Live Amazon Wholesale Q&A Session - Amazon Seller School

Happy half-way to one-hundred! In honor of our 50th podcast, we’re answering questions live. Stay tuned for answers on everything from winning the buy box to shipping products to using capital wisely and the fastest way to $500,000.

The best time to start selling on Amazon is now, so stop waiting and start listening.

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Products That Won’t Sell

When a product won’t sell, try pushing it through on Amazon using coupons, discounts, and five-cent auto advertising campaigns. If you can’t get ungated or something’s just not selling, clear it out on eBay or Facebook Marketplace. Also try optimizing listings by improving images, bullets, and descriptions. Check out Todd’s webinar all about the mine and refine method here.

The Ethical Way to Go Exclusive

Whatever you do, don’t register a brand under your Amazon account. Should you ever stop selling or sell your business, that brand’s account is now trapped in your defunct or sold profile. Instead, Todd recommends having a brand give you access to their account so you can take it over without having to register it under your name. Also make sure to have an on-paper agreement!

$10,000 in Capital?

If you’ve got cash but don’t know where to start, Todd always recommends going wholesale. Wholesale is low risk and it’s easy to get started. Check out Todd’s videos all about reverse sourcing so you can start contacting suppliers and gaining momentum.

Increase Your Buy Box Percentage

Winning the buy box used to mean winning at price. Now, cracking the code isn’t so simple. Beating the buy box now has more to do with where your inventory is and how much you’ve got. Essentially, Amazon will send your products where it thinks they’ll sell best, but you’ve got to give Amazon enough inventory. You’re more likely to get the buy box if you’ve got less inventory using UPC. But Todd recommends using FNSKU for products that might be breakable or digestible or that you just want more control over.

Profit From A $10,000 Investment?

To give you an idea, Todd’s top-line ROI is 45-50% before taxes. After expenses, you’ll likely have a 12-15% profit. As you build your business, Todd recommends gradually putting money toward savings, so when you’re ready to take the Amazon leap, you’ve got an emergency fund to fall back on.

Pitch Yourself

It can be tough pulling brands away from Amazon and convincing them you’ve got value. But here are a few places to start. For one thing, Amazon has terrible listings. As in some of the worst you’ve ever seen. Emphasize your ability to optimize bad listings and jumpstart sales. Also point out that Amazon doesn’t follow up with negative reviews.

Finally, position yourself as someone who cares deeply about a small brand’s success. As a small business owner yourself, you understand their needs and can offer a personal touch. In contrast, Amazon is a massive corporation that doesn’t care about the loss of one small seller. As a result, Amazon will never put in the effort third-party sellers do…and it shows.

Out Of Stock

Unfortunately, COVID has affected the supply chain. But when it does rebound and you’re ready to buy, make sure you’re using the Keepa graph to confirm that a product’s prices were still profitable before April.

FBM Best Practices

Is your package less than a pound? Use First Class shipping. You can also use websites like ShippingEasy to compare prices. If it’s a hazmat product, you’ll want to ship it yourself. Otherwise, Amazon’s shipping service is typically your best (and cheapest) bet.

Brands That Bite

If brands are contacting you demanding that you stop selling their product, they typically have no legal grounds to actually sue. Hopefully that’s good news. Bottom line, if you’re a legitimate seller selling legitimate products, you’ve got nothing to worry about.

Feedback Software

When it comes to boosting sales and winning the buy box, having feedback plays a big role. Todd has never used Feedback Five, but he does recommend using the Jungle Scout plug-in to automate requests for feedback.

Overall

If you’ve been thinking about starting a business on Amazon but just haven’t taken the plunge, Todd challenges you to sell one thing before the month’s end. Amazon is truly the opportunity of our lifetimes, but eventually, it will get harder for new sellers to squeak in.

The time is now. So happy selling everybody.

Resources From This Episode

Outline Of This Episode

[00:00:35] Todd’s introduction to this episode

[00:07:59] How to sell products that just won’t sell

[00:14:54] Going Exclusive

[00:19:45] The best place to start

[00:21:34] Winning the buy box

[00:28:48] Profit and what to do with it

[00:36:06] Putting yourself above Amazon

[00:42:23] Is everything out of stock?

[00:46:29] Shipping best practices

[00:54:21] Dealing with brand backlash

[01:03:13] The best software for automating feedback requests

[01:09:55] Todd’s closing thoughts on this episode

Transcript

Todd (00:00:00):
By the way. Thank you. I have went from zero to 100,000 in sales in four months, much value from you. Helped me. That is awesome. Stephen, congratulations, a hundred thousand dollars in sales is definitely not a small thing, especially in four months,

Announcer (00:00:18):
Welcome fellow entrepreneurs to the Amazon Seller School podcast, where we talk about Amazon wholesale and how you can use it to build an e-commerce empire, a side hustle or anything in between. And now your host Todd Welch.

Todd (00:00:35):
What’s going on everybody. Welcome to episode 50, the big 5-O, it’s pretty cool that we’ve been doing this for 50 episodes now and you guys are sticking with me. The audience is bigger than ever, and we’re all just learning together, growing our Amazon businesses. So I really enjoy it. I get a lot of emails from you guys out there, comments on the YouTube channel and some on the Facebook page as well. So really appreciate everyone out there sticking with me for 50 episodes. And what I decided to do for the 50 episodes since this podcast would not exist without all of you out there is I did a live Q and a session to answer your guys’ questions out there. And that is going to be our 50th episode, because what better way than answering your guys’ questions to celebrate the big Five-O halfway to a hundred.

Todd (00:01:42):
So I year from now, we should be over the a hundred episode Mark and keep ongoing strong. So really appreciate it. I think you’re going to enjoy this. We answer a lot of really good questions, some basic stuff, some advanced stuff like how to win the buy box. Selling FBM. What’s the best way to ship products. If you’re doing FBM or what’s the fastest way to get to $500,000 in sales, what’s the best thing to do with $10,000 in money to spend on your business and things like that. A lot of really good stuff. If you want to get the show notes, head on over to amazonseller.school/50, and make sure you’re on the email list. If you miss out on the live, make sure you’re on the email list over there on amazonseller.school. You can get on the email list at the bottom of the page and, or make sure you like our Facebook page.

Todd (00:02:42):
And that’s at amazonseller.school/Facebook because we decided to go live over there this time instead of on YouTube. So make sure you’re connecting with us on all those different channels. And then next time you can be sure to get your answers. Are your questions answered as well? So now one thing I noticed, unfortunately, the audio is not super high quality, unfortunately, through recording on Facebook on this live. I’m not sure if it was my microphone or something going on. But there’s a little bit of what’s called clipping. So when the volume gets too high, it starts kinda like distorting a little bit. So I don’t get too loud most of the time. I think, I think I’m just kind of going over questions and stuff, so should be okay most of the time, but I know that it’s there. I apologize for it.

Todd (00:03:34):
Hopefully you guys can get through that and still get the really good content. That will be a part of that. So with that without further ado, let’s go ahead and dive into the live Q and a session that we did.

Todd (00:03:48):
So I appreciate everybody joining me. This weekend was a big jump in sales for me. If you guys are selling on Amazon, hopefully it was a big jump for you. It seems like Christmas sales are starting to maybe take off and excuse me, as you might’ve seen in the email, I actually jumped into $1 million in sales for the year. I’m about at one, 1.1 million right now. So I’m hoping to finish the year at about one and a half million dollars in sales. So business is `going very good for me. Sales, just keep increasing, you know, with all the craziness out there, people want to keep buying more and more online.

Todd (00:04:40):
Let’s see, we got Brian, Paul says sounds good. Robert says, Hey, EA, how’s it going? Robert Brian Calvin, Calvin, thanks for joining us, says, hi Todd. Hope the family is doing well. We are doing very well. I’m not sure if I mentioned this publicly, but I did actually come down with coronavirus. COVID 19. So did my wife and her parents, we all live together and we all caught it from each other, but we’re all past it and healthy now. So we are all good to go. So I appreciate the concern, Calvin. I’m assuming that’s probably what you were talking about. We got Julie Hasket, Woohoo, congrats that hitting the million dollar Mark. Appreciate it Julie. Will says congrats, appreciated it as Will. Thanks for joining us Will, it’s it definitely feels good, right. You know, and I’m not putting it out there.

Todd (00:05:40):
I didn’t put it out there a whole lot. But I don’t want to gloat or anything, but I just want to show you guys that it’s, you can still grow. And especially right now, Amazon is just booming and going crazy. And so it’s a perfect to get in, you know, it’s still accessible and relatively easy to do. You know, there’s a lot of hoops and stuff to jump through. But at some point as Amazon matures here, it’s going to get harder and harder and harder for new people. So really now is, is a great opportunity to get started. And that’s kind of what I want to do the live Q and a, we haven’t done a live Q and a for quite a while. And so I want to jump on here and answer some questions. I’ve been doing a small group coaching program with some students that have been doing awesome.

Todd (00:06:36):
Fantastic. That’s been a lot of fun, the path to six figures, I’ve called it. And that’s been a lot of fun. So I’ve been putting a lot of attention on that in the podcast and stuff as well. And of course, just growing the business, I’m in the front of the warehouse right now in the back. My father-in-law, who’s a new employee now, the business is helping me prep product in the back right now. So things are going pretty well. So go ahead and start posting your questions in the comments. We’ll do a first come first serve as we go through here and try to answer as many as possible. And I’m going to get my coat out of the background here.

Todd (00:07:29):
Don’t need that a part of the background. We’ll just give everybody a second here to post some questions and we can get going, whatever kind of questions you have. Let me know if there are questions about my business, about your business, how to do something, you know, no question too big or too small for us to answer here. All right. Got one here from Roberts. Robert says any favorite liquidation sites for items we can’t sell on usual platforms. That’s a good question. So if you can’t sell it, buy, can’t sell it. Do you mean that it just isn’t selling on like Amazon or that the product was banned or something like that? Because if you can sell it on Amazon, I would try to first push it through there. Right? If you haven’t done like deep discounting and maybe some coupons as well can really help push it, maybe do that like 5 cent auto advertising campaign that we talked about in the past to try to get sales rolling.

Todd (00:08:49):
Lot of times the big discount though, can really kickstart things. If you’ve got a ton of stuff, we’ve got black Friday coming up here, so you could try a lightening deal. It’s going to cost you some money, like the minimum, 150 bucks up to like 500 bucks or more, depending on the day you select. But if you’ve got a lot of inventory that might be a way to get some marketing from Amazon and a push for your products, get rid of them. Otherwise usually when I’m trying to clear something out, like if it’s something that’s just not selling, which is pretty rare, or if Amazon like blocks the sale of an item and I can’t get it Ungated

Todd (00:09:34):
Unsuppressed, then I’ll just usually clear it out on like eBay and possibly Facebook marketplace Facebook marketplace. I haven’t done it myself yet. But they have the ability now to do shipping really easily on there so people can pay for the product and then you can ship it to them. So the marketplace is a lot bigger now, so that’s definitely an opportunity, but eBay and Facebook are probably the two that I use the most. I’ve never used any like liquidation sites and such most of the products that I get I usually can sell through them at some point, maybe it’s slower than what I expected. But I can usually sell through them. Sometimes I might have to do some upgrades and fixing of the listings and stuff like that. You know, like the wholesale mining refine, which I’ve talked about on the podcast where we’re taking bad listings that don’t look very good and optimizing them, taking new pictures doing the bullets description title.

Todd (00:10:41):
A lot of times I can get them selling that way. So a little bit of work that way sometimes can get them selling if it’s a product that you can keep purchasing and it makes sense to put a little work into it. If you guys are interested in that at all you’ve probably heard me talk about it before, but you can check it out at entrepreneurventure.com/mine. M I N E. I did a masterclass about three hours long of walking you through the process of fixing up a listing finding these low hanging fruit products, cleaning them up, getting them selling. I do really good with them. I have a lot of them that are like a hundred percent ROI and selling pretty good now. So it’s a really good way to make some extra money. And you might be able to do that with your products that are not selling well, maybe that’s why they’re not selling well, but otherwise eBay and Facebook, I would definitely look at using them to kind of clear it out.

Todd (00:11:36):
Other than that, I have not used a lot of liquidation sites. So if anybody else out there is using liquidation site, go ahead and post that in the comments. Let us know if you have a favorite that you’ve used before. We can pass them down to Robert and help Robert out a little bit here because that is what we try to do here, help everybody. Yeah. So hopefully that answered your question, Robert, that’s how I do it. And hopefully that can help you out with your inventory that you’re having trouble with. And just so you know, if I cough a time or two here, I still got like a little lingering thing from the coronavirus in my throat that makes me cough a little bit every once in a while. It’s just a little annoying rather than anything with what I’ve got my water here, this isn’t champagne or anything, not drinking a beer, it’s a sparkling water.

Todd (00:12:27):
All right. Let’s see, Julie have you looked at tactical expander yet? Curious as to your thoughts about that and tactical bucket, if you use it? Never use tactical expander. I’ve used tactical bucket with tactical arbitrage. Not familiar with tactical expander though. So I’m not sure now let’s see what exactly is tactical expander. That must be, be something related to tactical arbitrage perhaps. I’m not seeing anything in search results. Oh, here we go. Entree source, perhaps tactical expander, expand your tactical arbitrage sourcing. Have you ever told a friend about selling on Amazon suggest that they try it out at a lot? So something about expanding tactical arbitrage. So I will look into that Julie, but I’ve never actually used it. So I’ll look into it and maybe I can report on it in a future episode here, but tactical bucket.

Todd (00:13:37):
I’ve used that a lot with tactical arbitrage, the tactical arbitrage, if you’re not familiar it’s similar to like AMZ analyzer or analyzer tools they’re called now where it can take your spreadsheet and match that to the products on Amazon and allow you to go through that quickly and see if you can find products potentially sell and tactical bucket allows you to create these little files that you can upload into tactical arbitrage to connect tactical arbritage to maybe a wholesale website that you have a log in for. And it will pull all the products from that site and bring them into tactical arbitrage and match them up to Amazon. And it allows you to more quickly go through those sites. So I’ve used that for several different sites. You just want to make sure that that site that you’re using has like the UPC and everything in there, or it’s not going to be really great matching up with Amazon.

Todd (00:14:35):
But I’ve used it with that. So I’ll look into tactical expander though, and we’ll see if it’s something that maybe we can talk about on a future episode here. My cousin, Andy Coen, how’s it going, Andy? Good to see you as well. Let’s Steven whites what is the best way to set up exclusive with a brand to do brand registry on my seller account or create a new one for them? All right. So good question, Steven. Appreciate it. In the very beginning, I was actually registering brands under my own account, which is a very bad practice. You don’t ever want to register someone else’s brand under your account just because it’s not really all that ethical because then you basically completely control their brand on Amazon. So I have since gone away from that, and now what I do is I, if they don’t already have an Amazon account, like an Amazon seller central account, I set them up with one and I go through the brand registration process and everything under their account.

Todd (00:15:47):
And then in the user permissions, I create a user for myself and just give myself all of the permissions and you can pretty much do everything on their account that the normal full administrative user can. So it’s basically like having your own account and your you can handle their brand registry and everything there, edit the products and stuff like that if you need to, but then you are selling the products on your account, assuming that you’re going to do a wholesale deal with them. And you’re not just actually running their whole brand, if you’re running their whole brand and like onboarding them onto Amazon and stuff, then what a lot of people do is the same thing set up their own account, sell under their account and have an agreement in place where you’re going to like split the profit in some way, whether it’s 50, 50, or 60, 40, whatever the case may be.

Todd (00:16:47):
I don’t do a lot of that. Pretty much all of the exclusives I have I have a user in their account, so if I need to edit their listings and stuff like that, I go in there and do that. And then I sell all the products on my own account. So I’m buying from them wholesale, sending them into Amazon under my accounts. So that’s usually how I do it now. But I definitely wouldn’t recommend registering under your account. For example, like, let’s say you decide to stop doing Amazon at some point. Maybe it’s not something that you really like, or it doesn’t work out for you then their brand registry is just stuck under their account. And Amazon is very reluctant to move stuff from account to account when you’re brand registered, or maybe you sell the pro the, maybe you sell your business.

Todd (00:17:37):
Like I hope to do maybe in the next year or two sell my wholesale business. Yeah. And then if that brand decides they don’t want to work with that new customer, you have to go through that process of separating that brand. So it’s just easier, more ethical to set everybody up separately, have an agreement in place so that, you know, you don’t set it up and do all the work. And then they are just like, okay, adios. Most people are not going to do that. Most people are pretty ethical. And once you make that relationship and maintain that relationship again, it’s all about the relationship and wholesale. Once you have that relationship and you keep it going they’re not gonna want to, you know mess around or mess that up. But you want that agreement in place anyways, cause it just keeps everybody honest and it sets a foundation for, this is what’s happening.

Todd (00:18:35):
This is what we’re going to do. This is how it’s going to work. If there’s any disputes or issues, you can refer back to the agreement and you know, if things need to change, you guys can negotiate that, but you have that paper in place which is very important for doing the process correctly and just having everything legitimate, same thing. If you do a partnership, you know, I just thought of this. If you do a partnership with somebody, a lot of people just get started. Hey, let’s do this business together and they’re going down and they never expect anything to happen, but money can cause a lot of strange issues. It can cause stress and it can put strain on relationships and things like that. So having an agreement, a partnership agreement is what that would be. If you’re in a business, having that in place can just alleviate so much of that laying out who’s doing what and when and how much, how much is people getting paid and things like that. It’s just super important to have those agreements in place. All right. So hopefully that answered your question, Stephen. I appreciate it.

Todd (00:19:43):
Bob Miller asks, if you have 10,000 plus in capital, what is the best place to start? I would have to ask you to define best place to start, but I’m assuming we’re talking, excuse me, I’m assuming we’re talking about Amazon. So definitely Amazon wholesale, I think is the best place to start. And I’ve talked about that numerous times wholesale versus private label versus retail arbitrage, lower risk in wholesale higher reward and private label, but it takes more to get going and you really have to build a brand and stuff like that. And I like to do that private label stuff as well. And I’m trying to build a brand and doing that as well. But wholesale is where I would say you’d want to start out look up my reverse sourcing videos that I have on YouTube or on entrepreneur, adventure.com.

Todd (00:20:39):
And that is the method you’re going to go through to find products, potentially sell build yourself a big of brands and distributors. And I’m talking hundreds of distributors and brands that you can buy these products from. And then just start calling them and trying to open up accounts, get spreadsheets and use a tool like AMZ analyzer, or tactical arbitrage and find products that you can potentially sell. So that is where I would start. A $10,000 in capital is plenty to get started. You just have to keep flipping that, you know, the lower amount of money you have, the more, you just have to keep flipping it and growing it and not taking anything out, the more money you have, the more products you can buy up front and grow a little quicker. But 10,000 is more than enough to get started in the wholesale game.

Todd (00:21:34):
Let’s see Liz asks any suggestions on increasing buy box percentage. Their percentage is based on a variety of factors, but wondering if there’s actually something I can do. Yeah. So that’s a hard one, especially right now with the current buy box is acting very strange as compared to the past. In the past, it was very much price. You know, if you had the same price as everybody else, then they would rotate the buy box. If you went a penny below or two pennies below, you would get the buy box a super majority of the time. And that was a majority of what gave the buy box rotation. Now there’s always different factors in place. For example, if you have a product and you’re putting the FN SKU number, the X number on it over the UPC. So Amazon’s barcode that inventory is your inventory only.

Todd (00:22:34):
And if you’re only sending in, let’s say 50 units and Amazon can’t spread that throughout the country. And most of your inventory let’s say is in Florida. And there’s a shopper in Utah. And I have inventory in a Las Vegas warehouse. Even if I’m a little bit higher priced, Amazon’s probably going to get the buy box to me because it’s cheaper for them and faster for them to get the product from the Las Vegas warehouse to the customer in Utah, then from the Florida warehouse to the customer in Utah. So that’s another factor how much inventory you have and how much that’s spread throughout the country. The more inventory you have, right? If you send in, let’s say 200 units of something Amazon will typically have most of those units, let’s say 150 of them will go to one of your local warehouses. And then it might have 20 of them go in here.

Todd (00:23:31):
And 20 of them go in there, 10 of them go on there. And they do that to kind of start spreading it around. And then that 150 that lands at your local warehouse when they get there, maybe 20 of them will go in stock and the rest we’ll say reserved or FC transfer. And that’s Amazon distributed thing them throughout the country to where they think they’re most likely to sell. So Amazon will do some of that for you, but you have to give them enough inventory. So that’s one big thing is having enough inventory for Amazon to spread it around. Now, if you’re not using that FN SKU, you’re just using the UPC. Then everybody’s inventory is yours, right? Everybody else who’s not using the Amazon barcode. And I do that a lot for products that I don’t have to worry about.

Todd (00:24:23):
Like if it’s just a product let’s say Oh, I don’t know, maybe some, a dog toy, right? Like one of those dog rope, dog toys, there’s not a whole lot that you can do to screw the preparation of that up. Right? It comes in its packaging, you throw it in a box, send it into Amazon. And there’s not really anything you’re doing. There’s not really any way to break that necessarily. That kind of thing. I would just use the UPC if it was something that could potentially be harmful to someone if transported wrong or if it could be broken easy. So let’s say it’s like a dog treat that the dog is going to eat. That I would probably use the Amazon barcode for, because I don’t want to take the chance that some other Yahoo who doesn’t know what they’re doing sends in expired dog treats or a knockoff or something like that.

Todd (00:25:25):
And somebody’s dog gets sick and I’m the one who made that sale. And so they get mad at me, maybe Sue me something like that. Or if it’s a glass product that can break easily, if it’s not packaged really well, that I’m going to use the FN SKU number four as well, because I might bubble wrap it. I want to make sure it’s good. I don’t want someone else who doesn’t know what they’re doing to send my customer a broken unit. So I kind of go back and forth, but that is a good way to increase your buy box percentage matching the buy box for sure. Increasing your seller ratings is big. You know, the more seller ratings that you have, and this is different than product reviews. A lot of people confused, product reviews and seller ratings seller feedback.

Todd (00:26:14):
And that’s what you see in the back end of seller central. When you go under performance, you can look at your feedback on there. You want to make sure you’re getting that as much as possible. And the best way to do that right now is using jungle scout. You can either use their extension and go to your orders page. And if you have an extension installed, a little orange button will show up there, you can click it and request reviews and feedback for all those orders that are on that page. And you just go through all the pages and that feedback and reviews inside of every order. Now Amazon has a button to request reviews and feedback. That is pretty much at this point, the only legitimate way that you can do that, that aligns up with terms the terms of service.

Todd (00:27:00):
So you want to make sure you’re doing that all the time. I have a virtual assistant, who’s doing that multiple times a week and going through but I did just realize that jungle scout now has an automated system in their software. So if you’re paying for the full jungle scout package, you can actually turn that on. They’ll just automatically do it for you programmatically and request that seller feedback. So that’s really important. You can think about that as how much Amazon can trust you. Right? Same kind of thing is if you’re going to go to a new restaurant and you look up the Google reviews to see if that business is any good, that’s what the seller feedback is for your Amazon store. Are you doing right by the customer? Do you have the feedback? Amazon is definitely going to take that into account as to how legitimate your company is.

Todd (00:27:52):
And if that feedback drops below 90 or 85%, that can start effecting the sales. And also it seems like the bigger sellers with higher feedback potentially may be getting better buy box rotation as well. So those are probably the main things that you can actually control. Otherwise if you’re not getting the buy box, you might just have to start cutting the price. Something like 25, 50 cents. That’s just try to get that buy box and get it moving. Now, it’s not ideal to do that because then everybody starts losing money. But if you’ve got products sitting there and it’s not selling, then you’re going to have to do something. So that’s definitely a way to clear out some inventory, if you want to clear it out and use that money to buy something else. So Liz appreciate you joining us, hopefully that helped you.

Todd (00:28:48):
We got one here from Kelvin young. So I’m going to be putting 10,000 into my wholesale business by the end of the year, I’m hoping to pull some of the profits since my full-time job has been up and down since COVID started, what kind of profit would be realistic to expect from that investment on average? So my top line ROI right now is around 45, 50%. So that’s before my expenses of like employees all my softwares and things like that and you know, paying people and all that good stuff. So, but 10,000, let’s say you were able to do 40% top line ROI. And you know, my ROI is a little higher than most because I, the wholesale mine and refined method that I talked about so it helps increase that ROI. So most people are down around maybe 40, 35%, so let’s go 40%.

Todd (00:29:52):
So that means you’d have about 4,000 top line profit. If you were able to flip that $10,000 and then you’d have to take your expenses and stuff out of that. So your bottom line should end up being around between maybe 12 to 15% after all of your expenses. So 10,000, if we do 15% of that, you’d make about $1,500 flipping that 10,000. Now that doesn’t sound like a ton, but that’s pretty good profit. And then, and what’s cool in wholesale. And just online in general is you can do that right off the bat, right? A brick and mortar store. You’re literally talking about one or two years potentially before you get back the money that it takes to launch. So you’ve got the 1500 bucks. And if you roll all that back in now, you’ve got 11,500. And if you do that again at 15%, now you’ve got $1,725 in profit and you start get that compounding and it can grow very quickly.

Todd (00:31:01):
So in the beginning, you want to make sure you take out very little. I recommend if you follow the profit first for e-commerce sellers or the profit first book you can start taking out a little bit. I wouldn’t pay herself right away, but what I would do is just do a very small percent of your disbursement, like 1% and move it into what’s called a profit account. And that money just sits there and just collect and that’s money that’s coming out of your business, going into savings. And eventually that will become your pay, not the money you saved up, but that, that percentage will become your pay. Then the business just gets used to not having that money in there, and you can grow it as you grow your business. And then you’ll know for sure that you can take money out, grow your business, and your business can keep going without that money.

Todd (00:31:56):
And by the time you’re ready to pay yourself, you’ll have a nice nest egg in that savings account that can become your emergency fund. So let’s say you’ve got $20,000 sitting in your emergency fund and you decide to make the jump and go, full-time selling on Amazon. Now you’ve got $20,000 that let’s say tomorrow, Amazon shuts down your account for some reason not legit if you’re doing it everything correctly, but it can happen. You’ve got enough money sitting in that emergency fund to keep paying the bills and paying yourself for maybe two or three months while you get that stuff figured out. Normally it’s not going to take that long. It usually takes maybe a few days or a few weeks. But then you have that protection. So that’s what I’ve done. And that’s what I would recommend you doing as well.

Todd (00:32:54):
Calvin let’s see Spencer, how does a new seller win the buy box since the algorithm change? I imagine the buy box price, but it doesn’t cycle. So we just got done talking about the buy box. So all of that would pertain to you as well. It can be rather difficult right now. If you run into that situation where a product is just not selling, you might have to clearance out of it and move your money into something else. If you’re a little bit more willing to take risk, you could try ordering a couple more case packs or a few more case packs and send them in and see if that gives it a push. Especially if it’s one that you’re using an FN SKU that we talked about, the Amazon barcode. See if that extra inventory will get you into the buy box.

Todd (00:33:47):
You know, maybe your inventory is not in the location where people are buying it. And so you’re not getting that buy box. So you could try that if you want to take a little bit more risk, if you’re willing to try that. And if you have enough room to play with so that if you have to, you can just cut the price and clearance out of it. Now, if you’re looking at the, keepa graph, look at the history of the lowest, the FBA price went, can you go under that price and still make profit? Because if you go under that price, hopefully everybody else on there we’ll stop. You know, maybe it’ll only be making 5%, but at least, you know, that you can clear out and move that money into a different product. So you just kinda gotta play with it. Unfortunately, right now, it’s just the way things are.

Todd (00:34:35):
And like I talked in the beginning, there’s still a lot opportunity, but there are certain things that are getting harder and it’s gonna keep going that way. So getting in now while it’s still relatively easy and you can make profit if it’s a good idea and I say easy not in that, the process of selling and finding products is easy because it’s not, it’s a lot of work. But easy as in right now, everybody can still sign up to sell on Amazon. And I don’t know if that’s always going to be the case. It’s getting harder and harder right now, right now, you’re going through like a zoom call, video interview to get an account open and everything. People are getting shut down if paperwork doesn’t match up and stuff like that. So it’s getting harder, but it’s still relatively easy for the opportunity that’s available on Amazon. So I don’t have a whole lot more that you can potentially try. It’s kinda just trial and error to see how it goes. And if it doesn’t go clear out and move your money into another product, or like I said, double down and see if he can get that needle moving for you and just keep growing your business, keep getting that feedback and growing. And eventually you’ll start getting the buy box More and more.

Todd (00:36:05):
All right. Will how do I pitch a brand that is currently working exclusively with Amazon getting exclusive or get them to sell to me as well? What value add could I offer? So yeah, it’s not easy to pull someone away from Amazon. One of the best brands that I work with actually I tried to get them they were already working with Amazon. They said, no. And then about eight months later, they got back to me and said, you know, we’re sick and tired of dealing with Amazon. And then making a send stuff all over the place and making us put our products in bags and stuff like that. We want you to just take it over. And so some people might call that luck. I call that, you know, being in the right place at the right time, you know, luck comes to those who put themselves in a position for it to find them.

Todd (00:37:02):
And so I lucked out with that, you know, big time by putting myself in that position how you can pitch them in the way that I usually try to approach it is is this so most of the time, the list things that Amazon is selling on are some of the worst listings you’ll ever see. They’re horrible. Amazon doesn’t care about the brand. They don’t care about improving the brand or helping them in any way. The only thing they care about is getting the lowest possible price on buying the product and making the brand to do as much work as possible. So Amazon doesn’t have to do it, for example, sending it all over the country and putting things in bags if necessary, putting labels on and stuff like that. So I usually try to approach it in that way, especially if the, the brands listings are really bad and point out that, you know, Amazon is not currently doing that for them that if you were to be selling it, you could optimize the listings, take new photos, all that good stuff, and probably double, triple or quadruple the sales.

Todd (00:38:12):
Now that’s assuming the price of the product is a little bit higher. Really cheap products is difficult to compete with Amazon, you know a product that might sell in a store for like three, $4 on Amazon. You and I would probably have to sell that for like seven, eight, $9 where Amazon will just sell it for like two or $3, which would be negative like 110% for us. Right. so low price products that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but products are a little higher price, like 15, 20, 30, 50, a hundred dollars. It makes more sense for us to sell it than Amazon, because we’re going to care more about that product, assuming that you do care about the product, and if you’re doing what I’m teaching you, then we like to do that clean up these listings make them better and get more sales.

Todd (00:39:06):
And so you can approach it in that way, point to them how bad Amazon’s listings are for their products, and then show them their competitors that are doing it right, and how awesome their listings are. I guarantee you can find some listings that are just awesome, that are probably blowing them out of the water. And either that company is selling it themselves, or they have a wholesale person or someone doing it for them, and they’re going to be leading the sales in the category typically. So you can point that out and that you can help with that. You can also point out that Amazon is not following up to any negative reviews. They’re not trying to help the customer in any way. That’s something that we do. And I recommend doing as well following up on reviews. And so I also try to point out that Amazon is gigantic, right?

Todd (00:40:01):
Amazon. I don’t, I don’t know the actual number off the top of my head, but they do something like what, 50 billion in sales or something like that. And if the company that you’re looking at most likely as a small company, maybe they’re doing one, two, five, even 10, $20 million in sales, but to Amazon, they’re like a, nobody. If they stopped selling to Amazon, their products disappeared. They went out of business. They wouldn’t matter to Amazon at all, but I’m another small business. You can talk to me on the phone. We can jump on a phone call any time, talk about the weather, talk about football, talk about whatever, talk about business. And we’re going to care a lot more than Amazon will ever care about their products. So trying to do that personal touch, it’s not easy even with all that. And it’s really frustrating when I’m looking at a product and I’m like, Amazon is just ruining you guys.

Todd (00:41:04):
If you’d let me take this, I can help you so much. It’s really frustrating sometimes when they’re not willing to do it. But it’s not on them. It’s on me, it’s on us because we didn’t sell them the vision. And so you need to sell them. And that’s where the salesman comes in and that relationship and that connection comes in. You have to sell them on the idea that you are going to do it better than an Amazon. And that’s not easy because in a lot of people’s minds, Amazon should be able to do everything better. Right. so we have to show them that it’s not and tell them why and how we can do it better. So I would approach it in that way. And that should help you maybe pick up some of those leads. It’s gonna be a small percentage, but picking up a few of those can really help the business, help the bottom line and make bring a lot of profit into the business, especially if it’s products that are selling really well.

Todd (00:42:08):
So hopefully that helped Will, let me know if you get some of those ones stealing some from Amazon, because I always liked to share those stories because Amazon really doesn’t care and they do a really bad job on so many products. It’s really sad. Stephanie Chase says, I am new to wholesale. I’ve already been accepted by several suppliers. I’ve tried to place an order five times with no luck. All the items were out of stock for all the suppliers. I spend a lot of time analyzing the products for nothing. Is it a COVID thing or is it the norm? Right now it is a lot to do with COVID. For example, one of my distributors I sent over literally about $8,000 in product to buy. And she came back to me and said, well, we have $800 of this in stock.

Todd (00:43:00):
So it’s definitely a big COVID thing right now. It’s making it a lot worse than normal. Normally a super majority of things would be in stock for most distributors and brands. Right now And it depends on the category. Some are better than others, but it’s like a 50 50 shot if something’s going to be in stock. So don’t let that get discouraged. The supply chains are all screwed up right now and it’s probably not going to get better anytime soon, we’re going through a new spike and you know, we’re in cold and flu season right now. So we all knew that COVID was going to go up, but COVID is a type of a cold, similar to the common cold. It’s worse. We all know that. So I’m not comparing it to the common cold, but it’s the same kind of thing.

Todd (00:43:53):
And it reacts the same way to a lot of things. So it’s cold season, it’s getting worse and that’s going to mess up everything. A lot of States are shutting down again. Thankfully I live in Utah. So while they have a mask mandate right now odds are very slim that they’re going to shut down. They only shut down for like one month in the very beginning, back in April. So we’ve been mostly like normal. Honestly, if I didn’t look at the news, I wouldn’t really know anything’s going on, but it’s going to mess up the supply chain. It’s going to be that way for awhile. So just keep checking back with them and make sure that if they are able to, they’re putting those items on back order for you. Now you want to be careful and make sure, look at the history of the Keepa graph and make sure that at those low prices back in like April and March of this year, make sure that those prices at those prices, you would still be profitable because the odds are very good that if they’ve been out of stock for a long time, the price has risen.

Todd (00:44:59):
So you want to make sure that once they’re back in stock, that, that price, when it comes back down, which inevitably we’ll probably do, maybe not all the way back now, but it’ll come down. You want to make sure that you’re still profitable at those lower prices. So always look at the history, especially right now, like pre COVID pre April April is when the keepa graph get all out of whack right now, right? The sales rank, a lot of things out of, out of stock prices go up and the sales rank changes. So you want to make sure historically the price was good so that when things get more back to normal that you can still be profitable. So make sure you’re looking at that. But get on back order and just keep trying, you’ll find more products that you can order from.

Todd (00:45:48):
And when they’re back in stock, you can be one of the first ones back on that listing and possibly get those sales at the higher price and get more profit as well, if you can get them in there right away, real fast. So hopefully that helps just keep on trucking on don’t let it get you down, but it’s awesome that you’ve opened up enough accounts to have five places you want to order from. That’s a big accomplishment. So don’t look past that first off and just keep moving forward and keep growing. You’ll find more products and eventually they’ll get back in stock and you can get those in stock as well. Let’s see. Another one here from will, can you discuss FBM best practices, for example, what types of mailers boxes to use or products and type of mail service to use first-class et cetera.

Todd (00:46:40):
So I am probably not the best person to talk about FBM. I don’t do a lot of it and it’s not something that I relatively enjoy doing. So the FBM that I do it, I am typically just using a lot of the boxes that I get from like returns and stuff like that. So I’ve got just a pile of those in the corner and I’m using those to send out that product. If you’re buying products and things first-class is definitely huge. If the product is under a pound, then you can typically send it first class mail and that’s going to be by far the cheapest. And in first-class mail, it doesn’t matter a whole lot, the size of the box. It just matters that it’s under 16 ounces. So you want to have a smaller box because that helps keep the weight down, especially if it’s right on the edge.

Todd (00:47:36):
But if you can get it under 16 ounces, sending it first class as big, because then your shipping might be three, four, $5 for a product to ship it. If it’s over that pound I’m using right now, a service called a shipping easy.com. That’s shipping easy.com and they can compare prices for me with USPSs, FedEx and ups. And I can pick whichever one is cheapest and it can buy the postage for me, spit out the label, like a, slap it on there and send it out. So I use that for some situations where I’m having to ship the product myself, like if it’s a hazmat product or something like that. Otherwise you’re pretty much going to be using Amazon’s shipping service for the most part. That’s going to be by far the cheapest, just using Amazon’s ups pricing and buying the boxes.

Todd (00:48:38):
If you’re selling products, a lot of a similar products, then, you know, whatever boxes are, the cheapest that will fit the product, you know, you can buy from the boxery. I think it’s the boxery.com. That’s where I buy some of my boxes from youline.com they’re a little bit more expensive, but they have a huge selection. If you’re just buying a smaller amount buying right on, Amazon can be really good prices. I find that they even have better prices sometimes then you line does for boxes and things like that. So that can be really big. But I’m not huge on FBM. I know I need to do more of it, especially this time of year. So I’ve got a little bit of that going on. But I am far from an expert on FBMs.

Todd (00:49:28):
So hopefully that a little bit of knowledge will help you out though. Let’s see. Another one here from Stephan white, is there any way to make a deal with a brand to be the only allowed seller on Amazon? Is that brand gating? Technically no, there is you can get the exclusive with the brand, right? And then you are the exclusive on the Amazon platform, but Amazon doesn’t really have a foolproof way of stopping others from being on the listing, selling on the listing, but you could try to get brand gating, but that’s really reserved for huge brands like Nike and things like that. So the odds that you can get that as pretty low what some brands will do in, in my opinion, it is not legal is they will file IP complaints intellectual rights complaints against sellers on their listings or copyright infringement.

Todd (00:50:32):
And I get those from time to time and I can usually get those cleared right up if I provide invoices and proof that the product is legit I can get cleared right through that and then keep selling the product because legally you have the right to sell the product. So the only real way is to control their supply chains. So the brand needs to number one, not sells other Amazon sellers, if you have an exclusive. So they have to have that in their onboarding process where they’re saying in their paperwork, that the other people are signing, that they will not sell on Amazon. If they do, they will no longer be able to purchase the products they need to tell their distributors that they do not want to allow selling on Amazon. You know, we get that all the time, right?

Todd (00:51:21):
That’s one of the hardest things for us to overcome is that we don’t want more Amazon sellers, and that is what they need to do. If you have an exclusive with them is control the supply chain. That’s the only legitimate, moral, and legal way to control the sales on Amazon, because technically Amazon is a public platform. Anyone can sell on a listing and that’s just the way it is. So you have to control your supply chain is the biggest way to control that. Stephan says, wow, thanks, very useful information. You are very welcome, Stephen, glad I could help. Then he also says, by the way, thank you. I have went from zero to 100,000 in sales in four months, much value from you helped me. That is awesome. Stephen congratulations, a hundred thousand dollars in sales is definitely not a small thing.

Todd (00:52:17):
Especially in four months, you must be like just working 24 hours a day, or just doing the system perfectly and putting yourself in the right place for luck to find you as I like to say. So keep on going. You will probably surpass me keep going at that rate. So great work, Brian, Paul if my goal is to go from zero to 500,000 in gross sales, assuming I have access to capital, what is a reasonable timeline to forecast to achieve my goal? Well, I would say go talk to Steven White. He went to a hundred thousand for months, so he should be able to get you there. No, but seriously, zero to 500,000 in gross sales, assuming you have money to grow at a rapid rate and the time available to put in, or maybe you’re outsourcing that time to virtual assistants and things like that.

Todd (00:53:19):
You can probably go from zero to 500,000 in a year, I would say is a safe bet. Now I should ask zero to 500. Is that a month or just total? Because you could probably go to zero to 500 pretty easily in a year. And what is that? That’s about 45,000 a month, so that shouldn’t be too much of a problem in a year. And then you can really start ramping it up and in year two, probably get it to one, to maybe 250,000 in sales. I’m assuming you’re doing everything really well. You’re learning from people and executing and not running into any roadblocks and things like that. So, you know, that’s just kinda, if all things go favorably some times it might take longer, sometimes it might go faster. It really depends, but if you’re doing things properly should be able to go pretty quickly.

Todd (00:54:21):
All right. Steven White, again, how often do brands and other sellers contact you with the demand that you stop selling their product and how to know if the claim is legit, you always start with a few products. So yeah, it it’s fairly common. No, not a ton, but it definitely happens. Sometimes they’ll reach out to me in like on a message and that is against terms of service for Amazon. So sometimes I’ll just ignore that. If you wanted to, you could reach out to the brand and talk to them directly about it, if you want it to be cautious and you know, see if it’s actually someone from their company trying to contact you. And if so, if you want to, you can say, Hey, I’m going to clear out and we won’t sell any anymore. Alternately, as I said, there’s really nothing wrong with you legally for selling the products on Amazon.

Todd (00:55:17):
So you could just keep selling it. Even if you get an IP complaint or something like that, get it reinstated and just keep selling it. I’ve done that in the past before as well on some products. So it does happen super common, but at my size, I probably yep. One, two, maybe three a month that I’m getting IP complaints and things like that. I got to clear out and keep selling. Sometimes I think it’s from the brand. Sometimes it’s just from Amazon, maybe a listing is you know, got on their radar somehow with people selling fraudulent stuff or knockoffs or customers returned products saying it wasn’t authentic. Amazon can take that initiative and shut down and listing as well. And they don’t really tell you who it came from or where it came from. So you kinda gotta figure that out, just get, I usually get, just get it cleared and keep selling and wait and see if something else happens.

Todd (00:56:18):
If it happens again. Then I might start taking it a little bit more seriously. The brand reaches out to me again, I I’ll call them directly from like a number on their website and talk to them that way. Otherwise if you get like a legal letter Borys is a big law firm out there that sends out these garbage lawsuit notices. And I say garbage just because they’re, they’re unethical and immoral sending those out because there’s really no legal claim behind them, but I have heard that sometimes they will take people to court to try to get them off the, the listing. And really what they’re trying to do is just trying to scare you off of the listing. And nobody really wants to go to court. A lot of us are smaller sellers, so they’re just hoping you disappear.

Todd (00:57:12):
So typically if I get one of those letters, like I said, it’s not worth the hassle at that point. So at that point, I’ll usually just clear out and tell him to take a hike and not sell their products anymore and just move on. There’s just so many products that you can sell that it’s not an issue. So I usually don’t worry about it. If it comes to that, I just get rid of the products. But a lot of times I will just keep pushing through until it gets to that point. Or maybe try to negotiate with the brand and see what their plans are with Amazon. Maybe you can help with it and help them grow their brand. That’s why I say, reach out to them right away and find out, you know, what’s going on, what’s their plans. Maybe I can help.

Todd (00:57:58):
Maybe I can be one of the exclusive sellers or something like that. You never know. So you want to take them seriously and reach out to them brand and see, you know, what’s actually going on. After that, if they still don’t want you to sell, it’s kinda up to you, you’re not technically doing anything wrong. So you can either clear out or keep selling and see if it moves to going a little further with the legal letter to send stuff like that. So that’s kinda how you got to deal with that. It’s just a part of the game and we just move through it whenever it happens to us. I don’t worry about it. It’s not something that keeps me up at night because I buy all of our products from legit distributors and brands. And so I know I have legit products.

Todd (00:58:44):
I’m not all that worried about it typically. All right. So we’re just over an hour here. So I’m going to wrap up here. We’ve got a few more questions and no more questions after, sorry, I’m going to butcher your name, but odd, odd AB so we’ll finish up with that one there. So let’s see. Will Morgan, do you ever set your price above the box and wait for people to sell out under you? If so, what drives that decision? Not technically on purpose, but in my repricer, I will set my floor usually at about 30% ROI. And then I’ll set my maximum, you know, maybe it’s that 75% or a hundred or 150, depending on the price of the product. And so that may put me above some of the sellers on there and I’ll just wait to see if it sells now, if I don’t get any sales after maybe a month, then I’ll start knocking down that min ROI.

Todd (00:59:49):
So maybe I’ll go from 30% down to 25%. And then down to 20% down to 15% until I start getting sales. And if I only am getting sales at a lower price, I’ll probably just sell out at that price, not restock until maybe the price comes back up and then restock it at the higher price. So not purposely but that is a definitely a tactic. I’ve just got so many products that it’s hard for me to look at each and every one in that way. So usually I’m just using the price repricer to take care of that for me. And just handling it that way with set levels. So my, you know, my VA’s are going in there and changing those prices and stuff for me over certain timeframes and stuff like that. Let’s see, Spencer, how much FBM are you doing compared to FBA?

Todd (01:00:39):
So it’s like 95% FBA, 5% FBM right now. I know I’ve told you guys to do more FBA and do more three PLs and this is just an area where I didn’t necessarily take my own advice. Like I should have it’s it’s work right. To do FBA and third-party three PLS and stuff like that. And with everything else going on, I just didn’t have the time to get all that set up. So what I’m doing actually more is I have stock in my warehouse and I’m just streaming it in every shipment I might send in, you know, 10, 20, 50 of an item just so I can keep streaming that stuff in and stay in stock. And so that’s kinda my strategy for right now, which maybe that’ll backfire on me. Maybe it won’t, we’ll see how Christmas time goes here and how long the receiving times get that’ll be kind of the issue.

Todd (01:01:38):
But if it starts getting too bad, like I said, I’ve got the product back here, so I can just flip on the FBM and start sending that out. You know, it’s not too difficult to turn that on, but a majority, super majority is FBA right now. Steven White, again here, do you have many seller accounts? I have two seller accounts, one for my wholesale business. One for my private label business. Amazon knows about both of them. I got their permission to open up the second one. And that is the only way I recommend doing it. There’s some people out there who say, you know, get those little hotspots, have separate computers, have separate accounts and things like that. I don’t like doing any of that. I don’t, I’d rather not put any of my accounts at risk. So I’ve got one wholesale account and one private label account.

Todd (01:02:27):
The rest of your question here, I know many wholesale sellers have it to get more percentage of the buyboxs. They said a different business address, VPN services to not get blocked. So yeah, I don’t do that. It’s immoral and I know other people do that out there. Hopefully they get caught and get shut down. Eventually they probably will. It’s against terms of service and I’d rather, you know, I spray a little bit into the gray areas but I, for the most part, try to stay a white hat as much as possible. And that’s an area risking my account where I’m doing, going to do one and a half million dollars in sales this year. It’s just not even worth it, putting that at risk to me. All right. So Will Morgan, what do you think of feedback five? Never used it before.

Todd (01:03:17):
I think that, who is that from? Is that from seller labs or be cool? E-Comm engine. Yeah, so e-comm engine. That’s why I see it all the time. Cause I use restock pro and when I log in and asked me which one I want to log into so I’ve never used feedback five. I used to use feedback genius from seller labs and I don’t even do that anymore because Amazon has just gotten so ridiculous in the emails that you send to customers. That even if you’re just asking for seller feedback, they’ll like shut down your sending privileges because they say that somehow you are by saying, thank you at the bottom of your email, you’re trying to manipulate the review or something. It’s literally gotten like that. Ridiculous. So I just use the jungle scout plugin and jungle scout will automatically hit that button on for each order that requests the feedback and review.

Todd (01:04:15):
What’s nice about that is that then I can tell the brands and that I’m working with that I am requesting reviews for every order as well. So I’m trying to get reviews from your customers and I’m legitimately doing that. Because I’m hitting that button requesting feedback and reviews. That’s another way another thing that you can help to sell your services get exclusives and things like that. Let’s see, Steven White, when do you think the 200 inventory cap will be gone really hard to say if this COVID garbage keeps up, it could be a long time. E-Commerce is just booming, like crazy. Amazon’s up something like 60% in sales from last year this time. So it’s just booming. And so I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon, but keep in mind that inventory cap is only for products that you don’t really have a history or you have a really low selling history.

Todd (01:05:15):
So I have a product that sells, Oh, I don’t know, off the top of my head, maybe a thousand to 2000 a month. It’s one of those ones I have exclusive on. And when they first put that cap on there, it was limited to like 200, but now it’s limited to, I believe last time it was like 1,150 that I was, it was had increased. So that cap increases as they get a sales history from you. So it’s not going to stay at that 200 now. And that’s assuming that you have your IPI score high. What does that stand for inventory performance index or whatever that score that Amazon’s given you with? How well you’re managing your inventory. If you have that above 500 in the last cutoff your 200 inventory cap will keep going up. If you’re under that, then I think it might just stay at that lower level.

Todd (01:06:08):
So if you were below 500 and you’ve got that restriction, you’re going to want to make sure before January towards the end of December, they’re having another check. I should know that day, but I don’t know off the top of my head. But right now you’re going to want to make sure you’re getting your IP score up above 500, you know, at least five 30, five 40 five 50 so that you will know that you’re good and you’re not going to have that limit on your account. So that inventory cap will go up. When did it go away? Really hard to say it could be in place for a long time because Amazon’s just bursting at the seams right now with product and sales. All right, let’s see another name that I apologize if I butcher it. Allamaed Abimbola destroyed that.

Todd (01:07:00):
So, sorry. I am new to wholesale and I want to know if supplier help prep products before sending to Amazon, or how can I go about that? Some will some will not. It depends on the supplier, so you’ll have to ask it really varies. I probably have about 50 50 right now that will send indirect for me. And we’ll do some of the prepping. Well, probably less than that. Probably about 30% that will actually send in direct and do the prep for me. The rest is coming to my warehouse and I do it all myself. So pretty much you just have to ask them. And that’s why we’re not trying to hide anything about selling on Amazon or anything like that. Once you build that relationship, you can ask them, I would not recommend doing it right away.

Todd (01:07:53):
I like to get the products in my hand first or at least to a prep center. So the prep center can check them out, maybe take photos of them for you and make sure they’re the right product. See what kind of prepping needs to be done because Amazon is not always correct with what they say, that the prepping that needs to be done. So you want to make sure that the product is what you think you’re getting and also to see if it needs any prepping but first sending in the Amazon. But then after you built that relationship a little bit, then you can ask them that say, Hey, would you mind, you know, sending in direct, slapping on a sticker maybe putting in the bag, something like that. You can even charge me, you know, 30 cents, 50 cents a unit, whatever.

Todd (01:08:34):
And see what they say. Some will say yes, some will say no, but you just got to ask. All right. And the last question here, what software do you use to manage inventory? So I use restock pro restockpro.com works super well if you don’t have a warehouse since I’ve had a warehouse I’ve been looking for a replacement or trying to push them to fix issues like bin locations, which they have, but it’s not easy to update in the locations I need to update. The shipping in of products is not as smooth as I would like. So I’m looking for a replacement, but I’ve literally like interviewed like 20 different softwares and none of them work as good as restock pro, they work better in some places and worse than other places. So I don’t know if there’s a perfect software out there.

Todd (01:09:30):
It just might not exist right now. So I’m starting to kind of create some of the stuff myself with a programmer to try to automate some of the stuff that I’m having to do manually. But that’s what I use currently. And if you’re using a prep center, restock pro should work just fine for you. And I’m hoping to have them on an upcoming episode here. So we can actually talk about a restock pro a little bit more. All right. So that will wrap up this Q and a, we went over about 10, 15 minutes here, but I appreciate everybody sticking with me and all the fantastic questions, really good questions, and just keep on keeping on out there. Great time to be an Amazon seller. And if you’re just getting started, I challenge you to sell your first product by the end of November here, or at least the beginning of December get a product in there and get it sold. Even if it’s something go find a product in your garage that you’re not using, that you never opened, or maybe even a used one listed on Amazon, send it in, sell it, start learning that process and get going. So appreciate everybody out there joining me today. This has been fantastic. So as always, I’m your host, Todd Welch signing off happy selling everybody.

Announcer (01:10:56):
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.

Entrepreneur Adventure is now Amazon Seller School