Rolando Rosas 03:20
All right, Dave Tyler is doing some big things. Big props to Tyler. All right. Let me tell you about Kevin King. If you have not heard who Kevin King is you’ve been living under a rock. Kevin King has been an entrepreneur his entire life. It’s been 30 years that he’s received a paycheck from someone else. But I know that his time is money. So I know he’s got to be making good money now that he’s not getting a paycheck from anybody else. His business is legendary. He has traveled to seven continents and 90 countries. I love that I love the globe trotting aspect. A few years ago, he was named one of the top 40 direct marketers under 40 by target marketing magazine. Whoa, he is an amazing guy. And he’s been quoted in such publications such as New York Times USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and appeared on shows such as lifestyles of the rich and famous. Look at that inside edition and Entertainment Tonight. Kevin is the current host of the am pm podcast and leads the extremely popular billion dollar seller summit where top Amazon sellers meet and learn pure gold knowledge. Let’s welcome to the podcast, Kevin King.
Kevin King 04:44
Gentlemen. Hello, buddy.
Rolando Rosas 04:46
Hello, Kevin. We are so honored to have you on the podcast today. I know that you’re like gold you are like one of those figures that I’ve been waiting to have on the podcast because we You are in at the intersection of so many cool things happening. So much change when it comes to Amazon. And you are the wizard when it comes to what’s happening on the platform, you talk to sellers, you have your billion dollar summits where you get all this rich knowledge and everywhere else. So I wanted to bring you on because I know Kevin’s got the 411 on what’s happening right now.
Kevin King 05:23
I try to keep my ear to the ground. Don’t know everything. But I know a few things.
Dave Kelly 05:27
And listen, we have a lot of questions that we want to ask you, Kevin, before we get into that quick sponsorship read.
Rolando Rosas 05:33
This podcast is brought to you by Global Teck? Worldwide, your Technology Office experts that’s been around for 20 years providing trusted, personalized office IT solutions. Check them out at amazon.com/teck. That’s amazon.com/teck still paying for slow,
Dave Kelly 05:55
outdated business internet. Why would you do that everything is so expensive and 2022. But listen, you might not realize you can go to circuitloops.com instant quotes to easily compare with what you’re paying for and find the upgrade that’s right for you. It’s that easy. Go to circuitloops.com. All right, Kevin, back to the show here.
Rolando Rosas 06:17
And Kevin, let’s start with something where I know it’s near and dear to your heart. The last time you and I had spoken I actually was watching you on a webinar just recently, you were talking about technology and how Amazon sellers need to pay attention to that. I just want to ask you as we start to show, what do you what tech Are you geeking out on right now.
Kevin King 06:36
In regards to Amazon, it would be the AI stuff in regards to just general Tech, I just discovered these little projectors that is LG a projector that you can actually set within three inches of the wall and it projects 120 inch, like movie theater screen or something that’s the tech outside of the Amazon space that you can buy within Amazon or within e commerce. It’s ai ai is a hot topic right now. I just did a podcast on it on the Am/Pm Podcast on Helium 10 elite. So just recently, we actually had someone come on and speak about that, you and I have spoken about it a little bit in the Helium 10 elite Mastermind Talks that we do every month. And it’s game changing, it’s gonna uproot quite a bit of industries, not just ecommerce, but it’s going to have a major effect across everything that we do out there. And that’s why I don’t know if you saw that Google just recently asked the two founders to come back full time. Now they kind of semi retired and we’re just doing an advisory stuff. And they said, Hey, this AI stuff, this chat bot stuff, a big enough deal, we need your help come on back into the office. And you see what Microsoft’s doing, where they just invested billions of dollars into open AI. It’s game changing, it’s gonna affect everything from search to the way we create content to the way we we do everything. It’s amazing stuff. And that’s what I’m trying to get my head around right now is how can we best utilize this and what we do?
Rolando Rosas 07:57
No doubt. And just this morning, I was talking to one of my colleagues, and it’s you know, me, Amazon bots went out of control with a word, oddly enough lithium, which they said in the details of the seller performance, we suspect that your product is a pharmacy product, we don’t even sell pharmacy and get this. So the product is just your regular generic headset that you can wear, there’s no lithium, anything in that product. Now there are wireless version of that stuff that contain batteries, those contain lithium, but somehow the bots went out of control, suspected that we were selling a pharmacy product that required a prescription. And that’s not allowed. So we had to submit a plan of action here to just get that all corrected and whatnot. So we went into ChatGPT, within 15 seconds, I sent the put we put in the notification that Amazon sent and just put in act as if you were an Amazon seller in creating a response to this, or would you write this? How would you write this appeal 15 seconds later, beautifully written appeal. And my coworker submitted that to Amazon. I don’t know what the result is, because that happened this morning. But something that would have taken a lot more brainpower to think about this and that and the other done?
Kevin King 09:21
Well, one of the things about that, too, is I don’t know if you did this, but you can tell it exactly how long to write that appeal. Like guys, one of the tricks on Amazon when you do a plan of action is you need to keep it short to the point and a lot of people tend to just ramble on. And you know, those agents on the other side have a short window of time to deal with something if you rambling on your chances of having success with it are minimized. So
Rolando Rosas 09:42
that chatbot it was all bullets. It was all it came back with all the bullet right by the way.
Kevin King 09:46
That’s great. That’s awesome. Yeah, you can tell it do it in 300 words or less or whatever, format or however, but yeah, it’s amazing what it can do. It’s not perfect. You still gotta go read it. Sometimes it can mess a few things up. I’ve had that happen a few times I was doing On dog bowl, I was just playing around. And I was doing this for a presentation for a talk I did in New York at ASG. TG a few weeks ago. And I said, look at these reviews, I took the four and five star reviews from Amazon, download those using the Helium 10. Extension, and just pasted those in ChatGPT. And then told it, analyze these reviews and write me an Amazon listing based on the key positive points people are discussing in these reviews. And it’s split out within seconds, like a perfect listing with five bullet points and a description and a title and everything. But then when I start reading the the bullet points, one of the bullet points said something to the effect of this dog will the slow feed dog was so awesome. Me and my family like to eat out of it too.
Rolando Rosas 10:49
Oh, that’s for sure.
Kevin King 10:51
I had to you know, correct that. So you gotta be careful. It’ll do little things like that sometimes. And then I think the major thing that people are worried about is it can be misleading, you know, it takes the information that’s out there. But that information maybe wrong
Rolando Rosas 11:04
still needs human verification, I think it’s not there, where it’s like 100% accurate, but brings you something that would have taken an hour down to about 15 minutes, you know, between you adding the prop properly, and maybe going back and forth and cleaning that up. But obviously,
Kevin King 11:22
it’s not just for business, either my wife, I told her about it as like, maybe you gotta check this out. She’s like, What is it? It’s the rage I just go play with it. Just go sign up for the free trial and play with it. So she did it. She’s Oh, this is freaking amazing. We were sitting there one time and she was talking about nuts. You know, she’s wanting to get some snacks from Whole Foods or something. And she’s like, you know, which nuts are the best for me? Which ones are the healthiest or have the lowest fat and stuff and we started rattling off the top of her head. I think Pistachios are good. I think this one’s good. As I want you to ask the ChatGPT. So she just typed in something like which nuts are the healthiest and high on protein, low and fat or something like that. And it spit back like this detailed thing like list. Here’s the top 10 nuts. Here’s the breakdown of each one. And here’s why each one is this one’s better than this one. Or it was like you couldn’t do that on Google, you’d have to go find some blog posts or someone was ranking them or something. But it was like analyzing the nuts between each other. It was amazing.
Dave Kelly 12:17
What I love about it and comparing it to Google is Google will if you’re searching, you know what are the best knots for antioxidants, or vitamin D or whatever it might be. Google’s gonna throw all these ads in your face. You know what, like my mother, she clicks on the first thing all the time, she wonders why she has so many problems with a computer. But my wife is not a tech person at all. My wife is starting her new business. And she came to me last week. Now first off, I just want to say we’ve incorporated chat, GP Teddy Edie. So we’ve named him, we’ve hired him. He comes to all of our team meetings, we’re teaching salespeople how to use them customer service, how to use them, the customer service team loves it, Kevin catalog, people love it. And our team, you know, just having something polite to say back to an angry customer. He helps Eddie helps to kind of diffuse that. But my wife, she wasn’t convinced until late last night, she wanted some help writing a contract for a client of hers. And I said come into my office. And we went online and I showed her how to do it. And she was absolutely blown away. We were pretty specific what we asked for some of the details within the contract. But she had blocked off like four hours last night so that she could focus on doing a couple of these contracts. We finished the job in like 20 minutes. And she had three contracts written for three separate clients. So I took a non tech person and she is a huge believer. And we’re using Eddie so many different ways. Everyone on the team is learning how to do it. And we’re just so excited to have this as a tool. It saves so much time so much time. Yeah,
Kevin King 13:58
I mean, the beautiful thing too is I didn’t actually realize this till I did my podcast is it actually goes back 8000 characters, so you can have a conversation with it. So you could type in a question and then reference something that’s in this whole conversation thread it will use that information to modify exactly the next response. Kevin King
Rolando Rosas 14:17
has given us pro tip numero uno. Alex says credit for a pro tip. Tell us about having that conversation within ChatGPT. And going back to the results.
Kevin King 14:31
Yeah, a lot of people don’t realize there’s a couple of settings and ChatGPT and one’s called the heat setting. And it’s like a temperature setting that can determine how tuned in it is. And the other one is a lot of people don’t realize it goes back 8000 characters. So within a chat thread actually referenced something that you asked it before it will build upon that or we’ll use that to negate something else or however you want to do it but it’s amazing. It’s like having a conversation with the smartest person you know.
Rolando Rosas 14:57
Awesome. I love that. The other thing that I just discovered recently for them, and we’re gonna get to somewhat of your ninja hacks here soon because I love that I eat them all up. But if we were to give another tip to folks that are listening to us is that you can take ChatGPT now and put him into a spreadsheet. And I was playing around with this last night. It’s an extension for Google Sheets, where we have all of the different things we want it to do. So the prompt is act as a Hollywood script writer with 20 years of experience. Go ahead and make a description that gives an epic story about and then we put the product. And then within the Google Sheets, which is where our people that work on our product listings. It spit out the result. 1000 words. Now that’s gonna go into the description. And we don’t have to worry about going back and forth between copying and pasting. And then they have their other things, okay, a spit out five bullets that, that highlight some of the keywords if we’re using, let’s say, Helium 10, as a tool for extracting keywords, use these keywords within the bullets, five bullets done. And then we go into all the other aspects, what are the most frequently asked questions around this niche to do? So now folks that are working on the team can get to the part of analysis and spend more time around that rather than just the creation side of catalog work, which is not glamorous, but essential to the work of being on Amazon.
Kevin King 16:32
I know the people that are using it now to write Kindle books that are actually going to the tools and looking up keywords and looking for opportunities on Amazon or within the Kindle system. What are people looking for that there’s not much about the subject and then going into ChatGPT. And they’re saying write me a children’s book that that has the Princess and the Frog. And they go on a journey to some imaginary world and it writes a whole freaking short story, the whole
Rolando Rosas 16:54
ebook? The whole ebook? Yeah, sure. Oh, my goodness, that is amazing. mazing. Kevin, the tips and hacks don’t end there. Because you’ve inspired me today. And paying homage among the many things that you’ve contributed to the Amazon world is your ninja hacks that you provide within Helium 10 elite group. And for those that don’t know it, you could just go check out Helium 10. And they have a bunch of information on the elite group. I really love it. I love what you do there. So in tribute to your ninja hacks, I have the five best kept secrets Alex go ahead and hit that segment.
Guest Speaker 17:37
Well kept secrets Well, secrets gotta keep them safe. Sound Well, let’s see for secrets are just like Dima.
Rolando Rosas 17:54
And these five best kept secrets, Kevin. That song was written by Eddie bar, house, Eddie, and another website that does song composition. So the whole thing the entire thing. Now, obviously, that’s not some musician. We’re not musicians here. We’re sellers. So it could get a lot better. And I’m sure version 10 of this, at some point will sound exactly just like a musician at some point, instead of some autotuned amateur. That’s cool. So go ahead, Alex, give me the graphic here on the five best kept secrets. Now, Kevin, you can weigh in on these as well. These are just hours, I felt that there are some things that are not necessarily hidden, but they’re in plain sight and a lot of folks undervalue some of these things in the first thing, the number five, I have brand registry brand registry unlocks the keys to the kingdom. And there’s still tons of sellers I talked to sellers, and they don’t even know what it is. You know, and it seems like it’s worth mentioning if you’re not brand registered today if you are starting out because Kevin there are a lot of folks that are probably going to be hearing this that are probably moving away from the tech space as it relates to one of these tech companies that have been shedding employees and they may be looking to start their own thing on Amazon. I would say make sure you get brand registered, Would you concur with that or you have a different opinion on that. Now you that
Kevin King 19:22
should be the first step you do. It should be the very first step if you’re going to sell on Amazon specifically, you need to get brand registered and to get that you need a trademark so whatever your brand is, or your company name is go get a trademark apply for a trademark and used to be you had to wait for that trademark to actually complete and take 910 months before you can get brand registry. But now Amazon will take the little confirmation ID number the registration number while it’s in progress, and actually allow you to use that to get that but brand registry opens up so much stuff so many tools. Like he says the keys to the kingdom and it gives you all this data straight from the horse’s mouth that Amazon has on search STURMS and on categories and on all kinds of stuffs what’s being clicked, what’s being bought, all straight from Amazon, it allows you to do a lot more on your listing to add to what’s called a plus content, which is that extra section, if you scroll down the bottom where you can put additional pictures and video, it lets you do some different stuff in the advertising realm that you can’t do. If you don’t have it, it gives you a little bit of protection if someone else tries to sell your products that’s maybe perhaps not authorized. It’s so important. That should be one of the very first things that you do even some cases before you pick your final products.
Rolando Rosas 20:31
No doubt, no doubt, well, this you’re flying blind. And I would say even naked on Amazon, because a lot is going to happen on Amazon, a lot good, bad and sideways. And without brand registry, you don’t have some protections, I’ll just put it that way, because it doesn’t do everything. But it’s going to do way more than if you went on Amazon started selling today without being brand registered. Number four, when you can get that
Kevin King 20:55
for the people that don’t know how to do that just amazon.com. So if you’re new, and you go, how do I do it? Brand registry.amazon.com. It’s all the information.
Rolando Rosas 21:06
Awesome. Thank you, Kevin. And one of those, I would call a hack. Now this is something that we’ve discovered, and I’ve shared this one with you is that you can react and engage. Now let’s say you’ve beyond brand registry. Now, one of the things that we really like and we’re taking full advantage is to be able to react and engage with old questions that are on your product listing. Today, when you go on Amazon, it will tell you 10 questions answered. They’re way more questions, especially if this is a product that you get consistent sales on. And sometimes he’s just falls through the cracks, you don’t get the notification or maybe you get 1000 emails in a day. And somehow you missed that notification that somebody actually had a question on there, you can now respond with a video, show your face address the question, as well as put in the text. And what we do as a best practice is put both. So we get seen by the algorithm, as well as being able to provide a clear answer where somebody can either see the product, or address a question straight on. And there’s a link that we’ve discovered that will allow you to reveal so if you had 10 questions, maybe you had 30. But Amazon will not expose those other 20 questions, unless you’ve answered. So that’s one of our kept secrets there. And I shared that with you a little while ago so that you could do the same. What do you think about that one, Kevin,
Kevin King 22:28
that’s a good one. That’s another one where you could if you need to get that word lithium in there and not have your listing shut down, you could actually do it. Because the q&a section though that stuff gets SEO indexed, it gets indexed, but it doesn’t count against you as on your listing. So that’s where a lot of people, if they’re selling us stuff related to CBD, some of those keywords will get your flags just like you had the problem with lithium, or lithium can be for batteries, or it can be the medicine for people with a mental disorder. And so it that’s a way to get around that is actually put that stuff in the q&a, and it will flag it.
Rolando Rosas 23:02
Oh, man, I love that. Love that. Yeah,
Dave Kelly 23:05
good point. And also Kevin, what we’ve been doing it so we’ve been going back and answering questions for quite a long time on our listings, been adding video for about a year and a half on some of these listings, answering the questions, we’ll do a little bit of editing to make it a little more entertaining than just the talking head. But we’ve been incorporating the AI, a lot of the products that we sell, we’ll have a lot of the repeat questions, I can give you the top five questions that people will ask. So when you’ve been selling the types of hardware that we have, for 20 years, some of our responses, we haven’t changed up our responses and so long, because it’s just how we talk when we can answer these things in our sleep. But what we’ve done is we’ll take our standard answer, put it through AI, and then it’s coming up with responses, just different ways of raising the answers. And it’s just put a new spin a little more dynamic touch to what we’re doing. So it’s just a one of many ways that we’ve started using the AI piece. There’s one
Kevin King 24:05
important thing to say on this AI to like what you’re talking about there, it’s important for people to notice, the current technology that’s out there, like open AI and ChatGPT only goes through 2021. So it knows everything through 2021. So anything if you ask it analyze the Ukrainian Russian war, and it’s not it’s gonna refer to something in the past, not the one that’s that we all know is happening. So that’s one of the probably the only big disadvantage to it, it’s not current to the state. Now that’s going to change with ChatGPT with GPT four, which is the next generation of it, but right now, that that is a limiting factor. So if you haven’t analyzed reviews, which you said it’s not going to incorporate anything that’s on Amazon from 2022 Forward, unless you copy and paste that into the thread so you can put a link in there that says go analyze these reviews and give the link to the product on Amazon as long as that product was there and 2021 or better or it can do it. But if you need to incorporate new material, you need to copy and paste that. So if it’s a new product that just launched last year, it’s you’re trying to analyze the reviews that say on it, then you need to actually go and use a tool like Helium10, Ray plugin or something and download those reviews, paste them in there just as raw data and say, analyze these. That’s the way you get around that.
Rolando Rosas 25:22
Good point. No, terrific, terrific. And, Kevin, you just drop in so much knowledge. I wish we had five hours to probe with questions because we could do like 10 podcasts alone with you on just these few things. Because there’s going deep and how to analyze it, and even how to optimize ChatGPT. For it, we’ve been playing around with it on the back end. But I also want to continue here on top secrets and get your feedback on it, something I just heard, but I’ve known never run out of stock. Now, what I would have to add to this is what I’d heard was that from a former Amazon employee who worked on on the fulfillment side and had intimate knowledge about fulfillment and how Amazon views this as it relates to the a 10 algorithm. Now, one of the reasons why when you go out of stock, and your product may not be back at the same level, you said to me, if you’re in a niche, where Amazon’s algorithm can offer up more choices, it can offer up substitutes, or similar products that a customer might be looking for that now where your product filled that void, they can fill it, they’re gonna put it there. So even when you come back into stock, if your product is in stock, it will take you longer, because there’s more substitutes. There’s other things in that niche that can fill that void. Whereas if you’re in a smaller niche, a category that doesn’t have as much competition, you may pop back right away to that level where you were at before does that square with what you know?
Kevin King 26:57
Yeah, it’s because Amazon is what have you done for me lately? So the ranking on Amazon, there’s a lot of factors. There’s 222 factors or something like that in the ranking. And I’m sure that’s constantly changing. And I just want to correct one thing, it’s the eight nine algorithm, there is some reference out there. There’s one of these gurus used as a marketing things and a look at everybody, there’s a new a 10 that that’s BS, Amazon, it’s called the a nine, they do tweak it, and they do modern versions of it. But it’s actually called the a nine. But within that algorithm, there’s 222, and probably plus now, things that they look at, and each one of those is weighted, and one of the ones that’s weighted a lot is What have you done for me lately, what have you sold lately, and so the algorithm looks at it, and it breaks it down into hourly sales into six hour periods into one day periods into three, day seven, day 14 day 30 Day averages 90 Day averages and 180 day averages. And so when you run out of stock, and you’re not selling, it’s logging zeros in there, as that’s what your sales were zero. So a lot of people will say, Hey, I’m about to run out of stock, which you just told me and Rolando it’s never run out of stock. So Should I raise my price? Should I jack my price, I’m selling this for 20 bucks, Should I raise it to 25 or 30 to slow the sales down so I don’t run out of stock until I can get some more in there. That’s one of the worst things you can do. Because that actually hurts your average as well.
Rolando Rosas 28:15
Here comes a pro tip. Kevin, clear the deck here on raising the prices or not to raise the prices before you run out of stock.
Kevin King 28:27
Yeah, you should not raise the price before you run out of stock. If you can raise the price and it doesn’t slow down your sales momentum, by all means raise the price. If you’re selling 20 a day and you can raise the price five bucks 10 bucks and still sell 20 a day, more power to you. But if you’re raising the price for the point of actually going from 20 sales a day to 15 to 10, just to stretch out that inventory once the more is in transit, so you don’t run out of stock. That’s actually a mistake. And the reason that that’s a mistake is that will hurt your averages. So your average is just like I said, there’s multiple days, there’s time period averages and those time period averages, the more recent ones are going to be worse. And those have a higher weight. So if you have averages of hourly, three hours, six hours a day, three days a week, and so forth, if for a week you raise your price, and you slow that down to 10, your weekly daily average your three day daily average, your daily average, all those are going to be lower numbers, and they carry a much higher weight in the ranking. They’re like, it depends on who you listen to, but 60 to 80% of the ranking is what have you done for me in the last week. And so that’s going to pull you down. And so then when you come back into stock, you’re going to have to build yourself back up. And if it’s like you said, if it’s in a non competitive niche, it’s probably not that big a deal. But if it’s in a competitive niche, you’re going to be hurting yourself and you’re gonna be fighting to get that position back.
Rolando Rosas 29:42
And we’ve seen this in a product that during the height of COVID manufacturers had all kinds of supply chain problems and we had one particular SKU that was doing well for us and we experienced this it’s a very competitive niche that this product was in was out for a month. We couldn’t get those Nowhere to get it, it just, we just had to deal with it. No, they weren’t shipping it because they had all kinds of problems as well. And we’ve got it back in stock since but it’s still inching, it’s not back, it’s just inching its way up. Because there’s a lot of competitors in that space, just like you said, Kevin,
Kevin King 30:17
it just, it’s a momentum killer, I see that happen all the time with new sellers. They’ll watch some YouTube videos, some gurus say yeah, don’t buy 1000 of a brand new product, you don’t know if it’s gonna sell just by 10, or by 50, or 100, and maybe 50 or 100. And get into it, and they get into it. And maybe they do hit a chord, they’re on Amazon, they did good research, and they do well. And they get those 50 or 100. And they’re like holy cow, I need to get some more in. And by the time they get some more in, all they’re doing is starting over again. Because once they come back into stock, after selling those 50 to 100 that they started with, they’re back to ground zero and having to build it all the way back up again. And the meantime, there’s been a lot of other people watching on these tools, X ray and other tools saying that they did well. And they’ve entered the market with deeper pockets and bigger inventory. And you’re basically just leading the way for others. And it’s a problem out there for a lot of new sellers.
Dave Kelly 31:06
But as a seller if you’re stuck in that situation. So you have product going FBA, it’s in transit, your inventory is running short, trends say that you have five days left of inventory. But you know, that product won’t be available at Amazon for another 10 days. If raising the price is a detriment to all the work that you’ve put into it. If it slows down sales, what should you do,
Kevin King 31:33
there’s two things that you can do to get those zeros keep those zeros from appearing on those dailies. One is to close the listing. So you go into your inventory, and there’s a little pulldown there, it has a bunch of options. One of them is to delete listing ones at it and some others, one of them is closed listing. And that’s scary to people that Oh, no, I don’t want to close my listing that you can always reopen it. But by closing that listing, it will actually temporarily close it, it won’t log those zeros days of sales. And so that’s helping, and that’s not gonna preserve your BSR. So if you were a BSR of 10,000, and you do that you’re going to slip 10,000 or 20,000, or depends on how long you’re out of stock, you’re going to slip, but it’s not going to hurt you as bad. And when you come back into stock, if you slipped down to 20,000, and you’re back in stock in 10 days, you’re going to be able to jump from 20,000 to probably 14,000 13,000 pretty quickly, and then work your way back up, hopefully to that 10,000. And maybe even better, but it will take a little time. But it’s a much faster climb, than if you just let it sit there and accumulate those zeros and you fall for it to a BSR of say 40,000 or something like that. The other way you can do it is by modifying your price. So Amazon has pricing bands, and most people don’t even realize this exists, they’ll raise the price or lower the price. And Amazon knows that if you’re selling this particular item and most people a reasonable price for it based on what everybody else is selling it for is between 10 and 42 bucks, if you raise or lower your price to the below 10 or raise your price to above 40, it thinks you might have made a typo or made an error. And so it will actually you’ll lose the buy box on your listing. And sometimes I’ll actually suspend the listing temporarily. And indeed, and you can control that by going into your settings Amazon and actually saying this is my minimum and maximum price. And that gives you more flexibility there if you’re playing around with this. But what I do is I use that, and I go and I set my settings to something fairly low. And so then I deliberately raise my price from if I’m selling for 20, I’ll say my max price is 25 and the system and then I’ll raise it to $200 or something crazy like that. And the Amazon system freaks out they can you made an error. And we’re gonna pause this, and it pauses it and that also prevents those zeros from analogs.
Rolando Rosas 33:41
And it’s believed they call it fair marketplace policy or something I’ve seen those notifications. So when you get that notification, although it’s technically a bad thing, it can be a better option than being completely out of stock and then having to deal with those ramifications that you’re saying, Go ahead. Within the minimum maximum bands go above the or the maximum or below the minimum, you need
Kevin King 34:06
to go above it. If you do it on the same screen, like there’s three columns there, there’s a column for my price or sell price or whatever it says the minimum and maximum if you do it on that screen, sometimes it’ll catch the error right there, it’ll pop up on the screen and say no, you can’t do this, you guys set the minimum maximum on FBA inventory screen. And the way you can make those appear is actually go up to the preferences in the top right corner. And you can turn columns on and off. And so that’s where you want to turn those columns on. And then you want to actually change the price maybe using the Seller Central app or from the main screen not from that because that way it won’t give that a built in error checking.
Rolando Rosas 34:41
Got it. Love it, man. That’s a great tip. We’re gonna remember that on how to blunt not that you’re trying to run out of inventory but things happen supply chains are crappy right now three peels don’t always get things out on time. It’s taking longer to get Amazon stuff checked in. It used to take like for us a couple days. We can see when it arrived. And a few days, the inventory process on Amazon’s FCS would kick in knots taking a couple of weeks, whether you use a small package, I would hate to be a seller, that’s got to send in LTL right now, or pallets through trucking, because freight is just ridiculously slow, when it goes in stuff getting checked into Amazon. So I feel for you, if you’ve got to rely on trucking to bring your packages over to the FCS,
Kevin King 35:24
there’s a workaround on that if you’re able to get into the beta program, Amazon, basically, I’m forgetting the exact name of it right now. But they have their aw D I think it is, they have their own, basically fulfillment service, not three PL, if you can get into I think it’s in beta right now. But if you have a SAS wrapper, you have a rep, you can ask them to get you into that. And they actually have their own three PL so you could ship your LTL shipments to them in bulk, even bigger bulk than what they may allow you to ship into Amazon to the warehouses, and they will store it and they feed it in as needed. It’s so they use their algorithms, this warehouse over here, and he’s 26 more so they take it from like your backstock is like your three PL stock and they ship it in as needed. And that way you can store more and avoid running out of stock. And it also lets you get around some of the inventory limits. And the beautiful thing about it too is if they do run out, say someone comes and wipes you out, because they bought a big bulk purchase, this is a business or something, and Amazon’s got to backfill it from their little three PL aw D, they will actually show it as still in stock as it’s being transferred. So you don’t actually lose that the customer confidence where it says it’s going to be delivered in three weeks, or it’s out of stock or whatever. So it will still stay in stock or just have a little bit longer shipping window. But that can help you on your conversions as well.
Rolando Rosas 36:40
No doubt that Kevin, you just that’s the support. I’ve heard of that program. But the behind the scenes on that is just it’s amazing that Amazon is essentially rewarding you for placing inventory into those new warehouses. I can’t wait to see how they roll it out to other sellers to take advantage of that. So before we run out of time, I
Kevin King 37:02
still got number one ago.
Rolando Rosas 37:03
Yes, yes ChatGPT deployment. Now for some you believe it or not, Kevin, folks aren’t really clued in like you and I on what’s going on there. And you alluded to it earlier. ChatGPT, which is our number one here is a game changer. And with version four, you we’re going to be going on ChatGPT, they’re going to solve some of the problems, there’s going to be an update with the timeline for when they’re pulling information. There’s some talk that they may even include some ability to go out to the web, if you don’t have that there is a plugin called Web GPT will also bring those results right now, even with the current version into your search, and the parameters get this Kevin, it’s going over to over 100 trillion parameters. So it’s going to be able to have what’s called more tokens, it’ll go back further in time in terms of that conversation, it’ll go over that 1000 characters, and whatnot, so that you can have even more data fed. So if you’re writing an ebook, and you’re scraping some website, and you dump in, over right now you dump it over 10,000 characters, it will timeout and tell you there’s too much data and it won’t handle it, it’s going to blow the lid off of the amount of data, you can feed it into the chat at one time, as well.
Kevin King 38:23
And no ChatGPT It’s super, it’s free right now their servers can get overwhelmed. So I know there’s been a few times I’ll try to go into it and it’ll say please come back. Other people were using it, but they’re getting ready to actually charge for it. They can do that people want this and it’s cool. And it’s really good marketing. So they are going to start charging for it. But I think 40 something dollars a month by me is what the word is to initially announced. But for me as a business owner as an Amazon seller, it’s worth every penny of that.
Rolando Rosas 38:48
A Heck yeah, Heck, yeah. Could have been 400 bucks. It’ll be totally worth it, Kevin, because you are the master of all things hacks. I want to ask you what ninja hack or things that you’ve heard. Because these things sometimes are temporary. You could do this today, we go back and play the tape a year from now they put a stop gap on it. You can’t use it anymore. Is there a hack or hacks are things that people have told you to do? That is still viable today that are still paying dividends for you?
Kevin King 39:20
Oh, yeah, there’s hundreds of them. But like you said, sometimes they do start working. But the important thing is, yeah, I’m known for doing these little ninja hacks and sometimes, like little tricks like little software things like do this or add this to your URL and ways to get around the way that the original coding was done or to accomplish a goal. And other times the hacks are just tips. Let’s check out this open AI. Or check out this AI software. This one does some cool stuff. So it’s not always like a very specific hack. Sometimes it’s just cool information or cutting edge stuff. But the thing that’s you have to keep in mind no matter what the hack is and whether it’s working now or been working for 10 years. You can’t build your business around hacks. I do those because that’s what people they love to hear, Oh, what’s the coolest thing to give me a competitive edge? Or what can I do right now to solve this particular problem, and that’s great. But sometimes Amazon’s listening to that. And they’re like, Oh, that’s a loophole, we gotta close. And they go and close and it quits working. Or they just make internal changes that just make it not work. So you have to build your business on sound business principles, sound marketing, sound fundamentals, that’s what you really should be focusing on not knowing what the latest hack is, what the latest shortcut is, but building on sound principles. And that’s what you guys have done. That’s why you’ve been in business for as long as you’ve been in business, and are able to migrate over to the Amazon platform from doing what you were doing in the past. It sound business. And that’s what you really need to focus on first. And it’s not so much the hack. So hacks come and go. But the fundamental business principles don’t.
Rolando Rosas 40:47
Well, you must have read my mind, because that’s the next thing I wanted to follow up on you about the business. This is how hard it is to be on Amazon. And hax alone can’t get you to the top. And given that you live in the great state of Texas, I put at the top and horse, a Texas horse, maybe you go look at how hard and this is for marketplace posts. So if you’re watching this, we have the infographic. So for those that are not watching it, I just tell you, this is an infographic here that shows a pyramid, where at the very top of the pyramid are approximately 50 sellers on Amazon, in depending on the numbers that you hear, you may hear anywhere between a million and a half to 3 million active sellers. I know, Kevin, you may have shed more light on that. But essentially, this report by marketplace polls that came out last year, it had 350,000 sellers, only get up to the $100,000 mark in terms of sales. I don’t know about you, Kevin, but even if you had a job and your job was depending on what city you live in, that may not cut it to pay the bills on Amazon, it is not enough, I can’t imagine you can pay the bills, make profit and make much money on 100,000 in sales on Amazon. And as you move up the pyramid, it gives you the information on so the million dollar level a year sellers. That’s about 60,000, roughly 4% of the sellers out there today $5 million level, that’s about 9500 sellers, $10 million level around 3300 sellers, which is point two 2% of all the sellers. And at the very top of the payment, those that are 100 million or more in terms of sales, roughly point oh three or around 5055, zero sellers on the platform. And if you’re trying to build this business, third
Kevin King 42:42
party sellers, just to be clear, okay, yeah. And that’s the it’s not first party. So there are some first party people that send an Amazon based on invoices and purchase orders that so these numbers would be higher. But this is third party sellers.
Rolando Rosas 42:56
Thank you. Thank you for that clarification, Kevin. And so if you’re a third party seller, on the platform, it’s not easy. That’s to my point to what you’re saying. It is not a passive activity. And if you’re looking to build a business, it is hard. It takes work. It takes dedication, it takes research, it takes continuous effort. Continuous improvement is I’d call it and having a knowledgeable resources, like what Kevin does on his podcast Am/Pm Podcast, as well as some of these other places where you’re able to grow your knowledge to grow on the platform to really have staying power. Kevin, what would you say to folks that want to establish their business on Amazon, and you want to grow and move up that pyramid and be a legit business that’s on Amazon?
Kevin King 43:44
Well, the number one thing is when someone whether they’re new to Amazon have been selling for a while as they think it’s a quick cure. They come in that they’ve been working their corporate job, and they’re like, I’m tired of working for the man. And I go out on my own, they come in, and they think they’re going to be able to actually, like you said, is $100,000 enough to live in some cities, that’s gross revenue that you’re showing there. That’s not profit, right. So if you need $100,000, to pay your bills, it’s gonna take you quite some time to actually get to that point on Amazon where you can take $100,000 out, unless you start with millions of dollars to invest in, it’s gonna take some time, and the average person doesn’t realize that they want to quit their job too soon, or they want to get to the point where they had this total freedom quicker than what is realistically possible. Now, is it possible to do really well on Amazon? Yes, but usually takes a little while to get to that point. And if you’re living in Pakistan, and you want to sell on Amazon and the average wage there, it’s $500 a month. And by selling on Amazon, you get freedom and can make six $700 a month. That’s a different story. But for us in the West, in Europe and the United States and Japan and so forth, it’s a different story. So it depends on your goals. A lot of people use it as just a side hustle to supplement their current income and there’s nothing wrong with that they’re school teacher by day and the Amazon Seller by night, and they make a little extra money. Take nice vacations or buy a few extra things for the house or whatever. And the other thing is a lot of people come into it with, they don’t realize how cash intensive this business is. And that’s one of the reasons you can’t take money out is because if you’re successful, you’re going to be constantly rolling and rolling that over into inventory. So if you spent $5,000, on your first round of inventory, and you’re selling like crazy, and like we said earlier, you don’t want to run out of stock, then you’re gonna need to order you’re like, holy cow, these numbers keep going up, I’m selling 10 a day. And then the next week, I’m selling 15 a day, and a month from now I’m gonna be selling 50 a day and you’re super happy, that’s a great problem to have. But then you gotta go the factory and say, Hey, I need five times what I ordered last time, I need $25,000 worth, and you may not have that money, or you may have to come out of the profits that you’ve been making, you’re just rolling it back over and you can’t take anything for yourself, maybe buy a cup of coffee or something. And that’s about it. Because a lot of people don’t realize that and they don’t understand how much money it takes to reach their goals. So that’s some of the stuff I have a course called the Freedom tickets, that’s a part of Helium 10. So if you have a Helium 10 membership, you get this course for free. And we go through 60 hours of training spreadsheets and how to figure this out. And we have a spreadsheet in there from Profit First, which is you can look that up on on Amazon, it’s a really good book, and shows you how to set your goals. If you need to make $70,000 a year to pay your bills. This is what you need to sell this is how many products you need. This is what the price point needs to be. So you can have a clear plan. And a lot of people just wing it. And but it is the greatest opportunity of the last 100 and some odd years of entrepreneurship or business, there is no better opportunity out there. And selling on Amazon, it hasn’t jumped the shark, you’ll hear people say, ah, selling on it, you’re going to the forums on Amazon, this just doesn’t work anymore. You see it on Facebook, and it doesn’t work for a lot of people because they do it wrong. Are they listening to the wrong people, but the make money is you need leverage why people do real estate, that’s why you get leverage. And you can use other people’s money to make money in Amazon, you can use other people’s systems and other people’s money to make money, there’s no way you’re I could start a Shopify site. And doesn’t matter how much money we had to spend on Facebook advertising, or what list we have and build it as quick as just getting in front of all these 200 million eyeballs on Amazon. And if you know how to play game, it is a game in a way if you know how to game the system, or how to actually show up on the results and how to stay there. You can make bank as long as you got the bank behind you to actually fund the inventory. And that’s why a lot of people, that’s why there was a huge rush of aggregators that were coming in, they’re seeing this and they’re like, Hey, you got these Mom and Pop operators that start on their kitchen table with five grand or 10 grand, and they grow it to a million dollar a year business. But they don’t know what to do after that they don’t know how to hire the people, they don’t know how to scale it up, they don’t have the money to scale it
Rolando Rosas 47:45
up again, a lot of back end to really scale a business on Amazon,
Kevin King 47:49
if they would just do this and this I could be doing 5 million. So they come in, they buy those people out and then roll it into their system. And a lot of times when you sell your Amazon businesses, the biggest payday you’re gonna have, there is a real hot rush and 2020 in 2021, people are paying ridiculous amounts, it’s calmed down now. But there’s still great opportunity where you can get two or three extra profits. And that’s additional leverage. So if I build a company on Amazon to a million dollars in sales, now I’m Private Label, I should have at least a 20% bottom line profit. And if not, you’re doing something wrong, it could be higher than it was let’s just say it’s 20%. So that’s 200 grand and net profit on the books per year. That doesn’t mean you put 200 grand in your pocket. It means on your accounting software on Tyler, Jefcoat’s accounting program she has talked about earlier, it shows $200,000 profit, and that someone could come in, we’ll come in and buy that for between 406 100,000 right now in the current market, cash in and give you that up front. And a lot of people are like, why would I want to sell my business, I got $200,000 in profit, it’s growing next year, I think I’ll have $300,000 in profit, I want to save this for my kids is my legacy, whatever, no, you should actually sell it and take that $600,000 Take some chips off the table. Now go do it again, you’ll probably have a non compete, you can’t do it in the same category. But you know the system, you know how it works, go do it again and another niche and you’re starting with a much better starting point. And now that 600,000 Maybe you think half of that, and you use two or 300,000 of it to start the next one. And you have a lot more confidence knowing what you’re doing and you build that one, this company grows to 5 million really fast within a couple of years. You sell that one for millions of dollars and you do it again. There’s a couple that I know out of Indiana that it’s exactly what they’ve done. They started in 2015 they just sold their like six or seven business and they just keep rolling it and building it and stair stepping it up and they’re like millionaires in the eight figures millionaires now wow, loving. Those opportunities don’t exist and hardly anything else. You look at this. You’d look at franchises people buy a subway, I always do this. I go into a subway store to get a sandwich and I’m just looking okay, I just spent nine bucks or whatever for my sandwich and chips and drinks. And I’m looking around Okay, how many people per hour come through here. I’m doing the math. My hair go in this place must be doing 1000 1500 A day maybe. So of course, that over a year, that’s 234 300 $400,000. I’m like, Man, all this hard work with these low margins, they had this huge upfront franchise fees, and the build out fees and all this kind of stuff. How do they make any money and they’re not the owners of those places are usually back they’re working, or the only ones that make money are the ones that don’t want 100 of them, and they’re just they’re skimming a little bit of money off of each one. And that makes sense. But on Amazon, you don’t need all that overhead. You don’t need all that stuff. You can do this in your pajamas with your laptop, and it’s
Rolando Rosas 50:34
gonna get easier there with ChatGPT. Now, so the, the workload should come down a little bit, right, let’s say you’re that solopreneur, Kevin, and you’re starting off, you got to create listings, you got to have an inventory, some systems right to start, and you have some of those things. And maybe, let’s just call it a 40 hour workweek, maybe now it’s 30. Showers right? In, that gives you a little champion,
Kevin King 50:59
it’s going to definitely help. Some I don’t know whether I’ll make it easier. But it’s going to allow you to focus on other things you need to focus on, instead of spending four hours writing a listing, you might be able to in 30 or 40 minutes, you can spend the other time focusing on PPC or marketing or something else that you need to put your energies to All right, I don’t think it’ll make it easier. I think it’s going to put a shift in where the priorities are and let that thing be taken care of. So you can focus on another core thing.
Rolando Rosas 51:22
Let me ask you about this, then, I think I’d love to get your take on because this is something I’m really interested to see what your view on this is. What are your predictions for Amazon, in terms of where it’s going? It’s a maturing platform, there is a greater reliance on PPC, from the Amazon corporate side to generate profits as it matures. We’re off with the COVID party is over from like, everything goes let’s sell everything that’s not happening anymore. A little bit more competition from the Walmart and Target side. Obviously, they’re still way behind. What do you predict is going to happen on the platforms and sellers should be looking for now that we’re in this kind of new phase of Amazon,
Kevin King 52:05
Amazon is going to continue to grow, it’s going to be slower growth, like you said, it’s more mature. So the growth will be slower, and you’ll hear some negativity Amazon down from last quarter. So they’re still up overall. And it’s not going away. Like you said Walmart and Target, they have a long ways to catch up, they’ll chip away at it, especially Walmart, but they’ll never surpass the Amazon less Amazon just implodes. Amazon’s biggest risk is government regulation, being too much of a monopoly and the government’s making them split their one p and three P business or doing something along those lines. And that’s one of the reasons that you’ve seen all this data being given by Amazon to sellers. Now, all the brand analytics data and all the search term data that used to be used to have to pay some guy in China or India $100 Report to get these things from the inside. Now Amazon just saying Here you go. And that’s one of the reasons they’re doing that is to say, look, we’re giving them the same data that we’re using. And so that’s their biggest probably threat from a seller it is becoming more of a pay to play platforms, it’s going to become more and more. What are you willing to spend to actually make the sale versus what are you willing to organically try to maximize to make the sale, I think there’s always going to be an organic element there, but it can become less than less. Because there are some natural things that should pop up organically and be rewarded. But it’s just like in a grocery store, if you want to be on the endcap you’re paying for that if you want to be at eye level, you’re paying for that.
Rolando Rosas 53:31
So that’s why the big brands are on the endcaps. Right? I was at a Altria. So packaged goods company, you’re gonna pay to have your sodas, Pepsi and Coke fighting for it as you walk into the supermarket. And they’re paying him for that. They’re not just a store manager wheeling it out, because that’s all they sell. They’re being told Pepsi and Coke are paying for that put them out there in front, right?
Kevin King 53:52
Yep. So do you guys see Amazon become more of that. So you’re gonna have to have the margins. And that’s another mistake a lot of people make is they don’t have good enough margins in their product where they can adjust to those kinds of things, and still maintain decent profit levels. So the money on Amazon is made in the sourcing, not in the selling. And that’s where a lot of people that they think it’s all in the selling, it’s not it’s in the sourcing back in source a product for $3 and sell for 99. And my competition is sourcing that same product or a very similar product for $5 or $6. And they’re selling it for 99. And they decided to hey, I want to undercut Kevin and let’s go down to 79. I can go down to 79 as a lesser percentage cuts into my margins than it is for them. And so I have more room if I need to compete on price to compete on price. But most of the money, it’s always made in the sourcing, it’s the better you can source the more money you can actually make and it’s also in packaging and perceived value. Everybody thinks Amazon is a platform to buy stuff cheap. And some cases that’s the case people go there to they don’t care what the brand is they just want the cheapest thing that’s going to work and has decent reviews. But Amazon reaches so many people there is a sub market on Amazon of people that are willing to spend a lot of money for something,
Rolando Rosas 55:03
then I heard you talk about that with Nora Farrar on your Am/Pm Podcast and the perceived value of taking the same product, putting beautiful packaging, and then be able to raise the price and you spent maybe an additional dollar on packaging, but your price went up 100% Because you were able to just spend more on packaging,
Kevin King 55:21
and people eat with their eyes first. And so you always you have to remember that at the dinner table. And when you’re selling products as well. It’s an important thing that a lot of people, they’re just trying to cut costs. And they’re not thinking about the user experience on the other side, and who’s willing to pay for a better experience, just like some people when they travel. They’re like I’m Motel Six all the way. No way in hell, I’m gonna pay more than 50 bucks at night for a room. We’re like, No, I’m staying at the Four Seasons, I’ll pay the 800 bucks a night or whatever. Because I want that experience. It’s the same thing on Amazon. There’s different markets and a lot of people just think it’s all cheap. And it’s not. Right. Amazon’s a lot of times is not the lowest price. Amazon likes to say that all their trucks driving around, to have that choose to things whatever fast delivery low price, they emphasize that but that’s not necessarily the truth on everything. And so there’s tons of opportunities there if you know how to do it.
Rolando Rosas 56:12
It Kevin, so this is just a rapid fire segment. You tell me what comes to your mind when I’m gonna ask you 10 things, words or phrases, whatever is in your mind. split it up. Number one, FBA
Kevin King 56:27
the best fulfillment thing ever created.
Rolando Rosas 56:32
Amazon advertising
Kevin King 56:34
expensive.
Rolando Rosas 56:37
Chinese sellers.
Kevin King 56:40
motivated and competitive.
Rolando Rosas 56:43
Amazon Seller Support.
Kevin King 56:47
often not very good.
Rolando Rosas 56:50
Amazon q&a video responses.
Kevin King 56:54
A powerful hack. Most people don’t use
Rolando Rosas 56:58
interesting drone deliveries.
Kevin King 57:02
I think it’s in its infancy. Lots of issues still overcome on that.
Rolando Rosas 57:06
All right. We touched a little bit on this one Walmart versus Amazon.
Kevin King 57:12
Amazon is King Walmart is prance
Rolando Rosas 57:15
All right. Elon Musk,
Kevin King 57:19
super smart guy.
Rolando Rosas 57:21
The future of Alexa.
Kevin King 57:26
Voice Chat is going to be around especially now with ChatGPT and stuff is gonna get integrated into that.
Rolando Rosas 57:32
Okay, and last, but certainly not least, Jeff Bezos,
Kevin King 57:38
one of the most brilliant pioneers ever.
Rolando Rosas 57:42
Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for playing rapid fire segment. Kevin, you have been such a great sport today. We’ve been talking to you dropping knowledge we could do five more hours on that. If people want to know more. They want to get in touch with you listen to you. What should they do?
Kevin King 58:01
You can go to ampmpodcast.com. I do a weekly podcast you were just on a recent episode, as well as a great episode. Also, you can look me up follow me on Facebook because I’m not on LinkedIn or Instagram, really. But on Facebook, you can follow me there host some different stuff from time to time there. Or if you’re a large seller and interested in cutting edge and your million dollar seller Summit is an event I do virtually and in person each year.
Rolando Rosas 58:26
Awesome. Kevin, you are a pro. I really truly honored that you’ve been able to be on our podcast today. Now we gotta go pay off that Amazon lending loan that will pay to get you on the show today.
Kevin King 58:41
No, no problem.
Rolando Rosas 58:44
So we’ve been talking to Amazon, Master Guru, Kevin King today regarding life on Amazon and what sellers should be paying attention to. You can listen to this episode, hit rewind, because there’s a lot of good nuggets and hacks that came out of this conversation today. Check those out on our website circuitloops.com or wherever you consume your podcasts, as well as other episodes where we’ve got other wonderful smart people that have come on the podcast. So check that out at circuitloops.com and we will see you next time.
Outro 59:20
Thanks for listening to What The Teck? Be sure to check out our other episodes featuring awesome tech and amazing guests. Find them on circuitloops.com or wherever you consume your favorite podcasts.
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