#48: How To Prepare for Q4 in 2020

Date: October 7, 2020

Episode: 48

Title: Norman Farrar Introduces Tim Jordan, Founder of Hickory Flats, which Offers Training and Sourcing Trips and Private Label Legion.

Subtitle: Expectations and Preparations for Holiday Season

Final Show Link: https://lunchwithnorm.com/episodes/episode-48-how-to-prepare-for-q4-in-2020-w-tim-jordan/

In this episode of Lunch With Norm…, Norman Farrar introduces Tim Jordan, founder of Hickory Flats, which offers training and sourcing trips.

Tim Jordan is an eCommerce Expert and host of the AM/PM Podcast. He discussed ways on how to prepare for Q4.

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In this episode, we discuss:

• • 4:34 : Tim’s thoughts on Q4
  • 8:04 : How to avoid long waiting time
  • 9:19 : Inventory placement
  • 14:17 : Sellers preparation for Q4
  • 18:17 : How to get consistent conversion rate
  • 20:33 : Key points when creating FBM listings
  • 23:37 : Getting a new product ready for Prime Day
  • 26:45 : Adopting keywords into PPC Campaigns
  • 34:36 : Is listing launch date essential?
  • 39:43 : Things to consider before relaunching a product
  • 42:59 : Things that people are overlooking
  • 46:42 : E-commerce seller as a user of Amazon
  • 54:55 : Sticking with your price during holidays
  • 59:04 : Driving traffic to storefront organically

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In this episode, we mentioned the following resources:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/tim-jordan-b79507150/
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Norman 0:01  

Hey everyone, it’s Norman Farrar, a.k.a. The Beard Guy here and welcome to another Lunch With Norm, the rise of the micro brands

Norman 0:20  

Alright,today’s guest is e-commerce expert, coach and host of AM/PM podcast, Tim Jordan. Tim and I are going to be discussing strategies on getting ahead this fourth quarter. So before I introduce Tim, we’re broadcasting to you live on Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn. If you’re watching this on my replay, if you’re watching this on a replay, just skip ahead and for those of you watching on my profile page, you can always head over to the fanpage Norman Farrar, a.k.a. The Beard Guy, and watch the whole episode, highlights and content. So where are you Kelsey? 

Kelsey 0:59

Hello, Happy Thanksgiving. 

Norman 1:02

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving.

Kelsey 1:04  

Yes. How are you? Alright, so if you’re joining us today, you can follow us on social media, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram. any of the videos that you see here will be directly uploaded to YouTube. You can find all the short clips in full episodes and if you’re watching right now, you can hit that like and share button and smash it, ring that bell and we are an official podcast so you can find us on Spotify, Apple Music, podcast being anywhere you listen to podcasts, you can find Lunch With Norm and I think that’s it. We got Marina. Happy Thanksgiving Marina. 

Norman 1:42

Hey, Marina. 

Kelsey 1:44

Alright,and let us know where you’re watching from today. Are you celebrating Thanksgiving today? Are you in the US? Alasia? We’d love to know.

Norman 1:52  

Alright,perfect. Okay, so if you have any questions, just put them over in the comment box and we’ll get to them throughout the show. Or we’ll make sure that they get answered after the show. So sit back, relax, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy the show. So welcome, Mr. Jordan. 

Tim 2:12  

Have my cup of coffee just like you said.

Norman 2:14  

There you go. But do you have a beard guy cup of coffee?

Tim 2:17  

I don’t have a beard guy cup of coffee.

Norman 2:19 

I’ll send you one. 

Tim 2:20

I do want to know like in your little when the music kicked on, and it showed kind of your logo with the beard. There was a fork and a knife. Like embedded into your beard.

Norman 2:30  

Yeah, that happens sometimes.

Tim 2:34  

Like, is this like indicative of what happens at that meal time at Norm’s house occasionally stuff gets just lost in there.

Norman 2:41  

Hey, sometimes I find small children.

Tim 2:45  

It reminds me of that Family Guy commercial when Peter Griffin grew that big, long beard out and he had the birds living in his beard.

Tim 2:52  

Did you see that one?

Norman 2:54  

Oh, man. I feel like that sometimes.

Tim 2:56  

You tripped me out when you said Happy Thanksgiving because I’m like, are we already already month and a half early? Like is q4 really flying by that fast?

Norman 3:05

That quick.

Tim 3:07

I know.

Norman 3:08  

No, it’s our Thanksgiving. We already had our meal yesterday. But Oh, boy. Yeah, I think the turkey still kicked in.

Tim 3:17  

Yep. Today in the US is Columbus Day. Right? Which is an interesting holiday, because many Americans are refusing to celebrate and honor it now and I made a Facebook post yesterday that actually got a lot of people fired up one way or the other. But the holiday was instituted to commemorate Christopher Columbus Discovering America. Okay. I don’t believe Christopher Columbus discovered America. There’s thousands of indigenous tribes here with pretty advanced societies long before he showed up. So now I’m starting to hear and I heard on the radio this morning, people. Oh, I messed up. But so I’m calling it Columbus Day calling it Indigenous peoples day. So all it’s your Thanksgiving in Canada. We have no idea what holiday it is in the US today.

Norman 4:12  

Alright. Well, how about Canadian Thanksgiving? How’s that?

Tim 4:16  

Happy. It works for me.

Norman 4:17  

Yeah. Alright. Perfect. Alright. Hey, we’re gonna be talking. A lot of people are talking about the fourth quarter. But I was just wondering, you got any general thoughts? I know this is gonna be a nutty fourth quarter because of how everything’s happening right now.

Tim 4:34  

I feel like in general, and we could talk about micro practice, but in general, there’s nothing you’re going to do differently that you haven’t already started preparing for that’s going to change q4. Like, this is one of those hold on for the rod and let’s see what happens because so many things are happening, that we can’t anticipate what those are going to be. So whether it’s the logistics issues that are going on, we can talk about whether it’s Amazon really firing off this Prime Day plus q4 plus all these other incentives for buyers, holidays and buyer holidays and then we have to look at things like what retail stores are doing to adjust. Some of the big retail stores that people used to buy. They’re saying we’re not opening up the evening of thanksgiving like we used to, and maybe Black Friday, willing to allow a quarter occupancy, blend all that into we know this is going to be a huge demand. The demand for e-commerce is going to be huge this year, like we’ve never seen before, mixed in with that thing that I mentioned earlier. Like we can’t get stuff inbound to FBA, and we need to have some third party logistics. So I will say this, that throughout this episode, I’m sure we’re going to talk about a lot of things but just understand that e-commerce is one of those games where you have to slow down to speed up, you have to measure twice, cut once like you can’t be ultra reactionary, or you might screw something up and right now, we’re in the boat, the boats in the ocean, the waves are kicking up all around us. Like maybe we can throw out a couple extra fishing lines. But we’re not going to drastically change our situation. This is going to be like a hold on. Hold on for the ride. Don’t get thrown overboard and let’s just try to keep calm and carry on this q4.

Norman 6:16  

Yeah, we’ve talked about this on the podcast before but I think Q4 is gonna be just, it’s all about inventory and how you manage it, isn’t it?

Tim 6:26  

Yeah, and unfortunately, the way that we manage it now is going to be very Hey, it’s Tammy from Cold Lake Canada. I’m sorry, I saw a pop up. I’ve got some stories about her if you ever want to hear anything really embarrassing. I’m just kidding, Tammy. Kind of. But, normally in q4, getting inventory in is a big deal. We have to do that. But we could rely on infrastructure that we can’t rely on this year. We know what’s going on with Amazon FBA and this year, there’s been a huge surge for people to begin using third party logistics services, which most of right now we’re not even accepting new clients, they’re completely full. So it’s like, even though we know what one of the problems is, and we know what some of the solutions should be, we can’t necessarily access those solutions, right. So I know people that are unloading containers in 40 foot containers at their house, and unloading pallets and pallets and pallets in the garage, and they’ve never done that before. I’ve been selling for five years. So it’s definitely crazier logistically for sure.

Norman 7:32  

Right, I’m probably one of the most important things that people can do is, is definitely make sure that you have the FBA and FBM listing turned on. So Oh, we never had to really do that before. It’s this year, that’s been kind of crazy. The other thing, Tim, do you have any tips or suggestions on how you can avoid those three week, four week receiving into Amazon?

Tim 8:04  

So I haven’t necessarily figured out anything great. But what I have been doing is I’ve been, I’ve got a mastermind program and I watch the Facebook groups and all that stuff, Tammy and I follow along with where people say, hey, my stuff just got checked into Juliet, Illinois, or my stuff just got checked into Memphis faster and instead of hauling my stuff all the way to Dallas, or Charleston or something like that. I have begun on a few occasions using inventory placement, which is expensive, right, because they’re going to charge me per unit, I think it’s 30 cents, by getting a good pick and choosing which fulfillment center that I go to. I have had a little luck on some high priced items where I really needed those in FBA, super competitive, just to sync the money and send it in. But the problem is I’m going off of information. That’s a little bit subjective. I’m making the decisions. I’m going to ship to Memphis from a ship to Juliet, based on what I saw on a Facebook group, or someone said, Oh, my stuff got checked in quick. So it’s not an exact science, it is try to send it places where other people are getting faster turnarounds.

Norman 9:09  

So let’s talk about inventory placement for a second. For those of us that don’t know where to find that, how do you go about using inventory placement?

Tim 9:19  

Yeah, it’s just an option within your basically your inbound shipping settings and what you’re doing is telling Amazon Hey, this is where I’m gonna go. Now, the only other time that I’ve used that with success, especially with large oversized items where it’s like one unit per carton, right, so if I’m selling something huge, there’s not a carton carton, and I have a carton of 50 units. I used to be able to say a pallet was 50 units and the pallet sells a carton but Amazon slapped me on the wrist for that. So if it’s $120 oversized item, I’ll pay the 30 cents so that I can ship everything into one fulfillment center as opposed to them saying we’ll send 10 here, 20 here, 50 here, 40 here because if I consolidate those in a four or five pallets, you ship them directly and it saves me a mountain on the inbound and it completely negates that 30 cents per unit. So it’s not something that many people use. But it’s definitely a tool out there for a few scenarios like this q4, maybe, or super oversized items.

Norman 10:18  

Fantastic. Great point. Kelsey, let’s go through a few shout outs here.

Kelsey 10:24  

Yeah, for sure. We got tons. Lots of people are joining us. So Lisa Kinski is joining us. They have a birthday or Happy Thanksgiving. Sorry.

Tim 10:33  

Happy Birthday Canada!

Kelsey 10:36  

Nathan is back from San Diego. Alan. Hello, Alan. 

Tim 10:42  

Norman have you ever met Alan? 

Norman 10;44

I don’t think we’ve ever met. 

Tim 10:46

But you see his name pop up, right?

Norman 10:47  

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Tim 10:48  

Alan is one of the most interesting and funny guys I’ve ever met in my life. I can tell you some stories about Alan. He’s a professional thief and he’s gotten me in trouble at one of the most premier Athletic Clubs in the world. I can tell you about that.

Norman 11:05

Oh, really? Alright. 

Tim 11:08

He didn’t tell me, he invited me to lunch at this place and didn’t tell me you have to wear long pants. So I walked up to the Singapore Cricket Club, which is like one of the most exclusive sporting clubs out there and they met me at the dorks I was wearing shorts.

Kelsey 11:23  

We also got Simon joining us.

Norman 11:25

Oh, Simon’s happens back. 

Kelsey 11:26

Yeah. Michelle from New Jersey. Tammy. Let’s see Truong. I believe that’s how he says it. I’m not quite sure. Faye, Faye has a question for us later on. But okay. Leonard’s here, Tony. Right. Alan, Paul.

Norman 11:43  

Tony was just on the podcast last week. Paul was on the podcast a couple weeks ago. Yeah.

Kelsey 11:48  

So you got a whole bunch of people joining us and if you guys want to jump into questions, just let me know. We already have like three or four.

Norman 11:55  

Oh, fantastic. Okay, so let’s see. Why don’t we take one of the questions before we move on?

Kelsey 12:01  

Alright,perfect. Let’s see who is the first

Kelsey 12:05  

We have this was just about your Helium 10 presentation. I know you have given a killer presentation on H10 Elite about AMC posts, but I can’t find it. Which month was it?

Norman 12:19  

Oh, I think it was last. I think it was last month. Okay. Yeah. It was like it was last month. Yep.

Kelsey 12:26  

Okay, so from Tony. Happy Thanksgiving guys, at least for the Canadians. Have a good one. My question is if you guys started using the Helium 10 advertising PPC tool?

Norman 12:37  

I haven’t. Tim have you?

Tim 12:40  

No, and man that the folks that Helium 10 might kill me for saying this, but I’m just going to say it because I call it like it is. Helium 10 has those of you listening at Bradley concert? If you’re listening, let me finish my comment. When Helium 10 first launched their ads tool, their PPC tool. It was rough. Right and it’s not because Helium 10 doesn’t know what they’re doing. But it is incredibly difficult to automate PPC, even the biggest companies like Tikka metrics and Core tile, they’re good for some functions not good for others. So just inherently it’s tough to automate PPC, right. But I will say one thing that Helium 10 has done is they have now purchased Prestozon. They launched this, like two weeks ago Prestozon, which is apparently some really good software for some things and they’re integrating those features into the Helium 10 ad suite. So even if you’re asking, Hey, how is it and I personally haven’t used it, but if you see some bad reviews about it, give it another month or so, because they are blending these existing software’s into the software that they’ve acquired and I think it’s going to continue to get better and better. So it’s kind of an ongoing process.

Norman 13:52  

Victor is going to be on the podcasts, I think in about a month. I think we just confirmed him coming on. So yeah, stay tuned for that and get your questions ready. I agree with you, Tim. It’s just a matter of time to build it out. Okay, so let’s talk about the most important thing. If there’s a single thing a seller has to do, what would that be for q4?

Tim 14:17  

It depends on when you ask me if you ask me right now, my answer is different than three months ago. Three months ago, it said get a bunch of inventory, get that stuff ranked and ready. Right now I feel like q4 one of the secrets is going to be not having shiny object syndrome and waiting for things to selland here’s a scenario. Prime Day. We’re already getting blown up by Amazon. Oh run Lightning Deals, run daily deals run these things, exclusive offers. Hey, we suggest you jack up your PPC by 200%. All this stuff? Well, the only person that benefits from that is the customers and Amazon. We don’t really benefit from that. Because think about what’s going to happen this q4. We’ve talked about inventory problems. Right? Everybody’s got inventory problems. We’ve also talked about all these promotions being run at once and we see anybody saying, oh, push, push, push, show your stuff, cheaper, cheaper, cheaper. But I don’t know about you guys. But most years, I end up selling inventory in Q4 already. So one thing that I feel certain about this year to capitalize on the inventory you already have, because it’s too late to get more inventory generally, is ignore all the hype, ignore all the promotions, ignore all the discounts, ignore all the coupons. Don’t raise your PPC, because I think what’s going to happen is everybody’s going to run out of stuff, all your competitors are, everybody’s going to blow out. So if I have 2000 years of something, and Prime Day, which is tomorrow, I run a big promotion, what’s the point of blowing through half of my inventory at a discounted rate, right, when I’m probably going to sell it up by Christmas and elevate it, right? Same with PPC. Everybody says well jack up your PPC, jack up your PPC for Prime Day, what I’ve always noticed is that everybody runs out of the daily budget, they’ll go from $1 bid to $3 a bid and they’ll go from a $20 day budget to a $30 budget and they burn out by 11 and then their ads stop. Well guess who gets to add next me still bidding $1 a bid or if you’ve seen the data about when purchases happen in e-commerce and most time zones that happen between like 3pm and 9pm. So everybody blows through their PPC budget super early. So my point is, when you think, we’ve got two and a half months before Christmas, whether it’s FBA, FBM, it doesn’t matter, people are going to probably buy your stuff and I don’t want to blow out my stuff at a discounted right now and Black Friday, Cyber Monday, when I could be the only competitor in my niches, selling for double the price in December. So that gives me more inventory stability. Remember how important that is inventory stability, that inventory performance index. If I blow it on my stuff, and I’m out of stock till the end of January, that’s not gonna help me. But even if I’m not selling super fast, I’m selling consistently, but I keep my inventory in that’s good. Also, think about just the branding and the placement, people are going to see your products, people are going to notice your brand more as they search, people are going to be retargeted with Amazon, PPC ads, even off Amazon, as long as you’re in stock, and you have the buy box. So write this sucker out and when you notice your competitors start going and your sales start moving. Understand that you’re selling at a higher profit margin than you would be if you went through all that glitz and glam.

Norman 17:29  

Yeah, that’s exactly what we do. Yeah, tired of blowing our budgets and wasting time with that. I think it was, the first time I heard it was Brian Johnson said that he used a cascading effect. But one of the takeaways I got was, wait, hold on and then at the end of the day, or towards the end of the day, now you start hitting them, and you’re going to sell it anyway. So do you want to sell it at 30% off and make no money or stay steady and make the full sale because if I have a plastic shoe stretcher, that is everybody else has run out of inventory, I still have that plastic shoe stretcher, I can sell it at the same rate, or I can even bump up the price a little.

Tim 18:17  

Yeah, and I will say this, I see a few questions about running out of stock and pricing stuff for one. Yes, I think it’s Simon just asked, if I keep in stock, and I’m selling it consistent, right? I’m the champion of Q1, absolutely. Even if a lot of these people come back into stock, they’re gonna have a harder time trying to catch back up to your stability. Because remember, ranking right now is not all about the tricks and the blackhat stuff and the fads. Amazon is essentially wiped away most of that I still know of some stuff going on and some stuff that works. But generally speaking, the thing that will keep your ranking higher for a search term is a high degree of conversions, consistent sales, consistent inventory. Right. So think about that thing, what I just said, consistent conversion rate. Be careful, I know Paul’s talking about he’ll jack his price up on Prime Day and still sell Prime Day maybe. But what I don’t like to see people doing and Q4 is especially if they know hey, at my current run, I’m going to stock out December. Oh, what a lot of people think is Hey, I’m going to increase my price by 20%, which will slow me down and then I’ll stock out on December 20. So you’re only getting a few more days in there. But you’re starting to slow your conversion rate and slow your velocity. So when you do come back in stock, Amazon is pinpointing your current location. I like I did a YouTube video recently where I’m talking about. It’s like if you’re going to drive your car off a cliff. I’d rather mash the gas and drive it off faster. Right so I don’t intentionally slow down sales before me to go out of stock for an extended period of time. Sometimes I’ll even lower my price to hear my PPC here just to get that conversion rate and get that velocity up just a tiny bit and I might stock out one or two days earlier. But now I’m at a little bit higher place to stock out. So then I do come back and my placement should also be a little bit higher. Right?

Norman 20:11  

Yeah, hundred percent agree.

Tim 20:12  

Yeah. So don’t try to stretch it out or you’ll just tank your ranking.,

Norman 20:16  

Right. Kels, any other questions?

Kelsey 20:19  

Yep. So Alan has one. So I’m currently shipping to a 3PL, a new range of products and have yet to create my FBM listings. Are there any key points I need to take into consideration when creating these listings?

Tim 20:33  

Well, I’ll start with one and Norm, I’ll let you do one. Typically, Amazon is dirt cheap for fulfillment. I mean, nobody can beat FBA rates for fulfillment. So if you go to FBM, it’s just going to cost you more and your profit margin is going to be a little bit less. One thing I like to do is, as long as I’m still profitable, I’ll keep the listing price the same. Okay and the reason is, if I’m going in and out of FBA, FBM, FBA, FBM. The price fluctuates consistently, which can jack up a lot of things. Sometimes I’ve even seen people jack up their prices for the merchant fulfilled listing so much that they’ll lose their own buy box, which is good, because now your listing gets all jacked up your ranking and all that stuff. So as long as I am making 30% here, and 20%, with FBM, instead of trying to raise my FBM price, I’ll keep the buy box price the same. No, I’m not making quite as much money with the fulfilled by merchant option. But at least my listing is consistent. Remember, we’re playing the long ball, we’re playing the long game and we want that price consistency, because if you raise that price, your conversions will start to drop too and then your rankings can be affected.

Norman 21:39  

Right, the only time that I would change that is if they wanted expedited shipping. If they wanted expedited shipping, I charge a bit more, I guess we’re listening to the same Amazon experts because that’s exactly what I would do as well, you want to make it simple. You want to make, you don’t want to. I mean, it’s already people or if they’re going over to FBM.

Norman 22:04  

There was a concern more in the past than it is now. But it was FBM, people trusts Prime. FBM was always known for extra charges and long turnaround times. But we also want to make sure that you set it up properly and Kevin was on he was talking about Kevin King the other day, and he was just talking about doing it properly, people would set up a an absolute separate listing where it’s so simple to go into your FBA listing in inventory management, go over to edit or not over to edit but add a condition and then it’s very easy to create an FBM listing, it just gets imported over and then when you run out of FBA, it can flip over to FBM. So that’s something the other thing that Kevin and I were talking about is changing from going to UPS and asking them to do ground with freight services, and freight pricing and that seems to be bringing FBM listings into Amazon a lot quicker than if you’re doing it the other way. So you can still get three day receiving on Amazon for the most part. So anyways, that’s all I have for that.

Kelsey 23:21  

Okay, Alright,so we’ll jump into another one. From Leonard, I recently launched a product and want to create a few more campaign ads off Amazon. Should I wait until after Prime Day to do this or just go ahead now anyway?

Tim 23:37  

Leonard, this may be one that I actually want to address on our group call today in this Insurance League, but here’s my opinion is there’s going to be so much traffic with Prime Day, even Amazon, running ads on other platforms. So Amazon runs ads on Google, Amazon runs ads on Pinterest, if you were just starting something in prime days over the next couple days, I wouldn’t do any off Amazon advertising because the data you get is going to be so jacked up. So even if you get a few sales, you’re not gonna know what you’re looking at. The cost per click is going to be super elevated, the conversion rates probably going to be low. Because so many people are poking around, we’re probably going, and not necessarily purchasing or just shopping and just checking. That’s what I do tomorrow morning, I’ll wake up and I’ll spend two hours just seeing what everybody else is selling but I will buy it. I would wait a couple days before I started doing that. But, you know what you’re going to do off Amazon, I think your strategy is going to be good, but I would definitely wait till after Prime Day and I wouldn’t change anything around Cyber Monday Black Friday, right? Because everybody’s going to be outspending you, even Walmart online, they’re going to turn their giant cannons and start lobbing millions of dollars at Google Slides out that day. We can’t touch that. I wouldn’t adjust anything. I would just keep the status quo. Let it ride and see what happens.

Norman 24:57  

Something you can do off Amazon too. It’s too late for Prime Day, but going into Black Friday, it’s a different story and that is promoting your own website. So promoting, if you’re selling on Shopify, if you have another e-commerce platform, you do a pre Prime Day Sale or pre Black Friday sale, and then you can carry that right over to Black Friday. Here’s a bit of a trick that you can do. So you have to do what you do, you do an added value campaign, where it’s a product that you can’t get on Amazon. So they want it, they already have been driven over to your website. So they want your shampoo with a free bottle of conditioner, whatever it is, but then you give them a coupon to go back over to Amazon on Prime Day or black friday and buy your product at 10% off or whatever and that’s just another way to get two sales instead of one.

Tim 25:50  

I like it.

Norman 25:52  

There you go. 

Tim 25:54

But when’s the last time you bought shampoo and conditioner Norm?

Norman 25:57  

For the beard? Come on?

Tim 26:00  

I thought that was bar soap and beard oil.

Norman 26:03  

Yeah.

Norman 26:06  

Okay, Kelsey, see, there’s a bunch of comments and questions. I cannot, Tim. The reason is I have this so small. I can’t read the bloody thing even even with my glasses. So Kelsey’s got to read it for me.

Kelsey 26:16  

It’s my main job.

Kelsey 26:20  

Okay, so actually, wow. Wendy is joining us from Sydney, Australia out there and we have facing thanks again for such an amazing and awesome podcast. Thank you. Yes. Alright. Tony has one. Should I adopt keywords, which is its monthly search volume or under 100 to put into a PPC campaign?

Tim 26:45  

So for me, I love those keywords. I love the keywords that have 100 here, 500 here, 400 here, because most people aren’t focusing on those I can rank for them easily. The problem is if you try to load up Amazon with too many keywords to run campaigns on, it starts missing it starts screwing up, you start having problems, right? On most campaigns, like a whole campaign, I won’t do any more than about 15 keywords because I noticed my impressions start getting wonky or they drop out, right. So what I’ve been doing recently, which seems to work, after I’ve gone through this isn’t like a test campaign that I sometimes do and it’s not for a launch campaign. Because in a launch campaign, I’m usually targeting like 10 keywords that have 1000 to 3000. That’s kind of like for me my magic number to launch and eventually I’ll start working my way up, excuse me to the higher volume ones, but but initially starting with the high conversion rate low competition, so I’ll shoot that 1000-3000, 8-12 keywords later on maybe two or three months after my launch. Oh, by the way, if you do your job right, those super long tail with 100, you’ll start indexing for pretty easily, I’ve noticed. But maybe a month or two or three months into my campaign, I’ll actually turn on auto campaigns to start capturing those hundred searches per month. Right. So I’ll run an auto campaign on negative out all my exact keywords, and I’ll run an auto campaign for half the price per click than I am in my manual campaigns and it usually picks up those 100, 90,300, 400 very, very, very well and I don’t have to worry about trying to manage all those physically. Now what I will do every two or three weeks is pull that report and see which one of those has a high conversion rate, which may have more impressions than I expected. So if you look at a keyword, you say it only has 100 searches per month, but you let an auto campaign run for 30 days and it’s targeting that keyword you see well yet 3000 impressions, you start scratching your head go why with 100 searches a month or 3000 impressions, well, maybe the search tools weren’t accurate, or maybe there are people coming back over and over and over again. So I’ll look at it too. But usually the real small capture is an auto campaign.

Norman 28:48  

Right? We do that with rebates. So we’ll just create silos of, we call them the primary keywords, which are a longer tail keyword and then longer tail keywords. So, natural bully sticks or odorless bully sticks and six inch odorless bully sticks, grass fed, natural, odorless, and we’ll see and they can be under 100. They could be usually they could range between four and 400 and down or 700 and down and also it depends on your niche. But what we’ll find is over time, especially with rebates that if you’re let’s say you’re targeting that word, odorless bully stick that might have 4000 impressions, but you’re using all these long tails. Now you’re starting to climb, the ranking of odorless bully sticks, start to climb as well as you’re targeting these long tails with the rebate, it’s crazy and I don’t know if you’ve seen that Tim but like if you’ve got something I know I did this with Chef Knife. So you had to I forget how many It was like 70,000 searches or something like that. So we did a long tail with it and all we had to do is instead of giving away 1000 chef knives, we gave away 150 chef knives, all long tail, and they started just to climb, we actually were ranking in the top 10 for chef knife, we got up to about number three, I think and it stuck there with maintenance, like just giving away a few rebates with press releases. It just stuck.

Tim 30:24  

So when we think about what I said about the reason things ranked high is because of conversion rates. So if I’m selling a chef knife, well, there’s a million different chef knives out there. People want sets, people want Damascus steel, people want ceramic people want a 10 inch or 12 inch or a nine inch or eight like it’s crazy, right? They want wood handles, they want plastic handles, they want silicone handles, they want it. But when so if I run a PPC for chef knife, and I’m showing it to everybody, essentially. First PPC position that it’s typing chef knife, I’m not relevant to everybody, because even if I have the coolest Damascus steel chef knife for $60 that’s not what people are looking for. So to your point, I don’t even target chef knives. I target nine inch Damascus steel chef knives, Damascus steel chef knife, Damascus steel kitchen gift, these long tail keywords, and now the people that are seeing that ad, I know exactly what they’re looking for. So my relevancy is so high, that my conversion rate becomes high. My click through rate and my conversion rate. So although I’m targeting several keywords, and I’m trying to independently, this one has high conversion click through, this one has high conversion click through, this one has high conversion click through. The product is, as an overall is racking up a high percentage of click through rates and conversion rates. Right. So now that data is looked at for every keyword that Amazon is indexing, including chef knife, so Amazon is identifying, hey, this is a chef knife with high conversion rate, high click through rate. But I did it by targeting the ones that I knew would have the higher rates because of a higher degree of relevancy and it gives me the bonus up here at the top for that. That kind of castle keyword. I call it that short tail super high search volume.

Norman 32:11  

Right? Do you ever use those types of keywords with Amazon posts?

Tim 32:18  

Amazon post?

Norman 32:19  

Yeah, do you work with Amazon posts at all? 

Tim 32:24

No. 

Norman 32:25

Okay.

Tim 32:27  

I’m looking at you like what are you talking about Norm?

Norman 32:30  

So, yeah, we spend a bit of time with Amazon posts and one of the things that we’re looking at now is taking those long tails and actually putting them in the caption and the other little trick, if, at the, if you’re going into at least three out of the four Amazon posts that you can do. You get, you’ll see categories and then you can start going into each one of those categories and targeting those keywords. I have no idea if they’re indexing, I’m just experimenting with that right now. But when we’re looking at and this is like fourth quarter if you’re doing a launch or if you’re doing maintenance, PPC rebates and press releases and Amazon posts, and Carlos or buddy Carlos Alvarez, big on Amazon live. So those are a few things, those are the four pillars of our success with launch or maintenance. Yep. Is that, yeah, you kind of agree with me or?

Tim 33:34  

Kind of, I mean, I know so little about posts. I don’t really want to give too much of an opinion.

Norman 33:39  

Just smile and wave Tim.

Tim 33:43  

I thought you said, smile and look pretty. I’m out on that. I can smile. I can’t do the other one.

Kelsey 33:50  

Alright,we have Paul, given some insight on the posts too. He says we get on average 2000 monthly visits to our listings from our competitors listings from Amazon post. Wow.

Tim 34:02  

That’s Paul just making stuff up, though. We don’t actually know.

Kelsey 34:07  

Jago is joining us, too. He says hi and he’s got a question. See if I can find it. Give me a second. Do you believe in the fact that listing release or listing release date or launch date are important for your honeymoon start or only the date when listing gets inbound inventory is important?

Tim 34:31  

Can I be controversial Norm?

Norman 34:33  

Go ahead.

Tim 34:36  

I have two answers to that. Right. The first one is, I don’t put a whole lot. Right. I know there’s a lot of people that build these entire launch phases on the magical honeymoon period and I think that it’s been a little bit overhyped. Now let me explain what I see. See the honeymoon period is, if I’m launching a mason jar, okay, my water jar here. If I’m watching a mason jar, and there’s 10,000 listings that are indexing for mason jar, Amazon’s not going to put me on page 3,241. They’re going to give me some benefit of that. They’re gonna say, Okay, this guy based on this listing is indexing formation jar mason jar, we’re gonna start him on page 12. If I do, and that’s just an arbitrary number, don’t take that as gospel, we’re gonna start me somewhere that’s not at the bottom. If I do, well, I’ll start rising. If I do poorly, I’ll start falling. So basically, Amazon’s giving you some benefited out. So if I take a listing, mason jar, and my listing sucks, and I’m always out of inventory, and my price is too high and my conversion rate, and my click through rate is just in the doghouse. Sometimes I’ll pull all that stuff out and I’ll start over. Because after three months I’ve tanked it, I’m just losing ground from my initial starting period. So the honeymoon period, I don’t see it as a time when you can magically rank. But I see it as a placement where you’re giving some benefit of the doubt in which you can start gaining ground faster than losing it. So if I completely take a listing, I may pull the inventory out, close that listing, delete it, put a new sticker on it and start it over. But for me, I’ve also never seen anywhere where that honeymoon period is like 14 and a half days or 12 days, like, I just don’t see that right. Now, that being said, I have never seen anything be affected with launch date or release date necessarily as much as just the date that it goes is available. Right. So when the product becomes available, when it becomes available, the buy box pops up, the listing pops up, that’s when I think the countdown has started for Amazon, decide if you do well or do poorly. Now one thing that I’ll do within this honeymoon period that I’ve had some success with other people not so much but I’ve had success with it is imagine the scenario where you ship in 500 units and you’ve got your PPC set up, you got everything rocking and rolling and the first 10 units get checked in and they sell and they sell up. Well now, your buy box disappears, the listing disappears and then five more units checked in here and the 10 more units and then you’re out of stock and then 20 units check in you’re out of stock. So Amazon’s looking at that listing and you’re in, out, in, out, in, out and even though your listing has started the first day, you might sell five units when you should have sold 20. But Amazon didn’t have it checked in. So a lot of times I’ll even intentionally suppress a listing by removing the main image from that listing still seems to work pretty well for me and Amazon will continue to distribute those products. So I’ll keep the first image out until I see, if I shipped in 500 units, I’ll make sure I have 90 or 100 units available, the rest in FC transfer, then I’ll click that image back in the listing goes live, my PPC goes live. But as far as manipulating PPC period, or not PPC honeymoon period, those are the only two things I do is if I’ve completely crashed a listing into the ground, I’m going to have to resurrect it from the dead. I’ll start over to start in that kind of medium position and I will make sure that when I initially start my conversion, my click through rates are high. My availability stays consistent by suppressing listing until Amazon can distribute the FBA that’s FBM. It doesn’t matter as much.

Norman 38:18  

Right. So I got a question. Would you along those lines, If you had a product that you were going to launch a couple of days before Prime Day, or a couple of days before Black Friday, would you?

Tim 38:31  

No, I don’t see a reason for that because you’re going to launch this thing, right and what is an actual launch? What do you call that? Did you have all your inventory in place 20 days before but you’re going to start your PPC campaigns, you’re going to start your big stuff on Prime Day. Your giveaways or your big promotions, well it’s going to get washed out because every Tom Dick and Harry sell on Amazon is doing the same thing. Like you’re just going to get caught up in the turbulence and gone, right and I definitely wouldn’t try to get my products landed three days before Prime because the inventory is going to be all over the place. You’re not going to have consistent buy ability or your listing even up because your inventory is going to be all over.

Norman 39:09  

Yeah. Okay. More questions? There’s a ton of questions. I think. I can’t read them. 

Kelsey 39:17  

Yeah, we do. There’s a ton that are coming in. Let me see. I don’t want to miss anyone.

Norman 39:26  

Doctor Cause. Hey, Jordan.

Kelsey 39:29  

Oh, yeah. Yeah, we can do Doctor Cause’s question. So when you start over if a product got some bad luck reviews, do you copy that listing or really make a new listing? Any pros and cons and how you actually restart relaunch?

Tim 39:43  

There’s not actually a playbook because every time is different. If I have a product that I know is a decent product. One star reviews. I’m not going to immediately tank it because if I have 1000 units and that’s a pain in the butt to retract those. I’m going to see what happens, maybe it’s just bad luck and I’ll have to get over the hump and get going. If I have I’ve seen people that get so bent out of shape. I had six five star reviews, and then a two star review and it killed my sales.

Tim 40:11  

It was really, yeah, I don’t know. Yeah, it was fake. Well, one, people, sometimes your products just suck, right? Like you don’t actually know what’s fake, don’t accuse me of blackhat stuff. Sometimes either your product sucked or broke, your listing wasn’t accurate. Or sometimes people are just a holes when they review your product, let it go. But right now, people, consumers are so sick of being lied to with reviews. That’s why the US government in the US is stepping in and regulating reviews on consumer review websites, because they want the whole picture. For me, if I look at a product that has 30 reviews, and it’s an average of four stars, fine roll with it, there’s going to be some turns out there, and I know that, I’m not going to worry about it. Don’t take your listing. Now I’ll say this, if you launch something, and you get six reviews immediately, and they’re all one or two star reviews, the problem isn’t your reviews, this is not going to be an issue of pull my stuff out, re label it, send it in and try again. The issue is probably that your product sucks. Like you need to be thinking hard about calling a troll now. Are there blackhat negative review campaigns? Yes, there are. That stuff happens. But I bet it only happens 1% of the times people accuse it of happening. Right? Most people they’re launching products unless they’re launching supplements or toys, like those super competitive things where the black hat guys are going after you. Most people aren’t going after you. Like if I’m selling a mason jar toothbrush holder that has 4000 searches and I saw it on Pinterest and there’s nobody out there attacking me with negative review campaigns and that it’s too small, like nobody’s paying attention to those niches right? So if I get three or four one star reviews, I’m gonna figure out, is my jar breaking? Like what’s the problem? So it’s not always a simple answer of like, oh, once I hit a certain number of bad reviews, I restart the listing. Sometimes I try to crawl back out of the hole because it’s bad luck. But if they’re legit bad reviews, I need to figure out why it’s happening. Because if I just relaunched the product, it’s probably gonna happen again.

Norman 42:10  

Right? Are there any? How do I say this? Or they’re the least important thing that people can think of? That is important. Does that make sense?

Tim 42:25  

Absolutely not. I look so confused, what are you talking about?

Norman 42:28  

Oh, God, okay, this happens all the time. Alright. Is there somebody like it might be focusing on your reviews, might be focusing on the question area, might be on an Amazon post, but is the least important thing out there that people sometimes overlook? Are there things that are important to be focusing on right now? Like maybe getting, adding questions or coupons stack or photos or back end, putting up keyword research or whatever?

Tim 42:59  

I think really simple things right now and I’ll go to the big things that people are overlooking simple things, people are overlooking are videos, right? You don’t have to have a trademark in, you don’t have to have Brand Registry necessarily use videos just to use those. Even a year ago, you could have somebody leave a review video on any listing, like you can leave it on anybody’s. People are overlooking that. I think that off Amazon traffic is being overlooked right now and it can be super confusing, almost daunting, like almost scary, like, Oh, my gosh, driving traffic to Amazon and I’m not saying I get misquoted all the time he likes it. Tim says drive all your traffic to Amazon. No, it’s not what I’m saying. There are a lot of times you sit into funnels and you capture the audience. But man, sometimes if I’m launching something on Amazon, just a quick boost, I’ll just drive some Pinterest traffic straight to Amazon because it’s easier to convert, and I have the higher buyer intent coming to Pinterest. I’ve since learned from Joe Wrightsville that may not be the best thing to do. My point is, there are other places where you can drive traffic to that’s inexpensive. If I go to Google, Google ads are getting pretty competitive because there’s so many people running them. What about Bing, nobody talks about Bing Ads. Well Bing only accounts for 10% of the internet users, but they’re the people that get a Microsoft Windows laptop, and that’s the native browser and they just don’t know how to change it. So they’re using Bing right and those people might not be super internet savvy. So run some ads on Bing drum straight to Amazon to get a little boost right? So off Amazon traffic, use videos. I can’t really speak too much like voice because a lot of stuff voice enabled or we’re still trying to figure that out. But the biggest thing that I think people are overlooking right now is not the nuances of tweaking your listing and I see this all the time people like man if I could get my A cost down another 2%. Man my conversion rate needs a 1% tweak man this, this, this, this, this. They’re getting frustrated. Oh, I got one more three star review when I had 289 five star reviews and it’s affected my I would say that the biggest problem that people are having they’re overlooking, it’s just picking those the right dang product to launch, like people that are freaking out about, oh, well, if I could just get my PPC A cost down to the 2%, I’d be profitable. A cost 2% difference will make you profitable. You’re selling the wrong thing. Your margins are too low, right? People like to get all upset about their duties. Oh, I thought the import duties were 15%. I found out they’re 17 and a half percent. Oh no, I’m gonna lose on this product. I’m not. Dude, if a 2% import duty crashed your profitability. You pick the wrong dang product, right? Do your homework first. Don’t get emotionally attached to a product. Don’t go out and decide, oh, I think mason jars are cool. I’m gonna launch a mason jar toothbrush holder, figure out what’s in demand with low competition, launch that, then your margin should be high enough that if your import duties change by 10%, who cares? If your A cost changes by 10%, who cares? If you get one star review, even at launch, but you’re the only person that has this product listed on Amazon, who cares? People are still going to buy it, you’ll eventually get those five star reviews, right? So my little soapbox for the day, quit worrying about your 1% tweaks and start picking the right product. 

Norman 46:11  

There you go. Alright, Kels. I think there’s more questions here.

Kelsey 46:14  

Yep. So yeah, George Smith, I’m so surprised to find out that all the competitors in the first two pages are Chinese companies. Who can compete with your own supplier in China? I think Amazon models of businesses are no longer suitable or sustainable. What do you think?

Norman 46:30  

Alright,you or me that’s going to do this, this is perfect.

Tim 46:35  

I think that you can start and I’m going to get fired up to answer this too

Norman 46:39  

You start and then I’ll finish.

Tim 46:42  

Stop talking about the Amazon business model and George, I’m not meaning to be critical to you. But like I’ve stood on stage, with 1000 people and said, raise your hand if you’re an Amazon seller, nobody goes and I’ll say quit being a dead Amazon seller and obviously, like we’re supposed to. I strongly encourage you to think of yourself as an e-commerce seller that uses Amazon or as a product seller that uses Amazon, right? So when I see a question like this, George, I know exactly what’s in your head and it’s this typical model of that all the courses have taught, you go to Jungle Scout, you go to Alibaba, you buy this thing, you put your sticker on it, you bring it in and sell it, that business model is gone and I would argue that it’s almost always been gone. We were able to slip under the radar for a little while. I mean, like some of my old products like these emergency hammers, that’s exactly what I did. I sold them. But it wasn’t a great model just because I had a year’s worth of sales, because then it tanked, it got too saturated. If you’re building an e-commerce business, where you have a product that’s in demand with low competition, either you’re one of the few people offering it and demand is higher than is supported by the current products available, or your branding is so good, people want your brand, people want your buyer experience, people want all that stuff, then your Chinese suppliers are never gonna be able to keep up. Right? They’ll never, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a Chinese competitor try to launch the same thing as me and they can’t do it because they don’t know what PPC and running, they don’t understand targeting keywords, they don’t understand the buyer journey. They don’t understand creating a brand, they don’t understand any of that stuff and eventually they give up and for me, I usually try to sell products that fly under the radar. I don’t have a single product that sells more than about 40 units a day and I love it. If I have a product start selling 40,50, 60, 70 and today I’m getting nervous because now people are going to see that and the Chinese suppliers, Chinese, I’m not saying all Chinese positives, but the ones you’re talking about the the suppliers in China that are competing with you by basically taking your ideas. They’re not interested in stuff that sells 30,40 units a day, because the only way they can compete is to drop the price so low, that they have to have huge volume to make any money. So if I’m selling something 20 units a day, 30 units a day, they’re not interested, they’re probably not going to compete with me, right? It just doesn’t happen. So again, it goes back to picking the right product. When you’re picking the right product and you’re not thinking of yourself as an Amazon seller, then the Chinese business model or the Amazon business model is not as much of an equation that you have to worry about.

Norman 49:21  

Oh, Hey, Joy.

Tim 49:24  

Joy Packard!

Norman 49:26  

Was an E Woo.

Tim 49:28  

I haven’t seen Joy. Joy, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.

Norman 49:32  

Yeah, so. Okay, I want to go back to George’s question for a second. Because I see this all the time. I get asked this all the time as well. Let the Chinese or whoever, if you want to buy plastic shoe stretchers and they want to be 75 cents each or whatever it is. Let the low priced bottom dwellers product cannibalize themselves. What you do or at least what I advise is I always like perception, if I can do something different than the plastic shoe stretcher, I don’t know different color, different string, spring, different whatever, make it more unique. Spend money on the packaging, but even, it’s not so much as just being on Amazon, you want to build that brand. So be that brand, have a nice listing, have your ecom, like your Shopify site, build up some consistent looking social media, and then start building content and content either through PR, it could be videos, it could be a blog article. Now you’re driving traffic over and what’s one of the first things that you do I don’t know about you. But when I see something new on Amazon, I go onto Google, my kids will say I’ll say the Google but it’s Google.

Tim 50:53  

No, that’s the Facebook, not the Google.

Norman 50:56  

The Facebook, not the Google and I’ll check it out and if I’m consistent, guess what, I can get twice the price, or three times the price and it happens all the time. It’s not that, like, let’s say something’s 3.99 and everybody’s in around that price. I’ll go up, if I can to 7.99 and I’ll compete with the higher end products, sometimes you can’t do it. But most of the time, you can and you’re making more products. For those that want to compete on volume, that’s one thing. But the people that want quality, and there’s a lot of Amazon, people that want quality, they’ll buy my product.

Tim 51:34  

Don’t get tied up in the sales volume fallacy. Like people think that they’re losing on Amazon because they’re selling a mason jar at $20. But the Chinese come in, and they have I’m just, throwing that out as a generalization. The Chinese come in, and they have a three pack for $20 and they’re selling three times as many as me. Who cares? If I’m profitable I promise you I’m making way more money than they are with a third of the sales. Because my profit margins are there. So don’t get caught up in this fallacy of like, oh, they’re selling more than me and volume. They’re doing it better than me. That’s not always the truth.

Norman 52:16  

Right. Alright,Kels, next.

Kelsey 52:18  

All right and just to let you know, we are at the 52 minute mark.

Tim 52:23  

I went fast.

Kelsey 52:24  

Yeah, you did. Okay. Alan has a question. As we are aware, there are significant delays with Amazon checking in our goods. Do you know food products take priority, or are they treated the same as non food products?

Norman 52:40  

I don’t know that. Tim?

Tim 52:42  

Oh, I don’t know. I’ll tell you what I have noticed is many, especially perishables use different fulfillment centers, just like many super oversized things use different fulfillment centers. So I’m not sure that it’s like my mason jars and my protein bars are all getting shipped into DF one. Or DFW one, is it? Yeah. Like I don’t know that the protein bars are going to take higher precedence. But if I have especially perishable, it’s going to go to a different fulfillment center, which is by nature faster, right? Because they have to get food in. So Alan, I don’t think that is a general statement. It’s fair to say food gets checked in faster I think pallets show up. But I will say that some fulfillment centers that aren’t as bogged down with all the general merchandise will be faster by design for perishables, for hazmat, and for super oversized stuff, right.

Kelsey 53:38  

Next question, yep. Alright. Let’s do Tony’s. After exploring a new, potentially profitable keyword, should I put it into a new campaign or leave it into an existing campaign exact and broad?

Tim 53:52  

That’s kind of like saying which color is best? Depends on who you ask. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. For me, I think that it all comes down to organization. I don’t like to have a campaign with 50 keywords because I think Amazon just starts losing that and jacks it up. But if I’m looking at a different keyword for a product, hey, I want to add these three keywords that talk about something different. I’ll usually set up a new campaign for my own organization, like hey, test campaign, test dash, drywall, whatever that keyword is just to help me remember that because also, if I put that keyword in a different campaign, my campaign metrics can get skewed, if like the conversion rate and sales right and A cost is not high. So just from a quick glance, I like segmenting everything out. So I can do a quick analysis of which groups of keywords are performing better than others. I don’t necessarily know that it matters too much.

Norman 54:46  

Now, we may have already touched on this but do you have any pricing optimization tips for the holidays?

Tim 54:55  

No, because I just leave it just like it is. By now, I’ve already priced the house out of saying it The moment you launch a product, you know what the price needs to be, you’ve researched the crap out of it, you know what your competitors are, you know what your profit margins need to be, pick your price and stick with it, you shouldn’t need to adjust anything. If all of my competitors, all jack that price up a little bit 10% of the time, as long as I don’t affect my sales velocity, I’ll make a little bit more money. But I’m not going to jack up my price to slow down my sales intentionally for now stock like we talked about, or to eliminate an out of stock situation. So generally, I just keep it like it is and go back and look at your Keepa or your Helium 10. That graph on Helium 10, that shows you your sales to see and look at your big sellers, your big sellers, they didn’t jack their price up all over the place, you open it up to all time and look back to 2016. That sucker’s has been the same price forever. But they’ve sold a bazillion units of those things. I don’t think that we need to make that many changes. I think that all that does is complicates our lives and it confuses Amazon, because Amazon starts wondering what what the crap is going on to these people and that’s when you see stuff, get reindex and you see stuff, lose your own buy box and you see all sorts of craziness happen, just leave it alone.

Norman 56:09  

Yeah, I do think though, when you are coming into holidays, or if you’re in a launch, you want to probably split like do a split test on the pricing, and make sure that it is an optimal pricing for the listing and that really comes down to the quality of the listing or the perceived value again, but yeah, you can use I was at one point, I use Splitly. But the other thing you can do is just go out to UsabilityHub or PickFu and check out the price to make sure that it’s at the right price. But if you’re doing that, make sure you click the proper demographics and that’s crazy important.

Tim 56:49  

Yeah. So I don’t think that, I wouldn’t say hey, never adjust the price. What you said was during the launch? Yeah, during a launch, I’ll keep it lower because I want that conversion rate, click through rate super high. But if it’s an existing listing moving into Christmas, I’m probably not going to adjust it just because I’m moving into q4, right? If it’s brand new, I’ll do some price adjustments for the launch. But if I’ve been selling it for 12 months, kind of leave it alone unless all my competition disappears and I’ll start creeping up.

Norman 57:15  

Hey, Kels. Are there any other questions for q4?

Kelsey 57:19  

Let me see. There’s one.

Norman 57:22  

Or anybody has any questions?

Kelsey 57:23  

Yeah, there’s still tons. Oh, yeah, I’m not sure if we’re gonna be able to fit them in. But, this Prime Day sees so much action in the UK? EU?

Norman 57:37  

I am not sure.

Norman 57:38  

I know about North American Prime Day. We should do that. We should take a study or get the the numbers from

Tim 57:48  

Let me just call Jeff Bezos real quick. 

Norman 57:50

Can you?

Tim 57:54  

Hey Jeff Row. Give me the deets on that UK Prime day.

Kelsey 57:59  

Alright,we’ll jump into Nathan’s question. Will Amazon customers actually pay more for a Made in America? I know people want Made in America but are they willing to pay extra?

Tim 58:09  

It depends on the product. If it’s a plastic shoe stretcher, nobody cares.

Norman 58:14  

Cosmetics?

Tim 58:17  

If it’s cosmetic, yes, if it’s a mason jar, nobody cares. But if it’s three mason jars made on a wooden stand that you hang on the wall to hold your cosmetics and toothbrushes. Then maybe so. So is this like cosmetics, ingestibles, consumables? Yes. Is this a luxury item? Yes. But if it’s just a commodity, tchotchke or something, then no. So it’s very, very much product dependent. Right.

Kelsey 58:46  

Okay and we have Tony from he was on Friday. Amazon is putting a major focus on the brands, what strategies do you have to optimize your Amazon storefront? How can we get traffic to the storefront organically instead of always using PPC?

Tim 59:04  

Well, here’s how I would answer this, Tony. When you shop on Amazon, you go to people’s storefronts because I sure don’t. The old time I go to the storefronts to see what else they’re selling, researching. I was at a meeting once with the guy from Racket in the Japanese marketplace and he was explaining the difference between Amazon and Racket 10 and Racket 10 is a storefront platform. He was like this is kind of like walking into a shopping mall. You walk down the aisle and you see the American Eagle store and you see the Hot Topic store and you see the store, store, store and you know exactly what’s in the storefronts. You have loyalty to those stores. But you walk into or you log in Amazon, it’s like walking to Walmart. You walk into four categories, but it’s a hodgepodge of all sorts of brands of crap everywhere. Right and while I understand Amazon is having some success marketing brands, I’m not convinced they’re going to have success driving people to storefronts, because that’s just not the way Amazon is. I don’t go to Amazon and search for Nike. I go when I search for Nike running shoe size 12. I don’t care about the Nike storefront, I want to see what Nike running shoe size 12 there are in the list. The way it is, our intent is for a product. Maybe a brand, but definitely not just a storefront. I’m not sure how much focus I’m going to put right now on the Amazon storefront. Although it looks cool, I just don’t think people are using it. Right now I’m not at all saying products aren’t or branding is not important. Look, we’re talking about prices. Look at TOMS shoes. It’s a canvas shoe, I can buy it for $4 at Walmart. But I’m more likely to go to Amazon and pay 60 bucks for it because the brand, so brands are important. But I’m just looking at TOMS Shoes, I’m not looking at the TOMS shoe storefront. Right, so just my opinion and maybe this will change like a lot of things do and I’m sure some people have had success with it. But for me, I just don’t think Amazon is designed and educate people well enough buyers to really utilize a storefront. So I’m not spending a ton of time on it.

Norman 1:01:11  

This is another area where you can drive people over to your Shopify site and you can display your brands there, or display your products there, have some sales, and then drive over to Amazon as well and the beauty of doing that is your conversion rate. So if people have already seen something, and they like what they’re going to buy, chances of them buying it are very good. Another area where you can play around with it without actually going to your storefront Tony is in Amazon posts, you can take these cross, you can cross promote now that you can do multiple images. So you can cross promote all these different products that you have, and drive people over from your competitors page over to yours, at least the impressions and if they go through the cycle, the four clicks, your conversion rate is definitely going to pop up.

Kelsey 1:02:07  

Okay, and we are past the one hour mark.

Kelsey 1:02:11  

I’m sure there’s two more questions. But if it’s, that’s okay.

Norman 1:02:17

Can we do the marathon two Tim?

Tim 1:02:18  

Yeah, we can do two more.

Norman 1:02:20  

Okay, so two more and we are done with that. 

Kelsey 1:02:24

Alright, so I’ll do this one from Era. Do American customers appreciate made in Germany?

Tim 1:02:30  

I think for certain products yes. I think European made is fine. I mean, I want Italian leather. Right? I want Swiss watches, I think for sure.

Kelsey 1:02:40  

Okay and our last one from Dr. Koz, hey, Jordan, if you’re selling fast and know you’re going out of stock, what is the reason not to jack up the price to slow sales?

Tim 1:02:50  

Yeah, and we mentioned this earlier, so you can get more of a lengthy explanation if you watch the replay this earlier on. But if you jack up the price to save a few more days of being in stock, by jacking up the price, you will decrease your conversion rate and decrease your click through rate. So when you do run out of stock, your placeholder essentially and your page positioning will be lower than if you just let it run out and Amazon is doing a pretty good job of maintaining your spot. They know if I run out and I’m positioned for even if I restock two months later, they’ll usually put me on page one. If I slow down in those last three days, I go from position four to position 14. When I restock, I’m probably closer to 14. So I don’t think it’s worth it to be longer. But lower converting. Right. I did a really good YouTube video on that if you want to see my hand graph, go to the Private Label Legion or just Tim Jordan on YouTube and there’s a recent video where I drew out a kind of graphic of that.

Norman 1:03:50  

Yeah, some people last week were asking about wood products. So I directed them over to your wood tips, sourcing wood tips.

Tim 1:04:00  

My woods.

Tim 1:04:03  

You directed my wood tips? Thanks Norm.

Norman 1:04:05  

You know what I told you Turkey.

Norman 1:04:13  

I sent them over to your YouTube video. 

Tim 1:04:16  

Norm, I know we’re good friends but, man, that we got some problems on that stuff.

Norman 1:04:21  

Okay, now I’m turning red. 

Tim 1:04:28

But Joy Packard’s on here. She’s just shaking her head.

Norman 1:04:30  

I know. I know.

Norman 1:04:32  

I think everybody is.

Norman 1:04:36  

Alright,sir. Is there anything else you’d like to talk about? Other than wood tips?

Tim 1:04:45  

No, it’s the same stuff we talked about in the beginning. Y’all get excited. Q4 is going to be huge. If you don’t have a ton of inventory. If you’re just getting started, write it off, but don’t be discouraged because look, this COVID thing sucks. I mean, 2020 has just been a dumpster fire over a year. But the truth is, even when the actual pandemic is over, more people are gonna be shopping online. So I still say there’s never been a better time to be an e-commerce seller. But don’t be an Amazon seller, be an e-commerce seller. Think long strategy. Don’t think short term , hacks. Don’t be too reactionary, every big decision. You’re gonna make sleep on it for a night or two. Keep calm and carry on. This is not a flash in the pan. This is going to be a long term deal. But you don’t wanna drive yourself crazy making rapid decisions based on emotion. That may not be the best decision. So Alright.

Norman 1:05:35  

So how can people get a hold of you, Tim?

Tim 1:05:37  

Facebook and if guys, this is terrible. Norm, are the same way. I have like 1500 message requests I’ve never read. But go to my Facebook group Private Label Legion. Join that. I think there’s 5000 members or so in there now and it’s a good community, privatelabellegion.com and I have a mastermind too called Centurion League. You can Google the Centurion League Mastermind.

Norman 1:06:01  

Alright,very good and of course, you’re the host.

Tim 1:06:03  

Oh and my podcast. Yeah and AM/PM is on every podcast platform, YouTube. One episode every week drops. It’s all good in the hood. 

Norman 1:06:15  

Oh very good. Alright,Tim. Well, thank you, sir, for joining us today. Really appreciate your time.

Tim 1:06:21  

Yeah, thank you for having us on and thank you for doing this. I know you put in a lot of work to put this content out there and you and Kelsey do so. Thank you guys for continuing to faithfully provide content for everybody.

Norman 1:06:33  

Hey, you’re very welcome and we got to have you back on. 

Tim 1:06:36

Sounds good. 

Norman 1:06:37

Alright,sir. We will talk to you soon. Alright,everybody. So I hope you enjoyed this podcast today. As we mentioned at the beginning, this whole episode will be on my Norman Farrar, a.k.a. The Beard Guy. If you want to watch the video, check out our video YouTube channel and we have tons of content there not just the episode, but tons of other content. Also, if you’re looking for great content, check out our newsletter at normanfarrar.com. Or at I know this guy or sorry, Lunch With Norm. I Know this Guy’s the other podcast. But Lunch With Norm. There’s an area to subscribe to the newsletter. I promise you it doesn’t suck comes out every Monday. It’s all about e-commerce, not just Amazon and Kelsey, where are you sir?

Kelsey 1:07:28  

I’m here. Hello and thank you everyone for watching. Yes, we had lots of engagement. Lots of questions for you. 

Norman 1:07:35

Yeah, that’s awesome. 

Kelsey 1:07:36

Yeah, so we are an official podcast. So find us on Apple, Spotify, Podbean, anywhere you listen to your podcast, you can find us. We are on YouTube. So if you’re looking for the replay, you can just go straight to YouTube. Just search Norman Farrar, and you’ll be able to find it. We are doing a little bit of rebranding on some of the YouTube videos and so you might see a little bit of a different thumbnail coming up soon. But, yeah.

Norman 1:08:09  

Oh, and about the group?

Kelsey 1:08:10  

Oh, yes, the group. So it’s coming. We promise. I’m hoping to get this up maybe this week. But keep on the lookout for that. Maybe start thinking of some friends that you want to add to the group as well. But I’ll be moderating and Norm will come in too, so we get both of us and yeah, we’re looking to build a community. Should be lots of fun and we’ll do some giveaways. Give away some mugs. Yeah, it should be a lot of fun.

Norman 1:08:41  

A few things and yeah, help support Kelsey, because if you don’t join the group, I don’t pay Kelsey. So anyway, please, please, please join to pay Kelsey. Alright,everybody. So thank you for tuning in today and remember, every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at noon, Eastern Standard Time, we’re live. So thank you for joining the podcast today and enjoy the rest of your day.