome the anxiety of just calling that first supplier.

Todd: 00:25:45 Here’s the worst case.

Dillon: 00:25:46 And I love playing the, the supplier, by the way. It’s always fun. I’m like, all right, hand up. Literally hand up. Call me and go hi. They go through their little pitch real quick. Oh that’s awesome. I actually hate Amazon. I hate you as an individual. Please don’t ever call me again. Click and like how, how bad was that? They’re like, not at all. I was like, that’s the worst case. I’ve had somebody laugh in my face, in my face, over the phone. And what’s funny is it was so out there that when I hung up the phone, I started to laugh. I wasn’t even offended. I was like, this was hilarious. Like it just laughed me off the phone. But it doesn’t have to be, it doesn’t have to be scary. Like you said, it’s just a conversation and it’s the same conversation right

Todd: 00:26:29 Over and over and over

Dillon: 00:26:31 With a human being. By the way. That’s, that’s the easy part.

Todd: 00:26:35 Yup. Yup. Now are you calling first or are you emailing first and following up a phone call?

Dillon: 00:26:41 I don’t like emails. I’ve talked with countless suppliers. They’re like, we actually just pre-filter those. Super funny actually. I learned that a really interesting way. I kept emailing this one company and eventually like they just wouldn’t respond to it. I just called them. I just kind of like got over my nerves. I was like, I’m just gonna call it. And the rep I was talking to I was like, you know what, the fact that you called is great. We actually have it listed on the site. No Amazon sellers, we use that as a filter. It’s not that we don’t want Amazon sellers, it’s that we don’t want the, the general normal standard Amazon seller. And she made a good point. Right. She goes the fact that you just called me and had a conversation and we talked for two hours by the way.

Dillon: 00:27:26 Nice. mainly just establishing report with her. We didn’t even talk business half the time we joked around. We laugh. Like that’s always something I like to do. Make somebody laugh on the phone first and foremost. If you can do that first, everything else is easy. And I, and I wanted to drill down cause I wanted to understand it more from their perspective. And she’s like, we, if it says anything about Amazon, we just delete it because if you really want it, you’ll call me. And you can’t tell me you want a bad enough cause you emailed me 50 times. That takes zero effort. Yeah, that’s a good point. Very good point. And she, and she, she made a good point too. Although the world is at this point where I want to work from my laptop, I don’t want to have to talk to people.

Dillon: 00:28:06 I just want to send emails and make decisions and be done. There’s nothing wrong with that. But you’re dealing in an industry that is not at that point yet. It is still handshakes. It’s still relationships. It’s still jumping on the phone and spending two hours with somebody. Just joking. I’m hoping you get it obviously, but you may, you may not get the get the account. But the point is that our business model is completely different then their business model, but they have to mesh together. And if you can understand that it doesn’t have to be difficult. I, I get the whole, you know, send four or 500 emails per day. I kind of get it. But here’s the thing. I know the conversion rates cause I track these, the conversion rates to open an account, not for a profitable account. By the way you just got it opened for emails is about 10%.

Dillon: 00:29:00 That’s being generous. For phone calls, 30 to 40%. Once you understand what you’re doing early on, yeah, it’s between like 10 to 20%. But you know, given 50 phone calls you’ll be closer to 30 to 40%. Okay. So if the conversion rate is that much higher, like triple, if not quadruple though those 400 leads you had just for one day, I can take those and convert far more of them. 400 leads converted at 30 to 40% based off. The buying criteria that I follow is about six figures in annual sales. Consistent sales too, by the way, not just like, you know, I got to go redo this. Great relationships. But when you’re sending so many emails, you’re churning and burning leads and not even actually giving yourself an opportunity to build the relationship that gives you that account. I love when people are like and it’s joking.

Dillon: 00:29:55 I’m in Facebook groups when they’re like, Oh, just give me a, give me your supplier list. I’m like, what’s funny though is I can give you my supplier list but you won’t get the account. Yeah. Because I have the relationship, I built a moat around my accounts so it’s hard to get because they enjoy working with me and I understand what their needs are and I seek to F to, to solve those, but always go, always go the the non scaling route and get granted. Again, I’m the scaling automation nerdy guy, but there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past year. The thing that does not scale is the thing you need to do the most. And once you understand it, then you could look to scaling it. What I mean is, you know, when we started aura, I decided I want to, I want to do user onboarding sessions one-on-one.

Dillon: 00:30:46 Every new user they were supposed to be like 15 minutes. They end up being like an hour, but I was like, it’s good, right? Tons of value is awesome. I’m doing this, I’m doing this, I’m doing this. It doesn’t scale. I can’t scale that [inaudible] the impact it had on those users and the amount of feedback in knowledge and experience and learnings I got that we then applied to the company was well-worth not scaling. Now yes, eventually get to the point where, you know, we started to grow users very quickly and yeah, I, I physically do not have the time to do that. Like I can’t do that for, you know, 20 hours a day and run the company. We got to where we were, which now we can do things at scale, but we had to do things that didn’t scale first. It’s really interesting. So do those things, like just make phone calls just to learn and understand what is the process here?

Dillon: 00:31:34 Like when do I say what? How do I overcome X, Y, and Z objection. Once you understand the process, now you can start looking at efficiencies, scaling automation, all that good stuff. But it’s funny, a lot of Amazon sellers, especially new sellers like month one or like, Hey, how do I get this thing to, you know, $1 million? Plus, I’m like, all right, you got a lot to learn first, give it time. Right. Give it two to three years. I’m not saying it’s going to take you that long, but, but seek to learn and understand first and then, then look for the opportunities to save time and all that good stuff. But but I, but I go down that rant because it is easy to send an email, but it’s honestly just as easy to make a phone call and you get better results.

Todd: 00:32:19 Yeah, you’re going to get a lot better results. And my process is fairly similar. I do email first to just to try to get that low hanging fruit and then doesn’t respond or responds negative. And then we follow up with a phone call to open up an account. And even the ones that I do open up an account with email, you still want to follow up with a phone call and start building that relationship because that could open the door for better discounts and maybe exclusives down the line for new products or their current products, whatever the case may be. So it’s exactly blooper important. As far as when you are building your business in the beginning, how did you manage cashflow and how much cash did you actually start out with?

Dillon: 00:33:09 Yeah, I love this question too. So when I started, I had $1,500 cash and like a $5,000 credit card. Like the majority of us getting started from what I’ve understood. So, so credit cards were super important to me at the moment because that was my only outlet that that would work. Me and James, my cofounder actually met on Instagram because he, he was running a seven figure wholesale business at the time. Mine’s doing a quarter. So, so, you know, almost mid six figures, but I was like, Hey, you know, I really want to know what I don’t know. Right. And so I just reached out and DMD everybody I could, and James was the first one that really jumped at the opportunity to have a conversation with me. And just shared everything. I was like, Oh, here’s what you need to be doing.

Dillon: 00:33:55 I was like, okay, that’s kinda cool. And I understood the cashflow was such an important part for wholesale. I mean I, I innately understood that, but I didn’t understand how to manipulate it. And James helped me understand that. Yeah, it certainly, it’s less work to place one restock order one massive win per month. Right? That’s kind of great. But when you look at the math on it, if I can an inventory, so let’s, let’s say I have 10 Ram just to spend in a month, I can spend that once per month or I can spend it twice per month is blows people’s minds. I love it. So if a place, one large restock order, it’s 10 grand, I can spend that once a month, right? It’s 30 days worth of inventory. But if I can actually have that, I can actually purchase more skews in the same period of time and if I can churn.

Dillon: 00:34:46 So basically if I can, if I can spin and receive $10,000 once every two weeks, my compound, cause it’s really just a compound equation by the way. My ROI in the long run is much higher. I was like, that’s kind of interesting. So I, you know, I thought I had to have like tons of money and you know, I have to cover a 30 days or a full month’s worth of inventory. I really don’t. So what I like to look for, and this is super helpful, is I want inventory to be sold within two weeks of it being checked in. That’s, that’s ideal for me. Yeah. I’m going to factor in, you know, shipping and lead time and stuff like that. So I’m placing, I get to a point where I’m actually like doubling if not tripling my restock orders. So I was like, man, this is a lot more work.

Dillon: 00:35:31 Like every Thursday I’m sitting down placing like restock orders, but I started to see the ROI impact. Oh, interesting. So now I didn’t have a problem where I was like, I need to go raise another five grand so I can onboard this new supplier that I have. I’m like, no, actually I can, I could do that now. So that was super important. So yes, managing cash flow is super important. The thing to keep in mind because a lot of people that are getting started, I always have this question, I had it too. How much money do I need to start with wholesale? My asterisk here is that regardless of the number, I tell you, it doesn’t change how much you have, right? Cause if you have two grand, and I say it takes 10, you’re like, man, I don’t have enough. You’re not going to get started.

Dillon: 00:36:14 Right? But if I say, Oh, it takes two grand, you’re like, perfect, I can get started now. It didn’t change anything. So my caveat to that question, it’s however much you have is however much it takes. If you’re coming at this with $10,000 cash, it’s a little bit easier for you. If you have 500 bucks, it’s going to be harder. Not undoable, but harder. The thing to keep in mind and something that really was a myth to me or it’s a myth now, but like I believed it very heavily at the time. I thought you needed tens of thousands of dollars to get in the wholesale. Right? I’m like, that’s a big boy playground. I’m like, no, it’s not. The, what’s funny is in my experience, the high MOQ, right? So minimum order quantities, whether it’s, it’s going to be dollar amount or unit, I find that they rarely exceed $500 and they’re easy to break by the way, if you just have a conversation with them, the way, the way I approach this, so I, I do not place large orders first.

Dillon: 00:37:16 It’s all a a hypothesis, right? I need to prove and test. So I place a test order, like a case, maybe two cases because I would rather something go wrong with 24 units, then, you know, 500. Right. Makes sense. So what I like to do is, and again, this is why you make phone calls and build relationships. I call the the supplier, the rep, whoever I’m talking to and say, Hey, listen everything looks good on my end. Here’s what, here’s our process. I don’t just say, here’s what I want to do. Here’s our process. Our process is that we place a small test order. The point here is to ensure that there’s no logistical issues so that nothing gets caught up. But the moment everything is greenlighted and they start to sell, I immediately will call you and place a full restock order, a matching much higher than your MOQ based off my analysis.

Dillon: 00:38:02 But I want you to understand, here’s why. Just so we, you know, we talked previously about, you know, I don’t want an, you know, or negotiate with you and be a small fish in the pond so to speak. But we do place small test orders so that if something does go wrong, it goes wrong with a few cases, not a pallet. Sound good. Awesome. Right? It’s exactly right. And what’s cool is a lot of the things that you think you can’t do with suppliers or that relationship, if you give them a logical reason as to why you want to do something, eight out of 10 times, they’re going to say, that’s okay. Yup.

Todd: 00:38:39 Yeah. Right. It’s so interesting to anybody who has had a problem with making small test orders. You might have to pay more and maybe you’ll just exactly. But yeah. Making sure eliminating that risk. Exactly. Exactly. Wholesale. And that’s what’s great about wholesales, that you can, those risks and yeah. Yeah. It’s just, it’s super important, like we’ve said, building those relationships and things that really does come down to that. Pretty much all of it. Yup. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s actually what makes wholesale so awesome because private label, if you have a ton of money, you can push everybody out. Right. Retail arbitrage is you’re just, if you have a ton of time, you can make that work. But would wholesale if, if you’re starting with $5,000 and you’re competing against someone with $5 million, the interaction that you have with the brands and getting to know people and building that relationship can outdo the person with $5 million. And that’s what’s really awesome with wholesale.

Dillon: 00:39:49 Yup. And, and it does all the time in my conversations with suppliers, it has come up more than once where, you know, I’m asking, Hey, you know, what, what are your plans with Amazon as a distribution channel? Like, I like to get as much intelligence, if you will, as I can. And a lot of times when, when you started to dig into to why they have frustrations in working with Amazon sellers they’ll, they’ll straight blatantly tell you, you know, we’ve worked with very large ones yet the place massive orders, but it was a pain to deal with them. I mean, it’s a pain to deal with Amazon by the way. I mean, a lot of brands that I’ve worked with have left working with Amazon to work with third party distributors like, like us, you know, third party sellers because they’re like, I can jump on the phone with you, I can call you at 10:00 AM on a Tuesday and you’re going to pick up and have a conversation. And if I have a question about selling on Amazon, you’re not going to be like, Oh, that’s my thing. You can do it. Like, no, you’re going to tell me everything.

Todd: 00:40:45 And the exact same thing with right there. They’re just tired. Amazon, all the hoops that they make them jump through sending stuff all over the place

Dillon: 00:40:54 And they beat down the prices too. They’re like, yeah, you can place a a hundred thousand unit order, but one, I’m not set up to do that, so you’re going to completely destroy my other distribution channels. And two, I’m barely making any money. So what does it matter? And that’s a good opportunity for third party sellers,

Todd: 00:41:10 Big time, big time. It’s a big opportunity coming here. Like we said earlier, if Amazon’s actually dropping out of these smaller sellers, which in my opinion makes sense for them. So yeah, I mean I think we could keep talking on this for hours more here, but just for the sake of not going too much longer than an hour. And I want to talk about your software because they’re so integral to what we do in wholesale. Probably. Let’s start with Venn dry first since we’ve talked and been talking a lot about building those relationships and things with the brands and vendors. And that’s what vendor I was kind of all about. So why don’t you tell us about that a little bit and what that helps us do. Sure.

Dillon: 00:41:55 So Vendrive is a CRM tool. So just a contact or a customer relationship management tool, you’ll, you’ll learn very quickly when you get into this business model that there, there’s a lot of administrative management. What I mean by that is it’s managing where is every lead, every supplier along your pipeline. And if you don’t think that you have a pipeline, you do by the way. And if you’re just randomly just going down a list and calling and hanging up, that’s not effective. You know, you need to understand when to follow up with, with brands. That’s super important too. And early on before I met James, we, we were just doing it off spreadsheets, like independent of each other. We kind of discovered like, Oh, we’re kind of doing this similarly. That’s pretty cool. And James at the, at the time he was finishing his master’s degree in computer science at UMass in Massachusetts.

Dillon: 00:42:47 And he’s like, Hey, I kind of built this tool that’s kind of been helping me because spreadsheets are great. I’m a finance major, they’re awesome, but they’re only useful for certain things and it’s like, Hey, try it out. And I was like, all right, cool and assertive to use. I, I migrated everything over. And it was great. It’s got a user interface so I could, I could tell you exactly where every single brand supplier lead is in my pipeline. So I can tell you which ones have I not called yet. Which ones have I called and they haven’t responded, which ones have I been approved for? Which ones are actually waiting for me to sign the the application to send it back. Right. Because what I realized is when you’re managing a growing business via Gmail and Google sheets, you tend to drop the ball.

Dillon: 00:43:32 Not intentionally. Not for lack of trying. It’s just, it happens. It’s just not the useful system. I remember trying to weed through my, my Gmail and this was before we had Vendrive and I found an email. I was like, Oh, interesting. They never responded to me, but they did. I saw the day on the email, they approved me, gave me everything, login credentials, and I logged in and scanned everything. I was like, that’s $2,000 a month in net profit that had been sitting there for three months. So it literally was costing me money. So Vendrive helps you essentially manage your lead flow. I mean it’s, it’s knowing who’s where what your next next task scar. Right. So it’s understanding, you know, when I log in every single morning I know exactly who I need to call and what needs to get accomplished to consistently move the needle forward for the business. That way you’re not dropping the ball

Todd: 00:44:23 Super important. Yup, definitely. So what I, I currently use HubSpot you know, CRM tool and it works okay if the flow is not nearly as awesome as your guys’s flow. So I want to switch over yours. I’m a little bit stuck with like the automated email tracking, which was really nice, but yours, I need to switch over because there’d be so much more organized for me. So I’m definitely going to do that at some point. But it’s just really cool because you have these little columns in here and it’s actually tracking with a bar as you’re going across. And you can see exactly what stage you’re in with every person you’ve seen there. You just drug it to the next stage. And so it’s built perfectly for Amazon, which is excellent

Dillon: 00:45:20 Built just for wholesale. It’s so specific. Here’s what’s cool though. If you, if you get to a point where you can hire a virtual assistant to help you source, which you should. What’s cool is you can, you can have a process set up to where your VA’s doing a lot of the sourcing to find new brands to contact and just dropping them into your, your Vendrive account. And so every morning you just have a refresh of new leads you need to call. And so you’ve just worked through that and it just, it’s great. It’s like a machine. It’s like an assembly line of wholesale. So that’s when things get really, really fun.

Todd: 00:45:55 Yeah. And, and what is your price currently? I think it’s almost free.

Dillon: 00:45:59 Yeah. Yeah. Basically. So there’s a 14 day trial and then it’s $27 per month after that. That’s almost nothing in the grant. Yeah, I know. So then drive is built. When we launched, you know, this was like our first software tool and it was mainly just built for us, but we were like, we wanted to get into software more. So we wanted it to be accessible for people getting started because we come at this, both being Amazon sellers, we understand how quickly it you get to a point where basically you’re spending like, you know, $1,500 a month on SAS subscriptions. And so we’re like, okay, you know, what’s a good move here? And, and we, we thought 27 was pretty good. It’s, most people can afford that, even if you’re just getting started. And that’s what we wanted. Right. So if you want a little bit upgrade and not use a Google sheet, this is probably gonna help.

Todd: 00:46:53 All right, perfect. Yeah, I like it a lot. And you know, if you’re super strapped for cash you can use a spreadsheet, you know, that’s better than nothing. Hubspot has a free version. Yeah, exactly. You’re gonna want to switch to something like this. And I know I’ve brought it up to you a bunch of times about adding in that email track.

Dillon: 00:47:15 Yeah, I know I was gonna I was gonna mention that. I was like, man, that’s the one thing that we don’t have is built in automations. Yeah. Right. And it’s a hard thing too, I’ve learned in running a company

Todd: 00:47:30 Of you making it too complex as always, kind of like a weird balance to walk. I, I want that too for sure. Cause it, cause it makes a lot of sense, but yeah, I totally get it. But even, even without it, which I’m sure you’ll bring it in sometime, I think I’m going to switch over to it just for the flow tracking. It’s just more logical and you don’t get lost. And it’s just so important to track those relationships. You know what’s going on. So that is Venn drive. Anything else? One thing I would mention is there any special landing page or anything we could get for viewers of the show? Yeah. So we can put something together for you. I’ll, I’ll send you a link to, to get that set up and we’ll give you a promo code. And it’s, I believe it’s set at 25.

Todd: 00:48:21 I’ll have to double check, but I think you get like a 25% discount for the first three months. So it, it, it basically Vendrive ends up being less than $50 in total for three and a half months of using it. So like if you’re strapped for cash, it’s way cheap for sure about this beforehand. So I’m just throwing it on you now. We’ll definitely, no, we’ll hook you guys up for sure. I’ll put it in the show notes, which is going to be a, this is going to be episode six. That’d be amazonseller.school/6 and then I’ll also link amazonseller.school/vendrive, V E N D R, I V E to that as well. So you guys can get a special discount from vendors over there if you’re interested in that. Check that out. And plus if you go through that link, you’ll a, as Scott Voelker likes to say, you’ll buy me a cup of coffee and I love, coffee as well, so we’ll go with that.

Todd: 00:49:17 Now your other tool that you have is your repricer. Yes. this one is absolutely critical as well, especially once you get the accounts open. Don’t worry about this until you have a bunch of accounts open. Yep. I’m already, but this is a really important tool as well. So tell us a little bit about that and why someone needs a repricer rather than just doing it inside of Amazon. Sure. This is our baby and this is, this is like our main focus for sure. So outer space guy there were, were slightly nerdy if you could tell. So, so why a repricing tool here? Here’s the issue. We, we know how competitive the landscape is. We understand how many sales come through the buy box, right? So obviously you’re incentivized to be in the buy box or control it. You eventually get to a point where you just can’t physically keep up and changing your prices. Right? So, so the analogy I love to give is let’s, let’s say prices, your prices are changing every five minutes. Can you change let’s say 30 prices

Dillon: 00:50:28 Every five minutes, 24, seven three 65. Yeah, you probably could, but it’s probably not really enjoyable. And by the way, they change far more quickly than that and it never stops. And so what a repricing tool enables you to do is set certain criteria. We use some, some algorithms behind that as well, and it does all that for you. 24, seven three 65. So the moment you’re taken out of the buy box by a competitor or a seize that reprices you back into the buy box and moves on. The point with repricing is understanding how competitive the landscape is and then using machines to do the heavy lifting for you that you really should not do by the way, to increase sales and help maintain if not increase profitability. This is super important. A lot of people will have this, this misunderstanding it that repricers just tank your price.

Dillon: 00:51:25 Some do but, but that’s not the ones you want to use. The point is to understand how the buy box works, why it’s so important, and then to build a system that can just do that for you. I literally love automation. If I have to do something more than once, I’m already thinking how I can automate it, right? Because I don’t want to do the task every single time. I just want to make the decision on how that task should be handled and then hand that off to ideally a computer because they don’t need breaks. I don’t have to pay them, you know, all that good stuff. And, and just know that it’s being done and I want to check in every few days, but I’ll get, we’re still good. Awesome. strategically you can certainly use repricing tools to liquidate inventory, which, you know, we have some sellers, you know, every now and they’re like, Hey, it’s been 60 days.

Dillon: 00:52:15 I just want to move it perfect. We can do that, but this, this is going to help save you a ton of time because you’re eventually, you’re going to get, get to a point where you’re like, why am I spending way more time in seller central changing my prices for them to just change? Again, it may not source new inventory. It becomes a bottleneck. No, Amazon has a repricer that they’re starting to build into Amazon. So what is the benefit of using your guys’s versus just using, sure. Yeah. So Amazon’s always had like their automatic repricing or they just call like pricing automatic. I forget what they call it. They have like an internal tool, right? It doesn’t have a whole lot of features. You can’t really decide a whole lot of things. And the critical piece, the piece that should really be the breaking point for me.

Dillon: 00:53:03 For most sellers, it’s great. It’s really fast that repricing down but will not reprice up. Okay. and, and think about the incentives, right? Like what’s the incentive for Amazon when it comes to prices? They want the lowest offer. Why? Because more people will purchase from them and they get 15%. Either way, they don’t really care. And so they have an incentive to lower the offer price. But you, the seller actually want to make money because you’d like to continue running this business. And so we’re third party. If we just get rid of aura, you know, specifically third-party repricing tools, the goal is to increased profits as much as possible, if not at least maintain them. Again, it’s very easy to assume all repricing tools just tank your price. That’s not what we want. You know, we want to make you more money. [inaudible]

Dillon: 00:53:55 That’s the ROI here, right? Like I want you to hand us X number of dollars for the monthly subscription and us hands you via repricing more than that. That’s what we want, right? W we, what we see on average is at least a 20% increase in sales just from using a repricing tool. We try to aim for 30 to 40% increases with users. Now granted, it depends on the quality of your inventory, all that stuff. But if you’ve never used a repricing tool, try a 14 day trial. Here’s the cool thing. We, we don’t have what’s called a gated trial with Aura where you have to, you know, give a credit card, just start a trial. So I love when new users are like, Hey, I jumped into a 14 day trial, got it, set up super fast and launched it, and then made enough money to cover my subscription before you charge me for it.

Dillon: 00:54:43 I was like, good, that’s so cool. So the risk is super low in trying one. And you know, again, you can try whichever one, you know, we’re not hardcore sales with stuff. But, but jump into a free trial and try it. The cool thing, at least the way we approach it, we, we don’t like to, what’s the best way to put this? We come at this from being Amazon sellers, so we understand what it’s like to work with other software companies. I don’t want you to feel like you’re alone because repricing, if you’ve never use it, can feel overwhelming just because it’s new. So we spent a lot of time doing a live customer support. So we don’t do emails, we do live, live chat. It’s, it’s, it’s cool when, so when, when our accusers, like I really do have a team of nerds behind me, like you do, right.

Dillon: 00:55:31 That’s what we want. I think that’s a critical point to make too, is Amazon’s not going to do that for you. I mean, we all know what, what seller support’s like, right? It’s not really this my thought too is that you always got to think about what, what is their end goal? Yeah. Their repricer [inaudible] probably is doing okay. But like I said, Amazon’s goal is to sell things as cheap as possible. So yeah, I’d rather work with someone who has probably more of my best interests at heart than what Amazon probably does. Yeah. Cause we only win when you win. And I love when people kind of test us on this, but like we, we literally care about our users. It’s fun. I mean it’s, it’s, it’s such a fulfilling thing when a, a seller is having, let’s say, a confusing moment about like, why is it repricing this way?

Dillon: 00:56:29 Well, I love when they reach out. Like, Hey, like what’s happening here? Here’s the skew. And I jump in. I’m like, Oh, here’s what’s happening and here’s why. And also here’s the solution. Do you want me to do that for you? So one, you understood he grew from it. You have more knowledge into how repricing works, but also you don’t have to do all that leg work. I’ll just do it for you real quick. Because we want you to succeed, right? Because we only succeed if you succeed. And I’m of the firm belief that the business mantra should always be that the people you serve should win more than you. Yeah, always. I don’t know where I got that from. It probably from like GaryVee but, but it makes so much sense to me and we want, we want the people that we served a feel that too. Not just like hear it but actually feel and be like,

Todd: 00:57:16 You guys got our, you guys got our back here. That’s kind of cool. And you know, full disclosure, right now I am using Bqool. BQOOL.com, which is one of your guys’ competitors up. And I am playing, I’ve used you guys a little bit in the past. I’ve tried your trials twice. Which is nice that you don’t have to put a credit card in there. I can attest to the fact that a, you guys are right on top of support and I want to very possibly switch at least part of my business. But you know, I’ve got everything set up so it’s always hard to make that switch. Yeah. Now but I’m checking out your guys’ software and I really like pretty much everything that you guys are doing. It seems very slick interface and it’s really nice.

Todd: 00:58:05 So if you’re just looking to get a repricer, you know, I think yours go our a.com is a perfect option. And I’ll throw a link in there as well. Maybe we can come up with a discount for everybody for Aura as well. So I’ll make a amazonseller.school/aura which is a U R L and that’ll take you over to that. So it will put up a page there and get an extra discount for people would be awesome if that’s possible. Yeah. But yeah, I mean it’s, it’s one of those things that you just have to have because otherwise, yeah. Whole life doing repricing if you’re manually. So what are your guys’s current pricing on that?

Dillon: 00:58:50 So right now it’s $97 per month if it’s monthly. And then if it’s a annual subscription, you take two months off of that. Just look at cheaper. I mean, obviously we’ll, we’ll give you guys a promo code for the first. So basically you’ll get a discount for the first three months after the trial period. So again, you know, we like people to be able to jump in and try it, see if it’s a good fit for some people. We’re not a good fit. And you know, I want you to be able to test it. Test our support too. It’s always fun. And, and you mentioned kind of that switching pain, right? That that always comes, we, we’ve built in some systems like our uploads feature where, you know, if you’re like, Hey, I have all my costs, mins and maxes stored in this tool, most tools you can actually export that and upload it directly into aura.

Dillon: 00:59:34 And we just apply that. We just need to recreate your strategies. I’ve literally sat down with users and said, Hey, screenshot me your strategies that you’re currently using and I’ll convert them. Because like I get it, right? Like I understand that switching pain is always uncomfortable by the way. Cause we have to do it. The tools do. So if we can make that easier, it’s awesome. And here’s the cool thing. If you want to try something new, you don’t have to completely go off on, right? You don’t have to completely shut down the other one and try a new one. Try 10 skews, right? Don’t, don’t have to repricing tools on for the same, the same listing. It’s great to watch. Not what is your inventory. But you can test that, right? So you don’t, don’t feel like you have to make this massive decision.

Dillon: 01:00:20 Take 10 skews over here and see if you like it. And if you’re like, yeah, I’m good where I am, cool. Not a big deal. You didn’t actually have to switch a whole ton of things and switch it back. But if you do, you’re like, Hey, cool, my strategies are set up. I just need to actually export one little file and shut it down and we’re good. So, so don’t feel like if you’re wanting to find something new that it’s super painful, I promise you it’s really not. We help users do this all the time.

Todd: 01:00:45 All right, perfect. I will have to take you up on that, I think. Yeah. Finally make the jump here. So one little thing I just want to throw in there is a, when you’re using a repricer, don’t be the penny cutter, match the buy box. Don’t go a penny under and be the person who drives out all the profits for everybody. That’s a but we are right at about an hour here. So we need to wrap it up. Any parting words that you’d like to give and maybe let people know if there’s anything you would’ve done differently if you were starting out new now?

Dillon: 01:01:20 Yeah, don’t treat this as an Amazon business. Treat it as a real business and give it enough time. It’s very easy to call 10 suppliers, not yet 10 accounts and say this doesn’t work. It’s not enough. You need to focus on it. Especially if we’re just talking wholesale for a second. Commit to two to three years to make this work regardless of the business model. Really commit to that amount of time. Because again, I said this earlier, you know, success in my opinion is, is being laser focused, raised to the power of time, right? How focus on how determine and how obsessive can you be about making this work. And if you can commit to that timeframe, also commit to calling a hundred suppliers. You can call a hundreds of suppliers. You have a much larger sample size to dictate if it works or if it doesn’t. And you’re going to grow so much for it. But, but take this business model seriously, run it as a real business, starting a real company and you’re going to do fine.

Todd: 01:02:19 Totally, wholeheartedly Agree. You got to put the time in. A lot of people just give up just a little bit too soon. If they would’ve kept pushing through that hard part, they would have found success. So you just got to keep moving forward and make it happen. All right, well Dylan, I really appreciate you coming on the show. I think this was awesome episode for sure. People are really gonna like it. Again for your tools make sure everybody goes and checks out the show notes, amazonseller.school/6 and then we’re also gonna have amazonseller.school/aura and / vendrive as well. And they can get those discounts on top of the awesome discounts that you already give people when they’re first starting out. So really appreciate that. Appreciate you coming on and it’s been awesome. Yeah, Todd, thanks for having me on, man. This has been fun.

Announcer: 01:03:13 This has been another episode of the Amazon Seller School podcast. Thanks for listening, fellow entrepreneur, and always remember success is yours if you take it.