8 Figure Amazon seller, Todd Snively Joins Lunch with Norm to discuss the benefits to wholesale. In this episode they discuss the barriers to entry, mistakes when it comes to Amazon Wholesales and some of the most recent news and updates about inventory strategies sellers should look into. Serial Entrepreneur Todd Snively has been pursuing his dream of true financial and location freedom by creating profit centers for almost forty years now. He is the co-founder of Expert University™, an online training center that currently specializes in developing professional Amazon sellers using the wholesale model.
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Episode: 192
Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Todd Snively – Capitalism Initiative Director
Subtitle: “Amazon Wholesale Opportunity for Online Sellers”
Final Show Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKRY0PKB7QM&list=PLVIz0IewRSqDUVXG_IAXsVx9ZWE8_Vanz&index=2
Back on Lunch with Norm…On today’s show we have Todd Snively, an 8 Figure Amazon seller that joined to talk about the benefits to Amazon Wholesale, the barriers of entry that sellers should be aware of and the most recent news on wholesale and Amazon. Snively has generated over one hundred million dollars in online revenue and now spends most of his time creating courses for others to learn his methods. He is the co-founder of Expert University™, an online training center that specializes in the Amazon wholesale model.
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Norman Ferrar 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 Ferrar 0:20
Okay, we get messages all the time about other opportunities. What can people do outside of Amazon or what does Amazon offer that’s different today we’re going to talk to you about this. We’re going to be talking about wholesale opportunities on Amazon, and possibly Walmart. Anyways, today we have a serial entrepreneur. Our guest has been pursuing his dream and true financial and location freedom by creating profit centers for almost 40 years. He’s the co-founder of expert University and has generated I said this on the last podcast over $100 million in online revenue. Over this time, we’re going to be talking about the Amazon wholesale model. My guest today is a returning guest Todd Snively. I can’t wait to talk to him. He’s an awesome guy. But before we get to it, I do want to just give a great big shout out to H refs, our sponsor, H with Webmaster Tools, looking to become more than an Amazon seller. start increasing your sales through your own website using the help of H refs. With their new, very advanced and easy to use, and free tool. Agents can help you launch inbound sales from your very own website with ease, all while you sit back, relax and enjoy the podcast. So take advantage. Sorry, I got this frog in my throat. Take control of your business. And check out h ref webmaster tools at hrefs.com/awtand. That’s a H R E F s.com/awtallright. Where’s the Boy Wonder?
Kelsey 1:55
Oh, Happy Friday.
Norman Ferrar 1:56
Happy Happy Friday. Oh man. I’m just warning people. Now. I got a bit of a frog in my throat too. I guess. I had a cigar yesterday. And it’s coming back to haunt me now. Yeah, you got to stop sending me them.
Kelsey 2:11
I know. Yeah. Well, I’m off to a good start. My lovely roommate just made me a whole breakfast right next to me and got some sausages and eggs. So I’m ready to go. I’m in a good mood. And yes, so welcome, everyone. Welcome to the show. If you haven’t yet, please smash those buttons, give us thumbs up, hit that subscribe button on our YouTube channel. We really appreciate it. Also, if you have any questions throughout the show, of course, just throw them over into the comment sections. We go live every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at 12pm. Eastern time. So just come and join us on Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. We do have an awesome price today, as well. We are still doing our 200th Episode beer Nation members. So if you’re interested in coming on to the show, for our 200th episode, go to our Facebook page or facebook group lunch with Norm Amazon FBA and E commerce collective. And you’ll be able to find a pinned post where you can answer a few questions or one of the questions and yeah, you can be part of the show. So I’ll put the link in the bio or in the comment sections. But we can just jump into it today.
Norman Ferrar 3:25
All right, fantastic. So if you do have any questions, throw them over into the comment section. Other than that, sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee, and enjoy the episode. Where is Mr Snively? There is
Todd Snively 3:40
basically I got you know everything I asked myself that where am I?
Norman Ferrar 3:45
Looking at you in your professional podcast studio? No, man.
Todd Snively 3:49
I know. But aren’t green screens. Wonderful to see. Swimming Pool in two minutes if you want me to.
Norman Ferrar 3:58
Yeah, that’s good. Okay, so for those of us who don’t know you, can you tell us a little bit about yourself what you do?
Todd Snively 4:07
Oh, sure. You know, well, I like making money online. Because basically, I’m lazy. And I like the easiest way to do things. And, you know, I’ve done a lot of different businesses over the last 40 years from from physical stores, to actual consulting businesses. I’ve written a book, I got a book out there I’m very proud of called the Amazon code was a number one bestseller on Amazon. So I was thrilled about that. But right now, our passion since 2002, has been selling physical products online, what we call wholesale distribution. And, you know, just the fact that we’ve been doing it since 2002. should give you a hint as to, you know, the legitimacy of the model, not a flash in the pan, something that’s going to be around for a while. And so what we really been doing is trying to figure out the difference Ways to pivot when, you know life throws things at you like international, endemic, and things like that, and different ways to drill down into that business model, whether it’s different marketplaces, different product types and sources, and are different, even software tools to help you sell more. I mean, even though we’ve been doing this since 2002, I would say not a month goes by that we don’t learn something significant. They help us make more money in our business.
Norman Ferrar 5:31
Right? And you’re not talking about a little bit of money, people can go out there and make significant dollars, correct?
Todd Snively 5:39
Oh, yeah, I mean, this is one of those business models that can’t really be oversaturated, or especially by any one person, when you look at even on Amazon, the largest marketplace in the world, the top sellers are still only in like the 100 million dollar range, you don’t have any billion dollar sellers on Amazon. And a lot of that has to do, just based on the limitations of the marketplace. And the model. You know, we could grow as big as we want it to, but we picked a level that we’re comfortable at, for the investment in infrastructure, employees and technology, and our monthly cost of goods sold budget. So a
Norman Ferrar 6:22
million is just a, you know, that’s a smaller budget, your your low achiever.
Todd Snively 6:28
Well, you know, what I’m what’s really funny is because people ask me all the time, they’re like, Well, how much do I really need to get started. And online distribution, which is, which is what we call this wholesale distribution model, as it pertains to us happens to even be the name of our parent company, whole online distribution, it meets people where they’re at budget wise. So if you’re like, Well, I just have a few $100. And I want to put my toe in the water and see what happens, you can do that. If you can say I have $100,000 that I want to turn every month, you know, selling physical products in marketplaces, you can do that. And everything in between. That’s the beauty of selling physical products online. And for a lot of people that have a hard time visualizing this, I mean, it’s almost you can be like, making it a virtual garage sale, if you will. And matter of fact, you know, it’s kind of funny, I said that, you know, the last two years has been a little challenging, because of COVID. Really, I mean, when COVID first came out, we probably sold three years of inventory in three months. And yeah, and while everybody was doing this, if you you know, people were not going out, they weren’t going to the stores only say 17% of all retail was being done online. And that’s jumped to like 28%. Right now, maybe the number is probably even higher. Now. I haven’t looked at it recently. So you have all these people moving online that have never bought online before. And they’re buying all kinds of things that you can think about. So what happened and I think other marketplace sellers that might be listening to this will agree, it became difficult to find inventory, because distributors were running out, because the brands and the manufacturers weren’t able to keep up with the demand. You know, they’re using equipment and volume models, if you will, based on a normal situation. So they’re manufacturing, on adjust on just in time basis, based on a normal environment while the pandemic hit and nothing was normal anymore. Now you had companies running out of raw materials, so you couldn’t make the items fast enough to get them to the distributors to get them to people like me to resell on the marketplaces. So we did a very interesting pivot now, for the people that know me, the people who’ve read my book, people that have been following me for a while they know that the way I started in the business in March of 2002, was selling used customer returned goods used products, we would go to online auctions, we would purchase the stuff in mass, we would inspect it, and then we would list it on the appropriate marketplace. And we’ve been doing that. Since then a fraction of our business has always been customer returned goods. But when the pandemic hit, and the inventory shortages started, what we realized was it wasn’t affecting the returned goods. There were more there was more inventory available in customer return goods than there had ever been at better prices than we had ever seen. We were used to paying anywhere from 10 to 15 cents on the dollar for these return goods. Now we were picking them up for three to six cents on the dollar was the sheer volume that was available in the marketplace. So one of the pivots that we did was when it when it came when it was difficult to buy the brand new merchandise. We went and just started buying more liquidation customer returned goods at auction. So a lot of our you can sell those, by the way, there’s there’s, there’s these misconceptions. Well, you can’t sell that stuff on Amazon. Well, yes, you can. All right. But there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it. Usually the people that say no, you can’t do that, or doing it the wrong way. Or they don’t know the right. Well, that’s typical, of course, right? There’s always somebody out there, it’s fine. Wait a minute, I’m making millions of dollars a year doing that. You mean I can’t, I shouldn’t. But what’s really funny is there’s these other marketplaces, and one of them happens to be eBay. eBay is I used to I used to joke about eBay called eBay, the marketplace that products go to die. But it’s,
Todd Snively 11:00
you know, that’s a little bit unfair. You know, I say that because eBay back when I started in 2002, was the game. I mean, that’s where stuff was really moving back then, you know, other than selling you stuff on eBay, you had to make money online, either in porn or books, right. Amazon was really out there selling books, and, and just getting just starting to think about other products. So e-bay, eBay was the place. Now, obviously, Amazon has just eclipsed them by leaps and bounds. Now you have Walmart, you know, who actually you probably know this, but jet jet.com. And then for 3 billion, and then just basically close to Yeah, I say they have the best chance in the world of overtaking Amazon. But we just sell that we just sell new items on Walmart, but it’s became a new channel for us. You know, we, when we were looking at the different ways to distribute these products, we found out that Walmart was a much better marketplace than Amazon for certain items. eBay was a much better marketplace for certain items. And Amazon was a better marketplace for certain items. Every marketplace, you know, has these niches, these little pockets. Plus they have the client base, the loyalty, I’ll call it the loyalty of the customer. There’s some customers that will only ever shop on Amazon never. Right? People that will only ever shop on Walmart, right? Not Amazon. It’s just an interesting mental dynamic, you know, from some people, some people will only buy only buy the item at the cheapest price available. They don’t care where they get it. You know, some people will spend $20 in gas to go to an outlet store to save $3 on a product. I mean, it’s just I don’t know, it’s more like a hobby, I think than actually saving money.
Norman Ferrar 12:54
Yeah, no, no, it’s price driven. But you’ve got to take in all those other expenses. One of the things I wanted to talk to you about I know there’s people that are listening right now and going, okay, when you’re talking about wholesale, are you talking about retail arbitrage going out there grabbing stuff, you know, at Costco, or wherever, and, you know, sending it over to Amazon, and you know, all those pain in the butt things? Like, is that what you’re talking about?
Todd Snively 13:23
No, I’m, I’m actually not a fan of arbitrage, whether it’s retail or online, I would never tell somebody not to do it, if that’s their jam, I just don’t, it’s just not a scalable business. And if I’m going to put, like I said before, I’m like the laziest guy you can ever meet, I need the easiest way to do something. So I’m really big into systems, standard operating procedures, and you know, the replication of you know, what you’re doing, I used to say, if you can figure out how to make a single dollar, right of profit online, all you have to do is figure out how to do that 10,000 times a day. Right? And that’s all done with systems automations and standard operating procedures. And the people are important. You know, we we have employees and we have virtual assistants, but we have more virtual employees than we do regular employees. And, you know, they come and go, that’s that’s, it’s like the McDonald’s of the online, selling online. You know, if you don’t have a system, where you can plug somebody in, like, you know, McDonald’s, if you go to McDonald’s, the very first thing you want to work, they’re there, they’re gonna sit you down, and you’re gonna watch a video a training video on how to make the apple pies. Alright, and it’s standard. It doesn’t matter if you’re going into the one in Los Angeles or Detroit or Honolulu or Miami. It’s the same video on how to make the same apple pie to give that customer the same experience. You have to, you have to be able to move that over into whatever business you have. Or you’re going to find yourself working in your business and not on your business. Right? The value I bring to my business as its CEO is innovation, bringing new ways of doing things better, better standard operating procedures, and an additional opportunities. I don’t serve my business by going into the warehouse and packing boxes, right? That’s not how I can best serve my business. It’s not how I want to serve my business, I want to be a true CEO. And matter of fact, the second book I have coming out is called the virtual CEO how to work one hour a day, and earn a million dollars a year. So that book, you know, became a pet project, because I saw so many people getting stuck in the stuff that wasn’t important in making money with their business. Yep, you see that all the time? All the time. And I don’t understand it. I don’t get it. So I finally just sat down and the books in its final editing stage. And, and again, wholesale. When people talk about things like arbitrage, they’re getting caught up in what I believe is a fad. Oh, how do I say this? You know, there’s a lot of gurus out there that they make their money selling, you know, five and $10,000 arbitrage courses, right? Well, if you do that long enough, people are going to start to think it’s a legitimate business. And it’s more you have to understand what it is it’s really more of a hobby. Because if you look at the terms of service, a lot of places a lot of marketplaces don’t allow it. They want you to have that like the physical product in your hand. So if you’re looking to
Norman Ferrar 16:48
find that Tod, what is retail arbitrage or online arbitrage compared to wholesale?
Todd Snively 16:55
Okay, arbitrage in and of itself is taking advantage of price inequalities. All right. And arbitrage is applicable in a lot of different businesses. Some people will trade Kansas City wheat, right in the commodity markets versus Chicago wheat, and try to pocket the difference between the pricing inefficiencies. So somebody will go online to a marketplace, like, like walmart.com. And they’ll find a blue widget that is maybe $9. And then they’ll go into Amazon a different marketplace. And they’ll find that same blue widget, and maybe for whatever reason, it’s selling for $19. So they’ll put an offer up at Amazon, for that blue widget for $19. And if it sells, if it sells, they will then go back to Walmart, purchase the blue widget for the lower price and have it sent to the customer. Well, there’s a lot that can go wrong with that model, if you’re just if you just ran through what I just said in your mind. So you know, it’s not a it’s not a great business. Now, the difference between retail and online arbitrage is in retail arbitrage. You’re physically taking your body to the big box stores like Big Lots more warm, you’re physically driving and walking through the clearance section with your little scanner or your phone scanner app, scanning barcodes against different marketplaces. And then at that point, you have to buy the product, right? So now you’re buying something that you you think there’s a pricing inefficiency you get, you’re buying this on clearance. It’s not on clearance online yet. So you’re going to go and sell that? Well, again, a lot of things can go wrong with that. And then the one thing people don’t even think about is this little thing called sales tax. You walk into a big lots, and you go to their clearance and you buy like the last 12 blue widgets, you know, that look profitable. If you sell on Amazon, you know, you’re paying 6% sales tax on the way out, you know, if if you handicap yourself, right from the beginning, by giving away 6% to the government, because you’re buying that product. That’s a mistake right there. So there’s just so many things wrong. I mean, we could fill two shows about what’s wrong with it, those models. But I want to talk about one other model that came to mind sensor on this path that I want to warn people about. It’s called, it’s actually it used to be called Amazon automation. But now I’m gonna call it the automation model, because now people are offering automation businesses for Walmart, Amazon, eBay, I mean ATSI they’re out there with these automation models, and 99.9% of them are fraudulent. They’re just people are promising to do things they can’t deliver on they’re mathematically impossible to deliver on. Oh and and here’s the this really Ryan’s me, okay. The light, the light, the light, latest iteration of this fraudulent automation model is private label. Now that should really bother you. Excuse me. So here’s what they’re doing. Alright, and you’ll, you’ll know what’s wrong with this right from the get go. Here’s the pitch, give me $50,000, I’ll go out and I’ll do the research. And I’ll find a product that would make a good private label product. And we’ll get it set up to be manufactured in China. And we’ll get it sent over here. And we’ll get it sent over to the marketplace. And we’ll optimize your sales page. And we’ll optimize the back end and the front end. And we’ll set up the PPC for 38% of your profits and a $500 a month fee plus the 50 Grand up front that does that sound like a deal to you? And what’s the one thing and what’s the one thing that’s really, really wrong with that model? Not every swing at the bat, swing of the bat, at our private label launch is successful.
Norman Ferrar 21:02
Yeah, at 20. Really?
Todd Snively 21:05
If that, right, yeah. So here’s people don’t don’t really understand that. They think that every time they launch a private label product on Amazon, it’s going to be a million dollar home run. They don’t understand all of the work involved, nor do they necessarily want to. So it sounds so good to give somebody 50 grand 500 A month 20 30% of the profits, right? And just sit back. And there’s nothing they have to do except pay for the product and pay for the transportation. Right? It’s the worst thing that you could, you could do is get involved in any type of automation program. Here’s how you do automation, the right way. You learn how to do the business yourself and you outsource yourself. Don’t outsource the creation of the business, right? You have to take some responsibility, understand how that business works, get it rolling, then put your virtual CEO hat on and start outsourcing the things you no longer want to do. Like for example, in 2002, when I’m on my forklift in my empty warehouse, waiting for my very first truck to show up, right? I couldn’t wait to hire somebody to do my packing and shipping because I really hated that part of the business, right? But it was just me for the longest time and I couldn’t afford anybody. Right. But the very first profits that started to roll in that I didn’t need to live off of I hired a shipping clerk. Right I autumn I in effect in sourced or outsourced however you want to talk about it, the shipping. But when somebody comes to you, right, and says, I’m going to automate this entire business for you, so that all you have to do is fund it, right? Alarm bells should just go off in your head. And and here’s the other problem with this model. You’re not gonna know that you got screwed for six months to a year, maybe longer. Right? Now all of a sudden, you’re you’re a year out, you’ve got 8000 blue widgets down at Amazon FBA that aren’t selling in bought to incur long term storage fees. And you realize that 50 grand you wired to a bank and I’m gonna say Canada don’t take offense to that North. Know what I mean? You know what I mean? That money’s gone. Yeah. Do you ever read, if you ever read actually read these agreements that these automation gurus make you sign? It’ll tell you right in the agreement? Yeah, you’re basically screwed. You know, this thing is almost impossible to become successful with and you understand that, so you’re gonna sign off on that. But send us your 50 grand anyway, because we’re gonna
Norman Ferrar 23:52
end that 38% every month. Yeah.
Todd Snively 23:55
Well, the thing is, is that’s a that’s a red herring. That’s a red herring. You’re never going to get that because you’re never going to have any profits. Right? Right. They drag you out for so long. And then a year later, they’re like, Well, gosh, this didn’t work. Do you want to try again? send another 50 grand, we’ll, we’ll try another product. You’re like, oh, no, I’m done with this bullshit, or not? Sorry. I’m nonsense. And you know, and you think that was just a normal business transaction? No, they had you from the word go. And here and here’s why. Okay, and here’s why. Here’s why all of this automation stuff is nonsense. They’re doing this to 2020 503,000 people. I mean, just common sense. should tell you. It’s not possible to service that many people. It’s not possible. Right. So So what is this? Is this just a fraud? A con? Yeah, it’s a long con.
Norman Ferrar 24:57
Well, it’s that Nigerian prince Right, they left you all that money. Worse than
Todd Snively 25:02
that, because a person can look at the Nigerian trance and say this is nonsense. I can tell you norm this is this is gonna blow it. This blew my mind this might blow your mind. I cannot tell you the number of people that have contacted me, because I wrote an article out there about this right? So I have this article and people track me down. Say Can I ask you some questions about automation? Yeah, go ahead. I’ll I’m dealing with this guy, this company, yada, yada. And I’ll flat out tell them yeah, that guy’s a crook. Don’t Don’t give any money to that guy. And this is what they do. But it’s, it sounds so good. I’m really considering doing this. Did you not hear what I just told you guys a crock. You know, it’s terrible. Anyway, but,
Norman Ferrar 25:44
and I get that too. So what I’ll what they say is okay, this really does sound too good to be true. You explain to the that situation. And that could even be about a person’s listing. And you go through the whole process, and you explain what you think needs to happen. And you’ll always hear, but if and it’s like, okay, everything I just said nobody heard. You know, and, and and they go on, and they do their own thing. So Todd, before we get into talking more about wholesale, you have a great giveaway today. And I want you to explain what that is.
Todd Snively 26:22
Well, I am thrilled, silly to spend 30 minutes one on one with anybody in an Ask me anything. Zoom call. So if you’re already in the business, and you want some secrets on certain aspects, we can do that. If you’re thinking of getting started with wholesale and have some pointed questions, you can ask me that. And I’m more than happy to, to answer. And if you just want to talk about what it’s like being, you know, no laptop, Nomad, you know, we can do that, too. So the lifestyle, I get a lot of questions about living in Puerto Rico, you know, the tax benefits down there. I get questions about we have a home in China, you know what it’s like in China, you know, and I get some not so nice questions. So. But it’s an Ask me anything. 30 minutes?
Norman Ferrar 27:13
Well, that’s fantastic. So to take advantage of Todd’s offered his giveaway, it’s hashtag we’ll have Kelsey, if you want to have a second entry. It just take two people. Okay, so let’s dive into wholesale and why you like it. So what is the wholesale model? When it’s talked about going and getting and receiving? Returns? Oh, by the way, I went to a local area, a local distributor here who handles Amazon returns, oh, 10 bucks, I grabbed a package. And we grabbed two. And one was $1,200 worth of Rosetta Stone. And the other one was about $150 hair straightener, which was kind of cool. But you’re not talking about that.
Todd Snively 27:57
Now that whole liquidation model that customer goods is is an aspect of wholesale distribution, because what you’re doing is you’re I call it the second oldest profession in the world. We all know what the first what the oldest is. But the second oldest is, hey, I want to give you some money for that. And then you turn around and you sell it for more money, buy low, sell high, right? That’s really a wholesale distribution. In a nutshell, the big secret to wholesale distribution is finding products that you can buy inexpensively enough so that you can resell them at the current market price and make a profit. Now, most people get wrapped up in Amazon, that Well, I got to sell the most popular stuff. And Amazon has these top 100 lists, right? And so they go and they try to find distribution on the brands in the top 100. And let’s say they do find distribution for one of these sexy products. Well, the wholesaler gives you a price. Let’s say it’s, well, we’ll sell you that sexy product for $5. And you go to Amazon and you see it selling for four 95 Well, wait a minute, this model sucks. I can’t make any money doing this. The whole trick, okay, is to find products that still have really, really, really good demand, but aren’t in the top 100 I mean, the average the I was gonna say BSR but best selling rank, right? Cuz Amazon ranks every single product from one to well over 2 million. Okay? The average best selling rank of the products that that we look at are probably in the eight 910 20,000 range. It just depends on the category. So what we’re doing is we’re using software to find the products that we can buy because we already have like let’s say an agreement with a distributor or a wholesaler and Do we know what products they’re willing to sell us? Well, we’ll use software to analyze all of these 40 different data points that are important to us before we make a buying decision. To see which one of these products we can sell profitably, that need additional sellers, because that’s another concept a lot of people don’t quite understand about Amazon, specifically. Amazon works with multiple sellers. So does Walmart, okay. We call them there’s competitive and there’s non competitive sellers, right? A non competitive seller. That’s easy. That’s some that’s some doofus that is asking so much money for his for his blue widget right? That he bought it wholesale, that nobody, nobody in the right mind would ever pay for it. Because there’s because there’s lower priced offers. All right. So. So if you’re one of those lower priced offers, and can still make a lot of money, Amazon wants as many of those sellers on that product as possible, so that they can get these products distributed across where they’re their warehouses, their distribution centers all across the country. This is how I can order, you know, my shampoo in the morning and have it the next day, because they have enough competitive sellers that have placed this shampoo within a one day trip. Right my house exactly right. Now, in fact, I look at a lot of the stuff that comes to me on Amazon. And I’m talking about I’m in Las Vegas right now, in our Las Vegas home. Most of it I’d say 90% of its coming from the Las Vegas distribution center, they’re not shipping that stuff to me from New York, or Michigan or Florida or California, Las Vegas, the only way they can do that is to incentivize sellers to be on those listings, as many sellers as possible that that listing will support. Right. And by that I mean, let’s say something sells 1000 units a month? Well, most sellers would be happy with 100 of those 1000, right 10% of that overall volume. So Amazon will allow are basically the way the model would work is it would allow 10 competitive sellers, each of those 10 would get 100. Maybe an 11th seller comes around and he looks at that and he goes man, I’d only be getting 80 a month and that’s not good enough he moves on. So it’s kind of like it’s how do I explain this, the thing has the model has a life of its own, the products that can handle 100 competitive sellers will eventually get to 100 competitive sellers, the products that can handle only three competitive sellers, will will top out at three competitive sellers. The key is finding the products that are already selling profitably at need an additional competitive seller, that’s you told
Norma Ferrar 32:50
me something that blew me away. I had no idea that this was part of it. Well, there’s two things you told me. One was the buy box, and that they will rotate. It’s not. It’s not based on price it’s based on if they have those 10 sellers. It’s not necessarily based on price, they’ll rotate through that correct.
Todd Snively 33:11
Price is a huge,
Norman Ferrar 33:15
huge factor. But it’s not the only factor. In the
Todd Snively 33:19
last year and a half. The one of the larger factors has actually been delivery time. Right? Which this again brings up a great point. And this is about pivoting. Alright. Before I talk about the pivot real quick, I just want to say how important mental attitude is if you’re deciding you want to be an entrepreneur, right? If you’re gonna go out and try to make money on your own, whether it’s online or other way, you better get your head straight, or you better you better know that you’re either you’re either in the crap, you’re about to hit some crap, or you just left some crap, okay? That’s the life of an entrepreneur. It’s all about solving crappy problems, okay? And if you lay down at any one of these crappy problems and quit, okay, you got to take that entrepreneur t shirt off and burn it. Okay, cuz you’re not an entrepreneur, not a true entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs. Don’t let crappy problems stop them. So the pivot the pivot, when when COVID hit, and a lot of people will remember this, Amazon, who’s ready for an international pandemic when distribution is your model, right? Amazon got mired in the quicksand. They got inundated with orders, and they physically didn’t have enough people in their warehouses to fill all of these orders, right? They started ordering more and more merchandise, right? Or more and more merchandise was coming into their warehouses because of the demand. And it wasn’t getting received because they didn’t have enough people to receive it. The the ups and the freight trucks. This is not this is not a joke. Literally the guys were sleeping in the parking lots for two weeks. waiting to find out when they were going to get unloaded. This is how bad it got at Amazon. So their answer was to hire hundreds of 1000s of people, and so on and so forth. Okay, so what so what happened, the Prime Program literally crashed two day delivery. But from Amazon went away for a while. It just they couldn’t do it. Matter of fact, they went and said, we’re only going to ship what they called necessary items. Now how they deem necessary. I mean, they never really came out and said that, but if you needed soaps, or medicines, or first aid devices or personal protection equipment, that stuff was going out way before, you know a massage massager, right or whatever. So alright, so what’s the pivot? Well, a lot of our members stopped sending product to FBA, and started fulfilling it themselves. FBM, whether it was off their kitchen table, right out of their basement or garage storage unit, went and got a small office or warehouse, or went with a third party logistics company to do the end to consumer. Fulfillment. Right. Okay, because they were able to offer a faster delivery time than FBA. So for the first time, and I’ve been on Amazon since 2009, for the first time since 2009. I saw FBM fulfilled by merchant offers, getting the Buy Box exclusively over FBA sellers had never seen that right? Or like, right. Now we’re starting to see the equilibrium come back. Okay, things are returning to normal, Amazon starting to ship everything back out, you know, in a two day, a timeframe, maybe not everything, but they’re in the 90% percent range right now. And they’re offering the faster delivery times. So now the way to get the stuff to the customer fastest again, is FBA. Right. But if you but so many people that did the FBM thing they saw, they saw the how smart it was. And they basically said, Wow, if I can get it to the customer faster, and I have still have a competitive price, I’ll get the buy box, even if I’m not FBA, and they’ve set up these FBM businesses that they have a lot more control over, right? Because let’s say, let’s say I’m ordering product and being sent to my garage, let’s say from a distributor, and I know it’s gonna be here in two days, well, I can put an FBM offer up right now, today, make it live and start selling. And just put in there that you know, I have a two day latency it will be two days before it actually ships, right. But I’m going to get it to you in two days anyway, just because you maybe you’re using a two day priority mail delivery system, right? Or your your inventory sent out a few different P PLS, a three pls around the country. And you’re just tell have the order routed to the one closest to the buyer. You’re literally running your own little distribution network. And they saw the value of that. And they just started expanding on it, which is something I thought I would never see happen. And it only happened because of the pandemic. So right.
Norman Ferrar 38:15
The The other thing you talked to me about, and I didn’t I didn’t think this existed was using PP PPC, to drive traffic over to your listing, I always thought that it was useless. And you came back and you said, No, you they’ll drop a cookie in there for 24 hours. Yep. So you’ll get the sale if they come back. Or if they buy, you get the sale for that product with because of that cookie.
Todd Snively 38:42
Yeah. What people don’t understand is if you’re running a PPC campaign, on a shared Buy Box, or rotational Buy Box or your own private label Buy Box, when somebody does a search, and there’s a search term, and your product shows up in the search term, it’s already got the cookie attached to that search result. So that when somebody clicks on it, you’ve been assigned as the seller. This is why if they leave that page and come back, you’re still the seller, they leave that page and come back, you’re still the seller. Okay. That’s why a lot of people will come to me and say, Well, you know, I did a search term, and I clicked on it and Joe Blows in the buy box, and I’ve refreshed the page 500 Times today in Joe Blow still in the buy box. I’ve all Yeah, because Joe Blows cookied to you clear your cookies go back in and somebody else will be the seller, right? So yeah, so that’s a 24 hour cookie, that Amazon, you know, gives you the opportunity to, for that person they figure well, if that person comes back within 24 hours and buys, they’re going to give you credit for that sale, even if there’s 20 Other people offering it, you’ll still be in the buy box as a wholesale distributor of that name brand product.
Norman Ferrar 40:03
So you go out and you find these distributors, you sign an agreement with them.
Todd Snively 40:11
You know, a lot of them don’t actually have agreements, they’re really it’s more of an application process. And some distributors to be like getting into, you know, a University of Michigan versus Princeton, maybe that’s a bad example. But or Harvard, right. So, you know, you can probably get into University of Michigan, if you’re good student, right. But Harvard may still turn their nose up at you, you don’t have enough experience, we really, you know, don’t know enough about you go out and you know, sell, you know, sell a little more and then come back. And so you have distributors that are like that, which obviously, are the ones you want to get with, you just need maybe a little more experience, or whatnot. So we have a database. I mean, I’ve had, I’ve been filling this database up since 2002, of people that I buy from, and it has every legitimate distributor in there. Because see, here’s the other problem. You know, a lot of people go on to Google. And they’ll search, let’s say, they want to sell pet products, they’ll do a search, like wholesale pet products, right. And then there’ll be a sponsored result for some company, and ad and they’ll click on that. And the first rule is if a dish distributor, quote, unquote, is running sponsored ads, they’re probably not a legitimate distributor. Alright, you’re gonna find these people are more like a retailers in disguise, okay, and they use that word wholesale, really loosely. And you’ll find out, you’ll know that you’ll know this because you add stuff to the cart that you want to buy, right. And then at the checkout, they want to charge your sales tax, they don’t you know, they don’t have a mechanism to to make you tax exempt, which a wholesaler legitimate wholesaler can do? Right? So the problem is, is, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of wholesalers out there, I mean, there’s hundreds of 1000s of legitimate wholesalers, wholesalers out there, and every one of them suck at SEO, every one of them have sucky websites. You know, if you landed on a legitimate wholesalers website, nine times out of 10, you’re gonna hit the back button, because it looks like it was made in the 1970s.
Norman Ferrar 42:15
I know exactly what you mean, most of us,
Todd Snively 42:20
I deal with this one guy, you know, Halloween is coming up right now. I make an extra $400,000 a month, just because a Halloween. That’s one of my vertical holidays that I’ll go all out for and have for many years, I have one supplier, that the owners, this old guy that still uses paper and pencil to do orders and stuff. It’s crazy. And he knows all of his customers, right? And if he sees somebody selling one of his products on Amazon, and he doesn’t recognize them, he has like an aneurism. That guy is, you know, he’s got just complete control of that type. And he’s the best distributor, though, that I’ve ever worked with. And yet he doesn’t have a website. He has no website. It’s crazy. So I
Norman Ferrar 43:09
taught it sorry for cutting you off. But I have a question about costs. So if I’m a private label seller, I order 1000 units, and I am taking a chance on that selling, when you have multiple wholesale products. How do you protect your cash flow? Because you have to buy quantity there? Or are they drop shipping?
Todd Snively 43:32
You do not have to buy quantity, that would be a myth. I’m gonna call I’m gonna call that out as a myth. You can buy one unit, if you want. Now, are you gonna get the same pricing? It depends. I have a lot of distributors that will break open a case and sell me one unit at the same price as the case price. Maybe there’s 24 in a case, right. But they’ll have different programs, the volume programs that if I hit a certain volume, I get more of a discount, I hit a certain volume, I get free shipping, I hit a certain volume, they’ll send me a rebate check at the end of the year. Okay. So there’s ways and ways and ways but to your point, the big benefit to wholesale over private label or inventory turns, inventory turns. Alright, with private label, you have to to your point, you have to order enough, let’s say you have to order six month supply to get the price to get the factory to work with you. And yada yada yada. Well, if all of that SOP does in fact sell out in six months, and you will have to order another six months supply, you have made two inventory turns in one year, right. Let’s say you have $50,000 invested in your 25,000 Each time, alright, you got to use that same $25,000 From the first time the second time. So you turned that $25,000 twice. You basically doubled your annual return on investment because you use the same money twice. With wholesale, our average turns are 17 times a year. Wow, whatever we spend in inventory is coming back to us with profit 17 times a year. Now, even if you’re only able to achieve seven or eight, you’re still a lot better than to. So it’s about sending your little money soldiers out to war, right? Several times the same soldiers over and over and over, they’re loyal little soldiers, they go out, they come back with more soldiers, and you send all of those soldiers out seven, eight times, 1718 times a year, the ad annualized return is crazy. Because I mean, you’re doing really good. Anyway, as far as a margin goes, and an annualized return, multiply it by 17. This is why like these financial people, you know, from the stock market come to me and say, Yeah, let’s, let’s get your money in the market. And let’s get you that eight or 7% a year, I’m saying, dude, if I’m going to put money into anything, it’s going to be my own business, because the returns are like 3456 700%, annualized, just depending. And there’s more products out there than you can actually conceptualize. And, and here’s the here’s the cool part. Right now, a lot of people don’t know this. The people that are doing private label right now that are successful. If they know what they’re doing, well ultimately allow their product to go to wholesale distributors for more distribution. They think they think a lot of this is a mistake. I have a private label product. I’m the only seller on Amazon, Amazon’s the only channel they sell on so I’m not going to sell my product to anybody. Why would I do that? I’m my I’m the Amazon seller of my product. When you go to a wholesale distributor, who do you think they’re distributing to other than Amazon sellers? brick and mortar stores? Right? Right. They have deals with, you know, 10s of 1000s of small brick and mortar stores all over the country, your private label product can end up in tom tom jeans hardware store in Boise, Idaho, right, it could end up in your supplement could end up in some health, little family health store down in Florida. And all of a sudden, you 10x Your sales by doing nothing more than then making a deal with a wholesale distributor. Alright, so can you restrict other people from selling it on Amazon, of course, that’s what brand registry is all about. Right? So you can still run your Amazon business if you want. But if you take your product to a wholesale distributor and make an agreement with them, they’re gonna buy from you in quantity. So whatever, whatever they’re ordering, let’s say 10 pallets of your blue widget, they then will distribute it to hundreds or 1000s of their customers and keep reordering from you. You literally have one customer buying millions of dollars a year of your private label product. And I do this all the time. I mean, I see it all the time, I’ll get a list of 20,000 products from a pet supplier. Right. And we’ll run it through our software. And I’ll go and I’ll analyze the results. And I’ll see several private label products, I can pick a private label, it’s pretty easy to pick out a private label product on Amazon. I mean, if you’ve been doing it this long, like reading the newspaper, right, they all do the same thing that the bullets and you know, the brand name is the seller name, and nobody else is selling it. That’s a private label product nine times out of 10. Right. But now all of a sudden, they’re into distribution. So I know I could buy that and sell it on eBay. Or I could put it in one of my successful web stores I use I know a lot of everybody uses the word Shopify to describe like a webstore I hate that. By the way. I absolutely hate that. I cuz I use WooCommerce I’m a WooCommerce guy. Right. And I know the limitations of like Shopify. But anyway, that’s a whole nother that’s a whole nother rabbit hole. I don’t think
Norman Ferrar 49:08
we should call them that’ll be next time.
Todd Snively 49:12
I’ve lost track of how many rants I have. And I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older or what it is.
Norman Ferrar 49:18
You know, my family so my brother, my father and I were working in this business. We had no salespeople. It was strictly distributors. And distributors got us in to Walmart, they had the Walmart number targets CVS Ekornes. Though a whole company ran on a few distributors selling their products depending on what their specialty was. We the product went over to them. And so I mean, I can’t tell you more than distributors are worth their weight in gold. If they have the contacts and you’re not selling on or if you’re selling on Amazon and you can get a hold of a few good distributors Man, you can just make your product explode.
Todd Snively 50:03
I’m telling you, you know, and that’s another question I get, well, how many distributors do I have to set up with? How many products do I need to sell? Well, it’s all based on how much money you want to make, you know, but if you want to do $10,000 a month, in additional net profit, you only really need like maybe 40 products from one distributor. And, you know, I know this one distributor, excuse me. I’ve been with them since 2015. And they’re an $11 billion a year distributor. And I’ve had the same sales rep that whole time. He, he I wasn’t this was when I had my, I still have my warehouse in Michigan, but he had offices in Michigan. And he would come by my office once a week on a Friday and bring a six pack a Heineken and just sit down. And I had a pool table in my office also. So we’d play some pool, we drink some beer, and we kind of became friends. He’s still my sales rep. To this day. And I’m telling you, when you develop a relationship, like maybe not to that extent, but it’s, it’ll be like that, maybe you’ll never meet the guy, they’ll just be on the phone. Right? But when you’re able to talk to the guy like that, you know, Hey, John, how’s it going? Yeah, you know, he had that surgery, go for your wife, and did your kid get into Harvard? You know, that kind of thing? Right? Those, those people are going to look out for you. So I could I mean, I’ve got story after story of how this guy has helped me make money in my business. And that as a sales rep for a distributor and $11 billion distributor. I’m not even their biggest customer, not by a longshot, right. But what I want to make one other observation that popped in my head, I go to a lot of trade shows for a lot of different reasons. Okay. I will see Amazon private label people with a table at a trade show. And I know I know who they are. I know these people, I know these brands. And I walk up to them. And I’ll ask them, say, what do you guys don’t hear? And they’ll say, Well, we’re here to get distribution for our product. We’re hoping like someone from Walmart walks by falls in love with our product. And we ended up in Walmart. I said, you know, that’s not how it works. I said, I said, Do you know, in the same trade show that you are right now, there’s no less than five distributors that you need to go talk to? Don’t wait for them to walk by your table, go over there and show them your product and say, What do I have to do to get you to distribute my product? And I guarantee you out of those five, your walk away with two deals today? And they just look at me like I’m stupid. But that’s how it works. The distributors are there to find products to distribute. The brands are they’re looking for distribution. Right? And I’m seeing I just went to what show was a I was actually the it was the private slash white label show. Oh, yeah. Here in Vegas. Yep. And I saw the same thing. Just brand after brand after brand after brand sitting there looking for distribution, not knowing how they were going to get it. And I you know, I asked a few of them. Has it ever crossed your mind to contact just distributors? Oh, like, No, that’s okay. Okay, maybe that’s, maybe that needs to be another course? I don’t know. There’s a book. Yeah. There’s got to be a book in that. Right.
Norman Ferrar 53:23
Okay, last question. For me anyways. Mistakes. What are clear mistakes people are making when they’re looking for to get into wholesale,
Todd Snively 53:32
buying the wrong products? Absolutely. Without a doubt. This is a numbers driven, non emotion type of a business, right? So I’ll have people come up to me and say I’m a good cook. So I just want to sell cooking type things as well, you’re already going to lose money, but that kind of a mindset. Your mindset needs to be, I’m going to sell anything I can buy for $1 and sell for $2. Who cares if it’s a golf ball, or a cooking pot? Or a back scratcher? Or you know socks, who cares? You should be in it to make money with the model. Not care now, I’m not talking about some people, their religion or their ethics might prevent them from selling, let’s say a set of whiskey glasses. Right? That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just saying if you don’t have a problem selling a product you should you should sell it if it’s profitable. So the other the big mistake they’ll make is they’ll buy stuff they’re not allowed to sell on Amazon specifically right? So before doing all of the due diligence on the product, they just see the profit and they up in the order it then the product shows up. They tried to send it down to FBA and then all now all of the flags pop up. No, that’s hazmat you can’t send that no, that’s restricted. You need to be approved. No that’s that’s a lock picking kit, which we don’t even allow people to sell, you know, against Terms of Service, you have to do your homework. I mean, you have to you have to know how you’re going to sell it before you buy it. You know? And that’s how you make your money. By the way. I don’t remember who told me this was a long time ago. You make your money when you buy the product, not when you sell it.
Norman Ferrar 55:19
Do you know Daivari?
Todd Snively 55:20
Any real? You do?
Norman Ferrar 55:23
I think yeah. Anyways, he started on Amazon with a bunch of products. One of them was a lock picking kit. And guess what he got kicked off, right. So acting as an entrepreneur. He had like containers coming over because they were selling so hot. He didn’t know what to do. You had these containers he had I forget how many, but they were in the 1000s. Okay, 1000s and 1000s. He went over to Groupon. And it became the hottest selling thing on Groupon. And he continued to sell them. But the reason I bring that up is you talked about it before, if you’re an entrepreneur, you have to pivot. So he got kicked between the legs. He didn’t cry, well, maybe powdered a little. But he found the right outlet to go and distribute his products. So I mean, I thought that was really cool.
Todd Snively 56:13
I agree. And you know, it just punctuates the fact that your journey is not linear, right? I’ve been through marketplaces that people, they won’t even remember anymore. There the there was this one called bids with a z.com. Maybe they’re still around, but it used to be your bid, you’d start selling something at $1. But you could set whatever the shipping was. So you know, we were importing power tools at the time, we were able to sell a whole electric drill, electric drill set for $1 plus 1999 shipping and still make a resale on that marketplace bids, right. So that bids went away, or they went to jewelry only or something like that. You pivot, you pivot you pivot. And there’s more ways to sell that. I know we’re probably out of time, but there’s more ways to sell than just on Amazon.
Norman Ferrar 57:03
Okay, do you have a little bit of extra time?
Todd Snively 57:06
Dude, I love talking to you. I’ll sit here as long as I’ve got drink to keep my throat. Oh, okay,
Norman Ferrar 57:12
perfect. Okay, so Kelsey, where are you, sir? Hey, I have some questions.
Kelsey 57:20
We do we do have a couple of questions that can throw up for you guys. The first one is from Jason, can you still use helium 10 or Jungle Scout for these analysis is? Or do I have to cough up some more for software?
Todd Snively 57:34
There’s, if you’re talking about for wholesale, I do use Jungle Scout but I use Jungle Scout more for confirmation. The software that we use to do the initial file analysis is wholesale inspector. So you can go to wholesale inspector.com and just get that software Keepa is another thing that I use a lot. I have the premium keep a membership I don’t think they actually just went to it used to be free all the time. And then somebody over there woke up and said we need to charge for this. And they did a basic which is worthless. And then the premium which is what you really need. So yeah, I use jungle up. I’m sorry, Jungle Scout, I use for the confirmation, but Helium 10. I gotta tell you, Helium 10 has been upping their game. And they have a couple of really cool things that help in wholesale they actually have if you do the Chrome extension, when you go to an Amazon page, they have a sales predictor, a sales velocity, so you can actually click the button, the helium 10 button on that page and it’ll tell you how many units they think will sell every month, which you used to have to disband depend on Jungle Scout for. So now, when the time comes to renew my Jungle Scout, I probably won’t. Because Helium 10 is picked up that slack. And another shout out for helium 10 I love these guys. I’ve known Manny, you know, for forever before he sold Helium 10 He, ah, they did something that was so cool. Now with Walmart. Alright, and I just I just watched a presentation yesterday about expanding into Walmart with helium 10. And three of their tools are now going to be significant with respect to researching helium are on Walmart, and it’s all Helium 10. So I’m leaning much more towards Helium 10. Do you need anything past that? Maybe Keepa. And again, wholesale inspectors was what really is going to make your money unless you’re into this. Reverse sourcing, like a lot of people will spend hours just going through Amazon product pages, find something that meets certain parameters and then go and find sourcing, I think it’s a waste of time, go to a distributor, they’ll give you a list of the 10,000 20,000 50,000 products they’re willing to sell to you run it through software like wholesale inspector that tells you what to buy and then do the Finally on Page Analysis with helium 10.
Norman Ferrar 1:00:03
Very good. Hey, great. Kelsey, can you put those links in there to helium? 10. Wholesale inspect during Keepa?
Kelsey 1:00:13
Yep. From Jessica Rabbit, what is the average ROI on Amazon wholesale?
Todd Snively 1:00:19
Our blended average. I have the numbers for last year. We’re 20%. We’re actually a little higher this year. I think we’re running around around 32% right now. But it’s not hundreds and hundreds. Okay. So, but the thing is, is where it really helps his returns. So if you’re averaging just say 20%. And you’re able to turn 12 times a year, that’s 20 times. So that’s a 240% annualized return. I think everyone would agree that’s a good return. Yes. Okay.
Norman Ferrar 1:00:55
Maybe I can’t afford to pay Kelsey, then.
Todd Snively 1:00:57
At the way he eats.
Kelsey 1:01:01
All right, from Jason got any quick tips to avoid having my account health severely compromised from late FBM shipments beyond my control?
Todd Snively 1:01:11
Um, well, Amazon didn’t use to ding you. For a late delivery, it was only if you uploaded an invalid tracking number. Or if you shipped it late, like if they give you a two day, that’s where the latency comes in. If you if you set latency to say one day, you’re telling Amazon and the customer that this is going to leave my my warehouse within 24 hours one day, if it doesn’t, you got things, right. Alright, you upload had to upload a valid tracking number. If a lot of people were shipping late and sending out bogus numbers, Amazon got wise to that. So now you could think I’m not aware and actually probably check this out. But I’m not aware that you’re getting dinged on health. If the carrier delivers it late, okay, I think what they’re doing is they’re giving you that number. So as a business owner, you can make a better decision about how you’re getting your packages delivered, right? So if you’re, if you told your fulfillment center to send everything out parcel post, because you want to save 85 cents over regular, you know, priority mail or whatever. And the stuffs showing up, you know, two weeks later, Amazon saying, Hey, you might want to look at this, because a lot of people are complaining, and you’re getting, you know, these these late deliveries, right? So you have to be able to sell profitably with a decent delivery time. Now, a lot of people rag on the postal company, postal service, right. But their priority mail product is still one of the best products in the world for delivering quickly and inexpensively do they lose stuff? Yes. But that’s why they have insurance. And I get a stack of USPS insurance checks all the time, they do pay off write ups is still super expensive. I don’t like using them. So I you know, if I can go priority mail, or first class package with delivery confirmation, I’m finding that my stuff is getting there for the least amount of money in the fastest time. And I’ve never ever, ever had an issue with late deliveries.
Norman Ferrar 1:03:23
And you’re correct, you’re not going to get dinged. If you ship it out on time, where it could affect you is when that customer comes back and gives you that one star review. But you could notify them, you just got to be on your customer service, if you think it’s gonna be late, or if it is late being delivered, let them know that it was beyond your control. And even if you have to either provide a refund or provide something else like for me, if it’s a soap bar, hey, I’ll send you out another free bar of soap. But you don’t you want to be able to get rid of those types of feedback, because it’s not a product review. You can’t just delete it. They’re going to say that that is a verified feedback. Comment.
Todd Snively 1:04:10
Yeah, yeah. Now I’m going to tell you what we do. Because Nora made an excellent point. And it’s about the customer service. If we are shipping something ourselves FBM. And we know there’s a problem, right? And we know it’s gonna take a while to resolve the problem. What I tell my shipping department to do, and I’m not saying that you should do this, and I’m not even saying this is within Terms of Service. If it’s if I do anything gray area, this would probably be the closest gray area. I tell them to send a handwritten apology letter with a $20 bill and stick it in an envelope, print out the postage label from that order. So I’ve got a valid tracking number that gets uploaded in time. And the package goes out to the customer packages. They receive it in two or three days. They open it up, pull it out, they have a 20 dollar bill and an apology, a handwritten apology telling them what the resolution is, I want you to accept this $20. Because of this inconvenience, we’re going to refund your order. Because, you know, the, the forklift ran over the last one of these blue widgets we had, it’s going to be another week before we get one. But when we get it, we’re sending it to you free, who
Norman Ferrar 1:05:21
are free, and they get a free autographed picture of you as well.
Todd Snively 1:05:25
We haven’t tried that yet. I think the point is, is you know, I had to I had to beat this into my shipping managers head, because they couldn’t reconcile the fact that I was willing to send $20 give a refund, and I send a product, they’re like you’re losing money. I said, No, I’m not. Because here’s what you got to think about. What is your Amazon business worth? And if Amazon suspend your account, and came back to you, and said, If you that only taken care of that one customer, like a world class customer, we would have suspended your account. Okay, well, what would it have been worth you then to go to turn back time and fix that problem before it becomes a problem? That’s how you have to think something right?
Norman Ferrar 1:06:06
Absolutely. Alright, kills. Oh, and by the way, if you are interested in that 30 minute concert with, with Todd, we’re going to be getting to the wheel of Kelsey very shortly. Just just type in hashtag wheel of Kelsey, or tag two people.
Kelsey 1:06:25
Alright, so we just have a couple more. Okay. From chab? How long do you think FBM is gonna last? Is there ever a point where you don’t think people are going to do it anymore?
Todd Snively 1:06:36
There’s always be up a place for FBM. And here’s why there’s a lot of products that are only profitable FBM, right? There’s a lot of things that we sell, that we will always only sell FBM. Because that’s the only way it’s profitable. Right. And plus, like Amazon, let’s say you’re not in the hazmat program, but you want to sell aerosols, or you want to sell perfumes, or you want to sell something else that you need to be in Amazon’s hazmat program, if you want to sell them sell them FBM. Oh, and I’m going to jump in with one more that just came to mind. This is the one and only one time drop shipping is actually allowed on Amazon. And the end that I think it’s a good idea. If you go to a manufacturer that has a big, heavy, expensive item, and you get an order for it FBM on Amazon, you then send that to the manufacturer and they ship it to the customer. Technically that’s a dropship. But because you have that agreement in place with that manufacturer, Amazon allows that kind of a dropship. So that’s always going to be FBM. big, heavy, expensive item. Mm hmm.
Kelsey 1:07:54
Yeah, that’s question from narrow. How about go repricing tool for wholesale?
Todd Snively 1:08:02
You know, I haven’t. Oh, go aura repricing tool for wholesale. Yeah, that’s who we use. That’s who we use. There’s a lot of repricing out there, you have to have a repricer with this model. I think once you start getting 10 or 15 products down there, you better get a repricer just to maximize your profitability. A lot of people don’t understand that you’re not maximizing the selling price. you’re maximizing profitability. A good repricer is an intelligent algorithm algorithmic based repricer that looks at price action. Before changing the price one penny, it decides the best price to get you the most profit. So yeah, we like them.
Norman Ferrar 1:08:49
Perfect. That was the last question kills. Yep, I think so. All right. Well, let’s go over to the wheel of Kelsey. Have you seen the new improved wheel of Kelsey?
Todd Snively 1:09:01
No, I’m I’m very excited. Okay.
Kelsey 1:09:03
All right. Get ready there we go. Chelsea. Here we go. This is for a 30 minute consultation or q&a with Todd. I’m gonna shuffle these up. If you are the winner please email me at kg at lunch with Norm calm so I can connect with
Norman Ferrar 1:09:35
chocolate especially YouTube. We have no way of actually YouTube
Kelsey 1:09:38
because I cannot get to you got that Guten Tag. That is YouTuber Sarah Gulo. So please reach out to me at a K at lunch with Norm calm and we’ll get you that q&a Session. All
Norman Ferrar 1:10:01
right, very good. Okay, Todd, I know that you’re involved with a bunch of stuff. But is there anything? How do people get a hold of you? You’ve got some interesting things like you talked about your book. So I guess, how do people get ahold of? Yeah, what’s your contact info?
Todd Snively 1:10:17
You know, I’ll tell you, if you’re really interested in wholesale, we have a free preview program, that’s going to give you a lot more information, kind of the things we were talking about today, but in more detail, and you can sign up for it for free. And there, you don’t need a credit card or anything like that. And you’re going to be able to go through a training program, that’ll give you enough information to allow you to make an intelligent decision about whether or not this is really for you. And just go to wholesale product mastery.com. And sign up for that and go through it. And you can even you know, schedule some time to talk with me or someone else in the company. And we’ll get all your questions answered.
Norman Ferrar 1:10:58
Fantastic. And what was the name of your book,
Todd Snively 1:11:01
The Amazon code, the Amazon code? And not only does it go through all the different models and how to do wholesale correctly, it kind of gives a my background story and how, how this all, you know, came to be, you know, and so it was a real cathartic experience. I didn’t know if anybody would want to read the book. But the feedback that I’ve been getting from people that have read it has really warmed my heart. So if you want to read that book, I think, even though I wrote it, I’m gonna say it’s worth the time for sure.
Norman Ferrar 1:11:35
And we’ll get that up there. The other thing I want to say is that if you want to hear about this guy’s life, he was one of the first person persons that I interviewed on I know this guy. And it was an awesome interview. We did it. I think it was a two part interview, because it was so cool. And you’ll get to know Todd’s background. This, you gotta hear it. It’s one of my favorite. So anyways, that’s all I know this guy. And it just look for Todd. Anyway, sir. Thank you for coming back. Please stick around. I got to talk to you about a few things. But it was a pleasure to have you back on.
Todd Snively 1:12:11
I always have a blast. You’re just a real true human being that I enjoy talking with. So anytime
Norman Ferrar 1:12:17
and right back at you. All right, Todd. We’ll see you in a bit. Okay, everybody. So I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Todd’s gonna be back I’m not sure when but we’ll be talking about whatever he’d like to talk about. I’d like to also give a shout out to our sponsor, global wired Advisors, a leading digital bank focused on optimizing the business sales process. For more information, please visit Chris at global wired advisors.com But I wonder Do we have anything that we need to go over?
Kelsey 1:12:54
You know, smash those like buttons if you haven’t already. Just catch my smack? Yeah, just give it a smack. It’s a Friday around. Yeah, so also subscribe to our YouTube channel. It’s a great day. Oh, boy. Okay, well, it seems like everyone just love today’s episode. So that’s great to see and hear. Jonathan Shaw, we had so many new people to that I noticed in the comments section so it’s really great to see that so go on over to our Facebook group. Lunch of norm Amazon FBA oh my god ecommerce. So
Norman Ferrar 1:13:31
professional Cal. So
Kelsey 1:13:33
this is a professional podcast we got. But anyways, I think that’s it. We’ll leave off on good notes and not dragging this down any further as
Norman Ferrar 1:13:43
well. And don’t forget to check out our Member site. If you do want to buy Kelsey a coffee because I don’t pay him enough. You can always check that out. Okay, so thank you, everybody. We’re going into another weekend. I can’t believe that weekend’s gone by so quickly. But enjoy your weekend. And please join us again every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time. And thank you everybody, again for joining us being part of our community. And we look forward to growing this podcast in this community with you
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
