David 0:00
Sorry to interrupt the episode, but I’d like to tell you about an incredibly powerful and easy to use software by Ava. In fact, Ken and I have been using Ava to manage our Amazon businesses in the US and internationally for quite some time. Ava has a suite of built in tools and services that help you sell products smarter, faster and more profitably on Amazon. Since we’ve been using Eva, I’ve been able to reclaim hours of my time and increase profitability of my Amazon stores by more than 15% Eva makes selling on Amazon Simple, easy and affordable. You’ll get access to real time analytics and dashboards along with cutting edge tools like dynamic pricing, replenishment forecasting, and promotions management. They also resolve 20% More reimbursement claims and charge 50% less than other providers. Head on over to Eva, and you can thank me later use promo code ft m for Firing the Man to get a 15 day free trial of the EVA platform and 22% off your first month. And just for using that code, you’ll receive a complimentary onboarding call and strategy session to properly configure and dial in your settings. Answer any questions that you have and set you up for continued success. Thank you again Eva for sponsoring this episode and helping me grow my Amazon stores. Now back to the show.
Intro 1:20
Welcome everyone to the Firing the Man podcast a show for anyone who wants to be their own boss. If you sit in a cubicle every day and know you were capable of more than join us. This show will help you build a business and grow your passive income streams in just a few short hours per day. And now your host serial entrepreneurs David Schomer and Ken Wilson.
- Rossman, John (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 168 Pages - 06/09/2021 (Publication Date) - Clyde Hill Publishing (Publisher)
David 1:44
Welcome everyone to the Firing the Man podcast on today’s episode, we are joined by high mag, the co founder and CEO of EVA.guru. For those of you who are regular listeners of the Firing the Man podcast you have likely heard us talking a lot about the new Eva software stack we have been using which includes dashboard reporting, inventory management tools such as replenishment forecasting profitability reports reimbursements that run automatically in my favorite that dynamic pricing tool. On today’s episode, we’re going to dive deep into some common problems that Amazon sellers run into, and how the EVA tool can help solve these problems. Welcome to the show. Hi,
Hai Mag 2:24
hey, thank you for having me, David, then Ken. So it’s great to be here again.
David 2:28
Absolutely. So for those of our listeners that did not listen to episode 155, the first time you were you were a guest, can you give us a brief overview of your background? And what led you to founding Eva?
Hai Mag 2:40
Sure, after almost 20 years, in software companies like IBM and Oracle and management consulting company, Accenture, I decided to I had a side hustle, which was an Amazon business with with my partner, I decided to move on. And we decided to create ILA, because what we saw was four years ago, a lot of things that we do, just because we are computer engineers, and focusing a lot into data is helping everyone every ecommerce, you know, owner to be more successful. We started with EY like four years ago, and over the over the four years, it has been a great journey. So far, you know, developing both the platform and the services around it.
David 3:27
Excellent, excellent, just to lay out kind of the format of this podcast, because it is going to be a little bit different than we have in the past. And we’re really looking forward to it. So prior to this interview, Ken and I brainstormed a series of problems that we have encountered over the last few years in our own businesses. These are also problems that we think are very common amongst almost all Amazon sellers. And so what we’re going to do the format of this episode is we’re going to present you with a problem, then we’re going to ask, does Eva have a solution to this problem? For some of these, we may jump on a screenshare and take a look at some of these, we may just be be answering. So if you’re tuning into the audio episode, check out our YouTube channel, there will be an accompanying video portion of this that I think is going to be incredibly valuable. So does that sounds good? All right. Sounds good. So problem number one
- Stone Brad (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 464 Pages - 03/26/2014 (Publication Date) - RANDOM HOUSE UK (Publisher)
Hai Mag 4:16
and before that before that, David let me share my screen right so that everybody sees also the first you know, kind of the executive dashboard as what we called. So for the ones who are watching our episode, at least they know how the executive dashboard looks like on EVA, because everything from our perspective before all the problems, it starts from understanding your p&l right let you know for every seller, what is the profit, what is sales, what is expenses and you can even see all the details of the ROI margin or the sales data or expenses data from the dashboard and the in the on the second row. It’s more about like the split between the organic sales, advertising sales a cause as well as you know, from my perspective, like one of the most important KPI, the tacos. And that’s kind of the the executive dashboard gladly is just, I thought it would make sense to share and start digging into the black problems.
David 5:19
Absolutely, absolutely. And this is something that I can and I use this tool, this is kind of the heartbeat of our business, and something that I definitely like to tune in to daily and see how things are going. So I’m glad that glad that you showed that. So Alright, So problem number one. In order for our businesses to be successful, we need to maximize our net income. While revenue numbers are nice, we pay ourselves and the bills with net income. And so that is our focus. We have heard the Amazon sellers can generally take two approaches one, you could have a high velocity, low margin product, or you could have a low velocity high margin product. For some of our current products, we are not sure what price points, we are maximizing net income. We have tried to measure this in our spreadsheets but are constantly running into this situation that I’m about to describe, we move the price of product A from 15 to $20. Of course, we are burning more net income per product. However, this is offset by a lower velocity, a lower conversion rate and higher PPC costs, this becomes incredibly complicated to measure. And so we ended up picking a number in the middle, say 1750. But in the back of our minds, we know that is more of a finger in the wind estimate. And we don’t feel confident in that number. And so our question to you is, is this a problem a VA can solve? And let’s let’s dive into it.
Hai Mag 6:42
Absolutely. So that is like you know, it’s kind of a PACCAR type of a problem because there are too many parameters here. And they’re all correlated with each other. And it’s not even clear how this correlation works. So this is one of the problems we are trying to solve for, you know, forget couple of years now. And it was even the first problem. So also, I’m kind of like moving into the pricing management of EVA, where for every single product that is private label or a brand, we also have a solution called dynamic pricing. And the reason why we started with dynamic pricing Pricing in the first hand was to fix the problems like you describe now, back to the problem, there are a couple of things that we look at, you know, and we look at a couple of parameters and how they develop over a certain period of time. And the number one thing that we check is the sales velocity. Because you know, one of the things even in the beginning, you mentioned low velocity, high margin versus high velocity, low margin, even the fundamentals of Amazon is kind of very much around high velocity, by the way, why because if you don’t have the high velocity or the ranking, then the challenge is like you will not be ranked like on the first page or you know, more people will not see you very much like irrelevant, you know, to have an eye velocity or not to sacrifice the velocity just for the sake of the profit, which reads that the kind of macro economics of pricing in general life is not always applicable to Amazon. And one of the reasons is this ranking problem because you always want to rank more and you cannot always sacrifice the profit like in the real life just for the sake of having maybe a lower velocity because that it will create that chicken egg problem where you will have lower velocity and you will have less sales, as you have less sales it will have lower velocity and it just goes like that. That’s like one area. The second area that I see here, as you mentioned is the advertising relation to the to the sales because you can increase the price but if you are also increasing the advertising then the advertising conversion rate may go down. So here there is another parameter which we really like which is the unit session percentage, I think at parameter that is not always highlighted as much as the CVR but somehow I liked the USP more because CVR has a bit of a value calculation where the average order value is also relevant to CVR. But in the unit session percentage, the USP it is the sales divided by number of sessions basically. So I’m going to say that sessions you have in order to sell x units, you know, like that’s kind of like what we are looking at. So we tried to combine all of these two together. So that’s kind of like I mean, the two challenges the advertising impact, the ranking impact, but at the same time, how can we maximize the profits? The short answer to the question is Yes, Eva definitely solves that problem. They A solution to that is an AI based dynamic pricing. But the ingredients of that solution to the AI or to the to the engine is the unit USP, because it’s both the organic and advertising sales, which kind of contributes into the number of sessions ensuring that ranking is, is still there, because we cannot just sacrifice the velocity to some extent, we may for the profit, but not like in the in a theoretical approach, where we just sacrifice for the sake of profit, you know, that we cannot do, you know, combining that USP as well as the ranking into the into the formula, which will create the optimum price at any given time. So that’s kind of like what we did.
David 10:48
Now, how can you show us Can you show us an example of one of these and how it would be adjusting the price around,
- Tracy, John A. (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 384 Pages - 11/01/2011 (Publication Date) - For Dummies (Publisher)
Hai Mag 10:54
right. So you know, there are, you know, a couple of things. So first of all, maybe I can show you a kind of like a just an example where we visualize the whole pricing, for example, there are two white dashed lines here, like the white dashed line, which is the on the top is the maximum price, and the one on the bottom is the minimum price. So which means that it’s a business decision, the business owner decides what’s the minimum and the maximum that EY can play with the price. And then the EBA is starting, you know, finding the best price point between these two prices, the minimum and the maximum. So what I can do from Eva is also search for, you know, kind of an available item. And, you know, like, I’m just checking some different examples here. For example, at this moment, what you’re seeing is on the 14th of February, the sales price was 119, that 88. And based on based on the sessions, and the number of sales, Eva is increasing the price because the demand is increasing. And by the way, this price changes that Eva does is typically between zero to 3%. And it’s aligned with the Amazon algorithm, because you don’t want manually to opt to increase the price a lot. And then Amazon may suppress the buybacks. So that’s also avoided by the eBay algorithm, because it’s aligned with the Amazon algorithm. And as the time passes, the price is going up to 124 124. And then even 125, that 88. And finally, it reaches to 128, that 38. So in six days, that price increase do not change the velocity or the sessions are, which are a result of advertising and organic effort. But in terms of profits, we are talking about an additional 50% profit as a result of that price change. So that’s kind of like what I’m seeing afford a lot for that five days. And you’re still seeing the sales trend going up for the last week, same day, as well as last 30 days and last quarter as well.
David 13:15
Awesome. Awesome. Sounds good. All right. Ken, over to you for problem number two. Yes, absolutely. So
Ken 13:21
problem number two for an Amazon seller. This one is around product launches. And so let’s say we launched, you know, a very unique product, and we’ve got the listing optimized, the images are dialed in, we’ve got video, etc. We’re running heavy PPC, everything is dialed in except for price. And we’re selling maybe we haven’t sold any maybe we’ve sold just a few. And we think our price needs to be adjusted. Is this any problem that Eva consult?
Hai Mag 13:47
Absolutely. So let me let me talk about that one. So for example, in this particular product, which is a supplement, what are what we can see that like you know, as the if the demand is going down, and the sessions are still at a similar if the demand is going down, which means that if the velocity is low, but the number of sessions are similar or going up, it makes sense to drop the price. And by that dropping off the price to to increase the USP and as well as the conversion rate. I mean, that’s something that you we are seeing for two days. And then what happens is like we see a price, we see an orders increasing and the demand is increasing after two days of like dropping the price, for example. And the system continues to check both, you know, points that are better or lower or higher based on the demand and the number of sessions that are happening every day. All right
David 14:46
onto problem number three. And this has been one that we’ve been dealing with very recently. So we launched in the Amazon us and then we decided that we wanted to go into the UK, Germany and Canada. So we went from managing one currency to four different currencies. And it’s a little bit overwhelming because of the constant fluctuating foreign exchange rates. And so is this something that Eva can help with?
Hai Mag 15:10
Absolutely. And that’s the way that we do, we designed the EBA. First of all, it is available in all marketplaces, all Amazon marketplaces globally are in including Australia, Japan, Europe, and all American marketplaces too. So which means that it is pretty easy to switch even from one marketplace to another and analyze the the profits and the revenue in that particular currency and marketplace context. Now, one of the problems that every seller is having is what will be the price on the other marketplace because you know, you have the US prices and now what will be the the the prices on Canada. Now one of the great things here is like with ILA, you can select the master store, there are three zones of Amazon, basically, the first zone is America, and the second is Europe. And the third is the Asia and Pacific. Now based on this zones, you can define and master store, for example, the US to be the master store. And you can also define, like for the other marketplaces, like Canada, and Mexico, what type of a surcharge you want to add, because that’s kind of a requirement as well, from a lot of sellers, they would like to sell with a surcharge of, let’s say, 3%, more on the Canadian marketplace, or the Mexican marketplace, it can also be 3%, more for the Canadian marketplace, but 5% less for the Mexican marketplace. And that this can also be arranged with Eva. And as soon as it’s done based on the international exchange rates, the prices will be converted into that specific marketplace exchange rate together with the impact of the searcher, the surcharge, and this will be automatically synchronized every day if the customer wants it. Or it can also be a one time synchronization to Okay, so
David 17:07
just to make sure I understand that correctly, you would set up say the US as your master store, and then your Canadian pricing would be based on that adjusting for the current exchange in the premium that you’re talking about. That’s right. Okay, that makes sense. And say you like we’ve heard from people that you can earn a little bit more up in Canada. So there’s, if you say you wanted the US and Canada to operate independently of each other, maybe capture a little bit more margin up north, could you do that as well?
Hai Mag 17:38
Absolutely, that can be done right. You know, by adding that surcharge. At the same time, what happens is like, as soon as this prices are synchronized, then depending on the setting, and depending on the demand, the markets will start acting on their own right, like, you know, for example, the Canadian marketplace, if the demand is high, maybe the prices will change it according to that too. So that will be another area but it’s also possible to synchronize his prices daily with us, which means that then Canada just acts as a slave market to the to the US market, but you can definitely make more money by adding that surcharge.
David 18:18
Okay, sounds good. All right. Ken,
Ken 18:20
over to you. Yes. Awesome. Okay, so the next next problem for an Amazon seller, this is huge. This has been an issue for an ongoing issue for several years now, especially recently, and it’s IPI inventory performance index. And so it’s becoming incredibly important to monitor that metric. And so let’s an Amazon seller has, you know, maybe they have 75 or 100 SKUs. And their IPI is very low. And they noticed that there, they have a low sell through rate on some of their skews. And so can Eva, identify those skews and then change how you can increase your sell through rates?
Hai Mag 18:53
Absolutely. So there are a couple of things that may be interesting to show here. One of the thing is the there is an inventory management suite inside the EBA. So EBA is a platform that every single feature is using the same database. One of the biggest things by the way, I think it’s a it’s an important thing to mention we another set of tools because there’s a lot of like, you know, companies with just acquired different products and they just offer a bunch of sweet bunch of tools right now on the EBA. The biggest difference is every single feature and function is using the same database. It is the same database, we are able to correlate between advertising ranking USB inventory and pricing as we are able to I mean we already talked about pricing for the last 30 minutes, but we also have the inventory data. You know if we know the status of the inventory, we can use the pricing to liquidate or to accelerate the sales as well for exam ample one of the one of the reports that I really allow is the inventory health report, because it’s already showing what’s the age of the inventory? Is there any estimated excess units? Is there an estimated long term storage fees? Because it’s somewhat related to two things right. One IPI score is also related to these guys who are not selling, you know, enough. And the second is like, not only that these products are not selling, but also they stay in the inventory, and Amazon will start charging you right, but they don’t want that right. I mean, Amazon doesn’t like or anybody who is in the three PL business, no veils, manager likes this products that are sitting in their warehouse, because it doesn’t pay the bills, like storage, never pays the bills of America, it’s what pays the bills is the actual the operation in and out, in and out. That’s what that’s why there is a IPI score, which is related to it sell through rate. Now what we do is like, we play with the price by using like a velocity based pricing, we are able to, you know, like increase the liquidity, you know, increase the demand or increase the sales by reducing the price at that’s what we can do as well.
- Amazon Kindle Edition
- Clarke, Adam (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
David 21:19
All right, so continuing on the discussion of IPI we have a particular account that has over 300 SKUs in managing inventory can be a nightmare. We are constantly going out of stock on products, which then hurts are IPI. And so is this something that Eva can help out with?
Hai Mag 21:36
The answer is yes, and there are a couple of things that may be allowed to mention here about Eva. Again, we talked about the inventory management and the relation of the inventory to price as well as the profits. So one thing here, very important between advertising, pricing and inventory is if the inventory is low, you may want to act totally different than if you have inventory, right, like and there are two things there. Number one, if your inventory is low, probably you don’t want to spend too much money on advertising, you want to fine tune your advertising, but you don’t have enough stock, why should you spend all the money in advertising. So this is also important. The second area is if you continue to sell with the same sales velocity, you may be in an out of stock situation, maybe in a couple of days. So what we build is something called inventory protection by a and typically that inventory protection is a is a parameter that the sales the sellers set as seven days, but it can be changed, the default is like seven. And based on that inventory protection, if you have seven days, let’s say you seven is selected, right, if you have seven days of stock left, then the prices will gradually increase as the prices are increasing, two things will happen. Number one, the velocity will go down, which will delay the out of stock. And number two, you’re gonna make more money because you’re maximizing the profit. Now another great example like and this, you know, q4 is coming right sooner or later, you know, in the next six months during the q4 for most of the sellers, it’s a guess they I mean, send all the stuff to FBA all the products they have B but they don’t know if it sells a lot. And if there is a prediction problem either let’s say if the 20 days is selected, you know if there’s 20 days of stock, and if you start gradually increasing the price, we have seen like 20 to 30% profit increase during the q4 by using the inventory protection on EVA an increase the price automatically every day to delay the out of stock. Now the other way to delay the out of stock is always to know what you can replenish right and what’s the right time which product to replenish. Now Eva is providing a one click simulation of the replenishment for example here for a number of products he was telling you about like what is available, what is in transit or what is in bound and I can easily go and do a one click simulation and based on that simulation, the system will tell me how much money is required. And for every single unit what should be the best way to replenish a similar tool exists with within Amazon. But for many reasons. We very much believe that this replenishment tool that I’m showing you will give you a much better much accurate result as we know the seller biller the sales velocity but also the biggest difference with Eva is like because we know the cost we also know the the ROI and the margin. So the replenishment forecasting is done based on the sales velocity but also incorporating the ROI and margin into the equation not just the sales velocity, but also the out of stock days as well. So that’s kind of like a very is a way to create a replenishment for guests every week Israel.
Ken 25:04
Okay, yeah, I really liked that feature. You know, we always like making more profit basically even when the as the inventory is running out. So that’s really cool. The next problem we have, and this this is essentially a problem for every single Amazon Seller that’s ever sold on Amazon. Amazon has such a very, very large company. And they have so many FCS fulfillment centers, they have so many workers and things happen, errors happen, mistakes happen. And so as a seller, if you’re using FBA, which most everybody does to be successful, you’re shipping your inventory into Amazon, right? You’re sending in 1000 units or 5000 units, and they make mistakes, they lose them, they break them, they do whatever. And so as a seller, we really have no control over that. So is there a function of EVA that can help out with getting reimbursements? Yeah,
Hai Mag 25:47
and this is like one of the best functions features that I really like with Eva, because it’s very easy to show the value. I mean, it’s always when we talk about pricing advertising, you know, people are a you know, it’s great, but how can we how can I see it but reimbursements it’s like cash, you know, sent back to your account in that disbursement report. And so everybody loves this reimbursements. Now, one of the things that we do about this reimbursements is like we look after 20 Plus categories. And this month, by the way, we had a record of almost $10 million recovery from the for the Amazon sellers. And when I talked about this to new sellers, like they got surprised, oh, if Amazon lost my staff, I thought they are paying for it. Like they don’t think that like maybe there is a need for reimbursements. And they are to some extent correct, right, because the dashboard that I have tell it showing you right now is also showing this orange bar the orange bar is like what Amazon automatically reimburses So Amazon is trying to do a good job there and already reimbursing if there is lost or damaged items, and there’s like 20 Plus categories as I said, but unfortunately even if they are with their best effort, they are missing a lot of reimbursements that are not recovered automatically by Amazon and this can be between one to 3% of your monthly sales. So, in a nutshell, if you are if your revenue is $100,000 a month, we are talking about 1000 to $3,000 that can be recovered by the IVA t we detect this automatically everything is like automated but according to Amazon Terms of Service, you cannot automatically open cases. So we have had a huge team that is like you know opening the cases claiming that you know money for the for the for the sellers. Now the another beautiful thing about it is the reimbursement recovery fee for Eva is 13% for the EVA subscribers, which means they only pay one three 13% For every single recovery. So if we recover $100 We take $13 If we recovered nothing, we take nothing. So kind of a simple straightforward service. No brainer. Everybody should do that.
Ken 28:09
Yes, this is probably one of my favorite features of Eva. Excellent David over to
David 28:14
you. Yeah, there’s two things I want to add on to this. So to our listeners, if you have not run reimbursements, the best day of reimbursements is day one because you guys go back 12 Is it 12 months, 18 months, 18 months so if you’ve never run reimbursements on day one, they’ll go back 18 months and so can I remember when we flip the switch on we got like five like five grand and we had already been running reimbursements using another tool this was just like the stuff that they did not find and so this to me, there’s very few things that you can do in your business that give you one to 3% this easily like when I say you flip the switch on and do nothing else that’s it. It is I can say as a customer we don’t do anything for reimbursements it just happens profit you can get in there’s so many parts of the business that require a lot of effort. This one is you just turn it over in are only charged when when you’re successful. And so yeah, I’m a big fan of this tool. So moving on a lot of our listings have both FBA and FBM to our listeners that would be fulfilled by Amazon or fulfilled by merchant given the inventory restrictions. Sometimes we’ll go out of stock and cannot replenish our FBA inventory. And so we have FBM listings that serve as kind of a backup however, we want to ensure that our FBA listings always have the Buy Box assuming that they are in stock recently, we increase some of our FBA prices, but forgot to adjust our FBM prices. Therefore the FBM listing won the buy box and those are significantly less profitable. So our question is, is there a way to always have your FBM listings be more expensive than your FBA listings? And the
Hai Mag 29:51
answer is yes, absolutely. First of all, let’s start from for every single SKU. Does it make sense to have an FBM go session because you know in the past like five years ago it goes the discussion of like NPM is better two years ago let’s do FBM for some of the items let’s do FBA for some others today it’s like FBA is the on the way you know that’s the right way it’s the Moscow stuff. And I agree with that right we all agree FBA is the right way unless you have some product which is oversized or some like dangerous items, etc, right or melting item things like but here you go. For every single FBA, there is an out of stock challenge and if you have the warehouse and able to fulfill the orders, it makes a lot of sense to have the FBM version. Now having the FBM version has another interesting fact like I would like to share if on the same listing, the customer sees the FBA version. Let’s say the price is $10 but also sees that there is another seller actually selling it for $11. But that’s the perception right? Actually, there is no other seller, it’s you reach your FBM listing and the FBM listing is let’s say 10% and more expensive but the consumer the shopper things like hey, there’s another guy selling for $11 we see that it helps the conversion rate to you know like to having like another seller selling it for a for a higher price as they go into that FBA listing. So the question is like, how can you keep the FBA listings and FBA FBM listings together now one of the best parts of the best parts of era now Okay, so let’s let’s get you know, like again, a little bit Cattier. Okay, so I’m going to show you about the parent A’s and pricing. Okay, let’s talk about the parent and child pricing because like, I mean, I would like to kind of cover two things at the same time. So one is that like, you have the FBA and FBM versions, and the other one is like also you have different variations of the same product. And you would like to control everything all together, meaning that for example, for this parent DaeSan, one parent days, and you have a master child, like I mean in the setting. So this first one is a master child. And the second SKU is the FBM version of the first now what you want to do is like you want to decide that your FBM to be always 10% at ball the FBA so it can easily be set up on the IVA parent child pricing. Now not only that, you can set up the FBM version. But also you can set up like a two pack version, let’s say to be always 8% More than the master and for the child 80% More than the child. So with all the different variations of colors size, and also like to pack for pack eight pack versions and FBA and FBM. You’re able to set up like custom rules to make it work. That’s one way the manual way but you have the full control. And the second is like Eva AI is automatically if you have an FBM version and an FBA version, Eva AI will automatically set the FBM a bit more higher than the FBA so you don’t need to even touch that because it will work automatically. Now the question is a what about if the dynamic pricing changes the FBA like next day, the FBA price goes 3% up what will happen with the FBM. If that happens, the EBA will also synchronize the FBM aligned with that FBA price, meaning if FBA price increases by 3% FBM price will also increase by 3%. So the relationship that you define, which is like let’s say FBM, to be always 10% of all will be maintained. If they the child SKU which is the master, that’s the FBA price changes, then automatically all the other slave SKU or slave ASINs prices will be changing accordingly.
- Gildner, Gil (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 205 Pages - 03/28/2019 (Publication Date) - Baltika Press (Publisher)
David 33:52
This is huge. And this makes Yeah, we have quite a few products that have that two pack four pack, eight pack type of variation and being able to move them in tandem with each other really, really helpful. And so yeah, this is this is a great solution to problem number seven, so Can anything else we want to cover or high anything else we want to cover while we’re here.
Hai Mag 34:14
Absolutely there is one more problem that I sold that problem for the last three months coming to me all the time, which is about like okay, Eva is great Amazon prices problem is solved. But what about Walmart and Shopify because all the private label and brands now Walmart is kind of being more sexy looks like in the last three, four months, we will see if it is like fashion or it will be like, you know, kind of it will continue but one of the other challenges. Unfortunately, if your Walmart price or Shopify price is much lower than your Amazon price for some reason than Amazon you can ever buy back supression problem right like if your Buy Box is suppressed, probably you’re going to lose like 30 40% of yours. If and there’s no other impacts to this problem is salt, what we do is like we are able to synchronize your Amazon prices now to both Walmart and Shopify, that’s number one and number two, and minor release that we did two weeks ago. Again, you can put at percentage like it or an amount like a surcharge on top of that Walmart or Shopify synchronization, meaning that you can have a price on Amazon $10 for a product and you can define the synchronization as I don’t know, let’s say 10% More for Walmart and the Walmart price will be 11 and 20% more for Shopify, then the Shopify price will be 12. You can do it in the other way. And you can have your Shopify price to be 20% less than Amazon but just be aware that for some reason Amazon can suppress your buy box if they are scanning like all the basically the all the Shopify pages, sometimes it happens sometimes it doesn’t with Walmart, I think 90% of the time, Amazon knows the Walmart price or to escape from that.
Ken 36:05
That’s a really cool feature. Now why is that? Like an API connection? Or is that that’s what that was a new release. Okay.
Hai Mag 36:11
Yeah, it’s like, it’s newly released. You’re right, like, you basically connect your Shopify through API. Same thing with Walmart. And once you do the connection, then you decide if it has direct synchronization, or you need some like unit may add a surcharge to it. And it’s super great. Like I love this one, we tried immediately with 1015 stores. And it makes a lot of sense, because Amazon data is huge. The other value is now you’re able to synchronize the right price to Walmart and Shopify too. So it also fixes like one other problem, like a lot of sellers saying, hey, if I use dynamic pricing, my Walmart will be still the same price it because it’s fixed. Like I cannot update the Walmart price every day, right. And for some reason, if for the sake of dynamic pricing, Walmart price can be lower from the Amazon price, and it will end up in a buyback suppression. Now with that synchronization, all the problem is solved with that buyback suppression and maximize the profit on the Walmart and Shopify that’s also enabled. And because the Amazon data is already enough to find the right products, even for Shopify and Walmart,
Ken 37:23
that’s a really, really slick feature. I really liked that. And definitely will increase profits, revenue and profits, right? If you don’t get the buy box suppressed, and your profits and revenues goes up. So that’s really cool. I know we’re coming up on time. Hi, I really want to thank you for you know, showcasing all the features of IVA covering all of these problems and solutions to the problems that the tools provide. So I want to go ahead and close out the show with the fire round. Are you ready? Hi.
Hai Mag 37:48
Yep, I am ready. All right.
Ken 37:50
What is your favorite book?
Hai Mag 37:51
So it’s the the capital from Thomas pica showing they’re telling you about like how like the important is the capital to run the business and the economy in the world in the world scale, basically. So it makes it’s a very nice book. Okay,
Ken 38:07
awesome. What are your hobbies
Hai Mag 38:09
being? Like living in San Diego, two things that I really liked the most is surfing and rowing.
Ken 38:16
Awesome. That’s really cool. What is the one thing that you do not miss about working for the man?
Hai Mag 38:21
Definitely what I do not miss is like, invite like people inviting to me to a meeting, which there was another 10 people and nobody knows why where they are. It’s like all this inefficient, ineffective meetings I have not missing at all.
Ken 38:38
I definitely agree. Awesome. Last one. What do you think sets apart successful ecommerce entrepreneurs from those who give up fail or never get started?
- Ryan, Robert J. (Author)
- English (Publication Language)
- 137 Pages - 11/02/2019 (Publication Date) - Independently published (Publisher)
Hai Mag 38:47
I know, the the answer is in that in the question itself, right. You know, first of all, like not giving up is like super important, right? Like, you know, they always ask like when the startup fails, well, when the founders give up, right? So it’s kind of an important thing. But what I see right now, like how to be successful if the if the guy already has the resilience is to really master the data, like being data driven, mastering the data, and having a holistic view of the E commerce not just focusing on one single thing, like, I want to make the advertising, right, no, it’s really all about inventory advertising pricing together rather than fixing, like just one of the issues because all of them are correlated, like having that holistic view and being data driven, can make the commerce sellers really successful either.
Ken 39:47
That’s an excellent answer. So I like one big ecosystem. Awesome. Really appreciate you coming on the show. Hi, David, you want to close out the show?
David 39:54
Absolutely. Hi. You mentioned before we hit record that you had an offer for Our audience, so could you share that with them?
Hai Mag 40:02
Hey, that’s a great one. So I mean, thanks for having me on the show you guys are great ecommerce sellers. And they’re also a lot of great sellers watching and listening the show. So for them, what I would like to say is like they if they want to use the IVA platform, first of all, they can go to Eva dot guru, and start leveraging the platform for a 15 days free trial. Now, if they really like it, I would like to offer a 50% of on the first month subscription, and they can use the code Firing the Man 52 When they subscribe, so that will already immediately create a 50% discount.
David 40:44
Perfect that’s FIA r i n g t h e ma N five, zero. And we will post that in the show notes. Hi, I want to thank you for being a guest on the Firing the Man podcast and looking forward to continue to use this tool to solve problems in our own businesses. So thank you so much.
Hai Mag 41:02
Thank you. Thanks for having me, David and Ken. Thanks, everyone
David 41:05
for tuning in to another episode of the Firing the Man podcast. As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, Ken and I have been using an incredibly powerful software stack that serves many purposes, namely dashboard reporting inventory management tools such as replenishment forecasting, profitability reports reimbursements that run automatically and my favorite dynamic pricing tool. what this tool does is it moves your price around ever so slightly to identify the price that maximizes net profit. Since using this tool, we have increased our profitability by an average of 15% across our own portfolio companies. This tool is an Amazon sellers stream and I absolutely have to share it with our audience. If you’re interested in trying this tool out, click on the link in the show notes. Use promo code FTM to get a free 15 day free trial of the EVA platform and 22% off your first month. And just for using my code you’ll receive a complimentary onboarding call and strategy session. To properly configure and dial in your settings. Answer any questions that you have and set you up for continued success. Thank you all for tuning in. And we will see you next week.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai