British Amazon Seller

As an e-commerce brand owner, you know that product development is crucial to the success of your business. However, developing a new product from scratch can be a daunting task. In this article, we will discuss some product development hacks that can help you scale your e-commerce brand with minimal capital.

Timestamps

0:00:00 | "Developing a Skin Care Brand: A Step-by-Step Guide"

0:02:51 | Exploring Options for Developing a Skincare Product

0:04:16 | Exploring the Radical Path of Formulating Skincare Products at Home

0:08:13 | Exploring Radical Business Practices in the Skin Care Industry

0:13:08 | "Exploring the Benefits of Building a Brand vs. Private Labeling on Amazon"

0:14:15 | Exploring the Benefits of Having a Complimentary Team for Product Development

0:15:46 | Heading: Understanding the Basics of Website Design and Influencer Marketing for Entrepreneurs

0:17:21 | Conversation on Understanding Products and Hiring the Right People

0:19:04 | "Understanding the Necessity of Outsourcing and In-House Specialists for Business Success"

0:21:09 | Conversation Summary: Balancing CEO and COO Roles in a Small Business

0:26:28 | Conversation on Setting Clear Expectations for Employees and Establishing Long-Term Relationships

0:28:39 | Conversation on Product Development: Process, Results, and Time Management

0:30:12 | Exploring Strategies for Faster, Better, and Cheaper Product Development

0:31:36 | "Exploring the Benefits of Researching Competitors' Products and Services"

0:33:22 | Exploring the Mindset of Product Analysis and Customer Experience

0:36:13 | Exploring the Benefits of Meticulous Research: A Conversation with [Name]

0:37:50 | "The Benefits of Thorough Product Testing: A Conversation with [Name]"

0:39:25 | Interview with Jake from Crete Brand: A Passionate Entrepreneur's Journey to Success

0:41:26 | Conversation on Crete Club and Business Advice

0:42:15 | Interview with Jake Rosenberg of Crete Club: Achieving Success Through Hard Work and Thoroughness

Finding Your Niche/Brand

The first step in product development is finding your niche/brand. Your brand should be something that resonates with you personally and solves a problem. Jake, the founder of Scare, had a mark on his nose from a skiing accident and was using whatever shampoo smelled nice. He realized that there was a gap in the market for men’s skincare products that were easy to use and efficient. This led to the creation of Scare, a skincare brand for men that only takes 30 seconds to use.

Appealing to a Specific Set of Values and Behaviors

It is essential to have a specific set of values and behaviors that you appeal to when developing your brand. Scare is centered around the idea of efficiency and saving time. Most men don’t want to spend 30 minutes in the bathroom, while some women actively enjoy the experience. Scare’s 30-second skincare routine appeals to men who want an easy and efficient solution to their skincare needs.

Fast Wins

Every product that you develop should give your customers a fast win. Scare’s products are designed to give customers a positive experience in the first minute of use. This is important because people are more likely to continue using a product if they see results quickly. A gym membership, for example, can be challenging to stick to because people don’t see results immediately. Scare’s products give customers a fast win, which keeps them coming back.

Value Equation

The value equation is a critical component of product development. The value equation is the dream outcome multiplied by the perceived likelihood of achievement divided by the time delay and effort and sacrifice. Scare’s products deliver a fast win, which increases the perceived likelihood of achievement. The 30-second skincare routine is also easy to use, reducing effort and sacrifice.

Credibility of Your Promise

It is essential to establish credibility with your customers.

How Does Entrepreneur Decision-Making Work in Real Life?

Entrepreneur decision-making works in a variety of ways. Some entrepreneurs prefer to gather as much information as possible before making a choice, while others simply follow their gut instinct.Regardless of your decision-making style, there are some principles you should always keep in mind:

* Action creates momentum – If it feels like you've been stuck on the same problem for days or weeks without any progress, then it's time to take action. The more time spent thinking about how to solve a problem without actually solving it will just lead to frustration and an eventual loss of motivation.

* Test, measure and adjust – When trying out new ideas or testing different solutions for problems, don't be afraid to try things out quickly and see what works best (and what doesn't). Use this process as an opportunity for learning so that you can learn from your mistakes while they're still fresh in your mind instead of later down the road when they might have cost you too much money or time already!

Tactics for Entrepreneur Decision-Making- the Decision Matrix

There are three things that you need to do in order for you to make your own decision.

List the criteria for the decision.

This is the most difficult part because it requires thinking about what matters and why it matters, but it's also very important because you cannot weight a factor if you don't know what's being weighted in the first place. Make sure that all of your criteria are relevant and appropriate for this type of decision and don't get carried away by making too many or too few; this will help keep things simple later on when calculating weights (see below).

Weight each of your criteria numerically based on their relative importance (so 1 = high priority, 5 = low priority). 

To give an example: suppose I'm trying decide whether or not I want my ecommerce website design done by an agency rather than doing it myself. One of my criteria might be "time spent", since developing websites takes me a significant amount of time every month; another might be "cost", because agencies often charge more per hour than freelancers do; yet another could be "quality", since hiring someone else means outsourcing some portion of control over how well my site looks or functions.

The point here is not just listing them—you must think about these factors as having varying levels of importance depending upon which option(s) from our list above we're considering at any given moment during our evaluation process (e.g., if we had chosen Option A instead of Option B above, then cost would no longer matter as much).

Do the math

After this, it's a simple question of multiplying and comparing:

In a spreadhseet, you'd have the options or choices in rows down the left-hand column, and the criteria along column headers going left to right.

* for each possible option or choice, you'll have a score for each criterion

* For each of these criteria boxes, you'll need to multiple the score by the "weight" you've  which of multiplying the score of each possible option by the "weight" for  has the most weight

* then add up the total score across all the criteria for each decision.

* Finally, look at the relative scores of each decision.

Like most maths, and all spreadsheets, it's so much easier to see it on an actual spreadsheet!

Ken has created a spreadsheet that does the heavy lifting for you with a structured approach to decisions. Click here for his free entrepreneur decision matrix spreadsheet.

Today we complete our interview with Stephen Pope of my Amazon guy, which is an Amazon full-service agency.

They deal with the unsexy stuff like catalog management, PPC as well as supply chain issues.

 

If you have lost shipments, Amazon owes you money, sign up for My Refund Guy for $500 of free clawbacks.

You'll Learn:

* The different shipping restrictions issues and solutions to them

* Why everything is in short supply now

* How to source locally

* How to control your own mechanisms

 

We are still with Steven Pope talking about how to manage merchandising and other things in your Amazon Seller Account.

Order a USA Trademark from My Amazon Guy for $775 and get your brand registry on Amazon in under 7 days.

https://myamazonguy.com/trademark-services/

You'll Learn:

* About Brand Registry and Trademark

* How to get trademark registration

* How to get good at template uploads

* How to deal with uploads and avoiding issues

Steven Pope is the founder of My Amazon Guy, Amazon agency. He will talk about how a lot of people think that SEO is set it and you can forget it, he will make you think more objectively about your SEO goals.

 

Get A+ Content from My Amazon Guy for $1,000 USD.

Includes all of your ALT text SEO done at My Amazon Guy here.

 

You'll Learn:

* The 3 Phase Program

* The importance of focusing on indexing first

* The goals of SEO

* The best practices to optimize your SEO ranking

* How to optimize your title

All of us get into e-commerce for the purpose of making a profit. It’s the first and most important goal.  But it can be elusive. In this episode we’ll dive into the 7 Steps For Creating a highly profitable ecommerce company.

What you’ll learn

* How full-time ecommerce professionals answer the question, “how do you get more profitable” and how successful, but still part-time ecommerce sellers answer that question.

* Interesting insights from the recent Jungle Scout seller survey.

* A recap of Profit First, by Mike Michalowicz.

* 7 Steps to creating a highly Profitable Ecommerce Company

Creating your own product is a key to e-commerce business success. But it can be a long and complex process. In this multi-part episode Michael shares a 6-step process for creating your first unique product.

 

What you’ll learn

The 6 steps to creating a custom product

Eugene Terk is the vice president of business development at AlignToday, a business management software that focuses on detailed daily projects workload and helps manage higher-level strategic goals of your company.

Eugene will be teaching us how to scale up business through strategy and execution based on his knowledge and experience.

You’ll Learn About:

The methodology of AlignToday

The highlights of the Scaling Up Structure

The importance of knowing your foundational principles

The foundation core of the Rockefeller habits

How to move from strategy to implementation

Specific action steps to achieve goals

How AlignToday organize their meetings

The importance of tracking your metrics

 

Related topics about Scaling Up a Business:

Scaling an Amazon Business to 8 Figures with Fernando Cruz of Marketplace Ops

Scaling up – Private Label Strategy (Step 9 of 10)

Scaling a business on Amazon with Ashley Pearce Part 2

Scaling your Business Accounting with Penny Lowe Part 2

Grow Amazon Business with Jenna Lieber

 

Resources:

amazingfba.com/align

Aligntoday.com

 

Watch Scaling Up Principles Through Strategy and Execution

[video_page_section type="youtube" position="bottom" image="" btn="light" heading="" subheading="" cta="" video_width="1080" hide_related="false" hide_logo="false" hide_controls="false" hide_title="false" hide_fullscreen="false"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4TQ1upaeG8&feature=youtu.be[/video_page_section]

Running an agency can be an interesting adventure! It’s how you navigate the highs and the lows that can help you build a long-lasting business.

John Cavendish an Amazon seller with a 7 figure FBA business and co-founder of SellerCandy with his business partner Brian Patterson will show us the best way to run an agency.

You’ll learn about: 

How John became very good at selling $100k a month

The best practices of Sales

The importance of the Sales Process

The significance of having a Sales system

John’s process in the Sales system

Next Steps:

To work with John just go to sellercandy.com or email [email protected]

Mention “Amazing FBA” - pro package $100 discount

amazingfba.com/sellercandy

 

Other interviews with John:

Amazon Account Management

Coronavirus for Amazon Sellers

Translate Your Amazon Listing

How to Access Amazon Europe

The SellerCandy Services

 

Resources Mentioned:

www.massconversionmarketing.com 

sellercandy.com

Watch Running an Agency with John Cavendish of SellerCandy

[video_page_section type="youtube" position="bottom" image="" btn="light" heading="" subheading="" cta="" video_width="1080" hide_related="false" hide_logo="false" hide_controls="false" hide_title="false" hide_fullscreen="false"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgfQlPzS6HI&feature=youtu.be[/video_page_section]

This is part 3 of the interview with Joshua Price of www.SuspensionExperts.com regarding Amazon account suspension and how to prevent that happening in the first place. In part 2 of this interview, Joshua covered some of the performance violation details, and now he’s explaining policy violations that lead to a suspended Amazon account.

The Risks of Mistakes leading to Policy Violation

Amazon has over 100 pages of different policies, rules, and regulations that you have to follow. That’s a lot of different areas and you can make lots of mistakes. Nobody can remember all of those things and even small little things can exaggerate out to bigger problems quite easily.

Most larger sellers will have more products and more orders. The more things that are happening, the more chance there is for errors to occur. This is especially true if you start bringing in staff and other people into your organization because it increases the risk of someone making a mistake that leads to a suspended Amazon account. We might not be aware of the requirement to have white backgrounds on images, for example. It only takes one member of staff uploading the wrong image or an image incorrectly and you could be suspended for that reason.

Another example is to do with product variations, which has often been a system that has been abused. For people who use it, it’s quite complicated and for an account with 1000 linked listings, it’s almost impossible for a seller to keep track and make sure that products are a true variation as per Amazon’s definitions. All it takes is one small issue, such as accidentally linking products that are not variations of each other, for the account to be suspended.

The more volume, the more products, the more staff involved with your account, the more room there is for issues and mistakes to shut down accounts. So whilst in some online worlds expanding fast and cleaning up the details later can be a viable approach, when interacting with Amazon systems you must have strong internal business systems and be very careful who you let loose on your Amazon account.

Intellectual Property Rights and Complaints

A common policy violation is intellectual property rights and complaints. The topic is governed by the laws of the country that you’re selling in, so Amazon tries to be as general and vague as possible. Essentially, this is when you’re selling Brand A and buying it from your supplier. If the manufacturer of Brand A doesn’t really like what you’re doing, they tell Amazon and say there is a problem. Now, because it’s a legal issue about whether you can sell the product—for example, whether you’re infringing on a trademark, design rights, copyright, etc.—you now have a suspended Amazon account until you have sorted out the issue.

Amazon doesn’t want to be involved so they back away until you fix the problem. It’s a fine system; it means Amazon won’t get sued and you have the opportunity to resolve it without Amazon giving you too bad of a penalty. The problem is that Amazon doesn’t vet any complaints. Which means that anyone can make a complaint and you still have to take it seriously because you get suspended for it. The abuse of this infringement system at the moment is causing havoc for sellers because people who are competing with you are making these complaints so that you get kicked off Amazon.

Responding to Intellectual Property Rights Suspensions

The first step is to work out if it’s genuine or not. The email address the complaint came from is always a good indicator of that. If it’s from a legitimate company the email address will include the domain name of the business. Obviously then it’s something you do need to take seriously. Large companies will also have lawyers first to represent them in these issues. You also need to consult a lawyer if it gets serious. Ideally, you don’t want to need to contact a lawyer or even have this issue, but it does become a legal issue and not an Amazon issue if t...