My Amazon Guy

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NY Times Article: Book a coaching call
"On March 1, the day after the first coronavirus death in the United States was announced, brothers Matt and Noah Colvin set out in a silver S.U.V. to pick up some hand sanitizer. Driving around Chattanooga, Tenn., they hit a Dollar Tree, then a Walmart, a Staples and a Home Depot. At each store, they cleaned out the shelves.

Over the next three days, Noah Colvin took a 1,300-mile road trip across Tennessee and into Kentucky, filling a U-Haul truck with thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer and thousands of packs of antibacterial wipes, mostly from “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods,” his brother said. “The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

Matt Colvin stayed home near Chattanooga, preparing for pallets of even more wipes and sanitizer he had ordered, and starting to list them on Amazon. Mr. Colvin said he had posted 300 bottles of hand sanitizer and immediately sold them all for between $8 and $70 each, multiples higher than what he had bought them for. To him, “it was crazy money.” To many others, it was profiteering from a pandemic."

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Kevin Strawbridge, an experienced CEO and entrepreneur, joins the podcast and speaks about his history of working with Amazon since 2001 with JCPenney. Kevin has also been the CEO of ClickBank, and a leader of many other companies. 

• For our listeners can you tell us about how you and I met a few years ago? 
  • Kevin and I first met when he was President of MAG Retail Group. Kevin hired me help grow Amazon sales there. Since working together you’ve referred countless of clients our way.
• But you’ve doing Amazon since 2001, talk about your history with that.
  • Target website used to be run by Amazon.
  • JCPenney
    • Back then Amazon was the learner
    • Amazon became leag gen, only 5% over lap.
    • 72,000 skus
  • MAG Retail
    • 1-mil skus
• Low skus vs high skus - 
  • Low skus have to be super targeted
  • High sku can shot gun approach
• If starting an Amazon business what would you do?
  • Find current company with meaningful value.
  • Want to be inventive
  • Poll people - 12 ideas I’ve passed on
• How to grow sales right now?
  • Hire a consultant
    • Landmines can be avoided
    • Sales are quicker growth
  • Spend time learning or pay for service
• Corona
  • Importance of ecom
  • Rational vs irrational response
  • Once in a 100 year event
  • Previous Black Swan events in your business experience
    • 9/11 Black Swan
    • Impact to business development cycle?
      • Run your business like it’s always going to be bad like South West Airlines does.
• What excites you about being an entrepreneur? 
  • Create something
  • Solve a problem
    • Save time/money
  • Passing ecommerce and business to the next generation
• What book are you reading or have you recently read?
  • Built to Last by Bill Callings

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Today I’m joined by a very special guest. She’s the most amazing person in my life, mother to my 3 children, and head of our house, my wife Emily Pope. Thanks for joining me Emily.

I’m rather excited about this episode. I predict it will be the most liked episode we shoot out of our first 100 episodes. This is going to be a little bit of a roast. Because I’ve put Emily through quite the Amazon journey and she’s had to deal with it all. I hope all Amazon sellers share this with their spouses, because it’s all in good fun. So Emily, what’s it like to be married to an Amazon Seller?

We own the brand Momstir. As well as My Amazon Guy.

• Failed products
• Basement full of 9 pallets of goods
• Hot sauce
• Long hours at night talking to China
• Retail arbitrage phase
• Reverse wholesale phase garage full of candy
• 17k on Scotch tape liquidation buy
• Crazy entrepreneur
• Never leave the house
• Excited about Amazon sales holidays such as prime day and 12k days during Christmas season
  • What about decorating the Christmas tree
• Christmas gifts are just old products or liquidation
• A lot of other Amazon sellers have empty bank accounts cuz they continually reinvest but that doesn't describe us
• Friends and family to do reviews and testing products
• Guy at UPS store knows my name.
• Romantic date nights he's checking his Amazon seller app for sales
  • Fantasizing about private hot sauce labels
• Kids are obsessed with mail trucks because we get packages every day at the house
  • Kids making cars out of boxes
• Kids using pallets as play houses 
• Now focus on consulting company

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I’m joined by Gregg Rosenfield who is a former Clear Channel executive and owns his own media company. Gregg has been dabbling with Amazon for the past 2 years.

• Clear channel
  • Prime Time - 275 employees
  • 22 P&Ls. Each newspaper had its own P&L.
    • Find the trends.
    • You have a plan.
    • Budget goes down on paper. Budget to actual. Plan for that month, then what actually happened?
  • Top Line Revenue - hard part.
  • Control expenses is easy. 
• Amazon
  • 4 models in Amazon
    • Wholesale
      • Gregg’s preferred model for his lifestyle
    • Retail arbitrage
    • Online arbitrage
    • Private Label
  • What do you wish you had known when you started out?
    • At Clear Channel I had a technical person helping me. 
    • Wish I had more technical experience.
  • What are you curious about right now?
  • What’s something you’ve failed at?
    • Brand grating issues cost $1,000 to resolve on barbie dolls.
    • Amazon.com showed up in buy box on shorts
  • What have you enjoyed the most about selling on Amazon
• Coming up podcast on practicing not just pontificating 

Get amazon consulting at www.myamazonguy.com

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Selling on Amazon is a game of finding Where’s Waldo. You need a technician to find Waldo. You know how each page has a different setting? That’s Amazon. A marketer is better at running the same playbook over and over again, traffic, and conversion. A technician can troubleshoot anything. Your Amazon company will be far more successful if they hire technicians. 

Mar·ket·er: a person or company that advertises or promotes something.

Tech·ni·cian: a person skilled in the technique of an art or craft.

Where's Waldo?

• Troubleshooting brand registry
• Product detail page removals
• Logistics and storage issues
  • LTL shipments, ever met a marketer who with no prior amazon experience who has made an LTL Shipment? For a technician it’s just another jigsaw puzzle. To a marketer it’s overwhelming.
  • Now imagine telling them go to the warehouse and build a pallet - we’re going to stock out and the warehouse is behind.
• Liquidation
• Algorithm changes
• Ad management is technical not marketing, equation based
  • ACOS/TACOS
• Locations to hire talent
  • BetterTeam.com - shows everywhere
  • LinkedIn got me a great hire
  • Local community, Church
  • Referrals
  • Past companies you’ve worked at
  • Local community college - I haven’t gotten this one to work for me yet.
• Can’t get something done, what do you do? Ticket, research, research, test.
• A/B testing
• Things constantly changing
• Stranded inventory
• Alt text keywords of photos - an SEO technical aspect
• Launching new marketplaces
• Reporting
• Europe
• Vat/taxes/customs/imports
• Converting inventory to MFN or FBA. Btw, here’s a great tip - create duplicate skus in your inventory so that if FBA ever stocks out, MFN is already to go.
• Lastpass
• Communication channel use
  • Slack
  • Skype
  • Hangouts
• Vendor Central and Seller Central hybrid approaches
• Refunds and clawbacks. Plug for www.myrefundguy.com to get cash back from Amazon that they owe you.
• Multi-channel fulfillment orders.
• Setting up technology.

Things a marketer will do better at:

• Content production
• Taking a sales call
• Shooting promotional videos
• Creation promotions and coupons, knowing when to do them
• Project management

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Amazon Advertising Attribution Setup.

Amazon took away some nifty stuff with APIs and ability to track sales into platforms like Facebook this past summer. They are now rolling out new tools and functionality to everyone but in a more controlled format called “Attribution” which is in beta for Amazon advertising.

Here’s what you need to do:

1. Register for Amazon Attribution
2. Accept the invite by email.
3. Create user login
4. Create tracking ID for product

Help maximize your return on investment (ROI) and grow your product sales. For the first time, you can measure the impact of search, social, email, display, and video media channels based on how consumers discover, research, and buy your products on Amazon. Amazon Attribution’s unique conversion metrics — including Amazon detail page views, purchase rate, and sales — give you a comprehensive view into how each of your marketing tactics contribute to shopping activity on Amazon.

Here’s an example of what you will see when you are registered. A code that can be used to track into Google Adwords:

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I sit down with Andrei Lozovik, owner of New Wave Swim Buoy, a million dollar brand. https://www.newwaveswimbuoy.com/. This guy is the best in the business at crowdsourcing content. He drives more earned traffic through social media so I’m excited to talk to Andrei

• How did you start your amazon business
• What did you learn along the way
• What did you learn in the last week?
• Why have you never been to China?
• What other places have you sourced? (Taiwan)
• So what does your chart look like?
  • I’m a one man band. 
    • How does that work?
• So how are you the best in the business at crowdsourcing content?
  • Instagram
  • Content creation
  • Crowdsourcing content
    • FB ads
    • Swag
    • Quality of posts
    • # of posts a day for New Wave
      • Amazon Social / Amazon Posts
        https://myamazonguy.com/advertising/amazon-social-adopts-facebook-like-social-posting/
• So what mistakes or trials have you overcome along the way?
  • Europe boxing - EU removal fee $11k to remove inventory.
    • Removal fees have gone up, covered that in my last podcast.
  • California patent or EPA troll?
  • Suspended account
  • Going to Australia, not expensive mistake. Test and learn.
  • Product failures
    • Biggest flop?

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Spider Web Tool:

Yasiv.com is an interesting tool we came across and wanted to share with you called “Yasiv”. You can put in any ASIN (Product) into it and it will spit out all the items connected to the listing. According to the tool it’s an “Amazon visualization that shows similar items based on ‘Customers who bought this also bought…’ data from Amazon.” There’s nothing immediately actionable, so it’s just for insight purposes. You may even find it fun to see what products are connected. 

Reviews most helpful not auto sorting to top. 

Pinterest Ads:
https://ads.pinterest.com

Amazon Attribution:
Be sure to enable your Amazon attribution for it too. https://advertising.amazon.com/amazon-attribution?ref_=a20m_us_gw_aalm

Disposal fee is now the same.

https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/help-popup.html/ref=ag_200685050_cont_xx?ie=UTF8&itemID=200685050

New Tracking automation for Multi-Channel Fulfillment
https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/headlines.html?id=2882308250231093773&ref=nslp_all_1_2882308250231093773_ttl

Introducing a tracking website for Multi-Channel Fulfillment orders

Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) sellers and their customers can now use a new tracking website to get real-time updates on the location of their shipped packages.

Sellers and customers can visit Swiship any time to enter the tracking number provided when the order is shipped and get the latest updates. The site provides tracking information for all MCF orders, regardless of carrier.

• For customers: Shipment notification emails will link to the tracking site. To make sure your customers get these notifications, provide their email address during fulfillment-order creation.
• For sellers: After the order has shipped, the tracking number in the Shipping section of the Order Details page will link to the tracking site.

With MCF, you can sell products on your own site or another e-commerce site, and Amazon will pick, pack, and ship those items from your inventory stored in our fulfillment centers. To learn more, visit Fill orders from other sales channels (Multi-Channel Fulfillment).

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Amazon has gone from 2 day shipping to 1 day shipping to PRIME NOW. Selling on Amazon is no longer just about listing a product. Non-sophisticated sellers are going to go under, and sell to other complex selling machines. 

You need to open up manufacturing in the USA right now.

You need to get in on all the new programs:

• Social Posts
• Feedback Whiz https://www.feedbackwhiz.com/?r=v4er9qat
• Helium 10 https://crushtrk.com/?a=427&c=7&p=r&s1=
• Shipping to Canada from USA FBA 
• New Beta Display ads with Retargeting and Past Purchasers

Consulting at www.myamazonguy.com

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Learning is a rather difficult thing to do. 

·         Information over load. 

·         Distractions

·         Took me a few days to learn how to setup a podcast recording. 

·         Theory vs practical knowledge to actually go execute

I have a youtube channel with more than 100 videos answering technical questions with tutorials on how to do stuff within Seller Central. There are dozens of topics that I’m literally the only person on the internet who has a video on it. I know this because clients tell me my video was the only source of information.

This is why I’m starting this podcast. The difference between this podcast and my youtube videos is the videos are straight to the point technical show and tell. This podcast will be how to tutorials mixed in with story telling, inspiration, and lengthier diatribes on how to move the needle selling on Amazon.

Life story

• BS communications at Weber State. Debate team, beat Harvard’s B team.
• TV reporter.
• MBA
• Decade of ecommerce experience on the corporate side
  • 4 back to back failed startups.

APMEX 10-million unique visitor increase. Go to SEM Rush right now and type in APMEX, Alpha Papa mike echo x-ray dot com

• Side hustle consulting
• Agency was born

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