The Ups and Downs of Amazon's Growth

In episode #452 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Andrew Engle and Huy Nguyen are back. They are 7 figure sellers, but had very different 2022’s. One was up about a million while the other was down a million. We discuss in this episode how they dealt with their wins and losses, as well as a wide range of their strategies including PPC, Insert cards, credit card hacks, ChatGPT, and more.

In episode 452 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley, Huy, and Andrew discuss:

• 01:34 – Links to Andrew’s and Huy’s Backstory Episodes
• 02:20 – How was Andrew’s 2022 in Sales? 
• 03:50 – Andrew’s one Order of 250 Units!
• 04:46 – Huy’s Sales Have Gone Down
• 08:41 – How Do You Deal With a $1 Million Decrease In Sales?
• 11:58 – Andrew Increased from 16 to 60 SKUs in a Year.
• 15:50 – Huy is Consolidating Marketplaces.
• 19:12 – Insert Card ard QR Code Strategy.
• 24:02 – Andrew’s PPC Strategies.
• 28:45 – Success with Google and Bing Ads.
• 30:57 – Huy’s Suggestions for Using ChatGPT
• 33:08 – Credit Card Hacks
• 36:11 – Helium 10 Party at Dave & Busters

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got a couple Elite Amazon sellers who do millions a year on Amazon, and they’re gonna talk about not just their wins, but also they’re gonna get honest about their losses over the last year and give us some of their top strategies. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. We’ve got two serious sellers here, two elite sellers who are no stranger to the podcast. We’ve had them on here before, Andrew, and Huy, how’s it going?

Huy:

Going good.

Andrew:

Going good.

Bradley Sutton:

Excellent. Now, let me give you guys we’re not gonna go too much into their backstory because they’ve been on the podcast before. So if you wanna get Andrew’s backstory, guys, go to episode 319. I believe you can do that at h10.me/319. But it was an episode where we had Andrew and his brother on talking about their, their journey as brothers starting Amazon Business. And Huy has been on a couple times. The last time we was on was episode 305. He did an episode with Ankit. They talked about, you know, to together achieving over 20 million in sales between the the two of them. And his original backstory episode was, I believe, let’s see, 190. So if you wanna find out Huy’s superhero origin story, make, make sure to check out episode one 90.

Bradley Sutton:

But we’re not gonna go, like I said, too much into the backstory today because we just wanna see what these guys have been up to. So, first of all Andrew you know, this is the first time I’m talking to you in depth in 2023. How did your 2022 end, what was your wins and losses and, and what, like, how, how do your sales do? So in 2021, I’m looking at your original episode, I believe either you or you and your brother did about 1.6 million total. Was that just you or was that you and your brother together?

Andrew:

So that was just me. I can’t remember what my brother did that year, but yeah, that was just me that year for 2022. Yeah, for all through 2022 I did really good. I think I was, I think my goal was to get 3 million. I thought I was gonna get 3 million in 2022, but I only ended up at 2.4 still.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, yeah, you suck. That’s terrible. It’s like 2.4 million. What the heck?

Andrew:

I’ve still gotta have goals. But yeah, some of that was, I think coming off of Covid when everything started to open back up again, a lot of my stuff is industrial supplies, so things you could get at Home Depot or Lowe’s. So I feel like more people went to, you know, get that online there. And then I also got some more competitors that took a little bit of market share. So I think a little bit of combination of those two things. But for 2023 everything looks good. I’m, I’m 40% year over year, according to Helium 10. So that’s, that’s good. So kinda starting off 2023 pretty good.

Bradley Sutton:

And, and what were you telling me? Like when, when we were we were just chatting here before, before we got started, you just saw an order go through your FBA for 250 units of one, one product.

Andrew:

Yes. 250 units of, I like pulled up Helium 10. I saw a huge, like, spike. I’m like, oh, what was that? And just going through and 250 units of one product is,

Bradley Sutton:

Is that normal? Like, do you have a product that, that people buy in bulk a lot, or this is just like, has never, ever happened before?

Andrew:

Sometimes I get bulk orders, so I have, I’ll sell like, individual units and then I’ll sell like case packs of like, you know, 150 of those units, or like a hundred pack of of those units On this one, I, I don’t have a case pack like that. But yeah, sometimes I do get bigger orders but not, I, I would say not very often, maybe like once a month or something.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Interesting. Huy, I forgot what you were at in 2021. I think you were around like four or 5 million or, or so or what was your 2021, 2 years ago?

Huy:

Yeah, we were around that mark.

Bradley Sutton:

And how was last year up or down?

Huy:

I can say last year was down, so, you know, I’ll be one of those guests on your, on your your podcast that we’ll share it kind of like the downs. You know, I, I

Bradley Sutton:

Like that we always keep it real here, you know, not every,

Huy:

Everything

Bradley Sutton:

I tell Amazon’s not rainbows and unicorns every 365 days a year. So, so was it down just, you know, due to market, did you, did you like, you know, maybe lose a little focus and, and, and concentrate on some other things? Or just the natural cycle of your products? What do you think happened?

Huy:

Yeah, so we saw in the supplements category, and one of the big things that happened for us is during Covid, right? A lot of things you know, weren’t available supply chain issues as well. So we did overorder significantly just because I think that everybody was just, we had problems you know, with supply chain, we had our manufacturers put out really long lead times. And on top of that, I think that the biggest thing was, you know, like if people weren’t used to ordering online, then now everybody was ordering online, right? So you saw a lot of national brands, a lot of big big brands that are out there. They shifted a lot of their revenue dollars from retail directly into online. And then, you know, you started to see as well, Amazon make a significant push into advertising as well into search advertising.

Huy:

And you can see, you know, like if you look at their financials it became a massive part of their business. So a few years back, people didn’t really look at Amazon as being you know, a leader in the online advertising space, but you saw a lot of brands that were, you know, that had just added Amazon as a channel or weren’t necessarily concentrating on Amazon as a channel start to focus more on Amazon and start to push more of their marketing dollars towards that. And so, you know, like small businesses such as ourselves you know, we’ve been on Amazon for 10, 11 plus years and we’ve had the luxury of not having a tremendous amount of competition come in from, you know, some of the more traditional brands. People were focusing on it. They knew that they had some you know, they knew they had customers there.

Huy:

But then that, I think that a lot of people started to push much heavy, much more heavily into Amazon because they knew that’s where their customers were buying. And and so, yeah, like a lot of people, a lot of the brands that we were competing against drop prices you know, the cost of advertising became significantly higher and there was just much more competition. We’re already in a competitive space to begin with. So I think that, you know, we’ve been playing catch up. We’re not a lowcost leader and we generally don’t wanna play in that game. We’re on the higher end. And so I think that it’s difficult sometimes when we look at our, you know, our cost per click and just our you know, cost to acquire a customer. It’s difficult to play that game in large run.

Huy:

It’s just lose continuous amounts of money in the advertising space competing with larger brands that just push more sales volume and have outside advertising. And, you know, for them it, you know, it’s, it might be more cost effective to acquire that first sale and just push for a higher, you know, just to maintain, maintain brand relevance within Amazon. So I think that a combination of that, and then we’ve also had a few logistical issues that have kind of taken us on a downward path, but we’re on our way to turning that around now.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now 2022 versus 2021. Hey, if you were to put a dollar amount on how much you were down, like, were you down a million, were you down less than a million, more than a million year over year?

Huy:

Yeah, I would say we were down over a million. It’s tough to admit that.

Bradley Sutton:

This is why I wanna dive into that now. As a business owner, cuz that happens probably more times than people are up a million you know, are people down a million, you just don’t hear about it that much because people are too shy to come on podcasts and I’m like, Huy is like, Hey, he’s putting it all out there. But how do you deal with that? Do you have to cut back on other costs? Like, like do you have to lay off staff at all? Or how does a how does a business keep going after, you know, losing that kind of gross revenue?

Huy:

Yeah, I think I’m used to, I’ve, I’ve worked with a lot of startups in the past. You know, it’s been great for us for 10 plus years on Amazon. We’ve been on an upward trajectory. But this is the longest I’ve ever done something. I’ve heard it that way. So I’m used to you know, doing other businesses. I have an entrepreneurial mindset, jumping around doing a lot of different things. So I’m used to the ups and the downs, but it’s one of those things as an operator you just have to be calm, have to take a look at, sure. You know, the things that you can control and things that you can’t control and focus on what you can control. I know it’s very cliche to say that, but a lot of it came down to looking at operating costs, operating efficiency and trying to figure out, you know, what changes can you make in the business in order to operate at a more comfortable margin.

Huy:

We didn’t do any fundraising, so we’re completely, you know, bootstrapped I would say from, from the beginning. But we didn’t lay off any staff necessarily. I think the biggest thing was just looking at all the different platforms that we pay for, all the different apps that we pay for. We used to use a couple of the different, different three pls and we didn’t really, we always wanted to get away from using three pls just because we didn’t have full control. And a lot of times the 3PLs didn’t work out. They made a lot of mistakes and errors. So we took that opportunity to move a lot of our fulfillment in-house. And now that would seem like the opposite, where it might be more cost effective to use a 3PL. But in our case we just crunched some of the numbers and found it more effective to control more of our operating processes. So really a lot of it was like trimming the fat, cost cutting, cutting out a lot of apps that we weren’t using. And yeah, I mean, we were using everything and not that we were using it efficiently. We had just been operating like that for such a long time.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Yeah. So that’s, that’s good. That’s important for everybody to hear. That’s why I was especially excited to have you back on the podcast is, it’s important to understand that hey, you know, in a perfect world, sure, everybody just keeps going up and up and just, you know, have all the subscriptions and all the overhead that, that you want and you’ll still stay profitable. But there’s ups and downs on Amazon. You gotta be able to pivot, you know it’s not like you just set up, we’re just gonna go ahead and pack up shop. We lost money, or we didn’t make as much money as the previous year. Let’s shut down our business. No, you look at where you can, you know, save some money and make adjustments. So that’s really good that you guys did that. Now, back to you, Andrew, I remember in the, or I don’t remember. That’s a lie. I’m looking at my notes from the last episode. My memory’s bad. But you had said that you found your very first product that you sold on Amazon, like using Black Box, and then at two years ago you had, you know, from that very first product you had expanded to about 16 different SKUs. What are you at now? About,

Andrew:

So I’m at about, I think like 53 now. It is really just four main product types, and then there’s different like color and size variations

Bradley Sutton:

And all in the same, all in the same brand and, niche.

Andrew:

Yeah. Yeah. All in the same brand, not the same category, but, you know, you would use, these products are all like industrial products that you’d use.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. So now what’s been your strategy, you know, to increase? You know I would say, like I said, more people are probably down that I talked to, were down last year compared to the previous year. But, but you were up, so is it just because you kept launching new products or you had some of your legacy products also still have been increasing?

Andrew:

Yeah, I would say a lot of the growth for me is just launching new products. If I looked at my existing product line from 2021 to now, it’s probably per unit, it’s probably gone down a little bit. Just cuz of, yeah, COVID was over more competitors in space now. So a lot of that was from coming out with new product lines.

Bradley Sutton:

So now one thing that I think a lot of Amazon sellers have a question of is, you know, sometimes you become top in your space or you’re the, the first person your space to really provides something. But then how do you protect yourself from just a lot of competitors, you know, be it from China, be it from other countries where there’s a lot of manufacturing, you know, going in and undercutting you and trying to steal your market. But like, how do you stay relevant? Like how do you stay at the top where you’re not losing your market share to up and comers who just look at what you’re doing and then just try and duplicate it and, and make it cheaper or, or do so, so how, how have you battled against that? Like is it differentiation? Is it unique marketing you think you’re doing? Or what’s going on?

Andrew:

That is, that is the battle, especially in the stuff that I offer because it’s not, you know, IP protected or anything like that. It’s havin, I try to have the best creative, I try to have, you know, I love PPC and online Ads stuff, so I’m always in there trying to maximize the potential for PPC you know, try to just have the best listing. That’s all I can kind of do. And then lately I’ve been, just in this year, I’ve started to talk to, I have some other friends that are in different businesses and stuff, and I have a local like distributor that might be interested in either some of my products or having me source products for them. So now I’m kind of looking into, you know, possibly doing that, which would be, you know, it wouldn’t be on Amazon, but it would be another kind of side source of income that would help.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now that 2.6 million you mentioned, is that all on Amazon USA or is there a Walmart in there or Amazon Canada or anything else?

Andrew:

There’s Walmart. I think Walmart was like, I sold like 20,000 on Walmart last year, so it’s kind of like whatever. But hopefully, I think that’s doing better this year, but I haven’t checked the numbers on that

Bradley Sutton:

Now. Now we, I remember before you have ridiculous experience as far as marketplaces from Japan to all over the world. So are you still expanding or have you consolidated, like to try and you know, just focus on certain marketplaces or what’s your strategy been the last couple of years?

Huy:

Yeah, I mean, we were selling in UK and all around Europe. We were selling in China and, Japan as well. And I’ll be honest we’re consolidating back down to the US and part part of that is that our product is not universal. Meaning that I can’t just take a US product and put it into the UK or Germany or Japan. And in the heavily regulated space, we need different labels. There’s a lot of compliance regulations that we need to go through. So logistically, we just made the decision that we needed to slim down on some of the things that we were doing, even though that we were making some revenue you know, in those other countries. But I think that just, you know, with the cost of compliance and you know, producing unique products for those markets, it was, you know, an easier decision for us to focus on the US market. You know, we expanded, yeah, outside of Amazon, we’re selling on Walmart and we’re selling a lot more direct as well. And that’s kind of been our focus is really, you know, going back to grassroots as a DTC company you know, focusing on how we can actually drive and build customer loyalty through our own website.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now you know, we talked a little bit about the L’S you took last year. What’s some W’s, what’s something unexpected that happened or something that you actually did expect and it actually worked out exactly as you, you had planned? Like a product launch or some marketing campaign or, or something?

Huy:

Yeah, I think a big W for us was that we increased our subscription revenue and you know, we’ve always been pretty focused on retaining customers and customer retention. So on average our subscription revenue has gone up on Amazon, our subscription percentage and just you know, LTV in terms of Amazon subscribe and Save has gone up. And then also looking at our own website, you know, a lot more of that has you know, improved as well. And I think that, you know, most of that is kind of focused on us not being like the loss leader in our product category, us focusing on providing a more premium product, also working with a lot of affiliates. And our affiliates are not just like internet marketers and you know, your typical influencers, but we have a lot of affiliate partners that are actually doctors and healthcare professionals.

Huy:

So when they find a product that works well for them you know, they continue to order from us or recommend our products. And that’s reflected a lot in our reviews online. So we know that a lot of, like providers that are out there you know, they don’t wanna stock a lot of product, they’ll just tell people which products to go buy. And they know that, you know, a lot of people right now are just going out and looking on Amazon, looking online to buy those products. So we’ll offer them a discount code or affiliate commission for them to give to their customers to just go out and order. And we do see that reflected in our reviews where a lot of our products are like, my doctor recommended this to me, or you know, my healthcare provider recommended this, this to me, and it’s worked great. So I think that’s a big w for us is that, you know, just increasing our subscription revenue. But we do suffer on net new because you know, with PPC and just trying to get people for the first time, sometimes they’ll go and look at other products that are much cheaper than ours. So we do require a lot of education upfront and you know, we’ve been doing a lot more of that externally.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you have like inserts or QR codes where you can capture some of that Amazon what’s your strategy there, the, the Amazon customers where, you know, you might not be able to market directly to them?

Huy:

Yeah, definitely. I mean, we’ve used insert cards for, you know, I can’t remember when we first started it, but it’s been many years since we use insert cards. And we’ve tried a variety of different things from free product offers you know, to eBooks and a lot of different things. But now we’re switch, we’ve switched over in the past year or so to using QR codes and just labels instead of insert cards. And part of that is also, it’s just to streamline our packaging a little bit more. But with the QR codes, you’re able to dynamically change the link. And it’s just easier. Everyone’s so used to just being able to scan the QR code now just with Covid and, you know, going into restaurants and scanning menus. So we are doing that. We’re trying a variety of different things. We’re trying to provide, you know, educational content as well as different offers. Obviously the educational content doesn’t resonate or not, doesn’t resonate as well, but doesn’t perform as well as offering a big discount or, or free product. So, you know, we’re continually testing, but the good news is that we do have the resources on the backend to kind of swap those offers out. And since we own all of our unfulfillment you know, we can make changes on the fly anytime.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, you’ve sold tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of units, I’m sure with QR codes and things. Have you ever had anyone flagged by Amazon or gotten slap on the wrist of any kind of insert card or QR code?

Huy:

No, we haven’t. And I think that the main reason why we haven’t is that we’re not doing any of those tricks where yep, we’re asking people for five star reviews. We’re not putting any five star imagery on there. We’re not asking for reviews before somebody claims an offer. And I think that that’s important where, you know, people have a variety of different opinions about insert cards and things like that. It’s just, it’s really like you know, you have to let kind of take a look at it from the customer perspective and Amazon’s perspective. If you make a universal offer, like this is part of your brand and you don’t treat, continue to treat yourself like just an Amazon brand, and I think that you’re gonna be okay and then, you know, just obviously review everything that Amazon’s doing and don’t do the things that they tell you specifically not to do, and then you’ll be okay.

Bradley Sutton:

What would you say is your take rate now on getting, you know, I’m assuming it’s, you’re trying to get the email address or something like for, compared to the, the orders, you know, is it 1%, 5%, you know, 10% of people are scanning and, and opting in?

Huy:

Yeah, I would say, depending on the offer you know, we were, before when we were doing the insert cards we had a, we were getting about a 10% take rate. So, you know, it’s definitely good enough. But one of the things that to consider for my business is different than other people’s business is that you know, a lot of our revenue, probably 40% plus is subscribe and save. So you’re not gonna get people continually coming through. It does vary from time to time, but I think that, you know, obviously 10% is great. We’re happy when we’re getting it, and I think that, you know, that should be something that I hope that’s what other people are getting.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. And then which one is performing? You mentioned you, you, you’ve tried a lot of different things, whether it’s the education or do you do everthing like, I don’t know, you can’t really have a lifetime warranty on supplements or something, but, but what’s, what’s your best copy that gives you the best opt-in rates?

Huy:

I think that, you know, giving a product offer a complimentary gift that’s always performed well. And I think just naturally people want something for free. But we do offer a lifetime warranty on our supplement. So if anybody’s not happy with it at any time, they can always just return it. So it’s, and that’s just another point as well, right? So if somebody’s thinking about this and they may have purchased like a three pack or a six pack or something like that anytime somebody asks for a, a refund or lets us know that they’re not happy, then we’re happy to oblige by that. Yeah. The majority of people do not. So it’s, it’s really something that we don’t find too too much liability in providing that. But yeah, I mean, I think that anytime you can offer a complimentary product a discount it’s gonna depend by category, the educational content, yes, we get a lot of people to come through for that as well, but it clearly doesn’t perform as well as, you know, providing an offer.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Alright. Back to Andrew. Now you know, you saw Huy there is is giving us some good strategies there. So what’s some unique strategies that you’ve been using? I remember the last episode, you, you were kind of tightlipped about it, but you know, you don’t have to give all your secrets away, but what’s some unique things that you think you’re doing that has been the secret of your, some of the secrets of your success?

Andrew:

I’ve really like, as far as like the Amazon PPCs concerned, like I take full advantage of the sponsored display video ads, all the, you know, brand video, like the video headline ads. I really like it.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s talk about, let’s talk about that a little bit. What’s your strategy like? Like how do you, you know, it’s not just a matter of, oh, lemme just turn this on and boom, I’m gonna be rich. I’m sure you have some kind of specific things.

Andrew:

Well, to a certain extent it is like there’s a lot of people that, there’s a lot of people that don’t use ’em. But I as far as like what some of my strategies are, like for a sponsored display video, you know, maybe I’ll create 10 different ads and some of ’em.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Let people know about what sponsored display video is. Cuz I think, you know, a lot of people know the sponsored brand video sponsored display video was something I believe launched sometime last year. So, you know, people know regular sponsored display ads is just that, you know, some of those ads that came near or show up near the buy box on, on product pages. But what is sponsored display video for those who might not have heard of that?

Andrew:

From what I understand, basically it takes up the same, you know, it takes the same placements as the sponsored display, but it’s, instead of just a, a solid picture, it’s a video and you can put different videos, different headlines you know, little captions and stuff on there. So you can really experiment with different stuff. And if, if I’m targeting one sort of complimentary product, I’ll put a different video and, and a few different headlines in there and test them and see which one’s gonna do best. And then if I’m targeting another type of complimentary product, it’ll be a different video. So just getting really granular in that, in that stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you choose your targets? Like, are you only looking at, you know, ASINs your auto campaign discover, or are you going and like using Black Box or even just looking on Amazon using X-ray or something to find like, you know, targets that you think, oh, like, I think, I think I would do well on this page. What,’s your strategy there?

Andrew:

I do use the, like the black box, like the product targeting for the Frequently Bought Together and things like that. And then Brand Analytics has like the, the market basket or something, or it’s shows the, you know, people who bought this also who bought your product also bought this. There’s one of my products that it’s an industrial product, but I found that people are buying it for like birthday parties too. And so it’s just like really random. So now I’m having, like, I’m creating content that’s like, has that product in it, but it’s like in birthday parties for like birthday parties for kids, you know? So I don’t know. So that’s that’s some of the ways I can.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s the thing that’s important to, that’s important to, to, to, to call out. Like the sometimes your product will, will get relevant for the most random thing. Like, I’m taking over this one account recently that I’m trying to do some case studies on, and one of the main products on there was, I think it’s like an oil diffuser or some or something like that. And if you look in Brand Analytics or search for your performance, and even Cerebro for some reason, there’s just tons of like sexual product related keywords that this thing is not just showing up for, but it’s converting for it. And, and for the life of me, I actually kind of don’t want to know why, you know, I don’t want to think about it too much. Like why in the world are, are, are people buying it for this keyword, but hey, the data’s there, you know, like you would’ve never thought, I would’ve never thought like a oil, you know, essential oil difference. Like what does this have to do with XYZ keyboard that I can’t even mention on air, but it’s like, hey, double down on it. It’s, it’s, people are use products in different ways and you might probably never thought an industrial product would be used in birthday parties, but if you see the data you gotta double down on it. That’s, that’s what,

Andrew:

What kind of a funny story, when I was helping my brother at the very beginning when we were getting him started, he was looking through different products and he is like, I found this rope. And it was like, but he looked at the reviews and it was like, this rope is being used for like, you know, for adult purposes. And it was like, you know, the rope was like pink and purple and, you know, stuff like that. And everyone was saying how soft the rope was and I was like, oh, I see what you’re, what what this is used for <laugh>. So anyway, yeah. Like he ended up not selling that’s not his product, but Okay.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, well what else? Well, we kind of diverted here a little bit from here. Yeah. Your PPC strategy, but, but what else are you doing in, in PPC s unique?

Andrew:

Trying to do, I’m experimenting with different stuff of trying to bring traffic from off Amazon on Amazon. So you know, Google Ads is like Google and Bing ads been playing with that, been playing with like display ads more on Google. I’m finding, you can drive traffic pretty with pretty cheap, you know, click or cost per click and I’m just trying to see if that, you know, if I get rewarded for that or if my rank changes anything like that. So that’s, that’s kind of what I’ve been doing. And then lately I’ve been a one man show for a long time and I have an assistant now who is doing great and I’m looking to just get more of a team set up so I’m not like constantly bearing all the load here cuz I’m, that’s, that’s definitely something I need some help with cuz I have a really hard time like letting go of some of this stuff.

Bradley Sutton:

Delegating.

Andrew:

Yeah, yeah.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. I think a lot of us definitely have that issue. We actually have a opportunity in a couple weeks, you know, we have our elite workshop and Huy is gonna be on this new thing that we’re trying to a, a panel where people can, a, you know, I like providing forums where people can just ask each other questions. Cuz sometimes people get shy, whether it’s online or in person. It’s like they have a question, but they’re like, ah, I don’t want to ask. Or, or they, they’re kind of shy to raise their hand or something. So we try and provide those opportunities. So, so we has graciously agreed to be one of our first panel members ask a seller anything panel that we’re gonna have. Yeah. Are you coming out, Andrew, to the Elite Workshop?

Andrew:

I don’t think I’m gonna be at the Elite one. I’m going to the Billion Dollar Seller Summit though, so I’ll be okay a little bit after that.

Bradley Sutton:

Cool. That’ll be our second one, right?

Andrew:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. First one was awesome. I’m really excited for the Puerto Rico one.

Bradley Sutton:

Yes, yes. I’ll be, I’ll be there. I’ll be there too. So if anybody wants to get more information than a Billion Dollar Seller Summit, h10.me/bdss, I, I believe is the link. We, any last tips and strategies? You know, like something like a 30 or 60-second tip that you can, you can give the audience.

Huy:

So a lot of people have been talking about ChatGPT and all these different AI tools that, you know, there’s hundreds of different tools coming out every single day, probably more. And I think that there’s a lot of noise out there and people are trying to figure out how to use it. They’re trying to figure out how to use it for themselves and how to possibly replace jobs that they’re doing or their team’s already doing. I think that probably the biggest tip that I can provide is allow and encourage every single person on your team to actually use it. Because, you know, if you’re using it from the top level as a business owner, you may see different things than somebody who’s using it in their everyday life as, you know, working you know, on your business. And we’ve done that as well.

Huy:

So anybody from customer service to operations to marketing, everybody’s been using it and improving processes kind of like the own process that we’re working on. And then those processes are adopted across our entire business so everybody becomes more productive as opposed to just kind of one person. And, you know, thinking about all of the processes within your business. The other thing is you know, along those lines is that don’t always trust information that you get from ChatGPT I find that more oftentimes it’s actually more inaccurate than it is accurate when, when providing information. I know that pre it doesn’t have access to the internet currently unless you have ChatGPT Plus you are able to use different extensions to go in there to give it access to the internet. But just be very careful with the content that you’re putting out there. Or, you know, do your research, play around and figure out how to incorporate into your business for yourself.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep, I like that. I like it. Andrew, what about you? Couple tips.

Andrew:

Yeah just touching on that ChatGPT like AI thing, I’ve kind of noticed the same thing. I’ve, I’ve caught, you know, chat G B T just making stuff up or like lying and I kind of looked into it, they call it hallucinations that, you know, it’s like, oh chat b t makes up these hallucinations. And I’m like, what? So be careful with that. One thing I’ve been trying to do, I’ve been watching exit ticket on helium 10 and just trying to learn more like financially, cuz I, I do think at the end of this year I wanna sell one of my brands. I do have kind of a credit card hack on American Express. They have a credit card called the Plum Card and I never really gave it the time of day in the past, but it allows you to basically have, instead of, you know, you have to pay 30 days after your statement, you can wait up to 60 days after your statement.

Andrew:

So it gives you like more cash flow, it gives you like an extra month to pay. So that’s just kind of something people can go check out. All you have to do is make the minimum payment by the first, by 30 days after the statement and then you can pay the rest off, you know, another 30 days after that. So I put like shipments on it and stuff where I can get, you know, basically just an extra 30 days of, of like credit and the only, the only downside is if you wait the full, the full like 60 days, you don’t get any credit card points, which I love getting credit card points, that kind of stinks. But you do get, if you pay it off, normally you get like 1.5% cash back, which is pretty like standard. But yeah, if you want an extra 30 days to pay stuff off the Plum card from American Express.

Huy:

Yeah, that’s a good tip

Bradley Sutton:

Right, cool. I haven’t heard of that one.

Huy:

I’ll just add onto that as well in addition to the Plum card cuz I was also looking into that there’s a card Parker, so Parker gives you net 60 as well and then you can combine, so you can combine that like you know, this is for people that need funding for operations inventory or whatever it is, giving you that extra 30 days. There’s also the other hack that probably a lot of people have talked about before is that, you know, if you need to pay a supplier with a credit card but they only allow you to use a check, then you can use something like plastic to do that. They do charge a small fee on that, but I think that in combination with just net 60 days on the credit card, you know, allows you a little bit of breathing room.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. I’ve used that a lot of times could

Huy:

Could also be dangerous if you put yourself in a yeah,

Andrew:

Make sure you’re keeping track, you know, always you get hit with a huge bill.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah, yeah. Good for you. Yeah, I do that a little bit because of just, you know, funds and also, you know, some travel hacking so I can, if I got a bonus for points on a certain month or something, then that’s why I go every 50 episodes of the Maldives on my credit card points and stuff. So yeah, plastic is definitely something that I think is great. All right guys, well Andrew, I’ll be seeing you in a few weeks at Billion Dollar Seller Summit. We, I’ll be seeing you in a couple weeks here at our headquarters. If anybody else is interested to go, just reach out to customer service. Even if you’re not a Heating 10 Elite member, you can actually pay to go, but it’s, it’s, it’s pretty expensive. I think we charge like six or $700 or something to attend but Elite members can go for free. And then the night before so guys, the night before the Elite Workshop, we are doing a social event, like a little party at Dave and Buster’s. Did you ever go Huy to any of our Dave and Buster events that we did way back in the day?

Huy:

I did. I went to probably the inaugural one where we used to be called like FBA high Rollers or something like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep.

Huy:

I do remember we had that big room and all those gold balloons with Manny and Gui, it was a good time actually. And that’s you know, those events actually, I met a lot of people from those events that I continued to talk with and just dm. There’s a lot of conversations that don’t happen in the Helium 10 Elite group like Ankit and I didn’t meet ’em at that event, but I’m just saying that like, you know, there are a lot of conversations that happen you know, once you build a relationship with somebody and that’s a great place because, you know, there’s so many people that have different backgrounds, different stories, and just great place to have conversations.

Bradley Sutton:

All right guys. Yeah, so May 24th, save the date for that. If if you want to go to that one that’s not just for elite members, you know, anybody can go to that one. So reach out to customer service if you don’t know of the if you don’t have the link or actually I’ll make a link right now. Just go to h10.me/irvine, h10.me/irvine. That’s, that’s where it’s gonna be at. And, and be some nostalgic times there because yeah, that was my first ever Helium 10 party too, was at the Dave and Busters there in the Irvine Spectrum. So we’re trying to bring it back to the old school. So I’ll be seeing you there at those events. Huy and Andrew again in Puerto Rico. So thank you guys so much for joining us. It’s great to to hear about both the wins and the losses, you know, that you have had and, and that you guys are definitely both successful Amazon sellers. And I know your inspiration to a lot of people listening out there. So thanks a lot and we’ll look forward to having you both on at some time next year as well.