#213: Amazon FBA Seller Advice for Black Friday 2021

w/ Kevin King

About This Episode

Amazon FBA sellers advise for Black Friday 2021 and find out what’s new on the Amazon world? Find out how Kevin is planning for Q4 and what to expect for this time of the year. Planning for Q4 sometimes feels like an impossible task, on today’s Lunch with Norm we have Kevin King, a seasoned eCommerce expert discusses what’s new on the Amazon world. Find out how Kevin is planning for Q4 and what to expect for this time of the year. We also touch on the most common mistakes sellers make during Q4. Kevin has been involved with eCommerce for over 25 years, He was named one of the Top 40 Direct Marketers by Target Marketing magazine, has been featured on national TV shows as well as the front pages of prestigious newspapers like USA Today and The Wall Street Journal.

About The Guests

He sells millions of dollars of products on Amazon. He has been a recurring guest on over 30 FBA and e-commerce podcasts and is a highly-sought-after speaker at Amazon conferences worldwide (spoke at more than 30). He also mentors sellers collectively doing over half a billion US dollars per year on Amazon in the Freedom Ticket and Helium 10 Elite Masterminds. He also organizes the Billion Dollar Seller Summit.”

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Transcript

Norman Farrar 0:01

Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, aka the beard guy here and welcome to another lunch with Norm the Amazon FBA and Ecommerce podcast.

Norman Farrar 0:21

Okay, today’s show is going to be awesome. We’re going to be talking about advice for Amazon FBA sellers, and how to increase their sales on Black Friday, and during the holiday season, and I’m here with one of the top experts to get these things done, Kevin King, so I don’t even have to do an introduction. Kevin has been on the show a bunch of times. He is the host of the billion billion, billion dollar seller Summit. And that’s hosted twice a year, one as a virtual event and one has a live event. He also has a freedom ticket, the freedom ticket course, which I think is 3.0 now, and he runs the helium 10 elite mastermind. If you have any questions about anything about Amazon holiday sales, make sure you post them over into the comments section when Kevin’s on there’s always a ton of questions, so please get them in early. Alright, Let’s see. Oh, before I get started, man, I was going to introduce the squire. But I got to do this first global wired advisor, I want to give them a big shout out. So big thank you to our sponsor. For this episode, global wired advisors, the leading digital investment bank focused on optimizing the business sales process. For more information, call Chris and his team over at globalwiredadvisors.com, I guess you wouldn’t really be calling them. It’d be going to Google and you know, go into their website, so call them if you want. Chris is a great guy. All right now, where are you, Squire?

Kelsey 1:58

Hello, Happy Friday. Happy Friday, everyone.

Norman Farrar 2:01

Happy Friday to you young Squire.

Kelsey 2:03

Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, we’ve got a ton of people joining us already. That’s great to see. Welcome Manny, Doctor Caz and Jessica Rabbit, Miss F Jeff. If you want to say hi, just go over to the comment sections. Let us know where you’re watching from today’s gonna be a great episode. And like we usually start our episodes we smash those like buttons, get those thumbs up, go and share this video out to all of your favorite Amazon, FBA friends, family. Any groups that you think could use today’s episode, and welcome Marcia as well. Great seeing everyone. And yeah, it’s gonna be a great episode. If you’re new to the podcast, we go live every single Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 12pm. Eastern time. You can ask any questions you’d like, hopefully around the episode of course. And yeah, that’s pretty much it. It’s gonna be a good episode. We also have a nice little giveaway swag thing that we’re doing. So stay tuned for that. And of course, Happy Friday to Melanie too and said from Toronto. And Yeah. How’s everyone doing?

Norman Farrar

Whereabouts in Toronto said

Kelsey

Alright.

Norman Farrar 3:22

Just let us know. We’re about two hours outside. Well, you’re right in Toronto.

Kelsey 3:26

I’m in Toronto right now. Yeah.

Norman Farrar 3:29

Okay, let’s get started. So if you do have any questions, like I said, this usually gets packed with questions. So put them in early so we can get to them. So sit back, relax. Grab that cup of coffee. Enjoy this show. And welcome, Mr. King. What’s up? How are you sir?

Kevin King 3:50

I’m good, man. Listen, you. Oh, yeah, I got my norm kicks in a while.

Norman Farrar 3:55

Norm picks? I’m talking about Formula One picks

Kevin King 3:59

a norm fix with a cigar. 00. I

Norman Farrar 4:02

know. I know. But, you know, hopefully that’ll be done soon. We meet up at some event somewhere. And are you going to deemas event by the way on the fourth?

Kevin King 4:14

Night? It’s right down the street from me. But um, as of right now? No, he didn’t invite me. So we’ll have

Norman Farrar 4:21

to talk to that man. So, um, I’ve got, I’m gonna be over a powwow. I’m gonna pop over there. And then there’s a really unique Canadian event that’s happening in Edmonton. And that’s on the fifth. So it’s the first Canadian event I’ve heard of, in probably two years.

Kevin King 4:43

Yeah, I knew there’s one up in Vancouver I went to a few years ago. Yeah,

Norman Farrar 4:46

that was a good one. I heard I didn’t attend it. But I heard that was a fantastic one.

Kevin King 4:52

Montreal I remember. Well, yeah. Yeah, the What’s that tell us a river cleaner as a software river clarity did a couple of years ago. Yep. Yeah, there’s not too much of an golden Chandra there.

Norman Farrar 5:08

We want to get that changed, but Edmonton is going to be great when that’s on the fifth. But let’s get into this. So Kevin, first thing, if people don’t know Yeah, can you just give a brief intro? What who are you? What do you do?

Kevin King 5:25

Yeah, I’m just a guy that sells stuff. Steve, my buddy Steve Simon’s would say I just sell things. Yeah. No, I I’ve been. I’ve been doing e commerce since before Google existed back in the days of Yahoo. And AltaVista, but 9594 95 They, I took my first credit card payment online. I’ve been selling on Amazon since 2001. Do an FBA model for about seven years now. Before that, I was doing wholesale primarily. And yeah, get four or five different Amazon accounts that you can own partners in different brands also do a lot of training. Like you said, I hosted billion dollar seller summit twice a year and high level but one of the highest level probably in MDS, the two highest level events out there in the space. And then I do the training for helium 10 Both the freedom ticket which is a course for free if you if you have a membership there ASIO has sell on Amazon, do you have a guest little module in there? I do. And but 160 modules, I guess it is it’s the most complete most thorough course hands down period on selling on Amazon. And then I do their their advanced training called Helium 10 elite, which is a people that have their highest level membership, or software package, they also get a monthly training and we do some some other really cool stuff around that. We’re actually doing a webinar for that next week showing some revealing some secrets next Thursday on that. And then I do products advice with Steve’s Amazon, where we we help sellers look, find new product opportunities. And basically here’s a product and resource and it’s not done for you service. It’s not more of those kind of our agency type of things. It’s more just taking a couple of pain points out for for big sellers. It’s not for new people, but for for bigger sellers. And now we’re starting to do some stuff for some really big, really big sellers. So it should be interesting. But yeah, and what else i i speak at different events, I hang out with you as much as I can at the different events on cigars and drinking Coke zeros. And

Norman Farrar 7:28

the best part about that is going back to your place and sitting down. And every time we do that, it’s like we ended up at 334. So, yeah, oh my God. That’s true, by the way. But anyway, you know what, I highly recommend that, you know, if you’re a new seller, getting into it, even if your immediate seller, you know, if you’re going on to YouTube, or trying to get your information, and you know, you’re listening to the podcast, that’s great. But going in there and actually going through a course, and just go through the course get the education, and usually a paid course, this course used to be about 3000 bucks. But like with that membership, it’s free. So and most people use helium 10 that I know of anyway, so you kind of need one to get the other. But the freedom ticket course is very, very detailed. And it’s something that if you haven’t done as a new seller, just get to know Amazon, it goes through everything. And then when you talk about the elite service, which is part of that, by the way, we still listen to it, I have my team listening to it, and what we like what we do, we set up an SOP that, you know, we listen to it, we figure out what we can apply to our business. And there’s always I can guarantee you there’s always something every time that we go, Holy crap. You know, I didn’t know we could do that. And it’s just a hack that, you know, we couldn’t learn or strategy. So please, you know, I’m not saying this just to push Helium 10 or Kevin, it is something that we do on a regular basis. So anyways, let’s get into these fourth quarter sales and what’s happening over at Amazon. Did you know Did you notice? I’m sure you heard about this, but there’s been some pretty wild emails going out from Amazon. Suspending service providers, like Klaviyo was suspended this week. You know, one of the rebate companies was suspended this week. What’s going on over there?

Kevin King 9:39

I think they’re they’re cracking down on the companies that are abusing their access to the API.

Norman Farrar 9:44

But how does Clavijo

Kevin King 9:47

I think was sharing. My understanding is that they are sharing some of the data you know that they’re making addresses, you know, a public there’s there’s there’s still a loophole that Amazon hasn’t shut down yet, right? A couple other software tools out there that that are doing that too. But I remember like, should I use ShipStation for one of my companies that we sell on Amazon for it’s tied to the Amazon for any FBM. And it’s also tied to we have our own website. So orders come through there regularly as well. And I remember, six, eight months ago, or something like that ShipStation, all of a sudden had to change because I used to go to go in there and download all the data, all the customers names and addresses, even for the FBM ones. And now it only stays for 30 days, and then it wipes out. So if I don’t go in there every 30 days and download, let FBM data, I lose it. And they made that change. And it was kind of a pain in the ass. And I think a lot of these letters like Klaviyo it’s something along those lines, I don’t know that specific for CLEVEO for rebate key, that that one’s kind of self explanatory there that they’re that they’re posing themselves one way, and they’re actually something else, in a lot of ways, but a lot of people were using them for something else. I mean, that’s not rebates, keys attention, and they were doing some stuff with URLs, and just some things that Amazon just doesn’t like. And it wasn’t just rebate key, but they also own elite seller, which is basically a competitor to Helium 10, developed by a bunch of big sellers, and that one got taken out too. And I think you’re gonna see more, I think Claudia was just the next one. I was shocked by that. I Robbie was a huge rails, you don’t know, it’s a huge email management system. I mean, it’s it’s big billion

Norman Farrar 11:27

dollar evaluation, I think, yeah,

Kevin King 11:30

I don’t think they you know, out there, there’s a lot of Amazon sellers that were heavily using that there’s some so I don’t think it’s gonna really affect them too much. Now, rebate key and, and elite seller, so it’s going to majorly affect them. I don’t know exactly how they’re going to pivot from that rebate keys doing stuff on Walmart and other places too, but I don’t know exactly what they’re gonna do there. But I think you’re gonna see more of that I think seller tools is going to be next are coming soon, they’re doing really, the Titan group is have is pulling some of the data into their tool I think they may have if they’re not careful, a lot of people out there. And the bad thing is if you’re using these tools, you’re you’re on a blacklist. So Amazon if you’re using elite seller, and you have that connected in your Amazon Seller account, Amazon knows and don’t don’t think they’re forgetting about that don’t think it’s just going to elite seller and saying you’re shut off on this day. Amazon’s making a note that says okay, you know, I wasn’t using them. But if I was you know, Kevin King is on the list, he was using this tool, let’s let’s keep a close eye on him or use this, he gets an eye other kind of trouble. We can use this as extra ammunition. And so I would be careful, you know, Helium 10. I don’t I’m not partners in helium 10. I don’t own anything empty. I just do their training. Sometimes people think I’m some how involved but I knew Manny and ghee when they first started, we were friends. And we did some stuff together. But I’m not part of that. But Helium 10 is very careful. And I think Jungle Scout is to a couple of others that are very careful to make sure they go by the terms of service, and what they do. And so that’s why you don’t see like SFR information, any software tool that has SFR information embedded in the tool is likely to get shut down

Norman Farrar 13:16

by me. Just for those that don’t know, what is SFR

Kevin King 13:20

search, it’s the brand analytics and any of the brand analytics data. So as far as search frequency rank, it’s how often it’s a rank of how popular a term is not necessarily how many searches does it have. But how popular it is. I mean, it kind of goes in hand with how many searches it has, but it’s based on popularity. So so like pennant, I think is one of the top search terms, I think it’s called pennant like the last three months bi n.it I know what that is, I have to go look, I just saw that my one of my tools that he was like, but if you download the grant Alex data yourself, and you use it yourself on your own computer, and that’s totally fine by Amazon. And if you if you can create your own little Excel spreadsheets to manipulate the data, your own little personal software thing that that’s okay for Amazon, but if you put that out there publicly into some sort of a publicly accessible tool that you’re charging money for or not charging money for, then that’s where it’s a problem. And that’s where I think you’re going to see more of these and then the ones that were allowing the ship the the data, the customer data, but names and addresses. That one though, as they’re doing that, and there’s still a couple that I have a backdoor into that they if they haven’t shut them, I’m gonna check them. And then I think any of them that are doing any of the other using any of the Amazon information in a way that they shouldn’t be, are including, you know, some of the ones that are better how they are allowing you to bypass the shipment system actually shipped to a warehouse of your choice, you know, doing some manipulation to actually in and you and I We mentioned the name of someone earlier on here that has a tool that does something like that. I would be careful. I don’t want to say, say who that was, but I want to be, I would be careful with that because of Amazon. I think they’re, I think they’re gonna be cracking down. But at the same time, Amazon’s loosening up, you know, that new brand opportunity, what’s it called product opportunity, or the new thing? It’s in beta right now? Yeah, they’re given some additional information. So that opening up a little bit more information, as well. And so it’s going both ways.

Norman Farrar 15:31

Right. So, you know, the, I guess one of the things that you have to really be careful of, because you, you mentioned that, even if you’ve done this in the past, you could be affected. So, you know, moving ahead in the future, and just trying to go all white hat, beige hat, you got to do beige, I mean, nothing is white hat. I don’t think I mean, it’s very, very little white hat. You know, but, you know, you drive traffic. Technically, that would be kind of beige hat. Technically, it you know, but it’s not there. They’re actually rewarding you for driving external traffic over now. But one of the things to do is just be careful, because I know when the October November 2017, came around, I had 3000 reviews on this soap. The next day, I wake up, and I had nothing, they were all gone. And you know what? Okay, I admit it, I paid for a lot of them. $10 Each, it was $30,000, basically, of, you know, cuz at the time, that was perfectly kosher. Like, you know, while it wasn’t in TLS, but everybody was doing it. But I paid the penalty, a lot of other sellers pay the penalty. And that’s where you kind of have that aha moment that I just spent a lot of money on nothing. You know, it was a waste of time. And so now other ways of doing sales velocity, so let’s talk about that. Fourth quarter,

Kevin King 17:00

right, you’re working there is a lot of still white hat stuff, though. But there is, yeah, but you don’t have to resort to games and hacks and tricks to actually make money on Amazon. I mean, I’ve talked about this in the past. But that’s what most some of you know that regular listeners hear. I have a calendar business calendar that you hang on the wall every year. And we launched we launch, we sell those on our own website. And we also do do well on Amazon. That business, I don’t do any advertising at all, no PPC at all. I don’t do any search, find buy at all, no, no rebates, nothing like that. I launched the product. And we just were late this year. And last year, we launched it in July. But our shipments is because of all the shipment delays and the port problems and stuff like we didn’t actually get our order in until the fifth of October. So I turned them around. And the next day got first batch and Amazon, I think we went live on Amazon, I don’t know, ninth 10th 11th, something like that on Amazon. And we’re already it’s four different skews. We’re already up to about 1500 to $2,000 a day right now and sales on those skews. And there’s been no no advertising, no search, trying buys, no nothing, just putting them up with the right keywords targeting them right now, this is a niche product. So this is not people, there’s not 10,000 searches on the keywords for this. It’s in the 1000s or below, but it’s highly converting. And I have my own customer list. So what I tell them is, instead of buying for me, and you could buy from me, if you want, you can pay 995 shipping, because you know, if you buy a counter for us, it’s 1995 plus 999 95, shipment cheap and $30, which is highly profitable for me because the calendar cost me $1.50 landed, and the cost first class mail, but five, six bucks to send it out, including the packaging, so it’s highly profitable. But if they go on Amazon and get it for 1995, and prime, you know, no shipping, and then I make a lot less money, but I don’t have to deal with it. Right? And so I will take a segment of my customers and say, hey, they’re available from us directly. Here’s a link to our store, our ecommerce store. It’s similar to Shopify, but similar to that, or if you want click right here on this link to go to Amazon and that link I just used for helium 10 gems, I use the one of the links from Helium 10 gems might be the canonical URL when and I make sure that canonical URL has certain keywords in it. And a number of them will go there, you know, I’ll get probably 4050 people or something real customers, I’m not giving them a rebate. I’m not giving them a discount code. I’m not doing anything. They’re just clicking the link and going and buying it just purely. Purely legit. You know, no, no game. Other than here’s a here’s the here’s the it’s not a embedded link that’s going deep into it. It’s strictly the canonical URL. And within a week were ranked on all the keywords that I want to be ranked because they’re in the title and then in the canonical and it just takes off from there and I in and I also get all my calendars in there. For the customers who bought this also bought, now all for minor there, so one of them tends to take usually one of them takes off and, and you know, has a much better BSR. And so it’s getting all the traffic when the people say, oh, there’s also these other ones that are similar. Let me click on those, and it just snowballs. So a lot of people think it’s all game and ship on Amazon. And all you need to know hacks and you know, I teach some of that stuff, you know, people want to know that, but that you can still legitimately honestly, 1,000% Honestly, set something up on Amazon and, and still make money. If you know what you’re doing. It’s not a field of dreams, you can just put it up in they’re gonna come. But if you pick the right products and do it right, there’s still plenty of opportunity to keep your nose completely clean.

Norman Farrar 20:43

Yeah, and you’re right. Like when I said every thing is beige hat. I mean, we talked about it on the pod, like on this podcast about your images, the titles, the engagement, bullets, what you’re talking about, you know, the canonical. So I want to step back just a second, you talked about the helium 10. Gems. So a lot of people don’t know about that. If you go there, it’s just G m s, they have a list of different different URLs that you can use. And one of them is a canonical URL. It’s really helpful. So I don’t know if you want to explain the canonical and the benefit of that. You know, and I mean, if you do that right now, you could see sales, you could see it help sales. And why is this Kevin?

Kevin King 21:34

Yeah, canonical is the natural URL that’s generated by Amazon system for for every product. So it’s something like amazon.com forward slash? Kevin’s best calendars 2022 For slash DP, the Asin. And it what it does is it the canonical, it used to be just five words, it would take five words from your from your title and stick them into the canonical. And there was ways in the past by putting a dash or a colon to actually force it to take a certain the first five, and there was a little trick, Casey Goss from back in the days when he on Viral Launch came up with this and, and it would, it was a cool method to actually make sure you get the five words you want. Because otherwise, I’ve just picked five random words out of your title. And sometimes those are the ones you want to rank on. Sometimes they’re not. And that’s that’s the goal. You see, when if you go to Google, if you go to Google, and you type in something, you type in a queue of search on Google. And you see some that you look down the results. And some of those are going to Amazon, they’re not the ones that are ads, but the ones are just naturally indexed spider. And actually index, you look at that link. That’s the canonical. And so the keywords that are in that, that that canonical link carry extra ranking weights on Amazon, and Amazon used to put a lot of importance on it. And then they adjusted the a nine, and didn’t quite work as well. And people started using all these href and hidden referrals and all these other types of links, which you can see some of them on, on Helium ten.com, forward slash, gems, JMS, you can you can see that. But then just recently, you know, and this was discussed at the most recent billion dollar seller summit, I can’t tell the whole secret here. Normally, you know, you were there. If you missed that talk, it’s in the notes. But someone actually did a presentation on how that canonical has now come back. And you can actually get up to seven or eight words in there. And you know, the helium 10 tool only does five four shows you five, but there’s a way to get seven or eight. And I can’t tell you exactly right here because that was part of the billion dollar seller summit, I have a non disclosure agreement that I signed up to present that so but there’s a way to actually get get them all seven, seven or eight words in there. And it’s this person said they’ve been doing a lot of testing and they sell a lot of stuff. And they’re like, look, this is making a huge impact again. So something has changed in there. So if you haven’t tried that, give that a try. And I think we might do it in next week. And the helium tip, we’re doing a webinar for helium 10 elite, because a helium 10 elite, which is the advanced training for for helium 10. And you also get the highest level of the tools for helium 10. We’re doing a webinar or we’re closing the helium 10 elite down, they don’t want to keep it active open all the time. They’re gonna close it down for I don’t know how long it could be months on women on a webinar two years could be two years, I don’t know. But they’re gonna close, close it down. And we’re still we’re doing a webinar to invite some new people as part of that webinar. We’re going to show you a little bit about this. So check that out. It’s a free webinar. So hopefully you’ll be able to, to join us for that and but I’ll share a little bit more there but very good. Not trying to tease them or No, no, that was unintentional. Just kind of let down that path. But

Norman Farrar 24:46

yeah, sure. Okay. Let’s talk about we’re getting closer. You know, it’s not too late. What are some things that people can do right now? To help drive traffic for Black Friday or during the holiday sales,

Kevin King 25:05

no one thing is I will be looking at the low lying fruit, I wouldn’t be looking at the keywords that are, are that are not the big keywords. But that have a lot that have that and making sure your index for those and make a dish in China get rank for those even run a little bit of PPC on those. Another tool. I mean, this is a trick that we shared in the helium 10 elites this month. And I’ll share it with you guys here since I like Norman and his audience so much is one of the things that you can do to drive some extra traffic this holiday season is look for the buyer intent keywords on Google, but 25% of the traffic that comes to Amazon comes from Google initially, people start their search on Google and then they end up on by clicking something on Google and end up on Amazon. But there’s a lot of people be doing that this Christmas season. And but look for the keywords that have buyer intent. Like it has the word Amazon that this Christmas gifts for Dad Amazon. Yeah, yes sir dad buy gifts for dad or gifts or that discounts or words, something that has a qualifying order that indicates they’re looking to buy not just window shopping, if they just type gifts for dad, they may be looking to buy or they may be window shopping, but they add that other word discount or sale price or, or Amazon or something they’re looking to buy. And so if do some searches around the words that are relevant to your products that have those, those additional buying qualifying words on them. And then take a look at the results that show up on Amazon and click the first clip a couple of that go back to Amazon, the organic ones, not the advertised ones, but the organic ones. And what you may find is a lot of times, someone may type in a gifts for Dad, Xmas or something, I’m just making this up with Xmas. But when it actually redirects to Amazon, Amazon change, that’s a gift for dad, Christmas, and changes to cute. I mean, this is a big one, but changes the keyword to Christmas. And what happens is you can oftentimes find these little gems on Google where there were the ones that get changed. And you can actually make sure you rank for it when it gets changed. Because a lot of times it changes to something more obscure that probably wasn’t the best example because Christmas is a big keyword. But I just couldn’t think of anything off the top of my head. But it’ll change some of the word that’s not quite as obscure. And that’s not quite as big. And if you can rank on that on Amazon, with PPC or by making shirts in your title or your page, you can oftentimes shop right on the first page results. And for and grab a lot of sales from someone else or even do top of search bid placement for some of those. And there’s a ton of these, that that are available right now, let’s just low line through that you can do really, really well on

Norman Farrar 27:52

Have you been looking at some of these new tools like the listing optimization tool under inventory or under brand, the search term optimization tools, if you’ve been using any of those

Kevin King 28:04

on Amazon, I have done some testing with like the list optimization one is, is one where they’ll show you some of the missing words. Or you have the word D in there too many times or whatever I’ve played with that one. I’ve also done the A B split testing. What are some of the split testing stuff that Amazon lets you do? Those can all be good things to to try to get your your listing Dolly. And that’s much better than using a tool like split Lee, or some of the other ones out there because it’s straight from Amazon Amazon’s doing this, but that is splitting, not some sort of tool or a timeframe. But yeah, that listing if you use the listing optimization thing. Yeah. So

Norman Farrar 28:42

that’s we’ve actually built that into our regular like our, our SOPs now. So we’re using that on a regular basis. We’re also working with the performance health. So we’ll go into inventory planning, we’ll take a look at what is it? What’s it called, that’s one of the four there, it’s not exceeded inventory, it’s sell through, sell through inventory. So when you click that, you’ll have the opportunity to see what you need to do. So if it’s either paid advertisement drive, drive more traffic, do whatever, it gives you a list of six or seven things that they tell you to do. That’s another way of just Amazon telling you hey, look, you know, if you want sell more, create a deal create this do that. But the best tool that we’ve seen so far that they’ve just released recently was that listing optimization. And there is one other

Kevin King 29:45

way you can just leave them just can’t tell them that what are you doing with that? You got to explain that with what the listing optimization, how’s that

Norman Farrar 29:52

101 listing optimization, so you go into inventory, you’ll see it there. It’ll just be it’s called listing optimization. I’m Believe you click on it, you pick the product that you want. And then it’s going to drop down a list. Actually, when you go into that, when you don’t have to select a product, it’ll drop down a list. And it can have anywhere from one to six different items. And you can just pick what it says it could be adding keywords, or it could be adding a, like I’ve seen, it’s a plus content, or, you know, what it gives you the suggestion, all you have to do is follow the bloody instructions. And it can help you out, it’s it’s very easy to do. And all it is is like the Walmart optimization tool. It doesn’t give you a score, but it says, Here you go, here’s what you need. This is what we’re telling you you need. And now on the other side of it when you go over to brand analytics, or when you go to brand, and you see the left hand navigation side, and you click search term optimization. It’s interesting because it’ll show you low or no value keywords. And they’ll give you suggestions of what they’ll show it in pink. So you remove those keywords. And then you can add in more relevant keywords that will give you better product, or better chances for sales velocity. So you might be repeating a word too many times it’ll show it and then it’ll tell you to repeat it or to get rid of it in your search terms. And then he just added, I don’t know if you’ve seen that it just highlights the keywords that you should repeat, or delete

Kevin King 31:37

Yeah, I’ve seen that.

Norman Farrar 31:39

Yeah. Now, there is a fourth one, I will get back to people like we’ll put it into the comment section, which is another really cool one, it’s a sales, I don’t know, I forget what it’s called an event. And if you’re listing, throw it into the section here because we have added this into our like into our SOPs. And what it does is it tells you not only what to do, so it might be add a video, a plus content, and it’s separate from listing optimization is different, but it’ll show you the forecast of the sales that you’re actually missing out on. Have you seen that, you know,

Kevin King 32:22

I’m not seeing that? Well,

Norman Farrar 32:23

I will after this I’ll get Vandana to send you over that we’ll post it in here. It’s very cool. So I just did this, I did a video on YouTube about it. And I just took two products. And the one product said okay, it’ll increase it by $1,800 a month. The other one is $1,300 a month by doing two simple things. And anyways, it’s brand spanking new. I haven’t really seen the results. But within the next quarter, I’ll make sure that you know we post them in here as well.

Kevin King 32:59

That’s cool. Yeah, let’s check that out. I would say no. Yeah. Now, one of

Norman Farrar 33:03

the things we talked about the billionaire seller Summit, and there is strict non disclosures. So you know, I and I follow those. And you know, everybody else does. But there is something that you posted, that is now being talked about freely in the Amazon world. And this is these new search terms that are it’s what is it called? Opportunity explorer? Yeah. You want to get into that a bit?

Kevin King 33:31

Yeah, that’s a new thing that Amazon actually announced it at the accelerator events. Was that this week or last week? This week? Yeah, yeah, they announced it there. It’s in beta. So you may not have access to it not all accounts have access to it. I think only two of mine, under like five actually have access to it. But it’s a new product opportunity called product opportunity, Explorer,

Norman Farrar 33:54

opportunity, explore

Kevin King 33:56

your opportunity explore. And they’re actually revealing the exact search volume, you know, Helium 10, and tools like that guess. And then fairly reasonable, and I guess is what this is straight from the horse’s mouth, the exact search volume for every keyword, that showing you the conversion rate data beyond just the top three that you can see the top 1015 20 conversion data is which is which is pretty cool. They’re also showing you sales estimates. So they’re not giving you the exact estimate, but they’re giving you a range. So they’ll say, you know this off of this keyword, the estimated sales monthly sales are, you know, 1000 to 1500 units. I’ll give you some sort of range like that. They won’t tell you exactly, and then they’ll show you some other keywords that are that are related to it that are making sales. Some of you may already know from tools like helium 10 of cerebro. Other ones are like well, I didn’t actually realize this word was getting was related to this. And and it’s making sales so there’s really cool little tools in there, I’ve noticed it’s not complete. So you can’t download right now you cannot download anything. You can’t download an Excel file and massage it in your own little way. And it’s not complete. It’s only I don’t know what the it’s only certain categories that have much data in there, even then that data is not real accurate. I know. Bradley from Helium 10. played with it quite a bit. He’s played with him more than me, he did a blog post on it earlier this week, you might check out where he showed some of the good things and some of the weaknesses. It’s on the helium 10 blog, comm ten.com Ford slash blog, I think you’ll probably find it. And he talked about it in more detail. But I noticed like even from some of my calendars, none of that data is there, some of the keywords that I look for on my calendars, not a single one, I’m even shows up on the opportunity. So if they must have some sort of cut off, that they’re only going to certain SFR. Or they’re, I don’t know what the rules are. But it’s not like it’s not complete, like brain analytics is pretty complete. This has nothing so but it’s a good starting point. You can find some good product ideas in there pretty quickly, I found one just by looking at the category they’ve categorized and stuff, and you can kind of dig down and follow rabbit hole. And I found a couple good product opportunities that I sent over the products device by doing that. So take a look at that and see if you have access to it. You have to I think the way I get into is a special link. I don’t know that. I haven’t seen it actually. Have you seen it on your accounts in the pulldown menus at the top?

Norman Farrar 36:27

I have not seen it. I’ve been trying to get in. And I can see the information. But I can’t. It’s not in any of my pull downs yet.

Kevin King 36:38

But did you use the link to get in? Yes. No, no, I haven’t. That special length, like the one that was posted in a billion dollar seller Summit Group. If you click on that link, it’ll either take you right in if that account that you’re logged into has access, but it’ll give you a warning message that says sorry, this is not activated on your account yet or whatever it says, oh, make sure you’re the primary user. So not as logged in as a secondary user, you have to be logged as a primary user, or users it hasn’t gone out to then try try that and then try try your bigger volume accounts like mine. If it’s not on a my I want account that doesn’t have brand registry, it’s not on that account. The rest of all my accounts have brand registry, and it’s only on two of those as the bigger selling accounts.

Norman Farrar 37:26

Okay, so and that’s what I was trying, I was trying to log in with some of the larger accounts, but because of the agency side, it wouldn’t allow us to come in. And yes, you know what I’m just looking. And it was that link that you had, and it came up with permissions not granted. But we were going in as a secondary, not as owner,

Kevin King 37:45

you’re going with your counselor, you’re the owner. Yeah. And then you can still if you’re not, and you can request access, you can open up a support ticket and request access, and they make granite.

Norman Farrar 37:57

Perfect. Now, you know what, and this is just a complete offer to you. But because they don’t download all those search terms, and there’s probably hundreds of 1000s of them. Maybe hundreds, maybe 1000s. Kelsey is available, you know, to handwrite each one. Oh, yeah, he just asked him he’ll

Kevin King 38:16

know I don’t want no card. So I need I need one one note card. And then on the backside, you got to use a different color pen. And you got to write the extra search volume. And with with with commas, no pick no periods. You got to be the American way. Not Yeah, yeah. So he could do that.

Norman Farrar 38:35

Well, I’m not sure how well he can do it. But yeah, yeah. Yeah,

Kevin King 38:40

he’s no person.

Norman Farrar 38:44

There you go. There you go.

Kelsey 38:46

I’m writing this down right now.

Norman Farrar 38:47

Okay. But you know what this, this is when you talked about brand analytics. And this is so important, because downloading and doing this on your own. I wanted to talk about that. Like when you first started talking about it, we have an episode where you went through

Kevin King 39:09

like Kelsey, put that back up again. That’s a good one for people that was a that was not there long enough. What is

Norman Farrar 39:14

that? Adams?

Kevin King 39:16

This, this little hack here to actually be able to download some of that data an opportunity to explore. That’s, that’s a good share there, Mark.

Kelsey 39:25

Okay, so I’m gonna read it out just for audio listeners. So March posted a comment saying Adam Heiss posted a hack in one of his live videos to get that data off of the product opportunity explorer into Excel. If you download HTML table scraper, you can copy paste the data into Excel. Oh, man.

Norman Farrar 39:43

There you go. So Kelsey is off the hook. That’s good. But going back to that brand, going back to that brand analytics, and you know, this goes back at the beginning of the product cast if you missed it, listen to it, but you know, download it and You know, it’s so easy to do. And especially when you go back to the podcast, in SEO, put the podcast in where Kevin is talking about his system and how he works with brand analytics, or at least top level, so you get an idea. And like he said, you know, if you’re doing it, if you’re downloading it, if you’re taking a look at the information, that’s not manipulation. So check it out. I just wanted to throw that in there. One of the things we didn’t we have not talked about today, just very quickly, usually, we do this at the beginning, but we just got into it, but the giveaway today. So today, our giveaway, hashtag will have Kelsey, you tagged two people, and you’ll get a second entry. But we’re going to give away a little bit of bling. We’re gonna do the mug with the m&ms T shirt. And we’re going to give away a free one month for new members of Centurion. So if you want that it’s hashtag. We’ll have Kelsey and take two people. Okay,

Kelsey 41:07

just to clarify just if you are a member of Centurion, you’ll get all the other stuff. But the centurion is only available for new members who haven’t tried out Centurion.

Norman Farrar 41:20

And if Simon wins, I don’t want to hear any complaints about the mug taking too long to get to you. Okay. Now, anything else new in the world of Amazon, as of now going into fourth quarter, or in fourth quarter? Oh, Amazon

Kevin King 41:37

is claiming that they’re ready for the for the onslaught of business. So I saw some posts saying that, hey, we’re not going to have another global March or April issue like we had last year. We’re ready. We’re so we’ll see. But they’re claiming that they’ve geared up and ready that doesn’t fix the inbound problems with stuff sitting on ships still. Right. But I think this Christmas season is going to be interesting, because of supply chain issues. I think I’ve actually told my wife is to like buy your stuff now. You know, anything is especially if it’s a something that’s a popular item. Buy your Christmas gift now I bought all my guests right now for my all my family. And she’s got one. I can’t tell you what I got. But it’s it’s coming up. Oh, yeah. All right. Yeah. It’s a it’s a while you’ll like it. No. All right. Good. No, so So

Norman Farrar 42:41

what I got you.

Kevin King 42:45

So, yeah, so I told her buy it by, by now. So I think you’re gonna start seeing that on Amazon, too, that you’re gonna see, back in the fourth quarter, I think you guys start seeing that the volume increases a little bit higher than normal before Thanksgiving. I don’t think a lot of people as the smarter people are going to spread this out. Amazon and others target all these others that are already running Black Friday advanced, right? Yeah. Because they’re trying to even out even out. So the trick is, if someone’s go, what’s going to happen? If someone goes to look for a particular item, and it’s not available? Because supply chain issues are sold out? Does that mean that sales are going to go down? Does that mean that just make another choice kind of go into the movies, if you want to go to the movies and see the latest? Say the new drastic park just came out? And everybody’s lined up to say, and you go there and it’s sold out? You’re like, Damn, you’re disappointed. But do you go home? Or do you see, Okay, what else is playing? And you end up seeing something else? So is that going to happen on Amazon where people are looking for something, and then they end up buying the best alternatives. So if you’re that best alternative, and that’s something I would be doing on Amazon’s I would be, I would be trying to monitor some of your top competitors inventory levels, and see where they’re at. And that might be I’m just thinking this off the cuff right now. And I haven’t done this before, but maybe managing they’re they’re watching the inventory levels. And as you start to see them go down. Maybe that’s when you should ramp up your PPC targeting towards their page if you have something complimentary or a substitute product. And you might actually be able to do really well or something like that. That could be a strategy. I just think

Norman Farrar 44:22

that’s a great idea. And now for new people. How do you monitor your competitors inventory?

Kevin King 44:31

There’s tools that will do it like helium 10 has a tool that do it. You can also do it yourself by trying to add. I haven’t tried this lately, because I use the tools, but I don’t know there’s the 999 tricks to work where you try to add.

Norman Farrar 44:43

Yep, I did that recently.

Kevin King 44:45

Okay, cool. So you’re trying to add 999 to the cart of an item and I’ll come back and if they don’t have 999 It’ll say sorry, only 706 available. And then you could do that every day and the next day you’ll see 620 available next you see four Are 18 available, what else you can monitor that way? That’s not 100% accurate because stuff could be in transit or stuff could be in a reserve or whatever. So those numbers can fluctuate a little bit, but at least it gives you a baseline idea. So that that’s one way to do it or use some of the tools that are out there like helium 10. Has it and some other software’s have it as well. And I would, that’s something I would be watching actually, now I’m thinking I’m gonna have to look into that a couple months things just came up with that idea. Thanks for for the idea.

Norman Farrar 45:32

Yeah, sure. Whatever I did. Oh, one other thing I need to talk to what I need to say is I got to give a shout out to sell rise and salaries is your comprehensive solution for your everyday business needs. It’s everything you need to grow your and scale your Amazon business, and it’s just one click away. For more information, contact Deema and visit solarize COMM And remember salaries as one are not to.

Kevin King 46:01

Okay. Next week in Austin.

Norman Farrar 46:05

Exactly. Yeah. If you’re in the Austin area, check out Diem has got some really great people there. He’s gonna be I’m not sure what the hotel is, but he is having the event in Austin.

Kevin King 46:16

Same one is a billion dollar solar Summit.

Norman Farrar 46:19

Okay, very good. Yep, so Marriot. Okay, now, let’s see, oh, I was gonna ask, and I don’t know if we can do this else. But if somebody’s interested, they want to come on live and talk with Kevin and I about a question or has a comment about anything? Can we do that?

Kelsey 46:42

Kelsey, yeah, it’s, it is possible.

Norman Farrar 46:45

Okay. Why don’t we just say if anybody wants to come on live and just ask a question. Let’s do that.

Kelsey 46:53

Okay, so if you’re on the spot,

Kelsey 46:56

so yeah, if you’re interested, you will need just a webcam. But email me Kay at lunch with Norm calm. And I’ll send you the link if you have something new. There you go. Please have a question. Ready? Or email me your question. And Caitlin’s with Norm calm and you can come on. All right, fantastic.

Norman Farrar 47:14

Now let’s get into some of these questions. Because there’s a ton probably my old man, get ready. Get ready. All right.

Kelsey 47:23

Okay. Let’s all see how much I can juggle. All right. Our first question he’s already given what do you what do you know about Amazon selling to allow in store pickup this might be great for my furniture business.

Kevin King 47:42

Yeah, they I just I saw they just announced that at the accelerate, celebrate that conference. I don’t know a lot about it. But yeah, I would think you know, for me selling Callum calendars, all my companies. And you know, that’s the only thing I have here locally, there’s three PL somewhere. I, I wouldn’t want someone showing up to pick that up. But for furniture or you know, if you’re large items, I think it could make great sense. I think it could be huge for that. And I would definitely Tony look into that. I don’t know all the particulars in the details. But I think it’s it sounds very intriguing to me for for the right type of products. And yours would be the right type of product.

Norman Farrar 48:21

By the way, probably the biggest news of the week, we forgot to talk about that came out of Amazon accelerate this week. I don’t have all the details, I don’t think has been released. But what they announced that the This is crazy. So this might be to try to, to fight against Project Glass over at Walmart. Where they’ve just kind of consolidated everything from pickup to delivery shipping. Now, Amazon, have you heard about this retail thing? Oh, this crazy. Amazon. Now this could be a huge game changer for local retail has said okay, let’s partner with people. I live in a farm town. There’s more cows and people here. So if I live in this little small farm town that has a local hardware store, that hardware store can partner with Amazon. And now I can go to that retailer order online. And I’ll get their product to me delivered to me as an Amazon partner in an hour. So now local

Kevin King 49:31

businesses favor Uber, Uber Delivery or something.

Norman Farrar 49:35

Yeah, I’m not sure what it is. I don’t have the details. But now local businesses can partner with Amazon. They announced it this week. And once I get more information, we’ll we’ll do a podcast about it. But how cool is that when you know, oh, that’s the old Manny coats expression. But it is really cool.

Kevin King 49:55

That’s cool that that could be a major change. Yeah, that could be big.

Norman Farrar 50:00

Yep, yes. And it supports like everything that Amazon. It supports local business again,

Kevin King 50:09

I don’t know if you have it in Canada or house, we have something here called favor, fa V O R. And I don’t know how widespread it is in the US. And there may be other versions of it under a different name. But they’ll pick up anything. So if my wife wants to take a bath, and she wants a bath bomb from lush, she can just go into this app and say, Go get me this bat, looking for this item number 3217. From lush, you know, the black bath bomb? Yeah. And they go pick it up and bring it to you. They pay for it. And then they charge you on the app, you know, delivery charge in for big enough and they bring it within an hour or two. So I think that’s something some what what that sounds like is Amazon’s gonna roll something out similar to that. It could be it could be big.

Norman Farrar 50:51

Crazy. Yeah. So we’ll get you more information on that I completely forgot when we got on the call. But okay, Kells next question.

Kelsey 51:04

Right, next question from many, I’m going to launch two other products in my same niche color variation, my main competitor keeps launching standalone ASINs of the same product only with other colors more than 50. Now.

Kevin King 51:20

What’s the question?

Kelsey 51:24

I’m ranking on the first page with my first Asin. Now should I power up this asin with variations are also going for real estate?

Kevin King 51:35

That’s that’s an age old question is do you go after your boss? More spaces? Or if you if you’ve got one that’s already on page one, and this other guy’s got 50? Or something you said? I think it’s what you said, I would probably put those as variations and ride the coattails of that one. Because to get those others up there, you’re gonna have to rank them too if the other guy gets 50. And I think you said better. All right, that’s going to be difficult. But also you can make the argument well, if you can, he’s got 15, you only have one. Versus if you have three, you have a better chance. That that’s that’s a hard one to say without knowing the specific product and me taking a look and seeing exactly what’s happening. But off the cuff of that I probably goes initially as a variation, since your first look around page one and ranking well.

Norman Farrar 52:24

And you could split it up. Let’s say that you wanted to split like for soap exempt, for example, you could create natural, tropical scents, men scents, instead of having them all together. But yeah, I agree with what Kevin saying. He learned Oh, man, he was saying something about launches every week, nearly every week. Okay. But same rule applies.

Kelsey 52:52

Alright, our next question, let me see who this is from. This is from Yvonne, when you use the URL to drive traffic does that class classified as driving traffic from outside Amazon, so you get the reduced rate piece.

Kevin King 53:07

Now that has to be specific that goes to your storefront, that’s a special URL that you have to use to get that rebate up to usually about 10% reduction in the fees, that that’s a special URL has to go your storefront. So like a canonical URL won’t do that.

Norman Farrar 53:25

And you also have to be signed up for the attribution program. Yeah,

Kevin King 53:29

that’s a different thing.

Kelsey 53:34

From Jessica Rabbit, Kevin, how is how important to you is Google My Business?

Kevin King 53:42

Not very important.

Norman Farrar 53:43

It’s important to me.

Kevin King 53:46

I don’t need a whole lot. I mean, I know norm uses it a lot. But and he’s taught a whole whole thing on how to use that for ranking. But I have not gone down that rabbit hole Jessica out.

Norman Farrar 54:01

So he No pun intended. But you know what? Next time, I’m in Austin, we should sit down and I should be able to show you some of the things that happen because I’ll give you an example.

Kevin King 54:15

You presented on

Norman Farrar 54:16

going. I did. Yeah. Yeah. But one of the examples that just came up, I was talking to somebody yesterday. There’s two examples. One was a local furniture store. Now we could do this with a brand as well. But a local furniture store wanted to gain traffic. It was a failed business during COVID. And Google My Business got this. This failed local business furniture store 2.1 million views. Okay, a car dealership, which is now seven. I’ve already talked about this one, Kevin, but it was it started with one they were spending $55,000 in digital media. And then it worked out so well that they spread it to all seven. Okay, this is in Washington in Washington State. And now it’s a total of $7,000 for SEO, that they’ve gone from $55,000 per month per dealership to $7,000. And getting as good or better results. All from Google My Business.

Kevin King 55:27

No, I don’t have that. Yeah. I just haven’t gone down that rabbit hole yet.

Norman Farrar 55:31

Oh, just wait. I see a cigar a couple coats. And we’re all set.

Kelsey 55:42

Rates? Let me see. Is SFP did I hear Amazon removed rebate key from partner list rank Bell and others?

Kevin King 55:51

I don’t know about anything about rank Bell being removed? I haven’t heard anything about how I heard that. No, I there’s many rebel is not the same as rebate key. It’s the right type of thing. There’s others out there? I haven’t heard anything about them. But I don’t know. I don’t think social advised it. I think you know, Amazon’s keeping a close eye on it and and seeing what people are doing. But is it dead? No, because that’s the way people buy things on Amazon. So it’d be almost impossible for them to make that not affect rank when someone types in a keyword and buys the product. I mean, just think that Amazon can’t, there’s no there’s no link, there’s no URL, there’s no nothing. It’s a natural process. What happens after that natural process where people are asking people to take additional steps. That’s where the problem comes in. And depending on what those steps are, that’s where Amazon is cracking down. But can they crack down? 100% on that No, impossible, but where they can crack down into someone’s on the backside that saying, oh, leave us a review, click this link or click use this special thing to do this? And that as part of that, then they can crack down. But no, it’s it’s not that. I mean, there’s nothing wrong. You can have you know, if you’re a member of a church, and you know, big church and you use launched your new barbecue sauce, you know, like, Hey, everybody, you know, you can you can make an announcement and the church bulletin. And you know, radio ads do this now, you know, search and say, Hey, I just launched Kevin’s barbecue sauce, put something in a church bulletin, everybody go to Amazon and type in Kevin’s barbecue sauce and buy it help support me, there’s nothing wrong with it. That’s a search, find buy. And that can rank your product really fast. But just don’t sell don’t go buy it and leave me a review. Don’t go buy it and I’m gonna give you your money back afterwards, or whatever. But that that kind of stuff is totally fine. That’s a search run by people do that to rank legitimately. It’s just they don’t want you to manipulate it.

Kelsey 57:56

Okay, for many, What strategy do you recommend if a competitor copies all the keywords of my title, He is everywhere, where I am like a shadow.

Kevin King 58:06

Nothing give his take as a compliment. I mean this, that the only thing you might be able to do on something like that there’s some sort of special wording in your title is copyright that word. But most likely, it’s gonna be hard to copyright that learning wording if it you know, it’s a slogan, you know, something like just do it for Nike is copyrightable, and trademark. It’s or something like that, that you could do. And then you could go after them. But if it’s just straight up, you know, using the same words, through garlic press, there’s not much you can do. It’s just someone that’s a bit falling, the only thing you can do is have a better listing. I mean, you gotta beat you gotta beat Come on, having better imagery, having better listing, and better copy, and hopefully, more reviews that are higher.

Norman Farrar 58:56

Diane bolster was on and she talks about these hypnotic anchor these keywords that you can go out and copyright and make your own. The other thing about this, just give me a sec here. I’m trying to reread the question. I can’t What was the question, Kelsey? I can’t read it.

Kelsey 59:15

What strategy do you recommend if a competitor copies all the keywords of my title? Okay, is everyone.

Norman Farrar 59:21

So the other thing that you can do? I don’t know if you do this, it can be expensive, is defend your listing with PPC. Just anywhere that that competitor can show up. You just defend your own brands, listings with your own PPC. And like, I know when I talked to Brian Johnson about this, I mean, it can be costly, but it also builds brand awareness and when somebody’s showing up on your listing, they’re not seeing your competitors, you know, advertising. It’s something you can

Kevin King 59:55

Yeah, I think that might get costly. It is costly. costly, pretty fast and might not be a worth it. Yeah, that’s an unfortunate thing and people do it. Yeah, that’s, that’s a hard one man. Yeah.

Kelsey 1:00:14

Okay, Pietro, what supply chain software? Do you suggest for European Amazon Marketplace?

Kevin King 1:00:22

I have no idea what to recommend on that one, you know,

Norman Farrar 1:00:27

supply chain? Who was it that was on? Kelsey, we had somebody on that could answer that question. It was just recently, and they were talking about European supply chain. I don’t have it at the tip of my tongue, but we can we can definitely supply it. Maybe Simon’s got something or maybe that’s what’s that?

Kelsey 1:00:52

Nick Penev? Was he? I think he might have been maybe

Norman Farrar 1:00:56

that person, rail overall from Z or even Z? Yeah, we could reach out to z and z. So z.co might be your answer there. All right. Any other questions?

Kelsey 1:01:11

Okay. There might be one or two, I just need I need to just need a little time to.

Norman Farrar 1:01:17

So while we’re doing this, just a reminder that if you want to get a little bit of bling, it’s hashtag we’ll have Kelsey or tag two people. And we’re going to be sending out mug, little m&ms. And one month free CenturyLink membership, that alone is about $199. So if you’re interested in just we’ll hashtag we’ll have Kelsey.

Kelsey 1:01:42

Okay. From Tony. Kevin, have you run Google to Amazon?

Kevin King 1:01:47

Yes. It could be very effective. And there’s a there’s a new tool called amston. Io, a MPD. Io. I think the Titan network guys have been promoting it, I think they may have a piece of the action there. They’ve been promoting it pretty heavily. And then the beta, but that tool looks like it might be effective. But

Norman Farrar 1:02:11

I’ve heard incredible things about that. Like a lot of people that I’ve been talking to that are using it say that it’s very effective.

Kevin King 1:02:20

integrates with attribution, as well. Yeah. It does a lot of that I have access to it. I set it up I I just haven’t started running it yet. I need to actually start running it got to that I want to play with it myself and then someone else. But yeah, it looks. It looks promising. I know a couple people that use it that said they had so so results. Then other people said it’s been really, really good. But it’s called apps a mpd.io. And it’s a it’s been around for a while for other marketplaces, and other things. But they just add an Amazon integration recently. And it automates a lot of the process and makes it because Google Ads can get really complicated really fast. And it manages a lot of it does use a little bit of AI to keep it dialed in and does all the links back to Amazon and everything and gets you some really good statistics on how it’s working for you. How much of the attribution because with attribution, you can afford to spend more money on Google on the Google ads and that outside traffic can help you rank better organically on Amazon too. So it’s kind of a full circle flywheel type of thing looks promising.

Kelsey 1:03:30

Okay, our next question is from Red is Amazon bringing Buy now pay later flexible payments just like Shopify I would think that they

Kevin King 1:03:39

almost have to that’s a huge trend right now in the payment processor payment world with the Buy Now pay later I mean, they kind of have it with the Amazon credit card that you know they always when you checkout on Amazon and say this, this your card could be $50 instead of $125 if you sign up for the Amazon card, because we’ll give you $75 credit or whatever it is it’s the kind of that’s kind of a version of buy now pay later than Amazon is doing pushing their card but I can see them either starting their own company or acquiring somebody or partnering with one of these big Buy now pay later services because among millennials especially in the younger the 18 to 30 year old age group that’s a very popular way to pay because a lot of them they don’t want they don’t want to sign for a bunch of credit cards. They don’t want to sign up for a bunch of stuff it’s a it’s a different way I think even people have been old guys like me and Norm it’s yes as Chelsea there you know his age group is big into that by now pay later. So I would see that Amazon almost has to do some version of that at some point. Yeah, sure.

Norman Farrar 1:04:47

Love debt. love more.

Kelsey 1:04:54

Do you have any recommendations for trademark attorneys competitors are infringing I need to get them to stop Thanks.

Kevin King 1:05:02

Yeah, one of our best buddies could do that. Who’s that norm?

Norman Farrar 1:05:07

Rich Goldstein.

Kevin King 1:05:09

That’s right. Oh, constant law is a is a good one that might be able to help you out with that. Yeah, I think you just Google a Goldstein, gaol d s t i n. Long. You can find this is a URL, and there’s

Norman Farrar 1:05:23

a there’s also a backup like Jakub Kabili. She’s been on as well. But yeah, Richie. Rich is a great guy. We see him at most of the events that we’re at.

Kelsey 1:05:37

Okay, from Jeremy, regarding the Google ads, are you running using two step URL to your PDP?

Kevin King 1:05:44

No, it’s an attribution like. I’ve gone straight, the product is placed on the storefront or the attribution like using that app.io. But you can also run Google ads that that do go to your product display page if you want to run those separately. But that’s not what I’m doing right now. I’m using the attribution so I can get that extra juice out of it that Amazon gives that 10% back.

Kelsey 1:06:07

Okay, and Simon, just wanted to clarify, doesn’t each 10 or so stock do this supply chain management as well?

Kevin King 1:06:14

Yeah, the stock has been, I haven’t played with stock in about a year. So I haven’t. I’m not sure I’ve heard it’s gotten much more sophisticated and better.

Norman Farrar 1:06:22

I wasn’t sure about that, too.

Kevin King 1:06:25

But Helium 10. Both of them do some estimating forecasting, for you sort of shows Amazon, I don’t trust Amazon. But they they do some of that. But they’re not. They’re not full on supply chain management. Tony so stock more so than helium 10 is more of a supply chain management tool. But yet, there’s some other more sophisticated tools out there that depending on what you’re doing, and all multichannel and stuff are really good. But so stock out of those two, I would take a look at some stuff.

Norman Farrar 1:06:57

Yeah, give. Give them a so Kelsey, put up the URL there. And you know, talk to Chelsea it’s, we use it over at honu. But it’s great. I just didn’t think of it for the UK.

Kelsey 1:07:11

Okay, yeah, I’ll get that link over to the scarfing it now. We have just a couple more questions. One from Dr. Cause. Hey, Kevin, any fresh ideas to pop into shipments as a Christmas gift? Last time you mentioned m&ms.

Kevin King 1:07:26

Um, yeah, I didn’t know that. Any, anything like that? I would, you know, little Christmas candy. A little I know this time of year a candy cane or something would probably go a long ways people just don’t remember that. You know, it can’t it can’t pop into the box and use a little card attached to a little note says Thanks, Mary. Happy holidays. USA. Be careful. say Merry Christmas. But Happy Holidays and Happy New Year. Safe, safe trip safe travels for you and your family, whatever you want to say, with a little candy cane or something could go a long way. And those little things people will remember that. Like you’d like that m&ms. I even forgot about that. Yeah, the little m&ms that when I was ordering from that, from my dad’s Supply Company for beta cassettes and stuff, everything they would throw a pack of m&ms in their sector in the summer. But then some of they put a note sorry. We can’t put the m&ms because they might melt. And they included something else. I forgot what it was. But it was something wasn’t as cool. m&ms are the cool one. Yeah, it’s just one of those little like Halloween packages, you know, a little Halloween pack. But sometimes I throw an extra one in there. And it’s like, oh, cool. We got to and it’s not that big. Five cents, 10 cents for these things, whatever it is, but it made an impression and so it makes you anticipate the next Miko box to come in and get my m&ms.

Norman Farrar 1:08:52

Yeah, it’s all about the customer experiences.

Kevin King 1:08:55

It’s all psychology about that. Yeah.

Kelsey 1:08:58

Okay, CJ s asks, What would you recommend in launching variations, child under separate listings, listing all together or using current listing parent?

Kevin King 1:09:09

We just kind of answer that one earlier. It just depends. I mean, it totally. I usually do it initially as a variation. And then later on, I split them back out and try them once they each have some reviews on them. But it’s usually easier to get reviews on a new product and it’s a variation on something else. And then I might split them back out later and test and then maybe put them back. But that’s just one of those. It depends on the product depends on the category depends on the reviews depends on your competition, which way is better. Amazon prefers you to do it as a variation. But sometimes you want more real estate.

Kelsey 1:09:51

Okay, Simon’s asking how do you manage your inventory if you’re not using so stocked? How do you manage your FBA inventory?

Kevin King 1:09:59

I Me personally, I have a personalized little spreadsheet that I use. But also I’m not managing the hundreds of 1000s of skews, I think a total SKU count on all my businesses is like 60 or something. It’s not, it’s not unmanageable. If I had hundreds of 1000s of SKUs, and all kinds of different variations that would be, I would need something like that. Can I get a lot easier?

Kelsey 1:10:24

Okay, and our last question is from Salinas, do you know any good courses that outline how to delegate and create great processes for our Amazon FBA store?

Kevin King 1:10:35

I think the guys it wasn’t naked for free. He started what’s the name of is called

Norman Farrar 1:10:40

outsource school. Yeah, and I believe, Kelsey, we have to check but I believe Nathan’s gave us a coupon if you are interested in outsource school, so outsource school will not only give you like how to have a VA handle your inbox or whatever. There’s, there’s a bunch of one off courses, but there’s one that’s really great, called cracking the VA code. And that teaches you a lot of this very short processes to take control back of your day. We also had Vinay on and he’s from process.st St. And you could actually take a look at both you can do the course go back over to him, he has training. And it’s very, very simple approach on how to create SOPs. And by the way, he was just on if you wanted to check out that podcast that was just last week.

Kelsey 1:11:47

Okay, and one more question just snuck in from Manny, how does the lifecycle of an asin look like especially towards the ending,

Kevin King 1:11:56

um, most ASINs do have a lifecycle on Amazon. What that lifecycle is, is dependent. Here’s something that a lot of people when dealing with the lifecycle, this came out of the billion dollar seller summit to during the presentation, I don’t know, if you were there, normally, I was for that, where a lot of people will get an asin going and get it rocking and rolling, and then kind of take the foot off the gas like we’re doing well, we’re in the top positions, we’re crushing it, and they take their foot off the gas and dial back on their advertising and dial back on some of the promotions and other things they’re doing. And then they start slowly sliding. Once you start a slide on Amazon, this person has enough data that I believe what they’re saying. They’re seeing that that slide is almost irreversible, right. And you don’t ever want to take your take your foot off the gas. So that should be able to extend that lifecycle. Basically, I’ve always thought in my mind life cycles, about two years of a product, but because by then people knocked you off, people, things have changed, as some products last a lot longer than that, and keep on going a lot longer. And you know, these, these aggregators aren’t gonna buy stuff, it’s gonna die on them right away. But the main point is that it’s keep that lifecycle going, it’s Don’t ever take your foot off the gas. And this person has gotten enough data to say that look that once that starts Amazon algorithm actually accelerates that decline, and pushes you out of the way and makes room for the next person. So how, but that’s what I have to say about the lifecycle is try to try to extend as long as you can, and never taking your foot off the gas. Very good.

Kelsey 1:13:48

Okay. All right. That’s it for questions. I think. Okay, that’s it. Yeah, we? Yeah, not to park. Good job.

Norman Farrar 1:13:56

In what Kevin? I didn’t see your mug.

Kevin King 1:14:00

Yeah, my maid. My housekeeper took it away. yesterday. It was sitting here on my desk. I headed out

Norman Farrar 1:14:05

second in a row. He could not know

Kevin King 1:14:11

what’s to lose, get rid of us. I was looking for when we started sending stuff away. I was like, well, maybe she put it back over here and it’s not over here.

Norman Farrar 1:14:22

Well, although I’m hurt. Talk with her. Alright, let’s get to the wheel of Kelsey.

Kelsey 1:14:30

Right. Here we go the wheel of Kelsey. All right, thank you everyone who entered I hopefully I got everyone there was a lot of names that are coming in. But here we go. This is for our swag bag. 321 All right, so you’re missing a mug or something shirt. Oh, got it. Amar.

Norman Farrar 1:15:11

All right, Omar, congrats.

Kelsey 1:15:16

Okay, congratulations, if you can email me at kg at lunch with Darren calm, but I believe I have all your all your contact information already. So that should be no problem. And thank you, everyone, Manny. Braden, so many people joining. Thank you guys really appreciate it. Okay,

Norman Farrar 1:15:38

you, Kelsey, I do want to, there’s an interesting comment that Simon made. And I just want to highlight that, because I think it’s important. Okay, so you can read that out?

Kelsey 1:15:50

If you have taken your foot off the gas, can you reinvent and launch a new Asin?

Kevin King 1:15:56

Yeah, that’s probably what you would have to do, you would probably have to based on what this person was saying, based on the data they’re seeing across hundreds of skews, if not 1000s of SKUs? That, yeah, you would probably want to have to, to, you probably want to restart.

Norman Farrar 1:16:14

Yeah. It’s not a spritzer upper.

Kevin King 1:16:17

Yeah, what you could do is you can restart and make the original variation. And that way you have some of the reviews will come up with the show up as a variation. And that may help you accelerate that restart.

Norman Farrar 1:16:31

All right. Very good. Kevin. You’ve got a virtual Summit coming up in a few months. That’s the billionaire seller Summit. What month is that?

Kevin King 1:16:42

Since February, February, 24. And 25th 23rd 24th.

Norman Farrar 1:16:47

Okay, very good. So the closer we get, we’ll, we’ll definitely make sure that people get that information. And if they want more information, where can they find that? Or where can they get in touch?

Kevin King 1:17:00

I’m, I’m hard to get in touch with. But you just follow me on Facebook and just look me up on Facebook and just follow me there. Yep. That’s the best place that usually posts information there from time to time. I know. I’m not a big social person on Facebook, where I post what I ate for dinner. And here, there’s me at the grocery store shopping. I don’t do that kind of stuff. I can

Norman Farrar 1:17:20

attest to that. Like, for years. He had a picture of his dog. I didn’t even know this, Kevin. But but you change it now you you you’ve moved up,

Kevin King 1:17:32

finally had the sitcom but yeah, I usually only I use my Facebook for business. So that’s it, I’ll post a post stuff on there, you know, about the building or something about other things from time to time. And that deleted, you know, I don’t keep my feed. It’s not You’re not gonna go through and see the history, I’ll make sure that, you know, like, like by now, I think I have a link to this pipe. What we’re doing right now on the search for normals on there, but in two or three days, I’ll actually delete it. So I keeps it fresh. And every time someone comes there, they see the highlight

Norman Farrar 1:18:02

podcast. I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart.

Kevin King 1:18:08

billion dollar solar summit stuff, I believe. It’s not just it’s not just yours. Don’t Don’t worry.

Norman Farrar 1:18:14

Okay. All right. Thanks. Thank you. I just tried to

Kevin King 1:18:17

keep it fresh.

Norman Farrar 1:18:18

Kevin, thank you so much for coming on. It’s always mean, it’s always a lot of fun having you on the podcast. And you know, we can’t wait for next month.

Kevin King 1:18:27

I try to do this again. Be Thanksgiving in the US. You already had your Thanksgiving in Canada, but yeah, Black Friday. Time. Probably.

Norman Farrar 1:18:37

It’ll be exciting. That’s right. All right, sir. We will see you later. And thanks again for coming on. All right. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed the show today. You know, we always go over when we talking to Kevin, we always get lots of engagement, which is fantastic. Monday, we’re gonna have a returning guest again, Ben Leonard. And we’re going to be discussing how to determine the true value of your business. Now, Ben was I believe purchased in in the UK, which was called beast gear. Anyways, really great guy. He just drops a ton of knowledge. So make sure you tune in for that. And also just a quick shout out to z.co. We mentioned them a few times during the episode, but they’re also a sponsor. And I just wanted to just read a little bit here of their advertisement. And that is are you a private label seller looking to expand into a larger international market? Z can help. Z makes selling your Amazon products abroad easy with excellent import knowledge, door to door delivery or door to door solutions, customer service and scalability. That’s right, you can sit back and enjoy the lunch with Norm podcast while You have peace of mind and z’s handling everything. So ready to expand your EECOM empire, check out z.co. And that is z e dot C Oh. And by the way, if you really want to just have another great podcast was with the guys over at Z rail, and he just got right into what they do. So alright cast, what else do we have? It’s about time to wrap this up.

Kelsey 1:20:30

All right, yeah, we went a little overboard, or not over boil over time than usual. But thank you guys for sticking with us. Hope you guys enjoyed the episode. If you’re looking to, you know, get more out of your Amazon business, you can go to our membership program on our lunch with Norm website, you just have to click the membership button on the top kind of the top of the banner, and it’ll take you to our membership program where you can get small group q&a sessions with me in norm, we do three sessions every month along with special guest. So we’ve had Amy Reese, give a special guest lesson. We’ve had an awful lobby, we’ve had Ben Leonard, he was our first one I believe, or second one, actually. So it’s been really great. Check it out. If you’re interested. We’ve got a bunch of different plans for everyone. Or you can just donate a cup of coffee a month, that would be more than enough. Just watching is more than enough, really. But yeah, that’s it’s also if you guys did really enjoy this episode, we’d really appreciate it. If you shared this out. From Facebook, if you hit that little Share button. That would do a lot for the podcast. It just gets more eyes on the podcast. And yeah, hopefully we can help out more sellers. But that’s it for me smash those like buttons if you haven’t already. And I think that’s it.

Norman Farrar 1:21:56

Fantastic. So enjoy your weekend, Kelsey.

Kelsey 1:22:00

And we’ll I’ll be moving the entire weekend. So you’ll see a different place. I’m not in this little dungeon anymore. I’ll have a window in my room, which is fantastic.

Norman Farrar 1:22:12

I’m glad you’ll have that window. Okay. And for everybody else if you’re not moving on Monday, please join us on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. And thank you for being part of the community. Thanks for listening to the podcast. And we just couldn’t do this without you. So guys, enjoy the rest of your day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

k@lunchwithnorm.com

#213: Amazon FBA Seller Advice for Black Friday 2021

w/ Kevin King

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#213: Amazon FBA Seller Advice for Black Friday 2021

w/ Kevin King

About This Episode

About The Guests

Sponsors

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Explore these Resources

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