I am joined by Amazon expert, Kevin King where we discussed everything Amazon! From pre-selling products using FBM to creating high quality brands to sourcing the best products to using Amazon Post and much, much more! This episode is jam-packed with great content.
Kevin King has been involved in internet marketing and e-commerce since 1995. It’s been 30+ years since he last received a paycheck from someone else. He’s traveled to all 7 continents and 90 countries. He was named one of the Top 40 Direct Marketers by Target Marketing magazine, has been featured on Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous and Entertainment Tonight national TV shows as well as the front pages of prestigious newspapers like USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. He sells millions of dollars of product on Amazon.com. 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.com in the Freedom Ticket and Helium 10 Elite Masterminds. He also organizes the Billion Dollar Seller Summit. You can learn more about Kevin and listen to some of the podcasts he has been on at amzmarketer.com
Date: September 4, 2020
Episode: 12
Title: Norman Farrar introduces Kevin King, an e-commerce entrepreneur since 1995.
Subtitle: All about Amazon
Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/12-talking-amazon-kevin-king/
In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, introduces Kevin King, an e-commerce entrepreneur since 1995.
Kevin King sells millions of dollars in Amazon. He discussed everything about Amazon from pre-selling a product to sourcing the best products.
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Norman 0:00
He’s got me something for Father’s Day.
Kevin 0:03
Ah.
Kevin 0:07
That’s cool. That’s cool. That’s cool.
Norman 0:11
So in case you didn’t know, that was me on the mug.
Kevin 0:14
I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell. The beer gave it away.
Norman 0:19
Yeah, I think so. So, Kevin, you’ve got so much going on right now.
Norman 0:25
Why don’t you just tell us a little bit about what’s going on in your life? I mean, you’re handling a ton of different projects right now, aren’t you?
Kevin 0:33
Yeah, I’ve got eight businesses that I run and a couple of them are not active right now. One of them is seasonal business. It’s only active in the fall, it deals with calendars. That pretty much kicks in. I mean, we’ve already had to order, we print those in South Korea and they’re already on the way but the work on that doesn’t really start until October to January. That’s kind of silent and then the Billion Dollar Seller Summit that I do which is the high end event for Hyatt for big sellers is obviously there’s no events going on right now. So that one’s a fairly calm but then I’ve got several trainings that I do with Helium 10 with freedom tickets and with a Helium 10 Elite and then I have several Amazon businesses selling on Amazon and then I do products advanced with Steve Simonson where we we help advanced sellers you got to be an advanced not a new seller but we help you out with your products and sourcing and stuff and so that’s keeping him busy. But one of them in particular right now is blowing up. We launched it in early June and it’s gone from zero to a mid five figures per day already. That’s real sales, that’s not giveaway or promotional sales. That’s real sales and as we continue to get more organic position, It’s everyday setting a new record. That’s keeping us on our toes, thousand plus orders a day.
Norman 2:06
Wow. Now I just noticed that Victor said that my volume is low. Can anybody else tell me if my volume is normal, they’re saying that Kevin’s is fine. This is a new platform that we’re using today and it’s supposed to be fairly seamless.
Kevin 2:24
Yours is a little low, Kelsey says sounds really good.
Kelsey 2:27
Yeah, mine’s okay.
Kevin 2:28
You sound like you’re a little bit far from the mic. It’s not bad, but no.
Norman 2:33
Yeah, I’m turning it up. Yeah.
Kevin 2:36
That’s perfect.
Norman 2:38
Thank you, Victor.
Kevin 2:39
That’s a little too much.
Norman 2:41
Oh, okay. Thank you, Victor.
Norman 2:45
Okay, so, anyways, Kevin, yeah, you’ve got, like you said tons going on and one of the things I wanted to know about what you’re doing right now, so you’ve got a product that you just launched. You pre-sold the product and I was wondering if you could just tell us a little bit about how you did that most people don’t under don’t know that you can pre sell a product.
Kevin 3:08
Yeah, it kind of surprised me. It seems just natural for me. Something I’ve been doing for a while, but I mentioned this on the Helium 10 Elite a few weeks ago on the training and people just start asking all kinds of questions. I was like, holy cow, does nobody actually realize this and I guess they don’t. But yeah, we have a product, someone that’s doing a mid five figures a day, right now and we launched it June 3rd. So today, I guess it’s the 30th day it’s been launched. We’re not FBA, we’ve shipped into FBA on June 17. But it hasn’t been checked in yet and we’re been told by our freight company that it’s June 10, or June 12 are the first check in dates for a couple of the warehouses. So it’s taken a long time to get checked in. So under normal circumstances, we wouldn’t be selling right now. We will be waiting for that check. Again, waiting for Amazon to populate it out and to go FBA. When I was like now we’re gonna miss too much of an opportunity if we do that. So we set up the listings as FBM. You got to make sure if you do this so that you can actually fulfill it FBM. So we have a good third party distribution company that can handle this for us and we kind of figured we might be doing some volume. We turned it live on June 3rd as FBM and just started running ads, PPC, no other gamesmanship or anything. We did a couple little promotions on Facebook, just to get the initial thing going. But it’s pretty much been driven by PPC. So it’s a heavy PPC. So I’m not worried about the A cost. I mean, if it goes over 100% we kind of modify it but we have figured we’d be having some 70-89% a cost. Most of them I think our average right now is about 25% on this product which is pretty good considering it has no reviews, it’s FBM. The delivery date that we set up on June 3rd, was a June 25th release. So we said we put it, you can do a future date on Amazon. So he said it’s going to be coming out on June 25th. So on June 3rd, you would think someone would go on there and then they go to click on it, and maybe they see our ad and they’re like, this looks interesting. They click on it like, oh, wait a second, this is not FBA, it’s FBM. There’s no reviews. So how do I even trust the products? It says I’m gonna get it in July, because it says it’s released on the 25th and then you know, a few days, Amazon cushions it for shipping after that. Screw this, I’m gonna go find something else and this is a super competitive product. This is not like we’re the only one. There’s lots of other choices, lots of lots of other choices and it just started growing and growing and growing or PPC kept converting. We studied it. Made a few modifications and within basically, three weeks, we hit at mid five figures a day, so right now we’re on a run right about $18 million a year on this. There’s three main SKUs that we launched. So it’s not one SKU and it looks like it’s going to do pretty good and once we get FBA, I think that’s going to completely change it again. On that June 25th date, we shipped, we had a lot of back orders, obviously, and those all went out through a third party fulfillment, and they’re continuing to right now until we get into FBA. But what we did is we actually then went in and set up a separate listing, not starting from scratch, you just go into the FBM listing and you go into the settings and you say add a condition and we added a condition and in the conditions there’s used and all new, used, used like new whatever, that’s not the one you want to do. There’s another one there that says Amazon FBA. I forget the exact wording but basically that you can choose if you want to make it FBA and then we chose that option. Then the only thing you gotta do is enter a SKU, no asin, no descriptions, no nothing, you just enter a SKU and so we set up a separate SKU. So if the first one was SKU was 123-FBM, this one was 123-FBA, for example, as the name of the SKU, the only thing and hit the button and then boom, up comes another listing, they’re tied together the same ASIN, same everything and that one just shows is inactive until it gets checked in on Amazon. As soon as it gets checked in an Amazon. It’s going to basically take over the FBM listing. So all the reviews, all the sales history, all the keyword associations, everything is there that we have been doing four to five weeks before we came. So as soon as we hit FBA, we think the sales will probably be two to five x. It’s gonna be interesting to see on this particular product in the past, that’s what I’ve seen. Just by the fact that you’re FBA, and people can get it in a few days instead of a few weeks and now there’s reviews so you know now when it becomes FBA, one who’s got 13 reviews because we use early reviewer program from Amazon to do that, we couldn’t use vine because it’s not it’s not an FBA, you have to be FBA for vine. So, yeah, that’s, uh, that’s what’s happening and I’m launching another company with some other partners in August and we’re gonna be doing the exact same thing again. If you got to do this, you’ve got to make sure that you can fulfill because if you missed that date, if you put June 25th, like we did, and for some reason, you have delays, and you don’t ship this to the 28th of June or something, Amazon is going to suspend your account or they’re going to probably shoot you a warning first. You’re gonna have to issue a POA and if they accept that POA, and you get caught up and ship it, then you’re okay. So there’s a risk there. You got to make sure so it could blow up in your face. So we actually cushioned it’s 25th date. Our real date was like the 17th. But so we cushioned it to give it some time. But that’s how we did this launch and it’s working exceptionally well.
Norman 9:15
One of the things, I know the brand, and we’re not going to talk about it here, but you probably don’t even care if we do. But one of the things that you’ve done, and this is consistent with every listing that I’ve seen of yours, it’s about the brand, you’ve built a brand. I’ve seen the videos that you’ve done for it. They’re not cheap videos, the quality of the brand, everything that you have about this product is high quality and both of us preach that all the time, right. You can’t go in and expect to build an $18 million business with some fiber logo.
Kevin 9:53
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, the idea to do this came to us in mid March to do this product. It’s not just me, there’s some other people and some other partners involved. We did start with a little bit of money. So this is not a start with $5,000 and do something and we started with a chunk of change. But we were entering into the most competitive space on Amazon. I mean, there’s almost nothing more competitive than this space and so when we looked at it, and it’s this product to differentiate, it’s the product itself is pretty much very similar no matter who you buy it from and so we had like, how can we differentiate this? So we did that with branding and so in a three month period, basically we did what would normally take probably a couple years and a whole branding a traditional corporate company, where we have, it’s a really good logo, we have two different levels on the logo we have. We have a custom song, we have a jingle that was written. My wife is Colombian, so she knows some music producers in Colombia so we have a music jingle that pushes the product that was done in both English and Spanish so we’re going after the English and Spanish market. We have five different videos that we did, one of them’s a PSA video. We pulled out every step, we did press releases with your company. Were doing Amazon posts, we have an Amazon storefront, we have all the A plus content we did, we went to Germany to get our trademark so we could get Brand Registry, get all the features of that, the listing are completely fully, I think Helium 10, if you use their plugin, it gives you a little score there 10 out of 10 or one of them I think is nine point something out of 10 right now because it doesn’t have 10 reviews or whatever it is they have that as a factor in the score.
Kevin 11:56
So we’ve done everything on that side and really high end professional photos with different models and different situations. As the first reviews, or first comments are coming in from customers, we see what they’re like, three or four people are asking the same question like, does this product have X in it? We’re like, we say that in the listing, but I guess people are missing it. So we went in and we changed one of the images to illustrate that this product has x or is made of x and put that as an image and overnight the conversions went up. Obviously a lot of people had that. So we’re constantly monitoring it and yeah, it’s a full on brand. We didn’t go into this to get rich quick. We looked at this because this be another fidget spinner or hoverboard and it’s like now we’re going to do this to build a brand and sell this hopefully and in within a year or so to a very large company. So that money that I just said, it’s just Amazon. We also have our own website that’s starting to ramp up now it’s nowhere near what Amazon’s doing. But the Shopify sites, and then we also have retail distribution. So we have a $200 million distributor that’s already pre sold quite a bit and it will be in stores and all over the place in the next month or two as well and then, so yeah.
Norman 13:24
So before you got into this, how much competitive research did you do?
Kevin 13:30
The idea came to me from I’ve some partners in another business in Hong Kong, they came to me and said, Hey, we should do this. We have a source in India for this. We took a look and my initial reaction was, nah, I don’t know, man, that’s super competitive. I don’t know, I just don’t know about this. Then I spent a day, I used Helium 10, used some tools from like Turku and some others and just did some research. That’s I was like, holy cow, maybe we can actually do something here. If we’re gonna do it, we got to do it right. So how much money can we scrape together? Everybody empty out their pockets and see how many coins they have. Let’s put them in a jar and see what we got. We had enough and like, alright, let’s do this, and let’s do this right and then we partnered up with another person that you guys know. Well, Norm, here too in the US. His reaction, at some point will come, we’re going to tell the whole story. I won’t be so vague about it. We’re just not quite ready yet. But we’ll make this public, probably in the next month or so, totally transparent, but to my partner, I went talking to him and he was like, Yeah, good luck with that. Then about a week later, he came back and said, you know what, actually, maybe there’s a way that we could, we could work together on this and get involved. So they got involved as well and that’s added quite a bit to the whole mix and it’s just exploding. Actually the biggest problem right now is grabbing a temper to the sales, we’ve raised the price twice already. It hasn’t slowed anything down, our supply chain, it can’t keep up. So that’s why we’re actually in the projector, we’re worried about that.
Norman 15:16
So, one of the things that just came up, we got a question here.
Norman 15:23
I think Oh, very good Kelsey. Kel, we’re on a stream yard, a question came up. Is it true that Kevin has no VA’s and he is up at four in the morning every day?
Kevin 15:35
Yeah, pretty much. I haven’t had my breakfast yet. Was it? It’s a little after 12 Eastern Time right now. Yeah, I’m a late night person. I do my best work at night. So I’m usually up till 3 or 4am and waking up around 11, 12 o’clock. I get my eight hours of sleep. I make sure to get that but yeah, I do work late as far as VA’s we do have one US based one that’s doing our social media like our Amazon posts, and our website, a couple of our Facebook and Instagram things. But other than that, yeah there’s no VA’s. There’s nobody answering customer service emails but me right now. Because I want to know, by being on those right now I’m seeing the problems I can nip them in the bud really fast and right now when you’re launching, that’s super important to know someone’s upset or doesn’t understand something, to answer them within 30 minutes if you can, so that they don’t have time to stew and go write a bad review.
Norman 16:34
Right. Yeah, but prior to this new launch, you had no VA, you were doing everything yourself, right?
Kevin 16:43
Yeah, I have. I’ve never hired a VA. I mean, I don’t do everything. I hire out like, I use Upwork if I need a project done or I’m not sitting here editing my videos, but a lot of them are taking my own pictures, but I will do the final editing. I know Adobe Illustrator. I know Photoshop. I know a lot of those tools. I can’t do all the bells and whistles on those, but I can do the final stuff. I write a lot of the copy. I write all the copy, write all the commercials, the videos and stuff.
Norman 17:17
So you’re a one man band, you do it all your head coach and cheerleader.
Kevin 17:21
This one may actually and there’s other people involved. I mean, I’ve got partners, so they’re doing some things too. So it’s not just, but all the day in day out stuff. Yeah, I pretty much handle it.
Norman 17:36
So for the new person coming into Amazon, we’re just getting into it. They’ve left their job, they’re starting to get into Amazon. What do you have to say to those people? What can they do? What are the top two or three things that they can do to get into the platform?
Kevin 17:57
Well, number one thing is you just need to absorb information. Get large as you can, as fast much as you can. Some people like to go to YouTube for that, and there’s some good stuff on YouTube, but you gotta be careful. Some of it is outdated, some of it is from people that don’t know what they’re doing. Or you got to take a course like the freedom ticket for example or there’s Brandon Young who has a good little thing and there’s some other ones out there. Take one of those and then just don’t expect. If you just quit your job or got laid off that this is going to save your ass. Because to really make money on Amazon, you gotta put some money in and you got to wait like this company that we’re doing that we’ve just been talking about.There’s no salary and we’re not taking a disbursement until probably January of next year. So I’m basically working for free on this for the eight months, eight, nine months and so, but that gives us the time nobody’s taking any money. So ever, all the partners, nobody, it’s all getting rolled back in and that’s how we’re going to grow it and we’ll get started, later. So it’ll probably be a really big payday. But that’s how we approach it. It’s not a survival type of thing. If you’re looking at it from a survival thing, it’s a little bit harder. I mean, it’s not too hard to start on Amazon with four or 5000 bucks and actually make a profit, but it’s gonna be small profits, you’re talking 500,000 a month, you might be able to take out for yourself. If that’s good enough for you, then that’s great. But for a lot of people, that’s not enough to live on. So it takes time. So don’t get too ahead of yourself, on paying yourself. So that’s the number one thing. Second is, make sure you know your numbers. I mean, you got to really know your numbers. There’s too many gurus out there that will show you in a webinar. Here’s how much profit you can make. I mean, there’s one guy right now he’s got a huge audience out there and a hundred thousand plus I think in his facebook group, and he sells a course and he’ll show you look guys to source this product for $2 on Alibaba and sell it for 20, $18 of profit on each one, and that’s just flat out wrong it’s about $3 profit on each one. So you got to know your numbers, that’s another curl and then differentiate your products. I mean you don’t have to complete the brand from the beginning. Not everybody can do what we just did. I mean that does take some money and some skill set that most people may not have initially but that’s okay. But differentiate your products, you just don’t go find something on Alibaba and stick your logo on and think your differentiator, add a PDF book to it. You got to really differentiate your product and make people feel like this is why they should buy you. They want to identify with what you’re doing.
Norman 20:49
So you were talking about Alibaba? Do you source on Alibaba?
Kevin 20: 54
No.
Norman 20:57
Any reasons why not?
Kevin 21:01
I have sourcing people that do it for me. So I can get much better pricing and much better deals, and find the factories that are not on Alibaba . I mean, they have to be on Alibaba these companies have to pay. So there’s a lot of companies out there that, if they’re my philosophy, Alibaba is not bad. I’m not knocking Alibaba, I did source from Alibaba in the beginning, when I first started doing FBA, five years ago, I got some stuff off Alibaba, or global sources is another one. But now, I don’t like to go there, because that’s where everybody’s going. So defining those differentiated products is hard and typically, the best factories are not on Alibaba, because they’re busy enough. They don’t need to pay to go on Alibaba to get a bunch of people to email them saying can you do an MOQ of 200 for me? Or they don’t have time for that shit. Sorry, they don’t have time for that stuff. They’re not on there and that’s one of the better factories and so that’s why I don’t really use Alibaba. I go outside of that. I’ll use Alibaba spot check something like, Ah, this is a cool idea kind of what’s the going rate in the market and Alibaba the prices on there are wrong anyway, but at least I have a baseline idea. Okay, this roughly cost five bucks or something.
Norman 22:21
Right. So I just wanted to give a shout out to Frank Sell and Victor, guys. Thanks for listening and by the way, I don’t know if you know Frank, he’s got a podcast called Home of the Hustle. It’s great and he’s got some really great beard oil, just letting you know. But Alright, we got another question here. So is there a quick way to get a VAT in Germany and France? I’ve talked to companies and they said it takes five months.
Kevin 22:51
Yeah, I’m not sure about that because I don’t sell in Germany and France. I had VAT setup in England and that took about a couple days, maybe, it was simply VAT. But I’m not familiar with Germany and France. I don’t know that. Do you know that, Norm?,
Norman 23:10
Who’s this for? Yeah, I can put you in touch with somebody that can give you that answer. So now I’ve got another, just my own question, Kev. So if somebody’s getting involved in Amazon, I get this question all the time. How much money do I need to put in? So if I’m investing in, let’s say it’s $5,000 worth of inventory? Is there a magical number that you would give them to say you need this much to really get in, to be properly capitalized?
Kevin 23:44
So if it’s $5,000 worth of inventory, I mean, there’s a number of factors that can change this but at a bare minimum, two and a half times that at the bare absolute bottom line. Robbing Peter to pay Paul minimum you need 12,500 and probably more, I would feel more comfortable 15 or 20,000 on that, to make sure that you’re properly capitalized. Now that you can get what’s only 5000 and see the problem is if you have 7000 bucks and you don’t 5000 inventory, you have $2,000 left. How are you going to run your PPC? How are you going to order if you’re successful, how you’re going to place another order with the factory and place of deposit? How are you going to do all the things that you need to do? You’re not and so you’re going to be one of the people that’s on Facebook, and this whole Amazon thing’s a scam, it doesn’t work. It’s oversaturated blah, blah, blah. It’s just you’re not doing it right.
Norman 24:37
Victor was saying isn’t there a new program on Helium 10 to help with VAT or VAT?
Kevin 24:44
Not that I’m aware of. There’s a I mean, they have a profits tool which is kind of like just gives you a snapshot. It’s not like an accounting program, it gives you a snapshot but then they have some partnerships with sellers funding now that will help you get money and pay your suppliers and stuff and I’ll help you also pay your VAT, i’m not sure if they actually help you register or not for that.
Norman 25:08
Okay.
Kevin 25:09
That just launched a couple days ago. So I don’t know all the details on that.
Norman 25:13
Yeah, I gotta check into that, too. I just heard about that yesterday. So Tim has a question. What’s the best way to get featured on the on site associates program on Amazon’s search results?
Kevin 25:31
I don’t know. I’m not familiar. Do you know that one? I’m not familiar on site.
Norman 25:34
No, I was hoping you would. I thought you knew everything.
Kevin 25:38
No, that’s fairly new . I haven’t had time to look into that one yet.
Norman 25:45
No. I’ve been asked this and I have not been able to find anybody that knew how to do this and I’m just thinking that you have to work with public relations to do it. But Editor’s Choice, have you been successful with getting on Editor’s Choice and if so, how?
Kevin 26:05
No, but I think they have some partnerships with a couple of the big review companies and big review sites that are providing a lot of that and then some other vine people, I think. I’m sure there’s a way that you can do it a backdoor way but I haven’t looked into into that I’ve noticed that starting to come up now and more and more but in a lot of those reviews, they look like if you go to Google and and search for someone, there’s those bestreviews.com or something like that. That’s kind of like a consumer’s reports on the internet. That may or may not be the exact domain, it’s something like that. Or it’s true or it’s not someone gaming the system saying these are the 10 best knives of 2020 which is really just an affiliate page just to send traffic too. It’s really not the top 10, it’s their number one or number two, and the rest of them are all affiliate links. They just grabbed out of the air. It’s legit so I think they’re partnering with some of those. But to be honest, I haven’t taken a deep dive yet. But that’s a good one to take a look at.
Kevin 27:12
I wouldn’t count on all that though. Just put out a good product and you’ll get really good reviews and you can rise to the top.
Norman 27:22
Right. One of the things that we’re doing with it, if we do see it, we’re tracking to see who they’re on like if it’s better homes improvement, or whatever it is. We’ll work with a public relations company, and we’ll see if we can get and target those companies that are being used by Amazon. Now I have no proof right now that it will work but Shane and I are just starting to do this and just starting to target the bigger companies, the bigger magazines, the trade magazines, and seeing if we can get some pickups that way. I don’t know if it’s gonna work and I will let you know if it does for us.
Kevin 28:06
I mean, one thing that’s working, you’ve talked about it, and I think you just did a presentation on you gave me a few tips and stuff, too when we started Amazon posts. Oh, yeah.
Norman 28:14
If you’re not doing Amazon, you’re missing out.
Kevin 28:17
Yeah, we’re posting. We started a couple weeks ago, and we’ve had some posts 10,15,000 already, I know you’ve had some way higher than that. The good thing is it’s totally free. So we go in there, and we just post a couple pictures a day and we’ve been testing different types of pictures, pictures of people, smiling pictures, people, products, different things to try to see if we can find a pattern of what’s working. I mean, we could go use Pickfu or something else like that. But still point this is free on Amazon might as well just use them and then we’re one thing I have, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, Norm, or not, but we had one post that skyrocketed. So if you’re not familiar with Amazon post, it’s posted at amazon.com, as long as you’re brand registered, you can actually go and sign up there and it’s totally free. It’s in beta right now and you post, basically, think of it as Instagram for Amazon, but Instagram with a Buy button on the bottom to buy your product. So you post a picture and they have some rules on what you can and can’t post, you write a little caption, and then you link a product to it, like one of your products to it. So then what Amazon does is there’s some people that are in the feed for this, but I can’t. I can’t believe it’s too many people, most people probably don’t even know that there’s a feed for it. Most people though are seeing it when you’re on the mobile and on the mobile app or on your mobile phone. They’re seeing it down the bottom of other people’s pages. So if I’m selling a steak knife, my post of my steak knife with a link to my steak knife is showing up on the bottom of my competitors pages and people if I got a good picture there and a good caption, it looks interesting and people are clicking it. I mean we’re getting engagement rates of between 2 and 15%. They’re clicking it so if this gets shown 1000 times for free on my competitors listings, I’m getting at a minimum 20 clicks to my listing and in some cases 150. Now, Amazon doesn’t provide you at least at this point, with data with how many of those clicks actually convert to sales. I think they know and they will, but probably once this comes out of beta, and they actually start charging for it or something they want.
Norman
Exactly.
Kevin
They want to justify that they can charge for it. So they’re not telling us that information and so, but I kind of believe that if I got 20 clicks, if I just compare it to my PPC, if my PPC is converting at, say 10%, that’s got to be two sales. I mean, it’s just got to be at least two sales off of that. Maybe more, because these are the people that scrolled all the way down the page, and actually were looking at the stuff more so it’s free money and if you’re not doing it, It’s crazy. But one of the things that we just noticed recently, Norm, I don’t know if you noticed this , we had a post that went crazy and it just went, if they normally have a 2000 views this one had 20,000 or something like what the heck happened with this one started? We started analyzing it, is it the pictures? Like, No, the pictures just aren’t that great. I mean it’s okay but it’s not like, oh my god, so amazing, and the description like just, okay. Let’s start looking in description and I noticed we had some stuff in exact match order in there some keywords an exact match order, that’s where it was repeated twice and so I’m wondering if, because Amazon assigns where they show this and normally they pick a couple cat two to three categories. So they know that you’re based on your relevance, that you’re in the dog niche or you’re in the nice niche or whatever. So they’ll show you’re on the knives and cutlery or whatever the categories are three or four different little subcategories. But I’m wondering if that keyword that was in there actually triggered it to actually show up when people are searching for that keyword, specific keyword. Because I looked at all of our other posts and all of our other posts or just more generic, you know, they’re more like what you would see on Instagram. We didn’t insert special keywords and phrase order. We’re testing that right now but if this turns out to be true, then we’re changing the way we’re going.
Norman 32:18
Crazy. Because yesterday, that was one of the questions on Howard’s webinar. Somebody came back and said, Yeah, can you rank with keywords? What I just said, Hey, I don’t know. I have no idea if you can, but why not? Like exactly like you said, if you can put the key the exact match in there. I don’t have that but if you’ve seen some proof in that, that’s great.
Kevin32:45
It’s not proof, it’s a theory right now. We’re testing it. I just noticed that two days ago. So we’re testing and my girl is doing that. Here’s a list of keywords you know, sprinkle these in the next few days and let’s see what happens.
Norman 33:01
So I just noticed Victor put another comment and , The VAT and GST service and easier way to pay taxes from registration and report filing to easy payments, let ALTA handle the complicated tax process. So thank you, Victor, I’ll have to check that out too. And, oh, Tim asked, Is there a PPC management company that you’d recommend? Well, I’m a little biased on it.
Kevin 33:35
Who do you recommend, Norm?
Norman 33:36
Geez, I don’t know. Tim, contact me after.
Norman 33:44
So yeah, all right. So let’s move on. I mean, time’s flying. It always does when we sit down and talk. But let’s see, if you can go back in time, would there be anything that you would do differently for Amazon specifically?
Kevin 34:00
For Amazon specifically. Yeah, when I first started, I launched five products FBA when I first started in FBA. I’ve been selling on Amazon for 27 years. Since 1993, no 2001 sorry, whatever that is 19 years. When I started, I started with a five FBA. I started with five products, five different brands and I don’t regret that but what I did is I put one of those brands took the bulk of the money on one of those brands because that would create a brand new as I watched a charging dock. I created a brand new product from scratch and it is 30 some thousand dollars in molding and 3000 MOQ and $25 per unit to buy it. I mean, we were selling the heck out of them selling $15,000 a day, Christmas 2015 it was a good product. But I was undercapitalized to really make that thing go like it needs to go and so I could not keep up and so I ended up not able to maintain that product. So I wish I would have taken, let’s say we started with $100,000 and I dumped 60,000 evidence of that product and 40,000 and the other four, I wish I spread that out more evenly and I think we could have had a better success. So that’s one of my biggest regrets and then also, when I first started, I took a little I was paying myself a little bit and I had some other stuff going on by paying myself and I wish I hadn’t done that. That hindered the growth as well on that initial company and then the other thing that I did is because of this problem with this Basecamp as the name of it, the charging dock. I ended up going out because I couldn’t keep up, I didn’t have the capital. I ended up taking some I call mafia loans the sites like on deck and cabbage and those kinds of guys that charge you through the nose, end up taking some of those loans and I had the margins but you know those loans, you can start stacking them and then you’re taking one loan to pay off the other loan while you do your inventory. Because you’re waiting on your inventory because it’s late and you just get into a big, a big circle jerk there and I don’t do any of that stuff anymore. All that stuff’s gone in the past but that hurt me as well.
Norman 36:27
It comes down to being properly capitalized again.
Kevin 36:30
Yeah it is.
Norman 36:35
So if you had a crystal ball, what’s happening with Amazon? What do you think?
Kevin 36:38
Amazon? I think a couple things. I think from the consumer side it’s blowing up and it’s gonna continue its juggernaut. I think the quarter for this year is going to be amazing. Now with the resurgence of COVID. It never went away. There’s a lot of people here in the states that say we’re on a second wave of COVID right now. No, we’re on the first wave. It just never went away. The big problem I truly believe, you know, I follow this pretty closely both the conspiracy people in the non believers and the people who are really following the science and everything in between. I really believe that this fall is going to be a disaster and the United States with COVID.The flu season starts October, November, December. I think you’re gonna see people falling like flies. What’s happening right now is not good and it’s gonna get a lot a lot worse. I mean, this one might get under control by August or September, but it’s gonna come right back. I think if you look at the Spanish Flu 1918, the same thing happens. In the spring, we got bad. In the summer, people started letting the guard down a little bit. The weather, that one’s a little bit different, but the weather kind of tempered a little bit and then in the fall, all bloody hell broke loose and I think that’s what’s going to happen here. So I think from an Amazon point of view as a seller, be ready. Because I think it’s going to go crazy. Also Amazon from the other side, Amazon is actually starting to crack down more and more, they’re under more and more government scrutiny for things so they’re starting to really crack down. I just saw yesterday someone posted that they’ve been talking to a lot of other big sellers and their Amazon is now doing a lot of test buys on products they’ve done over. They started in early June. They’ve done literally 10s of thousands of test buys with addresses you wouldn’t know it’s not gonna say at Amazon.com or ship it to Seattle. They’re using drop boxes around the country to actually send these to which there’s whole companies that do this where you can send their basically fake names and they send it like UPS stores, and you would never know who it is. I mean, melt melon companies do this by rent my mailing list, I can see the list with like 20 of these around the country that way I know who’s using my list, and if they’re misusing it, or if I only license it for one time, you’ll know if they use it again, Amazon’s doing something similar and doing test buys and they’re looking at your inserts, and they’re following the entire flows. They’re actually signing up for your manifest flows, for all these flows. So if you’re doing anything above, it’s not above board on any of that I would immediately stop. Because you’re probably going to see a wave of suspensions and it’s a good thing it needs to happen. But if you get those kinds of inserts out there and you got a product at Amazon right now you need to keep, I don’t know ,which many other than pulling the product back and taking that out, which may not be practical. You need to cross your fingers and hope you’re not on the radar right now.
Norman 39:50
You nailed it. I saw that today. They’re buying, they’re checking the inserts and they’re checking the emails that come in and seeing how you’re responding.
Kevin 40:05
Yeah, I mean, they have a whole new team that they just what was that? Like they just have a whole new department they set up to deal with this type of thing. Yeah, they’re getting serious. We’ll see, Anchors is one of the worst violators of this out there and Anchors is one of the biggest sellers on Amazon. So it’ll be interesting to see if this is equally applied. Or if there’s exemptions, but yeah, I would be very, very careful. There’s nothing wrong with an insert. There’s nothing wrong with putting your website address on an insert but just what you’re doing with that insert, you need to be extremely careful if there’s any hints of you’re giving away a free product for review or try to manipulate or do anything, you watch out.
Norman 40:48
Yeah and again, there’s really no need if you’ve got a good product, the customer experience is overall positive. Then why do you jeopardize, you’ll get that four to 7% review rate maybe a little bit higher, but it comes naturally. You don’t really have to go out and force people or get people. Oh, if you like my product, click here. If you didn’t, click here and you are just asking for trouble.
Kevin 41:16
Yeah, I mean, I have a collection, me and my wife order a lot off of Amazon just for personal stuff. Some days we had five, six packages. We probably get 20, 30 packages a week from Amazon, just for our own personal things that we bought and I every time she’s like going through the packages, taking her stuff out and throwing away everything. I’m like, wait, wait, wait, let me see the insert. I want to see what all the inserts are doing and so I have a whole collection of swap files of inserts here and I’m looking at some of these and going, holy cow. Yeah, these people. Since Amazon knows what you’re doing, you’re DOA.
Norman 41:53
So Kelsey, was there any other questions that came in?
Kelsey 41:57
Nope. That’s it for now. But if there are any, just put them in the comments and I think Norm will get back to you.
Norman 42:07
Yeah, it’s nice that you call me Norm.
Norman 42:13
Remember after the call, it’s back to Dad.
Norman 42:18
Okay, so Kevin, it’s been great having you on. I know I took a little bit extra time here, but you had some really great information. I don’t know if there’s any last words or any last thoughts that you’d like to say, but go for it.
Kevin 42:33
No. I just want to say it’s been a pleasure knowing you, Norman. I look forward to hanging out with you again. Next time, we can actually get together somewhere. It’s always fun smoking cigars and eating Kobe beef and drinking Coke zeroes.
Norman 42:48
Yeah and my gut always hurts.
Norman 42:51
From laughing or both. Alright, everybody. Well, thank you for listening to Lunch with Norm and my special guest, Kevin King, like Kels said, if you do have any other questions or comments, please post them and Kelsey, what’s the thing I’m supposed to do again?
Kelsey 43:09
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, we’ve got TikTok, that’s exciting. We’ve got two videos up there.
Norman 43:20
Yeah, ones with Kevin.
Kelsey 43:22
YouTube channel and also our Norman Farrar, his podcast, I Know This Guy. We have some great guests. So yeah, you can find us everywhere.
Norman 43:33
There we go. Alright everybody. Well, thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you next Thursday.
Kevin 43:39
Take care.
