My Amazon Guy

Send us a textSku limitations. We hope to see these go away soon, but for now it's complicated to manage. Amazon wants to be a distribution center, not a storage facility. This is why they are focussing on IPI limits. What are the principles of inventory management, what are some inventory management best practices?Adjusted Velocities to daily level.Buffer stock and seasonality.Why go from spreadsheet to sostocked.Syncing. 3rd party warehouses. Need to free time, inventory software.Most companies are going back to spreadsheets.What are some of the biggest mistakes people make in inventory management and forecasting?Not accounting for marketing plans as it relates to inventory planning.How to improve sales on Amazon:Improve bullet point in first words, "unlike other products that do XYZ, ours is better because. Sell into the objection."Chelsea Cohen is an Amazon inventory management expert and the co-founder of SoStocked.com, an Amazon inventory management software. She’s also a 7-figure Amazon seller, speaker & consultant. Her regular clients include 7 & 8-figure sellers. She has been featured on AM/PM Podcast, Seller Stories with Jungle Scout & the Amazing Summit stage, among others.Support the show

Send us a textMichael Maher runs Cartology, a full service Amazon agency, and speaks to the heart of how agencies often let down clients. We dive right in on this issue. There's a lot of meat to this conversation. Michael: "We do that by translating your brand story onto Amazon in a way that engages your audience, increases awareness, and generates revenue and focuses on profitability."Michael talks agency expectations. It's always the agency's fault client expectations are not met.Amazon sellers over estimate how fast sales will come from on Amazon. It requires signficiant capital in the beginning. Amazon seller support is not trained on how to problem solve. "They are meant to be a dam, to slow the flow."Amazon is leaving a hole open for competition. They are hard to beat because they are willing to spend and spend to grow and have low prices and high expectations with consumers. But this same thing happened with eBay because they put customers before suppliers. They should be equally important. How to grow Amazon sales?Major weight to advertising. Support the show

Send us a textBit by bit, Amazon sellers are eyeing the public markets. I read this article written by By Michael Waters. "Although Amazon’s third-party marketplace has been around since 2000, Amazon sellers have historically been far too small to reasonably consider going public. But as Amazon’s overall customer base ballooned this past year, so did the size of its top sellers. According to Amazon’s most recent earnings report, seller services — the amount that third-party sellers pay Amazon in commissions, fulfillment fees and so on — grew 57% year over year in 2020. Per Jungle Scout, 2% of Amazon sellers now boast lifetime profits of over $10 million. The third-party vendor Pharmapacks, for instance, brings in at least $250 million in annual sales."Read more of this article here: https://www.modernretail.co/platforms/why-amazon-brands-are-choosing-to-go-public/Support the show

Send us a textRobert Sperling owns East West Basics which has been sourcing on the ground in China for 22 years. So he's seen it all, and actively sourcing for large Fortune 500 companies.  He owns Abington Lane, and has been a My Amazon Guy client for nearly 3 years, and one of the most experienced sourcing people I know. holesale distribution of non-durable goods.What has changed in sourcing in the past 22 years?What are the various things that need to be set up in a sourcing operation:Boots on the groundInspectionsCommunicationFactory relationshipsManufactures are constantly looking to cut corners.Biggest sourcing mistake? Can't accept a big retailer because not making enough margins. Chose to work with less expensive factories and the factory cut a corner so bad it cost $200,000. The vase leaked purple ink into water failing a water proofing test.What types of products are you comfortable sourcing?Any consumer productsCar partsHome GoodsHow to grow Amazon sales tips:What are the competitors doing? How are their reviews?Improve a currently well selling product on Amazon so it isn't just a me too product.When you go to the Canton fares and other China fares:Talk to the manufactuers and get to know them.Most of them are trading comapnies and not factories.Visit a factory - what should you do. Harry Joiner says when you visit a factory in China it's like putting your hand into a bucket of water, when you leave the water goes right back to where it was. "Our primary company, East West Basics has been in business for 22 years. We develop and source products for many large retailers as well as wholesalers. Customers include Walmart, QVC, FTD, BBB, JCP, TJX, Ross,  Amazon, Wayfair, and others. We have our own sourcing infrastructure based in Shenzhen, China. Our full time staff of 35 people source products all over China. We also have a presence in Vietnam, and soon we will have one in Cambodia.My managing partner, who for the most part lives in China, is Taiwanese; he has set up our operation in China from its inception. By background, he is a UCLA pre-med graduate that chose the business world over medicine. Many of our seasoned staff members have been with us for 15-20 years. We do not go through middle-men or trading companies. We deal directly with all factories.We have merchandisers that focus on product development, along with a design team, as well field merchants that work directly with the factories.Our team/s are intricately involved with factory selection, price negotiations, sampling, etc. Once orders are placed, we have a detailed, and rather sophisticated PO monitoring system that spans the entire production cycle.We have a QC team - separate from the people involved in the field to insure many sets of different eyes are monitoring production prior to the final products being shipped out." - Robert Sperling.Contact Robert at sperls88@aol.com  or http://abingtonlane.com/ Support the show

Send us a textIan Kaneshiro is an Amazon e-Commerce pro. Originally from Los Angeles, he now runs Seller Snap’s Sales and Customer Success team from Tel Aviv, helping professional Amazon sellers level up their repricing activities.  https://www.sellersnap.io/Should Private Laberls be Running Automated Repricing?  Yes if they want to price against competitor items on other listings.Why does min and max price settings exist? To prevent items selling at a loss.What is AI algorithmic repricing and how does it differ from rule-based. Amazon price-alerts and our experiencePotential Seller Snap solutions for private label sellers.When Ian is not helping guide sellers through their Amazon journey, Ian enjoys going on bike rides and playing ultimate frisbee.Support the show

Send us a textTrevor George is the CEO of Trevco, and of the digital marketing agency Blue Wheel, one of Inc Magazine’s fastest growing private companies!  50 million dollar seller on Amazon. We talk ads and product launches! In these roles, Trevor became one of the largest 3rd party sellers on Amazon in the United States!Why is advertising crucial for growth on Amazon? https://bluewheelmedia.com/amazon-academy/search-term-isolation/What is Blue Wheel’s Search Term Isolation bidding philosophy and why does it work?Trevor is known for advancing brands in e-retail and marketplaces. He’s often featured in Business Insider, Internet Retailer, Search Engine Land, Entrepreneur Magazine, and more, and is one of the trailblazers in today’s changing e-retail landscape. Let’s give a warm welcome for Blue Wheel’s… Trevor George!Support the show

Send us a textJoe Cardillo quit his first job out of college after a year to start selling on Amazon. In late 2017 did $30k in sales his first month. Have since launched 3 brands and 12 products. Get 30% off Jungle Scout.Joe met Greg Mercer at Ryan Moran's Brand Builder Conference in Austin TX. "I joined the JS team shortly after, where I work in marketing since 2018. Amazon is a side hustle for me, spent ~5 hours per week on it right now. I really love the entrepreneurship mindset and talking product research/branding." Joe has launched products in baby goods, cat collars, and Apple airpods.Jungle Camp - Went to Indonesia to do a cultural get together every year to connect.Jungle Scout was the first chrome extension for product research. Jungle Scout has a supplier database using import records. You can click a sku and see unit and sales counts over time now in Seller Central. In Jungle Scout you can put your cost of goods in and other personnel costs. Jungle Scout can automate request a review button.Growth Hacks:Create  irresistible product page to improve conversion rates. Have dozens of designers create design to pick the winner.  https://99designs.com/. Target keywords with less comeptition. Blackhat tactics are dying, avoid.Create authenticity of your product.JS predictions for 2021: https://www.junglescout.com/blog/amazon-predictions/Support the show

Send us a textMy Amazon Guy Founder Steven Pope takes your questions live and thoroughly answers what's on your mind! Support the show

Send us a textDan Meadors is the cofounder of the Wholesale Formula and also has a full service Amazon agency. Join Dan's community.  We discuss how best to grow sales, avoid common sourcing mistakes, and where private label and reverse wholesale collide.How does private label and reverse wholesale work? Developing products.How do you grow sales?Do all marketing areas. Done is always better than perfect.Mistakes you've experienced or seen, that others learn from.Bought a retail arbritrage item that too many other sellers also boughtWhen doing wholesale sourcing research, find product where there is space on Amazon not being served. Find products with lack of competition. Dan started w/ RA, failed w/ PL - and discusseds the challenges that led him to reverse wholesale. What's the current business model you guys use, and how is it different than more traditional wholesale? The types of wholesale, problems with other models, how it relates to a lot of the same thing that PL sellers already do.What makes this model different than Private Label?  Cost, Speed to Market, Investment Time, Risk, Budget)Aren’t you just selling other people’s product? Dan's answer: Assets, Exclusivity, Cashflow, Monetizes A Skill You Already Have.Private label can incorporate Reverse Sourcing Wholesale into their business.Dan and Dylan are both from one of the poorest parts of the country - Southeastern Kentucky. They ended up landing pretty decent paying jobs, at least for around here and were considered to be doing really well by the standards of our area. In 2011, the CFO at Dan's company told Dan he was quitting his job. Dan couldn't believe it because he knew the CFO was making a six figure salary.. When Dan asked him why he would ever quit his job, the CFO told him he was making more money selling stuff on Amazon than he was as CFO and so he was just going to do that full time. Dan was shocked and asked him to prove it. So his CFO took him to Walmart and taught him the basics of Retail Arbitrage. That was enough for Dan and so he started pursuing the RA model for himself. He spent his nights and weekends in stores scanning or at home packing and prepping. And it worked. Within four months, he was making enough money to quit his job too. He reinvested every dollar he could back into the business and that's how he grew. By 2012, Dan had a million-dollar business. But the honest truth was that it wasn't really a "business," it was a j-o-b. It wasn't sustainable. If he wasn't working, he wasn't making money. So he had to work, and work hard, all. the. time. When Dan came to this realization that something had to change, he brought Dylan onto his team and that's when they discovered the reverse sourcing wholesale model. And once they started pursuing that method and left RA behind, they tripled the business in size in the first year to $3 million in sales. The next year, it doubled again to over $6 million in sales. And this was an actual business - a scalable, sustainable, passive income model where they didn't have to work in it for it to run like a machine. Today, Dan & Dylan work less than 4 hours per week in that business. They have totally outsourced it so that the business runs and continues to grow for them. Their business has now done more than $30 million in sales, million in profit and sold more than 500,000 products.Support the show

Send us a textAndrew Morgans hosts the Startup Hustle podcast, runs Marknology, an Amazon brand accelerator, and has also bought a couple of Amazon brands himself. Andrew grew up as the son of a pastor and has done countless retail jobs hustling through his life. Andrew grew up as a red head kid in Africa, blue collar worker in a white collar job today.Definition of an entrepernuer "Have to create something out of nothing."Bought 2 small Amazon brands. Failed launching some products.Keep optimizing. Amazon is an iterative platform. Amazon is a proactive platform.Advertising is highly connected to SEO and catalog work.Conversion tip - Open to outside feedback.Wide open book. Founder of Marknology, so have lots of Amazon stories to tell. Have been working in this space for 9 years.Support the show