Episode 83
In today’s episode, Ken and I talk about our major takeaways from the Prosper Show, a learning and networking event for established Amazon sellers who want to make their businesses more profitable and for service providers focused on offering business scaling. After the event, we felt excited not just for ourselves, but also for the entire e-commerce community. There are a couple of Amazon features that e-commerce owners should try now, and we share tips to maximize them all.
Listen to this episode and get a lot of e-commerce tips from the Prosper Show!
[00:01 – 03:38] Opening Segment
- We share our experiences during the Prosper Show
- We definitely miss in-person events!
[03:39 – 09:26] Should Amazon Businesses Be Excited?
- Ken talks about the importance of supplier terms
- Find out the terms we learned about!
- What’s a win-win situation for you and the supplier?
- David gives his insights about the boom in aggregators today
[09:27 – 16:45] Our Outlook on Walmart’s Growth
- Why you should try Amazon Posts according to Ken
- Want some Amazon refunds? Check out Getida
- Promo code: FTM400
- David talks about the growth of Walmart
[16:46 – 22:07] Next-Level Product Launches
- US-based sellers are not capitalizing on this Amazon feature
- Ken shares some practical tips to maximize this feature
- Why attend in-person events like the Prosper Show
[22:08 – 23:52] Closing Segment
- Connect with us. Links below
- Final words
Tweetable Quotes:
“There’s a great demand for Amazon businesses from all of these aggregators, but there’s a limited supply. That’s why an aggregator…is willing to offer up to $50,000 for a referral.” – David Schomer
“For every Amazon Live stream, check your sales data for the optimal time.” – Ken Wilson
Resources mentioned:
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David 0:00
Real quick before we get into the show, I wanted to share a new service called Getida that Ken and I have been using that has made us over ,000 in Amazon reimbursements. The service requires no monthly subscription, and getida collects a small percentage of the money they recover for you. It takes less than five minutes to set up and works on all Amazon marketplaces. Go to getida.com GETIDA, and enter promo code FTM 400. That’s FTM for firing the man 400 to get your first $400 in reimbursements commission free, how much money does Amazon owe you?
Ken 0:41
20%, down 30% 60 days after you ship and 50% 150 days after you ship. And what that means is if you place your q4 orders in August, September, you know you have 150 days after they ship the products to pay them. And so you’re essentially not paying them until February, March of the following year. And so you have all of those Amazon pay cycles to get that money and to pay.
David 1:14
So what this tells me is there’s an influx between supply and demand. There is a great demand for Amazon businesses from all of these aggregators, but there’s a limited supply. And that’s why an aggregator like the one that is giving out Tesla’s is willing to offer up $50,000 for a referral. And, you know, I really like this, I really like this as an owner operator of an Amazon businesses.
Ken 1:41
We’re gonna say $1 cost per click. So CPC if you’re running Amazon advertising, let’s just say for this example, it’s $1 CPC per click, if you do 100 clicks per asin per week. So let’s say and the goal is no more than two posts per asin per week. So like anything other than two posts per asin is kind of spammy. So two posts 100 clicks per asins per week. And if you have 20 asins, that’s 2000 clicks.
Intro 2:10
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.
David 2:34
Welcome everyone to the firing the man podcast on today’s episode, Ken and I take a deep dive into our experiences at the prosper Show in Las Vegas. Ken, what’s going on, man?
Ken 2:44
David, what’s up happy to be here. Getting back from the prosper show a few days ago, it was amazing. I don’t know about you, but I had a great time. It was really good just to be around people. This was the first conference since COVID that I went to, and yeah it was an amazing event. It was a lot larger than the last one I went to. But yeah, so what do you think? What was your experience David?
David 3:06
Yeah, absolutely. So this was my first prosper show. And it was great. I will definitely be going back. And similar to you. This was my first in person conference since COVID. And I’ll tell you what, a zoom conference is just not the same. And so it was great to shake hands with people and network and go out to eat and all the other things that go on at a conference. So in today’s episode, we are going to, both Ken and I highlighted our top three takeaways from the conference. And we’re going to be going through those and sharing our experiences. So let’s get into it. Ken, what was your first key takeaway?
Ken 3:43
Sure, absolutely. So like David mentioned, we’re each coming to the table on this show with our top three takeaways to add the most value to listeners. So the first one that I’m going to go over is supplier terms. And we’ve heard about this before, you know, supplier terms are important, but really listening to the speaker explain this. And the speaker was Scott from the northbound group, so definitely want to give him credit. He was a super sharp guy. And, you know, it was kind of funny, like, if you’re an Amazon seller, you get pounded with people that want to offer you financing for your business or maybe they want a percentage stake in your business or Amazon’s offering you financing whatever, like there’s money flowing into this business right. And a lot of times my personal experiences I’ve experienced predatory lending, you know, lenders that are doing 18% 25% just ridiculous interest on financing and Scotts entire process here of like, hey, supplier terms is what he says is the best source of financing is supplier financing. And what he means by that is better terms. And so he put out an example and when I put it onto paper, I was like holy crap essentially your supplier is financing your business. So let me break it down really quick. So the terms that he kind of shared was 20%, down 30% 60 days after you ship and 50% 150 days after you ship. And what that means is, if you place your q4 orders in August, September, you know, you have 150 days after they ship the products to pay them. And so you’re essentially not paying them until February, March of the following year. And so you have all of those Amazon pay cycles to get that money and to pay. And so really, like, you know, we’ve talked about this on the show before David, and it’s like, we know that supplier terms are huge. But when it was broken out in this, it was amazing. I was like, yeah, you don’t need any financing, if you can get the supplier to agree to those terms. That’s my next step. So how do you get to the better terms? And so Scott’s advice was, you run a sales forecasting model for three months, six months, 12 months of your business for that suppliers products, and then you present it to them in like a story mode, and you break it down and say, Hey, this is what we’re forecasting, and then let them know, like, if we can agree on these terms, we’re going to be able to order, you know, three times, or five times this much. Otherwise, we can only order, let’s say you’re going to order 1000 units. And if you can agree to these terms, then we can order 5000 units or 8000 units. And so it’s kind of a win win between you and the supplier. And so that was one of my favorite takeaways from that.
No products found.
David 6:35
Absolutely. You know, I would say in our businesses, the standard terms are 30% down and 70% when it ships. And so if you’re doing sea shipping, that cash is gone, and you need to wait quite a long time to recoup that cash. And so Walmart is notorious for this with their vendors. They do 180 day I’ve heard that. I’ve also heard 365 day terms. And so I really liked that. And I think a lot of times people like to negotiate on unit cost. And there’s a point of indifference here. And so I love that key takeaway. And, Ken, you and I were talking earlier this week, we are going to put this into action in our q4 ordering strategy. So I’m really looking forward to that.
Ken 7:16
Yeah, absolutely. So David, what’s your first key takeaway?
David 7:21
So my first takeaway from the conference was there was a ton of aggregators. And if you would ask me two or three years ago, what is an aggregator? I don’t think I could have given you an answer. But essentially, there has been a boom in this space of people that will go out and raise external capital, and they go out to buy Amazon businesses. And oftentimes, they will buy multiple businesses have an operating company. And their goal is to grow them and eventually exit them. And so it really is the private equity fund model. However, ecommerce, we just have to be different. So we call it something different, but it’s practically one model. So, you know, in particular, there was a group of people that had some t shirts on with a QR code, and above it, it said, refer a amazon seller, and get a Tesla. And essentially, what this company is doing is if you refer somebody, and they end up buying that company and closing on it, they’re gonna buy you a Tesla, or they’re going to give you $49,000 in cash, like the cash equivalent. So what this tells me is there’s an influx between supply and demand, there is a great demand for Amazon businesses from all of these aggregators, but there’s a limited supply. And that’s why an aggregator like the one that is giving out Tesla’s is willing to offer up $50,000 for a referral. And, you know, I really like this, I really like this as an owner operator of an Amazon businesses. Essentially, there’s a large pool of buyers out there, and they want to buy our businesses. And so I would expect that multiples are going to go up over the next couple months, and even couple years. And I truly think that we’re going to get the respect that we deserve. In terms of higher multiples. There’s always been an influx between brick and mortar and e commerce companies. And we’ve went into a lot of detail on that on other episodes, but anyway, key takeaway, tons of aggregators, and super exciting for the industry.
Ken 9:27
Yeah, absolutely. They were all over the place. So if you’re an Amazon seller, you probably get emails, you know, every day and then go to a conference and then you’re getting swarmed by them. But yeah, like David, like you mentioned man it’s great for Amazon business owners, so it’s only going to get better. My number two is Amazon posts. And if you’re not doing Amazon posts, then this is great. I’m going to share some you know, some details with you some information that’s going to help if you are maybe I would recommend like what we’re doing in our business. We’re going to double down on Amazon posts. So Amazon posts for those of you who don’t know, it’s essentially kind of like a social media, it’s only on mobile. And you can highlight products. And as you know, Amazon shoppers kind of scroll through the mobile feed, it’ll be in there and then click on that take it to the PDP. So that’s kind of what a post is. So we’ve been running posts for a while. And some of the details and I apologize, I don’t remember the speaker’s name, but she was great. Actually, my number two and my number three are credit to her, mysterious girl that I don’t remember your name, but she was really sharp. So she recommends trying for over 500 clicks as like a goal per week, per asin, that’s high level. And so I’m just going to run down kind of like the top three or four strategies for the posts. And then I’m going to give you a kind of like a sales breakdown on how to calculate ROI from posts, which is huge. I’ve never done that before. And it was eye opening for me. So number one, choose a picture that engages the customers to click, and so not really clickbatey, but something that looks like Oh, that’s interesting. Let me click on that. Don’t put a boring picture, just do something that there’s something in there that will get the shopper to click on it. And also like David and I, we have multiple portfolio brands and so on the post try different images and different styles for the different brands and for the different product lines to see what’s the best fit, because what’s a good fit for one product line might not be a good fit for another one. So test those out. And next level tip is you can use I believe it’s up to 10 or 20 asins per post, she recommended not to do that she recommended to use one asin per post. And the reason for this is because within posts there’s like four or five metrics that you can track. And so if you use one asin per post, you can track that very easily on clicks impressions. Like I said, there’s like four or five metrics. And so using one asin per post, it’s way easier to track clicks. Clicks is what you want, like, that’s the metric that you’re looking for the KPI. And then finally, there’s a little bit of math here. And so whenever I thought about this, and you know, she was like, Okay, this is a basically free advertising, minus time, labor, whatever you use for posts, this is huge. And so we’re gonna say $1 cost per click. So CPC, if you’re running Amazon advertising, let’s just say for this example, it’s $1 CPC per click, if you do 100 clicks per asin per week. So let’s say and the goal is no more than two posts per asin per week. She’s like anything other than two posts per asin is kind of spammy. So two posts, 100 clicks per asin per week. And if you have 20 asins, that’s 2000 clicks, right? That is over a month, that is $8,000 worth of free advertising, I’ll say it again. So $1 CPC a dollar a click, you get 100 clicks per asin. And you have 20 asins. That is $8,000 of advertising a month for free, minus you know the time or labor or whoever’s working on your posts. That’s huge. And so brings me to my next example, putting a little bit more numbers to that if you have a $25 product with a 20% conversion rate, that equals 400 sales per month, which is $10,000. So it’s $10,000 in added revenue per month, and you take the $8,000 worth of advertising off of that. So that was huge. When I put those numbers together. I’m like, Yeah, I reached out said, Hey, David, we’re doubling down on posts. So over to you, David, what’s your number two.
No products found.
David 13:40
Sorry to interrupt the episode, you may have heard Ken and I talking recently about a new tool that we’re using for Amazon refunds. Now I have used other refund tools like this. However, I can tell you in the first seven days, they scrubbed it the back end of my Amazon account going back 18 months, and found $5,000 of refunds. And the nice thing about this is it’s my money, Amazon made a mistake and they are just auditing my account. The other thing I really like about this tool is there is no monthly fee. They only charge a commission if they are successful in getting you your money. Go to getida.com GETIDA and enter promo code FTM for firing the man FTM 400. This is an awesome tool. I can’t say enough good things about it. Now back to the episode. So international expansion was a really hot topic of conversation. One thing I really noticed was that there was a ton of vendors there. Some people that did foreign exchange, some people that did translation services, there was all kinds of people all focused on international expansion. And Ken This is something that you and I are right in the middle of going into Germany and the UK. And so this is something that I think Amazon is making it easier for sellers to go into international markets. And one thing that I love about this is your reviews come with you. So if you have a nice moat of say, 10,000 reviews, and you go into the UK on day one, you’re gonna have that 10,000 Review mark. And the other thing I would say is if your goal is to exit these companies, the pool of buyers goes from say in the US 330 million people to 7 billion, right, it’s now a global company. And you’re more diversified. And so we obviously really liked this idea and are pursuing it right now. But the amount of services that are out there to kind of do some hand holding along the way, it really shows that this is a big movement in the industry. Now, one thing that came up a lot in conversation was international expansion versus going into Walmart. And I’m not sure if there’s really any clear consensus on this, there was a panel of some, I would say like high seven figure and eight figure sellers. And they seem to think that international expansion through Amazon was the move that said, I am maybe a contrarian, I believe that Walmart and the WFS is just in its infancy, maybe the second inning of a baseball game. Walmart has one of the best logistics companies in the world. They have brick and mortar stores all over. And so they are positioned much better than say, like an eBay or an Etsy to take market share. And so I’m calling it right now, Walmart is I don’t think they’ll ever be as big as Amazon. But I would say that they will penetrate market share at least 10% in the next two years. That’s what I’m calling. So anyway, that was a big key takeaway for me.
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Ken 16:46
Nice. Yeah, I echo that, David. I was sitting in there with you on that seller sessions with those high level sellers. And I’m definitely bullish on Walmart. One of the statistics that jumped out at me was actually this was, Tim Jordan did a presentation on Walmart shout out to him, it was a great presentation. He mentioned Amazon has 124 fulfillment centers, right. And it takes them a long time to build a building, staff it, get it all operational. Walmart has 10,500 stores, existing stores with penetration is think about that for a second. You know, like that’s a game changer. So yes, very bullish on Walmart. Awesome. My third takeaway here is Amazon live. And I have a lot of stuff here. So I’m going to rip through it really fast, like the highest level stuff here. But I think Amazon live, we’re way behind the curve in terms of like the Chinese are more advanced with like mobile and tech, and they’re crushing Amazon live right now. And so it’s something that US based sellers are not doing as well. And so it’s something we’ve tested, we’re actually going to continue to drive forward and test it. There’s a lot of things Amazon is rolling out one of the the notes that I have here is Amazon currently has 63 job openings for Amazon live. And so if that doesn’t tell you they’re investing in it, like that’s huge. So Amazon live, there’s three levels, rising star Insider, and a Lister. And so you go up through those levels by how many followers you have. And so the last one I mentioned posts and Amazon live, both are being driven by followers. So if Amazon shoppers, if they follow your brand, then there’s going to be a lot more stuff coming down the pipe. And in future you can, you’re going to be able to email those customers, you’re going to be able to engage with them. And so they’re slowly getting into that there’s something called customer engagement. So if you go into Brand Registry, you go into brands, customer engagement, and there’s actually a beta right now for emailing Amazon customers. They’re gonna roll it out. I think they said q3 of this year, so huge. Okay, so top tips for Amazon live. gonna rip through them right now. titles, titles of your thumbnail, short and to the point and you want them to be clickbait, you can feature 40 items per live, but only the top five items are visible to the viewers that visit, they recommend using OBS Studio software with a dlsr camera setup. Let’s say test it and it works. You might want to go next level versus using your mobile phone. This was a pretty cool one I thought. When you first start, it’s like crickets. Nobody’s on your Amazon live. She recommended have friends and family join and then ask questions. And so it’ll kind of trigger might even trigger the algorithm or at least it triggers some stuff and then everybody else will start asking, be consistent. You need 90 minutes of Amazon live to apply for insider and so the more minutes and the more active you are you kind of rise through the ranks. Just you don’t even have followers you just rise through the ranks. You want to do a new thumbnail for every Amazon live. Also, for every Amazon live stream, check your sales data for the optimal time. You can go in and look at your sales history. And for whatever product line that brand is, you can look and see, when do people buy or when do they engage with your brand, run your Amazon live then if you can. And then the last one, which was kind of a, there’s two more. Last one, which are like next level, ask for followers and your Amazon live at the beginning, the middle and at the end, because people will just pop in, and also the voice, they have to click on it to engage it. So assign also they said having a TV in the background with something on there, like a sign, like maybe click to follow or something like that. And then the last key takeaway was run a Bogo during the Amazon live and promote it. A buy one, get one offer and promote it. So that is like next level for a launch. If you’re doing a product launch, run an Amazon live, have a Bogo going and then advertise that and you’ll get rapid sales pretty quick for product launch. David, over to you.
David 20:54
Very nice. I like it. I like all three of yours. Now my last key takeaway is not as technical, it’s more of a plug for why you should attend one of these seminars. First off for just fun. I had an excellent time, this was in Las Vegas on the strip. And it’s a wonderful way to get out and meet high level sellers. And if you have spent a lot of time on YouTube, a lot of time in Facebook groups, you will find that just going to one of these seminars, the amount of information that you gain is tremendous. And it is truly a positive ROI activity. I think Ken, the things that we’ve implemented just the week after has paid for this conference. And so and I would say the last thing is, it is nice to know other Amazon sellers that are crushing it. You know, when we run into issues, it’s nice to have 10 contacts that we can reach out to and say, you know, for instance, Hey, what are you doing with these inventory restrictions? Or who do you use for three PL and that’s been incredibly valuable. And so I really like prosper, I’m definitely going to be going back to prosper and would recommend if anyone has any interest, bite the bullet and sign up and go, they’re a lot of fun. So anyway, thank you everyone for tuning in this week to firing the man and we’ll talk to you next week. Thank you everyone for tuning in to today’s firing the man podcast. If you liked this episode, head on over to firingtheman.com and check out our resource library for exclusive firing the man discounts on popular e commerce subscription services that is firingtheman.com\resource. You can also find a comprehensive library of over 50 books that Ken and I have read in the last few years that have made a meaningful impact on our business. For that, head on over to www.firingtheman.com/library. Lastly, check us out on social media at firing the man, and on YouTube at firing the man for exclusive content. This is David Schomer
Ken 22:53
and Ken Wilson. We’re out
David 23:11
Before you go we wanted to share a new service that Ken and I have been using called getida that has made us over $10,000 in Amazon reimbursements. The service requires no monthly subscription in getida collects a small percentage of the money they recover for you. It takes less than five minutes to set up and works on all Amazon marketplaces. Go to getida.com GETIDA.com and enter promo code FTM 400. That’s FTM for firing the man 400 to get your first $400 in reimbursements commission free how much money does Amazon owe you?
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